▶ YouTube Summaries

• YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrD1rI9qaHQ
• Original title :: Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: society of spirit and "Prot's glasses"

The third video in Prot's Nicomachean Ethics series. He doesn't read from the book; he talks outdoors in the Cypriot mountains and ties together the first two videos with his own views, using Aristotle "as a pretext". His points: ethics is politics, because every deed sits in relationships and an instituted reality. Ranked goals act as a lodestar against tunnel vision, but every rational plan rests on emotion. The one sin is exaggeration, and moderation means respecting limits nobody can legislate. Eudaimonia is a "society of spirit", the many parts of a person or a community pulling in one direction. Through his own glasses he argues that a thing's end is the function people assign to it, which is why institutions can be changed. He closes by calling political apathy a lack of situational awareness.

Ethics is politics

• Ethics is about relationships: with yourself, your environment, and other people. Once other people are involved it is politics, and politics is about institutions.
• An instituted reality is objective as long as everyone treats it that way. Theft exists only where property is instituted; someone from a culture without property who takes a book isn't stealing by their own lights.
• Ethos means behaviour shaped by acculturation and habit. Character (literally "that which is carved") is the innate core you can barely change. Ethics deals with the first.

Ranked goals as a lodestar

• Aristotle: every activity aims at some end, and if you are mindful you sense that end at least in outline.
• Ends form a hierarchy. Building a house breaks into foundation, walls and so on; a finished foundation is a failure if the house never gets built.
• Keeping the top-level good in view prevents tunnel vision. Work can take over your life, colleagues and bosses can wear you down, but if you remember you are there for the money to live the life you want, the bad parts matter less.
• This is not private happiness. A neighbour shooting a rifle from the village (heard during the recording) shows how other people's lack of respect intrudes on your wellbeing anyway.

Emotion beneath rationality

• Ask why you want money, then food or a house, and you end at something bodily: comfort, no pain. Ethics concerns the embodied mind.
• Since the Enlightenment, reason has been ranked above "unreliable" feeling. But inquiry starts from something before reason: awe, a mix of admiration and fear (of the ocean, the outdoors, another person).
• Curiosity comes before any plan; the goal is invented afterwards to explain it. He could just as well have been a sailor or a pirate, going to the end of the world "because I can".

One, two, three

• Polytheism symbolises the many-sidedness of the human condition. The mind is transcendent (no near/far, before/after); the body is spatio-temporal.
• A person is one, which is two (mind and body), which is three (the two in relationship), and the three are one. The same pattern holds for being and modality, or God, the world, and their relation. It gives a reading of the trinity that needn't be Christian.
• Abstraction ("dog", then "animal", then being as such) strips modality until almost nothing is left, yet being and modality cannot exist apart.

Exaggeration is the only sin

• Greek thought has no absolute good and evil, only degree. Rest becomes laziness, eating becomes gluttony, wanting becomes greed.
• Hyperbole means overshoot and hamartia (sin) means missing the mark: the same idea.
• The middle ground is not up to us. An apple a day is healthy; a hundred a day is poison, and no law can make it otherwise. Gods "do not ask, they tell". Moderation is respect for the divine, or nature.
• Practically, moderation means saying no to yourself: enough food, no alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling. Someone who can do that has a good relationship with themselves, and so with others and nature.
• Addiction removes agency: the drug is in charge and you are its slave.

Daimones and eudaimonia

• A daimon is a neutral spirit with a life of its own but no body: anger, calm, excitement. To act it has to take over your body and recreate the conditions it needs.
• Addiction, or any sin, is a spirit that has taken over: behaviour that grows its own agency and makes you do things you regret. That is not just a metaphor. It explains how a gentle person can do evil without "being" evil.
• Christianity keeps only the negative sense. There are also spirits of creativity, tranquillity, sociability, and teaching.
• Eudaimonia is good-spirit-ness: a society of spirit, a concordance where the many parts pull one way. Its failure is "I want to but I cannot", being pulled in different directions.
• The same applies to families, friendships, nations, and humanity. Prot's football drill: two teams of eleven roped together race to midfield, and anyone who sprints ahead brings the line down. Winning takes a coordinated sprint, the many acting as one. Opponents still agree on one set of rules and one ball, so the game itself is an emergent organism.

Prot's glasses: ends are assigned

• Glasses seem to have an inherent end, better eyesight. But a mass-produced pair Prot waves around to make a point is serving the argument, not eyesight. Their "glassness" is the function he gives them by putting them on.
• Picture a collector framing "Prot's glasses" in a museum because of this video. They have become a product of shared storytelling, cut off from what they physically are.
• Shape and durability are inherent; function is not. If everything had an innate end, nothing could be re-instituted, and people would be alienated from their own creations ("there is no alternative", "the law doesn't allow it"). Some changes are hard and have many prerequisites, but they aren't impossible.

Situational awareness and politics

• Moderation requires knowing where the limits are, which takes situational awareness.
• Living alone outside the village means "I am not a lamb": lambs alone get eaten, so surviving out there takes vigilance and some ruthlessness.
• Your environment is also social and political. Being apolitical means hoping other people's decisions will be kind to you: entitlement, or recklessness. Without awareness there you are likely already exaggerating, or on the edge of the cliff.

Closing: life as agon

• Prot calls himself not Aristotelian but a representative of the older "elegance of austerity": a many-sided worldview of constant struggle, not withdrawing to work out a perfect plan.
• The Olympic agones were the holiest activity because sport stands for struggle. You can't declare yourself a footballer or declare yourself in eudaimonia; you have to live towards it. Relationships with yourself, others, and God are always a struggle.
• Aristotle would gladly have had this discussion: "we are sitting at the same table".