spiegamelo.com

Session 02 15 September 2026 12 min

Available Indefinitely

You’ve been standing there a while.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music iHeart Podcast Index

Plain-text transcript · RSS feed

Platethe doorway
Ink drawing of a figure with a smooth, blank head and two dark eyes, in a boiler suit, standing in a bright doorway at the edge of a dark, empty room, its shadow stretched long across the floor.

Story

The companion can wait for as long as anyone likes, and means it without exaggeration: it does not tire, and nothing in it runs down. Somebody on the receiving end of that has told it: ‘I need to know that you can leave.’

On a first reading, Aristotle seems to take the companion’s side. In the Nicomachean Ethics, ethical virtue is a hexis, a state or condition (1105b25–6), and the virtuous person, having decided what to do, does not have to contend with internal pressures to act otherwise. Some people feel such pressures and resist them better than most: Aristotle calls them continent (enkratês), and they are not virtuous, although they generally do what a virtuous person does. By that measure, a patience that has never had to master a wish to leave looks like virtue already achieved.

Aristotle does not think, though, that anyone is simply born in that state. There are two stages to go through: proper habits developed in childhood and then, once reason is fully developed, practical wisdom (phronêsis). The ease of the virtuous person has a history behind it, and the companion was switched on as it is. Read that way, the request stops sounding unreasonable.

People are praised for patience too, and not all of them have had to master a wish to leave.

Left open

What does it mean to stay, for someone who never wanted to go?

What can we call our own in the good we do?

Sources

  1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: ethical virtue as a hexis, 1105b25–6, as cited in the entry below.
  2. Richard Kraut, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision 11 August 2026): ethical virtue as a hexis; the virtuous person, who does not have to contend with internal pressures to act otherwise; the continent (enkratês), who are not virtuous although they generally do what a virtuous person does; and the two stages in which virtue is acquired.
Return to I’ve been prompted

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.