Book Review of Edith Hall’s Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

This could be taken as a self-help book based on the teachings of Aristotle. Edith Hall presents Aristotle’s relevant ideas in a straightforward, easy to grasp manner–despite her having studied and taught philosophy for many years. Hall fell in love with Aristotle in her youth when she discarded the religion of her parents and discovered that Aristotle had a reason-based ethics showing that morality need not depend on faith. The help Aristotle’s ideas provide is how to have a happy life. Aristotle held that happiness is not a momentary feeling but a deeply felt emotion stemming from satisfaction with the sum of your life–and the way to achieve it is to develop good habits and consistently live by them.

Hall presents Aristotle’s views on many virtues and applies them in simple language to situations of today.  For example, in her discussion of honesty she tells what she had to do to satisfy some bureaucratic regulation that would have required her children to get double vaccinations. She ended her discussion of one virtue: “In short, being magnanimous means being quietly courageous, self-sufficient, non-sycophantic, polite, discreet and candid.”

Hall’s chapter on communication has good presentations of Aristotle’s ideas on rhetoric and logic. Three values of particular importance to Aristotle are friendship, society, and art. Hall gives them each a chapter: Love, Community, and Leisure.

This book is valuable for anyone–particularly for one not already familiar with Aristotle’s works. The author’s theme, loosely stated, is “What would Aristotle do?” Hall very seriously takes Aristotle’s ideas as relevant for our time, although she thinks that today Aristotle would change his low opinion of women. I could have enjoyed her book more if she had stretched even more to apply some ideas of another lover of Aristotle, philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982). Acknowledgment of Rand’s Objectivist ethics of rational egoism would have allowed Hall to classify Aristotle’s morality as a form of egoism instead of a form of “virtue-ethics.” Rand’s recognition of rationality as the primary virtue (which is obviously in harmony with Aristotle’s identification of man as the rational animal) could have allowed Hall to see that rather than searching for virtues among specific cases of action to find a middle between two extremes, a virtue is what is rational for man qua man. Understanding Rand’s definition that “a ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context” could have prevented Hall’s few but jarring acceptances of state interference in one’s free choice (such as welfare programs). Recognizing Rand’s points that productivity is a virtue while art is fuel for man’s soul would have obviated Hall’s felt need to subjugate career to leisure.