Nicomachean Ethics

What It Is

Ten books, about three hundred pages, from roughly 340 BC. There is no drama, no character, no scene. What survives is closer to a set of lecture notes from the Lyceum: dense, compressed, occasionally repetitive, written for people who were in the room and had done the reading. The title probably comes from Aristotle's son Nicomachus, who may have edited it.

The question is stated on the first pages and pursued without decoration for the rest: what is the good for a human being, and how does a person come to have it? Aristotle's answer is not a rule or a formula. It is a description of a certain kind of person, and an account of how such a person is made.

Along the way he writes about courage, money, anger, wit, shame, pleasure, weakness of will, luck and friendship. Two of the ten books are on friendship. No major philosopher since has given it that much room, and the omission has cost them.

Why It Matters

His account of how a good character is actually acquired sounds obvious now. It was not, and every serious programme of moral education since is an application of it.

Its afterlife is one of the great chains in intellectual history. The Arabic philosophers preserved it and argued with it. Aquinas built the moral theology of the Catholic Church on it. When Elizabeth Anscombe blew up modern moral philosophy in 1958 and Alasdair MacIntyre followed with After Virtue in 1981, what they offered as the alternative to rules and consequences was Aristotle. Virtue ethics is now one of the three living positions in the field, and it is this book with the dust brushed off.

You cannot become good by reading it, and Aristotle tells you so almost at the start. The book is for people who have already been brought up decently and want to understand what happened to them and how to continue it. That candour is rare, and it is why the Ethics wears better than any self-improvement literature written since.

Before You Read

Twelve to fifteen hours, and it needs to be slow. Harder than Plato, not because the ideas are more difficult but because the prose gives you no help. Aristotle does not charm, and he does not repeat himself for your benefit.

The chapters on the individual virtues in Books 3 and 4 are the place to learn how to read him. Take one at a time and stop.

Book 5, on justice, and Book 7, on pleasure and weakness of will, are the two most technical and the two most commonly abandoned. Push through 5; go slowly in 7.

Read Books 8 and 9 on friendship even if you read nothing else. They are the finest thing anyone has written on the subject.

Which Translation to Read

• Joe Sachs (Focus Philosophical Library, 2002; now published by Hackett) — recommended. Sachs refuses the worn Latinate vocabulary that has smoothed Aristotle into a textbook. Where others print activity, he writes being-at-work, and the effect throughout is that Aristotle sounds like a mind working rather than an authority pronouncing. The cost: the coinages are strange at first and they will not match the quotations in anything else you read. This is a translation with a thesis. View on Amazon →
• Terence Irwin (Hackett, third edition 2019). The scholar's workhorse: precise, with the fullest notes and glossary of any English edition. The cost: it is furniture rather than music. Irwin translates for accuracy and lets the prose fall where it may.
• Roger Crisp (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 2000). The most readable modern version by a distance, and the easiest first encounter. The cost: the smoothness is bought by rendering the technical terms into comfortable modern English, which quietly makes Aristotle sound like a contemporary moral philosopher. He is not one.

Take Sachs to think with, Crisp to get through it, Irwin to study.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it against your own life, chapter by chapter. Aristotle expects it. His method is to start from what decent people already believe and refine it, so the book only works if you are supplying the evidence.

Slow down on the doctrine of the mean. It is the most misquoted idea in philosophy, and it does not mean moderation in all things. What Aristotle claims is more demanding and more interesting than the bumper-sticker version, and getting it right is most of the value of the book.

Read the introduction first here. Sachs's is philosophical rather than a walkthrough, and you will read the Ethics better for having it.

The commonest mistake is to read fast, looking for conclusions. The conclusions are unremarkable on their own. The reasoning is the point, and it will not survive skimming.