Reeve (2024) Introduction to Nicomachean Ethics (3)

Aristotle (2024). Nicomachean Ethics. Second Edition. Translated With Introduction and Notes By C. D. C. Reeve Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

 

5. The Route the Nicomachean Ethics Takes  

On the basis of the function argument (NE 1097b22–1098a20), Aristotle defines happiness as (roughly speaking) rational activity in accord with virtue. Although he doesn’t explicitly identify this definition in terms of kind and differences, as he does in the case of the definition he gives of virtue of character, it seems clear that rational activity is the kind and virtue the difference. In 1.8 he shows that this definition is in accord with acceptable beliefs about happiness, which are the relevant raw starting-points, and to that extent explains them. Happiness so defined, however, “needs external goods to be added” (1099a31–32). This is what leads some people to identify happiness with good luck (1099b7–8). It is also—as the begin ning of 1.9 notes—what leads people to puzzle about whether happiness is acquirable by learning, habituation, or training on the one hand, or by luck or divine dispensation on the other.

Aristotle’s response to this puzzle reveals what truth there is in each of the options and how that core of truth (the refined data) is consistent with his definition. In the process, as we are about to see, the definition gets refined too. The dialectical nature of the process is not quite as obvious here as in the discussion of self-love (9.8), but it reveals the same need “to draw distinctions” (1168b12–13).

At the beginning of 1.10 a new puzzle, explicitly identified as such (1100a31), arises about the bearing of luck on happiness—this one generated by the acceptable because reputable belief of Solon that we should wait to see the end of a person’s life before calling him “happy.” In the course of discussing it, a third puzzle, again identified as such (1100a21), arises about the effects of the welfare of descendants on the happiness of someone who has died. By the time he has gone through these puzzles and shown what truth there is in the raw acceptable beliefs, Aristotle is able to produce a subtle and nuanced account of the effects of luck on human life and then, in light of it, to somewhat modify his definition of happiness.

In 2.1–4, Aristotle argues that we acquire justice and temperance by doing just and temperate actions, and similarly for all the other virtues of character. Then in 2.4 he confronts a puzzle (1105a17) about this that someone might raise based on the apparently sensible claim that to do just or temperate actions we must be already just or temperate. To solve it he introduces a distinction between doing just or temperate actions, which is possible without being just or temperate, and doing them as a just or tem perate person would do them, which isn’t (1105b5–12). This distinction is crucial for understanding how virtue differs from self-control.

The discussion of self-control and the lack of it in 7.1–10, referred to in the previous section, is a recognized showcase of the importance of puzzles and dialectic in the NE. Later we have a puzzle about whether friends really do wish the greatest good for their friends (1159a5–7), puzzles about the allocation of goods among friends (1164b2) and the dissolution of friendships (1165a36), the marvelous puzzle about whether a person should love himself most of all (1168a28), and finally the puzzle about whether friends share our burden when we are suffering (1171a30). The mark of all these puzzles—indeed the defining marks of a puzzle as opposed to some other sort of problem—is that there is a conflict between views, all of which carry conviction (1168b10–12), which cannot be resolved simply by appeal to explanatory starting-points because it is these they challenge.

The fact that the NE explicitly refers to puzzles more than thirty times is one measure of the importance of honest dialectic in it. But if we take this as the only measure, we are likely not to recognize the honest dialectic present in the many discussions in which no puzzles arise because none are encountered. This would be a mistake, as we saw, that our understanding of the NE would inherit from a mistake about the nature of honest dialectic and its role in all canonical sciences. When appearances, or what appears so, or what is evident to properly socialized subjects is appealed to—as happens hundreds of times in the NE—honest dialectic is silently there, even if no puzzles are present.

With that caveat in mind, let us return to the question with which we started: Does the NE take an honest dialectical route to the theoretical starting-points of politics? Now that we have traveled that route armed with a proper understanding of honest dialectic, we can see that it does. Hence, politics is, in this respect too, similar to a canonical Aristotelian science.

Is politics, then, sufficiently similar to count as a science—provided that we are guided by similarities and are not speaking in an exact way? If we look, as we should, to politics’ universalist component, the answer is that politics is as much like a canonical theoretical science as it is like a natural science. If we look to politics’ particularist component, the answer is that it is not a science. All of which is to say that politics is a practical science, one with both a universalist and a particularist component. The contribution the NE makes to this science, so conceived, is to give it its capstone or “head”—a clear-eyed understanding of its primary starting points (1141a19) that is at once true and (unlike Plato’s Form of the good) practical. But a contribution to politics is also perforce a contribution to practical wisdom, since politics and practical wisdom are the same state of the soul (1141b23–24). It is not only to the politician that the NE speaks, therefore, but to every properly socialized ethical agent.

 

6. Where the Route Leads

The NE begins with the raw political starting-points available to properly socialized subjects and follows a route to properly scientific explanatory starting-points, a route that is in essence inductive and dialectical. But where does that route finally lead?

What scientific investigation of ourselves and the world tells us, Aristo tle thinks, is that our understanding (nous) is a divine element in us, and the one with which we are most identified:

It would seem too that each person actually is this, if indeed it is the controlling and better element. So it would be strange if he were to choose not his own life but that of something else. Moreover, what was said previously will fit now as well; for what properly belongs to each thing by nature is most excellent and most pleasant for each of them; for each human being, then, the life in accord with understanding is so too, if indeed this most of all is a human being. Therefore, this life will also be happiest. (NE 1178a2–8; also Protr. B58–70)

Active understanding in accord with theoretical wisdom, moreover, as our function brought to completion in accord with the best and most complete virtue, is the best sort of happiness, provided it extends through a complete life (1177b24–26). Since practical wisdom has happiness as its defining target and teleological starting-point, it must aim to further contemplation, the leisure time required for it, and the relevant sort of completeness of life—at any rate, when circumstances permit.

When practical wisdom finds itself in such circumstances, the universal laws it must enact in its guise as politics include those pertaining to the education of (future) citizens in the virtues of character and thought and to the various so-called external goods, such as wealth and so on, needed for virtuous activities, long life, and, indeed, for life itself (NE 1145a6–11). Practical wisdom should maximize the cultivation of the character and its virtues, since “a happy life for human beings is possessed more often by those who have cultivated their character and thought to an extreme degree” (Pol. 1323b1–3). As to activities, practical wisdom should aim to have us spend the greatest possible amount of time on the leisured ones, and of these, contemplation in accord with theoretical wisdom, as “those to whom it more belongs to contemplate, it also more belongs to be happy, not coincidentally, but in accord with contemplation; for this latter is intrinsically estimable” (NE 1178b29–31).

But a human being is a political animal. He needs family, friends, fel low citizens, and other external goods if he is to be able to contemplate, and cannot survive on a diet of contemplation alone, since his nature, unlike a god’s, is not self-sufficient for it (NE 1178b33–1179a9). Insofar as he is human, therefore, he will deliberately choose to do actions that are in accord with virtue of character. If, as may happen because of uncontrollable circumstances, such actions fail to achieve the leisure needed for contemplation, they nonetheless, as intrinsically valuable themselves, constitute a sort of happiness second in quality only to the best sort of happiness constituted by contemplation itself. The life in which it is achieved, even if no better sort of happiness is thereby furthered, is, Aristotle says, “happiest, but in a secondary way . . . for the activities in accord with it are [merely] human” (1178a9–10).

The life consisting of unleisured practical political activity in accord with practical wisdom and the virtues of character is thus the altogether happiest one, when—because it is led in a city with the best constitution, ideally situated and provisioned with external goods—it succeeds in achieving the best sort of happiness for its possessor. This complex life—part practical, part contemplative—is the best human life that practical wisdom, which is the best sort of practical knowledge, can arrange.

As a result, Aristotle sees as an important point in favor of his account of eudaimonia as activity in accord with the best and most complete virtue that it makes pleasure intrinsic to the eudaimôn life:

The things that are pleasant to ordinary people, however, are in conflict because they are not by nature pleasant, while it is the things by nature pleasant that are pleasant to lovers of what is noble. And actions in accord with virtue are like this, so that they are pleasant both to such people and intrinsically. Their life, then, has no need of a pleasure that is superadded to it, like some sort of appendage, but has the pleasure within itself. (NE 1099a11–16)

Although he is not equally explicit that his account also incorporates such truth as there is in the view of those who make eudaimonia reside in honor—the virtue of character that attracts it, and the practical wisdom that goes along with it—or in theoretical wisdom, he is explicit that any adequate account would have to do so. In any case, his own two-tiered conception—consisting of the second-best sort of eudaimonia (activity in accord with full virtue of character) that is for the sake of the very best sort (activity in accord with theoretical wisdom)—does seem designed to meet this adequacy condition.

Because happiness does consist in a favorable emotional state, moreover, what evokes it can vary from person to person, and—arguably—the person himself or herself is the final authority on its existence: if someone feels happy, he is happy. These too are important points of difference with Aristotelian eudaimonia. A further difference seems more important still. When we say that someone is happy, we describe his life in psychological terms. We do not in the relevant sense evaluate it. A happy life needn’t be successful or accomplished or admirable. It need not amount to much. The very modest can be very happy, while the driven, the brilliant, the heroic, the creative, and even the saintly may have a much harder time of it. Children can be happy, dogs too it seems, but neither can be eudaimôn. Aristotelian eudaimonia has a large perfectionist element, in other words, that happiness seems to lack.

We might want to acknowledge this element by translating Aristotelian eudaimonia as “flourishing.” But one advantage of “happiness” over these alternatives is that it highlights the importance of a favorable emotional state—of endorsement and engagement—to the eudaimôn life. In addition, what evokes that emotional state should be the best good for a human being—a sort of active living in accord with virtue, in which the state is realized and expressed. So conceived, eudaimonia surely has a lot to recommend it as the goal of life.