In this episode, Dr. Michael Giles, a political science professor at LCC, delves into the intersection of philosophy and political science, with a focus on political theory, which he studied extensively in graduate school. His passion for the humanities stems from a deep interest in what it means to live as a good human being.

This thought-provoking conversation explores Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a foundational work that examines what it takes to live a happy, virtuous, and flourishing life. They also touch on Positive Psychology, a contemporary movement in counseling and psychology that draws inspiration from ancient Greek philosophy. In this first installment, they lay the groundwork by discussing how philosophers throughout history have guided people toward lasting happiness and personal development.

• Referenced PDF: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

Welcome to Headroom, where we discuss all things essential to mental health and well being. I'm your host, Jim Owens, a licensed professional counselor at Lansing Community College.

I'd like to emphasize that while this podcast does not contain medical advice, it does introduce you to some phenomenal people who have incredible ideas for you and your life. Having said that, let's get into the headroom and begin today's conversation with Doctor Michael Giles, professor at Lanson Community College.

Welcome, sir.

Thank you. It's great to be on the show.

Good to have you here. And we've known each other for quite a while.

A long while now. Yeah, probably at least a decade, I would say.

Probably, yeah. And we actually worked together at one point.

That's right. LCC financial aid, that was it.

But now I was gonna say you're a philosopher. Well, that's what we're gonna talk about. But how would you describe yourself?

Well, I'm not a philosopher, maybe an aspiring philosopher. I try to have ideas. I'm interested, really, though, in the intersection of politics and philosophy.

And so, so that's what I studied in grad school, was kind of a sub field of political science, actually known as political philosophy.

And so political science, it's always resisted, there's always been an element of the humanities in political science, and that's kind of where I fall. And I have colleagues that are much more data driven, I would say, than I myself am.

But I think that's the joy of political science, is that it brings together sort of number crunching and boat counting as well as political experience.

Yeah, yeah. As you use the word science, I'm thinking of the science of politics versus the art of politics, which, you know, just to play with those two terms.

It is a crucial distinction because the art, just to say that there's like an art of shipbuilding, there is real knowledge that you have to have. And whereas a science, I mean, the word science just means knowledge. And.

But to say that there's a science means that there are real rules that you can observe in political life, that there are real phenomenon that you can generalize about.

So then it would be more than just an art, and that's why people say, well, it's an art and a science, and that they're trying to capture both sides of that.

There are some methods to the madness that we see in politics.

There is, yeah.

So maybe we'll talk about politics a bit too, and we're certainly gonna talk about philosophy.

But, yeah, so obviously you teach political science here at the school, but the person we're going to talk about today is someone who contributed to that and whose mentor, Plato, contributed greatly to the discussion on politics about Aristotle. But before we get to Aristotle, tell us a little bit more about you. How did you get interested, even in this field?

That is a great question. I think for a long time, like many students, I really was not sure what I wanted to study after taking some classes here at LCC.

And I think after some, really, toward the end of my time at LCC, I kind of concluded that I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. But I figured that if I could study about how to become a good human being, that I should pretty much invest myself into that.

And so that was really why I wanted to study more, was figure out more to that question. And the more questions that I asked, the more interesting and interested I became.

So after doing, I did my undergrad and took a break, worked with you, LTC, financial aid. But I had the sense that I needed to learn more.

And I felt like politics was a good window into the human condition, and I myself am a human being, so I'm subject to the same kind of constraints. And so I wanted to learn fundamentally about myself, figure out who is it that I am. And so that was really. It was a very personal reason for study.

The other thing, too, just to introduce Aristotle, just a second.

In my own story, Aristotle says in book three of the Ethics, which we're gonna discuss a bit, he says that virtue and the good life is in some way up to us. It is up to us.

And I remember reading that as an undergrad and then reading it again in grad school, and I remember how liberating that was, the kind of the power of human choice to really even change ourselves.

And so that, too, when I said, well, if choices matter, then I need to figure out what kind of choices I would possibly make and what are the most fundamentally sound sort of human choices there are. So those are some of the motivations that were behind my study.

Yeah, it was both. Sounds like very personal. It's similar for people who go into counseling.

I mean, we obviously go into this field because we want to help others, but, boy, do we want to understand ourselves better, too.

Yes. And we're sort of like a mystery.

I mean, this is something I've only begun to appreciate about my own small children, is that there's sort of like this mystery that is slowly becoming apparent, and I need to respect that mystery. I can't just sort of say, okay, I know all of what you are. It's like, no, I actually don't know all of what you are.

And if only we treated ourselves with some of that same sort of compassion.

Ooh, now we're going down the rabbit hole in counseling. When we talk about what do we actually know about people, what do we know about depression?

Let's say, for example, and we could say we know a lot of different things about it. And if someone came to me at a party and said, hey, tell me about depression, or, why are people depressed?

I'd have to say, first and foremost, I'd have to know the person first, because there are some things we could say in general about depression, but, boy, is it unique to the individual.

It is. And I don't understand how you could possibly know what a depressed person is going through even if you have been depressed yourself. Right. So it's a.

Yeah, I mean, Winston Churchill called it the black dog.

That's right.

And so there's something deep. I mean, the psyche is a very deep. Well, yeah. And so, anyways, I have great respect for the psychological profession and the counseling profession.

I also have questions, maybe, that I'd like to ask.

Oh, yeah.

But I'll save those for a bit.

Well, no, feel free. But, yeah, I just. I hear the analog to you discovering yourself.

And then at the same time as being a parent, you want to discover your children because they are not just clones of you and your wife. And it doesn't sound like you want to turn them into clones of you.

And your wife, hopefully in crucial respects different than me, but, yeah, it's interesting because I've not done a ton of time thinking about the role of counseling, and I feel like there are times in my own life I could have used help.

There was a time when I was in grad school when we had what are called comprehensive or qualifying exams, in which they basically, the way it went was you had. They basically would ask you a set of questions, five questions. You got to pick two from the list, and then you would write essays about that.

So you had to essentially answer in essay form, write two, maybe three essays in two days, basically, is how it went. And I remember, and it's about the whole of discipline. They could ask about any thinker, about any concept.

There's maybe any genealogy that they would be interested in. They're really looking to test you. That's kind of how the american higher.

Education, they want to find the edge of your knowledge.

Yeah, that's right. And so I found that preparing for this, I was incredibly stuck.

I just remember sitting in my office, staring at the wall, like, where do I even begin? Just feeling totally paralyzed.

And I felt like, looking back at that, I thought, oh, that was my first experience with real anxiety, with sort of crippling sort of inactivity, where I felt like I didn't know the first thing to do.

And part of it was just because these exams are comprehensive, and so they demand a kind of depth and breadth of knowledge that I felt like maybe I didn't have, but I couldn't even get there. And so the exams came. They went. I passed. But I remember that experience.

And I think, man, what if I had had somebody by my side, a Jim Owens, who I didn't even know at the time was really a counselor? I had some suspicion that he would teach in classes on the side. But anyways, that is something that I would have benefited from.

Yeah, you're describing, like, being stuck and almost, in a sense, lost, because as you talk about comprehensive exams and anything's kind of up for grabs. You're in a territory and you're going to be asked to go in a particular direction, and you don't know which direction they're going to send you in.

So you're not exactly sure to prepare. Are they sending me toward the mountains? Should I prepare for snow? Are they sending me toward the jungle? Should I prepare for heat?

Yep. Yeah. It was not easy, but at the same time, really healthy though, too, because it showed me the limits. I always felt like I.

I felt like I could learn anything. And that was the r1 experience of my limits, too, which is very healthy for me.

Man, now you're describing what we call a growth mindset. I really wish more students would capture that idea of I can learn to fill in the blank because I really do.

See, and you and I are both educators, so we get this. You can learn anything if you apply yourself with enough effort. Now, can you learn calculus in 16 weeks? I don't know. Some people can.

Some people can't.

I am among those who can't.

Right? Me, too.

I tell some of my students, I think it took me three attempts to get through college algebra, but I will say there's a little historical piece here for you. I say, look, the Greeks were getting close to calculus, but they didn't make it in that math.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

That's what I love, though, about higher education, is that you do get introduced to the greatest mathematical, philosophical, literary minds. And it's just like this privilege to be able to be exposed to genius.

And not only do we have to, I mean, now we have these english translations, so we don't even have to read them in their own language, although there's a special merit in that. Maybe, but you don't have to know Greek or Latin or Hebrew or something to be exposed to the essential idea.

So there may be one sophisticated person in the room. There's also a country bumpkin in the room who happens to appreciate a little bit of Aristotle.

No, actually what I love about this is that I'm not an Aristotle expert. I have my knowledge of Greek very limited. So I would just come as sort of a contemporary appreciator of a great mind.

And these great minds are for everybody if we seek to learn and we have sort of that disposition. And that's kind of what I hope maybe someone takes away from this, is that you don't have to be a scholar locked in your ivory tower.

Like you can go to your publisher's library, you can open one of these books and profit from them.

Yeah, yeah. So we're going to jump into Aristotle in a second.

But for those who are really interested in psychology and counseling, the first lecture I got in graduate school on counseling theory, which walked us through the last 150 years of the scientific investigation of the psyche, which the psyche, that is, the mind, the intellect, has been wondered about and investigated about philosophically for thousands of years, but really scientifically with instrumentation and observation and scientific methodology that's been going on only for 150 years.

But as we jumped into that history in that first course I had, our professors were very sure to remind us that everything we're learning is on philosophical antecedents. Counseling in psychology stands on the shoulders of philosophical giants. Or I should say philosophers.

So what are the. I'm just out of my own curiosity.

What are some of the basic presuppositions here that you have to believe in order to make psychology and counseling to make it work? Yeah.

Well, there's something really interesting in here, which is you have to believe that there's something inside of a person. First of all, you'd have to believe in homeostasis as good that a person should be at balance inside. They should be at peace.

They should be able to do the thing. I can't remember who said it now. It might come to me later. Who could. They could sit alone quietly in a room for five minutes with their own thoughts.

Yeah. That sounds like there's a french philosopher.

Oh, yeah. I think it is Pascal.

Yeah, it's Blaze Palace Pascal. He says that's why prison is the worst punishment for all of us, because we basically.

All of our problems can be attributed to the inability to sit in the.

Room for five minutes. Yes. Yes.

So, yeah. Thank you, Pascal.

Yeah. Thank you, Pascal. Another great contributor in many disciplines, actually, but so that's one.

The idea that homeostasis is possible and that's good for us, and that there's such a thing as ordered and disordered, which is much a culturally changing idea. You know, what is disordered thinking? What is ordered thinking? What is disordered behavior? What is ordered behavior? What is a disordered identity?

What is an ordered identity? So the idea that there's order and disorder in the universe, in the cosmos, is also a supposition, right?

Like, for example, I could have, and I have worked with many people who are regularly psychotic.

They have what we would call probably a schizophrenia or something, where their view of the world is just so radically different from what our view of the world is.

You know, in their world, we could talk about, you know, aliens or various things like this that are, you know, mind control and all these, you know, the FBI are following them every day, that kind of stuff. What's wrong with thinking that way? You know, they are living in an illusion.

And here we sit in the field of psychology, where there's something wrong with believing those things. So we kind of stand in this position of judgment in some ways, even though we. We.

We recognize that you have to approach counseling, not judgmentally, so you have to approach that with, you know, concern and gentleness. But who are we to say that they shouldn't believe that?

You know, who are we to say that someone shouldn't believe that they are the messiah or a prophet or the most interesting person to the us government or whatever, you know, like, may not be the case, but if they believe it, so what? So some of those things, some of the basic things I'd point to.

Yeah, that's really excellent to hear.

Yeah. So he's, he was born in a place called Stigiris, which I'm not quite sure where that is located.

So you can, all of you can use Google and look that up. So he, so he, I mean, he founded his own school after having a lot of insight from his teacher, Plato, who was himself a student of Socrates.

So that sort of Socrates is sort of like his intellectual grandfather. And so he founded what was called the academy and that's where we get our term from. So Aristotle founded his own school for the study of philosophy.

But philosophy really was concerned with two different domains.

I mean, there was a study of the human things, which that was the contribution of, of Socrates, who the first philosopher was to say, we can do more than just study the sun and the heavens or study how grass grows or what is fire, but we can actually turn the rational capacity of a human being toward the human being itself and say we're not just put together in just any way, but in actually a rationally identifiable way. And so Aristotle is especially concerned. So he's an old fashioned philosopher. He loves study of everything.

He's got a treatise on zoology, he has treatise on language and theory, kind of theory of signs. He has certainly what we'll be talking about today, his kind of a theory of ethics.

How is it that was supposed to live a good life, a flourishing life, but he's interested in politics. So he just. The old fashioned philosophers are less narrow. They're just interested in everything and they're interested in the cosmos, in short.

And so that's part of what makes him so interesting.

Even though it's not like Aristotle's zoological theories about how animals pass themselves on, it's not accurate, but that doesn't mean that it's without interest.

I remember learning this a little bit about him, that he was probably the widest of those three, you know, Socrates, Plato. I think Plato is more as a political philosopher, personally.

Yes.

And then Aristotle, I think, of like science, he was just investigating as much as he could, trying to gather knowledge and data in so many different disciplines.

Yeah.

So we're very fortunate that the writings, I mean, Socrates never wrote anything, but we're very fortunate to have their writings to be able to study as well as those who were influenced by them. I mean, I really think of like someone like Al Farabi, who was a muslim philosopher who was in many ways engaged with Aristotle.

And so there is kind of a conversation that is happening in the ancient world that we get to be privy to, which is extraordinary.

So what is this? So the area we're going to talk about is his contribution and ethics, which might need some defining upfront.

I don't know if we should describe ethics because people will conflate that with morals.

So first, let's think about his term, like for virtue.

So we take a very moralistic look at virtue and we say, well, this is about righteousness or something, but Aristotle is actually a pretty unreligious guy. And so he's actually thinking more along the lines of human competence, like, are you good at doing what a human being does?

Are you good at being a human being? Almost.

Think of something along the lines of what you see in Harry Potter, which is where I know every witch or wizard is educated, what to become a witch or wizard. There's a kind of a human competence. Can you cast that charm or can't you? And so that is kind of what he is concerned with.

It's like human excellence. You might even think of virtue. So you might say the virtue of a knife, that it's sharp, right?

And so that the virtue of a human being, they can do certain things that human beings can do. But think of it, though, along these lines too, that virtue. You could also say there's a virtue in this tax avoidance scheme.

So the way he uses virtue is susceptible of both of those kind of sides. And he's just more saying, hey, how do you fulfill what you are as a human being? Think about the old army slogan, be all you can be.

So what is it that you could maximize?

Wow. That is a question on many college students minds, as you brought up earlier. What can I. What should I do with my life? What would be the best?

I don't think people are thinking as wide as what can I do to be the best human being? But maybe what should I, Michael Giles, do with my life? What is the best thing I could do with my life?

Yeah. So there's, I think there's both a personal side to it and a side to it that is common to all of us.

That is, we're all human beings and we're not cut from a different cloth.

So I do think that if we are to discover this is kind of what, in many ways, what Aracel is saying, that if we are to discover what we are personally to do, that we have to interact with what it is that human beings do. We have to sort of be aware of what the common threads that unite all of us.

And so he says that, look, every action, every art, every choice is directed to what people see as good. Yeah. That's what they do. They direct you to what they see as good.

And so then it's like, then it's really important then to figure out, well, what is, what's good. Is there a difference between good and bad? And could you.

It, is there such a difference that would allow you to blame yourself for a past bad choice or to praise yourself for a past good choice, or to think about future good and bad choices and to actually really choose? So, in short, what's at stake is our responsibility for our own lives.

Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting concept. I've heard this repeated by many philosophers that every choice we make is a choice for good or a perceived good.

Right.

And whether it's a donut, which, okay, maybe those aren't so good for us, or maxing out our credit card to get things that, you know, whatever, like every, everything. But we may perceive that it's good, but it might have unintended consequences.

It may have bad consequences, which then end up frustrating our ability to experience good and do good in the future. Right.

So there's some kind of, here, this is going to be a very philosophical conversation, but there's something about doing something that's virtuous, that has in it, I think it's sustainable or it's, I don't want to jump to Emmanuel Kant, but it would always be good to do that, in a sense.

Well, think about those. Circumstances change. So you could be in a whole different set of circumstances.

The right action might not be the same in every case, but that doesn't mean that the target that you aim at is radically different. You might have to say.

So, for instance, if you're shooting at a target, I mean, you might be given a bronze bow, you might be given a crossbow, you might have no bow at all. You just have an arrow. And you got to figure out some way to skill at the target.

That doesn't remove the responsibility of aiming at something and the need to do so, in fact. So everybody sort of needs that target to aim at. And so the question, well, what's your target?

Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. In fact, unfortunately, much of psychology in the history of psychopathology has been describing what we don't want to aim at.

As I brought up earlier, psychotic breaks don't aim for that. Right. You know, it's dangerous. Even drugs that put you into a psychotic few, that's dangerous.

Be careful, you know, but it hasn't done such a good job of saying what we should aim at. Psychology here I'm speaking of, it hasn't done a great job of describing what we should aim at.

In fact, that's only a new movement in psychology, which is now called positive psychology. Okay, interesting, because it's a description of not what's bad, which everybody's curious about.

You know, everybody wants to take abnormal psych and learn about all the. The mental illness.

Those classes fill up real quick.

They fill up quick. What is multiple personalities? You know, what is all this stuff?

But it's interesting because working with clients, we do want to identify, as a counselor, I want to identify what they've been aiming at and why they're frustrated and hurting as a result of trying to aim at that and get at that what they perceive to be a good. And here I'm thinking of, like, relationships that are not good for people. They're really starving for relationship, starving for it.

This could be a romantic relationship, friendship, mentorship. It could be any kind, almost any kind.

But then if it's not healthy, they're very reticent to let that thing go because they would have to aim for a better relationship in something else, which I think they get sometimes confused about what exactly to aim for next, not just in college, but in life.

It's very hard because how can you know what to aim at unless you've had some experience of it? So that's what I love about Aristotle. Just to bring it back to him for just one moment, is that he doesn't say, look, it's your happiness.

So I'll introduce that for the first time. And it's not as if happiness is entirely up to us. So virtue might be, and virtue is important in happiness.

It's hard to imagine being happy without sort of human competence, but there's a lot that we don't control, and we're not entirely in control. So the question is, well, what's in our control and what's not? And that's a very important distinction to make.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what would Aristotle. And we're gonna wrap part one up here in a minute, and then we're gonna jump into part two.

So those of you who are around, please, you know, go look for the second episode on this session with Doctor Giles. But I wanna get into his. Did he write about what we should aim at?

He does, and he thinks that you can identify. It's interesting, though, because it's called the Nicki McKeon ethics. And it's not so much an external standard.

It's more like the image of the perfectly flourishing human being, which I think he admits that you can't really find someone who is happy in every respect. But let's kind of take a very comprehensive view of what happiness would be. And maybe so I'll maybe end this with a brief explainer.

Sure.

So for him, happiness is not sort of just a certain mental state of fleeting pleasure or something. It is really like the goal. It is a goal to be a certain kind of way of being, being at work, that is complete and self sufficient.

That is really the most important criterion of happiness, is that once you have happiness, you want nothing more. So it's self sufficient. Once you're there, there's no more really to be said or to be done or to be pursued. In a sense, it's the end of human action.

And he said, that's the reason why happiness might be the highest good. The kind of the good that every other good is trying to aim at. Every other action is trying to aim at. We're trying to be, in short, happy now.

So it's gonna be self sufficient. Once we have that, we don't want anything further beyond it. So, for instance, try money.

Okay, well, everyone wants money, so everyone wants the almighty dollar. But people don't really want the dollars. They want what they can do with the dollars. So according to Aristotle's view, money is not happiness.

And the reason money is not happiness is that money, the possession of money, is not self sufficient. You're going to want to figure out what to do with the money once you get it. But happiness is not like that.

Once you get happiness, no one says, I am going to use happiness so I can get a lot of money, okay? No, no, no. We get money in the hopes of being happy with it. So he says it's sort of the end.

It is self sufficient and no other thing beyond it is needed. And so then it's also comprehensive because it's going to cover every kind of possible flourishing.

And let me just sort of mention, he says, like, look, we're complicated. There's different parts of us. We've got things outside of us that we need to make. He calls them external goods. I mean, things like a house, clothing.

We need food to make you're not happy, not going to be happy without those. And so that's sort of a lowest base criterion. But there's also things that are external to us which are not material.

So maybe honor, like a good reputation. A person with a good reputation is happier than a person with a bad one.

And even if they're the same people, you know, the same person and do the same things, what about friendship? I mean, that would be really key to happiness, is a life without friends. Is unhappy in a crucial respect. So those are external things.

Those are things outside of us. But then there's us. And what about our bodies? He says our body is actually very important for our happiness.

And in particular, our beauty, our health and our strength. So, like, the same person would rather be healthy than sick. They would rather see themselves as beautiful than ugly.

They would rather be strong than weak. And so our bodies really are important in how we see our bodies. But there's something more beyond that, and that's the soul. Like, what is it?

And by soul, again, it's not anything particular. It's just psyche. What is it that is the non material part of us. And that may be too complicated to break down right now.

But just to say that the virtues are one of those goods of the soul that we need, that are constitutive part of us. And so a happy person, then. In short, he says that the virtuous person is healthy and strong and beautiful in their soul.

So just as there are certain virtues of the body, there are virtues of the soul. So, for instance, a happy person looks at themselves and is happy with themselves. They look and say, I approve of myself. I admire myself.

I like myself. So Aristotle pays really keen attention to that need for us. In fact, he regards it as important that we need, in a sense, to admire ourselves.

And that points toward this need for the good of the soul. That you can't just have lots of money and maybe a fine body, but, you know, you're unhappy in your soul. That's about to be for trouble.

Wow. That's fascinating. All right. Stick with us, and we're going to jump into flourishing and happiness in part two. Thanks.