Thesis 1:
The Relationship Between Pleasure and Happiness in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposes to consider the question of how people should go about ordering their lives so that they can be confident of living their lives to the very best that they can. Although this question was raised and considered in some depth by his philosophical predecessors Socrates and Plato, Aristotle was the first of the Greek philosophers to address the question of how to live a ‘good life’ in a truly systematic manner. According to Aristotle, the goal of all life is happiness and therefore the goal of all ethical inquiry, such as that undertaken in the Nicomachean Ethics, is to determine just what happiness is and just …show more content…
In this regard, Aristotle writes, “But about happiness – what it is – they are in dispute, and most people do not give the same account of it as the wise. Some people take it to be something visible and obvious, such as pleasure or wealth or honor . . .” (I.4). Aristotle ultimately rejects accounts of happiness as pleasure, largely on the grounds that such accounts paint happiness as being a state of possessing something which can theoretically be lost through external circumstances beyond the control of the individual. However, Aristotelian happiness is not unrelated to pleasure either. Rather, we will see that happiness is importantly related to pleasure and pain alike, both in that the virtuous person comes to desire and find satisfaction in acting virtuously, and in the sense that many …show more content…
Towards the conclusion of the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics and in summation of the preceding discussion of eudaimonia or ‘happiness,’ Aristotle indicates this close relationship in his definition of the elusive but all-important concept of happiness: “the human good [happiness] comes to be disclosed as a being-at-work of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if the virtues are more than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue” (I.7). Following his usual method of defining a thing through disclosing its genus and species, Aristotle defines happiness as a kind of ‘being-at-work’ that is uniquely characterized with respect to other possible being-at-works in that this particular being-at-work is specifically aligned with virtuous action. By being-at-work, Aristotle refers to not to a particular state of being, which can vary from being happy to being sad to being healthy to being unhealthy, but instead to the way in which a particular individual comes to move from one state of being to another. Therefore, Aristotelian happiness is more intrinsically concerned with how one goes about dealing with the reality of one existing in a particular state of being than it is with privileging and achieving one particular state of being over and against
The Relationship Between Pleasure and Happiness in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposes to consider the question of how people should go about ordering their lives so that they can be confident of living their lives to the very best that they can. Although this question was raised and considered in some depth by his philosophical predecessors Socrates and Plato, Aristotle was the first of the Greek philosophers to address the question of how to live a ‘good life’ in a truly systematic manner. According to Aristotle, the goal of all life is happiness and therefore the goal of all ethical inquiry, such as that undertaken in the Nicomachean Ethics, is to determine just what happiness is and just …show more content…
In this regard, Aristotle writes, “But about happiness – what it is – they are in dispute, and most people do not give the same account of it as the wise. Some people take it to be something visible and obvious, such as pleasure or wealth or honor . . .” (I.4). Aristotle ultimately rejects accounts of happiness as pleasure, largely on the grounds that such accounts paint happiness as being a state of possessing something which can theoretically be lost through external circumstances beyond the control of the individual. However, Aristotelian happiness is not unrelated to pleasure either. Rather, we will see that happiness is importantly related to pleasure and pain alike, both in that the virtuous person comes to desire and find satisfaction in acting virtuously, and in the sense that many …show more content…
Towards the conclusion of the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics and in summation of the preceding discussion of eudaimonia or ‘happiness,’ Aristotle indicates this close relationship in his definition of the elusive but all-important concept of happiness: “the human good [happiness] comes to be disclosed as a being-at-work of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if the virtues are more than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue” (I.7). Following his usual method of defining a thing through disclosing its genus and species, Aristotle defines happiness as a kind of ‘being-at-work’ that is uniquely characterized with respect to other possible being-at-works in that this particular being-at-work is specifically aligned with virtuous action. By being-at-work, Aristotle refers to not to a particular state of being, which can vary from being happy to being sad to being healthy to being unhealthy, but instead to the way in which a particular individual comes to move from one state of being to another. Therefore, Aristotelian happiness is more intrinsically concerned with how one goes about dealing with the reality of one existing in a particular state of being than it is with privileging and achieving one particular state of being over and against