Book Review: How to Flourish by Aristotle
Susan Sauvé Meyer’s translated Ancient Greek guide to living well samples the father of Western philosophy’s Nicomachean Ethics
Philosophy professor Susan Sauvé Meyer’s translated selections from Aristotle’s Ethics, How to Flourish: An Ancient Greek Guide to Living Well (2023; Princeton University Press), serves as a useful, compact reference. I’m glad I read it.
Being acquainted through philosophical study with the father of Western philosophy, thanks to Ayn Rand, I was interested in the small book, which I came across on a table at a Barnes & Noble bookstore while browsing.
In recent years, I’ve been reading and reviewing books about grief and various methods of practicing the virtue of selfishness. I found myself wondering what Aristotle would think of all I’ve learned about virtue, grief, love, joy and happiness. The book’s size, durability—I bought it in hardcover—and relatively low price caught my attention, that and the fact that it’s rare to see Aristotle showcased in a bookstore.
University of Pennsylvania professor Susan Sauvé Meyer, who focuses on teaching Greek and Roman philosophy, presents these selections, dedicated to a woman who first taught Meyer “to love Greek,” with simplicity, clarity and opportunity to explore with notes for further reading, index of translated passages, key Aristotelian terms, textual notes as well as footnotes and appendices. Each English language page features the original Greek on the opposing page. I don’t need to use that feature, though I found it interesting. How to Flourish is about 300 pages of quality typesetting, spacing, printing, paper and binding.
The first line to make an impression is Aristotle’s point that “…being bold makes you confident.” After my recent experience filming and screening Henry Dances, I know this is true. I’m more confident than ever after making bold, even risky, choices.
Interested in gauging my new year’s resolutions, goals and habits, I appreciate that Aristotle describes ”the psychological structure of self-discipline: the thinking part of the soul is in charge, and the appetitive and desiring part of the soul follows its lead.” Much, though not all, of How to Flourish affirms my methodology.
Other standout thoughts include Aristotle’s point that “… a joke at someone else’s expense is abusive” and “that shame is not a virtue.”
“… Action originates in choice, and choice arises from desire plus goal-directed thinking…” Aristotle writes, suggesting as I take it that “desire informed by thought” can be an excellent choice. These superficially simple words and thoughts are deceptively original; I discovered the desire to slow down while reading—the opposite of the impact of reading most of today’s copywriting, often on screens, which is so modern and junked that I’m often compelled to scroll, skim and skip entire sections—and pause, put the book down and think.
Thinking is an art, he wrote. On exercising good judgment, Aristotle argues that: “People with good judgment, it seems, are capable of excellent deliberation about what is good for them and useful—not with a view to some particular objective, such as health or strength, but more generally with a view to living well…” (italics Meyer’s).
Furthermore:
… good judgment is a disposition to act based on true thinking about human goods… Of the soul’s two thinking parts, this virtue…is not simply a disposition based on thought—as shown by the fact that such a disposition can be forgotten, while good judgment cannot.” (italics Meyer’s).
This reminds me that, as Rudyard Kipling writes in his poem, If—, one ought not to make thoughts one’s aim, as the rationalist tends to do.
Next, Aristotle provides an inspiring pathway or road map to feeling good in a whole, fundamental—I would add resilient, though he does not address this particular point—and enduring way of life. Aristotle, differentiating matters of the mind as the means to happiness, wrote that “[w]e get pleasure from every sense, and likewise from intellect and theoretical thought.”
“Pleasure seems to be inextricably bound up with being alive: without activity there is no pleasure, and every activity is perfectly completed by pleasure,” he argues, carefully integrating activity and pleasure. This point sets up a deeper point to safeguard you from both cynicism and hedonism: “… [T]ake happiness to be an activity chosen for its own sake, and not for the sake of something else.”
Then, as presented by Meyer, Aristotle cashes in with an exalted view of man at his best, contending that “… the most divine thing inside us…is theoretical thinking… . It is our highest activity because intellect is our highest faculty.” (italics Meyer’s).
Such a life would be higher than a life lived on human terms, since we live in this way, not insofar as we are human, but insofaras there is something divine in us. To the extent that this divine element is superior to the composite, its activity is superior to that of the rest of virtue. So if intellect is divine in comparison to a human being, the life of intellect is divine in comparison to a human life.”
Today’s loudest voices proclaim that there’s no artistry in thinking. These shrill voices scream the dumbest, most regressively primitive forms of emotionalist spurts—that’s being generous—including the anti-due process Me, Too movement (“believe the women”), racist and anti-conceptual Black Lives Matter (“Black Lives Matter”) and the anti-conceptualist attack on language by the forces for transsexualism, all of whom rage in fury against even the most elementary expression of curiosity, scrutiny, doubt or query.
As an exasperated Democrat, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, points out, this has led the Democrats to oppose the most basic acts of decency, such as defending against an imminent nuclear threat by raging mystics hellbent on “death to America(!)”, upon the flimsiest personality clashes with an American president.
Like Ayn Rand, Aristotle, who died in 322 BC in Greece, credits a thinker—a philosopher—with thinking which profits his own pursuit of reason. What Aristotle writes here is, as translated by Meyer, elegant and excellent:
Solon was right to define happy people as those who had moderate resources, performed…The finest actions, and practiced self-control throughout their lives…”
This deserves reading and re-reading. So does Aristotle. The caliber of his writing and thinking—and, as Leonard Peikoff argues, writing is thinking—are, sadly, still rare and exceptional. These words and ideas, properly studied and understood, can enrich, even save, a life—marvelously, your own. In the notes, Susan Sauvé Meyer reports that: “Aristotle‘s own position is that a life of eudaimonia contains many pleasures, but what makes it eudaimon is not pleasure but virtue.” (italics Meyer’s).
Miss Rand, an Aristotelian writer and philosopher who elucidates the ethics of egoism drawn from Aristotle, takes it from there. Here, thanks to thought, scholarship and an expenditure of effort by the individual, you can read, learn and know ideas on the origins of happiness and go by reason or refresh yourself to begin again.