Aristotle’s Plan for Life

In summary Aristotle said that the acquisition of moral virtue is the principal means to happiness. Below is a short outline for my personal reference of what this means.

Moral virtue is the creation of good moral character — "... the habit of choosing rightly between goods of lasting importance and transient pleasures and pains." (Reference 1, p 104)  

Three of the moral virtues are temperance, courage and justice. 

Temperance in pursuit of values of the body, 

Courage to do what needs to be done regardless of how bothersome or fearful it is, to   "… undertake the difficulty of looking ahead to one's life as a whole …" and making the right choices in the context of our lives.

Justice to treat others justly with the expectation that they will treat us justly in return. This is possible in the context of a society of law that protects our lives and property from violence and fraud.

Soul values are knowledge, skills of thinking, building, loving, friends, appreciation of art, self-esteem and honor.

Socrates said the the unexamined life is not worth living, Aristotle said the unplanned life is not worth examining. Hence the unplanned life is not worth living.

A plan of life is a plan to obtain the real goods of the body, mind and character. Since we are all human beings, by our nature the same values are good for all of us.

References: 

1. Mortimer J. Adler, "Part 3, Man the Doer," in Aristotle for Everybody Difficult Thought Made Easy, (A TOUCHSTONE BOOK Published by Simon & Schuster Inc., 1978

2. Mortimer J. Adler,  http://www.thegreatideas.org/apd-happ.html, "Happiness
Words that are generally misused in everyday speech are like most of the words that the philosopher cannot avoid using because they name great ideas or aspects of them. In some case another word might be introduced to remedy the ambiguity, The word "happiness" is a prime example.

There is, on the one hand, the purely psychological meaning of "happiness" when that word is used to refer to the satisfaction or contentment an individual feels in getting what is wanted. In this meaning, one can feel happy one day and not happy the next day, but in either meaning, the individual is reporting an experienced subjective feeling. The primary point to remember here is that, in their psychological meanings, happiness and unhappiness are experienceable feelings. That is not the case when we come to the ethical or moral meaning of the word.

In its ethical or moral meaning, the word "happiness" refers to a life well lived, a whole life that is morally good because it is the product of virtue (or the habit of right desire) accompanied by the blessing of good fortune.

In this sense of the word, happiness is not something we feel or experience. In no moment of period of time can happiness in this sense be felt or experienced. During one's life, one may be on the road to happiness, one may be described as becoming happy, but one cannot be said to be happy. Only when your life is over can someone else commenting on your life declare that you had lived a good life and can be described as a person who hadachieved happiness.

Happiness in heaven and out of time is experienced in eternity and is experienced by those who enjoy the beatific vision. (In regard to this meaning, see Beatitude, http://www.thegreatideas.org/apd-beat.html.)"

3. Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual,  p123. "Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. … By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."

William James Principles of Psychology - Stream of Thought

I've be reading parts of William James Principles of Psychology this morning.

It is a remarkable book. I wish I had read it decades ago.

In particular I am reading his chapter about the "stream of thought." Very enlightening. Our sense of self is generated by memory. (I grok this from Ken Wilber, Chapter 4 "No Boundary Awareness," No Boundaries when I skimmed through it a few nights ago. I've been resisting this insight for years and I finally got it.  Then, I find the same distinction in William James!) 

As some of my friends would say, it is all from the same source, so of course I find the same distinctions everywhere I look in my quick survey of the literature of mind and consciousness.

Luminosity Brain Training: First Impressions

My initial bias about puzzles, crosswords, sudoku, chess, etc. is that they are a waste of time.  I believed that I could find equivalent and more productive problems to solve in my work of systems analysis, writing code, letters, email and persuading others to consider my ideas.  I wanted to find ways to improve my mind, not train my brain.

My brother invited me to join Luminosity as part of his family package.  Out of respect for my brother, I have played 38 games in the last two weeks.  It is an interesting process.  This “brain training” is different from "mind training.”  Many of the brain skills translate into working faster on my job in ways that I don’t get to routinely practice.  I have another bias, I don’t consider these brain skill very important, because I value accuracy more than speed, doing the right thing, vice doing things right.

I begin to recognize that my initial bias was that I placed all my value on “mind skills” -- building conceptual and memory models of reality — by doing problem analysis and troubleshooting, distinct from “brain skills” found in Luminosity.  This distinction between brain and mind skills is useful.  I am becoming clearer about the difference between brain and mind. I use the words "brain skills" to refer to matters of memory, external attention, reflexes, simple problem solving and "in the moment flexibility,” all the games of Luminosity.  Some of these words have use in the context of mind skills, but their meaning is different. For example the solving the problem of my initial bias against brain training is a mental process vice a brain process.  It wasn’t even a problem until I wrote this essay.  Increased self awareness of this  type cannot be developed except through processes of thinking, probing, pondering, experimenting.  Luminosity training is the kind of experimentation that provides the material to have this new self awareness of my initial bias against puzzles possible. Writing and thinking about my experience with Luminosity brain training in this blog reveals to me the nature of the bias.

I can see a potential opening to the possibility of translating my process of solving these problems from mental modeling to responding from silence.

I predict that there may be stages to my process of solving these problems.  

First, I start with either talking to myself, or mentally working out the solution via a mental model of images and comparisons to similar problems that I have solved in the past.

Second, responding by reflex,  no mental verbalization, and the imaging done so fast I barely perceive it.

Third, I begin to approach the experience of having instants of responding from silence, stillness, eternity. 

I work to do these exercises while remembering myself, i.e. maintaining the sensation of my entire body, toe to head.  Usually I become identified with some aspect of the experience and forget myself.  (Self-remembering in the Gurdjieffian sense, see “In Search of the Miraculous” chapter 7, paragraph beginning with “Not one of you has noticed the most important thing …”)

Note: I consider the mind to be the immaterial “form of forms” (Aristotle for Everybody by Mortimer J. Adler) distinct from the physical organ of the brain/body. (Interesting discussion of this topic at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/ [The mind is] “none of the things existing in actuality before thinking” (De Anima iii 4, 429a24)

Juggling Lessons: Simple Basics Matter

Many simple tosses done correctly lead to more complex stuff. I need to resist the urge to try to move on without mastering the basic moves. Mastery means consistency and endurance.

A metaphor for so much else in life.

Hypnosis

The young barber started talking to me about making conversations with women. I told him that when I was his age I was too shy. I told him what I learned later in life about talking to women. I gave him an example.  I paid for my haircut, tipped him, and walked down several blocks to the grocery store to meet my wife. I went into the store and asked my self, why would we plan to meet here? where did she say she would be?  Then I recalled that she has said she would be parked illegally near the barber shop. I woke up! I felt shocked that I had been lost so easily.

The conversation with the barber had put me into a deeper hypnosis than I have knowledge of being in for a long time. It is the first time I have ever been able to look back at the moment of that awakening and say "I was really hypnotized," to feel that quickly fading sense of the pain of the loss of self-awareness.

Is this an omen? Should I take it as such?  The lesson seems clear, that I have a long ways to go in many different situations. Is there more?