Want to know how Aristotle would describe your character? Eat dessert.
Preferably the kind of chocolate geological event described in the menu as a sin.
“The question is asked whether happiness is to be acquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training . . .”
If you were trying to maintain a low-sugar diet, Aristotle would not judge you by the decadence of the dessert but by the amount of guilt you felt afterward. If you believed you deserved the treat, or simply ate it because you wanted to, he would call you self-indulgent. If you felt guilty—you just couldn’t help scarfing down that whole gooey mess—then Aristotle would say you were “incontinent.”
Chances are, you are not a self-indulgent person; if you were, you might be happily binge-watching Too Hot to Handle with a side of Oreos instead of reading this. But most of us are “incontinent” to some degree. We know the right things to do, but we succumb to the temptations that surround us.
The essential problem, Aristotle said, is a disconnection between our ends and our means. Our animal instincts often wander from our goals, away from what he called the “ruling part” of ourselves. We wish to be fit, healthy, and productive, yet we make choices that fail to reach those ends. We become happy only when we align our wishes with the means to achieve happiness. So, okay, how on earth do we consistently make the right choices? Aristotle’s advice: don’t. You need not act like a saint every moment. The trick is to limit the number of choices we must make. This does not mean avoiding decisions. It means sticking to the prudent ones.
We’re talking about habits. The subject may seem mundane coming from Aristotle, the man who invented logic and tutored Alexander the Great. But habits are more than a means to fitness and productivity. Aristotle believed that choicelessness is a crucial key to happiness.
This might sound positively un-American. After all, we enjoy the most self-indulgent culture on the planet, where the snack food aisle might as well have been guaranteed somewhere in the Constitution. But you also know that making choices—especially those that fall on the continuum from good-for-you to avoid-the-doctor—is stressful. To be happy, Aristotle implied, we need to put much of our life on autopilot. This principle made him the first great evangelist of daily habits.
The UK edition of my new book shows a buff Aristotle. The man could sustain profound thoughts—and planks, apparently.
I’ve come across other habit evangelists over the years, but one particularly stands out in my memory. Back when I was young and single, I visited a dentist’s office that employed an attractive young hygienist. Halfway through scraping my tartar, she nudged my arm with her hip. “Know what I like to do with my dates?”
I shook my head.
“I floss them.” She nodded toward the little sink, and I spat into it.
“You floss them?”
“I do, I floss them. If they don’t let me, there’s no second date.”
“Huh.” In my dating life I had met some . . . interesting women but had not yet experienced one with a flossing jones.
She resumed cleaning my teeth. “You can tell a lot about a person by their gums. What kind of lives they lead. People lie, but their gums don’t.” She reached over for the dental floss and broke off a section, lovingly wrapping it around her long fingers. “Your gums,” she said, squinting into my mouth, “aren’t bad at all. I bet you don’t even bleed.”
Were we flirting? Did she consider this appointment a sort of dental advanced placement, allowing us to skip the relationship’s flossing stage? I’ll never know; she gave me her number, but I didn’t call it.
Still, you might say that her gum-centric test of a date’s virtue counted as Aristotelian. My decent gums revealed a soul capable of at least one steady habit. It so happened that I had been flossing for so many years that it seemed a necessary bedtime ritual.
This, in both Aristotle’s and the hygienist’s terms, was a sign of virtue.
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