What Aristotle can teach us about positive emotions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.