How are you different from a fruit fly? The obvious answer is that you can reason, plan, and ask what your life is for. Aristotle takes that difference seriously. If reason is what makes us distinctively human, then perhaps the good life is not the life that feels best at every moment, but the one that develops our human capacities most fully. The difficulty is deciding what that requires of us.
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The Big Questions
- Is happiness something we feel, something we do, or something we become?
- What, if anything, gives human life a distinctive purpose?
- Can pleasure be part of the good life without becoming its foundation?
- Are virtues natural traits, or must they be trained through repeated practice?
- Does character matter more than mood when we judge whether a life is going well?
- Can a good life be measured from the outside?
- How much do friendship, wealth, education, and social conditions determine our ability to flourish?
The Argument
Aristotle begins with purpose. A doctor heals, a shipbuilder builds ships, and a basketball finds its point within a particular game. Human beings, he argues, must also have a characteristic activity. Since our distinctive capacity is reason, the human good must involve living rationally and developing that capacity well. This is the foundation of eudaimonia, a word often translated as happiness but better understood as flourishing, doing well, or living a good life.
Eudaimonia is not simply pleasure. Animals pursue pleasure too, and pleasure disappears as quickly as it arrives. Nor can the good life consist in honor, since honor depends on the judgment of other people. Wealth is also insufficient because it is useful only as a means to something else. Eudaimonia, by contrast, is sought for its own sake. It is not one goal among others. It is the larger end that gives the others their place.
For Aristotle, flourishing consists in the active exercise of virtue. Virtues are not feelings or opinions. They are trained states of character. Courage lies between cowardice and recklessness; generosity between stinginess and wastefulness. We learn these patterns through practice until acting well becomes less a matter of forcing ourselves through each decision and more an expression of who we have become. A person who repeatedly acts generously does not merely value generosity. Over time, that person becomes generous.
This is why Aristotle’s account shifts the question from mood to character. A pleasant life may not be a good one, and an unpleasant moment does not prove that a life is going badly. The question is whether one’s actions express virtue, reason, and practical wisdom over time. Happiness appears as a byproduct of living well, not as an emotional target that can be pursued directly. People trained in virtue eventually take pleasure in acting virtuously, but pleasure follows the activity rather than justifying it.
Aristotle’s view is not entirely attractive. His highest form of flourishing depends on intellectual gifts, education, wealth, and leisure, and his social world excluded most people from serious consideration. Still, the structure of his argument remains difficult to dismiss. Character matters. Habits shape desire. Friendship helps us become better or worse. Material conditions affect our ability to flourish. And a life can feel satisfying from the inside while still being badly lived. That final claim may be the most unsettling one.
Further Exploration
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle replaces happiness as a passing feeling with eudaimonia as sustained activity shaped by reason, virtue, friendship, and character. Most of this podcast has focused on the Nicomachean Ethics. For this episode, the most useful starting points are Book I, chapters 1–7, and Book II, chapters 1–6. A more detailed explanation of Aristotle’s theory can be found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Epicureanism
The Epicureans sharpen Aristotle’s challenge by offering a rival account in which pleasure, carefully understood, occupies the center of the good life. The Philosophy Teaching Library at the University of Notre Dame has an excellent discussion of Epicurean views of pleasure and pain.
Immanuel Kant
Kant separates virtue from happiness more sharply than Aristotle does, insisting that moral action must be pursued because it is right rather than because it completes or pleases us. Kant is not always easy going, but this discussion of his ethics and relationship to Aristotle is accessible.
John Stuart Mill
Mill challenges the connection between virtue and flourishing by allowing happiness to be assessed through its consequences rather than through the character of the person experiencing it. Mill’s ideas undergird the modern movement of effect altruism. A discussion of his notion of utilitarianism can be found here.
Martha Nussbaum
Nussbaum turns Aristotle’s question toward politics by asking what capabilities and social conditions people must possess before flourishing becomes a real possibility. She develops her approach in two excellent books: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach.
Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas (1225-1274) adapts Aristotle’s account of human purpose and virtue to a Christian framework in which ultimate fulfillment reaches beyond the limits of ordinary human reason. His most important discussion is in his Summa Theologica, “Part 1 to Part II,” Questions 1-5. An online version begins here. Aquinas’s style can get a little getting used to!
Moses Maimonides
Maimonides (1138-1204) draws on Aristotle to connect intellectual perfection, disciplined desire, and religious life within a Jewish account of human excellence. His most focused discussion is in his Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, chapter 27.
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali (c. 1058-1111) reworks philosophical accounts of virtue and happiness within an Islamic framework that subjects reason and character to a larger spiritual end. His most sustained discussion is in his short treatise, The Alchemy of Happiness.
The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament
Biblical traditions complicate Aristotle by speaking of joy, blessing, wisdom, and contentment without making rationally cultivated virtue the single organizing principle of the good life.
Reflection
Think of someone you admire. Which virtues do you see in that person, and what repeated practices seem to have formed them?
Which of your values have become settled parts of your character, and which still appear only when circumstances make them easy?
Would you rather feel happy while living badly or struggle emotionally while becoming someone you believe is good?
Continuing the Conversation
Do you find Aristotle’s account of happiness persuasive? Is happiness primarily a feeling, or is it better understood as a way of living and becoming?
I invite you to email some of these reflections and questions directly to me. I will not respond to them all individually, but questions from listeners may become the starting point for future episodes.
I have also created a Chatbot to accompany this podcast. You can interact with it here.
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Music: J.S. Bach, Prelude No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846, performed by Kimiko Ishizaka. Public domain / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Full Transcript
How are you different from a fruit fly or another animal? After all, just like other animals, we are born, we nourish ourselves and grow, many of us reproduce, and we die. Does anything set Homo sapiens apart?
You might answer that, in fact, nothing really sets us apart from other animals. Or you, like the ancient rabbis who discussed this question, might answer — perhaps playfully — that unlike nearly all animals, we have buttocks. Yet I would guess that you had neither of these thoughts. Instead, maybe you pointed to the human soul: that ethereal but ultimately unprovable part of us that makes us not just living humans, but unique individuals. Or, if you were a bit more psychologically inclined, you might have pointed to our ability to organize into very large groups around ideas and symbols. Perhaps it is our foreknowledge of our eventual death that sets us apart. Or maybe it’s our ability to simulate the future in scenarios we play out in our minds.
I would wager, though, that most of you thought of our rational minds as what distinguishes us from fruit flies and even chimpanzees. Even chimps can’t send rockets to the moon, destroy the planet through an increasing number of means, or play Mahler — although, regarding that last point, I honestly don’t know if there is an ape equivalent to Mahler. We are fascinated with, and a little fearful of, AI precisely because it pushes the boundaries of what it means to be human. If a machine can reason like us — or even better than us — is it actually like us? Sure, AI hallucinates. But I know plenty of humans who do too. AI can sometimes seem creepy precisely because it imitates that part of us that many consider uniquely human.
You’re listening to Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life, a podcast about ancient wisdom, modern psychology, and the search for a life that is not only successful, but meaningful. I’m Michael Satlow. Today: Aristotle, eudaimonia, and the idea that happiness may not be something we feel so much as something we become.
If you settled on the rational mind as the distinctive feature of human beings, you’re hardly alone. Thinkers from the dawn of time have pondered this question, and many — including the same rabbis who floated the idea of buttocks — also settled on our ability to think and reason as at least one of the primary distinguishing features of human beings. For our purposes, though, the most important ancient thinker to reach this conclusion was Aristotle. In today’s episode, I discuss some philosophical approaches to happiness, but I want to focus especially on Aristotle’s answer, because it is from his sustained discussion that many later approaches — both philosophical and religious — emerge.
I began this episode with a question about the distinctiveness of humans, because that’s where Aristotle begins. His definition of and prescription for happiness unfolds from there. The short version: Aristotle thinks happiness is not mainly something we feel. It is something we do, and maybe even something we become. So let’s get into it.
Aristotle studied in Plato’s Academy for about twenty years. After Plato’s death, he eventually founded his own school in Athens, the Lyceum. The works that survive under his name often read less like polished books than like lecture materials or school texts. One of these works is now called the Nicomachean Ethics.
The Nicomachean Ethics begins with two intertwined arguments. The first addresses the purpose of human beings. The second proposes a definition of happiness. I want to unpack these arguments, but you should know where we are going. By the end, I want to suggest that Aristotle gives us four ideas worth taking seriously: happiness is a byproduct; character matters more than mood; virtues are trained; and the good life is not simply whatever feels good from the inside.
Aristotle begins by arguing that everything has a purpose or goal. What he really wants to do is get at first principles — the fundamental goals that underlie things and actions. The answer to this question must come from the quality that is unique to that thing or action. A doctor’s goal, for example, is to heal. A shipbuilder’s is to build a seaworthy vessel. A basketball finds its fullest purpose in being used in a particular game.
Aristotle takes this argument a step further: what is the purpose of a human being? To answer this, you must first identify the quality that is uniquely human. For Aristotle, that quality is reason. Our purpose, then, must be to perfect that uniquely human capacity. Every human has the same goal: to live a life driven by reason. Note here that since, for Aristotle, reason is universal and not subjective, there is a single objectively best way to live. All humans who live in this way achieve a state of eudaimonia — which is the same for everyone.
What, though, is eudaimonia? Most people would say it’s equivalent to the good life or doing well, but they differ greatly on what this means. Modern translators often use the word happiness. But Aristotle himself quickly points out that the term needs far more precision than we normally give it. In Aristotle’s telling, eudaimonia is the ultimate good of human beings — our goal, the thing toward which human life naturally aims. Nobody seeks eudaimonia for the sake of something else; one seeks everything else in pursuit of eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia cannot be a simple life of pleasure, since pleasure is also the aim of animals. Nor is it the honor sought by those in political life, since the conferring and loss of honor is externally determined and outside of a person’s ultimate control. It is not the acquisition of wealth, since wealth is not an ultimate good but merely an instrumental one. Instead, eudaimonia must be living in accord with our unique purpose as human beings. As Aristotle writes, “the good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.” Or, as he says elsewhere, “eudaimonia is a virtuous activity of the soul of a certain kind.” He immediately adds that eudaimonia is more a way of life than an emotional state, and that we can only tell whether we have achieved it as our lives draw to a close.
A virtuous activity of the soul. The first critical term in this definition is the soul. Aristotle posits that the human soul has two major parts: the irrational and the rational. The irrational soul itself has two parts. One it shares with all animals — it directs the basic activities of the body, running our breathing and heartbeat even in sleep. The other part of the irrational soul directs our desires; Freud might call it the id. Fortunately, the second principal part of the soul — the rational part — can, with much training, control the irrational part in a way that is unique to humans.
The second critical term is virtue. Virtues, Aristotle tells us, are states of character, and they come in two kinds: moral and intellectual. There is nothing innate about moral virtue — humans have to be trained in it. Our parents do this, but so too does the state, when governed by wise politicians concerned with setting rules that lead us toward a more virtuous life. Through the exercise of reason, we learn that the virtues are paths of behavior that follow the mean, having neither excess nor deficiency. Courage, for example, is a virtue because it is the mean between rashness and cowardice. Generosity is a virtue because it is the mean between stinginess and wastefulness. Truthfulness is a virtue because it is the mean between self-deprecation and boastfulness. Aristotle is particularly interested in temperance, as its exercise leads us to proper conduct in an area of life we all share — namely, how we eat and drink.
Intellectual virtues are the other kind, developed through intellectual learning rather than habituated action. Aristotle specifies five: scientific knowledge, practical skills, practical wisdom, intuitive reason, and theoretical wisdom. Practical wisdom — which concerns itself with the ethical life and how to live — is the most important for the majority of people, because it is also necessary for the best exercise of moral virtue.
It is in Aristotle’s discussion of theoretical wisdom, though, that the pieces of his approach come fully together. Theoretical wisdom, or sophia in Greek, concerns itself with ultimate truths and the gaining of knowledge of the highest realities. Philosophers such as Aristotle are its primary seekers. Unsurprisingly, then, Aristotle ranks it as the supreme virtue — one that encompasses all other virtues and leads to a life of supreme eudaimonia.
How does this work? Remember that reason is what makes humans unique. So the purpose of human beings must be the cultivation of reason. Sophia is the perfection of reason. Upon achieving it, a person cannot but live also according to the moral virtues, because a life in perfect accord with perfect reason must be entirely virtuous. The achievement of sophia thus brings complete mastery over the appetites of the irrational soul. The appetites remain — but supreme eudaimonia means one is able, almost effortlessly, to control them in order to live according to the mean. Moreover, such a life leads to feelings of pleasure. As Aristotle writes, “that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing. For man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man.”
While this may all seem theoretical and impractical, Aristotle was not envisioning some kind of monastic, entirely academic existence. Wealth, he says, is a necessary but insufficient condition for eudaimonia — it is hard to live virtuously when lacking the funds to support yourself. Friendship too is necessary, particularly the kind he calls virtuous friendship: a friendship based on true appreciation of who a person is, in which true friends help each other become more virtuous. Eudaimonia occurs in community.
Aristotle’s views on friendship resonate differently in our world than they did in his. For him, virtuous friendships were mainly homosocial — men found male friends, and women, well, being a product of his time, he wasn’t much interested in. Today, the ideal might be that our significant other will be our closest friend. This would be somewhat problematic for Aristotle, because such a relationship is also a friendship of pleasure, and can therefore dissolve if pleasure lessens. A true friendship based on virtue is pleasurable, but the pleasure is a byproduct, not the foundation. A marriage based entirely on virtue rather than pleasure would be ideal in his view — but realistically, that is a high bar. Almost by definition, marriage includes elements of both pleasure and mutual benefit.
Another aspect of eudaimonia that resonates differently today is the role Aristotle assigns to the intellect. To reach the highest state of eudaimonia, in his view, you need to be born with intelligence and undergo a long, rigorous education — which in turn requires money. So what about the vast majority of people? A life of eudaimonia is open to them, but it seems, in Aristotle’s view, to be of a lesser quality. Such people will never, in his estimation, be fully able to tame their appetites and live according to all the virtues, although they certainly can take pleasure in living according to many of them, most of the time. Aristotle is deeply unegalitarian — but that doesn’t mean all his ideas should be dismissed.
I think the following four aspects of his theory are worth contemplating.
First, that our goal should not be happiness as we usually understand that term, but eudaimonia — the good life. Many things generate temporary feelings of positive affect, from eating a good piece of chocolate cake to sharing a good laugh. But the feelings that come from a life well lived are deeper, more enduring, and more satisfying. That is not to say it is wrong to pursue some activities for temporary happiness. But the good life is an ongoing, sometimes challenging enterprise that generates happiness as a byproduct.
Second, this raises the question of how we define the good life. For Aristotle, it is a life in which our activities are guided by virtues — a set of character traits that are cultivated through practice. These character traits capture the mean of human experience, and we discern them through the exercise of reason, that uniquely human trait. We have a purpose, we can discern what that purpose is, and we are most satisfied when we are fulfilling it.
Third, Aristotle’s vision of eudaimonia centers character development. We work on our virtues, and over time our actions begin to flow from the kind of people we have become. The more virtuous we are, the easier it is to discern the right course of action when faced with complex decisions. This is subtly different from a life guided by values. You hold values — some of which are probably the same as the virtues. But a life guided by values focuses on discrete actions rather than character. Aristotle might say: if you seek to live according to your values, why not go all the way and transform yourself into a living embodiment of them?
Fourth, the good life is objective. Unlike most modern measures of happiness or well-being, Aristotle’s eudaimonia can be assessed as easily from the outside as from the inside. I can observe how you behave — and if you are living a life of virtue, I know that you are in a state of eudaimonia. It doesn’t really matter if you’re feeling crappy on a given day, although Aristotle predicts that overall you’ll feel good about your life.
All four of these points mesh smartly together. Aristotle, for example, is aware that a person might develop an idiosyncratic or twisted notion of virtue and feel good about living according to it. Such a person might feel good — but they are not living in a state of eudaimonia, because their so-called virtues don’t arise from reason, which is universal. You may justify twisted actions according to your own logic, but that logic is not reason in the Aristotelian sense.
Aristotle’s theory has remained influential, even as it has been endlessly critiqued and modified. Many later philosophers accept that eudaimonia is an ultimate human goal and that humans need virtue to flourish. Not everyone fully agrees, though. Immanuel Kant argues that virtue needs to be pursued for its own sake, and that it is sometimes in tension with happiness. John Stuart Mill entirely disconnects happiness from virtue — the former can be achieved without the latter. Martha Nussbaum takes Aristotle’s question — what does human flourishing require? — and turns it toward justice: what must a society provide so that people actually have the opportunity to flourish? Once they have these freedoms, they can choose, or not, to exercise their capabilities as they desire. Aristotle would most likely strongly disagree with this emphasis on individual autonomy as unmoored from virtue and reason.
It is also worth noting a contrast with the Bible. Aristotle’s theory of eudaimonia plays an important role in the thought of later theologians — Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and Al-Ghazali all adapted it, and their reflections on happiness are enormously influential within their respective traditions. Yet this is more surprising than one might think. The Bible does not organize its vision of the good life around eudaimonia, either the word or the specific Aristotelian concept. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have rich vocabularies — in Hebrew and Greek respectively — of things we might lump under the general category of happiness: joy, blessing, wisdom, contentment. But the idea that the good life comes from the cultivation of virtue through reason is foreign to them. We will return to some of the Bible’s models for the good life in later episodes.
Aristotle challenged one prevailing view: that the main source of happiness was pleasure. This was a view held not only by a majority of people, but also promoted by an ancient philosophical school, the Epicureans. But what does it really mean to construct a life around the pursuit of pleasure? And come to think of it — what is pleasure? That is where we will turn next.
Aristotle leaves us with a challenge: maybe happiness is not primarily a feeling to be chased, but the byproduct of a life shaped by character, reason, friendship, and virtue.
Here is a question to sit with this week: bring to mind someone you admire. What virtues — what character traits — does that person seem to have? Are those virtues you would like to strengthen in yourself? And how might you begin to practice them?
In the next episode, we turn to pleasure. Aristotle thought that pleasure was not enough for the good life. But most of us still want it, seek it, and organize a surprising amount of our lives around it. What is pleasure — and what happens when we make it our goal?
You’re listening to Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life with me, Michael Satlow. Readings, resources, and ways to support the podcast are available in the show notes and at MLSatlow.com. I welcome your questions and feedback.
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