Polling Opinions and Setting Out Puzzles: NE 1.5

Aristotle distills people’s opinions about eudaimonia into four general categories and points out the shortcomings of three of them (NE 1.5). Aristotle’s now lost Protrepticus illustrates a similar choice of lives via the different kinds of people who attend the Olympic Games: some to make money, some to compete for glory, and some simply to watch the spectacle.³ The NE version lacks these narrative details. The text we have is more or less lecture notes, so perhaps Aristotle added them on the fly. In any event, as is often the case with Aristotle, his line of thought is easily captured in a table (see table 4).

English speakers often think of happiness as a feeling. Aristotle’s word for this is “pleasure” (hēdonē). It might be that happiness (eudaimonia) does ultimately consist in pleasure (hēdonē). The somewhat later philosopher, Epicurus, thought so and worked out an elaborate hedonist theory. Aristotle calls this a life “fit for cows.” In this, he is not merely being insulting; his point is that aiming for nothing in life beyond physical pleasure sets the bar too low, since human beings are capable of more than cows and other nonrational animals.

In speaking of honor (timē), Aristotle likely has in mind athletes, soldiers, and politicians. The trouble with such a life is that it relies too much on others. If your self-worth is based on whether others are fawning over you, Aristotle rightly points out, you are setting yourself up for a fall. This has become a huge problem in the age of social media.⁴ Rather than being honored or liked, perhaps what we should shoot for is to be honorable or worthy of being liked. What does that mean? Being good at being human, which is to say virtuous. Aristotle is not content with this either, though, as someone could be brave, smart, fast, and so on but never put those virtues to use. The student who is smart but never applies himself is not leading his best life.

Outside of philosophical contexts, the Greek word for “study,” theōria, refers to the practice of sending officials to observe oracles and/or religious festivals (there was considerable overlap).⁵ While this background would have been obvious to NE’s original readers, particularly those familiar with his Protrepticus, Aristotle seems to have a different meaning of theōria in mind. What exactly that is, he puts off discussing until the very end of NE.

Seeing happiness as moneymaking, finally, is simply confused. Money is a means to some further end: to understand happiness, we must know what that end is.

If Aristotle’s list is meant to be exhaustive, its omission of interpersonal relationships seems problematic. Given the priority given to family, friends, and even pets in the Pew survey, we may wonder how much human needs have changed since Aristotle’s time. Aristotle’s response is to ask what exactly we want in such relationships: pleasure, honor, material support, support in developing virtue? In NE 8–9, he will argue that we should think about relationships by looking at what they are based on. The options he gives there—pleasure, utility, virtue—fit easily within NE 1.5’s survey of lives. So, barring further opinions about eudaimonia, the question on the table is how to choose between these main options, nearly all of which Aristotle has found problematic. With this, the puzzles have been set out.

Working through the Puzzles: NE 1.7, 1097a15-b21

While individuals disagree about what happiness consists in, Aristotle suggests that we can agree on some general features of how we structure our lives around happiness. His first step toward resolving our puzzles is to lay out two general criteria for happiness.

Aristotle’s first criterion is that happiness is teleion. English editions tend to translate this as “complete” or “final.” The Greek is derived from telos (end) in the sense of the ultimate goal to which other aspects of our lives lead. In the spirit of Aristotle’s somewhat awkward Greek, let us use the equally awkward term “endy.” Aristotle spells this out: we pursue happiness for its own sake; we pursue other things for the sake of happiness; we do not pursue happiness for the sake of anything else (NE 1.7, 1097a31–36). In short, happiness is the “endiest” end. There are a number of things to note here.

First, endiness comes in degrees. Goods such as health may be desirable for themselves and for their consequences. In Republic 2, Plato declares such things to be the highest goods and argues that justice belongs to this category (chapter 8). Aristotle disagrees. He finds such goods second-best. The endiest end is the one for which goods such as health serve as a means. This disagreement may simply reflect that Plato and Aristotle are pursuing different projects in these works. Republic is an inquiry into the nature and value of justice. NE is an inquiry into the nature of happiness. If Aristotle sets the bar higher, it may simply be that his current topic (eudaimonia) is broader than Plato’s (justice). I suspect, however, and the subsequent philosophical tradition seems to bear me out, that there is a deeper disagreement going on here. In reading Republic and Symposium, I argued that purpose—finding self-worth through contributing to the well-being of others—is central to Plato’s moral thought. If asked directly about his ideas of eudaimonia, Plato may very well hold to Republic 2’s scheme and declare that the best life is one that is useful for ends beyond itself. This might simply move the discussion back a step, for instance, by making the good of one’s community the highest good. It may also lead to a more nuanced situation in which my well-being is tied up in contributing to the well-being of my friends and family, whose well-being is tied up in contributing to the well-being of their friends and family, and so on. This idea fits nicely with the culture of cooperative competition, which was put on display in Socrates’s conversations in gyms, hinted at in Lysis’s discussion of friendship, and more fully embraced in Symposium’s account of erotic love as a striving toward immortality. In short, Plato finds happiness in being useful. Aristotle seems to turn this on its head. At least on one reading, his ranking seems to place useless goods ahead of useful ones simply because of their uselessness.⁶

Second, it is unclear what Aristotle means by saying one end is “for the sake of” another. One reading looks at this instrumentally. Advocates of this view tend to translate teleion as “final.” For example, I go to the supermarket to buy walnuts to cook with my morning oatmeal, to eat as breakfast, to have energy for the day, to do well at school, to get a good job, to make money, and so on. If asked why I do any of these things, the next item in the list provides the answer. Aristotle’s idea is that we will eventually arrive at an item where my response will be just “because.” On this reading, all actions converge on a final, endiest end: happiness. This gives us a narrow view of happiness as a singular end and everything that leads to it as a means that lacks worth in itself.⁷ What single thing could serve as such an end? Aristotle’s pleasure, virtue, study, and money seem a plausible list of candidates. But if pleasure is all that matters, winning by cheating would be fine, provided one does not get caught. If study is all that matters, you could neglect family and friends, so long as they stayed out of your way. If money is all that matters, you could enter a career you hate, provided it comes with a large paycheck. To be honest, people do these things all the time. But are they really living their best lives? Proponents of the narrow view have responses to these various worries (chapter 17). Still, by understanding “for the sake of” instrumentally, we relegate large stretches of life to a crass means/ends calculus.

Because of these problems, many scholars recommend reading Aristotle in noninstrumental terms.⁸ On this reading, to say that we want pleasure “for the sake of” happiness means that pleasure is a component of happiness. We could say the same for virtue, moneymaking, study, or any other good that is valuable in itself and contributes to a well-lived life. Proponents of this view tend to translate teleion as “complete.” Such thinking leaves space for means/ends reasoning: even if playing lacrosse is part of my happiness, the bus ride I take to a game is still merely a means. This expansive view of happiness seems better to capture everyday intuitions about a well-lived life. There are some things we do simply for what they get us; yet a well-lived life will include several different things all of which are valuable in themselves. This approach, however, raises its own problems. If happiness is a composite whole of several intrinsically valuable things, then how many valuable things are enough? If sports, family, and study are all valuable, how do we deal with conflicting demands on our time? Such questions bring us to Aristotle’s second criterion for happiness.

Happiness, according to Aristotle, is also self-sufficient (autarkēs). Sometimes he uses this term to refer to a person who needs nothing he does not already have. Sometimes he uses it to refer to a life that needs nothing it does not already have. Either way, this seems a demanding standard. When given the choice between a life as a pro athlete and the same life as a pro athlete plus a cookie, who would pass up the cookie? What if we add a second cookie? A second home? A sports car? Where do we draw the line and say, This is enough? One useful, albeit morbid, way to approach this question is from the perspective of someone on their deathbed. A self-sufficient person can look back on life and say, I would not change a thing. This shifts the perspective away from cookies and sports cars. Put starkly, Aristotle asks: Would you trade your life for someone else’s? The self-sufficient person will answer no. While this may be inspiring, it does not give much guidance to those of us who are still building our lives. What is it that makes one life self-sufficient, and another not?

NE 1.1–2 suggests that goods fall into hierarchies. Aristotle uses the example of bridle making, which is valuable for the sake of riding horses, which is valuable for the sake of attacking enemies, which is valuable for politics, which is useful for a well-ordered state, which is valuable for the happiness of everyone living in it. Echoing a strategy employed in Plato’s Republic, this particular example zooms out from the individual to the state as a whole. Yet it still suggests a way of approaching an expansive reading of happiness. Could the bridle maker suddenly stop his craft and become an olive farmer? Of course. But what the state needs from him is bridles not olives. Likewise for an individual: there are many goods that we could pursue, but what matters is that the ones we do pursue fit into a coherent structure. When I look back on my life, what matters is not how many goods I amassed but whether those goods fit meaningfully into a life with which I can be content.

This reading of Aristotle finds support in contemporary psychology. In Grit, Angela Duckworth sets out to see what a number of high-performing individuals have in common.⁹ The majority of professional athletes, musicians, and soldiers in her study fit easily into the agonistic spirit of ancient Greece. What do people who excel in competitive contexts have in common? According to Duckworth, they all display high levels of grit, which she defines as the combination of passion and perseverance. Our culture tends to romanticize passion as a flame that burns hot and fast. The passion that underlies grit, however, is a “slow burn” that involves getting one’s goals in order.¹⁰ Duckworth quotes Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll on the need for a single overarching goal or life philosophy. In Carroll’s case, it is “Do things better than they have ever been done before.”¹¹ We all have short-term goals: crew practice, eating breakfast, writing papers, reading articles, hitting legs, calculus homework, calling mom, choir practice, going out, sleep, and so on. Modern life can be overwhelming in terms of the sheer number of goals we pursue in a day. Duckworth’s advice is to start grouping these individual goals into broader projects—for instance, school, family, friends, health. The next step is to fit those middle-level goals into a single overriding goal. Ideally, we can align all our various goals into a single hierarchy. Few of us have lives this tidy. What we usually find, instead, is a lot of mid-level goals that do not form a coherent whole. At other times, we find people who have a high-level goal—becoming a doctor, for instance—but no realistic conception of what it takes to get there. I have met several premed students who arrived at college without the algebra skills necessary to make it through the chemistry course they need to even begin studying biology. Given their professional aspirations, these students are not on track to live the best lives available to them.

According to Richard Arum’s 2011 study Academically Adrift, about 50 percent of US college students fall into the two classes of dabblers and dreamers. The other half of US students are split evenly between the unengaged, who are just going through the motions of school, and the motivated but directionless.¹² This last group is good at doing school. They study hard, get good marks, put in service hours, and pad their college applications with sports, arts, and other extracurriculars. Their motivation for all this is most often to get into a good college, which is a step to getting a good job, which is a step to being successful. But when asked about the end goal of all this, most students fumble.¹³ Does happiness come with landing a good job? Buying a house? Financial independence? Retirement? The trouble with all of this, according to Aristotle and Duckworth, is that students today do not think hard enough about the structure of their goals. As Arum has shown, some students do not think about such things at all. Some may have bucket lists, but a bucket does not lend itself to prioritizing. Others are on the fast track, though they cannot say to where. In short, Aristotle would agree with contemporary psychologists who find that our society is failing to prepare young people to live their best lives. At this point in our discussion of NE, however, we are still laying out general criteria for judging what a best life actually consists in. Aristotle’s self-sufficiency criterion, read against the start of NE and Duckworth’s study of high-performing individuals, suggests that the best lives will be structured in coherent ways. On a narrow understanding of happiness, this ensures that any means lead effectively to a single end. On the expansive view of happiness, this ensures that structured goals hold together multiple intrinsic goods in coherent wholes and provide a way to say when those goods are enough.

The final puzzle is how to fit family and friends into all this. If a happy person is self-sufficient, then he has everything he needs, and thus seems to have no need for other people. This sounds like a rather lonely life. Aristotle, however, takes it as a brute fact of our nature that “humans are political animals” (NE 1.7, 1097b12). A self-sufficient person is still a human being. His life will thus include immediate family, friends, and fellow citizens. As the Pew survey suggests, the best life involves meaningful relationships with other people.

In sum, we all seek eudaimonia, and we can all agree that eudaimonia is both endy and self-sufficient. There is some disagreement on how to understand these two criteria. A narrow view sees the best life as containing one most-valuable thing. An expansive view sees it as a compound of multiple valuable things. Either way, the best life will be coherently structured and somehow involve relationships with other people. Lives devoted to pleasure, honor, virtue, and moneymaking have been suggested as candidates for this best life, though each has been found lacking. With this, the stage is set for Aristotle’s own theory of what constitutes the best life for a human being.

Aristotle’s Account of Eudaimonia: NE 1.7, 1097b22–1098b7

Aristotle argues that human happiness amounts to living well, given the kind of thing a human being is. Socrates suggested such an idea at the end of Republic 1. Put briefly, human happiness is doing the human thing well. Spelling out what “the human thing” means is one of NE’s central contributions to Western ethics. Aristotle’s official view is that happiness is a life of virtuous activity expressing reason. This definition ties together several elements of Aristotle’s larger inquiry into biology, psychology, ethics, and politics. Let us walk through each part of this definition as laid out by Aristotle in NE 1.7. We will start with “expressing reason.”

Aristotle approaches human happiness by thinking about what it means for a thing to have an ergon (1097b23–33). The Greek term literally means “work” and can refer to an activity or a product. A sculptor, for instance, produces a work of art, a statue, through his work on a piece of stone, sculpting. Some activities, however, do not produce anything beyond themselves. The work of a dancer is to dance. Unlike the sculptor, a dancer does not produce anything beyond the dancing. Because of this, scholars often translate ergon in NE 1.7 as “characteristic activity or function.” The ergon of an artifact is easy to identify: the ergon of a knife is to cut; the ergon of an ergometer is to measure a rower’s work. But Aristotle thinks that living things have an ergon as well (1097b33–1098a7).¹⁴ The ergon of a plant is to grow and reproduce. Whatever it is about a plant that lets it do this, Aristotle calls its soul (psychē). The life functions of plants are limited to nutrition, growth, and reproduction. Aristotle sums these up by referring to plants’ nutritive souls. Nonhuman animals, let us say dogs, also engage in nutrition, growth, and reproduction, but in ways distinctive to themselves. They do not, like plants, simply wait for food to come to them: they hunt it. They do not just cast their seed to the wind: they spot mates and chase them. Given this new layer of complexity, Aristotle concludes that dogs, and all other animals, have sensory souls. We humans, likewise, do everything plants and dogs do, but in our own characteristic way. We neither wait for food to come to us nor simply chase things when hungry: we work out mealtimes, count calories, and so on. Likewise for reproduction, we neither cast our seed to the wind nor chase whatever catches our eye: we go through a complicated courtship process and join intentional relationships with long-term commitments. The thread tying all of these together is that we think about what we are doing. Aristotle thus concludes that humans have rational souls. As with dogs’ sensations, our reasoning is tied up in our lower life functions: nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, and the rest. When it comes to performing the human ergon, the human thing, Aristotle concludes that reason must take center stage.¹⁵

But simply having an ergon is not enough. As Aristotle puts it, “In the Olympic Games, it is not the finest and the strongest who are crowned victor, but those who compete: for it is from these that winners come. The same is true of life” (NE 1.8, 1099a3–6). This is one of the most explicit pieces of athletic thinking in Aristotle’s account: talent that is never applied scores no points. Happiness thus consists of a certain sort of activity. The question is, What sort of activity?

Aristotle argues that an ergon (work, function, characteristic activity) carries its own standards (NE 1.7, 1098a8–18). If your goal is to play the kithara, an ancient forerunner of the guitar, what that really means is that you should pursue excellence/superiority (hyperochē) in your kithara playing.¹⁶ The same goes for any undertaking. The Greek word for “excellence” is aretē (virtue). At this point, Aristotle relies rather heavily on his teachers’ list of human excellences: justice, moderation, bravery, and so on. He will spell out his own account of these virtues in the books to follow. For the moment, he grounds the role of virtue in the well-lived life via the agonistic idea that the point of doing anything is doing it better than other people. To the victor goes the crown. Pulling these pieces together gives us an account of happiness as virtuous activity that expresses reason.

The final piece is to point out that eudaimonia extends across an entire life. While our moods might change over the course of the day, it makes no sense to say, “I woke up this morning living the objectively best life for a human being, but then I stubbed my toe, so I stopped living the objectively best life for a human being, but then someone complimented my new haircut, so I was back to living the objectively best life.” As Aristotle puts it, “A single swallow does not make a spring” (1098a18–20). With this, we have his entire account: happiness is a life of virtuous activity expressing reason.

What does this look like in practice? Given all the passage’s talk of athletic crowns and superior kithara playing, the lives of an Olympic victor and a virtuoso musician are the most obvious candidates. Given that the Pythian Games awarded crowns for kithara playing in a musikos agōn, there is a good reason for treating these as a single candidate. Such lives are active and embody human excellence. One scholar highlights this point by translating aretē not as “virtue” but as “virtuosity.”¹⁷ Furthermore, reaching a top level of performance takes both time and the use of reason as competitors develop their technique. Duckworth cites psychologist Anders Ericsson for the “ten-thousand-hour rule,” which specifies the amount of deliberate practice it takes to master various skills in athletics, the arts, and other areas of life.¹⁸ The Greeks, however, saw Olympic victors as attaining godlike status. To attribute happiness only to this elite and quite small group surely sets the bar too high. We might downplay the text’s athletic imagery and say that the crown of happiness belongs to those who are the best in any endeavor. This would open the door to outstanding florists, weavers, sanitation workers, and philosophers. Yet it would still open it only to the best of them. By presenting virtue in agonistic terms, Aristotle gives a picture of eudaimonia at home with Plato’s aristocratic individual and our own ideas of meritocracy.¹⁹ Little wonder it lines up well with Duckworth’s study of high-performing individuals. Still, we may rightly ask, Just how excellent does someone need to be for Aristotle to count him happy?²⁰ If Aristotle looks to elite performers as models of happiness, is this a form of elitism we are willing to accept? To get a better sense of this, we can look at how Aristotle puts his theory of happiness to work.

Back to the Opinions: NE 1.8–10

Having set out happiness in its entirety, Aristotle argues, we are now in a position to see how the people he initially polled each grasped a part of the whole.

Those who think happiness is pleasure are not completely wrong: excellent activity is, in fact, enjoyable. There is simple delight in a well-played game. The pleasure that comes with excellent activity is its own reward, thus making a life of excellent activity self-sufficient. This is in contrast to things that we do not enjoy, which need to have pleasure added “like a charm bracelet” (NE 1.8, 1099a16). The point is that pleasure in virtuous activity is not like jewelry, which has no necessary connection to the body it is set upon.²¹

Those who think that happiness is honor have already been addressed: the real point is not to be honored but to be honorable, which is to say virtuous or virtuosic. But, as we saw above, it is possible to have virtue but never act on it. The point of virtue is to get yourself into (moral) shape so that you can outperform other people. Virtue may be endy but it is not the endiest end, since it is desirable both for itself and for the excellent activity that it makes possible. In this, Aristotle accepts Plato’s classification of justice in Republic but downplays the elevated status Plato affords justice and other virtues. The main argument of Republic 2–10 is that justice is a form of mental health, that, like bodily health, is valuable all by itself. In invoking Olympic victors, Aristotle argues that Plato does not go far enough: the ultimate point of virtue is not to have virtue but to use it.

As for money, Aristotle has already argued that it is not endy at all. Nevertheless, money has a place in the good life. Aristotle’s account of virtuous activity shows what money, in the best-case scenario, is a means to. The point of having money, and resources generally, is that they permit one to engage in excellent activity. Even if the Greek athletes competed naked, the time, food, trainers, and facilities needed to achieve Olympic levels required considerable resources.²² Likewise for virtuoso musicians. Surprisingly, Aristotle classes friends along with money and political power as things one “uses” for the sake of fine actions (NE 1.8, 1099a29-b1). Whether we use friends in the same way we use wealth remains to be seen (chapter 16). The fact that this is virtuous activity suggests that we will, at least, not be abusing our friends.

As for Aristotle’s two criteria for happiness, a life of virtuous activity ends up being self-sufficient by integrating into itself all the broad classes of goods identified in Aristotle’s initial poll. It is also endiest insofar as we can tell a coherent story about how people desire money, virtue, and so on for the sake of happiness but not the other way around. But which way should we understand “for the sake of” in this context? The example of money suggests an instrumental relationship. This would support a narrow view of happiness as a most final end, and distinct from the means that lead to it. Money, however, was the only item on Aristotle’s list to be rejected for not being endy at all. It makes little sense to claim that we desire pleasure as a means to virtuous activity. Aristotle’s point seems to be, rather, that pleasure is a component of virtuous activity.²³ This would support an expansive view of happiness, in which these various goods are component parts of a most complete end. How, finally, does virtue fit into this? It seems fine to say that a vase painter’s virtuosic skills in painting are a means to producing a vase that is distinct from those skills. Yet there is an inherent confusion in talk of painting, which could refer to either the action or its product. Aristotle’s examples of Olympic victors and virtuoso kithara players remove this ambiguity: in either case, there is no product beyond the performance. Aristotle concludes that it is the activity and not its product that is the end aimed at. In sum, the narrow view of happiness makes good sense of money’s place in a good life, while the expansive view of happiness makes sense of the whole list.

Having neatly fitted each of the initial survey of lives into his own account of happiness, Aristotle moves on to a messier question: If happiness is a kind of excellent activity, and excellent activity requires resources, to what extent is our own happiness outside our control? He starts out with another bit of endoxa (NE 1.8, 1099b2–6), saying, “Lack of good birth, good children, and beauty spoils our blessedness (makarios).” He cites, by way of example, Priam, the mythic king of Troy (NE 1.9). According to various legends, Priam’s city was burned to the ground, his sons were slaughtered, his wives and daughters were sold into slavery, and Priam himself was beaten to death by Achilles’s son, Neoptolemus, using Priam’s grandson, Astyanax, as a club.²⁴ Priam offers an important caveat to Aristotle’s account of happiness (NE 1.10, 1100b22–30):

Many things come about by chance (tychē); some small, some great. Minor strokes of good or bad fortune clearly don’t carry any weight in life. But many and great things turning out well will make life more blessed (makarios), for they naturally add an ornament (sunepikosmeō) and his use of them is beautiful (kalon) and excellent (spoudaios). On the other hand, [many and great] things turning out badly will oppress and spoil his blessedness (makarios), for they bring pain and impede many activities.

This is the first instance in NE of kosmos, here in its verb form, sunepikosmein. In the introduction to part 3, I argued that kosmos has three senses: strategic, cosmetic, and athletic. The vast majority of scholars read this passage in the cosmetic sense, treating goods of fortune as something imposed from the outside and bearing no close relationship to the individual’s character. But Aristotle has a term for that: “charm bracelet” (NE 1.8), and he treats it with suspicion, just as Hesiod does in describing the adorning of Pandora. This seems out of keeping in the present passage, which invokes religious language to speak of an adornment that makes someone “more blessed.” The strategic reading of kosmos avoids this problem, yet it still seems odd to say that good fortune will put someone’s life into order. Good birth, good looks, friends, money, and so on do not give structure but call for structure.

This leaves the athletic reading in which things going well for an individual reflect that individual’s virtuous activity. From this perspective, kosmos is a synonym not for “charm bracelet” but for the “crown” (stephanos) given to Olympic victors. On this reading, good fortune is the outward manifestation of a person’s inner virtue, which has been brought about through excellent activity. But this runs into an obvious problem, which I suspect is what motivates the standard cosmetic reading, that such a good would be the result of the individual’s activity and not of fortune. The solution, I suggest, sits in Aristotle’s idea that when it comes to matters of ethics, the best we can aim for is what “usually” happens.²⁵ The athletic parallel is apt. People who put in no effort get nothing. People who put in excellent effort naturally get crowned. Winning, however, is not guaranteed. The passage concludes: “But even in these circumstances, beauty (kalon) shines through (dialampō) when someone bears many and great misfortunes with good temper, not because he is not distressed but because he is noble and great-spirited (megalopsychos)” (NE 1.10, 1100b30–33).This conclusion to our passage easily fits an athletic mindset: the image of beauty shining through could be straight from Pindar, who speaks of “shining fame” (lampei kleos) and “a crown glistening with olive oil” (liparos kosmos) like an anointed athlete.²⁶ The athletic context also helps us make sense of the religious language: competing well is great, but being crowned victor is “blessed.” It is a way for humans to share in the life of the gods. Aristotle concludes, “If this is right, a happy person will never become miserable, but he will not be blessed if he falls into a fate like Priam’s” (NE 1.10, 1101a7–8).²⁷

Is our happiness outside of our control? Aristotle’s answer seems to be yes and no. On the one hand, happiness consists in virtuous activity, and Aristotle claims that a person can engage in that even amid disasters like Priam’s. Such a person is happy (eudaimōn) but not blessed (makarios). Blessedness requires excellent activity to be crowned with the natural reward of actually accomplishing things—having friends, family, wealth, honor—which, in turn, provide the means for an individual to engage in further virtuous activity. Beauty may shine through in defeat, but it usually shines through in success. The result is a virtuous cycle in which success breeds success, albeit only usually. External goods have a place in this cycle as both means and reward. Granted such things are not entirely within the individual’s control (chance plays a role), but they usually are. In the end, the Priam example adds a layer of complexity to Aristotle’s attempt to integrate the opening catalogue of lives into his account of excellent activity, yet it leaves the basics of that integration in place while admitting that in life, as in sports, there are no guarantees.²⁸

The question remains, Just how elitist is this view? Aristotle gives examples of top performers in athletics and music. I suggested above that we might broaden this to include top performers in any field. But is happiness really limited only to the best of the best? We can find an answer, I suggest, in the way NE 1.8 integrates other goods into virtuous activity. Aristotle’s virtuosic individuals build whole lives around putting virtues into activity, taking pleasure in that activity, making themselves worthy of honor, and putting material resources (and friends) to good use along the way. Any life that can do that, I suggest, will meet Aristotle’s standard of excellence.

“More Blessed”

Aristotle’s original audience had a ready model for a life dedicated to the pursuit of excellence: Herakles. Modern scholars tend to downplay NE’s religious language.²⁹NE 1.9, however, expressly connects human happiness with divinity, as either a gift from the gods or as something intimately connected to the most divine thing within us. NE 1.12 likens happiness to the god’s blessedness as something worthy of honor (timē) rather than merely congratulations (epeinos). Born a demigod, Herakles held divinity within him. Through his labors (athla, agōnes, ponoi), he reached his full potential and became a god. Olympic athletes imitated this by seeking prizes (athla) through competitions (agōnes) with the ultimate goal of receiving the ornament (kosmos) of an olive crown (stephanos; see NE 1.7) as they stood before the massive statue of Zeus wearing the same crown.³⁰NE’s discussions of athletes and blessedness are not just a handful of ways of speaking of happiness: they are part of a single aspirational ethos that was already extensively developed in art, literature, and religious practice.

What do such aspirations require? According to Aristotle and Duckworth, nothing short of organizing one’s life around central goals. Here too, Herakles provides a helpful model, as the core of his myth—the twelve labors—boils down to an organizational principle. While this might not sound very exciting, the episodic nature of this list has deep roots. One possible origin of the Herakles myth is the Egyptian Book of Gates.³¹ Here the sun god, Ra, makes a nightly boat voyage through the underworld, passing through a series of twelve chambers, corresponding to the twelve hours of the night, before ascending again into Heaven/the sky. From a religious perspective, Book of Gates holds out hope for the souls of the deceased that they may travel through the underworld with Ra and take their place in Heaven at the end. Herakles’s labor-structured life also fits nicely with the hierarchies of goals set out by Aristotle and Duckworth, as an overarching quest is broken down into twelve mid-level goals, which define the shape of Herakles’s life.

Given his hard-earned transformation into divinity, it should come as no surprise that Herakles was a patron deity of Greek gyms. His statues and altars adorned these sites where men gathered through the whole of their lives to strive through blood and sweat to be the best versions of themselves. Did Aristotle have Herakles in mind when he wrote NE 1? We cannot know. But, given the popularity of the myth and the pride of place NE 1 gives to elite performers, people striving for the divine, and Olympic competitors (not to mention that the Lyceum was a functioning gym that likely contained altars to Herakles), Aristotle would hardly have been surprised if a student had brought Herakles up in response to NE 1. Either way, as Aristotle turns to flesh out NE 1’s sketch of happiness, he introduces another famous strongman, the wrestler Milo of Kroton, as he presents his account of what virtues are and how we obtain them. With this, we have our first indication that ideas about elite athletes provide connective tissue holding the sections of NE together.