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Aristotle's Niconmachean Ethics

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Aristotle's Niconmachean Ethics
In Books 9-11 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle works to segregate the explanations of happiness as a result of fortune and happiness as a result of virtuous actions. However, after he reaches an ideologically pure explanation, he quickly pivots backwards, settling on an explanation that incorporates elements of both theories. This allows posthumous events to affect one’s state of happiness, impacts his definition of happiness, and exemplifies the text’s ideological inclusion.
Before we can delve into the puzzle of postmortem proceedings affecting happiness, it is important to understand the debate in Book 9 that sets up this puzzle. In Book 9 Aristotle debates how humans achieve happiness. He presents us with a false dichotomy. One possibility …show more content…
He states that if happiness comes from human cultivation, it can be easily shared and almost everybody could be able to achieve it. This is the basis for his strong belief that this is a better way to receive happiness. At one point he even writes, “it would be seriously inappropriate to entrust what is greatest and finest to fortune.” Citing this strong preference for human agency based happiness, Aristotle declares that this is how humans achieve happiness. He then remarks that this explanation dovetails well with the definition of happiness – the activity of the soul expressing virtue, with necessary and useful goods - he put forward earlier. In turn, since happiness depends on the virtue, which needs to be cultivated, teaching citizens virtue (political science) must be the best good. So this line of reasoning bolsters his conclusion that political science is the best …show more content…
He asserts that this reasoning leads to a conception of the, “happy person as a kind of chameleon insecurely based.” Aristotle rejects this notion because he believes that doing well or badly rests not on the swings of fortune but rather human activities. He writes that, “activities expressing virtue … control happiness, and the contrary activities control its contrary.” He then contrasts the constantly wavering fortune based happy person with virtuous acts themselves. He believes that virtuous acts are good because they represent some measure of the eternal divine. Aristotle believes that it is virtuous acts’ eternality that causes them to be remembered by so many people. This is a very significant point because from this point he deducts one of the defining characteristics of a happy person: “that the happy person has the [stability] we are looking for and keeps his character throughout his life.” He then expounds on the implications of this characteristic in writing “small strokes of good or ill fortune clearly will not influence his life.” On the other hand, large stokes of fortune will add “adornments” making his life more “blessed” and large strokes of misfortune will impede his blessedness. However, Aristotle quickly makes it clear that these strokes of fortune will not alter a
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