In my previous post I began explaining why I’m calling the teachings of Jesus the “origins of altruism.”  Aren’t people naturally altruistic to some extent?  Didn’t ancient Greek (and then Roman) cultures – the context in which Christianity emerged — understand how we ought to behave to others, and insist people needed to be “good to others”?

I started to answer by discussing Aristotle (don’t worry, it’s not boring), and his point (if you have trouble buying this, read the post!) that what people *ultimately* want is not good friends and family, wealth, meaningful employment, material possessions, or a really good blog; in the end, all of these things are simply means to our ultimate desire, to be “happy.”

If Aristotle is right on this point (I happen to think he is), the clear implication is that we need, each of us, to figure out how we should live in the world, what we should do, and how we should be in order to attain that state of “happiness.”  Not in the simplistic, surface sense of being happy after having a nice dinner, or watching our team win the Superbowl, or being praised for doing a good job at work.  Those can indeed be happy moments, but a happy life is much broader and fuller than that.  It is not simply a sequence of random, periodic good experiences.  It instead comes when we feel content with who we are, what we have done, where our life is right now, and where it looks to be going.  That kind of “happy” is more like contented joy, a deep sense of well-being and self-satisfaction in the positive, not the egotistical way.

The Greek word for that kind of overall contented joy and life-satisfaction is eudaimonia.  Even though it is commonly used in Greek philosophical discourse, it is notoriously difficult to translate into English.  You’ll notice that it has the word daimon in it; that’s the Greek word behind our word “demon,” but it doesn’t mean demon in the sense we normally use it to refer to an evil being that invades a body and compels it to do nasty things.  A daimon in Greek thought was a divine spirit, a divinity at a lower level than the great gods of Mount Olympus, but one closer and more involved with us.  If you had a good “daimon” in your life it was a bit like having a “guardian angel.”

The first two letters of eu-daimonia mean “good” (as in “eulogy” – a “good word” that is spoken in memory of the deceased at a funeral.).  And so having eudaimonia literally means having a good divine spirit over and in your life – not necessarily an actual daimon/beneficent spirit, but a kind of inner peace and satisfaction.  The word is usually translated (as the least unsatisfactory option) “happiness,” but again this is not a reference to a fleeting emotion that strikes us on occasion.  It is a broad and pervasive sense of being well and doing well and feeling content and satisfied because of it.

The question raised by Aristotle and virtually all the Greek and Roman pagan moral philosophers after him Jesus, was:  How does a person attain eudaimonia? That is, what can fulfill this ultimate desire we all have for happiness/contentment/well-being?

As you might imagine, if you have ever dabbled in much philosophy, the answer is decidedly not going to be: “A house in Malibou.”

Aristotle himself stressed that no one can be “happy,” in the sense we’re using, in a chaotic and threatening environment.  Ultimate happiness requires a stable, secure world that promotes individual well-being.  This is where Aristotle’s historical and social context become particularly important.  He produced his writings in fourth-century BCE Athens, when, in that part of the world, there were no great empires or nation-states ruling huge tracts of land. Greece at the time was ruled by individual city-states. Each city had its own government, economy, military, culture, and so on.  Aristotle’s city, Athens, was in competition with other city-states in the region, especially Sparta, and within living memory the competition had involved a drawn out and disastrous war that ended in Athenian defeat (the Peloponnesian War).  Athens continued as a city, however, and social and civic identity for its citizens were found in that urban context. For Aristotle, only in a well-functioning city could the happy and enjoyable life be found, with security, opportunities for employment, public entertainments, and other good things of civilization.  Eudaimonia thus depended on life in the context of the Greek city.

The word for “city” in Greek is “polis.” In the century before Aristotle, Athens had been the birthplace of democracy, where free adult males established and enacted civic policies.  Aristotle considered such participation as fundamental to individual and social happiness – which is why he famously said, in a comment often misunderstood, that “man is a political creature.”   By this he did not mean that humans necessarily ought to run for high office or even, as I once thought, that people are always in negotiation with one another trying to acquire more individual power.  Instead, for Aristotle people (or at least “men”) are “political” creatures because they are members of the community of the polis and need to find their wellbeing in that context.

If happiness is the ultimate goodness, and if people are necessarily happy only in the context of the polis, the polis must be good to allow people to obtain happiness within it.  The polis needs to be run and populated by people who are good for the commonweal, that is, people who exhibit personality traits that promote the welfare of society, of others, and of themselves.  They must be the best humans they can be.  The key to a happy life is to figure out what that might be.

Aristotle points out that every kind of living being has qualities of excellence that distinguish it from other living beings: what makes a most excellent apple tree is not what makes a most excellent racehorse.  The function of the apple tree, for example, is to yield good fruit.  The truly excellent apple tree produces the most and best fruit.  The function of a racehorse is to run fast; the most excellent racehorse will therefore run the fastest.  Speed is not an excellence of apple trees and fruit-bearing is not an excellence of racehorses.

What then is the ultimate excellence of humans?  The word for “excellence” in Greek is aretē, a word that can also be translated “virtue.”  In our day, “virtue” often does not carry attractive connotations – it sounds a bit pious and unnaturally wholesome. Not so in antiquity.  The English word itself does not come from the Greek, but from the Latin, based on the word vir, which mean an “adult male” (think virile).  Thus “virtue” in the ancient context refers to the qualities that make a man – a “vir” —  the best man he can be.  A v­irtuous vir is the manliest man there could be.  For Aristotle’s city-state, that would be a man whose personality and actions promoted the wellness and happiness of the polis and of the individuals in it.

 

AND, again, what’s this got to do with Jesus and altruism?  Stay tuned for the next post.