Aristotle (2024) Nicomachean Ethics 1.9

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

 

1.9 How happiness is achieved

It is also what leads people to puzzle about whether happiness is something acquirable by learning or by habituation or by some other sort of training, or whether it comes about in accord with some divine dispensation or even by luck.89

But if anything is a gift from the gods to human beings, it is reasonable to suppose that happiness is also god given—especially since it is the best of human things. But though perhaps this issue properly belongs more to a different investigation, it is evident that, even if happiness is not a godsend but comes about through virtue and some sort of learning or training, it is one of the most divine things; for virtue’s prize and end is evidently something both divine and blessed. At the same time, it would also be something widely shared; for it is possible for it to be acquired through some sort of learning or supervision by all those not disabled in relation to virtue.90 

If it is better to acquire it in that way than to be happy by luck, however, it is reasonable to suppose that this is how we do acquire it, if indeed what is in accord with nature is by nature in the noblest possible condition. It is the same way with what is in accord with craft or with any cause what soever—above all, what is in accord with the best one. To entrust what is greatest and noblest to luck would strike a very false note.

T he answer we are seeking is also entirely evident from our argument; for we have said that happiness is a certain sort of activity of the soul in accord with virtue, while of the remaining goods, some are necessary con ditions of it, others are by nature co-workers and useful as instruments. This also would agree with what we said at the start; for we took the end of politics to be the best end.91 And its supervision aims above all at producing citizens of a certain sort—that is, good people and doers of noble actions.92

It makes perfect sense, then, that we do not say that a cow, a horse, or any other animal whatsoever is happy; for none of them can share in this sort of activity. It is due to this cause that a child is not happy either; for he is not yet a doer of such actions because of his age. Children who are said to be happy are considered “blessed” because of our expectations. For, as we said, happi ness requires both complete virtue and a complete life.93 For many reversals of luck and all sorts of lucky accidents occur in life, and the most prosperous may meet with great disasters in old age—just as is said of Priam in the story of the events at Troy.94 And no one counts someone happy who has suffered strokes of luck like that and dies in a wretched way.95