MESOTES · THE MEAN
On a doctrine that says the right amount is different for every person and has to be found — and on the objection that it therefore tells you nothing.
Milo of Croton was the most famous athlete in the Greek world. Six times an Olympic victor, the subject of stories that were already tall by the time anybody wrote them down — that he carried a bull around the stadium, that he ate it afterwards. When Aristotle wants an example of a person whose requirements are nothing like yours, he does not have to explain who Milo is.
And the example he builds is, on its face, a joke about food. If ten pounds is too much for someone and two is too little, he says, the trainer does not therefore prescribe six.
It takes a second to see why that is not obvious. Six is the midpoint. Six is defensible, it is between the two errors, and it is what a sensible person would land on if they were reasoning about the range rather than about the man.
But for Milo, ten might be right. For someone beginning, six would be too much. The midpoint of the range is a fact about the range. It is not a fact about anybody standing in front of you, and prescribing it feels like moderation while being, for almost everyone in the room, simply wrong.
This is the doctrine of the mean, and the thing it is most often quoted in support of is the exact position it was written against.
Relative to us is the phrase every popular version drops, and it is the whole doctrine. The right amount is specific to a person and a situation and has to be found, which makes this a claim about calibration rather than about moderation.
Two misreadings follow from dropping it. The first is moderation — everything in moderation, nothing to excess. Aristotle did not think courage was moderate fear, and he says plainly that some acts admit no mean at all: some things are simply wrong, and no amount of them is right.
The second is arithmetic, which is the Milo case. Splitting the difference between two extremes produces a number with a respectable look and no relationship to the person it is for.
What the doctrine leaves you with, then, is not a target. It is the knowledge that a standard instruction will miss important individual differences, in both directions, invisibly.
The nearest empirical version is the idea of an individual optimum. Yuri Hanin’s work found that the level of pre-performance anxiety associated with a person’s best performances varies widely between individuals, and that some people do best at levels that would ordinarily be described as high.4
It is worth being exact about what that supports. It is evidence that a single prescribed level of activation will be wrong for a substantial portion of any group. It is not evidence that Aristotle was right about virtue, or about anything outside the narrow band the studies measured. The model is largely descriptive, the zones are identified retrospectively from a person’s own history, and the evidence base is thinner than the model’s popularity suggests.
So the convergence here is one useful negative claim arrived at twice, and nothing more than that. There is no single correct level. That is all either party has shown.
The doctrine is frequently accused of being empty, and the accusation is not silly.
The case against
The doctrine gives no method for finding the mean. It says there is one, that it differs by person, and that the person of practical wisdom perceives it — which relocates the problem rather than solving it, and is why essay six exists.
It also does not tell you which actions have a mean at all. Aristotle says some do not, and gives examples, but no criterion for sorting them, which leaves the hardest cases exactly where they were.
What the doctrine is actually good for is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. Knowing that a standard instruction will miss important individual differences, and knowing which direction you systematically err in, is real information. Aristotle supplies both, and nothing more.
Most people, Aristotle says, are systematically off in one direction, and knowing which is worth more than knowing the right answer.
His image for the correction is straightening warped wood. You do not aim at the middle; you pull hard toward the opposite error, and you land somewhere near right. That is a technique, which is more than the rest of the doctrine offers.
So: pick one variable you suspect you get wrong. How much you prepare, how long you rest, how much you say in a meeting. Rate it and rate the outcome for a few weeks and look for the direction of the error rather than its size. The direction repeats; the size does not.
And stop reading a standard prescription as a finding about you. It is a finding about a population, and you are one draw from it.
The constraint matters: one variable. Several at once produces a cloud rather than a pattern.
Ten pounds is too much and two is too little, and the trainer does not prescribe six. That is the doctrine, and the part everybody quotes is the part he is arguing against.
It does not tell you what the right amount is, and the objection that it therefore says nothing has force. What it does tell you is that there is no shared right amount, and that you are probably wrong in a consistent direction.
Both of those are usable. Neither of them is moderation.
The mean is “relative to us” — the right amount differs by person and has to be found. The midpoint of a range is a fact about the range, not about you.
The doctrine gives no method, which is the standard objection and it holds. What it gives is diagnostic: a group prescription will miss important individual differences, and you are probably wrong in a consistent direction.
Quotations are from the Nicomachean Ethics unless noted, cited by book, chapter and Bekker number; renderings follow W. D. Ross (rev. Urmson), Terence Irwin or Roger Crisp, and a condensed line is marked “after Aristotle”. Modern research is cited by author and publication.