Nicomachean Ethics
Walking Away project of reading Nicomachean Ethics
by Jared Henderson
How to read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Structurally, the parts of the Nicomachean Ethics are called books. So, the Nicomachean Ethics is referred to as a ‘work’ or a ‘title’ to avoid some confusion. I’ll likely just say it is a work, and that it comprises ten books. When we reference a passage, we don’t use page numbers. We reference the book, the chapter, and then the line. These lines were added by a later editor, and they are the standard way to cite Aristotle. It helps especially if we are working with a few different translations or editions.
Nicomachean Ethics is not an easy book to read; some writers have speculated that this was a technique employed by Aristotle to make you work at understanding. This would mean Aristotle was actually an obscurantist in the true sense of the term — he obscured the meaning of his work so that the reader would need to do some intellectual labor in order to really understand it. Let’s talk about what makes the book difficult.
First, Aristotle is highly systematic as a philosopher. This means that his work builds on itself. If you do not understand the first book of the work, then you won’t understand the latter books. It is important, then, to spend time in the early books really understanding how Aristotle thinks.
Second, Aristotle loves conditionals and hypotheticals. He will often say that if x were the case, and thus y and z followed, then we would say that a, and if b were also the case, then we can conclude that c. Understanding when this is a hypothetical he is merely entertaining in order to later dismiss and when this is actually a statement of his beliefs takes some work.
Third, Aristotle rarely defines his terms. This is not peculiar to him. Ancient writers tended to take the meaning of many of their terms for granted, and we just have to work out what they meant.
Fourth, Aristotle loves a run-on sentence. Maybe his writing does not technically violate our grammatical conventions, but he loves a sentence that never ends. Aristotle in this way was a spiritual German, and his way of writing tends to offend those of us who prefer what Orwell characterized as the plain style, where good writing is like a windowpane.
Book I - Happiness is an Activity
Book II - So that we may become good
Book III - What does it mean to act virtuously?
Book IV - On magnificence (and many other virtues)
Book V - Justice as a Virtue
Book VI - Dear Prudence
Book VII - Exercising Self-Restraint
Book VIII - Three Forms of Friendship | Nicomachean Ethics
Book IX - Thick as Thieves
Book X - The Pleasures of Aristotle
What Aristotle taught me this summer
Referenced in
- No backlinks found