The Pearl of Great Price: Michael Pakaluk on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
From an interview recorded on March 2, 2026
Dr. Michael Pakaluk is Professor of Ethics and Social Philosophy at the Catholic University of America and a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. His Oxford commentary on Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics and his Cambridge introduction to Aristotle’s ethics are standard references in the field. His work spans Aristotelian virtue ethics, the philosophy of friendship, Newman’s epistemology, and the application of classical ethics to business and accounting. His most recent book, The Company We Keep: True Friendship and Why It Matters, brings a lifetime of inquiry into friendship to a general audience.
We spoke on the occasion of the inaugural release from Logos Publishing — a new edition of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics — and walked through the major ideas of the text. What follows is a written summary of our conversation.
What drew you to the Nicomachean Ethics, and has your understanding of it changed?
Pakaluk came to the text through a desire for wisdom — not knowledge in the academic sense, but wisdom as something a text could transmit. His professors at Harvard presented the Ethics as one of the great vehicles for that transmission, and he took them at their word.
What has changed is how close he now places Aristotle to Plato’s vision. In Pakaluk’s current reading, Aristotle shares Plato’s sense that philosophy represents a pathway toward the divine — that the handful of people in Athens who had discovered this mode of thought were genuinely onto something that pointed beyond ordinary human life. The Ethics is not, on this view, a manual for living decently. It is a map toward transformation.
What is eudaimonia, really?
Pakaluk is emphatic that “flourishing” is the wrong translation. Flourishing is species-relative — dogs flourish, trees flourish — but eudaimonia is about conforming to a divine standard of life, which may not look like flourishing to the outside world at all. Socrates was viewed with contempt. He wasn’t well-dressed, wasn’t successful in politics or business.
The word itself combines daimon (a divine being) and eu (well off), but Pakaluk argues we should interpret it through what Aristotle says at the end of the Ethics rather than through etymology alone. And what Aristotle says in Book X is that eudaimonia is a sharing in the life of God — making yourself immortal as much as possible, even though you’re going to die. The proper term, which Plato used, is theosis: divinization.
This resonated for me with Diotima’s description of philosophia in the Symposium as metaxu — the space between ignorance and wisdom, animated by eros. Pakaluk agreed that the trajectory of the Ethics involves movement and transformation, though he was precise in noting that the movement is in the argument’s unfolding, not necessarily in the word itself.
What is the doctrine of the mean actually saying?
The doctrine of the mean is probably the most widely cited and most widely misunderstood idea in the Ethics. Pakaluk argues it has two distinct meanings.
The first is elementary: once you set a standard — say, 400 calories for breakfast — you can either overshoot or undershoot, and most people tend to overshoot. The standard is not necessarily the midpoint of anything; it is whatever reason determines is appropriate for your situation.
The second meaning is what emerges after months of disciplining yourself to that standard. The appetite gradually becomes responsive, flexible, easily governed by reason. You develop a kind of placidity that allows you to adjust naturally without internal struggle. Pakaluk compared it to a well-harnessed dog: one of his dogs strains at the leash, the other walks easily and follows his lead. The second dog is the image of a formed appetite.
This second meaning is the one that matters for the tradition of faculty development. The mean is not about finding the safe middle. It is about what happens to the soul after sustained practice — the appetite being formed until it becomes an instrument of reason rather than its adversary.
How does phronēsis — practical wisdom — actually work?
Pakaluk describes phronēsis as the intellectual virtue governing all of practice — and he means all. He views it as a “blank check”: anything you would want to say praising someone’s practical intelligence can be grouped under phronēsis. Aristotle’s own treatment is relatively sketchy, focused mainly on political leadership and governance, but Pakaluk argues we should not let that limit our understanding.
Two capacities he considers essential to phronēsis that Aristotle does not fully develop: understanding what the most fundamental goods in life actually are, and making appropriate trade-offs between competing goods. This second capacity — a kind of economic sense, making good bargains — is more explicit in Plato’s Phaedo than in the Ethics.
And then Pakaluk offered the image that reframed the entire conversation. Think of the parable of the pearl of great price, he said. A merchant finds the one pearl worth having and sells everything else to get it. That, Pakaluk suggested, is the structure of Book X of the Ethics: we have discovered philosophical contemplation, and it is worth throwing everything else away for. “And that would be phronēsis, because that’s making a good trade.”
I asked whether there was a convergence between phronēsis and Newman’s illative sense. Pakaluk, who visited the Birmingham Oratory and examined Newman’s personal interleaved copy of the Nicomachean Ethics — blank pages bound between the Greek text, filled with copious notes — said the direct evidence of influence is thinner than people assume. Newman taught mainly through Book III of the Ethics. But Pakaluk’s characterization of phronēsis as governing the entirety of intelligent practice suggests that the convergence is structural even if the historical line of influence is indirect: both Newman and Aristotle are trying to account for a trained faculty of judgment that operates below the threshold of formal demonstration.
What is magnanimity, and is it compatible with humility?
Magnanimity — megalopsychia, greatness of soul — is the virtue that can make modern readers most uncomfortable, because it looks like pride. Pakaluk reframed it as the virtue that directs competitive energy toward the worthiest objects. If human beings are naturally drawn to competition and honor, magnanimity is the disposition that asks: what are the good competitions? What is actually worth striving for?
Crucially, magnanimity is not about the honors themselves. Aristotle warns against identifying greatness with wealth or social standing — those are false identifications. Magnanimity is more like a conception of the sort of life that is worthy of being honored, whether or not it is recognized. An artisan who produces beautiful work that no one sees possesses greatness of character.
I mentioned St. Ignatius of Loyola, reading The Lives of the Saints in his sickbed and channeling his competitive nature into the desire to match or surpass the saints. Pakaluk picked up the thread and moved directly to Aquinas’s synthesis: magnanimity is compatible with humility because it involves a fair assessment of yourself combined with the desire to attain the right sorts of honor. Among the great saints, this took the paradoxical form of excelling in the acknowledgment of their own sinfulness. And greatness can take the form of imitating a God who shows condescension — Jesus washed feet, and you become great by following in his footsteps.
Nietzsche, Pakaluk noted, thought this transformation of values was false and contrived. But Max Scheler, in his book on Ressentiment, makes the case that the Christian transformation of pagan ideals was genuine and successful — not a sublimation of weakness but a real reorientation of the soul’s competitive energy toward higher objects.
Why does Aristotle give friendship more space than any other topic?
Pakaluk has spent a career on this question, and his answer has evolved. He no longer thinks philia should be translated as “friendship” at all. The English word applies only to close personal relationships; we have no word for the broader phenomenon Aristotle is describing.
What philia really means, for Pakaluk, is bond — the way in which two are called one. It is Aristotle’s contribution to the ancient problem of the one and the many, applied to human social life. Families, clans, associations, civil society — all of these are philiai, concretized unities that arise from affection or love. Aristotle is, in Pakaluk’s estimation, the first great thinker of civil society.
The Romance languages preserve this connection: amizade derives transparently from amor. In English, “love” and “friendship” have different etymological origins, so we miss the relationship.
Aristotle recognizes three species of philia, corresponding to three kinds of good: the good itself, pleasure, and utility. What distinguishes the highest form is where the love is intentionally pointing. If I admire your lucidity of thought, that quality is in you — it is yours. But if I enjoy playing tennis with you, what I love is happening on the court, not in your soul. Both forms bind people together, but not with the same stability.
For Kant, the distinction is loving someone as an end versus as a means. For Aristotle, it is love that succeeds in hitting the target — the other person — versus love that is deflected to something adjacent.
How should we understand Aristotle’s concept of self-love?
Pakaluk made a provocative observation: Ayn Rand is very close to Aristotle if you remove any conception of the common good, and if you remove God. Aristotle holds that you should love more those who are closer to you, and no one is closer than yourself. Self-love is the standard by which you measure love for others — approaching it, approximating it, never quite reaching it. This is structurally similar to the Christian injunction to love your neighbor as yourself, where “yourself” functions as the measure.
Where Rand and Aristotle diverge is on subordination. Aristotle recognizes that individuals live in communities where their good is sometimes rightly subjected to a common good — including, in the extreme case, dying in battle for one’s country. And behind the common good stands a divine order. Rand accepts neither, and so the self-love that Aristotle tempers through community and theology becomes, in her hands, absolute.
How does Aristotle explain akrasia — knowing what’s right and failing to do it?
Socrates said akrasia was impossible: if you truly knew the good, you would do it. Aristotle’s response depends on his distinctive view of the soul as a kind of community — not a single intellectual unity, as Socrates assumed, but a multiplicity of elements that must be governed. The soul has parts you can persuade but cannot command. They fight back.
Akrasia is what happens when reason abdicates its governing role — when it lets the other parts have their say. Pakaluk compared it to sleep, drunkenness, or some bodily disturbance that loosens reason’s grip. It involves negligence: an explicit or implicit relinquishing of the ruling principle.
I noted that this picture of the soul recalls Plato’s charioteer with two horses — one noble, one unruly. Pakaluk confirmed that Aristotle embraces the tripartite model. At the end of Book III, after discussing courage and moderation, Aristotle identifies these as the virtues of the non-rational part of the soul. The division is the same as Plato’s.
Is Aristotle saying philosophy is more important than everything else?
Pakaluk was direct: Aristotle is not an egalitarian. He sees human nature as stratified, with different prospects and possibilities for different people. There is one kind of life for very intelligent persons of leisure — the philosophical life — and a second-best life of political engagement for those suited to it. Below that, Aristotle is not particularly concerned.
This is uncomfortable for modern readers, and Pakaluk acknowledged it plainly. We take what is good from Aristotle and leave the rest. But we should not read our egalitarian assumptions back into the text. Aristotle did not share them.
What would you say to someone reading the Ethics for the first time?
Be prepared not to understand anything. Be prepared to find it so taxing that you are fatigued, the way you are exhausted after trying to speak a foreign language for an extended period.
Pakaluk’s mentors told him you need to read a philosophy text three times: once for the lay of the land, once to understand it, once to begin formulating intelligent questions and criticisms. Aristotle, he believes, requires ten readings. The text is written with extreme compression. There is intelligence in every word choice. In the Ethics, you will find proto-Wittgenstein, proto-ordinary language philosophy, proto-transcendental deductions — every argument form that has been interesting in the history of philosophy, thrown out without fanfare.
The intellectual training you receive from simply figuring out what the text says is itself transformative. And what it is talking about — the good life, the virtues, the nature of the soul, the relationship between reason and appetite — matters as much now as it did in Athens.
His final advice for anyone setting out on the philosophical path: “Follow truth. Embrace it. Act on it when you find it. And don’t be afraid.”
A note on a discovery made during the conversation: Pakaluk introduced me to the work of John Senior, the University of Kansas educator who became convinced that students needed a pre-education before approaching the Great Books — one involving work with the land, with animals, and with mousikē (music, poetry, communal singing). Senior’s insight that the soul must be prepared before it can receive wisdom is precisely the thesis of the faculty-development tradition I’ve been tracing from Aristotle through Sohrawardi.
The Nicomachean Ethics is the inaugural edition from Logos Publishing. Plato’s Symposium follows in March.