Aristotle is one of the brightest thinkers in the history of western philosophy. He was a student of Plato and the teacher of Alexander the Great. His works in ethics, political theory, metaphysics, and philosophy of nature were immensely influential and essential for his ancestors.
The «Nicomachean Ethics» is supposed the most influential work of Aristotle. The first book of the «Ethics» is dedicated to a theory of happiness. There Aristotle points out that majority of people identifies happiness with pleasure, «which is the reason why they love the life of enjoyment»1
. However, a pursuit neither of pleasure nor of wealth should become an aim of humanity. On the contrary, for Aristotle happiness is virtue activity which means that in order
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This statement might seem ridiculous: if eudaimonia could be gained by virtuous activity, why then lacking some other types of goods should have impact on one`s happiness?
In response to this question, Aristotle emphasizes that lack of other goods leads to a diminution of virtuous activity. As it is stated in the 10th chapter of the «Ethics», person is happy when he «lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life» 3
. What is more, happiness, from Aristotle`s point of view, means a final end.
Only at the end of the life one can find out, whether was the life happy or not.
Happiness is a long-lasting process of living in accordance with virtues. Grounding both on the information above and on Aristotle`s definition of happiness in the 7th chapter of the «Nicomachean Ethics», I can say that for human happiness it is necessary to live rationally and that eudaimonia is there where the soul acts in accordance with virtue4
.
In the paragraph above a lot was said about the importance of a virtue. Now it is essential to outline that Aristotle divides virtue into intellectual and
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The History of Western Philosophy – New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945. p.173
6 The Internet Classics Archive: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html
7
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/ are examples of moral virtue, while practical and theoretical wisdom illustrates intellectual virtues.
In the first book Aristotle distinguishes three types of life: the life of pleasure, the life of politics, and the life of philosopher. In the last book of the Ethics he describes each type of life more fully. The life of pleasure loses to other types of life due to its vulgarity. In the 6th chapter of the book X Aristotle writes that «we choose [pleasant amusements] not for the sake of other things; for we are injured rather than benefited by them, since we are led to neglect our bodies and our property»