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NICOMACHEAN ETHICS Gabriel Richardson Lear Happy Lives and the Highest Good This page intentionally left blank Happy Lives and the Highest Good AN ESSAY ON ARISTOTLE'S NICOMACHEAN ETHICS Gabriel Richardson Lear PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2004 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richardson Lear, Gabriel, 1971– Happy lives and the highest good : an essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics / Gabriel Richardson Lear. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-11466-8 (alk. paper) 1. Aristole, Nicomachean ethics. 2. Ethics, Ancient. I. Title. B430.L43 2004 171′.3—dc21 2003042899 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon and American Gothic Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 FOR MY PARENTS Dale and Leslie Richardson This page intentionally left blank Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix CHAPTER ONE Introduction 1 CHAPTER TWO The Finality Criterion 8 1. Introduction 8 2. What It Is to Be an Aristotelian Telos 11 3. Teleology in the Nicomachean Ethics 15 4. Teleology, Desire, and Middle-Level Ends 31 5. The Puzzle in NE I.7 and Two Possible Solutions 37 6. Ackrill’s Inclusivist Solution 40 CHAPTER THREE The Self-Sufficiency of Happiness 47 1. Self-Sufficiency: Three Problems for a Monistic Reading of Eudaimonia 48 2. Self-Sufficiency as a Mark of Finality 51 3. Self-Sufficiency in the Philebus 53 4. The Self-Sufficiency of Monistic Goods 59 5. Choiceworthiness and Self-Sufficiency 63 6. Self-Sufficient Happiness 69 CHAPTER FOUR Acting for the Sake of an Object of Love 72 1. Love and Final Causation in Aristotle’s Scientific Works 73 2. How Teleological Approximation Could Solve the Problem of Middle-Level Ends 85 3. Approximation in the Nicomachean Ethics? 88 CHAPTER FIVE Theoretical and Practical Reason 93 1. The Separateness and Similarity of Theoretical and Practical Reason 94 2. Theoretical Sophia versus Practical Wisdom 108 3. The Relationship of Phroneˆsis to Theoretical Wisdom 115 CHAPTER SIX Moral Virtue and To Kalon 123 1. To Kalon Outside Human Action 126 viii • Contents 2. To Kalon in Human Action 130 3. The Account of Fine Action at Rhetoric I.9 133 4. To Kalon and Spirited Desire 137 CHAPTER SEVEN Courage, Temperance, and Greatness of Soul 147 1. Courage: NE III.6–9 148 2. Temperance: NE III.10–12 162 3. Greatness of Soul: NE IV.3 168 CHAPTER EIGHT Two Happy Lives and Their Most Final Ends 175 1. The Competition between the Philosophical and Political Lives 177 2. The Superior Finality of Contemplation 181 3. Human Approximation of Divine Life: Part One 188 4. Human Approximation of Divine Life: Part Two 193 5. Choosing Moral Virtue for the Sake of Contemplation 196 APPENDIX Acting for Love in the Symposium 209 1. Possessing the Object of Love 209 2. The Intrinsic Value of Intermediate Objects of Love 216 Works Cited 221 Index Locorum 229 General Index 237 Acknowledgments MANY PEOPLE HAVE HELPED ME think and write about the material in this book, though whether I have made good use of their advice is for them to say. My former colleagues in the Yale philosophy department have been generous both in general support and in commenting on drafts of chapters 4 and 5. In particular, I thank Robert Adams, Tad Brennan, and Michael Della Rocca. Stephen Menn offered helpful guidance at an early stage. David Sedley offered useful comments on a draft of chapter 3. David Charles and two other anonymous readers for Princeton University Press wrote especially thorough reports on my submitted manuscript. I have learned from them and hope I have managed to go some way toward answering the problems they raised for my argument. This book began as my Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton University. I am grateful for my time spent there. The intense conversations in seminars that spilled out afterward to the Annex made it a happy initiation into the life of philosophical leisure. In particular, I thank the members of the Philosophy Department Dissertation Seminar 1999–2000 and the members of the Uni- versity Center for Human Values Mellon Graduate Seminar 1999–2000 who read and commented energetically on earlier versions of chapters 2 through 4. I also thank my fellow graduate students working in classical philosophy, in particular Jonathan Beere, Ursula Coope, and Zena Hitz. Alexander Ne- hamas is a teacher to whom I owe much. And I thank Christian Wildberg for his helpful comments as a reader of my dissertation. But above all, I thank my former advisers, John Cooper and Sarah Broadie. The countless hours they spent talking me through my ideas and writing meticulous comments on drafts have made this a better piece of work than it would otherwise have been. But more than that, they have been mod- els of scholarship and philosophical insight to which I aspire. I wish also to thank my husband, Jonathan, who has encouraged me every step of the way; Sophia Lear for being full of poise and warmth in the midst of frenzy; my sisters, Leslie and Dana; and my parents, who encouraged me from the beginning to be a philosopher. This page intentionally left blank Happy Lives and the Highest Good CHAPTER ONE Introduction ARISTOTLE INVITES US to conceive of the human good as a special kind of end (telos). In the very first line of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) he says, “Every craft and every inquiry, and likewise every action and every choice, seem to aim at some good; for which reason people have rightly (kaloˆ s) concluded that the good is that at which all things aim” (1094a1–3, my emphasis).1 He calls this ultimate goal of the successful life eudaimonia,or happiness (1097a28–34). Just as an archer aims at a target, so, Aristotle thinks, the happy person aims at the human good in everything he does (1094a22–24). In effect, he proposes that we think of happiness not as the property of being happy—a certain feeling of contentment or satisfaction— but as the goal or end for the sake of which the happy person acts. Aristotle’s investigation into happiness is thus decidedly practical. Not only does he want to arrive at a theory of happiness that will actually help us to live well, his investigation is guided by the thought that happiness is the ultimate ob- ject of rational desire and action. If we know what a good must be like in order to serve as the end of all of our rational pursuits, then we can use those criteria to evaluate goods, such as pleasure, wealth, honor, moral virtue, and philosophical contemplation, which people have at one time or other taken to be keys to happiness. Notice that for Aristotle the happy life needs to focus on a single kind of good. Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics he envisions the happy life as a life of devotion to a single supremely valuable thing (or kind of thing). This is the natural way to read the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics.InNE I.4–5 Aristotle considers whether lives characterized by the pursuit of plea- sure or wealth are happy, and he criticizes the idea that honor or moral virtue is the good at which the political life aims, apparently as a preliminary to supplying his own account. Then in NE I.7 he argues that the highest good must be activity in accordance with virtue, “and if there are several, in accor- dance with the best and most final” (1098a16–18). It is natural (although certainly not necessary) to interpret Aristotle as saying here that happiness, the ultimate goal of the happy life, is a single kind of virtuous activity, that is, it is a monistic good. When we reach the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, the impression that happiness is a single kind of good for the sake of 1 All translations are mine unless noted otherwise. However, my translations of the NE have often been influenced by the excellent translations of Ross (in Barnes 1984) and Crisp 2000. 2 • Chapter One which the happy person makes all his choices is even more pronounced. In NE X.7 Aristotle argues that the happiest life is one in which the agent “does everything” for the sake of philosophical contemplation (1177b33– 34). And in NE X.8 Aristotle allows that a life lived for the sake of morally virtuous activity (another monistic good) is also happy, though in a lesser sense (1178a9–22). Most readers are surprised, of course, when they dis- cover that Aristotle thinks the happiest life is lived for the sake of contempla- tion. The lengthy discussions of moral virtue and friendship and Aristotle’s evident admiration for the morally virtuous person lead most people to as- sume that, according to Aristotle, the human good is the exercise of practical, and not theoretical, virtue. What is not surprising (or at least ought not to be) is that, according to Aristotle’s considered opinion, the happy life aims at a monistic good. But although there is ample evidence, I believe, that Aristotle thinks of hap- piness as a monistic end in the Nicomachean Ethics, many, if not most, recent interpreters deny that this is what he has in mind. Instead, many scholars believe Aristotle’s eudaimonia is (or ought to be) a set that includes some or all intrinsically valuable goods.2 As I understand it, the motivation behind these various inclusivist interpretations is not so much that various particular passages require it, as that—despite the evidence that Aristotle does conceive of eudaimonia as a monistic end—the overall theory of the Nicomachean Eth- ics looks incoherent on a monistic interpretation of eudaimonia.
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