I’ve been avoiding tumblr because we couldn’t watch new episodes of The Good Place until today and I have a lot of feelings of course, but two main thoughts.
1. Palto
2. Eleanor holding up a copy of The Nichomachean Ethics was so great right? It’s so funny!
um. I can literally feel people scrolling by. I swear it’s funny if you’ve read Aristotle’s Ethics, which I’m guessing not that many people have. It’s not a page turner. I didn’t understand any of it until my second read and it helps if you’ve read The Physics. The texts go together. I still don’t understand a lot of it.
But. I can sum up a bit of the Ethics badly if you’re interested and explain why I am so excited . . .
In the Ethics the way to be a good person is to be Virtuous. You create good habits, you educate yourself, you learn from others--especially other people who are trying to be good. (notice I did not say ARE good.)
The bestest thing you can do to be VIRTUOUS is “contemplate contemplation.” Look. Ask a farmer what’s good and he’ll tell you to compost, or grow beets or something, but you ask a philosopher? They tell you it’s thinking about thinking. A close second to philosophy--is Friendship. Aristotle calls a good friend “another self,” or someone you consume much salt with. Someone you know well enough to eat regular meals with.
Friendship is a key virtue because when you pay attention to what a friend (another self) is doing, you have more perspective than when you examine your own bullshit. You can see their choices, actions, and consequences more clearly than your own. You can try to do good things your friends do and avoid mistakes they’ve made. This is simple to explain and very complicated in practice. Which is why I find this joke so brilliant and funny. Because you can’t forking explain “virtue ethics” or the Nichomachean Ethics in a sitcom by trotting out the text or discussing it directly. You apply it to specifics. Here’s some people trying to do good things and be good people for themselves and for others.
And I hope I’m not making Aristotle sound mercenary about his friendships, because he wasn’t. Out of all the European philosophers in the western canon--he’s one of the very few who was married. Friendship is important because it’s a big part of what makes us human. We’re to varying degrees--social animals. Being human is virtuous and the opposite behavior is vice/viciousness--or doing the wrong thing when you know it’s the wrong thing. Doing bad things on purpose makes you less human.
Eleanor holding up a copy of the Ethics, but then not referencing the massive importance of friendship by quoting the book--lets this story be about the messiness of friendship--not some ideal, but actual, real, developing friendship. There’s no chalkboard notes for this. It’s not abstract. It’s people being sweaty and defensive and difficult and yet helping each other and bringing good things into each other’s lives. (And sometimes bad things, or things that seem bad in the short term.)
This is why I prefer Aristotle to Plato. You do your best to judge the right thing to do and then you do it. Sometimes you’re wrong and other times you’re less wrong, and sometimes you’re closer to right. There’s no perfect virtuous state you can achieve. You can’t actually be GOOD, you’re always moving towards it--he has this delightful description of it--staying at work becoming yourself. I like it because it allows for the murkiness of actual life. You’re not trying to be perfect. You’re trying to live a good life. The messiness and change of life negates perfection.
Plato had Forms--like there was a perfect version of every thing in some magic place and Aristotle was like, “I know we’re bros and I love you man, but the Forms are really dumb, Palto.”
That’s why “Palto” is so funny. The only damn thing written on that board was Palto. The guy who advocated perfect Forms had his name misspelled in a philosophy discussion that was derailed by a demon in a story line that’s about Aristotle in practice.
You can kind of see why people read and quote Plato more. I spent the last two seasons wondering what the hell they were going to do about Aristotle and if they’d just skip him, because imagine trying to put all this into a bloody TV show in breezy snippets? You can’t. They did it anyway, but it’s sneaky. It’s all in there, but it’s not spelled out.
