In the Ethics, Aristotle defines what he calls the ‘mean’ that I interpret as belonging to a class of good not of excess or of deficiency. It is for us to choose the mean because it is for good and all human beings take happiness in the good for themselves and for others naturally.

When we have ten thousand in a city this is one thing, but what about ten million, with communication technologies always developing to provide extreme pleasures? It is natural in such a situation that the mean would shift to accommodate the total heightened pleasure.

When Kierkegaard wrote ‘these days people dont even commit suicide, they just choke on the idea’ he seemed to be in part criticizing that the same romantic mean could be applied to modern time. And he defined this sort of ‘leveling’ of the human condition that turns the good into a sort of necessary mechanism, stealing away its natural derivation.

The question is how do you think these pieces fit together, was it natural in Aristotle’s time to select the mean, but self sufficiency and pleasure now? Or is it always the same mean and we have just strayed from the path? Or has nothing changed at all? If this was what it was like at the turn of the 18th century, imagine how far from the mean we would be today. The selection of non-mean qualities might be more necessary now to be good. An example is millionaires who donate to charity, social media and online sex video companies that cure people’s loneliness and so forth.

Also you don’t have to have read the two authors to post here.