Edith Hall idolizes Aristotle in her trade book Aristotle’s Way, painting him as a fountain of wisdom and good sense, and as a philosopher whose work can help people live more fulfilling lives today. She interprets his work with striking charity, and argues for its relevance in the modern world. She illustrates the central issues with examples from literature, movies, her own personal life, stories of her friends and colleagues, recent news, and some of the major events in history. There is more high culture than popular culture, and being from the UK, Hall places some focus on British life, but the book is aimed at a wide readership and her examples are all accessible. Hall’s writing is clear and engaging, and sometimes quite funny.

Hall is certainly very familiar with the work of Aristotle and does a great job at explaining his central ideas about living well. Her tone is assured and comforting. If one is looking for a guide to life not based on religion, then one could certainly do worse than follow the approach of Aristotle. The ideas will be familiar to most students who have taken a course on ethics, with discussions of different approaches to moral rules, and the primacy of flourishing and virtue as central concepts. Hall emphasizes the special nature of human life and its difference from animal life, with the accompanying ideas that humans need to focus on their ability to reason rather than rely solely on their animals instincts and solely engaging in animal pleasures.

The view that Hall advocates is surprisingly and maybe suspiciously like a conventional middle class life. For example, she recommends monogamy in marriage, and cites evidence that this is what Aristotle believed, because couples need to be able to trust each other. She does not consider the possibility of open marriages where partners do not lie to each other. More generally, she recommends that each person become the best person they can be, and explore their own potentialities. One of the longest chapters is on how to use leisure: on her view, Aristotle would recommend reading literature, listening to music and going to movies for moral improvement and cathartic experience. Curiously, Hall pays no attention to whether we should play sports or spend time watching sports.

Those who have studied Aristotle may debate whether Hall’s interpretation of his views are right. While I am no scholar of Aristotle, Hall seems to gloss over many problematic aspects of his work. Most obviously, she treats him as a defender of an egalitarian view of people when he obviously held views that some people are intrinsically better than others. Aristotle defended slavery on the grounds that some people are natural masters and others are natural slaves, and he seemed to assume that Greeks were natural masters while other peoples were natural slaves. Natural slaves are more animal-like and should be treated more like animals. Hall says next to nothing about this, which is astonishing. How can anyone actively recommend the ethics of Aristotle without spending a good deal of time working out how to separate out his ideas about slavery?

There is also the question of Aristotle’s views about women. Hall does briefly mention this, but gives the impression that Aristotle can’t really have meant what he said. Yet Aristotle was clear that men should rule the household and that women are categorically different from men. His view of social life is deeply dependent on assumption of separate roles for men and women, with women taking a secondary position.

The evident approach to take in defending Aristotle is to say that his views of human nature, and particularly those of women and slaves, are separable from the rest of his ethics. That may be so, but it is not obviously true. Aristotle envisaged a hierarchical society where people are restricted to their level because of their nature. He does not advocate for social fluidity and mobility. It is far from clear that Aristotle’s vision of each person becoming the best person they can be will really work if everyone is a potential leader. Society requires some people to do the nasty work, the unrewarding jobs, the dangerous ones. In ancient Greece, these were not done by the people from the best families, and tended to be done by slaves. Hall does not address how her vision of a world in which everyone is completely self-realized will get the dirty work done.

Hall presents a rosy view of Aristotle as envisaging a world in which every citizen can lead a full life as part of the city/state. She pays virtually no attention to the fact that only a minority of the population were citizens, and most of the population keeps the society going without being full citizens.

Hall does address politics but paints Aristotle as being neutral between a concern for the working classes, sympathy for social change, and a conservative view that wants society to preserve hierarchy. She emphasizes that while Aristotle was probably from a wealthy family, he was not from a respected Athenian family, and he lived through a time of great social change during the rise of Macedonian power in Greece. So Aristotle had to find his own way in life rather than rely on his own privilege. She also mentions that Karl Marx was an enthusiast of Aristotle’s social philosophy. That’s fair enough, and allows the possibility of a more liberal interpretation of Aristotle’s work. Yet it minimizes the fact that Aristotle’s views of human nature and its place in society are mostly regressive and deeply conservative.

So Hall’s book is really about how she would like Aristotle’s Way to be — more Aristotelian than Aristotle. It is true that there’s plenty in Aristotle from which to engage in thoughtful discussion of how to live. Does Hall make a case that his approach is a really good one? Not really. She discusses it with great enthusiasm, and has plenty of nice examples and anecdotes, but the book is remarkably lacking in argument. In that way, Aristotle’s Way resembles a slightly elevated self-help book with lots of philosophical and classical references, recommending a pleasant way of life without much evidence.

For example, in one off-hand comment, Hall declares that Aristotle’s approach provides a life of exuberance, while Stoicism is all about self-control and avoiding pain, and thus recommends a joyless life. This assumes that Stoicism is really a very different theory from Aristotelianism, which might be a surprise to the Stoics who saw themselves building on Aristotle’s work. The claim that Stoics do not seek joy also seems like it needs a lot more support. It’s tempting to judge that Hall is basing her claim on an unsympathetic stereotype of the Stoic view.

There is a lot in Aristotle’s Way that is worth reading, and those who are completely new to ancient philosophy should find the book educational. But Hall’s Aristotelianism is very much a product of her own liberal views and pleasant life, and one wishes that she had engaged in more critical scrutiny of the ideas she presents. Much of the appeal of Aristotle’s work about how to live is not so much his ethics but rather his common sense psychology, and there’s been plenty subsequent psychology research that examines these ideas more carefully.

© 2019 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.