Emotions are to be encouraged

Photo by Anna Berdnik

The biggest change that Aristotle introduced into ancient ethics was quite a psychological one, which was that emotions are intrinsically to be encouraged and are good things. Now this really does mark him out against almost all the other ancient philosophical schools who all have similar goals of pursuing happiness, usually through virtue, ethics, trying to be a good person and linking those together. However, Plato thought emotion was an absolute demon and a beast, and we had to bind it down in our soul, transcend emotion entirely and replace it with pure reason.

Guides to the good

The Stoics, who came a generation after Aristotle, again thought that, for example, an angry man is a temporary madman; what we needed to do was learn to control every single desire, appetite and emotion and become this pure reasoning creature. The Epicureans thought that the thing to do was to remove yourself from all public life, even avoid having a partner and children, to achieve what they called ataraxia, which literally translates to “no hassles”. That means actually disengaging with anything that might ever make you sad, angry, envious, vindictive or feel like sex with someone – to suppress all of that. The other schools were all varieties of seeing emotion and passion as bad.

What is so amazing about Aristotle is that, because he sees humans as just an advanced animal, he says: “Not at all. These are guides to the good. If we listen to them, and then see whether we are exploiting them, or modifying them or training them in a way that leads to more happiness for everybody, then we’re actually using our reason to deal with our emotions and work with them.” The wonderful analogy he uses is actually of a spoon. So reason and emotion aren’t antithetical; they’re the concave and convex side of a spoon.

Theory of meson

This seems to me to be incredibly compatible with 20th century post-Freudian notions of therapy: you embrace and examine with your therapist the drives that you have, but then use considered deliberation and ratiocination in order to decide which ones need controlling or modifying and which ones need to be actually fertilised and allowed to see the light of day. The consequence of all this, in terms of his actual systematic method, is that he comes up with a theory of meson. This means the middle way, and it’s often wrongly translated – by interference from Latin – as the golden mean, but he just called it the mean.

He believed that for every emotion, and passion and appetite we had there was a correct, median amount to have. So you didn’t have a polarised ethics, where you had anger and then calm, or raging lust and then some kind of purity or celibacy, or throwing all of your money around all of the time so that you put all of your dependents into financial crisis. Every one of these things has a median in the middle.

Channelling vindictiveness into a moral agent

Detail showing Aristotle by Anton (rp) 2005.Wikimedia Common. Public domain.

I isolated my worst faults as excess of desire for revenge. That’s a very good example: revenge. All of the other ancient philosophical schools said it was ridiculous, and you shouldn’t want to ever have revenge. That evolved through Platonism into Christianity and turning the other cheek. Okay, Aristotle says, no way. Of course, somebody who’s obsessed all the time with getting one back on anybody who’s slighted them in the slightest way, and their life is dominated by planning revenge, that’s excessive and must be avoided. Though what he said, which nobody else ever had in the philosophical schools, was that someone with no capacity to feel vengefulness is not a proper moral agent.

If your child is bullied at school and you don’t feel that you want them to have some kind of apology or restitution, and you don’t frogmarch them off to the head teacher’s office to demand to know what’s happened and how it’s going to be sorted out, then you’re not acting as a proper moral agent. It’s what you do with that vindictiveness. And this has helped me extraordinarily to sort out which perceived slights or offenses are completely irrational, and that I’m simply making myself miserable by thinking about when to get back at them, and which ones demand appropriate action.

Living with a good guardian spirit

Aristotle’s definition of happiness was very different from any that had gone before. He used the same word as Plato and the Greek poets did, which was the traditional Greek word for happiness of a permanent kind, contentment, felicity and that is eudaimonia. That really means living with a good guardian spirit. It’s an inheritance of a religious sensibility, but for him it isn’t at all. Instead, it’s how to achieve the equivalent to blessedness, but off your own back, by your own efforts. He said the marvellous thing about eudaimonia through virtue ethics – which is what Aristotle’s ethics are: virtues and vices, and thinking about them – is that nobody can take it away from you. It’s a permanent internal state. It can be drastically affected by just one thing, and that is very bad luck.

So you achieve eudaimonia, which is an internal state, by being able to practise being the best possible version of yourself. That involves becoming the best ethical version of yourself by both working on your virtues and diminishing your vices. It also means, in practice, doing it every day. The marvellous thing – and this is another important Aristotelian concept – is that if you do something consciously and deliberately every day for a year, that’s nice to someone else or a good thing to do, it does eventually become something you do habitually on autopilot.

That relationship is a form of philia

Love, in Greek, is just philia, where we get all the words for being philanthropic; Philip, Philippos, means somebody who loves horses. Philia includes sexual relationships, but is not exclusive to them. So your life partner is your best friend, philos, and appropriate to that relationship with your very best friend is a sexual expression of it. For everybody else, from your own child or parent to your neighbour, from your fellow townsperson, your compatriot to your world co-citizen, the relationship is a form of philia, it’s just increasingly diluted. He actually uses the analogy of a liquid that you dilute with water, but it’s the same thing. It’s reciprocal goodwill, reciprocal doing of favours and being concerned when you take decisions not only about your welfare but about others’. So that would be the ideal citizenship. It would be the ideal parent-child relationship. It would be in your workplace with your fellow workers. It’s a form of friendship. This is very powerful.

Three categories of friendship

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He talks about how there are three basic types of friendship and all of the mistakes in them. And you can tell from the way he writes about it that he has had problems in relationships and had to give them a lot of thought. There are three categories, and all of the problems are caused when people confuse those three categories of friendship.

First are your primary friends, and he doesn’t think you can manage more than seven or eight of those. They will very often be your blood kin, especially if you have children, but they may not be. Indeed, if your blood kin do not behave towards you with reciprocal empathy and with your own goodwill in mind, he says that there’s no problem at all in relegating them out of the category of primary friends.

Then there are pleasure friends who you just enjoy being with. You enjoy going to the movies with them; you enjoy going to a dinner party with them; you might like going to the horse races with them, whatever it is that you like doing, but these are not people who you would expect to help you if you were arrested, stuck in prison and charged with something you haven’t done. They’re not people you would expect to put you up in their house overnight if you’ve had an argument with your spouse. They are there for fun, and it must be kept as fun. He said this is where young people have the greatest problem, because they fall in love so easily and they create passionate friendships without really knowing people very well. They assume those pleasure friends are primary friends too quickly.

Then there are utility friends, which sounds very kind of cynical and hard-nosed, but it’s not. It’s simply all the people in the world with whom you make a contract, for however long it is that you’re with them. Maybe you go on holiday, meet some fellow travellers for two weeks and it’s incredibly useful and mutually beneficial, but you’re not going to weep a single tear when and if you never see them again.

Decide who really treats you properly

So he says you need to basically go through all of your friends and obligations, including your blood kin and decide who really treats you properly as a primary friend and who doesn’t and you simply relegate. This is the beauty of it; you don’t have to get rid of the other people. You relegate a primary friend who’s let you down to pleasure friendship, so you can carry on going out for a drink with them but you’ll never again tell them your innermost secrets. Most important is to keep utility friends in that box. When I’m in the playground with all of the other mothers of eight-year-old children, these are absolutely utility friends. We babysit for each other, we’ll do favours for each other, we’ll drop our kids off at school for each other. Goodwill between us is very important, but I am not going to go, the first time I meet them, and tell them everything that’s wrong with my marriage. That would be for a marriage guidance counsellor or a primary friend.

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Ancient takes on emotions

Hall, E. (2010). Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun. Oxford University Press.

Hall, E. (2017). Aristotle's theory of katharsis in its historical and social contexts. In E. Fischer-Lichte, & B. Wihstutz (Eds.), Transformative Aesthetics (pp. 26–47). Routledge.

What Aristotle can teach us about positive emotions