Loading...I’ve been discussing Aristotle (really, it’s interesting!) and what he thought it took to be “happy” – not the giddy fleeting emotion but have a satisfying sense of contentment and fulfillment in life. For him, it means having the most “excellent” life you can and that requires being the most “excellent” person you can and that means having full amounts of the various kinds of human “excellences.” In English translations of Aristotle, “excellences” are usually rendered “virtues” (that’s because our English equivalent of the Greek word he uses comes to us from Latin rather than the Greek, and the word “VIR” in Latin means “man.” The excellences of a VIR are his VIRtues).
For Aristotle, “virtues” require a good life in community with others. So the virtues involved how to make life good in the socio-political context one inhabits, which for Aristotle was the “polis” – the Greek term for the city (since there were not empires or national governments connected with Greece; it was ruled city states). And that means that
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The first thing this post made me think of is this: i went through 14 years of mandatory school in my life, they would teach us all sorts of things: chemistry, physics, geometry, geography, you name it, the list goes endless . And yet: no teaching of how to be behave with other fellow humans. Nobody taught us how to love one another, not to be greedy, not be to violent, not be to selfish, not to be lazy…they would teach us in Italy what it’s like the morphology of the land in America but not one word of how to respect the teachers or parents or the authorities. We would know when Dante Alighieri was born but not one word of the sermon on the mount of Jesus! We used to have one hour of religion a week and it was NOT mandatory!
Why? How come we are not taught in schools for years and years,along with the other subjects, on how to be with our fellow humans??
It’s very inspiring to know of Aristotle and Jesus teachings (and not just them), i think they are very needed at all times but especially in our time
In the Athenian democracy women and slaves were excluded from the governance process, and since slaves made up 80% this only left 10% that had a say in how things were run. It’s an age old problem of two tier systems where different laws apply to those inside and outside of the in-group. The Jews dealt with this problem by considering only Jews to be part of the in-group. Jesus came along with the parable of the good Samaritan and challenged that assumption.
Where did you get the figure that slaves made up 80 percent of the Athenian population? The usual estimate is more like 25 percent (one in four residents). Deducting freeborn women, children, and metics (i.e., resident foreigners), you’re right that that leaves only a small percentage of voting adult male citizens; but 80 percent slaves seems like a real over-estimate to me.
Is helping a circle of kin and friends truly altruism, or just an enlarged sense of self?
Completely depends on circumstances.
I’m always skeptical about claims that someone (or some culture) invented basic instincts, I confess. Altruism toward kith and kin is not only almost universal among human societies, but demonstrable in many animals (children, allies). I doubt we know when it first extended beyond tribal boundaries, which is much less common. Ancient Judaism has rules for kind treatment of strangers. Hunter-gatherer societies are sometimes the same (the pygmies of the Ituru Forest, Inuits). Jesus “flips the script,” (love enemies, hate kin) – but so, in prototype, does Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, and 56:3-8. Note the sociological parallels: Isaiah envisions a Jewish empire; Paul and the Gospels envision an empire that worships Yahweh, for everyone in the kosmos (the oikumene, Mt.24:14 et passim). That intention is dramatically signaled, I think, in the buying of the potter’s field (Mt. 27:9-10; cp. Jer. 18, Zech. 11-12, but esp. the purchase of the cave at Machpelah by Abraham (Gen. 23) as a burial-ground for the ancestors of Israel – i.e., the claiming of a home-land. (The Potter’s field was illegally purchased *for foreigners* with blood-money by the Temple priests. I think the symbolism is stark.)
It’s arguable that by “eudaimonia” Aristotle wasn’t referring to an *emotion* at all (and as you say, certainly not the “giddy, fleeting” one that we mean by “happiness”!)
A frequently-suggested translation for eudaimonia in Aristotle is “flourishing”, which implies much more than an internal emotional state. For Aristotle, feeling a “satisfying sense of contentment and fulfillment” might be PART of eudaimonia, but it would not be sufficient in itself for eudaimonia — a dirt-poor farmer who was content with his lot would not be considered an example of eudaimonia, I think, because he would not be considered “flourishing,” no matter how content he was. It’s a rather slippery concept for us because we don’t really have an equivalent term, one that focuses on your perception of your state of mind *and* on your objective position in life *and* on your interactions with your community.
Side note: when Jefferson listed our inalienable rights as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he was almost certainly talking about something close to eudaimonia — the pursuit of a truly virtuous and flourishing life, NOT the pursuit of the emotional state that we now mean by “happiness. “