Christopher Rush

Happiness in Aristotle’s day was as elusive an idea to define as it is for people today.  Aristotle surveys a variety of potential concepts early in Nicomachean Ethics: both commoners and nobles “identify living well and doing well with being happy” (1095a.19), but few could ascertain its true nature, as “some identify happiness with good fortune, though others identify it with virtue” (1099b.5-9), “some with practical wisdom, others with a kind of philosophic wisdom” (1998b.24).  The source of happiness is also unclear: people ask “whether happiness is to be acquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training, or comes in virtue of some divine providence or again by chance” (1099b.9-11).  Aristotle effectively eschews the discussion of the source of happiness, assenting to its potentially divine origin as the best gift from the gods (1099b.10-14), focusing instead on a thorough understanding of the nature of happiness.

As ever concerned with purpose, Aristotle begins his definition of happiness by declaring “[h]appiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action” (1097b.21).  It is that final thought, the “end of action,” that is especially important.  For Aristotle, happiness “does not lie in amusement” (1176b.25-34), which is temporary and ofttimes accidental. Rather, “happiness is activity in accordance with virtue” (1177a.10-14), a virtue available only to certain kinds of people.

Young people are not truly happy (1100a.1-4), since they are too young to know how to live a life of consistent virtue.  On the other end of the spectrum, dead people are not happy either, since “happiness is an activity” (1100a.10-14), and dead people in Aristotle’s view are, at best, inactive.  Animals are likewise not capable of happiness, “for none of them is capable of sharing in such activity” (1099b.30-34), the “activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue” (1102a.5).  Servants are also not capable of attaining Aristotelian happiness: they assuredly have souls and are neither young nor dead, and while they may be capable of virtue, according to Aristotle they lack the final necessary ingredient for authentic happiness: free time.  “And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure” (1177b.4-5).  He says further, “Happiness extends, then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy …. Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation” (1178b.25-34).  Surely the servant class in Aristotle’s day did not have leisure time for contemplation.  (It is unlikely, however, that servants took much comfort from Aristotle’s later declaration that true happiness comes not from being materially prosperous but from possessing wisdom and virtue, cf. Politics, book 7, chapter 1.) Little wonder, then, that happiness’s source and nature were so inscrutable, since neither the young nor dead nor beast nor servant could be accurately deemed “happy.”