I'm laughing at mark pepper's post about Aristotle right now--well, mostly laughing, sometimes coughing. My sentiments about Aristotle were sort of the same, but I actually was kind of tickled by his lengthly lists and oh-so-sure attitude towards everything that could possibly happen ever. ever ever ever. Okay, maybe I felt stifled at first, but it was really great when he got to the parts where he told you how to manipulate the system. For example, "If it is agreed that a contract exists, this should be amplified /as longs as it supports the speaker's side...If [it] is opposed to the speaker [one can say] the jury is an umpire of justice; it is not this contract that should be considered but how more justly to treat the parties involved." (1.15.21, 23-24) As I read, I kept feeling like Tom's student who learned how to manipulate everything and everyone.
Okay, on to some completely unrelated thoughts, questions, etc:
--In Chapter 5, Aristotle discusses happiness as success combined with virtue or self-sufficiency. He goes through to list, like, 15 different elements of this so-called happiness (I notice graduate school didn't make the cut...go figure). How many of them are subsumed under Arete? How does Aristotle distinguish between virtue and arete--or does he? Kennedy offers us a lot of the greek words, but nowhere, as far as I can tell, does he or Aristotle mention Arete. Deborah Hawhee's book /Bodily Arts/ really stresses Arete as a quality of man gained through repeated exhibition of excellence both bodily and intellectual. It seems, therefore, that arete would factor into this happiness business in one way or another. Or, did arete go out of style at some point?
--I'm finally getting a sense of Plato, now that we're reading Aristotle. I'm not sure if anyone else is having that same phenomenon. I'm beginning to understand Plato's dialectic and Socratic dialogues, but also Plato's unwavering goal of capital T Truth. Aristotle's pragmatic approach makes me miss Plato's metaphors, the dramatism of the dialogues, and the movement of the texts Plato wrote. I'm also getting a stronger sense of the Athens world--I loved the little footnotes where Kennedy showed us where Aristotle was ribbing Isocrates, or where Aristotle was drawing up on earlier works.
--And my final note follows in step with the research I'm doing on Diotima: where are the women? what parts of this apply to women and what parts of it don't? women were still not considered citizens, right? but the texts I'm reading indicate that women still had a strong ceremonial power within the culture--that for religious ceremonies and whatnot, women were central. I think I'm thinking of this also because for me the section on happiness reminded me for some reason of Proverbs in the Bible, which distinguishes between the goodness and happiness of a woman versus a man. So does success or wealth or honor look different for a man than for a woman? Is a woman's beauty "different at each stage of life?" For that matter, is the female form even considered "beautiful?" Whereas Aristotle discusses the witness of a slave, he doesn't discuss the witness of a woman...why? I don't mean why in this super feminist way, I mean it in earnest. What does this tell us about the role of women in that society?