The Eudemian Ethics of Aristotle

Peter L. P. Simpson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Among the works on ethics in the Aristotelian corpus, there is no serious dispute among scholars that the Eudemian Ethics is authentic. The Eudemian Ethics is increasingly read and used by scholars as a useful support and confirmation and sometimes contrast to the Nicomachean Ethics. Yet, it remains a largely neglected work in the study of Aristotle's ethics, both among scholars and moral philosophers.

Peter L. P. Simpson provides an analytical outline of the entire work together with summaries of each individual section, making the overall structure and detailed argument clear. His translation and explanatory notes include the common books that the Eudemian Ethics shares with the Nicomachean. This translation contains renderings of words and phrases, and proposals for emending the text that differ from what other translators and scholars have adopted.

This translation is literal, without expansion or paraphrase, and yet also readable. A readable but literal translation is necessary because in the Eudemian Ethics, more than usual in Aristotle's writings, the logic of the argumentation can turn on the peculiar wording or order. Simpson explains the argumentation where necessary in notes and separate explanatory comments. This book is a fresh, twenty-first-century rendition of the work of one of the most eminent philosophers of all time.

TRANSLATION OF THE EUDEMIAN ETHICS

Book One: The Science of Happiness

Chapter 1

Introduction to the Science

Worth, Nature, and Questions of This Science. Thepleasantest and the noblest and the best are not three things but one thing: happiness. The study of happiness is about getting it and requires asking what it isfound in and how it is acquired: whether it is acquired by nature or learning or practice or divine inspiration or luck, and whether it is found in prudence or virtue or pleasure or all three.

The man who in Delos before the god gave out his opinion wrote it down on 1214a1 the propylaeum of the temple to Leto’s son, setting apart, as not all being found in the same thing, the good and the noble and the pleasant, in these lines:

What’s justest is noblest; healthy is best;a5

Most pleasant of all, love’s object possest,¹

but we do not go along with him. For happiness, which is noblest and best of all, is most pleasant.

Of the many theoretical studies that have something puzzling about them 1214a8 and need examination as regards each thing and each nature, some tend only to knowledge but others deal with getting and doing the thing. As regards what is matter merely for theoretical philosophizing, then, we must discuss what is proper to the study when the right time arrives.²

First, however, we must examine what living well is found in and how it is 1214a14 acquired, whether it is by nature that those who happen to be called happy all become happy (as is the case with those who are big or small or stand out in complexion), or by learning, supposing there to be a science of happiness, or by some kind of exercise (for human beings get many things neither in a20 accord with nature nor by learning but by habituation—base things by base habituation and good by good). Or whether it is in none of these ways but in one or other of the following two, either as people are smitten by nymphs and gods—being enthused by the inspiration of some spirit³—or by chance (for there are many who say that happiness and good luck are the same thing). a25 That its presence among men is in all or several or one of these ways is not obscure. For all comings to be fall more or less under these principles (for even all doings of thought might be brought together under those of science).

Being happy and living blessedly would be found mainly in the three 1214a30 things that seem most worth preferring. For some say that the greatest good is prudence, others virtue, and others pleasure. There are also those a34 who argue about the weight these have for happiness, asserting that one or other of them contributes more, prudence being a greater good than virtue for some, virtue than prudence for others, pleasure than both for others. b5 Further, some think happy living comes from all three, others from two, others from some one of them.

Notes

1. Theognis 255.

2. Probably not a reference to anything done within the EE but to what the gentleman does in worshipping and contemplating the god; see 8.3 below. Hence “first” in the next line does not mean “first of the things to be done in this treatise” but “first before the right time arrives for theoretical study.”

3. The Greek is daimon.

Chapter 2

Review of Others’ Opinions

Reason for Disputed Opinions about Happiness. All who are able to choose how to live set up some target of living nobly, as honor or repute or wealth or education. But there is a difference between what living well consists in and what it cannot exist without, and it is this that leads to dispute about what happiness is.

1214b6 So setting in place that with respect to these things everyone who can live by his own deliberate choice sets up some target of noble living, whether honor or repute or wealth or education, by turning to look at which he will do b10 all that he does (on the supposition that it is a sign of much folly not to order one’s life in view of a goal); we must first most of all define within ourself, and not in haste or lightly, which one of the things that are ours living well consists in and which ones it cannot exist among men without. For health b15 and that which health cannot exist without are not the same. This holds in like manner of many other things too, so that neither is living nobly the same as what it is impossible to live nobly without.

1214b17 Among such things some are not private to health nor to life but are, so to say, common to all states and actions (as that without share of breathing or b20 waking or moving, we would have nothing good or bad at all); others of them, which should not be overlooked, are private rather to a particular nature in each case (for eating meat and walks after meals are not related to a good bodily state in the same way as what has just been said). For it is these things that cause dispute about what being happy is and what it comes to be from, since some b25 think that what it is impossible to be happy without are parts of happiness.

Chapter 3

Which Opinions to Consider. The opinions of children or the ill or the insane are not worth examining, nor should the opinions of the many alone be focused on. But the puzzles proper to the highest way of life and opinions about them do need discussion, to show by refutation of the opposite what is true, and to determine what hope there is of acquiring happiness, whether it is a matter of chance or nature or of one’s own effort.

Now to examine all the opinions that someone or other has had about 1214b28 happiness is to overdo things, for there is much that appears even to small children and to the ill and to the insane that no one with any sense would puzzle over (for it is not words that these need but time to develop in the one case and medical or political punishment in the others; for medication is punishment no less than a beating). In like manner with these, neither b34 should the opinions of the many (for it is they who speak at random about almost everything, and especially so) be “searched into about” alone.¹ For it is absurd to bring reason to bear on those who need not reason but suffering.

Since, though, each undertaking has its own puzzles proper to it, plainly 1215a3 the greatest way of living and the best life must have them too. So to put these opinions to the test is a noble thing, for the refutations of disputants are proofs of the statements that oppose them. Not to let such things escape notice is worth the effort, especially in regard to what all investigation should aim at (what the sources are for being able to share in living nobly and well—if the a10 term blest living is rather invidious to use), and in regard to what hope there might be about each of the decent things.

For if living nobly depends on what happens by chance or nature, then most 1215a12 people would have no hope of it (for it is not got hold of by care or by what is up to them or by their own undertaking). But if it rests on what oneself and one’s deeds are like, then the good would be a thing more common and more a15 divine—more common because something more people can share in, and more divine because laying down happiness for those who make themselves and their deeds to be of a certain sort.

Note

1. Following the Bekker text but putting a parenthesis and not a stop after tas tonpollon (the [sc. opinions] of the many) at 1214a34, and closing the parenthesis after malista (most of all) at 1215a1 (cf. the similar position of kai malista at 7.10.1242a7). Taking also the peri (about) that immediately follows malista as going with episkepteon (should . . . be searched into) to form the nonce word periepiskepteon and so regarding monas (alone) as in agreement with the object tas (the [sc. opinions]), thus giving the sense “should the opinions . . . be ‘searched into about’ alone.” The sentence is sarcastic in tone, and the suggestions here of how to construe it merely serve to heighten the sarcasm, both by the word order (the “most of all” and the “alone” are put, for emphasis, at the end of their respective clauses), and by the nonce word, which, if correct, will be so clearly made up for the occasion that we should perhaps exploit current English usage and put it in scare quotes. Aristotle’s barb is aimed at sophists and rhetoricians and demagogic politicians who, to curry favor with their audience, put all their energy and ingenuity into repeated examinations (hence the periepi in periepiskepteon) and approvals of only popular opinions, which, since the many are most of all guilty of speaking about everything at random, is as silly as examining only the opinions of children or the ill or the insane.

Chapter 4

Summary of Opinions. Disputes will be clear if it is determined whether happiness is a matter of the soul being of a certain sort or the deeds too. The ways of life people pursue are either those that are concerned with necessities, as the vulgar and mechanical arts and business; or those that are concerned with leisured pastime, as the lives of philosophy and politics, which are about truth and virtue; or the life of indulgence, which is about bodily pleasure and is unable to conceive how the other lives can be happy (as a story about Anaxagoras shows).

1215a20 Most of the disputes and puzzles will be clear if there be given a noble definition of what one should think happiness to be, whether it is in only being of a certain sort in one’s soul, as some of the sages and elders thought, or whether one must both be oneself of a certain sort but, more, one’s deeds must be of a certain sort.

1215a25 Since ways of life fall into groups, and since some of these lay claim to being that kind of good time but are pursued as if for the sake of necessities—such as are those that are about the vulgar arts and business and the mechanical arts (I mean by vulgar arts those that people carry on just for glory, by a30 mechanical arts those that are sedentary and for pay, and by arts of business those that relate to the market and to sales by trading)—while others of them are drawn up with a view to a happiness of cultured pursuits¹ and are three in number (those goods that were also said before to be the greatest possible for men, virtue and prudence and pleasure);² we see that in fact there are three a35 ways of life that those who happen to be in power³ all choose to live: the life of politics, the life of philosophy, the life of indulgence.

Of these ways that of philosophy means to be about prudence and the study 1215b1 of truth; that of politics about noble deeds (these are the ones that come from virtue); that of indulgence about the pleasures of the body (which is why it b5 gives the name happy to someone else, as was also said earlier).⁴ Anaxagoras of Clazomenae,⁵ when asked who was happiest, said, “None of those you are thinking of, but he would look to you an odd sort of fellow.” Anaxagoras answered in this way because he saw his questioner was unable to conceive b10 that it was not someone great and noble or rich who happens to have this title. He himself, though, perhaps thought that one who lived without pain and was pure as to justice or who shared in some divine contemplation, that this man, humanly speaking, was blest.

Notes

1. The Greek is diagoge, which can also carry the idea of a leisure spent in cultured pursuits, as it does particularly in Politics 5(8).

2. 1.1.1214a30–33.

3. The Greek at 1215a35 is exousia, which carries the meaning also of right and opportunity and even resources.

4. That is, to someone else other than the one held to be happy by the first two, namely to one who indulges in pleasure and not to one endowed with virtue. The reference back is to the opening quotation in the first chapter, 1.1.1214a1–6, and also to the end of that chapter, 1214a30–b6.

5. The famous Pre-Socratic philosopher, 500–428 BC, and f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• title Page
• copy Page
• Content
• Introduction
• Analytical Outline
• Translation of the Eudemian Ethics
• Commentary on the Eudemian Ethics
• Bibliography
• Index