On Generosity and Magnificence, Nicomachean Ethics Book IV. Chs 1 & 2 - my commentary, notes and reflections

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book IV - notes

Chapters 1 and 2 - On Generosity and Magnificence

We humans are animals of community. From our hands to those of another it was with the giving and receiving of goods that we strengthened our bonds within our community and the foundations of the community entire. As we gathered to form villages and our villages grew into cities, so did the exchange of goods become systematised and grow proportionally more complex and dynamic.

Money was not merely a practical invention, it was a necessity. To name just a few of the reasons why money was necessary, we invented money (i) to avoid having to keep track of tables of complex ever-changing equivalences (e.g. 4 bushels of wheat = 2 pounds of butter = 1 ingot of iron), (ii) to enlarge the scope of trading itself by increasing the range of goods one person could buy as well as the range of people one could sell to, (iii) to enable a person to sell the perishable goods of one season with a view to buying those harvested later in the year. Money was a boon for every community and readily embraced as an institution. Money was made to serve us.

Yet today, more than any other point in our history, we live to serve money. Once upon a time we transacted to gain the goods we needed. Today the purpose of most transactions is to make more money. Spread across the histories of different people we will find celebrated instances of industrious chieftains, leaders and mayors who gathered goods and money to safeguard the growth and wellbeing of their community. Now we celebrate business oriented individuals who know how to organise humans into companies and corporations, i.e. communities whose purpose is to safeguard the growth and wellbeing of such and such a business person’s money accounts.

The means have become the ends. The ends have become the means. We entertain the fantasy that humans are higher than other animals. Have we considered that we have perhaps fallen lower than other animals? There are parents in the USA - out of all countries - who work multiple jobs to afford rent and utilities. Woodpeckers dig a hole in a tree and get their housing rent-free… and what exactly is the difference in labour conditions between a child cobalt miner in the Congo, a Foxconn factory worker in China and a battery caged chicken? Chicken in battery cages are animals we reduced to our own image. Afterall, we let ourselves be managed as resources by the human resources department when we could have been managing money resources as participants of the department of communal wellbeing.

What has gone wrong? Well, had humanity been a great tree, then money would have been the dead shadow that this tree cast. Stop looking at the shadow and its trinkets with such wonder and take more time looking at the tree, i.e. looking at each other. That is where life is. There is where wonder resides and dreams first hatch. Learn to engage with other people and spark fire in their eyes. Learn to relate with others, to form genuine friendships, to empower your fellow human beings and you will find greater things than the yachts and Lamborghinis the media puts before you. That is what health magazines imply when they print tepid headlines like “studies show that stable relationships decrease health risk”. Human nature is when individual humans come together to form friendships and households and communities. The greatest life we can live is one spent as members of a community based on friendship and mutual trust. That is truly something! This we can call luxury. All these shiny objects they try to sell us… are the food of vultures!

Aristotle lived in a world much crueller than our own. There were no human rights nor any other guarantees of security that we get to enjoy today. Yet, the world in which Aristotle lived was much more politically dynamic and community oriented than our own. Ιt is under such conditions that he and other greats of his age saw (i) those engaged with their community as more valuable and worthy than the “ιδιώται” - idiotai -, i.e. the private individuals and (ii) money as a means for the empowerment of the community, not its end. Aristotle neither glorified money nor dismissed it. He put it in its proper place.

Chapter 1 - On Generosity

(a) Introduction - the scope of generosity: In the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics, we learned that a virtue of character is a particular attitude or disposition which a virtuous person holds towards something. In the third book, Aristotle first emphasised that virtue involves both how we choose to think and how we choose to act under variable circumstances. We then came to understand that courage is a disposition towards fear and that moderation a disposition towards pleasure.

What is then the scope of generosity? Well, generosity is the virtuous disposition towards the giving and taking of wealth. “Especially the giving part” Aristotle underlines then explains that by wealth he specifically means “all the things whose value is measured by money.”

(b) Generosity as a mean between two extremes: For our sake and so that we can more easily conceptualise what a virtue is and comprehend why we should aim to acquire it, Aristotle provides us with a metaphorical schema based on proportions. Here we refer to the schema of the virtuous mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency.

To illustrate, let us say we have company and we want to prepare coffee for everyone. The optimal way to go about this is (i) neither to prepare too little coffee for there will not be enough for everyone, (ii) nor too much coffee for whatever remains will go bad and be wasted. Instead what we want is (iii) to prepare just enough coffee so that everyone gets their share and none of it goes to waste. To achieve this we take our experiences with coffee making into account and roughly calculate beforehand how much to make. We might miss the mark a few times in the beginning but with enough practice we will get the hang of it.

How does generosity fit in Aristotle’s schema? So far we have learned that generosity is the virtuous disposition towards the giving and taking of money. Aristotle places generosity as the virtuous mean between miserliness and extravagance. Miserliness points to deficiency in giving money and is often paired with an aptness for taking it. Extravagance, on the other hand, stands for such an excess in the proportion of the giving that it either leads to the financial ruin of the giver or compromises the way such a person takes.

(c) Generosity as opposed to extravagance and miserliness: We first defined the scope of generosity as a disposition towards the giving and taking of money. We then placed it within the framework of the mean and extrapolated extravagance and miserliness as two dispositions opposed both to generosity and to each other within the same scope. To gain a higher definition understanding of each disposition, and especially generosity, we will now look at them side by side and in more detail.

(i) Generosity: Aristotle, first and foremost, defines the generous as those who know how to give “the right amount of money to the right people at the right time” and who are disposed to do that “with pleasure, or at least without pain.”

Such a definition precludes blind or random charity. It points to a systematised approach to sharing and to those generous as possessing certain experience and knowledge in benefiting others. We may say that generous people subscribe to a clear and practical vision of what good they want to achieve and what it takes to achieve it. This also implies that they actively partake in communal matters and have intimate knowledge of the various problems and challenges that arise both in particular cases and in the community overall. To provide just a few examples, a person may instantiate their generosity through contributions towards (i) merit-based scholarships for young people who are driven and have potential but lack means, (ii) the building or repair of communal amenities such as roads and waterworks, or (iii) the relief of those who met unforeseen disaster. (e.g. war, floods, fires e.t.c)

We understand, of course, that for someone to be in a position to give away money, they must have a measure of wealth in the first place. To this effect, Aristotle underlines that a generous person is cautious not to compromise their own wellbeing by giving beyond what they can afford. With that said, they do not feel any inclination to engage in sordid dealings of any kind, however profitable, for the ultimate object of their desire and attention is not money but the welfare of their community.

(ii) Extravagance: The extravagant are disposed to live beyond their means. Aristotle explains further that they maintain neither a proper measure to their spending nor a proper approach. With this criteria in mind, we may call someone extravagant in any number of cases. In particular, we may call extravagant those who:

• naively engage in haphazard money arrangements (e.g. “honey, I just took all our savings and invested it in a Kazakhstani tupperware start-up.”)
• let some form of addiction get the better of them financially (e.g. “Bill blew his inheritance on gambling and drugs.”)
• conjure a spectacle of luxuriousness they cannot afford (e.g. “Hello grandma! Yeah, it’s Tim. I need you to lend me money so I can cover my monthly Tesla payment.”)
• waste money on various species of lackeys, flatterers and pleasers (e.g. “Ben gifted a brand new luxury car to an escort.”
• some combination of the above

No matter how extravagant someone is or in what way, Aristotle states that we can still help them improve their ways if they are willing to listen. In absence of that, however, and provided the circumstances appear, such a person might compromise their character further by engaging in sordid dealings to prop up their spending habits.

(iii) Miserliness: Money is a miser’s god and hoarding it the noblest possible activity. We typically perceive such people as crooks and more often than not they are exactly crooks. For we call misers either (i) those who go to great lengths to not give away one penny when their immediate personal gain is not concerned, or (ii) those who greedily take every cent they can without considering the wellbeing of others, the source of the money, their own reputation.

Misers venerate money and hold it as an object worthy of love and admiration. They think money has value in itself. They are somehow blind to the fact that money gains its value only insofar as a community willingly holds it as a standard of exchange of goods and services. In today’s terms, we may characterise such a person as a money fetishist. Their mind is only occupied with matters of money. Their view of the world is so twisted that they think that money makes the world go around.

They remind of a farmer who found a fruit bearing tree and eagerly gathered the fruit in sacks for himself but never bothered to water the tree, to fertilise it, to prune it, to protect it from disease. The next year he returned to gather more fruit, yet he bitterly noted that the harvest was small and did not taste good. He started shouting at the tree that it was “lazy” and should “pull itself up by its bootstraps.”

Aristotle states that the miser misses the mark of virtue by a far greater distance than the extravagant man. Misers are thus more greatly opposed to those generous than the extravagant.

Chapter 2 - On Magnificence

(a) The scope of magnificence: Aristotle moves on to magnificence. Both generosity and magnificence are character dispositions towards wealth. To this extent, the two virtues are related. They do not exactly map onto each other, however. Given that we have a fair grasp of what generosity is, let us learn more about magnificence by figuring out in which manner it is distinct to generosity.

How is magnificence distinct to generosity? Generosity concerns itself with how people give and take money in general and regardless of the sums involved. Magnificence specifically considers the manner people of great wealth sponsor their community. We may talk of how they provide for its defence or fund its religious functions and events. We deal here only with large sums. To put this in other words, a magnificent person is definitely generous but a generous person can only be magnificent if they also possess great wealth.

We note here that the ancient Greeks held the belief that only the wealthy could afford to venerate the gods and sacrifice to them, at least on behalf of a city. In this way, all wealthy men were expected to task themselves with the funding and organisation of all the religious ceremonies and events which took place each year. Among such events we count athletic competitions such as the Olympic Games or dramatic festivals such as the Dionysia where the famous playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Eurypides competed against others. This is the historical and cultural context in which Aristotle participates and from which he derives magnificence as a virtue.

What is then the scope of magnificence? Magnificence is the virtuous disposition wealthy persons may demonstrate when they contribute towards the public good, i.e. act as patrons of their community. As patrons they may e.g. sponsor religious events and ceremonies, fund the building and maintenance of city infrastructure, help with the organisation of the military, among other things.

(b) Magnificence as the mean between two extremes: So far, we have reached an understanding of the scope of magnificence. To do this, we first compared it to generosity and then considered the cultural and historical background from which magnificence proceeds.

To further refine our grasp of this concept, we now consider its position on Aristotle’s schema of the virtuous mean, identify the dispositions which stand for excess and deficiency, and place all three dispositions side by side to discuss them.

How does magnificence fit in Aristotle’s schema? Magnificence is the mean. It is the virtue of someone wealthy who knows how to use money to bring about great things. Now, on the side of excess we find gaudiness. We call a person gaudy when they combine being a pretentious show-off with lacking any sense of taste or proportion. Meanwhile, on the side of deficiency we locate niggardliness. The niggardly we identify as someone who always tries to give the bare minimum and always complains about giving too much.

Let us now consider the three dispositions more closely:

(i) Magnificence: Like painters bring brush to canvas and sculptors set chisel against marble, so do those magnificent know to use their wealth to bring about greatness and beauty and inspire wonder in their people’s eyes. It is for this reason that Aristotle says that those disposed to magnificence are like artists.

To be magnificent we have to be attuned to the constantly changing challenges and needs that our community faces and know what actionable steps to take to meet such challenges and needs. We have to be able to distinguish new and emerging trends and ideas in people’s minds and be capable of encouraging and establishing trends towards good destinations, starving out all the trends which lead to no good in the process.

Magnificent humans are not mere wealthy persons, they are celebrated personalities. Children look up to them. They get to speak for their entire community. They are not merely generous, they are like a river to their people.

(ii) Gaudiness: Like the magnificent, those we describe as gaudy have no problem with putting their wealth to use. Unlike the magnificent, however, the gaudy are completely out of touch with their community. They rather use luxuriousness as a tool to reinforce the distance in status between them and everyone else. They want to make sure that everyone knows that they stand above everyone else and in this way weaponise their wealth to antagonise everyone. A good example would be the anecdote of that man who launched himself in space while his slaves were not even allowed proper bathroom breaks.

(iii) Niggardliness: We deal here with the miser written large. Even as they possess overwhelming amounts of wealth, they are still stuck compulsively collecting money. To the needs and challenges of their community, they react with their doctrine of “money for money’s sake” and “money above all”, i.e. with a theology of money. We deal here with petty crooks devoid of self-respect. Wherever they can, they go around causing difficulties and complications to avoid giving their fair share. They have no qualms about raising a great fuss to save a few cents. Whatever trifle they did give, they will keep reminding everyone about it and make it appear as though they parted with a great fortune. Such is the disposition of the niggardly person

Here I end my accounts on Aristotelian generosity, magnificence and the dispositions related to them.

Would you like to read more of my work? Here is my account of Aristotelian courage and my account of Aristotelian moderation.