Book review: the Nicomachean Ethics

The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. You may have heard of it. My Pingouin edition calls it just "The Ethics of Aristotle". The word "Nicomachus" is merely the name of his father; or perhaps his son; either way it is just a label. To put my prejudices up front: I didn't like it. Unlike Aristotle's physics it isn't total junk; but it also isn't good, and shares much of the discursive unedited nature of the Physics and I presume all his writings. He is also incorrigibly inclined to divide things up into types and make lists of them, and unable to restrain his pedantry in pursuing the most unimportant and uninteresting quibbles. More than anything else the book needs to be boiled down, perhaps to as little as one fifth of its present word-count.

Leaving all that aside, I shall try to make some sense of it. My main complaint is that it is very "flat" and hard to summarise; try reading wiki's article, for example. My own reference is The Foundations of Morality, which provides a correct theory of morality. Big A, I think, doesn't have a correct theory. One problem he has is that the only morality he knows of, or can conceive of as being right, is the Greek one he knows. He does know that the fundamentals underdetermine any given moral code - he is aware of the difference between areas where there are fundamental rules, like though shalt not kill, and mere conventional morality. But he makes little of that.

Quite often, he takes "the good" as semi-assumed, and so his account becomes circular. Towards the end - but alas I cannot be bothered to look up exactly where - he does say that the good is what a good man would want and do. FFS. There is some discussion of, well, effectively whether a "good man" is a thing, or whether a good man is merely a bundle of choices-of-doing-good-things, if you see what I mean. Big A doesn't state it any more clearly, if I recall correctly, though I think is very much on the side of there being "good men". Some of the value is in the discussion around this; effectively, excellence is a habit, not a virtue. By repeatedly doing good deeds, we form ourselves into the sort of people that do good deeds, for the right reasons, because we want to.

From nowhere, he derives an ultimate good, and this must be what moral actions are aiming for. Since this is wrong, it gets in the way, but I don't think he uses it much, except to muddy his thinking.

There's a long discussion of continence and incontience - the moral sort, obvs, not the affair of bladders - and the old Socratic puzzle of how people can intentionally do what is wrong. Totally missing from this is the economic insight of time-preference: incontinent folk have a strong preference for immeadiate gratification and strongly discount the future.

Big A is keen on moderation. I think at one point he discovers that virtue is a mean: you must neither want too much, or too little. Whilst this is an excellent principle for life, I don't think it fits ethics well.

In the end, he drifts from morality to politics. This could be interesting, but in his hands it isn't. To what extent is the law intended to provide merely a framework for free citizens to live their lives in peace and security - without the state forcing them to also be "good" in the ways that morality extends beyond the law - and to what extend should the state try to enforce what-it-considers-moral on its citizens? Big A touches on these questions, but he doesn't really formulate them clearly or have any answers, other than education.

Russell

Uneasily sensing that I haven't been entirely fair to Big A, I bolster my case with some quotes from Russell:

The views of Aristotle on ethics represents, in the main, the prevailing opinions of educated and experienced men of his day. They are not, like Plato's, impregnated with mystical religion; nor do they countenance such unorthodox theories as are to be found in the Republic concerning property and the family. Those who neither fall below nor rise above the level of decent, well-behaved citizens will find in the Ethics a systematic account of the principles by which they hold that their conduct should be regulated. Those who demand anything more will be disappointed. The book appeals to the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seventeenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling it is likely to be repulsive. 

and

There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind, in so far as he is aware of them, do not move him emotionally; he holds them, intellectually, to be an evil, but there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends. More generally, there is an emotional poverty in the Ethics, which is not found in the earlier philosophers. There is something unduly smug and comfortable about Aristotle's speculations on human affairs; everything that makes men feel a passionate interest in each other seems to be forgotten. Even his account of friendship is tepid. He shows no sign of having had any of those experiences which make it difficult to preserve sanity; all the more profound aspects of the moral life are apparently unknown to him. He leaves out, one may say, the whole sphere of human experience with which religion is concerned. What he has to say is what will be useful to comfortable men of weak passions; but he has nothing to say to those who are possessed by a god or a devil, or whom outward misfortune drives to despair. For these reasons, in my judgment, his Ethics, in spite of its fame, is lacking in intrinsic importance.

Refs

* ethos anthropoi daimon.

* Aristotle's politics.

* Spinoza, Ethics.

* The burden of thought.

* They call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie.

Book review: Dumb Witness

Dumb Witness is a detective fiction novel by British writer Agatha Christie. It is yet another fun-enough spirt-of-the-times type of thing; as usual the plot is driven by money, inheritance, within one of her fading English families, this time in the countryside: a worthless son, an elegant but profligate daughter, another dowdy daughter who has - horrors - married a foreigner, some greasy Greek; faithful servants and of course M. Hercule Poirot. And all narrated by the faithful Hastings.

Of the plot I got one Key Element and you'll probably want to look away now if you haven't read it; that is, that the brooch seen in the mirror is of course reversed, and so TA becomes AT and of course Bella is really Arabella. This fixes her as heavily involved; but early on the book has carefully poisionned our minds against her husband - she is weak and would do anything for him, etc - so I wasn't sure Shedunnit. In fact I went for Shedun the nail, but that someone else did the poisonning; I think you could have made a perfectly acceptable story out of two murderers. The brooch, though, feels very heavy; like an externally constructed item dropped fully formed into the story, and it doesn't quite fit. Poirot, for example, discusses her brooch with Theresa in detail, including the yeah-I-had-mine-new-but-now-any-fool-has-one and yet at no point does T say "oh yes Bella had one", as she most naturally would have.

The it-was-phosphorous and you can tell because her breath during the seance was luminous I consider rather dodgy.

Nicely, Bella goes off to a hotel, reads HP's summary, and is found dead the next day. With - ta da - no suicide note, so how can it be suicide. This puzzled me, I take too much at face value, I was trying to work out who could have come for her: my working theory was that she must have contacted someone she trusted. I now realise that I should have read the book pushing "but there was no suicide note" at me as confirmation that it was suicide.

Newsletter 2024

Some people are kind enough to send us newsletters. This is a return. Mostly, it is pointers to my blog posts.

We start with Christmas 2023, at Mother's for the usual festive relaxation, and then Mfd+J for New Year.

Early in January I bought a drone and now have 293+ rowing videoes of which Mays may be the most interesting.

At the end of February the Event of the Year happened: Miriam retired. In celebration of that, and my 60th, Mfd+J gave us a weekend in London. She had been four days a week for a few years; now she is none; it seems to suit her well; she keeps busy with her Piano and her Buddha.

In March we went up to Stanage and Froggatt for some climbing. We should do more of this (actually we got up to Stanage and Birchens in April, too). Following Daniel, I've started bouldering a lot more, to the detriment of my running. We also visited Oxford to see E, aware that her time there was growing short.

Since I was 60, in May Mother was inevitably 90; we had a weekend away to celebrate.

I continued my rowing; we went down one in the Town Bumps but this was a success.

For our summer holidays we went to the Ecrins to walk, climb rocks and mountains, play cards and Go, eat and be together. The top pic of this post is from then, just in case you've forgotten what we look like. After that the others went home and I wandered around for a bit.

When we got home I wrote up our uninspiring election.

Chronologically before that, but I'll put it here as it makes a nice ending, was Miranda graduating from Magdalen in Maths+Stats, and <sniffs away a tear> departing for the frozen North - Edinburgh - to take up a job with Natwest as a Data Scientist, or something like that; she is most recently doing prompt engineering. Daniel remains in Cambridge working for Darktrace, newly acquired by an Evil American private equity megacorp. I remain at Roku writing C++ in aid of televisions.

Happy Christmas and Best Wishes for the New Year to All.

Book review: Quest for the Future

Part of the A. E. van Vogt cache in Oxfam from which I got Empire of the Atom was this, Quest for the Future.

This one is more blatantly a fix-up; but even beyond that, blatantly makes no sense at all. Even having finished it, I have no idea why Selanie and her father were selling gadgets from the future as trinkets on a train.

But even then the characters appear to have emotions and thoughts and are more human beings than, say, Greg Bear's people.

The "Far Centaurus" thread probably made sense on its own; but as a means of time-travelling to the future, going in a spaceship to get cold-sleep seems like waay overkill; and the way he just happens to fall into friendship with the richest man on the planet is weird.

I'm kinda split on whether VV's introduction of incomprehensible tech and events is good or bad. Sometimes, with other authors, this can work. I think in this case it doesn't; the entire thing is just so arbitrary and disconnected.

Book review: Empire of the Atom

As wiki puts it, Empire of the Atom is a science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. It was first published in 1957 by Shasta Publishers in an edition of 2,000 copies. The novel is a fix-up of the first five of van Vogt's Gods stories, which originally appeared in the magazine Astounding.

The fix-up nature isn't obvious; the various chapters fit together fairly well. What was obvious was that this was Romans-in-space, in that the people, whilst flying around in spaceships, (a) have no idea how they work; and (b) fight with Roman-level weapons; and (c) have a rather blatantly Roman-type civil structure. After a bit I realised that it was "worse" than that; that the Great Leader was really like... Augustus? (My Roman history is not good) and the evil empress is even called Livia. Then it turns out that it is pretty well ripped off from I, Claudius and everything falls into place; the Mutant is then Claudius.

Despite all that - and despite the cover, which isn't really what Our Hero looks like in the book - this is, as a Van Vogt, worth reading in a way that a Greg Bear isn't (I say this as having put down GB's Strength of Stones in favour of EotA). It's kinda interesting how VV's writing is just better.

Having said that, this is a mere potboiler, and I doubt I keep it.

VV's "concept" for their tech is Roman-level, but somehow with metallurgy capable of refining the "god metals" and using them to propel spaceships via some kind of explosive-reaction-in-chambers. This is all nonsense, and he sensibly declines to give any details. But the spaceships, whilst able to travel between planets (navigation is just waved away) are able to "float" in a wy totally incompatible with the rocket concept. Which is to say, he completely hasn't thought this out: his ship behave rather like the ones in the early Flash Gordon movies.