Taking Life Seriously
Frances Sparshott
University of Toronto Press, 1994

[Because this book is organized as a less than completely formal commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, the following quotes are all associated with particular sections and passages of the EN.]

Introduction: "[T]he 'deliberative imagination' reduces alternative possibilities to a single standard (On the Soul 433b29-434a10). It follows that humans, unlike other animals, being able to formulate alternatives and to envisage courses of action within the limited span of a lifetime, can think of themselves as living 'a life' and are faced with the question of how to organize that life." (SPARSHOTT, p. 8)

1094a1-1097b21: "[W]hat a human life *is* is essentially the life of a being that can ask itself how it is to live its own life." (SPARSHOTT, p. 11)

1094a22-24: "We now hear that it will be useful if we can make this 'end (telos) of [all] our actions' a target (skopos) to aim at.... The analysis of action in On the Soul shows that any being with a sense of time is already involved in the integration of present and future actions. The sketch of how crafts and skills are organized has shown that they are already integrated into large areas of concern.... But these integrations are performed unselfconsciously, on an ad hoc basis.... The fact is, as Aristotle will say in the very last chapter of the Ethics (X.9), most people do not actually consider the quality of their lives, take responsibility for themselves. They live from hand to mouth, as we say, responding to parental and peer pressure and conforming to educational and legal structures. This is the 'unexamined life' that Socrates in Plato's Apology says is not fit for human beings." (SPARSHOTT, pp. 16-17)

1095a13-1097a14: "It is true that 'the human good' has not been made a theme of critical inquiry before, but we have seen that it is what people and states already pursue in an unsystematic way - all we have to do is convert the unselfconscious telos into a conscious skopos." (SPARSHOTT, p. 25)

1097b24-33: "[T]he alternative to the hypothesis that a human being has work to do ... is that a human being is 'by nature idle.' There would then be no form of activity, no way of life, more suited to humans than any other.... The human function, it seems, is simply to be human." (SPARSHOTT, pp. 43-44)

1097b33-1098a8: "Being human, it seems, is something that has to be worked at." (SPARSHOTT, p. 45)

1098a8-20: "Literally and etymologically, [spoudaios] means 'serious' or 'earnest' or 'zealous': being full of spoude, which is 'zeal.' To be good at something, whether it be guitar playing or life as a whole, you to have take it seriously, work at it.... In fulfilling my function of living as a human being 'in accordance with rational discourse' (kata logon), all I can do is ask in any situation just what that situation is and what it actually calls for from me, in the light of who and what I am, what my resources are for dealing with it and similar situations, and how those resources can be developed. And if I want to know how I can do that, there is no other resources than to observe and listen to the people who are observably making a success out of living their own lives." (SPARSHOTT, pp. 50-51) [PSA: on restrictive vs. directive construals of 'kata logon' see WALKER-2018]

I.13-VI: "Our discussion has, from the beginning, had a curious double focus: the entirety of life and the totality of a lifetime, on the one hand, and the quality of action and experience at the present moment, on the other. Nothing will be more important than to maintain a dialectical relation between these two: our life as it is envisaged and implied from moment to moment, and the moment as what it is because our whole lives are implicitly brought to bear on it." (SPARSHOTT, p. 70)

1103a14-23: "A human child (or an unsocialized and inarticulate adult, for that matter) will develop behaviour patterns on the basis of its experience, as any other animal does. These patterns have nothing to do with virtue. But once the human begins to have things explained to it and acquires the idea of doing things *for a reason*, it will begin to modify its existing behaviour patterns accordingly. As we shall see soon, this means that a transformation has to take place, and the trouble with human life is that the transformation is not always complete. But the viability of the whole notion of 'the human good' depends on the supposition that the natural way for a human being, as a being whose whole life is suffused with symbol use, to develop, is for it to develop habits of acting in accordance with explicit principles - but for these principles themselves to reflect the quality of the entirety of the rational behaviour patterns as they have been developed." (SPARSHOTT, p. 78) [PSA: in order to demonstrate that you do things for a reason, you need the ability to account for what you do and engage in activity with an account, i.e., 'meta logou'; cf. BURNYEAT-1981]

1103b23-25: "The word used for habit formation, ethizesthai, is ambiguous: it could be taken as passive, 'being provided with habits'; it could equally well be taken as middle, 'to provide oneself with habits.' And training, askesis (granted, the word is not used here), is not something that happens to one, it is something one does. If I have interpreted Aristotle right, one starts to become moral when and if one starts taking life seriously; this is something one has to do for oneself." (SPARSHOTT, pp. 84-85) [PSA: thus enculturation and training are fundamentally mindful pursuits on the way to maturation]

1104b3-1105a16: "[C]ertain crude pleasures are basic and in a sense ineradicable, but a different set of pleasures, those of refined and civilized life, are more fully satisfactory. Humanity has an originating, animal nature, and a completing, rational nature.... It is because pleasantness is not something intrinsically *opposed* to beauty and goodness that a harmoniously valuable life is possible." (SPARSHOTT, pp. 90-91)

1105a17-b18: "The development of a virtue, it seems, is more than just developing a tendency to perform a certain sort of action: it is making oneself into the sort of person who would, as a matter of policy and self-expression, do just that sort of thing." (SPARSHOTT, p. 94)

1111b4-1113b2: "[W]hat one chooses to do is always something of which the value is indirect, derived from the reasoning process. What we act on is never the end itself, always 'what leads to the end.'" (SPARSHOTT, p. 122) [PSA: there might be a connection between prohairesis (i.e., "pros-hairesis") and "ta pros to telos".]

II.7, II.6-IV: "We start with the individual as a self-sustaining organism, with its self-preserving and self-maintaining behaviour. Then we move on to the economic order, the virtues of property, and then to the level of individual spiritual property, glory and reputation. Then we move up to the level of interpersonal relations in a civilized society, based on mutual recognition of individuals. And finally we come to justice, where the object of concern is no longer the individual's interests or those of particular face-to-face groupings of individuals, but the system of persons itself within which a stable and intelligible order is to be maintained. (This sequence - individual, household, heroic age of alliances between warring tribes, city as community, city as domain of law - is basically that of the opening chapters of Politics I.) The whole discussion proceeds in an order of decreasing materiality and increasing abstractness or spirituality." (SPARSHOTT, p. 148)

V: "The only relevant feeling is, as the Republic suggests, the intellectual jurist or administrator's passion for getting *the right answer*, the solution to the problem posed - in individual terms, the desire to do the right thing in terms of some publically accepted standard. It is an orientation to truth, and truth is the distinctive value of the intellectual virtues (1139a28-29; 1139b12)." (SPARSHOTT, p. 158)

1133b29-1134a16: "In the case of justice, virtuous action is cut loose from its foundation in psychology, so that the perspectives of agent, of victim, and of administrator and lawgiver slide into each other. Instead of the moral motive of action tou kalou heneka, for the very splendour of doing the right thing, applying to the way one handles one's other motives, it becomes itself the sole motive." (SPARSHOTT, p. 176)

VI: "[T]he quality of moral insight, the correct identification of occasions for action in relation to a grasp of what the good life is, will be an intellectual virtue, but not one that can be separately cultivated, since it effectively reflects one's basic moral character." (SPARSHOTT, p. 198)

1142a31-b33: "The work of good sense [phronesis] then, as we said before, is good counsel [euboulia], excellence in the process of deliberation that links our assumptions about the good to our perceptions of our situation. The process is a quest (zetesis), but not just *any* question, for inquiry in general has as such no practical point. The word 'quest' or 'inquiry' may take us by surprise: where did it come from? Looking back, we find it just after the quotation from Euripides about good sense in private life: people who have that are understood to *search out* what is best for themselves.... they inquire systematically into a good by which they think it is right that their action should be guided." (SPARSHOTT, p. 226) [PSA: at root this is the examined life, which takes the form of a quest for the complete good, i.e., the best life]

1152b1-1154b34: "What is it we like about things we like doing? Here, surely, the search for the unit is the delusion - what we like about them is in each case what is specific to them; that is why it is *them* we want to do and not something else. But a minimal (though not quite vacuous) answer to the question would be that it is the doing of them that we like. We value them as activities.... But what makes an activity enjoyable as such? Aristotle suggests that it is the lack of internal or external impediment: what we enjoy is the free exercise of our unimpaired faculties." (SPARSHOTT, p. 256)

"[P]leasures, the things people enjoy, may well be processes; the bodily pleasures clearly are so, being obviously inseparable from the physiological changes which are themselves thought of as supplying deficiencies; but the delight in them, the enjoyment, is a state of being, an activity, and from that point of view the pleasures are activities (1153a7-10). [PSA: the delight itself involves active awareness (theoria); cf. the theoria involved in recollection of past experiences and hopes for the future; on hope for the future see EN IX.7 1168a13-15 and perhaps Metaphysics V.29 1025a3.]

VIII-IX: "The account of individual hapiness in EN I-VI took for granted established and permanent relationships. How are we to account for them? There must be, as we know there is, a world of feeling in which we live, as necessary to happiness as virtuous activity. And to show how this can be we must somehow reduce feeling and action to common terms. And we do. And when we have done it we find that we have redefined the concept of practice itself in such a way that we can bring intellectual activity within its compass; so the digression on friendship turns out not to have been a digression after all. The concepts of happiness and friendship are mutually accommodated to make a new conception of the good life possible.... [T]he actuality of friendship gives a new perspective on life: it enables us to see that human activity is essentially a matter of awareness." (SPARSHOTT, pp. 264-265) [Here Sparshott refers to De Somno 454a1-7, on which he comments: "This passage of On Sleep identifies sleeping and waking as alternative states of the organism; someone who is awake always perceives something, either externally or internally. 'Perception' in this extended sense must be what we would call 'consciousness' or 'awareness,' a concept for which Aristotle's language affords no special term." (SPARSHOTT, p. 413, footnote 4]

"The idea of the self is a product of reflection (IX.4). Without this reflection, the 'sense of time' is unexplained because the relation of future to past is itself ungrounded." (SPARSHOTT, p. 268) [PSA: see also STERN-GILLET, p. 29 on the self as achievement]

VIII.2, 4-5: "True friends stick by each other through thick and thin. And this permanence is partly due to the fact that forming a friendship represents a policy, a series of decisions, not merely the growth of mutual sentiment. Really to love people is to wish them well for their own sake, and such wishing involves commitment of the whole personality, a practical judgment that must reflect a state of character rather than a mere passing emotion (1157b29-37). So, even if friendship is neither virtue nor 'with' virtue, it has something important in common with virtue." (SPARSHOTT, pp. 274-275)

1166a1-1172a15: "The last main division of the treatise on friendship is perhaps the most startling passage in the Ethics, and one that affords a key to the general tendency of the whole work. It is here that Aristotle develops the theory of activity, proposing a way of viewing human life that reveals the most fundamental way in which logos enters into human life. This is through self-awareness, the perception and thought that have perception and thought as their object.... Friendship, we saw, depends on love, on likeness, on recognition, on reciprocity, on activity, on quality of characters, and ultimately (from a different viewpoint) on sharing of life. These requirements (ta philika, 'the friendly things') are now recognized as being fulfilled most obviously in people's relationships to themselves, insofar as they consider themselves as objects - that is, to the extent that they can be self-aware. A friend is thus virtually a 'second self,' serving as a projection of the ego. One can know this second self as one cannot know one's real self, so that a friend can be a means to self-knowledge, and an indispensable aid to the happiness that only a fully conscious existence can afford. An unshared activity, it seems, cannot be a complete activity at all; or, at least, beings who share none of their activities cannot be fully conscious, and hence not fully aware, in any. For all its audacity, this passage is not unprepared. Its themes are activity, self-cultivation, idealism (action tou kalou heneka), harmony, the joy in living, and the conceptual normativeness of the virtuous person; and these have been leading themes of the Ethics throughout." (SPARSHOTT, p. 287)

"[S]elf-love requires a self to be loved, and this must depend on integrity of character.... [A] true self-love is the prerogative of a good person. But self-love can be nothing else than love of one's life, and how else could we define happiness than as loving one's life or having a life one loves?" (SPARSHOTT, pp. 288-289)

1166a1-b29: "[G]ood people consider their best interests in the longest run, make the quality of their lives as a whole a conscious object, deliberate in the interest of all their values ... find their existence good and ... approve of (take delight in) their existence as a whole.... Good people have assumed responsibility for the quality of their own lives." (SPARSHOTT, p. 290) [PSA: note the connection to eudaimonia as the complete good, i.e., as the best *life*]

"Vice has no principle of its own. The vicious person simply fails to be spoudaios, does not think things through, either fails to see that there is a mean or fails to use all available data to establish what the mean is.... [B]ad people can only maintain their conviction of their own rectitude by averting their attention from what is there to be seen. Their kakia lanthanei, they don't notice it, but in the longer run and at a deeper level they can't *help* noticing it." (SPARSHOTT, p. 293) [PSA: here again notice the connection to awareness / theoria.]

1170a13-b19: "[A] human life can be thought of as a continuous flow of consciousness.... Since it is in awareness of awareness that the value of this extended self-consciousness lies, one must suppose that *perfect* friends will spend their time together primarily in activities in which this awareness is most thorough and direct - in the sharing of words and thoughts (1170b11-12). So the intellectual life, praised at the end of VI as stemming from the highest intellectual virtue, is also characteristic of the highest friendship." (SPARSHOTT, pp. 299-300)

1171b29-1172a15: "It would seem then (cf. 1170b10) that in friendship one somehow incorporates a friend's consciousness with one's own by sharing thoughts and actions, which insofar as they are actions of a person are modes of consciousness. Thus friendship is an enlargement of consciousness and hence an enhancement of life." (SPARSHOTT, p. 301)

"An unconscious pleasure is a subhuman pleasure. That is the point of the remark in IX.9 that animal life is defined by the capacity for perception, human life by the capacity for perception *and thought*. To be human is to think about what one is doing, to make one's activities objects of conscious reflection at the same time as one is conscious *in* doing them." (SPARSHOTT, p. 302) [PSA: here again, eudaimonia is activity 'meta logou']

X.1-4: "[I]t is certainly distinctive of human intelligence that is exercised at work, in culturally developed and organized patterns of production of goods and services. This side of life is excluded from Aristotle's account, mostly no doubt in careless snobbery, but basically because we are to assume the stance of people deciding how to life their lives. To be in a position to make such a decision, one would have to be at one's ease, delivered from the necessity of making a living. The whole economic sector is accordingly relegated to the necessary precondition of the good life. But that is a viewpoint no longer accessible to us. Integral to the modern view of the human condition is our recognition of ordinary lives and of the ordinary activities of which such lives consist." (SPARSHOTT, p. 320)

1177a6-11: "In a well-integrated life there would be no clear distinction between what is work and what is not work: even at the most toilsome moments, the labour is not imposed but is part of the life that is one's own and the expression of oneself." (SPARSHOTT, p. 334)

1177a12-18: "The relevant ergon of humanity lies in the saturation of life with 'reason,' which we saw entails the intensification, focusing, and integration of one's self-aware activities. This requirement is adequate to specify a happy life: it is enough that we find a way to be serious about this, and the outcome of such seriousness might be any of an enormous variety of possible ways of living." (SPARSHOTT, p. 338) [PSA: on intensification, see Topics 115a26-31 and JOHNSON, p. 205]

1179a33-1181b23: "Aristotle presents us with the world we know, in which most people are ignorant, stupid, malicious, selfish, greedy, irresponsible, and short-sighted, and will always remain so. They are not serious about making their telos into their skopos." (SPARSHOTT, p. 356)

Afterword: "It is because the best life, the most living life, is one of fully developed activity, and this must be the life most successfully saturated with perception and thought, that the key value term in the original exposition was zeal, seriousness, spoude in its most general sense. The person who takes life seriously, with diligent energy and attention, who is not slack or idle and does not take life 'as it comes,' is the person who gets the most out of life and thus does what is required to fulfil the human ergon, to realize the potentialities of humanity.... The intimate connection between spoude and energeia is what gives the Ethics its point." (SPARSHOTT, p. 360)

"What is missing is any sense of how all these levels of freedom and culture are dynamically related to the life of the animals we are.... Because the problem of how to use our freedom arises only insofar as a solution of our economic problems sets us free, Aristotle slips into supposing that the economic problem can be solved and put behind us as individuals and as societies." (SPARSHOTT, p. 361) [PSA: cf the EE's thought experiment of how one would live if one didn't have to work.]

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