“How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life”: Yale Well Lecture with Edith Hall

so good afternoon and welcome welcome to Patel Chapel it's a my name is Sharon Kugler and I serve as the Yale University chaplain and a committee member of the Yale well Committee yell well offers a framework for instilling habits of wellness and students and developing a strength of well-being and emotional intelligence Yale well identifies and supports pilot programs that use the expertise and interests of faculty students staff and alumni these projects teach skills not always taught in the classroom today Yale well is delighted to bring Edith Hall to campus to speak on how ancient wisdom can change your life Edith Hall is a professor in the classics department at King's College London she is a leader in the study of ethnicity class and gender in ancient sources of ancient theatre and the continuing impact and use of ancient ideas in world culture she's the author of several academic books and editor of many more she also writes for the wider public thank goodness so some things I can understand her recent book Aristotle's way was reviewed in the New York Times Wall Street Journal and Time magazine particular review that spoke to me was written in American scholar and it it said in clear patient language Hall deftly weaves threads pulled from this daunting range of material into lessons that pertain directly to the dilemmas of modern life we're told that Hall first encountered Aristotle when she was 20 and he changed her life forever one of the books strengths is her tone of unmistakable sincerity I think we're in for a treat professor Hall will deliver remarks and we'll have some time for questions and answers afterwards please join me in welcoming Edith Hall thank you very much that's a very warm welcome and for the invitation to come here I haven't been to Yale for several years and I always like coming here and especially to Professor Emily Greenwood for organizing the whole thing yes I am a practicing Aristotelian I admit it quite what that actually means in everyday life is an interesting question this is a sort of picture that I do have in my fantasies in another life I might have been a student at Sir Aristotle's Lyceum which was somewhere with beautiful garden where scholars and students would meet and study with Aristotle it's really the first what it is it's the first thing that we can recognize as a university as we know it in world history in that it was a teaching institution for people of approximately undergraduate - sort of postdoctoral stages it had a wonderful library Aristotle had an extraordinary collection of his own books and actually the way that he arranged them was provided the model for the great library at Alexandria but something even more important he surrounded himself with colleagues not just in in philosophy because he was a true polymath the master of those who know as Dante calls him and so he had scholars of science and maths and physics and chemistry and biology and zoology as well as philosophy and especially local history constitutional history and they gathered there but at five o'clock in the afternoons or it's sort of sundown or it's not invited the general public who were interested in talking about ideas into the Lyceum every afternoon and would talk to them he had a huge commitment to public outreach in fact published a great many books in very short form short treatises which what he called the exoteric books which just means the opposite of e so Tariq instead of inward facing its outward facing so in very many ways he is apart from anything else a fantastic role model for anybody in higher education in the 21st century the picture that put me on to the Greeks as a child on to all of them was in fact in a children's magazine the one on the right it was called look and learn I just thought I'd never seen anything so in my life as those guys standing around in the Lyceum talking about great and eternal truths and my delight in the mid-1990s when the Lyceum was actually discovered during excavations for the Athenian underground train system and has been properly excavated and although those aren't the same flowers that bloomed there when Aristotle was talking to his closest colleague the great botanist Thea fastest who I like to imagine planted that garden it's still a very beautiful place to go it's right in the heart of Athens a little bit east of the acropolis and much to be recommended so I've been asked to talk about happiness because Aristotle's entire moral system has a goal in mind which is the individual and collective eudaimonia happiness which can't be achieved in a long-term sense actually can't really be achieved it has to be created and recreated every day it's more of a verb than a noun it's a way of life which is why I wanted to call my book Aristotle's way in a quite sort of Gospel sense it's a way of conducting yourself and it takes a certain amount of certainly intellectual commitment there is just one ancient picture of personified happiness on this beautiful vars in the British Museum but here we have actually the rather more populous view of what happiness is in that she's got some nice jewelry she's probably getting ready either for marriage or for meeting her husband she's surrounded by symbols of erotic love and luck should be that is probably the popular idea of what happen is and it may well be the sort of popular idea that we have of happiness happiness is something that you're supposed to be able to get by buying a foreign holiday going on a cruise going to McDonald's to get a happy meal going to a cocktail at happy hour and so on or just getting to be incredibly rich or just being madly in love all of those sorts of things this is absolutely not what our settlement Aristotle it was a commitment to trying to be the best possible version of yourself you could possibly be that is maximizing your whole potential and in particular as a moral being as an agent and by working on yourself to try to make yourself a better version of you than you were before you started thinking about ethics and he is absolutely probably gives you absolute promise that if you do this in a sincere way and are very honest about your failings and work on them that you will get to be a lot happier than you were before you did it and I can only give you the empirical evidence of my own life that I discovered this 40 years ago when I was about 21 and it's worked for me I think I am as happy as I could have been given all the cards I was dealt you know the different things that happen bad luck good luck all the rest of it so I've decided to write this book only about three years ago actually because my agent who had previously written a fairly standard history book about the ancient Greeks for said why are you always going on about what Aristotle would have said what Aristotle would have done could you please just write it down and I did in about ten weeks it didn't except for the last chapter which I couldn't finish and I'll tell you about that later it's he literally just said just go and tape yourself talking and thinking aloud because I think the world might like to buy this and I'm your agents I'm interested in making money okay where we're going to start the Aristotelian system of ethics is complicated it's also an amazing network that comes out to encompass not only moral behavior but biology your attitude to your material environment politics your attitude towards your fellow citizens and it's really quite hard to find an entry point and you'll be pleased to hear that after going to quite a lot of schools to talk to 15 year olds and 14 year olds about this I've decided that the best entry point is the political animal it's that we're all animals I'm not suggesting for a minute that your intellects are no more developed than those of 50 both but I find it easiest to start with this so this was actually a completely revolutionary thing to think in the 4th century BC that I am a homo sapiens I'm an anthropologist that means I'm an animal that was not the way the Greeks thought at all the ancient Greeks thought that they had been made specially by the gods and they were very different from animals and a lot of their structural thinking is about being not animal not wild but Aristotle says no we are animals were just advanced ones and then because he is actually the founding father of zoology I think there any zoologists in this room but you have to read Aristotle if you do zoology he invented the entire system of classification according to different modes of reproduction different modes of ambulation respiration kind of thing what he did was beginning his question what is a human and how can that human be happy by saying what is different about the human animal the political though on which was misquoted by President Trump in an altercation with the Pope a couple of years ago but never mind what is it different about us as a as Oh on an animal from all the others then we will know what it is to be human by a process of elimination and he spent two years on lesbos with his friend Thea thrusters who was from low score seventeen years younger than him this is a Victorian zoologists fantasy of them inventing botany on the one hand the zoology on the other as far as I know there are no lines or giraffes on lesbos but it's a very nice idea these are just some of the many animals the book I recommend if you've never read any Aristotle before the book I actually recommend you start with is his history of animals it's a joy to read it's not difficult it's all about wonderful stories about all the birds and bees and insects and the horses and fish that he was very expert in and had talked a lot to hunters and game keepers and fishermen about and he classifies them and these are just some of the animals like asses and bees that he was particularly keen on there's an awful lot about horses and just before I go on to the classification and the human animal I'd like to say I'm not going to talk much about politics today at all but one of the great advantages of Aristotelian thought is that he is absolutely compatible with and by a lot of people treated as the founding father of an environmental approach he's the perfect philosopher for 21st century green politics and this particular scholar who's a Turk called Osgood Orhan who are being in touch with because someone told him I was showing his picture a five foot has written a wonderful article explaining how arizona's approach to particularly production and sustainability is something that is a very good model he doesn't believe that we should ever produce more than we need he thinks that things start to go wrong when we have more commodities than we need he also fascinatingly to me I found right there in one of his other he wrote four treatises on animals that has survived one of the other ones that survived the first ever example of a human of an animal species that has been made rendered extinct by human activity and he's very sad because the red scallop of the lake on lesbos no longer exists the fishermen have told him because of over dredging the face of the lake so he's actually already sensitive to those issues but he decides and this is a very very simple summary I'm aware that there's at least one professor of philosophy who knows far more about Aristotle than I do in this room I should say I did not do my doctorate on Aristotle I did mine on Greek tragedy these are the things that he thinks most distinguishes Homo sapiens from all our fellow animals we like to live in communities but there again he says so do some others like bees we can develop that he's terribly interested in friendship strong friendship bonds with non kin and effect they may be more important kinship bonds than those with biological kin they may be a much more beautiful relationship crucially we can reason enquire deliberate and plan this is an extraordinary capacity which as far as we're aware no other animal shares with us fully and being able to reason think about the future make decisions and particularly ask questions about the world just everything that we do here at university that continuous process of one and inquiry and it's particularly important I mean the famous opening page of his metaphysics is that all humans by nature yearn for knowledge all humans not you know one race or one gender it's humans desire and yearn for knowledge we have this special capacity which in a slightly mystical way in some of the few very mystical bits of Aristotle seems to be linked up with his idea of God that we actually become most near what he imagines God which is an intellectual capacity we become most like God when we are fully activating our reasoning powers because this is something very special about us we can decide to and acquire them decide to acquire them and then go out and acquire them Tecna competences skills we can learn to man cars we can learn to analyze what happinesses is actually cause it just another technique another skill or competence and all of human life is about acquiring different competences and different specialists have different ones though there are some tech9 we all need like personal hygiene or ability to cook a decent meal we very importantly in his works on memory can recollect intentionally and purposefully he has noticed that dogs for example can remember other animals have memory it's quite obvious they do if you take a dog for a walk it often knows where to go the next time animals remember what time meal day their meals will be served they remember humans who are kind to them they remember humans who aren't kind to them but can they sit and say do you remember three years ago when we went on this walk that there was a rainbow right or shall we try and remember where all the water holes when we were here last year probably not though I know that the certain of very advanced animals we are now discussing a lot more what they're capable of humans ability to activate conscious memory is for individuals an extraordinary power and I will come back to that later and very touching Lee he thinks that laughter is very human which means it must be important he's very interested in laughter he knows there's bad true laughter but actually laughter is an incredible gift which he thinks only humans can do unfortunately we've lost his famous treatise on comedy so we are community dwellers we have these strong bonds with people who include non kin we can reason enquire deliberate and plan we can aside to acquire competencies we can recollect intentionally and we can laugh that's a fantastic set of things and Aristotle actually says that if that's the case then that makes us more responsible than all the other animals he says that human beings can be the noblest of all animals because of these credible gifts but it also gives us the capacity to do a thousand times as much damage as any other animal and I think that particular principle that it's the gift it's also the responsibility this makes us responsible for all the other beings with whom we share the planet and I'm much happier grounding all of this not just in all the environmental catastrophe we're bringing on ourselves but as we are by dint of our intellectual capacity we must be responsible for all the others it's it's it's absolutely essential right we are also born with two kinds of potential and the word Aristotle uses for the ten shots when the most exciting words in Aristotle is Dunamis Dean Ami's it's actually the word that dynamite comes from and I'm very upset that Alfred Nobel chose that word when he was wanting to label a highly destructive explosive with substance because I would like to have a positive dynamite this is the dynamite that could make the whole of the human race as far as i concerned far happier and that is this every single anthroposophical fill their true potential if they could do that then our chances of great happiness would be serious dynamite right we're born with two kinds a potential every individual you'll notice I'm starting from the individual the inside of the individuals head this is something that is very very different from the way you start to think about life with Plato for example it's very anthropocentric you start with quite a subjective principle rather than starting with the city state and working downwards you start with the anthropos and work upwards through partnerships to build the city-state so we've all got we were all born with the Dunamis or ease even from the moment of conception the Dunamis to develop into an adult human rather than for example a mature oak tree or a swan that is we would now call it we have our species basic DNA kit right he called it this special Dunamis he thought that it was imprinted somehow by the father semen on the woman's internal matter he didn't quite get the relationship between female the between mothers and DNA but he got this idea that it was in there already from the minute of conception but then we've also all got a Dunamis peculiar to ourselves and that might be to be a great gardener parent poet cook politician pianist singer mechanic engineer doctor teacher or something else but absolutely everybody has got something that they really ought to be growing up into being because they will be good at it right and that is not determined by what their parents do it's simply not it's much more random than that and the fundamental first stack if interning in terms of trying to become an Aristotelian happy person is to identify what it is that you will make you fulfill your thought become the very best possible version of yourself and then fulfill it easier said than done and I know I have I have very young adult children and it's one of the hardest questions of all and society is telling you all kinds of things pressures all kinds of pressures on you to be famous or to be rich or to be obedient or to be this that the next thing or to take over your father's company but it's crucial to try and listen and sense as hard as possible just momentarily during momentary actions during chancing cancers and experiences what it is that gives you really good pleasure and I don't mean eating or sex I mean what activity in your daily lives gives you true satisfaction that you would like to develop to actually get better and better and better at it rather than just enjoy it as a sensory experience it's also very important I think to be patient I did not figure out what I wanted to do till I was 27 at all good parenting and mentoring is of course essential and we don't have enough of that nowhere near enough parents even in highly developed worlds where people have got the luxury not to spend their lives merely eking out a subsistence to feed their children even where we have that luxury the amount of bad parenting I see just in two a wrong pressure right instead of letting the child finds their way and the way to do that I think is by maximum exposure to lots and lots of different things not by forcing people to have hundreds of violin lessons if they plainly don't like the violin but I don't know a lot about it but I'm assured by neurologists that there's a huge amount of evidence that the human brain is not fully wired up until 25 it's actually not fully wired up which means that forcing people who haven't decided what they want to do before what they're 25 is likely to have unfortunate results neither does not fit with our current pressurized examination programs and so on but I certainly know in my own case I was about 27 when I really realized what I was good at and what I wasn't good at and was able to decide what to do on that strength once you've found out what you want to do you gonna have to be able to communicate directly and effectively I'm actually really going through the chapters of the book I try to cover most of Aristotle's really important books and his rhetoric is one of the most influential text books on persuasion in world's history but is the first extant one we've got but what's so important about it was that his teacher Plato was very much of the view that learning tricks as he saw it of speech learning how to persuade people was something that led to very specious sophistic arguments people spin doctoring people being able to argue away from the truth towards untruth or worse towards really unpleasant agendas but Aristotle opens the rhetoric and again he's very good he's rousing openings and he says I do not understand why we train our fellow humans to be able to defend themselves physically right with weapons or their bodies and we do not train everyone to be able to defend themselves with that tongue which in everyday life he says for ordinary people is far more important being able to make a coherent argument defend yourself further your interests and those of your dependents avoid defend yourself against persecution advance your own interests and indeed simply deliberate well and I in my chapter on rhetoric actually do they do it on a job application with a CV you can actually reduce everything he says in the rhetoric to four principles and I'm very pleased that in English that gets to ABCD isn't that wonderful it doesn't work on being told by people translating my book into Arabic and Greek but hey and that is audience until you think about who is it who I am trying to persuade what the emotions are like what the emotional situation and relationship is between us you are lost and I know that I know this very very well as somebody sometimes has to read 200 letters of application for a single one year lectureship or something at King's College London people who have not bothered to find out who will probably be reading that letter don't do very well so audience research whoever it is to brevity as short as you could possibly be for the content clarity at all times and that's much harder to achieve than it sounds and then delivery and delivery can be everything from how you open an email to whether you being a starving student go and hire a well-cut suit for that job interview right delivery is the fourth element but it's incredibly important when I get emails that say hey prof. I'm not well disposed towards the person who has opened an email with April I don't particularly want distinguished madam either but that is if an hour a mean between these two and we should go on to that but to fill our human potential this is one of the greatest gifts really that Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics gave us is the ability to deliberate effectively and that is to make decisions and we all have to take decisions all the time far too many actually in modern life in terms of choosing between consumer goods and so on hardly anybody is trained at the right time which I believe to be the server early teens in the basic principles of good deliberation and this means that people take disastrous decisions precipitately and without thinking through all the consequences that is what happened with brexit as a collective decision but this is what happens when somebody leaves their spouse because somebody has told them that their spouse has been unfaithful right the next day this is not a good way of deliberating and I have been rather brutal with Aristotle here because he's taking some information for granted from free vyas writers on counseling and deliberation he also wrote a treatise on deliberation which has not survived but implicit or scattered in his work on decision making are these eight principles I'm leaving out the ninth which is don't deliberate with women or with when drunk because obviously you wouldn't want to do either of those thank you whoever laughed ok first take your time now that has become it sounds so obvious but when I was a young thing before email when we actually had to write a letter and put it in the post you would write the letter saying I'm resigning and emigrating to Australia forthwith or I'm leaving you cutting off our children and going to a convent I would write that letter I would put it by the front door I would go to sleep I would get our like throw it away in the bid and I felt much better because I had done that with that emotion what do we do now we bang off that email how many of you have done that don't my husband will not let me answer emails after 8 o'clock in the evening because I have almost always had a glass of claret by 8 o'clock in the evening he simply won't let me all right so that's why they had the Delphic Oracle in edge of Greece because it took 10 months to get an appointment by the time you've got your appointment at the Delphic Oracle the putt did City the state that you wanted to declare war on right had probably sent you a lovely present right it's very very good principle but more importantly even in that is verifiable information the amount of decisions that are taken on bad information misinformation lies slammed just bad facts we invaded Iraq about past Britons on entirely false information that we were presented with by Tony Blair entirely false information that decision was taken on in Parliament if you your best friend says that your boyfriend has been kissing someone else do you believe him or her you probably shouldn't because if they your best friend they've already got a vested interest in your emotional life they're the last person to believe actually what you should actually do is go and ask the person involved these are two very extreme examples but you know what people do not think about it you investigate precedents what happens when NATO invades Iraq or Afghanistan or anything else let's look at history you then look forward you're using this brain you calibrate likelihoods all possible likelihoods you write down every single possible likelihood if it's a serious decision of how everybody will react what might happen what might be there and you still won't get them all but you can try you have to factor in random chance there will be likelihood you cannot possibly anticipate definitely but there are things that might well happen the example I give in the book is if you're arranging a wedding you do not know if you live in Britain whether it will rain or not you simply don't know but you do know it's very likely which means therefore that you have an alternative venue for photographs indoors supply some umbrellas and have extra hairspray for the bride right uuuugh factor in randomness as far as you can you consult disinterested codeine liberators now because I was speaking at an Ivy League university I now I don't have to explain the difference between uninterested and disinterested I do actually to most of my students at some point you don't want somebody who's an uninterested in your your plight because they won't go to sleep and not listen but you'd want someone who has nothing whatsoever to gain or lose from you choosing either way alright nothing and that will not be your best friend it might be a specialist marriage guidance counselor it can be very difficult to find somebody completely disinterested but my word it's important and you can actually pay people to help you make decisions who have no personal investment you consider consequences for every single party concerned even leave spitting up with somebody have you been only being out with six months will affect groups of friends and parents siblings possibly right you think you have may not you may have to discount it it's not as important enough because it will affect your happiness not to make the decision you're going to but you have to be prepared for the consequences on everybody and lastly be prepared to chuck it all in the bin and start again and he's very big on this you must be open to new data and prepared to read to liberate in its light and it can be actual just new data like what will actually happen to the customs union our role in the customs union you know things we can know or it can be that the actual situation has changed and I'm not going to go on about this much but one of the reasons I am happy to do business with Aristotle even though in the first book of the politics he says that he is perfectly capable of tolerating slavery and he thinks women can't deliberate because I know I could supply him with the data and the persuasive rhetoric that would change his mind he is absolutely committed to constant revision of constitutions and relationships it's it's it's because several examples of this that in the light of new evidence interestingly and I always want to tell the NRA this one of the examples he gives of things we used to do in Greece until we decided it was a bad idea was bare arms in the assembly right we have learned to stop carrying weapons around in the city with our fellow citizens it didn't work ok so we stopped it and he gives many many examples actually the beautifully what he cites as what the best bit of evidence about when it's noble to change your mind it is not in constant right it's the sign of a proper moral agent is of tragedy called the philic TT's where it's a very brilliant tragedy morally but as a young man calls in the autonomous who is told he's a soldier that he has to go and take a poor old man in agony of an island where he was long ago dumped in agony because he's needed again because only he and his magic bow come and the Trojan War and he must just go and get him by any means necessary and Odysseus who's very crafty in this play forces him to go through with this as his orders or but Neoptolemus when he talks to the old man here's his story here his terrible pain this is a really grueling pain screams in pain so speech after speech he says no I can now see this would be an immoral thing to do and Odysseus tries actually highly utilitarian arguments like the greater happiness of all the Greeks at Troy if we can get rid of the war felony she simply won't do it sorry Neoptolemus will not do it and promises philip tt's that he'll take him home and look after him in his own home in his old age and it's an incredibly beautiful moment because this young man stops doing what the father figure tells him and becomes a man morally and does the right thing in the light of this new data and I just love the fact that Aristotle who adored the theater is using that example but to be happy you have to do one thing that is very platonic on a lot of ethics he's very different from his teacher Plato you have to know si se out on you have to know yourself this is just a 18th century engraving of a young man not quite sure how to be happy and a sort of cherub appearing with a tablet that says know yourself but you have to start with your virtues and vices the actual technical name for our Satine I think is virtue ethics which makes it sound really poncey and off-putting virtue and vices even worse it sounds like prostitution and drugs rings but just bear with me it just means good qualities and bad qualities all right I just unfortunately the words virtue and vice are very loaded Aristotle bless him gives us in his you Demian ethics an actual question are you ready for your questionnaire on yourself okay but just before I go on to it we have to just make it clear that this is not a dualistic system where you have virtue here and vice there and all those Stoics and Platonists and some christians won't like this it's part of the Aristotelian system that meant I could embrace this virtuous these ethics wholeheartedly instead of saying there is anger and then there is non anger anger bad non anger good yeah or there is carnal desire bad you know celibacy virginity purity good instead of that everything is on a spectrum and you want to head exactly for the middle of the spectrum people have often said to me including a couple of very famous Aristotelian philosophers they can't believe someone is so emotional and passionate as I am which I am I'm Priscilla - all those things can be an Aristotelian and I thought to say to them it's because I'm all those things but I had to become not a thirteen-year because I couldn't deal with a system that didn't allow me to have an acknowledge and sometimes think highly useful things like anger or revenge or desire what you're heading for is the middle so he's very interested in the whole nexus around anger and envy and revenge of course having too much anger is a bad thing too much younger woman your anger inappropriate ties with the wrong people you will hit your child when it's your boss that has been yelling at you right you'll have anger that is not properly controlled at the right person then though you have on the opposite end of that spectrum no anger and are sort of firmly of the belief that anybody incapable of anger cannot be an effective moral agent they can't be an effective moral agent they can't look after themselves all their dependents and we will never be happy you actually need to be able to get angry to be happy the point is that you have to use it to get yourself into court if somebody has smashed into your car and broken your legs or if your child has been bullied it's your soldier that helps you it's the general it gets you gives you the energy to get up and act on the anger when you have been damaged and he's absolutely clear that people who can't get angry at all will not make happy individuals or effective citizens so with that sort of spectrum and the idea of going for the middle here's just some of his principles from the new Demian ethics she gives you a table so you could go through them you can think how do I feel about money right now you don't have to tell me what you what your answers would be but if you're not honest with yourself it won't work you must know yourself if you're not honest you can't work on it and then get the fruits of happiness yeah so there is financial sense and integrity there is avarice which means you go around tricking other people and being obsessed with money but there is a deficiency which is just being stupid about money which means anybody can exploit you and that leads to very diseased relationships you need to be able to stand up for yourself with integrity about your money very closely allied to that is how much should you give away okay he really actually doesn't usually tell us which way he's tending on these things IRA sort of really hates mean people people do say mean with money you say tight don't you you know what I mean people who will not give any money away especially rich ones he hates them I've often wondered whether his father who was a doctor never gave him any pocket money or perhaps philip of macedon when he hired him to teach aristotle Alexander the Great didn't pay him properly he really hates meanness with money especially in the rich he thinks generosity is absolutely will help to make you happy especially if you can afford it but he's extremely worried about people who are prodigal with money again because he says not only will they lose all their money so they can't look after their dependents and themselves but they will be gullible and able to be manipulated which will lead to problems in again in relationships right if they're seen as a pushover that will make people think they can exploit them and the whole set of relationships becomes more and more Dean's disease this one interests me because very Greek masculinity you're supposed to boast right all those warriors in home yes boasting is supposed to be good but he says no there's a median which has just being very honest about yourself if you know you good at something denying it it's actually false modesty and in its way a fault that sort of doesn't and with this is quite interesting because humility and foe self denigration it's very much in our culture right but actually I think you can lead just problems if you know you're good at something and the certain task comes up it's good to be able to offer it confident knowing that that's something that you're quite good at it's also very gendered thing in that it's much easier for men to say I'm really good at this this and this without being seen to be what would be the word women are much more easily accused of being arrogant and boastful I love this one so just getting your daily manner are you a friendly person do you for non people to suck up to them or you just extremely rude I'm cooperative we all know people of all those extremes if you are on either extreme our subtle suggests you will be happier if you learn just to be friendly and the same to everybody obsequious again groveling behavior no no no but self-respect is fine but don't get too arrogant if I got this the wrong way around I have haven't I sorry my vices are the wrong way around self-importance McNamara see pettiness deviousness on one end gullibility on the other but there is just simple practical prudence in the middle and you know what it's just you think well this is all so obvious and how sensible yes it is a lot of Aristotle's ethics is just glorified common sense but when it comes to things like revenge and envy which are some of the hardest things to control in life I think and I think this is particularly appropriate in academia where as we all know the passions run so high when the stakes are so low you know tiny sums a travel grant I bought somebody's once decided not to be my friend after 25 years because I'd won a travel grant of 50 pounds or something that they hadn't got these are very very very bigger difficult ones and I had to be very very honest when I did this on myself my my own greatest faults are are precipitate Merce wild extremes of emotion I can be very rude I admit it I do tend to do it up the hill to superiors rather than down the hill sort of bullying uphill if you know what I mean but I've certainly done it in inappropriate ways at times but the real killer for me is I'm extremely vindictive picking an argument with a line manager boss who because he's got power even if he's trying to exercise it in a good way you know just because I can't you know I have problems with authority even when it's being exercised and I had I've had to learn I have made myself and it has made me happy and I have fitted better in since I stopped being quite so automatically uncooperative with authority but revenge has been when I've had to really work on I spent a very great deal of my life harboring my young life grievances which just looks you in the past again there are s total says people who have no desire for revenge cannot be proper moral agents and it's very honest about this so if someone has maliciously damaged you or your child or your dependent or your loved one then actually and this is where we do leave Christianity I think you do not turn the other cheek if you're an Aristotelian I could never I could never do that I think if you deserve recreation and public acknowledgement that you have to admit damage then it is perfectly legitimate and I found this much much easier to work with the trouble is when it then takes over your life that you basically spend all your time brooding on all the horrible things that have happened to you because people are jerks let's face it but so you can't you're not free of it and I I learn with Aristotle you know that really living well wellness fulfilling myself having the happiest life I could is in a way the best revenge if somebody wanted to do you real damage and doesn't want you to be happy then just going away and being happy regardless of what they've done do you see what I mean but anyway I won't go on about that anymore because you have to do your own advanced ethics how am i doing another five minutes I haven't really got much time he's credibly big on intentions as the test of ethical action that it's not the consequences but it's the intentions he's very interesting on when it's okay to lie he thinks that the default position for everybody's happen as his honesty for very good reasons one is that he wants you to be an authentic authentic or a person who is true to yourself which means you're going to be the same all the time to everybody you'll found your true person and if you're the same all the time to everybody then you can't be lying to one person and right there is a true you with truth so you will be happier but he says obviously if somebody's about to kill your family and a lie would get them out of prison then you tell the lie I mean it and I think I found this very helpful bringing up my children instead of punishing them for a lie we've always sat down and decided was the person you were lying to could they have helped you if you've told them the truth or were they trying to hurt you kids are quite capable of this quite capable of it if my kids lied to me when I will always do everything I can to help them then I won't be able to help them very effectively if I don't have the right information on the other hand if somebody you know stranger asked them to get in to the car and they said I can't I've got to be home in two minutes when they didn't you know I would reward them for that lie I would think thank heavens they can think on their feet and defend themselves it's the same with omission Aristotle was the first person we know of ever this comes into the Catholic theology but don't ask yourself at the end of the day did I manage to keep my nose clean keep out of trouble but what have I actually done with all the opportunities for helping people and doing good and I thought this has been very very important to me it's very very easy to just comfort yourself at the fact that you've kept out of trouble especially once I got tenure I once you've got tenure and you've got some money and some security if you don't speak up for people who haven't then you are actually irrigating a very important responsibility from a very secure position so I get that is how I assess politicians I don't say did they manage just not say anything racist today it's like what have they done and I find the cult of rich people and celebrities who do nothing with those positions deeply upsetting I haven't got time for equity but I'd like to I haven't really got time for any more of it actually but all of this expands out into relationships friendships and the easiest way to I'm just tantalizing you you do want to know that the Greeks are very very keen on Aras tatl at the moment because of his general ethical principles this the graffiti up in Athens weather unbelievably poor at the moment where he's saying but she did poverty is the parent of revolution and crime he did say that and in felony key there on this thing called the 700 euros protests that 700 euros a month is the absolute minimum you can live on in Greece that the organization's took poverty action they do it at the statue of Aristotle and Thessalonica is not lovely that I'm going to just end with potential I have left all the way through politics but I'm fascinated by this is Martin Luther King's last sermon in his own church in Alabama on New Year's the New Year's Day before he was shot but he actually takes the idea of potential and makes it a reciprocal Universal thing and this ties that with omission and Commission it's not good enough just to fulfill your own potential right unless you actively try to help everybody else fulfill their own potential then you're not fulfilling your potential right and that is in a sense an advance on the Aristotelian Dunamis position and he said I don't want you to forget he said to his own children that there are millions of God's children who will not and cannot get a good education but you will never be what you ought to be until they and what they ought to be and that I really feel I can feel Aristotle's head north nodding in absolute agreement it's not enough to go and be the best possible you because the best possible you actually means helping other people to be the best possible then that's it thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 12,770

Rating: 4.7026024 out of 5

Keywords: Education; Classics; Philosophy; Happiness; Wellbeing, education, classics, happiness, wellbeing, yale

Id: TIPF3qOr5ww

Length: 54min 43sec (3283 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2019