Today in class, we talked about Aristotle’s ethical beliefs and structure of the soul. Aristotle believes that happiness is the end in which we are all trying to reach. This belief is one that Socrates also shares. So in all the actions that we do in life we are ultimately trying to attain happiness and so it is teleological. He explains that the happiness he is referring to is not the mere psychological feeling, but an energia which is movement or process towards a certain end of being complete and lacking nothing. Along with happiness he explains his idea of virtue. He believes virtue is fulfilling our function in life; performing kind acts is not virtuous, rather doing the acts that are unique to the thing or person. An example of this Dr. Layne gave in class was a dog that is locked up in a cage. Because the dog is locked in the cage it cannot perform those actions that make it different or unique such as fetching a newspaper or running and playing with the owner so Aristotle would say this dog is not virtuous. Dr. Layne also brought up Aristotle’s theory that there is practical and theoretical reason. Basically Aristotle says that theoretical reason is more of reality and practical reason is idealism or how things should be. I don’t know how this ties in with happiness and virtue, but we talked about it, then we went into the structure of the soul.
Aristotle believes the soul is split up into two parts and these parts must cohere in order to reach happiness. The first part of the soul is the rational side which contains your virtues of thought which is the reasonable side. The second part is non-rational side which contains our appetite which disregards reason and desire which has a relationship with reason, but may not always listen. Aristotle state that our reason and desire must be in harmony in order to gain practical truth therefore we must train our habits or desires early. Some of the rules given to us by society and our parents help us to achieve this harmony.
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