The Analysis Of Aristotle's Use Of Eudaimonia

Aristotle said Eudaimonia is the excellent performance of the human ergon. Eudaimonia is roughly translated as happiness from Greek, but it is more than fleeting psychological gratification, which is today’s cultural understanding of happiness. Aristotle used Eudaimonia to describe human flourishing. Ergon, translated from Greek, means function. This function involves both what something does and how it does it. Spoons and forks both help us eat, but they do it in different ways. It would be extremely difficult to eat soup with a fork. Because they have different methods, they have different ergons. Aristotle believed the human ergon was more than the sum of the ergons of the body. The heart’s ergon is to pump blood, the spine’s ergon is to keep the body upright, etc. Living is the sum of these ergons. Aristotle believed the human ergon was more than life and could be found in how people live.
Aristotle argued the human ergon is related to what is uniquely human. Human uniqueness cannot be biological. Every DNA strand, regardless of species, is composed of the same four nucleotides. He concluded the distinction between humans and animals was the human ability to …show more content…
The universe can be examined with the assumption that humans are uniquely rational on Earth. Our solar system has three bodies with the potential for life: Earth, Mars, and Europa. Conservatively, every solar system has one body with life potential and 1% of those actually sustain life. There are more than 500 solar systems in the Milky Way Galaxy. In the universe, there are roughly 100 billion galaxies, which means 5x1013 solar systems. Therefore, there are 5x1011 bodies with life in the universe. Earth has around 8.74 million species, animals and plants. If that is rounded to 10 million, the odds of having a rational life form are .00001%. This means there are 50 thousand bodies with rational life in the