Aristotle

LISTEN. The latest New Yorker cover raises a specter, one which we touched on in Happiness class out on the James Union Building stoa late yesterday afternoon.

Some "transhumanists" and futurists think it's our destiny to merge with our machines and become a hybrid species. Is that already happening? If so, I recommend getting outside ASAP and going for a long walk. Unplugged. Step away from the console, Ray Kurzweil. ("...within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.” The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)

Can we know, reliably forecast, or even roughly anticipate the future? How many of us, for instance, saw the Internet coming even as late as (say) 1989, when we were already well into the Microsoft era of personal computing? I recall one morning in 1992, during my one-year stint at East Tennessee State, when my colleague excitedly told us about his new discovery of an exotic thing called a "search engine." 

Humans have been trying to peer into crystal balls for as long as they've been peering at anything, but our prognosticating track record is pretty spotty.  The future is an open and undiscovered country, as today's CoPhi subject Aristotle explained back when we were his far future.

Aristotle formulated the openness of the future in the language of logic. Living in Athens at a time when invasion from the sea was always a possibility, he made his argument using the following sentence: ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow.’ One of the classical laws of logic is the ‘law of the excluded middle’ which states that every sentence is either true or false: either the sentence is true or its negation is true. But Aristotle argued that neither ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ nor ‘There will not be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is definitely true, for both possibilities lead to fatalism; if the first statement is true, for example, there would be nothing anybody could do to avert the sea-battle. Therefore, these statements belong to a third logical category, neither true nor false. In modern times, this conclusion has been realised in the development of many-valued logic. Anthony Sudbery, Aeon

As Montaigne said, Que sais-je?

As Doris Day said, Que sera sera.

As George Santayana said (sort of), there's no cure for death but to enjoy its prelude.

And as Richard Dawkins said, we're going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. [YouT]

An old post:

Today in CoPhi it's our first pass at Aristotle. "One swallow doesn't make a summer" (or a spring-were the Greeks really so vague about the seasons as these alternative translations suggest?) was his most poetic observation by far.

 If then the work of Man is a working of the soul in accordance with reason, or at least not independently of reason... and we assume the work of Man to be life of a certain kind, that is to say a working of the soul, and actions with reason, and of a good man to do these things well and nobly, and in fact everything is finished off well in the way of the excellence which peculiarly belongs to it: if all this is so, then the Good of Man comes to be "a working of the Soul in the way of Excellence," or, if Excellence admits of degrees, in the way of the best and most perfect Excellence.

And we must add, in a complete life; for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.

Happiness is far more than the sum of its parts, it's a quality of soul steeped in a lifetime of habitual virtue. Or so we say, when interchanging "happiness" with "eudaimonia." Flourishing or well-being are better substitutes. By whatever name, though, Aristotle's saying the good life takes time, possibly more time than a lifetime affords. If your child suffers a tragic and premature end, even after you've gone, your life has suffered diminution. In some non-trivial sense your well-being has taken a hit, your flourishing has foundered.

Russell:

From 335 B.C. to 323 B.C. (in which latter year Alexander died), Aristotle lived at Athens. It was during these twelve years that he founded his school and wrote most of his books. At the death of Alexander, the Athenians rebelled, and turned on his friends, including Aristotle, who was indicted for impiety, but, unlike Socrates, fled to avoid punishment. In the next year ( 322) he died. Aristotle, as a philosopher, is in many ways very different from all his predecessors. He is the first to write like a professor: his treatises are systematic, his discussions are divided into heads, he is a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet. His work is critical, careful, pedestrian, without any trace of Bacchic enthusiasm. 

Russell didn't much like Aristotle's perennial quest for the "mean" between extremes, particularly when applied to truth and other intellectual virtues. But splitting the difference between excess and deficiency is often the right strategy in life.

...with respect to acting in the face of danger, courage {Gk. ανδρεια [andreia]} is a mean between the excess of rashness and the deficiency of cowardice; with respect to the enjoyment of pleasures, temperance {Gk. σωφρσυνη [sophrosúnê]} is a mean between the excess of intemperance and the deficiency of insensibility; with respect to spending money, generosity is a mean between the excess of wastefulness and the deficiency of stinginess; with respect to relations with strangers, being friendly is a mean between the excess of being ingratiating and the deficiency of being surly; and with respect to self-esteem, magnanimity {Gk. μεγαλοψυχι&alpha [megalopsychia]} is a mean between the excess of vanity and the deficiency of pusillanimity.

So many of the circumstances of life are beyond our control, on either side of the grave. Can we increase our chance of eudaimonia, or must we just learn to accept our fate and let happiness happen or not? Aristotle says we can take steps to develop our character, form strong habits, and live the good life. This is only partly subject to our control, since much depends on the quality of our early nurture. Some overcome adverse beginnings, others are derailed. Life and luck are unfair.

And that's why Aristotle was so concerned to create a just society, a polis capable of nurturing and supporting all its citizens (except slaves and women-in this regard Plato scores over his pupil). "We live together, and need to find our happiness by interacting well with those around us in a well-ordered state." If you choose to go it alone, you may or may not be pleased with your life but you definitely won't flourish in Aristotle's terms. 

The middle ages enshrined Aristotle as The Philosopher, the great authority not to be challenged. He would have hated that, inimical as it is to the spirit of free and open debate governed by reason alone.

Only hedonists conflate pleasure and happiness, but that doesn't mean the relation between them is easy to pin down. Wouldn't Aristotle admit that it might be possible to indulge the right pleasures at the right time for the right reasons etc., thus acknowledging that the time and place for pleasure is always a matter of judicious discretion? Bertrand Russell seemed to think he would not, and for that reason found the Nichomachean Ethics less than wholly appealing.  "The book appeals to the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seveteenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling it cannot but be repulsive." Repulsive!

I would have said tepid, not repulsive, but Russell has a bit of a point. I'll still line up on Aristotle's side of the School of Athens, though. Which side are you on?

Today in Fantasyland, speaking of theme parks... "Black America" opened in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century. "Black Panther" it wasn't, staffed as it was with "actual field hands from the cotton belt" and designed to show the slaves' "happy, careless life." Right.

Then we learn of a former Tennessee governor and senator who makes Bill Haslam and Bob Corker look pretty good by low-bar comparison who traveled the country with the same fantastic "treacly" message, before Hollywood got in on the whitewash with Birth of a Nation's "shameless" celebration of the KKK. In this light it might seem unfair to pick on the south, while the whole country was losing its mind to illusion and delusion. The Mind of the South contended that southerners had a particular "incapacity for the real, a Brobdingnagian talent for the fantastic."

The modernist New Theology is old by now, still foolishly stoking a simplistic God/Satan struggle for our souls. Other modernists realized Christianity must adapt to the times or be winnowed like every other struggler, bending to the theistic evolutionary hypothesis that evolution was "a new name for 'creation' rather than its denial. But Billy Sunday's old-time religion ("I don't believe your own bastard theory of evolution") captured a greater share of the credulity market and set the stage for Dayton, Tennessee, 1925.  What a circus. "It was absurd that 'the book of Genesis, written when everybody thought the world was flat,' should refute science." Was and is. But some people evidently just don't mind living a contradiction, or in defiance of their time.

(Carl Sagan & Neil deGrasse Tyson set them straight...)