HAPPINESS

Aristotle (384–322 BC): ‘Happiness is the highest good, being a realisation and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it.’

The term “polymath” is often used in a somewhat hyperbolic sense to describe a significant figure who excels in several different disciplines. In modern parlance, for example, a sportsperson who writes a newspaper column, has an interest in current affairs and wins a televised ballroom-dancing competition is often erroneously described as being a polymath.

The sheer range and depth of Aristotle’s contribution to Western philosophy cannot be underestimated. Aristotle wrote on subjects as varied as physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology, while still finding the time to study under Plato, found his own academy – the Lyceum – and act as a private tutor to the young Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s main contribution to philosophy concerns his work on the study of formal logic, collected together in a series of texts known as The Organon, and the use of “syllogisms” in deductive reasoning. In basic terms, a syllogism is a method for arriving at a conclusion through constructing a three-step series of premises, usually a major premise, A, followed by a minor premise, B, via which it is possible to deduce a proposition, C.

    For example:

    Major premise: All men are mortal.

    Minor premise: Socrates is a man.

    Conclusion/proposition: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

In order for step C to be a viable logical proposition, step A and step B must be true.

Aristotle is often credited with “inventing” the form, although in truth he was probably just one of the first people to explore formal logic in this manner, especially the way in which logic must proceed to avoid fallacies and false knowledge. Aristotle’s systematic approach to all of the disciplines to which he turned his enquiring mind displayed a love of classification and definition, and it is possible that where words did not exist for a philosophical phenomenon, Aristotle simply made them up.

The quote at the beginning of this article about “happiness is the highest good” comes from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a series of ten scrolls believed to be based on notes taken from his lectures at the Lyceum. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle addresses the question of what constitutes a good and virtuous life. Aristotle equates the concept of happiness with the Greek word eudaimonia, although this is not happiness in an abstract or hedonistic sense, but rather “excellence” and “well-being”. To live well, then, is to aim at doing good or the best one can, for every human activity has an outcome or cause, the good at which it aims to achieve. If humans strive to be happy, the highest good should be the aim of all actions, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

In this regard, Aristotle saw the pursuit of happiness as “being a realisation and perfect practice of virtue”, which could be achieved by applying reason and intellect to control one’s desires. In his view, the satisfaction of desires and the acquisition of material goods are less important than the achievement of virtue. A happy person will apply conformity and moderation to achieve a natural and appropriate balance between reason and desire, as virtue itself should be its own reward. True happiness can therefore be attained only through the cultivation of the virtues that make a human life complete. Aristotle also pointed out that the exercise of perfect virtue should be consistent throughout a person’s life: “To be happy takes a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring.”

The Nicomachean Ethics is widely considered to have had a profound effect on the development of Christian theology in the Middle Ages, largely through the work of Thomas Aquinas, who produced several important studies of Aristotle that synthesised his ideas with doctrines concerning cardinal virtues. Similarly, Aristotle’s works also had an important role to play in early Islamic philosophy, where Aristotle was revered as “The First Teacher”.