Can You Be Happy Even If Life Isn’t Going Your Way?
Guest Post! Book 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
I’m excited to share this first guest post! In it you’ll get Joel’s engaging overview of Book I of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Happiness, not Morality
When you hear about ethics, what do you think? Probably, the do’s and don’ts of morality, what’s right and what’s wrong, denying desires, obeying duty and that sort of thing.
Not so Aristotle. When Aristotle writes about ethics, he means happiness. Ethics is knowledge of the best pursuit of happiness.
This is because Aristotle thinks that knowledge of right and wrong wouldn’t turn out to be much use if happiness lay elsewhere. If the paths of happiness and of morality led off in completely different directions, the philosopher could preach morality all he wanted; no one would follow. And the philosopher himself would die unhappy and alone.
But since Socrates, it had been the conviction of philosophers that the happiest life was not that of the pleasure-seeker but that of the philosopher. Socrates set up this challenge for himself and philosophers after him: Imagine an all-powerful dictator who can do to other people what he wants and have whatever he wants and has incredible luck to boot. Socrates proclaimed that an impoverished philosopher, sentenced to death, is happier than said dictator.
Socrates himself lived this as he was put to death for practicing philosophy. (The people of Athens thought it was making young men into atheists and rebels.) Aristotle was the student of Plato, who was the student of Socrates, so he was an heir to Socrates’ approach to ethics and the challenge that Socrates had posed both in words and actions. For Aristotle, the life of the philosopher was the best human life.
The Purpose of Life
At the outset of his Ethics, Aristotle explains that happiness has to be the purpose of ethics because happiness is the purpose of human beings. Everything, Aristotle argues, has a purpose. Some of these are obvious to us: A hammer and nails are for fastening things. A coat is for warming and protecting from the elements.
For living things, their purposes are equally obvious, though we don’t always think of them as a purpose. The purpose of a dog is to live a doggy life: eat, sleep, poop, bark, wag its tail, and reproduce more dogs who will do the same. Likewise for other animals; the purpose of each is species-specific but, more or less, to live the life of its kind and reproduce its kind. Interestingly, animals, especially dogs, that get to do this are happy.
This is an animal’s purpose not in an external way, a purpose we have imposed on it, the way a horse is for riding, but rather in an intrinsic way: That is what it does on its own without interference.
Human beings are also living things, and we also have a purpose. We share with animals the biological purpose of living the life of our kind and reproducing our kind. But as a higher kind of animal, or Aristotle says, a “rational animal,” our purpose is higher than mere biological life. Nevertheless, when we are functioning best, we are happy, just like the dogs. So, happiness, Aristotle says, is the purpose, the end or telos (in Greek), of human life.
Notice, Aristotle is not saying that we all need to adopt this purpose that we didn’t know about. Happiness is what we are already aiming at, and Aristotle concurs with nature that we should pursue it. However, he will not concur with the majority of human beings about what leads to happiness.
Paths to Happiness
That is Aristotle’s next question: What leads to human happiness? And he considers three popular answers: Pleasure, status, and money. (Remember Socrates’ dictator? He has all three of these in an apparently unlimited amount.)
But Aristotle shows that none of them - money, status or pleasure- is the way to happiness.
Let’s look at them one by one.
First: Money. Can’t money make you happy? How? By buying things and services and friends, of course! Hold on, Aristotle says, then it’s not the money that makes you happy; it’s what money is thought to be able to buy. Money is a means to an end, not the end itself. (Maybe then happiness comes from owning things, having people do stuff for you, and having friends. Aristotle will consider all of these later.)
Next: Status. Aristotle calls this “honor.” We might call it being “cool.” It boils down to reputation; being thought well of. But here’s a similar problem, Aristotle says. It’s one thing to be thought “cool” - worthy of honor because unfazed by events, above the fray of vying for respect. It’s another to be cool. The fact that we want to be honored points to how good it would be to be honorable. It’s one thing to look unaffected, apathetic, like a cool teenager in a leather jacket. It’s another to actually be unaffected by external events (whether dressed in a leather jacket or a sick toga).
Last: Pleasure. Isn’t happiness just pleasure anyway? (How will Aristotle escape this one?) Well, not to put too fine a point on it, the intense scratching of athlete's foot is pleasurable. It seems like a person who does this is not at the peak of human happiness, no matter how intensively bliss his momentary pleasure is..
The problem with claiming that pleasure is man’s telos runs deeper because different people experience different pleasure depending on the state of their character. Thus, if we were to claim pleasure as the means to happiness, we would have to answer, Whose pleasure? Which state of character?
Activating the Answer
By a process of discovering what is wrong with these answers, Aristotle arrives at his own, counter-intuitive account of happiness: activity in accord with virtue in a complete life. Money, after all, is a means to possessing certain things, which themselves make possible certain kinds of activity. Honor is really just the appearance of excellence; excellence is what we’re really after. And whose pleasure is really worth experiencing? The pleasure of the person who is most excellent, who has the best state of character. And “excellence” is an alternative translation for the Greek arete, usually translated, “virtue.”
The “virtue” Aristotle extolls as producing happiness is not the restrictive moral virtue of the Puritan. Rather, it is the height of human excellence, akin to the modern psychologist’s state of “flow.” Happiness is not found by the passive reception of money, reputation, or pleasure, but in the activity expression of human capacity at the height of excellence.
The rest of the Nicomachean Ethics explores this account of virtue or excellence, but the final topic of Aristotle’s Book 1 is the relation of external goods to happiness. By identifying happiness with virtue, it might seem that Aristotle is adopting an incredible high-minded and unrealistic account of happiness. Socrates and Jesus might be able to be happy just by being virtuous, but most of us would like to have some possessions and have a few good turns in life. Aristotle’s account of happiness seems to be fit, less for a human, than for a god.
However, Aristotle is the realist of ancient philosophy; his philosophy is a philosophy for the common man, though retaining some of the aspirations of Socrates and Plato. Those philosophers attempted to give an account of virtue that made the virtuous man self-sufficient and independent of circumstances, possessions, and fortune.
Aristotle recognizes the role external goods like possessions and wealth play. First, if you have external goods, there are good things you can do with them that the poor person cannot do. The philosopher Diogenes lived in a barrel; but even if one simply has a house, this makes possible expressions of hospitality and generosity Diogenes couldn’t perform. Greater wealth can be used even to embody distinct virtues, like “magnificence,” that others can’t practice.
Aristotle also explores the part fate or fortune plays in virtue. The philosopher wants happiness to be independent of fate or fortune. But there are levels of tragedy in one’s life - and even after one’s life, like one’s children dying and one’s line cut-off after one’s own peaceful death - that affect happiness. Now, Aristotle believes that the virtuous person will be strong in the face of such tragedy, but he cannot deny that this has an effect.
Therefore, Aristotle distinguishes a dimension of happiness which he calls “blessedness” from happiness in general. The ideal would be to live a life of activity in accord with virtue in a complete life and have Fate or the gods smile upon one and bless that with some measure of good fortune. But the virtuous person will retain happiness even in the face of tragedy; they may just be lacking in blessedness. Aristotle’s account of happiness and of virtue is demanding; but it is also realistic.
Thus far, Book 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Happiness is the purpose of human life. But this is not the happiness of money, honor, and pleasure; it is the happiness of a wise and virtuous individual who lives a life of activity in accord with virtue. He is not immune from the effect of external goods and circumstances, but he is not controlled by them either. In this, Aristotle is summing up the best of ancient Greek philosophy but also tying it down to earth. Aristotle’s account of happiness is something we can actually adopt as our own.
Joel Carini is a philosopher and Christian theologian, living with his wife and three children in St. Louis, MO. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Saint Louis University and writes a newsletter, "Nature and Grace," at JoelCarini.Substack.Com. He writes about how people of faith can benefit from secular wisdom and how the secular world can profit from biblical wisdom and revelation.