Aristotle, friendship, happiness, Wendell Berry

In CoPhi it's time again for Aristotle. This time last semester, on August 30, that serendipitously coincided with the lead-off slot I'd been asked to fill in the Honors Fall Lecture Series. It also coincided with the kickoff of our Environmental Ethics course's discussion of the Kentucky sage Wendell Berry, so I found myself looking for points of intersection between Aristotle and Wendell--specifically on the subjects of friendship and happiness. Having already noticed some affinity between Aristotle and Socrates, I then also detected an Aristotelian strain in the farmer-poet from Port Royal. That again leaves Plato the odd man out. 

In particular, I noticed 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 made a few slides for the Honors lecture, probably too many and still in poor order. But they got 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.