Eudaimonia
In The You On AI Encyclopedia
Aristotle opens the Nicomachean Ethics by asking what the good for human beings is — the goal at which all human activity aims. His answer, developed across the ten books, is eudaimonia: activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, sustained throughout a complete life, supplied with the external goods needed for its exercise.
The concept cuts against two modern tendencies. Against the view that the good life is a matter of subjective feeling, Aristotle insists that eudaimonia is objective — it consists in actually living well, whatever one may feel about it. Against the view that the good life is a sum of satisfactions, he insists that it is an activity with internal structure, shaped by the virtues and requiring the cultivation of character.
The achievement society that Byung-Chul Han diagnoses and that the Orange Pill engages represents a civilizational category error about eudaimonia. It has identified flourishing with output. It measures the good life by productivity. The AI transition intensifies this error by making productivity radically cheaper, and therefore making the error easier to commit at larger scales.
The Aristotelian corrective is not anti-productive. Practical activity is one of the primary modes through which eudaimonia is realized. But the activity must be guided by virtue and directed toward genuine goods, and the question of what counts as a genuine good is prior to, not reducible to, any measure of output. This is why the purpose question — what are we for? — cannot be outsourced to the machine that has made production cheap.
Origin
Aristotle's treatment of eudaimonia runs through the entire Nicomachean Ethics, with the definitive formulation in Book I, chapter 7: eudaimonia is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete.
Key Ideas
Activity, not feeling. Eudaimonia is something you do, sustained across a life, not a subjective state.
Virtue-structured. It requires the cultivation and exercise of the moral and intellectual virtues.
Prior to productivity. The question of what is worth producing is prior to the question of how much can be produced.
Complete and final. It is chosen for its own sake, not as a means to anything further.
Debates & Critiques
Modern critics from Nietzsche to Williams have questioned whether eudaimonia as Aristotle conceived it is available to beings who live in radically different social and institutional conditions. The answer depends on whether the framework is descriptive of a particular Greek social form or normative for human life as such — and Aristotelians have defended both readings.
Further Reading
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and X
- Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
- Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford University Press, 1991)
- Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1993)
- John Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Harvard University Press, 1975)