Aristotle and the Essence of Life

On Wednesday October 9, 2024, in front of a packed audience on the 2^nd floor of Circa Everard Read gallery in Rosebank, on a stormy Joburg spring evening, I had the transcendental privilege of speaking on stage with renowned journalist Michael Avery about the true motives behind my new book Orthogonal Thinking – My Own Search for Meaning in Mathematics, Literature and Life. Later that evening, I bumped into my two children who were leaving the event with their au pair, it being a school night. I asked my son, who is ten years old, what he thought of all the proceedings, and I was surprised and amazed when he said, “I liked it. I am going to read the book. I often think that question, why am I me?”

I believe that everyone, not only academics and first-year liberal arts students, are plagued their entire lives by questions such as these. To be sure, existential questions such as what defines us as humans, and what gives our lives meaning, have been contemplated long before even early philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle first penned their thoughts on the subject. These ancient Greek thinkers took for granted that humans have an essence, a set of inherent, defining properties, that is within us, even before we are born. Our purpose in life is then to live rationally and virtuously in accordance with our human essence.

Up until the 19^th century, philosophers contemplating human nature and the meaning of life continued to be guided by Aristotle’s underlying contention that there exists an essence within us that inexplicably makes us human. During this time, traditional values were generally grounded in religious and metaphysical belief systems. Observing the changes taking place in Western society due to the industrialisation of the late 1800s, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that these traditional values were beginning to lose their hold on society, giving way to a growing sense of meaninglessness. This creeping nihilism concerned Nietzsche, though he also saw within it an opportunity for the creation of a new value system and sense of purpose.

Nietzsche communicated this idea most clearly through the figures of the “Übermensch”, a being who believes they have agency over their life and who is inspired to achieve more than just an ordinary existence, and his antithesis, the “Letzter Mensch”, or “Last Man”, the archetypal passive nihilist who seeks only comfort in life. Nietzsche warned that society was increasingly populated by apathetic last men and urged people to look to the figure of the Übermensch to gain the inspiration to transcend the limits that are imposed by society and determine their own values and purpose through what he called their “will to power”.

This emphasis on individual agency was reiterated in the 20^th century through the ideas of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who asserted, in radical opposition to Aristotle, that humans are not born with any intrinsic essence. Rather, humans exist first and then define their own authentic essence through their actions. The corollary of this – that our lives have no predetermined meaning or purpose – was not a cause for pessimism, however, he argued, but rather offered freedom to the individual to create their own meaning in life. This notion gained traction in Western thought in the second half of the 20^th century, as people, forever changed by the horrors of World War II, began to doubt the notion of an ordered world, based on a shared sense of morality and an intrinsic sense of meaning.

The current of intellectual thinking post-World War II therefore attempted to explain human nature – in a meaninglessness world and in the total absence of the idea of an inherent essence – through either a biological or a social constructivist framework. Scientists such as Daniel Dennett, as an example, offered an evolutionary account of how consciousness arises from the interaction of the physical and cognitive processes involved in the way that the brain processes information. The implication of this was that rather than being part of the mysterious essence that makes us human, consciousness, self-awareness, or what some people might consider the soul, had developed and evolved as a function of the physical brain.

Canadian cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker took a similar line of reasoning in interrogating how we acquire language, which has often been cited as a unique human ability indicative of an inherent essence. Unwilling to accept that language is simply, inexplicably, naturally part of us, in The Language Instinct (1994) Pinker sought to provide an evolutionary and biological explanation for why humans had acquired this skill. In Sapiens (2011), historian Yuval Harari similarly took an evolutionary perspective on the subject, though he emphasised the influence of social arrangements over biological processes.

It is fascinating to me how many scientists and philosophers have invented intricate and unprovable explanations for that which makes us different from all other animals, language and human nature. We live now in a secular world where we encourage people to define and express their own truths. This has led to the elevation of subjective truth over objective truth in a post-truth world that has no moral anchor, no centre, and not only is it being largely accepted, but it is something that many people believe is a positive development. I am reminded of a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats entitled “The Second Coming”, in which he writes: