I'm not sure I see a direct connection between Burke's "Equipment for Living" and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics so I will try to talk it out here.
Burke talks about proverbs as being "strategies for dealing with situations" (296). This is simple enough to understand. Proverbs console, correct, and educate and so they guide those that use them and in that way they act as strategies. He goes on to suggest that certain literature can be called "proverbs writ large" (296). His argument then seems very simple. Proverbs are strategies for situations and literature is like long proverbs therefore literature is a strategy for living.
The connection to Aristotle seems to be in the way proverbs are affected by attitude. Burke says that contrary proverbs exist because different situations call for different strategies. A person who makes a mistake may need consolation if he feels remorse or correction if he feels justified in his mistake. The point is that opposing proverbs can each be valid in different situations.
I feel like Aristotle flirts with this idea but ultimately denies it. He talks about the various arts and master-crafts as being good in "Nicomahean Ethics." He also says that the "Good" everybody strives for is happiness. But he seems to say that not all happiness is created equal. He talks about the life of pleasure as being "only a life for cattle" (15). The happiness achieved at the end of the life of pleasure is the same as that which would satiate a cow.
This seems key to understanding Aristotle's argument. He seems to think that happiness is not entirely subjective. There is some more objective happiness and someone cannot just say "this makes me happy so it is good." This seems opposed to Burke's suggestion that people have differing attitudes so opposing strategies for living are all valid. It is because of this that I wouldn't consider Burke's "Equipment for Living" to be Aristotelian. But then again I'm not sure Burke's "strategies" and Aristotle's "good" really parallel each other very much either except that they both tend to guide people.
I'm not sure that I'm not leaving a key part of either argument out.
1 comment:
Kavawrig,
You seem to have gotten at something good. But not Good.
In ending with the doubt about whether "Burke's 'strategies' and Aristotle's 'good' really parallel each other," you highlighted for me a key difference between the texts and what they were intended to accomplish.
Aristotle searched for a single Good while admitting that individuals carry with them their own idea of "good" and "happiness." His intention was to attempt to identify an ultimate Good which would solve the puzzle, so to speak, of political science and thus eliminating the need for such a study.
His discussion of happiness, then, appears to be the portion most similar to Burke, who lays the groundwork for all literary theory and criticism with his sociological theory. Clearly not all theory has resulted from his theory, but he sought to identify the core of all literature and art. He reasons, then, that all literature and art is "equipment for living" and is "developed out of the fact that new typical situations" spring up constantly simply as a fact of life (301).
Here is where the two come together: both Burke and Aristotle identify uniqueness of perspective as being a critical component of how one determines what is right, good, happiness, or anything really. Burke does so to understand art, expression, and literature, and Aristotle does so in pursuit of the "Good."
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