▶ YouTube Summaries

• YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq-PtJJOuPQ
• Original title :: Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: criticism, happiness, good-spirit-ness

Prot continues the Nicomachean Ethics reading from the previous video, this time indoors from the Gutenberg text in Emacs. He covers two topics. Criticism (from Greek krisis, judgement) needs knowledge of the subject and targets the work, not the person. It differs from mere opinion and deserves to be welcomed. Then eudaimonia, usually translated as "happiness", which he renders as "good-spirit-ness": a harmony of the spirits that govern your body and mind. That harmony cannot exist in a vacuum, which is why it is the goal of politics. He closes by tracing every relationship back to one: your relationship with the limits set by the divine or nature.

Inexact knowledge is still knowledge

• Aristotle concedes that ethics and politics cannot be exact. That should not stop the inquiry: an outline is better than nothing.
• Everyday life works this way: no exact definition of friendship, beauty or love, yet you have friends and know beauty when you see it.

Criticism is judgement

• "Each man judges well what he knows": a good judge is instructed in the matter, or has general mental cultivation.
• Critic, critical and crisis all come from the Greek word for judgement. A krisis is the moment you tell what contributes to a goal and what detracts from it.
• If you don't know the goal, or lack the knowledge to reason about it, your judgement is faulty.
• Disagreement is not automatically criticism. The other person may not know the domain or have thought through the consequences of their view.
• Real criticism shows you something you didn't know, didn't understand, or failed to acknowledge. You should welcome it ("dance and sing").
• Tell criticism from opinion by its target:
• "Hey Prot, I'm surprised you said this" is about the commenter's own expectations, so it is opinion.
• "You talked about criticism without defining what a judge is" targets the work, so it is criticism.
• Criticism of a person (e.g. "you drink too much") is really about that person's relationship with themselves, not the person as such.

Receiving criticism and putting yourself out there

• Your first response will be defensive. Don't argue back. Acknowledge, let it sink in, and come back to it a day or a week later with a cooler head.
• Ask: is there a world where this person is right, and what would I do about it?
• Learn to ignore personal attacks (looks, hair, glasses). Engaging gives them more value than they deserve. Letting the troll speak exposes their bad relationship with themselves.
• Speaking in public is physically hard: racing heart, tight stomach, imagined replies. With practice the body stops reacting so strongly. You acknowledge the emotion, but the judgement is made by reason, and reason needs calm.

The "young" are the inexperienced

• Aristotle says the young are unfit students of moral philosophy because they lack experience and follow their passions.
• He means young in experience or temperament, not age. Prot is a "baby" in music because he never studied it.
• Experience comes from engaging with the subject attentively, not from the passing of time. Age alone does not make a better judge, though a five-year-old obviously cannot do statecraft.

What is the highest good?

• Everyone agrees on the name, "happiness" (living well, doing well), but disagrees on its content: pleasure, wealth, honour, health when ill, wealth when poor.
• Prot rejects framing it as wise versus ordinary people. Like friendship, everyone is onto something, so discuss it in general terms.
• At the level of politics, happiness is collective, interpersonal and intergenerational, not only "I'm happy right now".

Eudaimonia as good-spirit-ness

• Eudaimonia (ευδαιμονία) contains daimon, a neutral word for spirit in ancient Greek. The negative "demon" meaning came much later.
• Literal rendering: "good-spirit-ness". "Happiness" isn't wrong, but it is shallow.
• A spirit has a life of its own, discernible apart from circumstances, as in "the spirit of the law".
• Every emotion can be seen as a spirit (anger, grief, pleasure) that wants to stay what it is.
• Spirits have no body, so to act in the world they must possess one. When anger takes over, it displaces the concord of calm, thinking and cooperating spirits, and you do things you later regret.
• Unhappiness is the sense that someone else is in charge: another person, or a partial version of you (laziness displacing industriousness). The fix is to change circumstances, ask for help, or make small changes that cascade until the spirit is displaced.
• Virtue is the same mechanism in reverse: you let yourself embody good spirits (philosophising, creating, cooperating). Good-spirit-ness is the state in which you feel in control and work towards your goals.

Why happiness is political

• Even a contemplative recluse lives in an environment. For lay people that environment always includes others.
• Example: a neighbour's legally loud music breaks the concord of concentration and creativity Prot needs to record, without making him angry.
• Other people's deeds condition your state, so there is no happiness in a vacuum. That is why good-spirit-ness is the end of politics/ethics.
• Lay people don't need Aristotle's technical taxonomy of justice; the general idea is what is useful in daily life.

One relationship behind all others

• Recalling the previous video: every sin is a form of exaggeration, and exaggeration implies limits.
• Recognising limits means recognising whoever set them: God, gods, nature, the name doesn't matter. Overeating poisons you whether or not you believe in it.
• Living moderately therefore establishes a relationship with the divine. That relationship shapes your relationship with yourself and with others.
• Moderation in one area but excess in another means the relationship has gaps, and those gaps carry over to self and others.
• So fundamentally there is one relationship, and all the others, and with them ethics and politics, follow from it.