EUDAIMONIA · A LIFE GOING WELL
The closing essay: on a concept that may not be usable, and on what this collection has declined to carry forward.
Everything went right this year. The thing you were working toward happened, the people around you are well, and sitting in the garden in October you would say, if asked, that it is going well.
Aristotle’s position is that the question you just answered is not the one his word asks. Eudaimonia — usually translated happiness, and badly — is not a feeling and not a report about a period. It is an assessment of a whole life, and it cannot be made from inside a good October.
That is either the deepest thing in the book or an unusable concept, and the honest answer is that it is some of both.
The unit is the error, and it goes wrong both ways.
The commonest and the costliest. A difficult stretch produces a verdict about a life, made on a sample far too small, and the verdict changes what gets attempted next.
The reverse: the unit is always the week, so nothing is ever considered at the scale where it might be going wrong slowly. Some things only show up over a decade and are invisible at every shorter interval.
Essay two used the first half as a claim about evidence. Here it is a claim about assessment, and the two are the same claim seen from different ends.
A thing that is constituted over a long span cannot be read off a short one. That applies to what you are and to whether it is going well.
Solon is supposed to have said that you should call no one happy until they are dead, since fortune can still turn. Aristotle takes the saying up at Ethics I.10–11.
He accepts the point about scale but refuses the conclusion, because a claim that can only be made about the dead is useless to the living.
What he arrives at instead is that we can say a life is going well so far, with the assessment held provisionally and revisable. That is a more honest position than either the Solonic one or the modern one where every quarter gets a verdict.
Modern wellbeing research splits the territory in roughly Aristotle’s way. Hedonic measures concern pleasure and life satisfaction; eudaimonic measures concern meaning, autonomy, competence, relatedness and purpose.4
The honest report is that the distinction is cleaner in theory than in data. The two classes of measure correlate highly, factor analyses often fail to separate them, and there is a live argument about whether eudaimonic wellbeing is a distinct construct or a differently worded route to the same one.5
What does hold up is the scale point rather than the taxonomy. Life-satisfaction judgments are strongly affected by what is salient at the moment of asking, and the assessment you give in a good October is partly a report about October. Aristotle’s insistence on the long unit is a correction for a real measurement problem.
The closing essay gets the strongest objection in the collection.
The case against
If eudaimonia is only assessable over a complete life, then at no point while you are living can it tell you what to do. Aristotle’s provisional version helps a little and not much: a provisional assessment of a whole life is still an assessment of something you are inside.
There is a worse version of the problem. The concept is also demanding about external goods — Aristotle thought a life could be spoiled by sufficiently bad fortune, and he was honest that this makes flourishing partly a matter of luck. That is true and it means the concept ranks lives by circumstance, which is the same failure essay nine had to head off.
What survives is smaller: a change of unit, run occasionally. Ask about the decade rather than the season, once, and notice that the two answers differ. That is the whole usable residue and it is worth having.
A closing note about what has been refused, because a collection on Aristotle has an obligation here.
He defended natural slavery, holding that some people are suited by nature to be owned. He held that women possess the deliberative faculty but without authority, and that this justified their subordination. The virtues in this book were written for free adult male citizens of a Greek city, and the exclusions are argued for rather than assumed — which makes them harder to detach, not easier.
These are not incidental blemishes on an otherwise portable ethics. They run through the friendship books, through the account of who can possess practical wisdom, and through the portrait in essay eleven. A reader who takes the framework without them is taking something Aristotle did not write.
This collection has taken the psychology — habituation, calibration, the gap between judgment and action, the cost of self-control, the basis of relationships — and has said at each point where the frame will not carry. That is a slice rather than an account, and the slice is defensible only if the omission is stated.
The case against
Natural slavery is argued for in the Politics at length. The subordination of women is argued for, not assumed. The best friendship is available to a leisured male citizen class, and the contemplative life he ranks highest requires resources almost nobody had.
The repair available is not to update him silently. It is to take the mechanisms that do not depend on the exclusions — and to notice how many of the evaluative conclusions do.
When assessing how it is going, ask about the decade rather than the season. Once, deliberately.
Both answers are useful and they are answers to different questions. The season-sized one is about what is happening; the decade-sized one is about what has accumulated, and the second is invisible at every shorter interval.
And watch the direction of the error. Almost everybody makes life-sized judgments from season-sized information during bad stretches, and nobody does it during good ones, which is why the practice is worth running when things are difficult rather than when they are not.
The first essay in this collection asked what the work is for, ran Aristotle’s subtraction on it, and reported that his own answer does not hold. It seems right to come back and say what is left after twelve essays of taking his book apart.
What I keep is four distinctions, and they are all of the same kind: each one separates two things that arrive feeling like one thing.
An incident from a disposition — because a week is a sample, and reading a verdict off it is the most expensive small error available. A capacity from an instance — because one of those is safe and the other is informative, and it is obvious which people prefer. Doing a thing from what it costs to do it — because two people with identical records can be in entirely different conditions, and the record will never show it. And what a relationship feels like from what it rests on — because that one arrives four months after you leave, and knowing it in advance turns a recurring small grief into information.
None of those requires a function argument, a doctrine of the mean, or a theory of the good. They are distinctions, they are checkable, and I did not have them in this form before reading him.
What I do not keep is nearly everything the book is famous for. The function argument does not hold. The mean has no method. Practical wisdom is a name for the thing that is missing. The ranking of ease above effort converts circumstance into virtue. The great-souled man is a snob. And the framework was written to exclude most people alive, by argument rather than by oversight, which is the part that cannot be tidied away and which I have tried to say at each point rather than once at the end.
So: a fourth-century BC treatise, largely wrong about what a person is for, and containing four distinctions I now use most weeks. That is a strange thing to be able to say about a book, and it is the honest report.
And the closing instruction is one sentence long. When it is going badly, check the unit before you check yourself.
It is an assessment of a whole life, held provisionally, and it cannot be read off a good October. Life-satisfaction judgments are strongly affected by what is salient when you are asked.
The concept may not be usable — an assessment you cannot yet make cannot guide anything, and it ranks lives partly by luck. What survives is a change of unit: ask about the decade, especially when the season is bad.
Quotations are from the Nicomachean Ethics unless noted, cited by book, chapter and Bekker number, with renderings consulted from W. D. Ross (rev. Urmson), Terence Irwin and Roger Crisp; where a line is condensed it is marked “after Aristotle”. The text is very probably lecture material, compiled and edited rather than written for publication, which is part of why it reads the way it does. Modern research is cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.