The Classical Mind Newsletter for February 10, 2023

Housekeeping, How to be Aristotelian, Self-Portrait Poetry, The Autobiographical Library, Mesmerizing Waves, and Proust on Writing

Housekeeping

• Jared mentioned this in our community chat but last week I was sick with a stomach bug and he had no internet due to the crazy weather in Texas. As a result, we had to delay recording our Beowulf episode.

• The episode will be out this coming Tuesday!

• Our March book is Macbeth. April will be Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor.

How to be Aristotelian

John Sellars teaches us how to be Aristotelian in the Antigone Journal. Sellars contends that “Aristotle is the single most important human being ever to have lived.” Perhaps hyperbolic, but not too far off. The reason for his claim is that Aristotle has influenced how so many people think about so many things, laying the foundations for empirical science, formal logic, politics, philosophy etc. However, what is most compelling about Aristotle is not so much any particular contribution he made to specific fields so much as his posture: “Aristotle wasn’t a rigid system builder; he was an inquirer, a man in pursuit of knowledge, restlessly in search of answers to every conceivable question.”

So what does it mean to be “Aristotelian”? It does not mean that we merely regurgitate a set of ideas. Rather, we become Aristotelian when we embrace “open-minded and endlessly curious inquiry.” Not only is this Aristotelian, Sellars believes it is “to be a human being in the fullest possible way.”