Taking Life Seriously: A Study of the Argument of the Nicomachean Ethics

Martha Husain teaches philosophy at Brock University in St. Catharines,
Ontario.

This account of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is as close to the
letter and spirit of the text as one can get. The closeness is reflected
in the unusually detailed table of contents, in the author’s attempt
to understand each section of the text precisely, and in the thoughtful
translation and discussion of terms. Taking Life Seriously should be
required reading for all philosophy majors, serving as a standard of the
real thing by which the all-too-prevalent facsimiles of scholarship can
be recognized.

The thesis that the Ethics is a single unfolding argument in which
everything follows from one initial hypothesis is made plausible by the
careful delineation of the Aristotelian sense of “argument” and of
the initial hypothesis. Neither fits modern models and ways of thinking.
The former is dialectical, a texture of rationality moving between the
general and the particular without ever losing sight of either, deriving
one from the other, or reducing one to the other. The latter is the
question of how human beings, as language-using animals with a sense of
time, should live their lives. The dialectical method is relevant
because such lives must be lived in the concreteness of animal existence
and the generality of language-use, without derivation or reduction of
one from or to the other.

Sparshott’s exegesis is both sympathetic and critical as it evaluates
a wide range of Aristotle scholarship. It is sober and also
excruciatingly funny. The only unease I feel pertains to a perhaps
somewhat subjective understanding of logon echon as
“language-using.” Would Aristotle really hold that “without
humanity ... the world would not exist as a system at all, [because]
there would be no way in which the essential and constituent features
would be separated from accidental phenomena”?