And today in those few Universities that bother to teach classical ethics anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato, endlessly play around with the question that in ancient Greece never needed to be asked: “What is the Good? And how do we define it? Since different people have defined it differently, how can we know there is any good? Some say the good is found in happiness, but how do we know what happiness is? And how can happiness be defined? Happiness and good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically. And since they aren't objective, they just exist in your mind. So if you want to be happy just change your mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha.”

Aristotleian ethics, Aristotleian definitions, Aristotleian logic, Aristotleian forms, Aristotleian substances, Aristotleian rhetoric, Aristotleian laughter...ha-ha, ha-ha.

And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states—buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig.