Q&A: Is the Golden Mean the best way to live our lives?

Aristotle proposed that the best way to live our lives is in balance.  Too much gluttony and we suffer serious health risks.  Too little appetite for food also carries its own health risks.  So its best to moderate our daily intake.  And when was the last time you heard about someone dying form eating too healthy?  In any situation I think about it, balancing out our lives just seems to work perfectly just as Aristotle said it would.

Q&A: What would a Aristotelian Society look like?

Aristotle did not advocate a government that would place absolute in the hands of one person, or a few. Despite that, Aristotle still believed that the government needed to have far-reaching control over its citizens. He viewed child-raising to be too important to leave to parents, and instead give that job to the government. The collective raising of children would led to a collective mindset.  At some point or another in time, society would become social-capitalist in both the economy and government.  The children might become fiercely patriotic, as the public child-raising will extend much further then our public education does;  it would be hard to say if a government would honestly raise the kids and not turn them into Prussian-style military armies.

Aristotle and Happiness

What is the best way to bring happiness to oneself?  Aristotle seemed to advocate a life solely devoted to personal reflection and deep thinking.  Yet complete focus in just area of human experience seems limited for Aristotle, more so when you consider that he believed that life needed to be lived by the means of lifestyles.  Aristotle probably wanted a balance between self-thought, pleasure, and honor and politics.  Experiences in one of the above mentioned lifestyles could help bring better satisfaction or understanding in the other areas.  For example: seeing how people interact in politics might help you better understand human nature and yourself. It seems so unlikely that Aristotle would have expected people to live fulfilling and examined lives if they didn’t experience the world.

What came first: The Chicken or the Egg?

From my standpoint, I believe that the egg came before the chicken.  Some time in prehistory, there was a chicken-like creature that laid eggs.  From one of these eggs, the chicken was born.  So the egg preceded the chicken.  So where did the chicken-like creature came from?  Like the chicken, it was born from the egg of a similar, yet different species.  And it keeps going back to the other chicken-like-like creatures, and down through dinosaurs, and then later down to the first land-dwelling egg layer, then to fish, until you arrive at the first life form on Earth.  What find to be a better question is “Just how does life evolve out non-living organic matter.” Or “How do the billions of living cells of our body form one thinking, conscience being?”  The mysteries of life really puzzle me.