Aristotle and Wendell

LISTEN. Today in Environmental Ethics we're receiving more Wendell Berry. 

I choose that word deliberately. Wendell's wisdom is a gift, a receipt to treasure. The astute hypothetical aliens who might ask for more Chuck would do well to ask for another Berry too.

In CoPhi it's time for Aristotle. That serendipitously coincides with the lead-off slot I've been graciously asked to fill in the Honors Fall Lecture Series. 

My CoPhi Section #12 will thus crash their party on the other side of campus at 2:40 this afternoon, where we'll consider Aristotle on friendship and happiness. I'm likely to bring Wendell into that conversation as well. I've already noticed some affinity between he and Socrates, now I think I also detect an Aristotelian strain in the farmer-poet from Port Royal. That does leave Plato the odd man out. 

In particular, I notice the echo in Wendell of Aristotle's insistence on creating strong communal lives wherein individuals have learned to trust and thus mutually support one another. That's the collective form of friendship, or at least its cousin. Good friends, good neighbors, and good citizens share a great deal of common ground. "We need better government, no doubt about it," writes Wendell in his 1970 essay Think Little. "But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities."

Aristotle's great theme, in the broadly-ethical sphere that asks what it means to live a good human life and thus to flourish and attain happiness, is ευδαιμονια [eudaimonia]. Nigel Warburton's mnemonic is worth remembering, even if a native Greek speaker might say it mangles the proper pronunciation: a flourishingly happy human is one who has succeeded in replacing you die with a virtuous life of αρετη [aretê], and thus has begun really to live. That's excellent.

Wendell's great theme, bound up with love of one's homeplace and a willingness to work joyously to sustain it, live from it, try to improve it, and ultimately pass it along to its next generation of caretakers, is also (I submit) something like Aristotle's version of happiness. Both aim at the great Graceful Life prize, αταραξια [ataraxia], serenity, tranquility, peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear. And happiness. "Be joyful, though you've considered all the facts."

But Wendell disagrees with Aristotle and Solon (“Count no man happy until he is dead"), we must take our happiness where and when we find it.

I've made a few slides, probably too many and still in poor order. But they'll get us talking. That too is something Wendell shares with the sage of Stagira, an uncommon ability to provoke constructive conversation. And so the Socratic gadfly from Kentucky is also an Aristotelian provocateur.