Selections from the Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle

Introduced, selected, arranged and edited by Marc Stier

Three works of Aristotle’s works on ethics have survived since his time, the Nichomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia (although some authorities doubt that Aristotle actually wrote the third work). Three of the ten books—what we today would call chapters—of the Nichomachean Ethics are found among the nine books of the Eudemian Ethics. The doctrines of the Nichomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics are for the most part consistent with one another, although most interpreters find some differences of greater or lesser importance between the two works. The Nichomachean Ethics is thought by most interpreters to be Aristotle’s most mature or finished thought, although in recent years some scholars have reserved this judgment for the Eudemian Ethics.

The following excerpts from the Nichomachean Ethics have been heavily edited. I have not changed or added to the David Ross translation of the text. But I have made extensive cuts and have rearranged the various parts of the text. I have done this with some reluctance and a great deal of trepidation. I believe that, in most cases, the texts of the great philosophers should not be tampered with. The order in which philosophers present their ideas, and the structure of their books, are important. It is usually impossible to understand a philosophical text unless we pay attention to the order in which the various parts of it are put together.

I have made these changes in Aristotle’s text for a number of reasons. First, the Ethics it is a long and dense work, one which we cannot study as a whole in the Intellectual Heritage program. So, if we are to study the text at all, some selections will have to be made. Second, some features of the text make it especially difficult to study in a short period of time. Aristotle was a philosopher who paid close attention to both the intricacies of human life and to what previous philosophers had said about them. His views are detailed, interlinked, and comprehensive as well as original. As a result, it is easy to get lost in Aristotle’s thought. To master his ethical writings requires long study, in which one tries to put the various piece of his thought together into a coherent whole. So, any first reading which tries to come to view of the central lines of Aristotle’s thought must leave much aside, if only to avoid getting bogged down. Even a consecutive reading of the entire text is likely to focus on certain passages and leave others more or less aside. A selection of the text for first readers of it, then, seems necessary.

These first two reasons might justify some my making some selections from the text. But, by themselves, they would  not justify the rearrangement of parts of the text. The character of the text provides the justification for my rearrangement of the text. Aristotle’s text is cryptic and compressed. Despite his detailed look at so many features of human life, many of the ideas in the Ethics require a great deal of elaboration. And, even more, the relationship between different parts of the text is not entirely clear. While there are some explicit transitions from one part of the text to another, some of the time it is not immediately clear why Aristotle moves from one topic to another. How the ideas found in the different parts of the text are meant to hang together is sometimes rather mysterious. Nor are the odd repetitions easily explicable. These features of the text have lead some interpreters to two conclusion about the character of the text. Some claim that the Nichomachean Ethics consists of lecture notes. That is, they are either the notes Aristotle used in giving his lectures in his school, the Lyceum, or they are notes prepared by Aristotle for his students, as reminders of his lectures. Other interpreters argue, following an old tradition, that the order of the text was not created by Aristotle but, rather, by his son Nichomachus who brought together a variety of materials that were not necessarily written as part of a single work. That Aristotle did not bring these materials together himself is thought to be a good explanation of the awkward transitions and repetitions—as well as the curious duplication of three books in both the Nichomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics. On this view, rearrangement of the text is justified if, in doing so, we can improve on Nichomachus’s problematic work as editor of the text.

I have some doubts about how far to take this claim. It is plausible that the some features of text are due to Aristotle’s never transforming his notes into a polished work or to the editorial work of others. But the longer I have studied Aristotle, the more it appears that there are subtle reasons, having to do with the multiple audiences for the text, that account for some of the peculiarities of structure and arrangement as well as content.[1] If I am right about this, then an extensive study of the text should pay close attention to the structure of the text as we find it. But, by the same token, some rearrangement of the text might be even more necessary on an initial reading of the text. For, if Aristotle reveals some of his ideas in bits and pieces and by indirect methods, beginning readers of the text cannot hope to grasp them without a great deal of help. The main aim of my rearrangement of the text is to help readers new to Aristotle to recognize the sub-structure of his ideas about ethics, so that they can come to see why Aristotle can, with some reason, claim that moral virtue is the core of human happiness.