Aristotle's Primary Character Reference

Creating the Good Life :Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness
by James O'Toole

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Aristotle is remembered today as a polymath and organizer of knowledge. A primary influence on medieval philosophy, he introduced a structure of logical thought that laid the groundwork for empirical science in the centuries to come. Although most of his scientific research had become embarrassingly dated by the time of the Renaissance, Aristotle's writings nonetheless gave scholars, inventors, and artists of that era license to explore previously off-limits secular and scientific worlds. Galileo himself noted that Aristotle would not have advanced his earth-centered model of the universe had the Ancient possessed a telescope. Be that as it may, his scientific works are seldom read today, but his books dealing with political and moral philosophy have stood the test of time.

It may seem as if Aristotle's ideas have been an integral part of the Western tradition uninterruptedly since the Classical age; in fact, from shortly after his death until the dawn of the Renaissance, his writings were little known in Christendom, and their very survival was in doubt. Scrolls containing Aristotle's writings disappeared in Europe during the Roman and early Christian eras. His thoughts were preserved thanks mainly to Syrian scholars who kept them in currency until they were propagated widely by the two greatest Islamic minds, Avicenna and Averroes.

The Ancient did not find a secure place in the literature of the West until the medieval scholar St. Thomas Aquinas became his advocate. While studying at the University of Paris in the mid-13th century, Aquinas chanced upon third-hand Latin translations of Aristotle's works based on Averroes' Arabic texts. Reading Aristotle even in such corrupted form, Aquinas was persuaded that the Ancient's philosophy was unusually timeless, logical, practical, moral, and, particularly important to a Benedictine monk, consistent with the teachings of Christ. Aquinas thus became the Christian Champion of the Pagan Aristotle. Now, how many résumés include a bona fide, Rome-certified saint as a reference?

Emerging from the cloistered, afterlife-obsessed Middle Ages, when learning had been focused on holy scriptures, Renaissance intellectuals rediscovered the great minds of antiquity and, in Aristotle, found a philosopher refreshingly practical and of this world. Unlike early Christian scholars, Aristotle had not cast his arguments in terms of either/or: sin or grace, angels or devils, heaven or hell. Instead, he argued that virtue lay in the middle ground between having too much and having too little of a good thing, whether money, fame, or power. So the goal in life was moderation, and the trick was knowing where to draw the line. This notion of a "golden mean" was quite alien to medieval Christian scholars, who typically had cast moral issues in all-or-nothing terms. They had accepted as gospel St. Paul's dictum "the love of money is the root of all evil," and then taken vows of poverty. But to Aristotle, wealth was intrinsically neither good nor bad; instead, he said the moral issue each person had to resolve was when he or she had enough. As capitalism evolved during the Renaissance, Aristotle's pagan take on wealth began to be viewed as more sensible than St. Paul's Christian construct.

Aquinas followed Aristotle's texts faithfully on the issue of moderation, teaching that virtue lay in "the just mean" and "sin lies in exceeding this mean." This formulation was adopted by the Church, and it became morally acceptable for Renaissance men to be rich even if, at the same time, it was sinful for them to pursue wealth as the sole object of life. The moral challenge was for each of them to answer the Aristotelian question, How much is enough?

Skeptics of the time found such moral questioning naïve, much as some today condemn as impractical the Aristotelian conclusion that a person totally absorbed in wealth creation is not leading a good life. After all, how can one say it is not virtuous for business people to devote their lives to wealth creation when society obviously benefits from their efforts ? The issue is not easy to resolve, particularly if we believe it is imperative to act in a manner consistent with our beliefs. If Aristotle's concept of moderation is morally right, it calls into question the behavior of many of us, and it becomes incumbent on us to pursue different ends. But if he is wrong, and it is morally acceptable to maximize wealth at the expense of other activities and concerns, that conclusion, too, will influence the course of our life planning. But how do we decide what is right for us?

For most of us, of course, the issue isn't how excessive wealth accumulation gets in the way of our pursuit of happiness; we each have smaller and different fish to fry. Nonetheless, applying Aristotle's way of thinking is useful whatever our particular issue may be–pride, envy, anger–and however large or small it is. As I eventually learned in my efforts to overcome my own counterproductive desires for approval, the long-term payoff from Aristotle can be enormous. But I also learned we can't benefit from Aristotle's wisdom until we understand the analytical process he uses, then learn to apply it imaginatively to our own issues. The challenge is to overcome the decades of sloppy moral reasoning that inhibits our ability to do so.

© 2005 by James O'Toole. All rights reserved. No Part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

About the Author

James O'Toole, is research professor in the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California and Mortimer J. Adler Senior Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He has written 14 books, the most recent being Leadership A-Z.