The Arisotelian Challenge

Blood was 6.0 this morning - much higher than I'm now used to. Probably explained by the complete absence of walking yesterday, and having gone out for an Italian meal last night.

Since d let me have my birthday Kindle early, I've been avidly reading on tubes again. And the first free book I've been reading is Aristotle's Ethics (and yes, I have his Politics to follow).

Turns out Aristotle had some views on living right that are something of a challenge for me to accept.
Without plunging you into the philosophical gubbins, Ethics is basically about Happiness - and how to achieve it. He claims - and indeed proves, to his own satisfaction at least - that...well, essentially that virtue is its own reward, and the path to true happiness. But as part of this, he puts forward the idea of...well, again, not to use a cliche, but it wasn't one when he wrote the book...Everything In Moderation - the right amount of activity, food, emotion, reaction, everything - not too much, not too little. A more thoroughly diabetic work of philosophy you'll probably never encounter.

One of the more startling things he talks about it "The Excellence of Self-Mastery" - essentially, the building up of habits of 'virtue' (or the right amount of things, including emotional reactions), and the denial of pleasure beyond what is "right" for the individual. In talking about this (and yes, I promise, there's a point coming. Listen hard and you can almost hear its distant whistle on the wind...), he says that complete abstinence from pleasures is just as wrong as over-indulgence, because it dulls and destroys your palette for pleasure altogether, and essentially makes you resent the pleasures and pleasure-taking of others.

Now, I think this is true, certainly - I've wanted to throw sharp objects through my own TV screen watching Cake Boss and Masterchef and Man V Food while pedalling my ass off on an exercise bike, and I think it's probably true to say that, for instance, sexually repressive religions tend to make their practitioners resent the sex that other people are having, particularly if it looks more fun than anything they could ever get. I don't think, for instance, that the Catholic clergy attracts people who were otherwise predisposed to paedophilia, but once you resign yourself to never getting any, and hearing the confessions of people who seem to be doing nothing else...I think it's fair to say it would turn you more than a little weird...

But here's the thing.
By Aristotle's logic, I shouldn't be entirely abstaining from sweets, and alcoholics shouldn't be entirely abstaining from alcohol. One day at a time is not a principle with which Aristotle would seem to have much truck. In fact, he seems to view complete abstinence as the coward's way of going about things, and Self-Mastery would involve training oneself to have a proper iron will - to occasionally indulge, but in moderation, and then, as it were, just...stop. Y'know, like a normal person.

I'd certainly agree that, for an addict, this is the look-at-me-I'm-a-dead-hard-bastard route to take. It clashes rather violently with the digital nature of my brain - the all-or-nothing urge to gorge or purge. I don't want one eclair - I think we've covered that ad nauseum - I want the entire cake shop. And in fact, at the moment of self-allowance, I need the whole cake shop. It's Cookie Monster Syndrome at its finest. The path of dead-hard bastardy looks, from here, like it would taste of ashes and mediocrity, conformity and beigeness and yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir bog-awful ordinariness. I think it's fair to say that anyone who actually followed the Aristotelian principle in all things would be the kind of smug bastard you just wanted to punch in the mouth...the kind of person you wanted desperately to see bad things happen to, just to take them down a peg or two from the lofty height of their perfect Self-Mastery...

But still...

Now he's put it out there, as it were - or rather, of course, now I've discovered it's been out there for thousands of years...

I'm not, of course, proposing to experiment with Aristotelianism while I'm Disappearing - that would seem to be an open door for failure and fuckwittery. But maybe...just maybe...when I reach my eventual goal, I'll give this hideous idea of Moderation In All Things a go for a while - just to prove I can do it. I don't think it works at all for those with an addictive personality, because he does, incidentally, up the ante, claiming that if you do it and don't love it, you haven't really done it (Is he serious??), and that to properly be Happy, you've got to love this so called "mean state", this neither-here-nor-thereness. Fairly sure on that basis, I'm doomed to Aristotelian failure.

Like I say though - might give it a go, just to stick it to the boring old dead git...