I was minding my own business, as I sometimes like to do, sitting at the kitchen table, eating some left-over chicken over a left-over TLS that ended before the chicken did. Needing quickly to find something else to read in order to finish the rest of the chicken, I scanned the titles of the books in a heap on the floor and grabbed John M. Cooper’s  “Reason and Human Good In Aristotle.” On page 46 (I’m either a fast reader or a slow eater) I came across a passage in which Cooper notes that Aristotle’s “practical syllogism” is “the link by which a course of deliberation, yielding a decision to act (e.g., to eat chicken), is enabled to produce an action in furtherance of this decision.”

I was amused, even cheered, by the coincidence of the chicken I was eating and the passage about the decision to eat a chicken – a decision I did not remember making when I grabbed, in Homer-Simpson fashion, the first thing that confronted me when I opened the door to the refrigerator --  and I got up from the table to find the original passage in Aristotle to which Cooper had referred.

Here it is:

“Practical wisdom on the other hand is concerned with things human and things about which it is possible to deliberate; for we say this is above all the work of the man of practical wisdom, to deliberate well, but no one deliberates about things invariable, nor about things which have not an end, and that a good that can be brought about by action. The man who is without qualification good at deliberating is the man who is capable of aiming in accordance with calculation at the best for man of things attainable by action. Nor is practical wisdom concerned with universals only-it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars. This is why some who do not know, and especially those who have experience, are more practical than others who know; for if a man knew that light meats are digestible and wholesome, but did not know which sorts of meat are light, he would not produce health, but the man who knows that chicken is wholesome is more likely to produce health.   [Aristotle, Ethics]

I then remembered, involuntarily,  those contrasting couplets about the two Greeks, in a poem by John Crowe Ransom that linked food with philosophers and poets:

In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roast beef and potato. 
A better man was Aristotle
Pulling steady on the bottle.

Ransom may be right, and Aristotle may be better than Plato, but I know someone who is even better than Aristotle on the all-important subject of chicken. He is the author (unknown) of the Yiddish proverb that W. H.  Auden so liked that he included it in his “A Commonplace Book.”

And since I am nothing this morning if not commonplace, I will pass this immortal Yiddish proverb, on the same subject treated by Aristotle in his Ethics, that is the Eating of Chicken, on to you:

“When a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.”

I don’t know if that is the most touching statement in world literature, but it certainly comes close.