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According to Aristotle, the goal of anyone who is not simply stupid or slavish is to live a worthwhile life. There are, no doubt, people who have no goal at all beyond the moment's pleasure or release from pain. There may be people incapable of reaching any reasoned decision about what to do, and acting on it. But anyone who asks how she should live implicitly agrees that her goal is to live well, to live a life that she can think worth living. That goal, eudaimonia, is something that is sought for its own sake, and for nothing else. Anyone who asks herself how she should live can answer that she should live well. The answer, admittedly, needs further comment. Aristotle went on to suggest that ‘living well’ amounted to living in accordance with virtue, or if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. Eudaimonia, happiness, is virtuous activity over a whole life. To live a worthwhile life we must acquire and practice habits of doing the right thing, for the right reason. Equivalently, we must do what a virtuous person would, and in the way she would, for the sake of to kalon, or beauty.
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References
1 Aristotle: Eudemian Ethics, 1.1214b7ff.
2 See Clark, 1985
3 Weil, 1959, 128Google Scholar
4 Aristotle, Politics, 7.1323b26f.
5 Ibid., 1.1243a27ff.
6 Ibid., 7.1323a27ff
7 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.1107a8ff.
8 Ibid., 1.1097b16ff.
9 Dunne, 1965, 113,122.
10 Aristotle, Ibid., 9.1169b8f.
11 Ibid., 1.1094a6ff.; see 1.1102a7ff.
12 And so can't ever be eudaimones: Ibid. 1099b32f, 10.1177a8ff.
13 Ibid., 10.1177b9ff.
14 W. Blake, ‘The Human Abstract’, in Blake (1966). See also ‘America’ 11.1 Off., Ibid. p. 200: ‘pity is become a trade, and generosity a science / that men get rich by’.
15 Aristotle, Ibid., 6.1144a3F
16 Aristotle, Politics, 7.1324a13ff.
17 Fragment cited in Burnet, 1900, 287n (see also ps-Aristotle, Magna Moralia, 1198b9ff.), from a scholiast.
18 ‘According to Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.1177a21f.) even the absolute Good can be a “bore"’ (Zaehner, 1974, 163)! This is admittedly a slightly dubious interpretation of the text. Aristotle elsewhere insists that we can ‘theorize’ with fewer breaks than we can do anything else (Nicomachean Ethics) 10.1177a21f.).
19 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10.1177b31ff., after Plato, Timeaus 89e.
20 The two claims are rarely put as bluntly, and as contradictorily, as that, but what else can be meant?
21 See Clark (1992).
22 Blish was well aware of the background to this debate.
23 See Clark, 1990, lOOff.
24 Plato, Republic, 1.329.
25 G. B. Shaw, 22 May 1900 (Wynne-Tyson, 1985, 327). Strictly they might also teach us things that, in the abstract, are legitimate, but Shaw was right to believe that means condition ends.
26 Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.1072a31ff.
27 Aristotle, Protrepticus, fr. 11: see Chroust, 1964, 9. The convenient idea that this is a piece of juvenile Platonism seems to me to be unwarranted.
28 See Clark 1992.
29 Aristotle (1972), De Partibus Animalium, p. 118 (see p. 123: ‘possibly a polite euphemism for “visiting the lavatory”’ which is also a euphemism).
30 Bernard was the father of modern physiology, and an unrepentant vivisector who conducted many of his brutal experiments on dogs immobilized with curare.
31 J. Keats, ‘Lamia’, II, 229ff (Keats, 1956, 176f.).
32 Chandrasekhar (1987, 52) quoting Freeman Dyson's quotation of Weyl. Compare Dostoyevsky's preference for Christ over the true, or the probably true, in Letter to Family and Friends (Dostoyevsky, 1962, 71).
33 M. Mothersill (1984, 125ff.) discusses Fibonacci and the Golden Section, unsympathetically.
34 See Chesterton, 1961, p. 39.
35 See Roth, 1969, 215f: James realizes the conflict, and attempts some resolution.
36 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 9.1170a2ff.
37 See McGhee(1993).
38 See Sircello, 1985, 81 ff.
39 Aristotle, Politics, 7.1332a20f.
40 See Clark (1993).