TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
How Aristotle can save us
Aristotle offers a framework that is strikingly relevant for this age of moral confusion and civic fragmentation.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Activists hold umbrellas and posters that read “No country without its people. Listen to our voice!“ during the 856th Kamisan rally in front of the State Palace in Jakarta on March 20, 2025. (Antara/Sulthony Hasanuddin )
I
n a 1995 speech outlining his “Visions for the 21st Century”, the renowned astrophysicist Carl Sagan called attention to the fragility of human civilization, given our infinitesimally small presence within the cosmos. Our future, he warned, depended entirely on our learning to live wisely and humbly together.
Clearly, we didn’t get the message. Three decades on, our “pale blue dot” is riven by geopolitical turmoil, and the late 20th-century hope for an ascendent global liberalism has faded.
Faced with such radical uncertainty, the best strategy may be to return to basics. And to explore the most profound of all questions – what is the good life? – there is no better guide than Aristotle, whose Politics and Nicomachean Ethics offer a framework that is strikingly relevant for this age of moral confusion and civic fragmentation.
Unlike the modern liberal tradition, which exalts individual autonomy, Aristotle began from a different premise: human beings are not self-contained units, but social animals whose flourishing depends on the cultivation of virtues within a political community.
To live well is not simply to do what one wants; rather, it requires the cultivation of character through lifelong education and habituation, and engagement in a shared civic life. (Not incidentally, the contemporary appeal of many nationalists and populists is that they offer a vision of the good life.)
Aristotle’s perspective stands in stark contrast to the libertarianism that long defined the traditional right (at least until recently) and the expressive identity politics of the left. He reminds us that liberty is not simply the absence of constraint, and that justice is not merely the fair distribution of rights.
True freedom, as he saw it, is the capacity to govern oneself wisely and ethically in concert with others; and true justice is found not just in abstract rules, but in practices that enable people to lead lives of purpose, dignity, and excellence.
