Thank you for your reply and for your suggestion. I will use and adapt the questions you gave me to talk about other virtues in the future as well. I appreciate it.

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>Our... system is in important respects very different from that of Aristotle’s time and place. Does Aristotle’s comment still apply?...

Aristotle's comments not only apply, I believe it is in fact dangerous that we ignore them to the extent we do.

The past several decades - especially regarding economic matters - have been the host of various sorts of liberation, i.e. various movements of deregulation. When these movements of deregulation happened, they were essentially experimental. We are always partially ignorant of what we are doing, we are always in a movement towards figuring it out. With that said, we do not need to become versed in statistical models to read what has been happening, we today measure the effects in our own lives.

To this effect, we once again get to learn the two lessons that our forefathers learned under feudalism and before it and after it several times, yet we always forget: (i) The powerful classes that emerge out of one community do not care to identify with the rest of their community. They would rather socialise only among themselves as well as with the powerful classes that emerge in other communities. (ii) the more degraded and demoralised the poor are, the more incapable they become to push back and at the same time the more resentful and vengeful they become.

Aristotle already knew these things and described them in his politics.

Generosity and friendship and some other virtues Aristotle mentions in the Nicomachean Ethics are behaviours that manifest in a society with a strong middle class. From what I remember - and without being able to point to the exact passage in the politics at the present moment - this Aristotle admits himself. Magnificence, on the other hand, is a virtue - I estimate - which contributes to having a middle class in the first place.

Now, I cannot claim that I am an expert on what happens when a society is left with a diminished middle class or even without one. I am also not an expert in what happens when we just let certain classes play the part of "owner" and some other classes play the part of "slave". I already see lots of the behaviours manifest which Aristotle describes in the 6th book of the Politics.

I recently had the opportunity to read Walter Benjamin's "The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility" and I came across this quote:

"The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing for- mation of masses are two sides of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the prop- erty relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses-but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical out-come of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life."

As I look at my magic ball, all I can do is speculate that unless "we bring about the conditions which will incentivise the moneyed classes to become magnificent" we are instead doomed to bring about the conditions for personality cults and totalitarianism.

Thank you for reading. I look forward to your own insight or recommendations to reading other works.

It was the word preffered in the English translations of Aristotle I read.

Have you seen something in my commentary that you do not like? Do provide me with constructive feedback.

Part of why I chose Aristotle's Ethics is because it is traditionally a good text to build up the skills to write philosophical commentaries. I am already doing the initial research to start writing a commentary on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil so stay tuned.

(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

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.

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.

Thank you for this article.

" The eagle we hold as a symbol for power and majesty. If mother eagles did not push their young ones out of the nest, however, we would know the eagle as a symbol for hedonism and cowardice. Afterall, childhood is the cradle of character and no young adult we praise as temperate and courageous started off as a “docile” and “disciplined” child. The case is rather that the parents made themselves available for the children as resources to connect with, to emulate, to help regulate their emotional states and develop their views of the world. This we recognise as the virtuous mean of parenting and such parents afforded their children spaces and opportunities where they could play and experiment, make mistakes and figure things out for themselves. For it is only through the forge of trial and error that we arrive to virtue."

Hey there everyone, I just finished and posted my own commentary and break-down of Aristotle's account on temperance in the Nicomachean Ethics. For those interested please read me here

coming up later today and tomorrow at 1500 CET, I and Streetli will be reading and discussing Bergson's laughter over Reddit Talk at Aristotlestudygroup

See you there.