Aristotelian Values I

9 December 2023

IDEA

If difficult life transitions, like ditching addictive behaviours, can be viewed as a bridge, what motivates people to cross that bridge and to stay on the crossed side?  The idea we’re exploring today is marked with the fingerprints of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (Reid, 2022).  That alone would have had me all over it but the fact that I recently completed a degree in philosophy—without ever hearing this word—is even more intriguing.  I believe that word, kalokagathia (pr. kah lo KAG ath eeah) is the prize on the far side, a prize so rich, it involves a lifetime of engagement.

Last week’s blog ended with two points of emphasis.  The first was our metaphysical freedom to design or evade this opportunity called life.  The second was the how of creating such a life and, in a word, that how revolves around kalokagathia, at least as I see it.

ELABORATION

Kalokagathia has controversial origins.  Sparshott (1996) defined it as distinction, the quality of a fine [human being].  Wikipedia tells us kalokagathia is an ideal of gentlemanly personal conduct, especially in a military context.  My limited research indicates that the roots are kalon (beauty, fineness, honour, excellence) and agathos (the Good, i.e., that at which we all presumably aim). 

In the previous eleven blogs, on Stoic Values, we’ve looked at the Stoic foundation based on belief in a providential G-d and/or universe.  I argued that evidence-based thinking makes providential deism difficult to accept.  If we don’t accept providential deism, we’re faced with our random evolution on an understandable and consistent planet that follows certain tested and predictable laws.

As the highest evolved species on this planet, we’re the ones who identify, test, validate, and revise those laws as data and reason dictate.  That ability, to reason and design, is responsible for space travel, philosophy, modern medicine, the arts, the internet, and the ability to monitor the health of our planet.  To skip through intellectual history, at the speed of keyboard clicks, we have also moved, at an accelerating pace, toward a better, humanities-based understanding of being human on Earth.  That’s what the metaphysical freedom above alluded to: we are here for a short time, we can choose any number of pursuits, and we can pursue them half-heartedly, earnestly, or with the intent of excellence.

The essence of ethics asks the question: Why do something well when you can get away with much less effort and then do more enjoyable things that don’t require excellence?  It’s a fair question.  The simple answer is that you aim at excellence because you’ll like yourself more.  If you like yourself, you’ll have more room for the foibles of others and, if you can get along with others, the planet is more peaceful.  Oversimplified, but not untrue.  At its core, we ought behave ethically because it resonates with our nature as human beings.

In Aristotle, [kalokagathia was described as] a life that involves the exercise of the highest faculties, fulfilling a person's telos or end. In other philosophies the good is identified with pleasure, or virtue, or the absence of desire, or conformity to duty (Oxford Reference, 2023).

That last sentence covers a vast part of the history of ethics.  What it says is that we, as free, reason-based creatures, can choose nothing, pleasure, identified virtues, the absence of desire, or conformity to duty as our north star, the goal(s) we aim our lives at. 

EXAMPLE

The reason I love working with people at the end of their ropes (addiction, trauma, burnout) is that agency becomes almost a presence in the room.  Agency is our capacity for freely chosen action.  An agent has some degree of control over her thoughts and actions and is thus deemed free.  That freedom, according to the existentialists, because of its looming limitlessness, provokes anxiety.  Yet if you ask communist-country immigrants about their response to living in Canada, I had one former Russian resident tell me that he kisses the ground every time he re-enters this country.  Clearly, he was not plagued by anxiety but by a barely quenched thirst to practice his profession freely, invest his earnings in a way that built a base for his family, and enjoy what the West once had to offer.

In the death throes of addiction or trauma, there appear to be no ways out.  You deny your own agency.  Using leads to death, not using is unthinkable so where to turn?  The irony is that the choices are almost limitless.  The challenge is that all those choices require the crossing of a high, rickety, windswept bridge.  The first part of that bridge is called sobriety or clean time, while most of the bridge is called recovery.  And the further along you go, the more stable that bridge becomes.  What we hear, on the stable side of that bridge, is that your worst day in recovery is infinitely better than your best day in addiction…and that’s because people have started acting for themselves—free of the compulsion of addictive behaviours.

What kalokagathia offers those crossing that bridge is a choice of goals, a way of acting, and a source of knowing.  The reason kalokagathia is my choice is because it seems the best oriented to differences in human character.  For example, excellence in musicianship is easily identified but of infinite variety.  Richie Blackmore can play Bach or rock, but his distinct voice was most audible to me on a Fender Stratocaster through a Marshall stack.  Conversely, Hopkinson Smith’s acoustic lute brings Bach to new levels of refinement.  Yet both musicians are recognized as players of excellence because that excellence is autotelic or self-generated i.e., it comes right out of their blood and bones. 

CONCLUSION

Part of my excitement with this concept is that, as T. S. Eliot predicted, I will arrive at the point at which I started and know it for the first time.  I re/cognized that point of origin when Reid (2022), et al. included the word autotelic in the description of kalokagathia.  I first learned of that concept in the 1990s, reading the recently deceased psychologist/philosopher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined (and elaborated) the concept of flow.  In short, flow, autotelos, and kalokagathia intersect in Maslow’s self-actualizers (here), a term also used by Aristotle.  Full circle.

This blog space will continue to explore kalokagathia as new shades of meaning appear but, to wrap it up, the concept has three attributes: action, aesthetics, and autotelos.  Reid (2022, p. 126) insisted that the influence of Socrates and Plato were evident when Aristotle claimed kalokagathia to be active, aesthetic, and autotelic.  Further, the achievement of this pinnacle was, per Aristotle, attained through education, not social status.  By far, the argument for education is the more convincing of those two. 

The hard part is the painful truth that sometimes this ultimate virtue is within reach while other times it is not.  Some are simply not able to cross that bridge.  The readiness is all.

Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying).  He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding 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

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023, 8 December).  Virtue Ethics.  https://iep.utm.edu/virtue/

Oxford Reference (2023, 8 December) https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20111004143409243#:~:text=(Greek%2C%20the%20good),desire%2C%20or%20conformity%20to%20duty.

Reid, H. L. (2022). A Gentleman or a Philosopher?  Xenophon vs. Aristotle on Kalokagathia.  Parnassos Press.

Sparshott, F. (1996). Taking life seriously: A study of the Nicomachean Ethics.  University of Toronto Press.