Aristotle → Nicomachean Ethics → Book Ⅰ (eudaimonia)

In the first section of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asks what we mean by “good.”

Most of what you do can be thought of as the means to some end, to some “good.” Some of those ends are perhaps real end ends, but many others are themselves component means to other more complex ends. Is there implicitly some ultimate end to which all of these intermediate ends are subordinate?

This translation of The Nicomachean Ethics seems to be using “good” and “end” somewhat interchangeably here, and “the good” for what I meant when I said “ultimate end.”

Because of this, my first reaction when reading this section was to be suspicious of linguistic trickery. It seems to me that we use the word “good” a lot differently from how we use the phrase “The Good” and that if we just try to casually slide between them without paying careful attention to that, we’re going to get confused.

Anyway, if there are these nested hierarchies of goods/ends, it makes sense to try to figure out what the ultimate or most-ultimateish ones are, so we don’t waste time pursuing intermediate ends that aren’t themselves worthwhile means to these more comprehensive ends. This, anyway, appears to be the task Aristotle has set for himself in this opening book of The Nicomachean Ethics.

In section two of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tries to pin down what the “ultimate end” of human activity and aspiration might look like.

He figures, for one thing, it would be something that we desire for its own sake (not as a means to some other end). This seems to satisfy the criteria I mentioned back in my introduction to this review, when I said I was most interested in an ethics that begins from a starting point of assuming that values are things judged by human standards (not by God or by reference to some myth or something overly-metaphysical). Here Aristotle defines the “ultimate end” in terms of what people desire.

Aristotle dismisses (a little too quickly, I think) the possibility that there is no such “ultimate end” — that the means-subends-superends structure is something more complex than a simple nested hierarchy. What if ends become means to other ends that are means to ends that wrap around on each other like snakes eating their tails? It wouldn’t surprise me to find that it’s something really messy like this. But, again, Aristotle isn’t having it. He says that if there is no ultimate end, this would mean “our desire would be empty and vain” (as though this were a reductio ad absurdum) — but perhaps, as the preacher says, our aspirations indeed are empty and vain!

So I guess we have to add a caveat to the rest of this book: that it’s valid unless life is meaningless and all our hopes are in vain, in which case it’s void.

But, granting that caveat, if there is an ultimate end to which we should aspire, what is it? Aristotle nominates, to my surprise, politics. Politics? This is because it’s the science of governing all of the other arts and activities of man, deciding what resources to allocate in what ways, educating citizens in various sciences and wisdoms, legislating which means are to be encouraged and which to be banned, and so forth. It’s sort of the superscience that regulates and directs all the other ones.

While it’s easy for me to see politics as a very complex example of an end (and a means to many others), to see it as the (or even an) ultimate end is too much for my imagination. I’m curious to see how Aristotle justifies his choice.

Section three of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics is a little throat-clearing before the real work begins.

First, Aristotle wisely warns us that the subject matter we’re dealing with — values, ethics, means & ends, choice, will — is the fuzzy stuff of human interactions, intentions, and motivations, and because of that we’re very unlikely to come across any precise mathematical formula that is up to the task of describing it. General rules-of-thumb are what we’re after, and we should expect in advance that there will be particular specific cases that the rules won’t apply to.

I like this humility. I see its opposite a lot in amateur political philosophy from the anarchist and libertarian wings — I’m thinking of folks who rediscover the non-aggression principle and think that they’ve found the universal solvent for political philosophy, when in fact they’ve just sort of swept under the rug most of the complexity and difficulty.

Anyway, after this, Aristotle discourages youngsters from trying to follow along. He says the young just don’t have enough experience and wisdom to really understand the breadth of the problem or of the arguments he’ll be advancing when trying to solve it.

I’ve decided to forge ahead anyway.

In section four of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, it seems to me that Aristotle backtracks a bit.

In an earlier section, he seemed to have advanced “politics” as his candidate for the ultimate end of our activity, but in this section he seems to be treating it more as though it were the ultimate means to the ultimate end, and now he wants to further examine what this ultimate end is. Okay, then; I’ll just go along with it.

“Happiness,” he says, is frequently brought up as a likely candidate for the ultimate end.

And here I have to go tangential. I hope I don’t have to do a whole lot of delving into the nitty-gritty of translation and such, but it’s pretty clear that “happiness” is a piss-poor translation of “εὐδαιμονία” (eudaimonia).

Ross uses “happiness” throughout his translation, but it seems so hopelessly misleading that I think I’m just going to use the original Greek term (there doesn’t seem to be a good English equivalent, though “flourishing” and “thriving” are sometimes advanced as alternatives; “fulfillment” also strikes me as worth considering). So, starting over:

“Eudaimonia,” he says, is frequently brought up as a likely candidate for the ultimate end we’re striving for, and the end to which politics is a means.

But what is this eudaimonia? Would we know it if we saw it? We’ll get to that later.

Some folks (he’s thinking here of the Platonists) believe that there is some thing or quality called “The Good” that particular “good” things partake in — the way all red things share “redness” — and that it is this “The Good” itself (not eudaimonia, which merely is one of the examples of Good things) that is the ultimate end we’re looking for.

Aristotle mentions this theory but doesn’t yet address it head-on. Instead, he reminds his listeners that he is trying to come up with a descriptive account of the ultimate ends of man, starting with specifics we know: the habits and inclinations and motivations of well-brought-up folks like ourselves; not a prescriptive account that starts from some high-level abstraction like “The Good” and derives particulars from it.

In section five of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says there are three types of men with three ideas of what is the ultimate good:

Vulgar men

To them, pleasure (happiness, enjoyment) is the ultimate good

Political men

To them, honor is the ultimate good

Contemplative men

We’ll get to that later…

Of vulgar men: yeah, whatever. Surely none of you good people are vulgar hedonists of that sort. But some of you may have been tempted by the idea that honor is the ultimate good we’re after.

The problem with honor as the ultimate good is that it seems to be more dependent on the vicissitudes of reputation — on the opinion of other people — than on the deeds of the person aiming for the end. The best political men seem to want to be honored not arbitrarilty but deservedly, based on their virtues, which suggests to Aristotle that they actually value virtue more than honor when it comes right down to it.

But Aristotle says that virtue isn’t good enough either. Even someone in a coma can be perfectly virtuous. (I can’t help but wonder whether that counts as one of those edge cases he told us not to pay too much attention to.) In any case, though, eudaimonia can’t be equivalent to virtue because it’s easy to imagine an extremely virtuous person who is miserable and suffering, a la Job.

I found this section to be unsatisfying for two reasons. First, he identifies honor, the pursuit of political men, to be an inferior path to the good. And yet on earlier occasions he’s teased us with the idea that politics either is or is the path to the ultimate end. Second, he seems to be assuming what he is setting out to prove, that eudaimonia is the ultimate end, and rejecting these alternative ends mostly because they aren’t eudaimonia.

In the next section, Aristotle will return to the theory of a Platonic Good and address it in greater detail.

In section six of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle takes a closer, skeptical look at the idea that there is a sort of platonic “Good” that all particular good things and actions represent examples of, the way all red things are partakers of a platonic Reditudinosity.

Aristotle notes that we use the word “good” in many ways and he doubts that there really is an overarching category that fits them all. A hammer is “good” for driving nails, but not very “good” with Hollandaise sauce. Does a hammer nonetheless share some platonic quality with poached eggs? “Good” isn’t (often, anyway) some stand-alone quality but is relative to some purpose — a hammer is “good for” driving nails; poached eggs are “good with” Hollandaise; Tiger Woods is “good at” golf.

Some Platonists would answer this objection by saying that the “Good” they’re imagining only corresponds to those particular good things that are good in and of themselves, not examples like these. So pleasure, perhaps, or health, is just plain good — not just good for, with, or at something. Aristotle isn’t buying it. He’s not convinced that there’s anything in that category, for one thing (isn’t health good for something, not just good?), or that even if there are such things that those things share some identifiable quality. Furthermore, he’s not sure even if this were the case whether knowledge about this abstract “The Good” form would be of much practical help to us.

This pretty well answers the worry I expressed after reading section one, as it seems that Aristotle had the same misgivings I did about the vagueness of the word “good” and possible confusion that could result from using it imprecisely.

Having turned his back on the project of trying to discern some platonic “The Good” as the appropriate ultimate end of our actions, in section seven of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle looks at the alternatives.

There might be one particular good, a good that’s at the end of the series of means to ends that are means to other ends and so forth. Or maybe there’s more than one such end-point, in which case, we’ll be satisfied with choosing the one that’s the most finalish-looking — that is, the one that seems most like an end and least like a mean to other ends.

He thinks that eudaimonia is the best candidate for this ultimate end, but he’s afraid it’s too pat.

Does man have a purpose — a function, like the way eyes are for seeing with or a shovel is for digging? One way of determining the function of something, Aristotle says, is to find out what it is uniquely designed to accomplish. A “good” something is a something that does the purpose of such somethings and does it well.

Humans, he says, seem uniquely designed to exercise their rational faculties — nothing else does this.

(He also adds that this ultimate end, whatever it is, isn’t just something that can be measured once in some time-slice of a person’s life, but is a measurement of a person’s life as a whole, or something of that sort. This will come up again and cause some trouble later on.)

Myself, I’m not ready to buy the reasoning by which he got to rationality as the function of mankind. For one thing, I’m not sure whether such a teleological argument holds water, especially given post-Darwin informed speculation about the mundane “purpose” of human life, such as an examination of our “function” is likely to reveal to us.

For another, rationality isn’t the only thing that humans uniquely accomplish. Look at how fragile Aristotle’s argument is: Imagine we’re visited by rational aliens from another planet or we discover a rational species of dolphin. Suddenly, we’re no longer beings who uniquely accomplish rational thought and so our purpose is up-in-the-air. But these aliens/dolphins never cook their food! Aha! The unique function of humans must be culinary! What’s the user manual for living? As it turns out, it’s a cookbook!

Aristotle could say that in such a case, he’d just include the aliens and dolphins in his audience and under his category of “man.” But then he’s pretty much just saying that his audience is defined by its rationality, ergo rationality is what his audience is designed for, which seems logically iffy.

In section eight of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asks how well “eudaimonia,” as he has been refining the term, agrees with the then-popular use of the term and with the philosophical state-of-the-art. As far as he’s concerned, it’s close enough that he doesn’t feel like he’s off course or has to invent some new term.

(Here, of course, we run into trouble, since there is no longer a popular use of the term — there is no equivalent term in English — and the philosophical state-of-the-art in Aristotle’s time is something that would require a lot of study to determine and then a lot of speculation to fill in the gaps.)

But he’s also not quite through refining his idea yet. He wants to emphasize that his idea of eudaimonia isn’t just an internal, subjective state but includes objective, real-world thriving as well — living & faring well. Being virtuous can be part of this element of eudaimonia, he says, but only to the extent that this is manifest in real-world actions.

If you love virtue, then the performance of virtuous acts is pleasant — indeed, this defines what a virtuous person is: someone who enjoys virtuous action. (I wonder how one goes about developing a love of virtue if that doesn’t already come naturally.)

From here he slides to a big ergo, without much syllogistic foreplay, but as no big shock either: eudaimonia is the Ultimate End we’ve been hunting for all this time. Virtue and being virtuous (that is, taking pleasure in virtue) is part of this, but more mundane things and accidents of fate play a big role too: social standing, political power, family riches, how well your kids turn out… things like that. Which leads to some questions…

If your eudaimonia is so dependent on arbitrary accidents of fate (as Aristotle noted in section eight of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics), is it really a question of ethics at all, or is it more a matter of luck? (Is this a secular version of the grace or works argument from Christianity?) You’re walking down the street, engaged in your uncommonly virtuous life, and a roof tile blows off a building and falls on your head and wham, there goes your eudaimonia.

In section nine, Aristotle tries to preserve eudaimonia as a proper end of deliberate action, against this potential attack.

For one thing, even if eudaimonia is partially just a matter of luck, the part that isn’t a matter of luck is still worth looking at. That part might indeed be the greater part, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Luck might provide us with more or less of the raw material and opportunity with which we construct our eudaimonia, but the genuine article itself requires deliberate action on our part: eudaimonia is expressed in “activity of the soul” and so is a dynamic thing we do, and not just the passive reception of fortunate circumstances.

Animals and children can’t be said to attain eudaimonia, since they aren’t capable of this sort of virtuous activity of the soul. (This again shows off the weakness of “happiness” as a translation for eudaimonia — it seems ridiculous to say that we can’t call a child “happy.”)

For another thing, Aristotle says, eudaimonia is, or ought to be, a judgment applied to a person’s life as a whole, not just some particular moment in time. It’s really only in retrospect that you can say, ah, there was a life of eudaimonia.

Wait a minute… isn’t that contradictory? Is eudaimonia something that’s expressed in an activity of the soul (which seems instantaneous and very much within a life), or an evaluation that takes place from outside of a person posthumously (much the opposite)?

I think he’ll try to clear that up in the next section.

In section ten of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle acknowledges the seeming contradiction between eudaimonia as something that takes place within a person as an “activity of the soul” and as something that is best thought of as an objective, external evaluation of a life as a whole — a sort of posthumous (or even post-posthumous) summing up of how successful a life it was.

What if you’ve lived a good life and it seems like your eudaimonia has been well-secured, but then, after you’re dead, your reputation is slandered and your family comes to ruin? Can you even suffer harm to your eudaimonia after you’re six feet under?

Aristotle says there has to be a middle ground between seeing eudaimonia as utterly transient and dependent on fortune on the one hand, and seeing it as unattainable in life but only assignable in retrospect on the other.

Nobility, greatness of soul, virtue — these things are durable. They lead to an enduring eudaimonia less susceptible to the whims of fate, and also allow their bearers to better adjust to whatever fortune throws their way. If your character is such that you’ll try to make the best of whatever life presents you with, at least you’ll never be miserable, though perhaps you’ll never be blessed.

That seems like sensible enough advice, though not particularly enlightening. One way I can interpret it is to think of nobility and greatness of soul and virtue as being a sort of riches that are less vulnerable to being lost by misfortune.

But even Job, though he “was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil,” when the devil threw misfortune after misfortune at him, came to curse the day he was born and concluded “I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.” Someone asked him what happened to the optimistic good advice he ladled out back in his days of wine and roses: “Should not your piety be your confidence and your blameless ways your hope?” No, he replies: I’m miserable and I see the wicked flourishing all around me and my piety and virtue are no comfort to me. So his companions are reduced to asserting that if Job redoubles his efforts to be pure and upright, God will of course restore him to health and prosperity, and eventually get around to smiting the wicked: virtue apparently is not its own reward after all. (God’s eventual answer to Job is pretty pathetic, and reminds me mostly of the bluster of “The Great and Powerful Oz” before Dorothy and her crew.)

But certainly if you love virtue and behave virtuously, voila! at least to that extent you’re richer and more eudaimon as a result of your action. But that’s not much to go on. If you love music, and sing aloud, to some extent you’re richer for doing so. Virtue is nothing special in this regard (or if it is, Aristotle hasn’t told us why yet). Indeed, if you love vice and behave viciously, you seem to reap an equivalent reward, by this logic.

In section eleven Aristotle spends a little more time talking about how posthumous events can effect the eudaimonia of the dead. I didn’t get much more out of that, except more confirmation that “happiness” is an absolutely inadequate translation for what Aristotle meant by eudaimonia.

Section twelve of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics is an interesting tangent, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

It seems to be a further meditation on to what extent eudaimonia is the product of luck or virtue.

Aristotle asks whether having eudaimonia is a praiseworthy thing or a fortunate thing. Oddly, given his tendency when confronted with choices between extremes to try to choose some compromise somewhere in the middle, he says eudaimonia is “prized” or fortunate.

It seems to me that just as he said that eudaimonia is partially a result of virtue and partially a result of luck, its possession ought to be in equal proportion worthy of praise and of mere congratulations. Or maybe he means that the praise is really only due to the virtue itself, while the eudaimonia is just a by-product that is only loosely correlated with anything praiseworthy. You don’t praise the winning runner for having such a beautiful gold medal, but for winning the race.

I think in part, Aristotle is reminding us that eudaimonia is supposed to be the ultimate end, the big good, the “prize” our actions should be aiming towards. Thus, eudaimonia is a “prized” thing, a desirable thing, and not the sort of thing that you praise someone for pursuing or attaining in spite of it not being desirable.

In the final section, section thirteen of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle prepares the way for the following books by asking what is virtue, or what are the virtues?

For one thing, virtue is the main topic of politics, at least according to Aristotle, who must read different news feeds than I do.

Virtue seems to have both a rational and an irrational component. For instance, you can have a virtuous will and a virtuous wisdom, which are conscious and deliberative and rational. But you can also have virtues like tolerance and liberality that seem more like subconscious character traits that are less under rational control.

This brings us to the end of Book One, in which we tried to figure out what the good is. The good is the ultimate end of our activities, what we’re aiming at in all of our day-to-day actions with their subordinate ends. That good is eudaimonia, within which is mixed virtue and a purposefulness that is based on our natures as uniquely rational beings. Politics is the pinnacle of human activity, as its proper aim is to maximize this purposeful, virtuous eudaimonia in society.

He had me up to that last bit. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone taking seriously the idea that politics is the science of promoting virtue and well-being. Maybe Aristotle had an idealized idea of politics in mind, or maybe politics were much better-conducted back then at the small scale of 4^th century B.C. Athens, or maybe he was just hoping to exercise a positive influence over the policies of folks like his student Alexander the Great by asserting as true what he hoped would come to pass.