Overall
Going by the title, I expected a book about how to write and speak well, but most of it turned out to be about human nature — and I enjoyed it for that. The argument seems to be that speaking well, that is, persuading well, requires understanding human nature and the principles behind human action.
It clarifies how emotions work and what it means to hold a particular emotion. It seems like a good book to pull out whenever I lose myself in some feeling. Not in the sense that human emotions are trivial, but as Aristotle’s view of what having such emotions means for a human being.
Notes
Emotion and character
Beyond proving your case, making others believe you requires prudence, virtue, and goodwill.
Anger
Every anger is attended by a certain pleasure, because of the expectation of revenge to come.
Anger is accompanied by pleasure, and that is why people become fixated on the single thought of getting their revenge.
Shame
Shame is the pain or anxiety that arises with regard to the dishonour that seems likely to fall on oneself — present, past, or future — because of some bad thing one is implicated in, …
Praising a person to their face; praising someone’s good points excessively while staying silent about the bad ones; grieving excessively over someone’s sorrow in their presence; and similar acts are marks of flattery, and therefore bring shame.
I found it interesting that flattery is a cause of shame. More than that, it is interesting that praising a person to their face or empathising excessively with their feelings is itself a mark of flattery, and so brings shame.
We care about what is thought of us by those we consider great, those who consider themselves great, those whose good opinion of us we want, those we wish to resemble, and those whose judgement we respect rather than dismiss — and it is before such people that we feel shame.
A beautiful sentence. I do not think I have ever read a list this long with this much interest.
Righteous indignation
It is fitting that a person should suffer alongside and feel pity for one who undeservedly meets misfortune, and feel righteous indignation at one who undeservedly prospers, because such undeservedness is injustice. For this reason we take righteous indignation to be an emotion of the gods.
I wonder whether indignation without envy is an emotion a human being can actually hold. There seems to be a reason it is thought of as an emotion of the gods.
Youth
The young think they know everything, and they are full of confidence. It is also why they do everything to excess.
A passage that sharpens your wariness of the illusion of knowing.
Old age
The old have opinions, but because they do not truly know, … they say nothing with certainty.
Maxims
Maxims are a great help to a speech. One reason is that the audience has a certain snobbery about it: people like it when someone generalises a fragmentary thought they arrived at through some particular experience of their own.
Enthymeme
The learned speak of general things everyone already knows, whereas the unlearned start from what they know for certain and what they feel in their own lives.
It seems that the more you learn, the harder it becomes to put your own colour into your thinking — because learning is less about creating your own colour than about establishing general principles. In that sense, holding on to your own originality through the process of learning is not easy. It makes me wonder whether that is why geniuses who built outstanding companies, like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of university.