"The Good Life" refers to a eudaimonic, or virtue ethics, account of happiness. By eudaimonia, the Greeks understood eu to refer to good, as in the words eulogy and euphoria; and daimonia refers to daimon, which is close to our demon, except without the negative connations, that is spiritedness. So a eu-daimonia means good-spirited.
Eudaimonia is another way of saying "doing well and living well". Thus, eudaimonia is not a state, but an activity.
Moreover, eudaimonia is the end or purpose or goal of human life, and all human life (all of nature), is for Aristotle, teleological. Teleological means directed towards ends. So we say that an acorn is directed towards the purpose of becoming a tree.
"The Good life" refers to the idea that happiness is the ultimate end, the end for which all other ends are themselves desired. So all other ends are intermediate in relation to happiness. Thus, we go to college for the sake of happiness, we take a nap for the sake of happiness, and we fall in love for the sake of happiness. Everything is for the sake of happiness.
When you translate Eu to Good and Daimon to Spiritedness, it seems that eudaimonia means something more like doing what you want in the moment because it makes you happy. This does not seem to fit well with the idea that eudaimonia being teleological. Also if eudaimonia is more of an activity than a state than how can we know if we have ever achieved it. Wouldn't that mean that as long as we are doing what makes us happy at that moment then we are at/in eudaimonia? -Thomas N.
ReplyDeleteIt could mean happiness "in the moment," admittedly, although there is nothing in those words that necessarily implying that. The idea behind the "daimon" is that it is not merely something whose constitution cannot be quickly shifted--that its affect is the product of activity (although this becomes clear more from context than from etymology).
ReplyDeleteBut you are right there is a disagreement with its teleological sense. This is precisely why so many thinkers will wonder if we can know if we are happy before our lives are over (Aristotle, Heradotus). This leads the paradoxical, but I think still logical conclusion, that we are not the people who can judge our own happiness. And that we can lose our happiness after our deaths?