Training and the Mean: NE 2

For Aristotle, training (ethos) sits somewhere between a mere capacity and an actual action. He calls this middle ground a condition (hexis; NE 2.5), which is the end result of a conditioning regimen.⁷ In particular, it is a condition that leads one to decide in certain ways (hexis proairetikos; NE 2.6). All people, for instance, have the ability to drink too much (capacity). And there are times when people actually do drink too much (action). Those who overdrink time after time are alcoholics (condition).

Conditions do not arise in us automatically. They are the result of training/conditioning. Aristotle introduces the idea via one of NE’s few jokes: you can throw a stone in the air as many times as you like, but you will never train it to stay up (NE 2.1, 1103a20–22). Humans are different. Our character is the result of training. This works for both good and bad character. By performing just actions, we become just. By performing unjust actions, we become unjust. Aristotle looks to the gym to illustrate this point: “Strength arises from eating a lot and withstanding much hard labor (ponos), and it is the strong person who is most capable of these very actions” (NE 2.2, 1104a30–33). So too with virtues of character. But how do we distinguish between just and unjust acts so that we can make sure children are trained the right way?

As a first step, Aristotle notes that both overtraining and undertraining ruin bodily health (NE 2.2). What we should shoot for is a sort of Goldilocks zone, which he calls the mean.⁸ Does that suggest that there is a correct amount for each person to eat, drink, fear, and so on? Aristotle clarifies by comparing Milo with a newcomer to the gym: “Ten pounds of food … may be too little for Milo but too much for someone new to working out” (NE 2.6, 1106b1–4). The mean is relative to the particular situation of the individual. This is not to say that Aristotle endorses what is today called moral relativism, that whatever a person or culture thinks is right actually is right for them. Aristotle’s point is merely that the mean varies from one situation to another, so we should be smart about what we are trying to accomplish. When bulking, load up on carbs. When cutting, go into caloric deficit. If you have never squatted before, start with just the bar. This is also not to say that a trainer applies one body of knowledge to advise Milo and another body of knowledge to advise the first-time gym-goer. Rather, the trainer has one body of knowledge—that is, knowledge of training—which leads him to make different recommendations to individuals in different circumstances. By analogy, to speak of an ethical virtue as a mean state (mesotēs) does not imply that the state itself is somehow positioned between extremes, but merely that it results in feelings and actions that hit the mean (meson). The virtue of moderation, the acquired disposition to eat neither too much nor too little, is the same for everyone, even if it dictates that Milo eats more than most other people.⁹

The next piece of Aristotle’s account is emotion: we hit the mean when we reliably feel pleasure and pain in the right way (NE 2.3). Someone who enjoys eating moderately is moderate. Someone who pines for empty carbs is not. Someone who feels shame at the thought of hazing people is just. Someone who thinks it sounds like fun is not. At NE 2.7, Aristotle combines these two sets of ideas –deficiency/mean/excess and pleasure/pain—to give a rough list of the ethical virtues, running through cases of fear, confidence, bodily pleasures, monetary exchanges, donating to causes, popularity, anger, honesty, jokes, interacting with friends, and being offended. In each case, he argues, there is a way to go overboard, a way to fall short, and a way to hit a happy medium.

At the end of the day, Aristotle’s thinking about virtue is thoroughly practical: “The purpose of our present examination is not to know what virtue is, but to become good” (NE 2.2). We should therefore not be “like a sick person who listens attentively to a doctor, but acts on none of his instructions” (NE 2.4, 1105b13–16). How do we obtain a healthy character? The first step is to have had parents and teachers who raised us the right way, using rewards and punishments to steer us as children toward feeling pleasure in the mean and pain in things that fall outside the mean, with the ultimate goal that we come to feel correctly without interventions from external authorities. Short of that, take a good hard look at your character, be honest with yourself about your bad habits, and try to push in the other direction (NE 2.9): if you enjoy drinking too much, then cut yourself off short of what would be your healthy mean. If you have weak shoulders, then program more shoulder work into your routine than you will ultimately need. Over time, you can come to enjoy a healthy medium.

A Trainer’s Handbook: NE 3.1–5

In sum, trainers can shape children’s characters through a mix of repeated actions, punishments, and rewards. Aristotle takes it for granted that such practices exist. In NE 3.1–5, he sets out to understand why and in what cases they are successful. In short, NE 3.1–5 is a handbook to guide trainers in meting out pleasures and pains. The passage is thick with puzzles and technical terms. I will go quickly over the first four chapters, which set the stage for the main discussion of training, which comes at the end.¹⁰

NE 3.1 sets out puzzles about which actions are performed willingly and which are not. A few cases are quickly dismissed: actions under compulsion and actions done in ignorance. What does this leave? NE 3.2 carves out a class of actions that are distinctive of rational, adult humans: those performed via decision (proairesis). The idea was introduced in NE 2.6, where Aristotle defined virtue as a hexis proairetikos, that is, a condition that leads one to decide in certain ways. NE 3.2 explains that decision is the result of deliberation (bouleusis), which NE 3.3 presents as a rational process about things that are up to us but do not always turn out the same way. We do not deliberate about policies in foreign countries because they are not up to us. We do not deliberate about how to do long division because it always comes out the same way. Deliberation ends up being a kind of thinking on our feet when we have to deal with unscripted problems.¹¹ Aristotle illustrates the point: “We deliberate about navigation more than about gym training because navigation is less exactly worked out” (1112b5-7). In an age of GPS, we might chuckle at the thought that gym training was once a more exact science than navigation. Aristotle’s point, though, is that we can tell a lot about a person’s character by seeing how she thinks on her feet. Nevertheless, deliberation is merely means/end reasoning: it takes a goal as given and works out the series of lower-level goals through which to meet it.¹² Wish (boulēsis; NE 3.4) is what determines which goals provide starting points for our deliberation and decision on any particular occasion. It provides the motive for an action.

According to Aristotle, these three activities—wish, deliberation, decision—are rational processes that reflect a person’s character. By showing motive, wish shows whether a person is brave, cowardly, petty, generous, and so on. By picking certain goals for the sake of other goals, deliberation shows the relative worth a person assigns to various things. Decision, finally, shows how much conviction a person has regarding the product of his rational wishing and deliberations. All of these give insight into a person’s character. Trainers, therefore, should take all of this into account when assigning praise and blame, punishment and reward, with an eye to helping children under their care wish, deliberate, and decide in ways that are in line with the mean.

This analysis of individual actions and the thought processes behind them lays the groundwork for the passage’s final question: Do we willingly have virtue or vice (NE 3.5)? Today, we might think of someone struggling to overcome alcoholism or a drug addiction. Does it make any sense to say that such people willingly have vices that they actively want to escape? On this score, antiquity was not so different from today. Aristotle argues that alcoholics are, in fact, responsible because they have lived carelessly (NE 3.5, 1114a4–5). They are like people who train incorrectly for a contest (agōn; 1114a7–9). Giving his own spin on male beauty contests, Aristotle concludes, “While we would never blame someone for being naturally ugly, we do blame people for not going to the gym (agymnasia) and for lack of care (ameleia)” (1114a23–25). In short, a person’s character, like a person’s physique, is the result of a lifetime of choices. By improperly training either body or mind, people freely give up their freedom (1114a19–21). Yet, insofar as they freely got themselves into these binds, they are responsible for their vices and should be held accountable.¹³

This trainer’s handbook has two main takeaways for our understanding of what virtues of character are and how we acquire them. First, NE 2 may have left the impression that virtues of character are fairly mechanical states, which we acquire through repetition and then act on without thinking. Granted, it might take careful reasoning to figure out just what the mean is in a particular situation, but NE 2 left open the possibility that such thinking is carried out by the trainer, not the trainee.¹⁴NE 3.1–5 corrects this potential misreading by showing how virtues and vices are infused with rational processes of wish, deliberation, and decision. As Aristotle set out in NE 1.7, human virtue is intimately tied up with rationality. A human being who thoughtlessly performs virtuous deeds is no better than a well-trained dog.

Second, NE 3.5’s emphasis on rational processes in character formation shows that not only the end goal, virtue, but also the processes through which people develop virtue involve rational thought on the part of the trainee. This corrects the black-and-white picture implied by Aristotle’s depictions of adults as rational and children as lacking reason. Instead, we find a developmental scheme in which simple repetition, reinforced by praise, blame, punishment, and reward, is gradually supplanted, as children are called to think on their feet in situations when the correct way forward is not immediately clear. If this reading is right, Aristotelian training is not merely a matter of rote memorization and drilling but makes room for what is today known as experiential learning. Since the goal of moral development is to enable people to navigate unscripted problems, then training for that goal should involve as much thinking on one’s feet as is appropriate for the trainee’s developmental stage.

Having set out a general account of what character virtues are and how we acquire them, Aristotle spends the rest of NE 3 presenting two paradigm virtues: bravery and moderation.

Bravery: NE 3.6–9

Plato’s Laches brought bravery to the table through a discussion of fighting in armor. While today we think of people in many circumstances being brave (from children skinning knees to cancer patients stepping up for chemo), the Greek term andreia (literally, “manliness”) has strong military associations. In setting out a definition of bravery, Aristotle’s first step is to distinguish it from closely related virtues. He concludes that bravery is most often seen in war (NE 3.6). Is that to say that children on the playground and patients in the oncology ward are not brave in our sense? Not necessarily. But Aristotle is talking about something else.¹⁵

A brave act, according to Aristotle, ends up hitting a mean of both confidence and fear while aiming at the kalon (what is fine, beautiful, noble; NE 3.7). The variables can be neatly shown in a table (see table 5).¹⁶ On one axis, we have fear. While we might think of brave people as fearless, Aristotle points out that there are some things that you should fear: those that are actually dangerous. Playing chicken with a freight train is not brave; it is just stupid. People who do so are deficient in fear. More common are people who are excessive in fear and shrink from things that are not actually dangerous. The brave person, then, is one who fears things that are actually dangerous and does not fear things that are not. We find a similar range of attitudes regarding confidence. It is not that brave people are really confident. As with any ethical mean, confidence is relative to the individual. Someone with excessive confidence overestimates his own abilities to perform as the situation demands. Someone deficient in confidence underestimates his own abilities. The brave person has a realistic sense of what he is capable of.¹⁷

Our first two axes, of fear and confidence, amount to a reality check: the brave person has a realistic sense of the situation and her own abilities. Still, it is possible to have all that in place and still be prone to taking pointless risks.¹⁸ It is one thing to run out into traffic to save a child chasing a ball. It is another thing to do it simply for the thrill. Aristotle’s final criterion looks to whether an action is done for the sake of the kalon.

The term kalon sits somewhere on a continuum between moral and beautiful, though scholars disagree about where Aristotle situates it in NE.¹⁹ When it comes to risking death on the battlefield for a good cause, such as defending one’s home and family, the moral reading is easy to make. Such an act is noble and fine. To call it beautiful is much harder. There is nothing pretty about being mowed down in battle, particularly for the person being killed. But perhaps pretty simply aims too low. We are more likely to refer to death on the battlefield as glorious. This English term, derived from a Latin root, has to do with light and calls to mind Pindar’s heroic language of “shining fame” and a “crown glistening with olive oil.”²⁰ Aristotle makes a similar point by likening the battlefield to a contest at the gym (gymnikos agōn) in which boxers suffer physical pain and great labor (ponos) for the sake of a crown (stephanos) and honor (timē; NE 3.9). Death may seem a steep price for a reputation one will not be around to enjoy. Such a critique is in line with a cosmetic reading, in which a kosmos or stephanos bestows beauty. In the athletic context, which Aristotle explicitly invokes, a crown reveals or acknowledges one’s inner worth.²¹ If we set these ideas against the backdrop of hero worship in general and Herakles in particular, then all this talk of labor, crowns, and facing death provides a way for human beings to overcome their merely human nature and realize their divine potential. Why would someone want to win an Olympic crown for boxing or die defending his home? Because these are among the most awesome (kalon) things you can do with your life!²² Anyone who thinks otherwise is likely too concerned with physical comfort.

^* Aristotle does not discuss the corners of this table. In two cases, the two axes combine to form extreme cowardice and extreme recklessness. Someone deficient in both fear and confidence would take a very passive approach to life. Extreme fear and extreme confidence seem harder to combine in a single person. My students have suggested we see these combined in the bravado displayed by bullies.

In the end, where should we place the kalon on the moral/beautiful continuum? Rather than argue for a particular spot on the continuum, our discussion of NE’s heroic context suggests we take a harder look at how we think of morality and beauty. In justifying a soldier’s sacrifice, Aristotle invokes neither the greater good served nor one’s duty to the state. What he does talk about is honors and crowns. As we saw in NE 1, however, the real point of honor in a well-lived life is not to be honored but to be worthy of honor, that is, to be virtuous. With this, we run the risk of circularity: in singling out a certain action as for the sake of the kalon, we are attempting to define what counts as virtuous. Aristotle, however, seems to take a certain set of kalon actions for granted, and he connects these with divinity. At NE 1.12, he states that we give honor (timē) to the gods for their blessedness but we do not give them congratulations (epainos). Similarly, in NE 3, honor is given to athletes and soldiers. The idea of morality at play, then, is an aspirational one as human beings seek to live their best lives, through heroic striving. The resulting actions are beautiful not because they are pretty but because they approximate divine models.²³

Moderation and the Pleasures of Touch: NE 3.10–12

What do eating, drinking, and sex have in common? According to Aristotle, they all involve touching something (NE 3.10). To illustrate the point, he cites a glutton who wished that his neck were longer so that he could take more time swallowing food. What is more, we naturally derive pleasure from each of these forms of touching (NE 3.11). It is therefore right and good for us to engage in them, provided we hold to the mean. The condition (hexis) to do so is the virtue sōphrosunē (moderation/discipline).²⁴ This is the virtue that Charmides, who seems to have suffered from hangovers, supposedly embodied but could not define. As with bravery, Aristotle applies his account of the mean by looking to the gym: “Whatever is pleasant and conducive to health and wellbeing, the moderate/disciplined person will desire moderately and as is necessary; likewise for other pleasures, provided they are not obstacles to health or contrary to the kalon” (NE 3.14). In short, Aristotle sets our pursuit of the natural pleasures of touch within two boundaries: health and the kalon. The first of these has already been explained through NE 2’s discussion of Milo: what is healthy depends on a number of circumstances relative to the individual. Aristotle likens the second to getting rubbed down with oil at the gym, a pleasure that is “most fitting for free people (eleutheriōtatai), involving all of the body, not just a part of it” (3.10).

While Aristotle’s rationale for massages is not the most informative, it shows that both biological and cultural considerations are relevant to determining the mean relative to the individual. Pork provides an excellent source of protein, but there is no right amount for someone keeping kosher. Far from giving a simple continuum of too little or too much, sōphrosunē requires us to pursue “the right things, in the right ways, at the right times” (1119b17; 1106b21 adds “with the right people”).²⁵ When it comes to sex, then, the question is not simply, How much is the right amount? We must ask, rather: When, with whom, for what reason, and in what manner? These questions, in turn, force us to look at the particulars of an individual’s situation: age, relationship status, religious commitments, and even scheduling may come into play. The end result is a balancing act as we integrate natural pleasures into our lives, enjoying eating, drinking, and sex, but not to the point that they interfere with our health, role in society, or other commitments.

What counts as moderate for an individual is thus not exclusively a matter of biology. General cultural norms impose guidelines, and an individual’s own choices play a role. Again, this is not a matter of relativism in the sense that whatever I think is right is right for me. Rather, by choosing to commit to certain projects, we limit what we may do in other areas of life. As Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver put it,

Pitching … determines what I eat, when I go to bed, what I do when I’m awake. It determines how I spend my life when I’m not pitching. If it means I have to come to Florida and can’t get tanned because I might get a burn that would keep me from throwing for a few days, then I never go shirtless in the sun… . If it means I have to remind myself to pet dogs with my left hand or throw logs on the fire with my left hand, then I do that, too. If it means in winter I eat cottage cheese instead of chocolate chip cookies in order to keep my weight down, then I eat cottage cheese.²⁶

These reflections from an elite athlete help us see how we may pursue natural pleasures, “as is necessary” and “provided they are not contrary to the kalon” (1119a17–18). When we enjoy eating a piece of cake, we might call it beautiful. Aristotle would call it pleasant. He certainly would not call it noble. The same goes for drinking and sex. If we are to find the kalon in such things, it will not be in the pleasure we take from them but in how they are integrated into our lives overall. For a professional chef, a piece of cake might actually be a thing of beauty, but this is because it makes visible the excellent activity around which that chef has structured his life. For the rest of us, as for Tom Seaver, cake is something we may enjoy, provided it does not interfere with whatever hierarchy of goals we have chosen to pursue. In this way, they will not be “contrary to the kalon” but something we engage with “as is necessary.”²⁷

Students are often surprised to find Aristotle chiding people for not engaging in enough drinking or sex. For him, not all virtuous activity involves noble sacrifice and self-denial. Simply having the right relationship with food has its place in the well-lived life. And while the ancient Greeks were no puritans, Aristotle does admit that when it comes to natural pleasures, people are more often prone to excess than deficiency. If anything, he has trouble coming up with a Greek term for someone who enjoys pleasures too little (1119a5–11). Still, he is aware that some people “drift too easily into natural pleasures.” Such people would do best to drag themselves in the opposite direction (NE 2.9).²⁸ He holds this out as a second-best option for those who struggle to find a stable mean. As in all things, though, the best option is to hit the mean in these pleasures. And we should raise our children to take pleasure in doing so (NE 3.12).²⁹

For the moment, we have reached a stopping point in NE’s discussion of virtue. NE 2 lays out Aristotle’s account of character virtues as conditions that aim at the kalon and are arrived at through training involving repetition, pleasure, and pain. NE 3.1–5 clarifies the role that thinking plays in all this, first and foremost through deliberation. Through the examples of bravery and moderation, NE 3.6–12 specifies that the mean is always relative to some kalon end. With this, Aristotle’s basic account of what virtues are and how they are acquired is in place. The next three books of NE turn to questions of how particular virtues fit together in a life of virtuous activity.