Aristotle and the Limits of Self-Care
Happy selfcareday readers! I just slathered on some Snail Repair Cream – made with real snail goo! – because I deserve it. How are you caring for yourself today?
Lauren Slater
6. Nov. 2021
Aristotle
Greek philosopher, 384-322 BC
If you have used the internet during the last couple of years, you’re probably familiar with the term ‘self-care’. It can be hard to pin down exactly what it means, but I think it has something to do with Himalayan sea salt, breathing apps, green blended drinks, spending money on things you do not need, downward facing dogs, overnight oats, withdrawing from the world entirely, and, apparently, snail excretion filtrate… is my cynicism showing? In seriousness, ‘self-care’ covers all those things that we can do by ourselves and for ourselves that make us feel a little bit good. Nothing wrong with that, chaps.
There does seem to be a pressing need for self-care in the modern world. We live in times of internet meanies, political turbulence, and climate crisis, so occasionally retreating into comforting moments with ourselves hardly seems like a bad idea. Indeed, one of the stated purposes of self-care is to equip us with enough mental energy to act effectually in the wider world. That, and because you gotta love yourself for the QUEEN you are.
The question I would like to ask (and perhaps briefly answer) is: can we effectively care for ourselves? And, if so, what kind of care can we provide? Is it the kind of care that we really need?
In order to try to answer these questions, I’d like to call on ancient Greek heavyweight Aristotle. Aristotle wrote a lot about human beings and their happiness. Importantly for our purposes, he thought that human beings are biologically social animals who ultimately cannot be their best selves by themselves. Here’s a quote from the Politics:
“The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self- sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A drive to join together into a community is natural in everyone.”
Here, Aristotle is saying that the individual is not self-sufficing and is like a part in relation to a whole – where the whole is the state, or the community. He also compares those who are self-sufficing and do not live within a community as beasts or gods – i.e. not really human. What should we make of this?
Maybe this seems a little extreme. After all, we’re not talking about withdrawing entirely from society, we’re talking about taking a bubble bath with the bathroom door locked at the end of a very very long day. Just not the same, is it Aristotle.
However, I do think there is something in Aristotle’s philosophy that’s worth reflecting on. His claim is that we cannot effectively create happiness alone. While there are ways in which we can care for ourselves, these are not the ways in which we really need to be cared for in order to truly flourish. Of course, we might enjoy brief moments of solitude, but these do not a happy life make. In the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics where Aristotle discusses how human beings best live, he outlines the idea that happiness is collectively created when members of society support each other and perform reciprocal good deeds. He thinks that we all have a responsibility to look after each other. For example: when a child is born, that child is, in a real sense, to be bought up by the entire community – the responsibility for that new life does not lie solely with the parents. It takes a village! Each member of the community has a role to play in the support and moral education of that new person (no doubt, this is a comforting thought for newbie parents).
Perhaps this collective support notion seems a little idealistic (even Aristotle himself had concerns about how this would work in larger societies), but I do think that he can speak to some of our concerns about self-care. One concern is that self-care activities are starting to be seen as replacements for more meaningful fixes to social problems. We have seen a lot of this during the pandemic… see: employers supplying subscriptions to meditation apps to their over-worked and highly stressed employees. As far as I can tell, this kind of thing didn’t go down very well. Perhaps this is because employers were thereby suggesting that their employees could make themselves feel better, instead of taking some responsibility for their well-being and actually reducing the workload.
Of course, we can all do things for ourselves and by ourselves that are comforting – and I really don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything wrong with that. But I’d like to propose, along with Aristotle, that this isn’t the kind of care that we really, deeply need as human beings. So, above all, we should try our best to care for each other. It’s so much better than putting snail goo on your face, promise.
Lauren Slater is a PhD student at University of London (Birkbeck), writing on 17th-Century theories of mind and language
