Does it sound odd to read Aristotle in our time? This is my first time reading Nicomachean Ethics, and I’m amazed by how modern it feels. Almost every major publication today talks about being “high-agency” and making deliberate choices.
What surprised me is that Aristotle was already talking about this 2000 years ago. Different words, same core idea. It doesn’t feel outdated at all. It feels foundational.
That feeling—'this very old thing is SO fresh and modern and relevant to me, actually'—is honestly the most precious part of reading older works. I've not read any Aristotle, but it's very cool you're having that experience. It's just nice to feel that these works endure for good reasons.
Yes, the ideas sounds very very modern. Like how to make a choice, what is happiness, what is high agency people, etc. My Substack is about applying product thinking to a Substack publication, and to my own surprise, Aristotle’s wisdom fits it almost perfectly. It is a book full of wisdom. And the most amazing thing is that he wrote it almost 2700 years ago....
Can I shamelessly promote my writing on this topic? I get genuinely excited every time I talk about it.
I read "Nicomachean Ethics" for the first time a couple of years ago, and I had a very similar response -- and I've been returning to it and rereading parts of it ever since! His commentary on friendship esp. struck a chord with me.
I love how broad your newsletter is in terms of subject! being an engineer working in railway signalling who is at the same time passionate about literature, art, travel and interior design means constantly being drawn in a milion different directions - and you seem to be able to combine your various interests so well!
Wiktoria—I can't tell you how much I appreciate this comment!! One of the things that made me hesitate about writing a blog/newsletter for ages is that I didn't have a theme…a single topic…I couldn't decide if I wanted to write about literature or tech or art or design (especially as an amateur in many of these domains). I also had this very powerful anxiety that I needed to pick a lane, or else I'd be mid or actively bad at everything.
But it's been fun to range widely across all my interests, and it is hugely, hugely gratifying to know that others feel seen by that/are excited by these things too! Also, one of the books I read in January was recommended by a friend who's a transit nerd/works at Transport for London, but is ALSO my number one source right now for critical theory/philosophy recs! People with broad interests are everywhere…we just need to find each other…
Thank you for introducing me to Megan Stephenson! Her paintings are incredible. And Fabian's book on happiness sounds fascinating. I'm going to check it out!
I had read Dubliners long back, and reading that line from Araby made me wonder whether I had read it at all. Time to reread it! In my mind, Dubliners is a set of fleeting images that made me feel like I knew Ireland all my life without ever really visiting it: Peas on a plate, a lighthouse on an island, two boys staring at an old man from a distance, suspicious of his motives. I remember very little of it, but the texture of its imagery has stayed with me.
This line stood out to me: "Activists, Schulman reminds us, ‘have to be committed to problem-solving,’ and understand that their responsibility is to be _effective_, not merely to be outraged." I've been exploring figures of power like Lincoln/Washington/LBJ, and Lincoln is a point of endless intrigue for me. On one hand, he's iconic, inspirational, and endlessly revered. I find the narrative around his ideals aspirational and the sneakily pragmatic methods he used to be "effective" quite interesting.
On the other hand, the more I dig into Lincoln's story, the more murky his actual motives and methods become ("Preserve the Union at any cost"). This also reminded me of a Henry Farrell article I discovered through one of your posts about how Silicon Valley is gravitating toward "Great Man" authoritarian mythology like that of Elon Musk – and in their reasoning, the alternative is to be consigned to outraged activism without being effective. But that seems like a false binary, because there were people like Aaron Swartz, high-agency "activists" who were also pro-collaboration and consensus, like the Sunflower movement in Taiwan. I find myself thinking a lot about what effective power without the hubris looks like.
As an aside, that butterfly story is almost identical in structure to a story in which the Hindi poet Kabir (famous for his couplets titled "dohe") dreams that he is a bird, wakes up and bursts into tears, exclaiming to his students: "Now I don't know if I'm Kabir dreaming he's a bird, or the bird dreaming he's Kabir!" Very cool how such a tiny fable has translated across cultures!
Yes, there's such a touching portrait of Ireland in Dubliners…it's funny to feel nostalgia for a place I've never been to/have no personal attachment to, but Joyce's attachment to it comes through so clearly in his images.
Also, what you said about high-agency activists who are also very collaborative is so interesting (and this is such a great, worthy question—'I find myself thinking a lot about what effective power without the hubris looks like'—I feel so many of us are trying to fumble towards an answer right now)
Thank you for the detail about Kabir's bird dream, too…how lovely
I had a similar response to Dubliners when I first read it - the stories felt so porous and easy to sink into, but some left me with a real lasting unease. ps if you like Meghann Stephenson, you might be interested in (if you don't know her already) Sasha Gordon! Her paintings are similarly poised and solemn but trade hauteur for the base and uncanny
Thank you so much for introducing me to Sasha Gordon! Your description is also perfect…Gordon's work has such an intriguing uncanny quality to it? Like the figures are posed so defiantly, there's this sensuality that's edged with…despair? aggression? something darker…it reminds me of the sensuality in Ottessa Moshfegh's novels
hey, noticed the link for the Kevin Power essay sends you to the Yiyun Li essay mentioned below. just letting you know, read both, delightful recommendations as always.
thank you for this catch (seriously! I also had 2 people write in about typos/bad currency conversions in my last newsletter…I'm very grateful to have an attentive and generous readership to find my mistakes)
I'm definitely intrigued by some of these, including the book about Bergson! I recently learned about him for the first time, but I'm still not sure where to start with his writings -- I'm curious to know if you have any recommendations?
I must confess…I haven't read anything by Bergson! (but I was talking to my coworkers about him over lunch, and one of the engineers said he'd read Matter and Memory and really loved it)
I find biographies very useful for a kind of…soft landing/entry point into a writer (Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe was my introduction to many 20th c. philosophers, and I only read the works of Arendt, Merleau-Ponty afterwards)
But I think the Bergson book I'm most interested in is Creative Evolution—I love thinking about creative process, and this book seems most personally applicable to what I do for work/with my hobbies/with this newsletter
I'll keep both those titles in mind! And yes, biographies are an underrated help that way. I recently read "I Am Dynamite!" by Sue Prideaux for Nietzsche and it really helped ground me, not to mention I found it so engrossing I stayed up reading it till the wee hours.
I was also surprised by how easy and fun it was to read Dubliners given that his other books are daunting. Araby was a favorite and The Boarding House had incredible tension and drama. The mother with her matter of fact demands was incredible.
My flatmate actually recommend the trajectory of: Dubliners, then Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then Ulysses…basically, go from very conventional/lovely/easy to assimilate and work up to the gravity-defying feats of literary experimentation…
I also loved those 2 stories…Araby is just a sublime depiction of young love and its anxieties!
As always appreciate how voracious of a reader you are, and how expansive your picks tend to be. Loved reading In Search of the Leisure Class:
"There must be a human activity that is done for its own sake, and this activity has got to serve as the teleological lynchpin of the whole system. Aristotle calls it “leisure,” or scholē."
Does it sound odd to read Aristotle in our time? This is my first time reading Nicomachean Ethics, and I’m amazed by how modern it feels. Almost every major publication today talks about being “high-agency” and making deliberate choices.
What surprised me is that Aristotle was already talking about this 2000 years ago. Different words, same core idea. It doesn’t feel outdated at all. It feels foundational.
That feeling—'this very old thing is SO fresh and modern and relevant to me, actually'—is honestly the most precious part of reading older works. I've not read any Aristotle, but it's very cool you're having that experience. It's just nice to feel that these works endure for good reasons.
Yes, the ideas sounds very very modern. Like how to make a choice, what is happiness, what is high agency people, etc. My Substack is about applying product thinking to a Substack publication, and to my own surprise, Aristotle’s wisdom fits it almost perfectly. It is a book full of wisdom. And the most amazing thing is that he wrote it almost 2700 years ago....
Can I shamelessly promote my writing on this topic? I get genuinely excited every time I talk about it.
https://xianli.substack.com/p/willing-is-not-choosing
I just downloaded it yesterday and now I'm even more excited to read it!
Yes. I like the section that he talked about happiness. Very very insightful.
I read "Nicomachean Ethics" for the first time a couple of years ago, and I had a very similar response -- and I've been returning to it and rereading parts of it ever since! His commentary on friendship esp. struck a chord with me.
Yes! Same feeling!
I love how broad your newsletter is in terms of subject! being an engineer working in railway signalling who is at the same time passionate about literature, art, travel and interior design means constantly being drawn in a milion different directions - and you seem to be able to combine your various interests so well!
Wiktoria—I can't tell you how much I appreciate this comment!! One of the things that made me hesitate about writing a blog/newsletter for ages is that I didn't have a theme…a single topic…I couldn't decide if I wanted to write about literature or tech or art or design (especially as an amateur in many of these domains). I also had this very powerful anxiety that I needed to pick a lane, or else I'd be mid or actively bad at everything.
But it's been fun to range widely across all my interests, and it is hugely, hugely gratifying to know that others feel seen by that/are excited by these things too! Also, one of the books I read in January was recommended by a friend who's a transit nerd/works at Transport for London, but is ALSO my number one source right now for critical theory/philosophy recs! People with broad interests are everywhere…we just need to find each other…
Thank you for introducing me to Megan Stephenson! Her paintings are incredible. And Fabian's book on happiness sounds fascinating. I'm going to check it out!
Fabian's book is great—he has a detailed table of contents/summary of each chapter here, and it's what convinced me to buy the book! https://profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/coming-soon
Oh I love that!! Thank you Celine <3
I had read Dubliners long back, and reading that line from Araby made me wonder whether I had read it at all. Time to reread it! In my mind, Dubliners is a set of fleeting images that made me feel like I knew Ireland all my life without ever really visiting it: Peas on a plate, a lighthouse on an island, two boys staring at an old man from a distance, suspicious of his motives. I remember very little of it, but the texture of its imagery has stayed with me.
This line stood out to me: "Activists, Schulman reminds us, ‘have to be committed to problem-solving,’ and understand that their responsibility is to be _effective_, not merely to be outraged." I've been exploring figures of power like Lincoln/Washington/LBJ, and Lincoln is a point of endless intrigue for me. On one hand, he's iconic, inspirational, and endlessly revered. I find the narrative around his ideals aspirational and the sneakily pragmatic methods he used to be "effective" quite interesting.
On the other hand, the more I dig into Lincoln's story, the more murky his actual motives and methods become ("Preserve the Union at any cost"). This also reminded me of a Henry Farrell article I discovered through one of your posts about how Silicon Valley is gravitating toward "Great Man" authoritarian mythology like that of Elon Musk – and in their reasoning, the alternative is to be consigned to outraged activism without being effective. But that seems like a false binary, because there were people like Aaron Swartz, high-agency "activists" who were also pro-collaboration and consensus, like the Sunflower movement in Taiwan. I find myself thinking a lot about what effective power without the hubris looks like.
As an aside, that butterfly story is almost identical in structure to a story in which the Hindi poet Kabir (famous for his couplets titled "dohe") dreams that he is a bird, wakes up and bursts into tears, exclaiming to his students: "Now I don't know if I'm Kabir dreaming he's a bird, or the bird dreaming he's Kabir!" Very cool how such a tiny fable has translated across cultures!
Yes, there's such a touching portrait of Ireland in Dubliners…it's funny to feel nostalgia for a place I've never been to/have no personal attachment to, but Joyce's attachment to it comes through so clearly in his images.
Also, what you said about high-agency activists who are also very collaborative is so interesting (and this is such a great, worthy question—'I find myself thinking a lot about what effective power without the hubris looks like'—I feel so many of us are trying to fumble towards an answer right now)
Thank you for the detail about Kabir's bird dream, too…how lovely
I had a similar response to Dubliners when I first read it - the stories felt so porous and easy to sink into, but some left me with a real lasting unease. ps if you like Meghann Stephenson, you might be interested in (if you don't know her already) Sasha Gordon! Her paintings are similarly poised and solemn but trade hauteur for the base and uncanny
Thank you so much for introducing me to Sasha Gordon! Your description is also perfect…Gordon's work has such an intriguing uncanny quality to it? Like the figures are posed so defiantly, there's this sensuality that's edged with…despair? aggression? something darker…it reminds me of the sensuality in Ottessa Moshfegh's novels
For others who are interested…here's a good profile from last Dec https://www.vulture.com/article/how-the-painter-sasha-gordon-marshaled-her-monsters.html and an interview she did with Lucy Liu https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/sasha-gordon-tells-lucy-liu-why-she-paints-the-things-that-scares-her (so fun??)
You're so right, they do feel very Moshfeghian!!
hey, noticed the link for the Kevin Power essay sends you to the Yiyun Li essay mentioned below. just letting you know, read both, delightful recommendations as always.
thank you for this catch (seriously! I also had 2 people write in about typos/bad currency conversions in my last newsletter…I'm very grateful to have an attentive and generous readership to find my mistakes)
and also thank you for reading and commenting!!
I'm definitely intrigued by some of these, including the book about Bergson! I recently learned about him for the first time, but I'm still not sure where to start with his writings -- I'm curious to know if you have any recommendations?
I must confess…I haven't read anything by Bergson! (but I was talking to my coworkers about him over lunch, and one of the engineers said he'd read Matter and Memory and really loved it)
I find biographies very useful for a kind of…soft landing/entry point into a writer (Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe was my introduction to many 20th c. philosophers, and I only read the works of Arendt, Merleau-Ponty afterwards)
But I think the Bergson book I'm most interested in is Creative Evolution—I love thinking about creative process, and this book seems most personally applicable to what I do for work/with my hobbies/with this newsletter
I'll keep both those titles in mind! And yes, biographies are an underrated help that way. I recently read "I Am Dynamite!" by Sue Prideaux for Nietzsche and it really helped ground me, not to mention I found it so engrossing I stayed up reading it till the wee hours.
I was also surprised by how easy and fun it was to read Dubliners given that his other books are daunting. Araby was a favorite and The Boarding House had incredible tension and drama. The mother with her matter of fact demands was incredible.
My flatmate actually recommend the trajectory of: Dubliners, then Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then Ulysses…basically, go from very conventional/lovely/easy to assimilate and work up to the gravity-defying feats of literary experimentation…
I also loved those 2 stories…Araby is just a sublime depiction of young love and its anxieties!
I find you and Naomi Kanakia to be so inspiring to my writing and reading. Very grateful for that in these times.
As always appreciate how voracious of a reader you are, and how expansive your picks tend to be. Loved reading In Search of the Leisure Class:
"There must be a human activity that is done for its own sake, and this activity has got to serve as the teleological lynchpin of the whole system. Aristotle calls it “leisure,” or scholē."