Aristotle's philosophy (in/and my life)

baddest yen so I guess I'm gonna add
this video to my playlist of kind of book naan reviews videos that are not book reviews but are talking about books that really influenced me and we're a big part of my life and with all those reviews have really made a point to not go back and reread the source book it's very much how I remember the books involved today 10 years later 20 years later which is quite different from going back and you know rereading the source and what you'd what you think about it now so a couple days ago my girlfriend asked me but I was really surprised the question you asked me have you ever read Aristotle now why did you watch her that's the question I was really surprised the question I feel like I met you - every thought of all the time oh yeah go you mentioned conversation yeah yeah yeah to me it just seemed like a preposterous question because I feel like Aristotle like I've I've recorded over 800 videos on YouTube but I think maybe 20 of them mention ever so maybe 30 I don't know like quite quite a few times I've mentioned it and I think I mentioned it in in conversation it just seemed to me preposterous one of your ex-girlfriends took a class in which right it was a quotation of Aristotle that was taken out of context feminist Women's Studies class right right right and discussing the interpretation of what Aristotle actually said about women and so on right so look um you know in terms of whatever stuff and you haven't read any Aristotle so what I find that bizarre I find that strange and for you so let's just talk about Aristotle as a cultural icon is one of things to talk about this what does Aristotle mean to you culturally as a white American from Detroit no I mean I'm serious like you know like you know me you know what is George Washington mean to you look what the cool who gives a [ __ ] about George Washington is George Washington symbolize anything positive to you but I think Aristotle is someone who really does have symbolic and cultural resonance and wait yeah I mean Aristotle is extraordinary because he made the transition from being a pagan philosopher to being a Catholic philosopher historically that is why he is so famous there was a brief period when the Christian Church what we now call the Catholic Church you know suppressed and persecuted Aristotle and then they kind of figured out that he wasn't as anti-christian as they thought he was they got to some of the passages where he says about the nature of divinity and God and Aristotle ended up being rehabilitated as kind of one of the few little bits and pieces of antiquity of pre-christian philosophy that could be embraced or at least remixed reinterpreted and Andry valorized in in Catholic Europe so Aristotle in in a period when Europe you know was was burning books was censoring their whole Christian past when you know philosophers like Lucretia soar what have you or really you know persecuted and so on what the things were regarded as heresies and terrible and what-have-you that you know Aristotle made the transition from being a pagan and a heretic to being somewhat acceptable within Catholic Europe so that's why his fame grew as much as it did there's no real reason I mean in a parallel universe why not carni ADIZ why not you know indeed why not Plato I think there are a lot of reasons why not play actually but why not some other philosopher who's now slipped into relative why not Democritus himself why not Puran ism what we now call skepticism there were why not cynicism for that matter you know sir cynicism is now used that you know we use it an english language a very different way but there was a school of philosophers called the cynics well Aristotle was the guy who won the lottery and made the transition from pagan to Christian enough to being acceptable within Christian discourse so his fame grew and grew now in in my life you know Aristotle does have some special significance you know I'm not someone who reads these books with the delusion that they contain a message for me nor that they contain a message for my times so I do look at erä so first and foremost as as a remnant of as a fragment of a very alien culture that in some ways I can never relate to so like you know if I read a book written in 17th century Africa I regard that as really by the way 17th century Portugal like sources have read from the Portuguese Empire and stuff really alien traditions and I'm just saying like even relatively recent within Europe I feel like I'm reading out you know an artifact from a different culture that in many ways I can't relate to at all I remember even reading some Dutch Empire sources from a couple centuries ago and the way they open an end like a letter you know your worship you know what wow it's so alien you know I am your humble of slave your worship so as you just go back a couple centuries within Western Europe and really feel you're dealing with it with a profoundly alien culture so this is this is one thing I don't look at eros Tolleson it's for me or Bella's message for for my times however you know if you come out of the political science background if you care about politics then you know I mean Aristotle is really he's defined even some of the words we now use in the English language for politics this is also true of metaphysics the word metaphysics itself comes to the title of a work of of Aristotle he had this definitive significance on the development of philosophy including social and political philosophy so I guess there was a sense when I was a young man of kind of how can anyone take themselves seriously if they haven't read Aristotle now a lot of people say that about Shakespeare I mentioned Shakespeare is an example come on with Shakespeare it's [ __ ] like you know I mean like you don't need to read Shakespeare you know believe me I do I'm gonna encourage my own daughter to retake but I don't have anything against Shakespeare when you think about it what is there really of such definitive significance in the works of William Shakespeare I think frankly nothing have you read some of the sonnets of Shakespeare you know the homoerotic sonnets they arresting he does yes out it's not okay you didn't read those okay so you had she had a censored literary class that's a big question how gay was Shakespeare that's a there's a huge stack of academic literature that by the way I'm sorry and you know Gino is sonnet about the dusky woman did Shakespeare or sleep with black women that's another yeah yeah there's a lot about Shakespeare sex life based on the base of the sonnets by the way anyway another topic another video but in what point is you know by delving into Shakespeare by pouring this kind of time attention well you can even tell from my joking around I have spent some time reading Shakespeare but I don't think you get anything out of it like that so being serious about political science being serious about politics being serious about philosophy in some ways in reading Aristotle you're gonna puncture that illusion you're going to deflate that illusion you're gonna move past that that kind of aura that it's works is taking on see the reality of what they are but there's one important sense in which you know I found something that was you know kind of shocking and tremendously important in Aristotle that really changed my perspective on both modern Western politics and the way politics is taught and learned in universities so in most editions of the complete works of Aristotle there is one very important work that is omitted and that is Aristotle's constitution of Athens so on the constitution of Athens is a work attributed Aristotle that was discovered quite late it was so it was not influential in antiquity it wasn't influenced when the Catholic period I've already alluded to it's it's a modern archaeological discovery feel like it's a text that's re-entered that was that was lost or largely unknown it was unknown outside of Egypt I think it was known within Egypt and then re-entered the corpus of of Aristotle's writing the view of democracy the philosophical view of how democracy works at the source and also the practical explanation of how the democracy of Athens really works in there and one of the things that came as as a studying there are many things in there that came to me is a stunning revelation in contrast to the way Aristotle is kind of packaged and modernized for students within academia but one of them is the word lot l OT what aristotle supports is election by lot he reveals and criticizes election by a vote as anti-democratic and as tending towards aristocracy the whole philosophy of politics and democracy that you get in other longer donal like you know he has one book simply called the politics and this kind of thing more on politics everyone translate the title you have to go back and reexamine it realizing what's made clear in the english translation of the constitution of athens which is that aristotle is a critic of what we now call electoral philosophy what party we now he is a critic of what we now call electoral democracy what he supports is election by lot lottery electing people at random his model of human equality and participation and also his whole criticism of it's still huge problem today of corruption and special interests and consul conflict of interest his way to overcome that is you constitute a class of educated people he's obviously not talking about collecting every one of the society Athens was a very unequal society there were slaves and there were slave owners but where you basically have a group of people who are a group of men it's only men who are qualified to hold public office and then they are assigned their particular offices in government by a lot by lottery not not by election in our sense at all and I remember reading that and it was a stunning moment because I realized the extent to which all my professors have been lying to me even my textbooks have been lying to me the the significance of and a lot of things Aristotle said that were kind of confusing in the past because he doesn't he's kind of confusing in terms of the incas are only reading this anguish on in greek he's kind of confusing criticisms of corruption and democracy how democracy doesn't doesn't work he talks a lot about the way in which democracy tends to slide into oligarchy and from ego rap in Canada at the time I couldn't really relate to that yeah well no I mean for you to it's like okay why did george w bush become president well because before him George Bush Senior was president why did George Bush Senior become president well because he was the head of the CIA why did he become head of the CI because he was a millionaire involved in oil rigs in the Caribbean and those oil rigs in the Caribbean were I mean it's it's pretty dark the role of you know the extent to which democracy becomes a kind of mask over oligarchy that was a huge issue for me growing up in Canada to some extent we all feel and realize so that aspect of Aristotle's philosophy which I had understood in the past but the English didn't quite make sense unless oh it's because he's dealing with a difficult to translate contrast there's a contrast being two types of elections election by vote and election by lot so when I knew that that was a turning point in my life in a lot of ways and it mean it deepened for me the sense that if I was gonna learn anything at all I had to learn it as an autodidact I had to learn it by interrogating primary sources to the greatest extent possible and you know the most easily accessible source of information whether those are kind of encyclopedia articles or introductory history textbooks those are almost always in our culture the most dishonest you know that you're better off getting a fragmentary and incomplete view of history by working from authentic primary sources you know what I mean which of course have their own type of bias rather than getting someone's overview of history and politics that has gone ahead and read a bunch of sources for you and smooth them out and made generalizations about them because underneath those generalizations I mean to say that the devil is in the details is is a in an understatement of course this is what I would go on to a counter encounter in Buddhism in First Nations politics and so many things it's so easy to give people a kind of reassuring summary a summation of what a philosophy is about what a political dispute is about even what a civil war is about you know what I mean you can watch a youtube video right now about the the Spanish Civil War 20th century war or about you know the Seven Years War you know or the French Revolution oh oh and I should say that sorry for me that's even linked to my break away from left-wing politics from communism my parents were communists I was very much raised to be a communist but you know I had a book that was literally on my bookshelf from my earliest childhood about the history of the Russian Revolution you know the creation of communism in Russia and it contains so many statements that were in the same way true but misleading you know the meaning you could say a lot about Aristotle and his philosophy and what do you say we just perspective democracy you can see things that are true but misleading were had to realize that so much of what I knew whether it was about Karl Marx or Western democracy or ancient Greek was in this sense true but misleading and that I had to interrogate primary sources and I was better off having incoherent little fragments of information based on those real sources rather than any kind of synoptic analytical overview produced by another by another scholar by another author because the level of deception was so high and indeed the level of self deception on the part of those authors was so offensive [Music] evolution