I’ve been reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as part of the online course at Hillsdale College. I should say rereading, since I read it in college as part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum, but that was the late 1980s. As long ago as the 80s were, it was recent compared to when Aristotle wrote them. I should also say reading selections from it, not the whole book.

A section on what he calls a good person versus a corrupt one resonated with how I’m choosing to live. Avoiding polluting and depleting seem beautiful to me. It takes work. It doesn’t make money or honors. I do it for others, not just myself.

I was pleasantly surprised at how accurately this over-two-thousand year old book resonated with the challenge and rewards of living by our shared values of liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy even when my culture rewards the opposite.

Everything below quotes the book (except the section headers).

Beauty Versus Corruption (Book 9 Chapter 8)

Therefore, a good person ought to be a lover of self, since he will both profit himself and benefit the others by performing beautiful actions, and a corrupt person ought not, since he will harm himself and those around him by following base passions.

So in a corrupt person, what he ought to do and what he does are out of harmony, but a decent person does what he ought, since every intellect chooses what is best for itself, and the decent person obeys his intellect.

But it is also true of a person of serious worth that he does many things for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary, dies for them, since he will give up money and honors, and all the goods people fight over, to gain what is beautiful; for he would choose to have an intense pleasure for a short time rather than a mild one for a long time, and to live in a beautiful way for a year rather than in a random way for many years, and to perform one great and beautiful action rather than many small ones. And this no doubt is what happens with those who die for others; they choose something great and beautiful for themselves.

Such a person would also give up money in a case in which his friends would get more money, since there would be money for the friend, but a beautiful act for himself, so that he distributes the greater good to himself. And it is the same way with honors and offices, for he will give up all these things to a friend, since this is a beautiful thing for him, and something to be praised. And he seems appropriately to be someone of serious stature, since he prefers the beautiful above all things. And it is possible that he would even give up actions to a friend, and it would be a more beautiful thing to become responsible for the friend’s performing them than to perform them himself.

So in everything that is praised, a person of serious worth obviously distributes to himself the greater share of the beautiful. In this way, then, one ought to be a lover of self, as was said, but one should not be so in the way most people are.

Happiness (Book 10 Chapter 6)

The happy life seems to be in accord with virtue, and this involves seriousness and does not consist in play. And we speak of serious things as better than those that bring laughter and involve play, and say that the activity of the better part or of the better person is always the more serious, and the activity of what is better is more powerful and more conducive to happiness from the start. And any random person, or a slave, might enjoy bodily pleasures no less than the best person, but no one would grant a share of happiness to a slave, if he does not even have a share in his life. For happiness does not consist in such pastimes, but in activities in accord with virtue,

• ← The redlined neighborhood I grew up in