Aristotle’s Way summary

“What is a human?” When Aristotle asks this question, he makes a series of distinctions. To do this, he poses another question: “What are the distinctive features of human beings?”

The fact that they get nourishment and grow isn’t distinctive, for example – plants and animals, after all, also do that. Neither is their possession of senses, or their use of those senses to discern the world around them, since other animals also possess such senses and use them in a similar way. 

Neuroscientists have shown that we make thousands of decisions every day. Most of these, however, are relatively inconsequential – what to eat for lunch, say, or what to watch on Netflix. These decisions require little serious thought. 

Other choices are weightier. Questions like when to settle down with a partner, whether and when to have kids, or whether to get divorced shape the course of our lives and determine our happiness. These decisions require careful consideration. 

One of Aristotle’s most influential works is a study of rhetoric – the art of persuasive speaking. This skill had been greatly admired by the Greeks for centuries, but it had gained a bad reputation by the time Aristotle wrote his treatise in the fourth century BCE. 

In the past, his contemporaries argued, rhetoric had been a noble pursuit. Now, it was little more than a tool favored by unscrupulous politicians hell-bent on misleading citizens. This was why Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, distinguished between philosophers, who pursue the truth, and sophists – honey-tongued manipulators who are only interested in influencing opinion. 

What are you trying to achieve by using rhetoric? 

Aristotle argues that rhetoric has three purposes. The first is persuading an audience to accept an account of the past. This is the kind of rhetoric you find in courtrooms. The second is celebrating people or institutions in the present – think of a wedding speech praising the newly married couple. 

There were many contending schools of philosophical thought in ancient Greece. Despite their lively arguments, however, many of these schools agreed that a virtuous life meant renouncing one thing or another. 

Stoics thus suppressed their emotional and physical appetites, arguing that the life of the mind was the only life that could truly be considered virtuous. Epicureans renounced their ambition for worldly power, fame, and fortune, focusing instead on a quiet life of simple pleasures. Cynics like Diogenes, who lived semi-naked in an Athenian marketplace, renounced both material possessions and social convention.

We often distinguish among different kinds of relationships by asking whether they’re sexual or not. We have intimate sexual relationships with partners, for example, and intimate but non-sexual relationships with family members. While we are born into the latter kind of relationship, we freely choose our friends, with whom we have non-sexual relationships. 

Aristotle sees things differently. For him, all relationships are a subset of the category of philoi or “friends.” Telling these relationships apart isn’t about sex or biology – it’s about the intensity of friendship.