25 May 2022
I had the good fortune to take my Ancient Greek philosophy course with Dr. John Russon at the University of Guelph. I asked him for some recommendations to further my understanding of Aristotle’s thinking, and he suggested Sparshott’s Taking Life Seriously, a book I’m reading slowly and carefully.
In an early portion of that book, Sparshott grapples with one of the oldest questions in philosophy: What is the good, particularly as Aristotle understood it in the Nicomachean Ethics? The quote below is Sparshott attempting to fathom the relationship between the good and happiness.
“Happiness cannot be something beyond the bounds or our lives, because all ends cash out into terms of activity. But (I would add) it cannot lie in a pattern of activity, because such patterns can always be interrupted and will, in any case, be arbitrarily cut off at death. It follows that happiness must lie in the texture of active life. The three attributes that happiness has been shown to have are finality or completeness, adequacy, and being the object of desire—a triad (if the third term is really distinct from the other two) introduced by Plato at Philebus 20D.” (Sparshott, 1994, p. 36)
We’ll take this one sentence at a time. In the first, the word ends means the values we pursue—e.g., the ends toward which she aimed. Sparshott more less assumed the conclusion of the second sentence (all patterns end in death) with his terms cash[ed] out activity. No surprises here.
So, with happiness situated within our living years, Sparshott dismissed patterned happiness because it cannot endure past death. I’m probably misunderstanding him, though I can’t see where my error lies. If patterns cannot endure, nor can textures so why is Sparshott claiming texture as a better descriptor of sustained happiness than patterns?
My belief is that, as highly adaptable creatures, our happiness is a decision—a way of being—that we bring to our evolving set of patterns. I do not see the interruption of patterns displacing a capacity for happiness in any way. As a person’s life changes, her patterns of behaviours, rituals, and habits change too. Those changes in no way seem to negate happiness arising from our patterns. But, more troubling, is Sparshott’s seeming insistence that happiness outlasts single lives. So maybe this is my error.
Is Sparshott reading Aristotle’s happiness as an external existent separate from human lives? Does the texture of a life touch that outside property with sufficient frequency to invest it with happiness? I find that difficult to accept and understand as it contradicts Aristotle’s own logical acceptance of reality pretty much at face value.
Let’s then look at the three attributes of happiness: completeness, adequacy, and desirability. Desirability seems the easiest as I believe this may be the fundamental desire of most people i.e., Why can’t I be happy? Let’s grant that as a given. Adequacy is interesting. When I smell one of my cherished magnolia blooms, is this enough in itself to be a complete or adequate experience? Yes and no.
On one hand, that scent and experience are more than enough to be a completely satisfying and beneficent part of life. On the other hand, I want more, and I want to be able to experience this beauty much more frequently—who would not? And this is where Sparshott’s texture begins to gain legibility (I’m starting to get it—his point, his view) and credibility. If we experience the visual and olfactory beauty of the magnolia as complete, adequate, and desirable, we also accept that it as a finite event. If our lives are spent moving between finite events, an individual texture does appear. That texture consists of experientially rich events (the complete, adequate, and desirable) and the time, spaces or voids, between these moments of happiness.
With this understanding, I grasp Sparshott’s explanation, but only partially. The part I still don’t understand is his concern with patterns being cut off by death because, as stated above, any experiential plane or texture is also bounded by our time on earth.
Perhaps the only important term I have neglected is Sparshott’s insistence that happiness lies in the texture of active life. Per last week’s blog, a life of passive contemplation is one that can happen more or less outside the currents of our own time (i.e., a cloistered life). Whether we embrace, reject, or work with those currents, the discrete individual events within those waves of momentum (the events of your day, week, life) define our emotional (happiness) response to life.
While I still don’t fully understand Sparshott’s response, I have outlined a valid, honest, and satisfying starting point for comprehension of that passage. The testing of that passage now constitutes one event within the texture of my own life (and yours, dear reader, if you’ve come this far) and for the effort devoted, has brought a measure of happiness.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the BCC’d emailing list.
References
Sparshott, F. (1996). Taking Life Seriously: A Study of the Argument of the Nicomachean Ethics. University of Toronto Press.
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