In today's society, there's hardly much interest in being a rational person. The intellectuals can't seem to come up with anything but that knowledge and wisdom are lies and can't be verified. The religion tell us to escape this world of flesh and greed with the spiritual world that hasn't been verified either. Hardly anything in this world is sacred to them anymore and thus they have lost all will to try to change it or they change it but damn anyone who doesn't agree with them even though they have no objective standard to a purposeful life. What a tragedy it is.
For myself, however, I live in a different kind of ethic. It's the Objectivist Lifestyle of where a man is worth himself and more if he can put his mind to calculate and create the world he wants for himself. (As long as he doesn't use force to create it.) We must use reason, negotiation, and persuasion to ally and convince people of his ideas and wealth creation. But not everyone follows the Objectivist Ethic. Many people find the philosophy too extreme for them with it's absolute rejection of the spiritual and the need for an Objective moral basis in Selfishness being the primary issues of this philosophy. (The arguments being from the religious that in order for an Objective moral foundation, God must provide it. The argument from almost everyone in the world is that Selfishness is wrong and altruism is good. Altruism being good however doesn't correlate as the definition of altruism is to sacrifice the better for the least of your preferences. i.e. Sacrifice yourself for others. And no reason has been truly made as to why any individual life is worth more to another than it is to that person.) But if so, how can Objectivists persuade people to live rationally in an otherwise irrational world? That comes in the form of the Aristotlelian ethics and method.
Aristotle (384 BC/BCE- 322 BC/BCE) was the Greek philosopher who helped inspire Western Civilization among his teacher and contemporary Plato. But both had different viewpoints of the world. Plato was concerned with the metaphysical realm of forms where perfection resides but Aristotle claimed that perfection can be found and made on Earth. The Aristotlelian Method comes from the scientific method he formulated at the time, giving him the title of the grandfather of modern science with his scientific method and researching capabilities being the primary source of all scientific endeavors to the present. But the primary issue needed to be explained is his ethics.
Aristotle's son Nichomachus, helped edit his father's work, presently titled for his son's editing work, Nichomachean Ethics. (Though scholars debate whether he was able to or not saying he could've died in war but that's a history lesson I'll have to research in the future.) This book gave the idea of what he had provided with using reason to cultivate good virtues by means of reason. What should be strived for is flourishing of the human body and soul is the primary means of having a successful life. Though we look for our happiness, Aristotle said that our search for eudamonia is a lifelong process rather than the short bouts of pleasure we think are actual happiness. It's important for all of us to pursue this eudamonia by following the virtues laid out in his Nichomachean ethics.
To Be Continued in Part 2 (The Ethics of Eudamonia)
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