Aristotle’s Way Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Aristotle’s Way

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Zusammenfassung von Aristotle’s Way

Name: Aristotle’s Way
Rating: 4.5 (211 reviews)
Author: Edith Hall

Edith Hall

How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

4.5 (211 Bewertungen)

21 Min.

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Stoizismus Westliche Philosophie

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Aristotle’s Way
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What’s in it for me? Learn the art of living well.

On the face of it, Ancient Greece and our present day don’t seem to have much in common. Our societies are so much larger, faster, and more complex than anything known in the ancient world that it boggles the mind to think what a citizen of the latter would have thought had he been transported to contemporary New York or Tokyo.

Life, however, tends to deal everyone the same challenges – whether in Ancient Greece or the modern world. Human lives are relatively short. If we are to be happy, we must learn to fill our years with a purposeful, well-lived life. The question, then as now, is how.

This was also the question Aristotle attempted to answer. Edith Hall, a British classicist, first read his answer to that question when she was 20. It was a revelation, and she credits the experience with changing her life – for the better. In these blinks, we’ll follow Hall as she breaks down the lessons she learned from Aristotle about happiness and the good life.

You’ll also learn

how to win your audience over without resorting to insincere flattery;
why too little or too much anger is a vice, but just enough is a virtue; and
how to spot a dodgy premise in someone’s argument.

Aristotle had a turbulent life and only produced the work for which he is remembered during his final 12 years.

It is easier to list the subjects Aristotle didn’t write about than the subjects he did. What is “being?” Why do animals behave the way they do? What’s the best political system? How do you live well? These are just some of the questions Aristotle attempted to answer.

Each of those attempts helped lay the foundations for a scholarly discipline. Without Aristotle, it is hard to imagine the development of metaphysics, zoology, political philosophy, or ethics.

Sure, this is an intimidating résumé, but late bloomers, take heart! All the work he is known for was produced late in life.

But before we jump into some of the intricacies of his work, let’s pose a different question. Just who was this extraordinarily prolific and influential person?

The key message in this blink is: Aristotle had a turbulent life and only produced the work for which he is remembered during his final 12 years.

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stageira, a city-state in northern Greece. His childhood was disrupted in his thirteenth year when both his father and mother died. This was a time of great turbulence in the Greek-speaking world, and Aristotle was uprooted by the increasing military strife.

At the age of 17, he arrived in Athens, Ancient Greece’s center of learning and culture. There, he enrolled in Plato’s Academy, the first university in the Western world. Aristotle spent the next two decades learning from Plato, the greatest philosopher of his day.

When Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and moved to a small kingdom in today’s Anatolia. He lived mainly in the cities of Atarneus and Assos. He married Pythias, the daughter of the kingdom’s ruler, Hermias. During this happy period, he spent a great deal of time studying the wildlife on the island of Lesbos.

Then, in 343 BCE, everything changed. Philip II, the king of Macedonia, summoned Aristotle to teach his youngest son, Alexander, later known as Alexander the Great. Aristotle appears to have found court life, with all its intrigue and treachery, distasteful. After Philip was assassinated and Alexander became king, Aristotle returned to Athens.

There he spent the final 12 years of his life. It was an extraordinarily productive period. Every work for which he is remembered, not to mention the 130 texts that have been lost, was written during this golden period.

The philosopher Robert J. Anderson wrote, “There is no ancient thinker who can speak more directly to the concerns and anxieties of contemporary life” than Aristotle. Anderson was right, as we’ll find out in the following blinks.

Thinking about how to live well makes us happy.

“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.

The secret to making better decisions is taking your time, verifying information, and seeking out experts.

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.

Identifying faulty premises helps you avoid falling for bad arguments.

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.

Aristotle’s “ABC” of rhetoric just might help you land your dream job.

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.

Virtue is a fruit of moderation.

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.

Learning the differences among the three types of friendship can help you enjoy them on their own terms.

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.

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Worum geht es in Aristotle’s Way?

Aristotle’s Way (2018) is a study of Aristotle, philosopher and polymath of Ancient Greece – but it’s not a scholarly guide to a historical artifact. Aristotle is simply far too alive to be relegated to that category. Friendship, happiness, talking, thinking, and living well were Aristotle’s great concerns. And what he had to say about those topics remains every bit as relevant today as it was when he first started exploring them some 2,500 years ago.

Bestes Zitat aus Aristotle’s Way

If you believe that the goal of human life is to maximize happiness, then you are a budding Aristotelian.

—Edith Hall

Wer Aristotle’s Way lesen sollte

Old-school self-helpers
Miserabilists ready for some happiness
Job-hunters struggling with their cover letters

Über den Autor

Edith Hall is one of Britain’s foremost classicists and a professor at King’s College London. She was the first woman to have been awarded the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy, and also holds an honorary doctorate from Athens University. Hall is the author of Introducing the Ancient Greeks.

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