Does this sound like Aristotle?
It might seem like it’s easier to love others than to love yourself, but it’s tough to build healthy relationships if you don’t love yourself first.
The sentence is from a WikiHow page, “How to Love Yourself: Treat Yourself Like Your Own Best Friend.” Back in in the 1970s, I thought something like it was an excuse for self-indulgence.
Atatürk City Forest
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
In Book I of the Iliad, Achilles restrains an impulse to run a sword through Agamemnon.
That may be the greatest act in the whole epic. I say so, having recently completed a reading of Njal’s Saga, which features a lot of impulsive killing. Now I am embarking on the Iliad again, a book at a time. Here I take up Book I, some comparisons with the saga, and some connections with Plato, Augustine, and Collingwood.
I wrote here about Homer’s epic, book by book, between April, 2017, and September, 2019. I was reading Chapman’s Elizabethan translation. In my account of Book I from then, there are details that do not otherwise stand out to me now, when
Sarıyer, Istanbul (European side)
Loeb Iliad, volume I
November 25, 2022
This post uses work of Hannah Arendt, Augustine, R. G. Collingwood, Tom Holland, Somerset Maugham, and Ved Mehta.
Ortaköy, December 27, 2021
In the first post of this series, I gave some reasons to read the Republic, and one of them was the problem of how our political leaders were not always the best. Plato had not solved that problem, since we still had it; but that meant nobody else had solved it either. Plato had at least taught us that people with great worldly power could nonetheless be more miserable than their subjects. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates teach that lesson
Judith Leyster (Dutch, 1609–1660)
Self-Portrait, c. 1630, oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss
I gave ad hoc consideration to Chapter XII of Collingwood’s New Leviathan on November 3 of last year (2016), just before the American Presidential election. This was in an article sharing the title of the chapter: “Happiness.” The idea was that in dreadful times, unhappiness is “parasitic” on happiness.
Allowing himself “a certain freedom of interpretation” (12. 15), Collingwood agrees with Aristotle that “happiness” is the general term for what we desire (12. 11).
Polytropy 