Happiness is an Activity | Nicomachean Ethics, Book I

Our read-along continues, now with some text from Aristotle. Politics and contemplation, the methodology of the Nicomachean Ethics, and teleological explanations of action.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and every choice, is held to aim at some good. Hence people have nobly declared that the good is that at which all things aim.

This is the opening salvo of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics — and for some of you, this might seem like a very odd way to start a book about ethics. Sure, we see some words we would expect: action, choice, aim, good. But all of this, really, seems a little bit abstract.

Aristotle seems to be aware of this, as throughout Book I he is very conscious of the methodology which he intends to employ throughout the work. He is in many ways setting the scene for the discussions of virtue, friendship, and the contemplative life which we will make up the bulk of the Nicomachean Ethics.

In this week’s post, I’m going to focus on a few major takeaways from Book I — some of these are sketches of Aristotle’s arguments, some of these are explanations of Aristotle’s methodology, and some are about what Aristotle is foreshadowing.

Note that Book I, while comprising 12 chapters, is not ordered in the most straightforward way. The same topic is addressed multiple times throughout the book, and so we’ll sometimes need to skip around the text as we discuss any one point.

Let’s start with Aristotle’s methodology.

Aristotle’s Methodology

Aristotle is a dialectical thinker. He begins with an idea, he challenges it and complicates it, and then he reaches a conclusion. This methodology is on display through Book I, but the specifics of his methodology are discussed mostly in Chapter 3.

I think there are three major methodological points we need to highlight.

Every inquiry has an appropriate standard

Nicomachean Ethics is a work of ethics, of moral philosophy. The subject matter is ethics, which is importantly different from other subject matters which Aristotle has been concerned with before (physics, logic, metaphysics, etc.) This means that the standard of precision we can expect in the work is different, and often lower, than what you would find in the sciences or in logic.

“It belongs to an educated person to seek out precision in each genus to the extent that the nature of the matter allows,” Aristotle says (I.3,1094b). The subject matter of geometry – a field held in especially high regard – allows for a level of precision which ethics does not. In ethics there is too much variability for that sort of precision. The inquiry would be adequately made, Aristotle says at the beginning of Chapter 3, is we attained whatever the appropriate level of clarity and rigor actually is.

This is something we will want to keep in mind throughout our reading. Sometimes we will not be able to get more precise, even if we’d like to. That’s just the reality of living outside of Plato’s Heaven.

Ethical inquiry requires experience, so the young struggle to do it well

Knowledge does not benefit you if you lack self-restraint (I.3,1095a). That is simply because, if you lack self-restraint, you are unable to act appropriately based on the knowledge you have.

The young and immature lack self-restraint, because they have not been able to develop that skill — namely, acting in accord with reason and not in accord with their passions. ‘Passions’ are a name for that part of our psychology that drives us to act — hunger, rage, sorrow, etc. It is a common classical thought, reflected in Greek thought and appropriated in later Christian thought too, that passions get in the way of right action. (It was the big Humean leap to claim that reason was always subordinate to the passions — classical writers think that reason can overcome the passions, though it is hard.)

Further, the young lack experience in the subject matter of the political art — which Aristotle at least briefly claims is the highest art, as it contains all others.

This is probably a good time to be reminded of our rule: Aristotle is always right. I remember when I first was told, as a first-year graduate student, that I needed to try and make sense of what Aristotle was saying — I bristled. But think through the argument here to see what he is saying. And note that being young is often a matter of years, but not always.

We must begin with what we know

Throughout Book I, and in fact throughout the entire text, Aristotle will use phrases like ‘The wise have said…’ or ‘It has been nobly declared…’. This is importantly different than ‘thus.’ We say ‘thus’ when we are marking a logical deduction or a sound inductive inference. ‘Thus’, essentially, means on the grounds of what we have said before, we conclude. That’s not what Aristotle is doing, at least not here.

Ethics requires a starting point. We need some conception of the good. We can’t start from scratch. Aristotle, admittedly, is an elitist, and so his starting point is with those who are considered wise, learned, and accomplished. He looks to them as a source of data from which he can build his theory. The technical term here is endoxa. We start with endoxa and then proceed dialectically to a result.

Finding the Good

Let’s return to that initial passage from Book I, Chapter 1:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and every choice, is held to aim at some good. Hence people have nobly declared that the good is that at which all things aim.

See what Aristotle is doing here: he is marking a leap in the inference with that phrase ‘Hence people have nobly declared.’ But he won’t stop there. He will go on to argue for a few claims:

1. That all actions aim at some good

2. That all actions aim ultimately at the good, which is a singular thing

3. That the good is happiness (eudaimonia)

4. That happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue

Let’s look at each of these claims.

All actions aim at some good

This claim is made at the very beginning of Book I, and it represents one of the key insights in Aristotle’s theory of ethics (and in fact human action). Aristotle speaks here of teleology. When we say that an action (or art, inquiry, etc.) aims at some good, we are speaking of its goal or its end.

Consider this question: Why did you kiss your wife? One answer is Because I love her. This is a perfectly reasonable explanation, and it is naturally read as a casual explanation. Because I love my wife, I kissed her. But you could also say To let her know I love her. That’s a goal-oriented explanation, and it is closer to what Aristotle means when he speaks of aiming at some good.

Arts, actions, inquiries, crafts — all aim at some good. The Ethics is peppered full of examples. Medicine aims at health, shipbuilding aims at ships, generalships at victory, and so on. We do not simply do things because of their causes; we do them in order to accomplish something, and in particular something good.

All actions aim at the good

Goods are arranged hierarchically according to Aristotle, and at the top of that hierarchy is some singular good. There needs to be some single good which sits atop the hierarchy, or else when we aim at some good we would never actually reach it — there would always be a further good to be preferred that we had not yet reached. A singular, final good provides a nice and elegant explanation for what we do and how we behave.

The good is happiness

But what is that good? Aristotle considers a few possibilities.

We might think that it is pleasure — this would be a hedonistic conception of the good life. But this reduces us to lives like fatted cattle, slaves to our desires. While some rich and powerful men, like Sardanapallus, boast of a lavish and pleasure-filled life, it does not seem like the best sort of life.

Note, though, that Aristotle is not anti-pleasure. He even has a higher conception of pleasure than the Stoics, which readers of Walking Away may be more familiar with. For Aristotle, pleasure is good. But it is a lesser good, only good insofar as it does not compromise our pursuit of higher goods, especially the goods of the soul.

Another option might be a life of honor. To be held in high regard is a very good thing, after all. But Aristotle notes that honor resides with those who bestow it, meaning it can be taken away from you. And thus this cannot be the ultimate good, as the ultimate good ought to be something which cannot be taken away easily. (Here we see a similar argument to the arguments concerning fortune in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.) So let’s look elsewhere.

Wealth, too, suffers from these problems. It is good, but easily lost.

Aristotle mentions other options – contemplation and virtue, notably – but the final answer is that the ultimate good is happiness.

How do we know it is happiness? Consider this passage from Chapter 7:

Happiness above all seems to be of this character, for we always choose it on account of itself and never on account of something else. Yet honor, pleasure, intellect, and every virtue we choose on their own account—for even if nothing resulted from them, we would choose each of them—but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, because we suppose that, through them, we will be happy. But nobody chooses happiness for the sake of these things, or, more generally, on account of anything else.

We know happiness is valued above all else because we choose other things in order to be happy, and we do not choose happiness in order to achieve other ends — we just value happiness.

Happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue

This, however, is not our usual conception of happiness. We moderns treat happiness a lot like pleasure, and this is not what Aristotle means. Happiness is instead a kind of life — you are flourishing and living well. We call this eudaimonia.

The final definition we get from Aristotle is that happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with virtue. This is important: it is not just virtue, but rather the activity of acting virtuously by one’s own will. To do that is to live well, to flourish, to be happy. And that is the end of human life.

By the end of Book I, Aristotle is setting us up for a prolonged discussion of virtue. These will need to be distinctively human, as we do not speak of virtue in general but rather virtue for the kind of being under discussion. Aristotle compares this to finding the ‘work’ of the human — what are human beings uniquely capable of? Find that, and describe a human doing it well, and we will be close to a description of virtue, and thus on our way to theory of happiness, and thus on our way to a theory of the best human life.

Political and Contemplative Lives

I want to note a tension we find early in the Nicomachean Ethics, which I flag just so you can think about it going forward. Two kinds of lives are mentioned favorably: the life of politics and the life of contemplation. Politics is an art which must coordinate all other arts, and so it is perhaps the highest art. But is it better to be a political beast or to live a life of contemplation? The contemplative life will be discussed more in Book VI — but keep an eye out for this tension, as it comes up a few times.

Street art in Krakow

Now let me ask you some questions to get the conversation started:

1. What struck you about this book? What was insightful, what was surprising, and what was difficult to understand?

2. How are you feeling about Aristotle’s style? I believe with some work it is quite readable, but even I can’t read it too much when I’m tired.

3. Which chapter of Book I was your favorite, and why was that?