Aristotle: Happiness, Virtue and Contemplation

Chapter three

‘What is human life’s chief concern?’ One of the answers we should receive would be ‘It is happiness.’1 We come now to Aristotle whose approach to happiness is among the principal topics of his Nicomachean Ethics (c. 348–345 B.C.E.). This book, which is among the most influential works in all of Western philosophy, does not exhaust the whole of Aristotle’s treatment of moral theory. The Eudemian Ethics is an earlier study whose authorship was for many years in doubt. Today, however, there is no serious dispute that Aristotle wrote it as well.2 But for Aristotle’s definitive analysis of the good life and of the way to live it, the Nicomachean Ethics includes what one needs to know. In what follows, therefore, we turn our attention to key texts and argu- ments from the Nicomachean Ethics.3 Our concern, as it was with the chapters on Socrates and Plato, is to extract Aristotle’s conception of happiness, to see whether it presents any interpretive problems and to determine whether any inconsistencies are embedded in the text. Along the way, we will address an issue that emerges even from a relatively casual reading of this crowded work, “crowded” insofar as Aristotle takes up many topics and examples throughout its ten books. Is the Ethics what we traditionally think of as a book in ethics? Does it approach the mat- ter of what an agent ought to do in order to discharge a tissue of disinterested obligations to others, or does it come across as a sophisticated “How-to?” book that tells a person what ideas and actions are necessary to secure and sustain his happiness? Perhaps the “or” of exclusion is inap- propriate. Does the Ethics deal with a tertium quid? Is its focus an effort to

1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, intro. Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Collier Books, 1961), page 78. 2 See Martin Ostwald’s introduction to his translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (India- napolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1962), pages xvii–xviii. 3 Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross, rev. J.O. Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aris- totle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Volume II. All citations, included in parentheses in the text, are to the standard pagination. Refer- ences to this pagination occur throughout the text and in notes below. Nicomachean Ethics is sometimes referred to as Ethics and is abbreviated NE. 86 chapter three establish that disinterested virtue and the self-interested desire for happiness qualify as appropriate concerns for a formal study of theoretical and practical ethics?

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We can begin this inquiry into Aristotle’s treatment of happiness as he begins the Ethics, with the claim that “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim” (NE.1094a,1–3; emphasis added). Since this declaration is too general as it stands, Aristotle adds that countless ends exist and that some of them are subordinate to other ends. He is, as a consequence, entitled to claim that “If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain, clearly this must be the good and the chief good” (NE.1094a,17–20). Ethical theorists study the ends at which our conduct aims, but political scientists must study them as well. Political science addresses questions about the connections between individual and public good. So the con- nection between ethics and political science, with ethics being a branch of politics, makes it essential that political scientists know and elaborate what is good for human beings, individually and collectively (NE.10941,19– 1094b,11). In these opening pages, Aristotle also warns his readers that the study of what is good for human beings and for political societies is not a science in the strict sense (NE.1094b13–16). Expecting such a science in the Ethics is an expectation that neither he nor anyone else can provide. For Aristotle and for Plato, as we saw in Chapter 2, “science” is a finite body of necessary truths from which other necessary truths (theorems) necessar- ily follow. Anyone who demands a science of ethics or politics is ignorant; “for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits” (NE.1094b,25–6).4

4 For a related statement, see John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, chapter xi, paragraph 10. Locke was deeply disappointed that he could not provide a demonstrative science of morals. Aristotle acknowledges that the material which moral- ists and political scientists study is too recalcitrant to be incorporated into a scientific body