Lear : Happy Lives and the Highest Good

University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. 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 (kalô 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 object 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. In NE I.4–5 Aristotle considers whether lives characterized by the pursuit of pleasure 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 …