Happiness Is an Activity: Nicomachean Ethics, Book I

Thoughts

Highlights

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Aristotle’s Methodology 🔗

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Aristotle is a dialectical thinker. He begins with an idea, he challenges it and complicates it, and then he reaches a conclusion. 🔗

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Every inquiry has an appropriate standard 🔗

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Ethical inquiry requires experience, so the young struggle to do it well 🔗

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We must begin with what we know 🔗

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We start with endoxa and then proceed dialectically to a result. 🔗

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Finding the Good 🔗

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Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and every choice, is held to aim at some good. Hence people have nobly declared that the good is that at which all things aim.
See what Aristotle is doing here: he is marking a leap in the inference with that phrase ‘Hence people have nobly declared.’ But he won’t stop there. He will go on to argue for a few claims:

1. That all actions aim at some good

2. That all actions aim ultimately at the good, which is a singular thing

3. That the good is happiness (eudaimonia)

4. That happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue 🔗

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All actions aim at some good 🔗

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Aristotle speaks here of teleology. When we say that an action (or art, inquiry, etc.) aims at some good, we are speaking of its goal or its end. 🔗

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All actions aim at the good 🔗

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There needs to be some single good which sits atop the hierarchy, or else when we aim at some good we would never actually reach it — there would always be a further good to be preferred that we had not yet reached. 🔗

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The good is happiness 🔗

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We know happiness is valued above all else because we choose other things in order to be happy, and we do not choose happiness in order to achieve other ends — we just value happiness. 🔗

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Happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue 🔗

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We moderns treat happiness a lot like pleasure, and this is not what Aristotle means. Happiness is instead a kind of life — you are flourishing and living well. We call this eudaimonia. 🔗

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The final definition we get from Aristotle is that happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue. This is important: it is not just virtue, but rather the activity of acting virtuously by one’s own will. To do that is to live well, to flourish, to be happy. And that is the end of human life. 🔗

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what are human beings uniquely capable of? Find that, and describe a human doing it well, and we will be close to a description of virtue, and thus on our way to theory of happiness, and thus on our way to a theory of the best human life. 🔗

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Political and Contemplative Lives 🔗

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Two kinds of lives are mentioned favorably: the life of politics and the life of contemplation. Politics is an art which must coordinate all other arts, and so it is perhaps the highest art. But is it better to be a political beast or to live a life of contemplation? 🔗