#just really moved by the nichomachean ethics

[ghostlyheart]

It's 8:30 p.m. should I go to bed

[briannysey]

Get to Know Me

Was tagged by @arianwells <3

Current Wallpaper:

I turn off icons on my desktop and sometimes just stare at it :)

The last song you listened to: Labour by Paris Paloma

Currently Reading: This is all for class but The Aeneid (Fagles Translation), Into that Darkness by Gita Serenay, Nichomachean Ethics, and Shogun by James Clavell b/c a friend asked me too.

Last movie: The French Dispatch by Wes Anderson

Craving: mashed potatoes. I'll be cooking them later on this week for the roomies

What are you wearing right now: gray tshirt and black sweatpants (these are my chilling at home clothes)

How tall are you: 5'10 i think?

Piercings: 1 stud in my right nostril (Want to move it to my left nostril and get a nose ring in the right

Tattoos: Someday when I have disposable income

Glasses? Contacts?: I got my first pair of glasses just over a year ago. Incredible improvement to quality of life

Last drink: Coffee (It's still warm :) )

Last show: Roomies made me watch Ted Lasso last night. Kept critiquing the KS accent but other than that it was nice

Last thing I ate: sunflower seeds

Favorite color: Silver

Current obsession: I've been diving back into ASoIaF and really digging it.

Unrelated Obsession: Writing/Rhetorical craft. Have been working really hard to improve my written comm skills

Any pets: Not anymore :(

Do you have a crush on anyone?: There's this very cool enby I've been chatting with on Instagram.

Favorite fictional character: Either Brienne of Tarth or Baru Cormorant

Tagging: My tumblr circle has all exodused and I interact with precious few new people. If you want, post your own and say I tagged you!

[imaginarycircus]

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.

[midnightactual]

Thanks for the answers! To be more specific I assume that their bond would be more personal built on trust as it would be less of Yoruichi turning him into a killer and more into a man. With that how would this bond evolve Ichigos personality? For Yoruichi could this bond make her realize that she is more than the past the same way Johnny Lawrence learns that training Miguel? Or would yoru open up to Ichigo about her past and Ichigo see her for person instead of an idea?Could that change her thx

Regarding Ichigo:

Sorry for taking my time in responding to this. I have a soft spot for Johnny’s “redemption” arc and think that his character growth across Cobra Kai has been great (if realistically uneven). So I see what you’re saying here and I think that would have been (or would be in fic or an AU) a very interesting way to take things for both of them.

With regard to Ichigo in this circumstance... I often think back to a description of eudaimonia from a particular video game: “Violence fades as society grows more tolerant and just, and even when this society’s hand is forced it often shoots to subdue rather than to destroy.”

The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence; and this will be that of the best thing in us. —Aristotle, “Nichomachean Ethics”

This is, not coincidentally, more or less what Johnny realizes and tries to teach Miguel when he moves away from the Cobra Kai school’s focus on “no mercy” and seeing the world in black and white: that there’s a degree of ambiguity to things. I think Yoruichi knows this, and I think it's something Ichigo eventually learns in LSS arc (when he resolves to deliberately kill Ginjō) but it comes at a high price for him across that arc (such as when he impulsively tries to kill Tsukishima).

That lesson being communicated to Ichigo—that there’s a time and place for mercy and for resolve alike—would’ve been a healthy lesson for him, I think. And I think you’re not wrong that it would be a healthy lesson for her to teach, both to help let go of the past and accept herself, and to humanize her as a person. You can’t really teach wisdom, but you can teach striving for wisdom, and I think that’s really what’s being discussed here (and is really the point of a lot of martial arts anyway).

When framed like this, I think that’d have been a very solid take and ultimately much more interesting than what we got. (To extend the metaphor further, Xcution itself could’ve functioned pretty much exactly like Cobra Kai does: a temptation to power.)

Good ideas, honestly!