# Aristotle on Living Your Best Life

Speaker: Lee Braver
Course: From Socrates to Sartre: How Should We Live?
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/lee-braver-aristotle-on-living-your-best-life
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/lee-braver-aristotle-on-living-your-best-life/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9lSq6bM9C8

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Lee Braver introduces Aristotle as both one of history's greatest philosophers and greatest scientists, then dives into his approach to ethics. Aristotle begins with empirical observation: everything alive acts toward some goal, and all goals point toward a highest good. That good, he argues, is eudaimonia, a Greek term better translated as flourishing than happiness. Braver illustrates this with examples from the natural world: a plant flourishes by growing strong and bursting with fruit, and a horse flourishes not by being happy, per se, but by running wild and healthy through the mountains. For humans, flourishing requires more than pleasure or virtue alone; it means doing good and loving it. Aristotle's famous function argument asks what activity is distinctive to humans, landing on reason as the answer. Braver then maps the mind into three parts and asks which ones matter for ethics, setting up the central question that drives the rest of Aristotle's account: how can the non-rational parts of the mind achieve excellence?

## The Greatest Philosopher-Scientist

We move on now to our third ethicist, our fourth philosopher, our third ethicist, Aristotle, also a strong, strong candidate for greatest philosopher who ever lived. He's also a strong candidate for greatest scientist who ever lived. Along with Newton and Einstein. Aristotle basically invented a wide, wide range of subjects that we still study today, as you'll recognize, as disciplines. He was the first person to really treat them as individual disciplines and give an organized, directed study of them. Those include logic, musical study, theater study, physics, political science, rhetoric, linguistics, anatomy, astronomy, geography, geology, meteorology, others, but especially biology. He loved biology.

Aristotle was a student of Plato. Of course, Socrates would wander around and ask these weird questions and gather people around him, young people who liked seeing this. One of them was Plato. Plato went on to found the first school in the history of West, which he called the Academy. That's where we get all the words like academic and academia from, from his first school. And one of his prized pupils was Aristotle.

Aristotle's most famous pupil, in turn, was Alexander the Great, one of the greatest conquerors of all time, who conquered not just the known world, but far, far more than the known world, way beyond what they knew of. And as he went, as Alexander conquered more and more land, farther and farther from his home in Greece, he would send servants running all the way back to Athens with new species, new plants, and new animals to take to his beloved teacher, Aristotle, because Aristotle loved seeing new species of plants and animals. He classified over 600 different species. So, it's a slightly more advanced version of putting an apple on your teacher's desk, because Alexander had greater resources.

## Why Empirical Observation Matters for Ethics

But because he was a great scientist, for Aristotle, empirical observations were crucial. If we are to understand how human nature works, if we are to understand what humans should do, we need to gather empirical observations, just as we do with biological studies. So, in this way, he would disagree with Kant, who said we must ignore empirical observations, but only have a priori thought, and side with Mill, who was also a scientist, a social scientist, and say we need the empirical observations.

And in fact, as I mentioned in the Mill lecture, a number of these arguments that Mill uses at the beginning of his thought come from Aristotle. So, if you've seen the Mill lecture, the next couple of points are gonna be quite familiar to you. And I'll go through them a bit quickly because we spent more time on them in Mill.

## Everything Alive Acts Toward a Goal

When Aristotle looks at people, when he looks at living things in general, because for Aristotle there's a very strong continuity between all living things. Plants, animals, humans. There's differences, of course. There are important differences, but there's more continuity. There aren't sharp, radical breaks there. And he sees all living beings as teleological. This comes from the Greek word telos, which means a goal, or an end, or an aim.

When he sees living beings, what he sees are entities that act for some purpose. And that's obvious with people. We go to work because we want to get the money. We go to restaurants in order to have the meal. But he sees this all the way down to plants that have no consciousness. When we take up ends or goals, it's because we've thought it through. "I have decided I want this, and I'm going to go take the actions that will allow me to achieve my goal." But this is something that is continuous throughout all living beings.

If you see a sunflower that turns the flower as the sun moves overhead, that's not random. That's not accidental. It doesn't just happen to do that day after day after day. It is moving in order to catch as much sun as possible. The sunflower has no conscious thought. It is not planning this out. It is not deciding, "I'm going to get as much sun as possible, 'cause I really, really like the sun. Therefore, I'm going to take this action." It's not doing any of that. But its action is teleological.

It is acting in order to achieve a goal, and its action only makes sense in terms of what it is trying to achieve. Otherwise, this movement would just be meaningless. But it correlates with the movement of the sun because that is what it's trying to get, and we only understand that movement when we understand what it's trying to get. So all of life is teleological, and in order to understand its actions we have to understand the goals that it is acting for.

And these goals are things that the living being values. If it didn't want them, it would be trying to get away from them. It wouldn't be trying to get them, it'd be trying to get away from them. If it's trying to achieve them, then it desires them in some sense. It wants them, it finds them good, and therefore we call them goods.

## The Chain of Goods and the Highest Good

When we look at all of the actions that plants and animals and humans do, we find there are a whole lot of actions. There are quite a variety of actions that people undertake, and therefore there are quite a lot of goods that people seek out. If we are to understand these, we can't encompass all of them. We can't look at all of these goods. There are just way, way, way, way too many.

But Aristotle makes a further observation. A lot of these goods are related to each other in a certain way. And this, again, is the argument we saw in Mill. A lot of things that we want, we don't just want that and we stop there, we want that for something further. So the example I used with Mill was someone watching this video as part of taking a class, an introduction to ethics. So, they're watching this video. What is the good they want? What is the telos, the goal they're after? Well, to understand Aristotle.

But that goal explains the action, but not fully, because now we have to understand what that goal is. We have to understand why they're after that goal, and we understand why they're after that goal by seeing what the goal of that is. So, although our immediate action, watching the video, has a goal, that goal itself has a further goal. Because we want to understand Aristotle in order to do well on a test. And that goal has a further goal. We want to do well on the test to pass the class, to get a diploma, to get a job, to get money, to buy things, to be happy.

As Mill took his argument directly from Aristotle, Aristotle's argument here is, this cannot go on forever. You cannot have these instrumental goods, these goods that are only good for another good. It can't go on forever, because then the whole chain would have nothing good in it, and we wouldn't want to do any of it. There must be something that is intrinsically good. Something that we want for itself. And this is what Aristotle calls the highest good, because it'll be on top of this chain.

And this highest good is the thing that you genuinely, truly want. You want the other things, but you want the other things primarily for further goals. You don't really want them for themselves. You want them in one particular way that is kind of weak, because you only want them if they lead to something further. You don't want them for themselves.

The highest good is unlike any of those, because that's the thing you want for itself, and that's the thing you're doing everything else for. That is what motivates every single action of your life. If every action of your life is teleological, you don't just do random actions, you do actions in order to get things that you want, that you like, that you think are good, and if the things that you like and you think are good get their value from one single thing, then getting that one single thing is the reason you do anything, is the reason you do everything. Getting that good is the meaning of life.

## Everyone Wants Happiness, But What Is It?

And Aristotle says, and this is the second page of the *Nicomachean Ethics*, his great, great book of ethics, "Then surely knowledge of this good also carries great weight for one's way of life, and if we know it, we are more likely, like archers who have a target to aim at, to hit the right mark. If so, we should try to grasp it and outline at any rate what the good is." He's saying, look, if this is the point of your life, if this is the reason you get up in the morning and go to bed at night, if this is the reason you undertake every single action, then let's do everything we can to get it. Nothing is more important than that. Nothing could be more important than that. And in order to improve our chances of getting it, let's figure out what the heck it is.

Because if you don't know what it is, you don't know how to get it, and you don't even know if you've gotten it. If you don't know where to aim, if you don't know what your aim is, then you don't know where to aim at. This book is the single most important book you could ever read, he is arguing. Because it addresses the only question that matters. Every other question you ever address, every other action you ever undertake is in service to getting the one thing that this book is about, the one true intrinsic good that you are after in every second of your life, the one thing that will make your life worth living. That's a pretty good blurb for a book.

Now, there's good news and bad news about what this thing is. The good news is everyone agrees. The answer is easy: happiness. That's what we want. Everyone wants happiness. There's nothing you would choose if you knew that choosing it would make you unhappy. As we saw with Mill, it has to somehow, at some point, in some way increase happiness or decrease unhappiness for it to be choice-worthy.

That's Mill and Aristotle's argument. That's what makes their ethics eudaimonistic. Any ethical theory that takes happiness to be the greatest good is called eudaimonistic because it comes from the Greek word eudaimonia, which is generally translated as happiness. We're gonna come back to that in just a second, that translation.

The good news is we know it. You know it. The reason why you do anything is to be happy. The bad news is everyone disagrees as to what happiness is. So yes, we know you want to be happy, but we don't know what that means. We don't know what it is to be happy, and we don't know how to get it.

The answer to the essential question comes on the second page of the book, but that answer doesn't help us until we understand the answer. The great thinker Douglas Adams told us that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42, the point being it doesn't help us until we know what the question is. So, knowing the answer is happiness doesn't help us until we understand what happiness is and how to get it, and that's what he spends the book explaining to us.

## Eudaimonia: Flourishing, Not Just Feeling Good

The word that gets translated as happiness here is eudaimonia, and that's a perfectly good translation of it, but the problem here, and we're going to have to learn three Greek words. The reason why I want to bring in three Greek words is because a language can often contain and reflect certain ideas of a culture, of an ethos, which means that there will be words that don't have exact translations because those cultures have ideas that other cultures lack. Ancient Greece was a pre-Christian society. Christianity transformed everything in Western civilization, transformed especially in ethics, in questions of what's good and what's bad. It fundamentally transformed the way that we think of what it means to be good or what it means to be bad, what it means to live a life.

And so, these thoughts that are framed in ancient Greece have an entirely different view on the world, a whole different outlook. That's one of the things that makes them very valuable, because you can only recognize your own outlook when it comes up against something that is different. If you never met anyone who had a different accent than yours, you probably wouldn't even know that you had an accent. You wouldn't know what an accent is. They're just, this is the way the words are pronounced. It's only when you hear someone talking funny that you realize, "Oh, that's a different way to talk. Oh, then I have a way of talking." Otherwise, it's completely transparent and invisible to you.

So, it's only when we encounter these, the technical word is incommensurable ways of looking at the world, ways of looking at the world that you can't simply define and map onto each other by changing a little thing here, a little thing there, it's only then that we can really understand our own and see the presuppositions that we're making that are so deep they don't feel like presuppositions. They just feel like the way the world is. That's when we can change from thinking that there's just the way things are to this is the way we see things, from the one way to think to one of the ways to think. So, it's very, very valuable, but it's also much harder. So, we have to spend a little time working to change our mindset to see the world from his perspective.

## What Flourishing Looks Like Across Species

And the first word that we're gonna learn here is eudaimonia. It's translated as happiness. The problem is in English the word happiness has a strong sense of a mood, a feeling. You are feeling happy today. You're whistling a happy tune. Things are going well for you. You just had a nice piece of cake. Your friend just complimented your shoes. "I'm feeling happy." That's not eudaimonia.

Remember, Aristotle is a biologist, and when he's looking at us, he's looking at us to some degree as a species. Animals can have eudaimonia. A plant can have eudaimonia. Now, a plant cannot be in a good mood. That makes no sense. But a plant can be deep green and bursting with fruit and growing up strong and getting into the sunlight, and that is a eudaimonic plant. That is a plant that is living its best plant life. That is a plant that's living the way that plant should be living. That is a plant that is giving forth fruit because it's so healthy. It's got so much energy and so much excess vitality that it can give forth leaves and give forth fruit and burst with health. That is what Aristotle's thinking of with eudaimonia.

A better translation is flourishing. A plant flourishes. An animal can flourish. A horse that's wild in the mountains and running free with the wind blowing in its mane, that's a flourishing horse. Strong, healthy, mating with a herd, that is flourishing. It's not necessarily happy. I don't know what it's feeling. I'm not gonna even speculate. But it's flourishing.

And what Aristotle wants to ask here isn't what makes you happy. Happiness is a fleeting feeling, and it's superficial. Happiness is a matter of pleasure. Exactly what Mill said, and Aristotle thinks that's just too superficial to talk about the goal of a human life. Pleasure's relevant, pleasure's important, but my God, to make that the center, the core, the goal of a life, that's sad.

## Why Pleasure and Virtue Alone Aren't Enough

But a flourishing human life, a human life that's lived the way that plant is lived. What is it, he's asking, that is for a human the way running free with the wind blowing in its mane is for a horse? What is it for a human that is deep green, bursting with fruit, growing into the sunlight for a plant? What is it to have a good life? Because on the one hand, every species has a way of flourishing. So there's the commonality. On the other hand, each species has its own way of flourishing.

For a pig to be running through the mountains with wind blowing through its hairs, that's not a flourishing pig. That pig would not be very happy. It'd be skinny, and it'd be wondering why it's there. And a horse rolling around in the mud and eating slop, even if the horse is having pleasure, that's not a flourishing life for a horse. That's not what a horse should be living like. That's not the horse's best horse life.

What is a good life for a horse is fundamentally different from a good life for a pig. And if a horse started growing fruit on it, it's time to make a documentary about it or something. That's not something to be celebrated. So to ask the question, what is it to flourish cannot be asked in the abstract. Flourishing is always relative to a particular species, Aristotle believed.

This is his biological training. He sees each species having different strengths, different weaknesses, different proclivities, a different niche in the ecosystem that it fits into, and that includes us. No reason to except us. No reason that we're radically different from everything else. Our niche is different. Our flourishing will be different, but the idea that we have one, of course, why wouldn't we?

So if the meaning of our lives, the goal of all of our actions is to be eudaimonic, then now we have to ask what that is. Pleasure isn't enough. Mill's wrong. Virtue isn't enough. Virtue isn't enough. Kant is wrong. Aristotle, even though he came 25 centuries before the other two, he takes up both of their ideas for what the goal of life is.

Pleasure is too superficial, even if you make it more complex with higher pleasures. Doesn't matter. That's just not enough to sustain a human life. Virtue, being a good person isn't enough, because people can be virtuous and do the right thing and be miserable. Kant said, "Exactly. That's why happiness is wholly irrelevant to ethics." Aristotle says, "Boy, you must be fun at parties. What a miserable existence you must lead." Aristotle does not see the clash between

## The Good Life Means Doing Good and Loving It

ethics and prudence that Kant sets up, the incompatibility between virtue and happiness. Now, remember, be careful. Kant did not say you have to be unhappy to be virtuous. He just said happiness is wholly irrelevant. You cannot take anything about happiness into consideration, and therefore, a person... And in fact, for Kant, if doing a good action makes you happy, that complicates things. It's okay if it makes you happy as long as you're not doing it in order to be happy. That just can't be your motivation.

But if it does make you happy, you can never be sure if that is your motivation or not. You can never be sure if you're doing it because it's your duty or you're doing it because it's pleasurable. So it just muddies the water. When it makes you unhappy, when you don't enjoy it and you do the right thing, that's when you are sure you're doing it for the right reasons, because there's nothing else there.

For Aristotle, a person who doesn't enjoy doing the right thing but grits their teeth and does it anyway, that's an awful life. That's miserable. Who would want that? That's not desirable. That's not admirable. Aristotle's asking the question, what kind of life would you want to live? What kind of life would you want to live so that on your death bed you look back and you say, "That was really good. I'm glad I lived like that"? So that at your funeral people said, "Wow, what a terrific life this person led."

And if it's someone who does good but hates it, says, "You miserable people, I'm giving you this stuff that..." That's not admirable. That's not enjoyable. That's not a good life. They're doing good. They have good consequences. Mill would approve. They're doing their duty. Kant would approve. But that's not a nice, enjoyable, good, pleasant, happy life. That's not flourishing.

A flourishing person is someone who does good and thoroughly relishes it. So virtue alone cannot be enough. Pleasure alone cannot be enough. For Aristotle, we need a much, much broader, more encompassing sense of what it is to be a good life.

## Finding Your Distinctive Activity

For Aristotle, human life is very messy. He looks at Mill, he would look at Mill's theories and Kant's theories and think that they are simplifying things terribly, they're cutting out so much important stuff just to get a clean, simple formula. Life is very messy, and his theory's gonna be messy because your theory should be as messy as the thing you're theorizing about. It's going to be complex. It's going to be rich. Because he wants to understand the way we actually live, not put up this ideal that he thinks is unrealistic.

So Aristotle's conclusion, at this point, is that in order to understand what it is to flourish, we have to understand what it is about us that's distinctive. The horse is running. The plant is giving forth fruit. The pig is rolling around in mud. In order to see what it is to flourish, we have to look at what is specific to a species, what is particular to it. Because only when that species does the thing that it's supposed to do, the thing that is special to it, can we evaluate it as flourishing.

If you want to evaluate a harpist, is this harp player good, you're not going to ask, "Can they do their taxes well?" You're not gonna ask, "Can they teach Aristotle well?" You're gonna ask, "Can they play the harp well?" Because that's what makes them a harpist, playing the harp. That is their distinctive activity. The thing that defines them as a harpist is the action of playing the harp.

If you wanna evaluate a knife, you're not going to ask, "Can it play the guitar or hold a book open?" You're gonna ask, "Can it cut?" Because that's what a knife does. So every evaluation of something is targeted. It's targeted to the defining action that that thing has, and this is

## The Function Argument: Ergon Plus Arete

What he calls an ergon. This is our second Greek word. This is often translated as function. I don't love that translation. I think it seems kinda weird to talk about a plant having a function. I think distinctive activity is a better translation.

So we're looking for the... Well, if you wanna say is this harpist flourishing, we have to look for the distinctive activity of a harpist, to play the harp. And that's the only thing that matters if we're gonna ask if this person's a flourishing harpist. We're gonna ignore everything else. And if we don't know what it is that makes a harpist a harpist, then we cannot evaluate whether they're flourishing as a harpist or not. If we don't know what it is that makes a knife a knife, we can't evaluate it.

So if we don't know what it is that makes a human a human, then we cannot say what it is to be a good human. If we do not know what defines a human life, then we cannot say what is a flourishing human life. And the third point here is that to flourish as a harpist is to play the harp. That's the ergon, the distinctive activity, and it's not just to play the harp, it's to play it well. It's to play it with excellence.

The flourishing horse is a horse that runs through the mountains, that's its ergon, and that runs fast and beautifully and wonderfully. That's to do it well. So it has to be done with... And here's the third and last, I think it's the last Greek word. It has to be done with arete.

Now, this is often translated as virtue, and sometimes that translation makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. Homer talks about Achilles, the arete of Achilles' legs. Now, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to talk about the virtue of his legs. The virtue of his legs is what makes him run fast. Eh. Excellence is another translation. I think that's much better. It's the excellence of his legs that enables him to run so quickly. And so here is the formula that defines eudaimonia. This is what's called, because of the other

## What Is the Human Ergon?

Translation of ergon, the function argument. This is his answer to the question, what is eudaimonia, which is the goal of life. The goal of life is to achieve eudaimonia, to flourish. And what is it to have a flourishing life, to have eudaimonia? It is to perform your ergon with arete. The way to flourish is to do that thing that is specific to you, the distinctive activity of your species, with excellence. To do it well.

To flourish as a harpist is to play the harp excellently. To flourish as a fruit tree is to give forth fruit that's really good-tasting and has a lot of it. To flourish as a horse is to run through the fields fast and well. So this is the formula that will tell us what eudaimonia is, and that will tell us where the target is that'll enable us to aim at it, that will increase the chances that you can have a good life, which is the only thing that you really want.

So we started off saying, how do people act? They act teleologically for goods. Then we got to the point where we said, although there are a lot of goods, there is one highest good, which is the thing that we want for itself that fuels everything. And that highest good is eudaimonia. Now we have the function argument, which helps us explain what, when we said, well, their happiness. Everyone says happiness, but they disagree about what it is. Now we have a way to figure out what it is. Happiness, eudaimonia, flourishing, is performing your ergon with arete.

And now the question becomes, every step along the way, we have changed the question. We've gotten more specific, more intelligible, except closer to answering it. Now we've got the question in its final form. Now the question is, what is our ergon as a human, and how do we do it with excellence? And that's what the rest of the book is about. The rest of the book is the answer to those two questions. What is the human ergon?

## Three Candidates: Growth, Senses, and Reason

What is our distinctive activity? What is our function? What is it that we do? Aristotle tells us that for it to be distinctive, it's gotta be special to us. Ideally, it's unique. Ideally, no other species has this. No other species runs like horses. No other species rolls around in mud like pigs. No other species gives fruit like fruit trees. These are the things that make that species distinctive, make it different from everything else.

And the second general quality that the ergon has is that it's the highest thing that we have. It's the best thing that we do. He thinks there's an inherent hierarchy of activities or functions, and we want to do the best one. Because if it's trivial or if it's small, if humans are the only species that has a certain size toenail, well, that's unique to us, that's distinctive, but that's pretty low and uninteresting and unimportant. So that wouldn't be a very good ergon to define what it means to be a flourishing human, to have really good toenails. So we're looking for something that is distinctive to us, special, unique, and that is the best or highest thing in us.

And he goes over three possibilities, three candidates. The first thing is we grow. We digest and we grow. That's a very important thing we do. If we don't do that, we can't live. This is crucial. We're doing this all the time. We're doing this right now. I'm digesting right in front of you. Growing, but that's unfortunately in the wrong direction.

So could this be our ergon? No, because plants have nutrition. Plants grow. Animals have nutrition. Animals grow. So it's not at all distinctive. It's shared by all living beings. Plus, this is pretty low stuff. There's nothing wrong with it or bad with it, but if you go to a funeral and someone gives a eulogy and the best they can say about this person is, "This person had a great digestion. Had really regular bowel movements." That's not a life that's been well lived.

So secondly, the second candidate, another thing we do is we have sense perception. We see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. That's very important. Again, I'm doing that right now. I'm seeing, I'm hearing all kinds of things. Very important. Essential to life. Crucial. But this also is shared. Plants don't really have this, but animals do. And not only do animals have this, but animals are much, much better at it than us. Eagles can see better, dogs can smell better, lots of species can hear better. So not only is this shared, but we're really not that good at it relative to lots and lots of animal species. So that's not a very good candidate either.

What else do we do? What's another thing that we do? Let's again talk about the immediate circumstances. What are we doing right now? What we're doing right now is we're trying to figure out what our ergon is. We're thinking. We're reasoning. That's something else we do. The very question is itself an answer to itself. What is something that we do that is distinctive? Asking questions like, "What is it that we do that's distinctive?" We reason.

Now, what about reasoning? Is that shared? This was a bit of a debate, but through the majority of the history of philosophy, philosophers have not thought that animals can reason, and certainly not plants. So most philosophers have believed that reasoning is unique to human beings. Is it higher than digestion? Certainly, again, throughout the vast majority of the history of philosophy, that's been unquestionable. Is it higher than sense perception? More of a debate, but in general, yes, philosophers like reasoning. They're rather fond of it. They think it's quite good. And they rank it, really, as the highest thing that we do. Nothing else does it, and it's pretty impressive. The very fact that we can figure out that reasoning is our highest activity shows that it's our highest activity, because that's really impressive. So reasoning for Aristotle is our ergon.

## Mapping the Mind Through Behavior

We've answered the first question. We've started answering the first question. Reasoning is going to be the thing that is distinctive to us the way running is to the horse, and fruit to the fruit tree, and so on. But, again, we still have to understand what it is to reason. And we then have to understand what it is to reason with excellence, with arete. And if we can figure out those two things, then we've got what eudaimonia is, and then we understand what it is to have an excellent life. And then hopefully we can go live it.

What is reason? Reason, for Aristotle, is a function of the psuche. Whoop. Yes. The psuche, this is where we get the word psychology from and psychological from. It's often translated as soul, but the problem with that is that in English, soul often has spiritual, religious connotations. The soul is what's immortal, what outlives us, what we care for when we're being good or worshiping. That's not at all what he's talking about here.

I think really a better word for what he means is the mind. Reason is something that the mind does. I believe if he were around today, he'd be talking about the brain. He was a biologist. He was a scientist. They did not know that the brain was the seat of reasoning. They thought the brain was an air conditioning unit for the body. But he would've been very interested in the biological basis for thought.

But he doesn't have access to that. He doesn't have MRI machines. They don't have exploratory anatomical surgery. So he can't look at the brain. But we can have some kind of anatomy of the mind, some kind of mental geography based on what the mind does. If we look at what the mind does, then we can figure out some things about what the mind is.

Because the mind has distinct actions, distinct faculties, distinct things that it can do, then we can separate out distinct parts of it for each of those activities. And this is how Aristotle tries to peer into the mind, to look through the skull without any kind of scientific apparatus, without any instruments, without any basis, any tradition to go on. He will go on empirical observations of how people think, how people act. So what does the mind do? The mind has to regulate how we have nutrition. Our digestive processes go on and something about us regulates them.

## Three Parts of the Mind

They're not random. They're controlled. They're rational in the sense that they operate well. So something is overseeing that. Something is controlling that. Now, it's autonomic, meaning we're not consciously aware of it or consciously in control of it, but still there's something in us that is watching over that. And that's part of what the mind does.

We also have emotions, and appetites, and desires. That's part of the mind also. And that's very, very different from just digesting and breathing and heart beating. So there's gotta be a part of the mind that's dedicated to that as well. He calls this part the nutritive, nutritive part of the soul, or psuche. He calls this the appetitive, appetitive part. And finally, of course, there's the part that we are exercising right now, the rational part.

And by the different activities that we can perceive empirically, Aristotle infers that there are different parts of the mind in control of those. And if you look at the brain, we have the brain stem, takes control of all of our autonomic processes like digestion and heartbeat and breathing. We have the limbic system, takes care of our emotions and our desires. And we have the cerebral cortex, which takes control of higher level reasoning processes. Distinctive parts of the brain, exactly like Aristotle said.

Not only are they distinctive, but they came about in evolution at distinct periods when there was plant life in the world. People who go into a coma and only have the nutritive part of their mind active, they only have the brain stem active, they're in a vegetative state because they are the level of plants. Exactly what Aristotle said. The appetitive part, the nutritive, the limbic system came out during the animal period. And the cerebral cortex, the highest, the most human, this is the most recent, and only came about during human evolution.

With just empirical observation of behavior, Aristotle gave us a rough but accurate anatomy of the brain and correlation with evolutionary stages. It's remarkable.

## Which Parts of the Mind Matter for Ethics?

Now, the question that we're asking is, what is the ergon of the human? It's reason, and reason is part of the soul, part of the psuche, the mind. So how do these three parts of the mind relate to reason? Because we want to know how to reason with excellence. And what does it mean to reason with excellence?

Well, the appetitive, the nutritive part of the soul, the nutritive part of the mind has no relationship at all to reason. You cannot persuade yourself into a higher metabolism. You cannot come up with an argument and convince yourself that kale tastes good and fried chicken tastes bad. It is impervious to reasoning, which means it has nothing to do with your ergon. The human ergon is reasoning. The nutritive part of the mind is wholly isolated from reasoning, and therefore it's completely irrelevant.

Plus, as we just talked about, it's a very low function, this is not a crucial part of a good life to digest well. So this gets taken off the board. That's irrelevant. We have two parts of the mind left, and what it will mean to reason with excellence, to perform our ergon with arete, will differ for each of these parts.

Now here, the other translation of the word arete makes sense. The other translation is virtue because as a noun we talk about virtues as positive qualities. And what Aristotle says is we have two different sets of virtues.

## Virtues of Character vs. Virtues of Thought

There are virtues of character, and there are virtues of thought. The rational part of the mind is simply reason itself, and therefore, what it means for the rational part of the mind to be excellent, is just to do what it does excellently. Very straightforward. It means to think well. In watching this video and reading Aristotle, you are exercising the rational part of your mind. And by doing this, you are improving it, you're making it better, and you are working on your virtues of thought. You're thinking better, you're reading better, you're analyzing better, you're discussing better. You're improving your virtues of thought. So you are working on becoming a more excellent thinker right now. Good job.

And we're only gonna talk about one of these, because these are things like using logic well and reading carefully and just all the things that make someone a good thinker. And we're not gonna talk a lot about those. We're only talking about one, at the end of the lecture. Virtues of character are much closer to what we think of as ethics, because this is about your actions, about what you do. Virtues of thought are about what you think. How good a thinker are you? And by and large, we don't, today, really think of that as an ethical question.

Virtues of character are what kind of person you are and what kind of actions you undertake, and that is what we think of as ethics. One of the names of Aristotle's ethics is often called character ethics. Because these are the virtues of character. And the virtues of character are a matter of the behavior of the appetitive part of your soul, of the psuche.

The question now, for almost the entire rest of the lecture, will be, how must the appetitive part of the mind behave in order to achieve its ergon with arete? If the appetitive part of the mind is not itself rational, which it isn't. Only the rational part of it is rational. How can it fulfill its ergon? How can it somehow reason with excellence if it itself is not rational?