Outline of Complete Thyself

Last Updated: 2026-02-26

The traditional "four lives" of ancient Greek thinking: making money, having fun, giving back, and seeking truth.
Why Aristotle skips over the life of making money.
Having fun: satisfying the natural self’s unreflective and unlimited desires.
Giving back: contributing to the shared goals and activities of community life.
Seeking truth: adding to human knowledge and wisdom through inquiry and reflection.
Fundamentally, living is activity (energeia).
Types of aliveness and levels of flourishing in plants, animals, and human beings.
The "difference of man" and the difference it makes.
Core human capacities: concepts, language, values, intentionality, sociality, etc.
Fulfillment is not a feeling of satisfaction but the activation and development of capacities.
Maturation as a process of developing ever greater unity, integration, and coherence.
The self as an achievement.
Taking life seriously.
The task of living a fully human life.

Taking goodness seriously.
Character is the most complete development of the capacities for action and emotion.
Character traits as thrivings.
These thrivings apply to both doing and feeling.
Learning to be good, educating your desires, shaping your emotions.
Building up your character is a process of internalization.
The thrivings help us manage and rise above pleasure and pain, enjoyment and despair.
How the thrivings foster order in our emotional lives, esp. with respect to pleasures and pains.
Balance, the mean, what's appropriate, what's beautifully right.
Internal order and disorder; unity, integration, and coherence.
Excellence of character vs self-restraint and unrestraint.
Thrivings as acquired traits and consistent practices.
Courage ancient and modern.
Moderation and the emotions.
Justice as a unifying principle.
The limits of virtue.
Aristotle's lists of virtues.
Beyond virtue: virtuosity in living.

Taking human relationships seriously.
Love as the most complete development of the capacity for forming relationships.
The importance of sociality in human life.
The three forms of philia.
Marriage, family, friendship, brotherhood, community.
Love as the greatest of the external goods.
External and internal aspects of love.
Love as feeling, love as activity.
Loving as a shared project and activity.
Loving is better than being loved.
The pleasures and pains of love.
Love, self-knowledge, self-completion.
Love as a practice.
Love, too, subsumes and supersedes the virtues.

How life has changed in the last 2400 years.
The four lives revisited.
The necessity and centrality of work in modern life.
What, if anything, does Aristotle have to say about work?
Arts and sciences as forms of seeking truth, business and the professions as forms of giving back.
The impact of modernity (the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment, democracy, capitalism, the sexual revolution, etc.).
The status of women, then and now.
Individualism and instrumentalism in modern life.
The snares, attachments, and distortions of modern society.
The continuing relevance of Aristotle's philosophic insights.
Notes toward a society of fulfillment.
But Aristotle is not a utopian: the purpose of philosophy is not to change the world, but to change oneself.
Fulfillment through the stages of life.
Completing yourself as the best path to knowing yourself.

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Passages

Index of Names

Index of Subjects