Eudaimonia

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Eudaimonia

Eudaimonia (Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
: ) is a classical Greek word commonly translated as 'happiness

Happiness

Happiness is a state of mind or feeling such as contentment, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy. A variety of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology and Biology approaches have been taken to defining happiness and identifying its sources....
'. Etymologically, it consists of the word "eu" ("good" or "well being") and "daimon
Daemon (mythology)

The words daemon, d?mon, are Latinized spellings of the Greek language da???? , used purposely today to distinguish the daemons of Ancient Greek religion, good or malevolent "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior divinities and ghosts of dead heroes" , from the Judeo-Christian usage demon, a malignant...
" ("spirit" or "minor deity", used by extension to mean one's lot or fortune). Although popular usage of the term happiness

Happiness

Mind

Mind refers to the aspects of intellect and consciousness manifested as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, free will and imagination, including all of the brain's conscious and unconscious cognitive processes....
, related to joy

Joy

Joy may refer to:* Happiness, an emotion...
or pleasure

Pleasure

Pleasure is commonly conceptualized as a positive experience, happiness, entertainment, enjoyment, ecstasy , and Euphoria . However, it is a difficult concept to define as the experience of pleasure differs from individual to individual....
, eudaimonia rarely has such connotations, and the less subjective "human flourishing" is often preferred as a translation.
lass="link1" onMouseover='showByLink("m888862",this)' onMouseout='hide("m888862")'href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Socrates">Socrates

Socrates

Socrates was a Classical Greece Philosophy. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students....
' philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, as it is represented in Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
's early dialogues, contains two related claims about eudaimonia.

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Encyclopedia

Eudaimonia (Greek

Greek language

Happiness

Mind

Joy

Joy may refer to:* Happiness, an emotion...
or pleasure

Pleasure

Greek philosophy

Socrates

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, as it is represented in Plato

Plato

Virtue

Virtue is morality excellence. Personal virtues are characteristics Value as promoting individual and collective well-being, and thus Goodness and value theory by definition....
(arete

Arete (excellence)

Arete , in its basic sense, means "goodness", "excellence" or "virtue" of any kind. In its earliest appearance in Greek language, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function; the act of living up to one's full potential....
), and knowledge

Knowledge

Knowledge is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation....
(episteme
Episteme

Episteme, as distinguished from techne, is etymologically derived from the Greek language word ?p?st??? for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ?p?sta?a?, "to know"....
): virtue

Virtue

Virtue is morality excellence. Personal virtues are characteristics Value as promoting individual and collective well-being, and thus Goodness and value theory by definition....
is a sort of knowledge, perhaps 'knowledge of good and bad', and it is this knowledge that is required to reach the ultimate good, with eudaimonia being the prime candidate for this ultimate good. The second, sometimes called "psychological eudaimonism

Eudaimonism

Eudaimonia, [literally ?having a good guardian spirit?] along with "ar?te" , is one of the two central concepts in ancient Greek ethics. Ancient philosophers understood eudaimonia to be the highest human good, and are concerned with saying just how to achieve it....
" or "Socratic intellectualism", is the claim that the ultimate good, eudaimonia, is what all human desires and actions aim to achieve. (left) and Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
(right) both have written on the subject of eudaimonia]] Plato's middle dialogues present a somewhat different position. In the Republic, we find a moral psychology

Moral psychology

Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Some use the term "moral psychology" relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development....
more complex than psychological eudaimonism: we do not only desire our ultimate good; rather the soul, or mind, has three motivating parts - a rational, spirited (approximately, emotional), and appetitive part - and each of these parts has its own desired ends. Eudaimonia, then, is not simply acquired through knowledge, it requires the correct psychic ordering of this tripartite soul: the rational part must govern the spirited and appetitive part, thereby correctly leading all desires and actions to eudaimonia and the principal constituent of eudaimonia, virtue.

The pursuit of eudaimonia is the central theme of Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
's Nicomachean Ethics
Nicomachean Ethics

Nicomachean Ethics, or Ta Ethika, is a work by Aristotle on virtue and moral character which plays a prominent role in defining Aristotelian ethics....
. Aristotle claims that "every art and every scientific inquiry, and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim at some good. Hence 'the good' has been well defined as that at which all things aim." According to Aristotle, the hierarchy of human purposes aim at eudaimonia as the highest, most inclusive end. This is the end to which everyone in fact aims. Further, it is the only end towards which it is worth undertaking a means. Eudaimonia is constituted, according to Aristotle, not by honor, or wealth, or power, but by rational activity in accordance with virtù over a complete life. Such activity manifests the virtue

Virtue

Virtue is morality excellence. Personal virtues are characteristics Value as promoting individual and collective well-being, and thus Goodness and value theory by definition....
s of character

Moral character

Moral character or character is an evaluation of a particular individual's Morality qualities. The concept of character can imply a variety of attributes including the existence or lack of virtues such as integrity, courage, fortitude, honesty, and loyalty, or of good behaviors or Habit ....
, including, honesty

Honesty

Honesty is the human quality of communicating and acting truthfully, in accordance with a sense of fairness and sincerity. This includes all varieties of communication, both verbal and non-verbal....
, pride

Pride

Pride is, depending upon context, either a high sense of the worth of one's self and one's own, or a pleasure taken in the contemplation of these things....
, friendliness, and wittiness; the intellectual virtues, such as rationality

Rationality

Rationality as a term is related to the idea of reason, a word which following Webster's may be derived as much from older terms referring to thinking itself as from giving an account or an explanation....
in judgment

Judgment

A judgment , in a legal context, is synonymous with the formal decision made by a court following a lawsuit. At the same time the court may also make a range of court orders, such as imposing a sentence upon a Guilt y defendant in a Criminal law matter, or providing a Legal remedy for the plaintiff in a civil law matter....
; and non-sacrificial (i.e. mutually beneficial) friendships and scientific knowledge

Knowledge

Knowledge is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation....
(knowledge of things that are fundamental and/or unchanging is the best).

Epicurus

Epicurus

Epicurus was an Greek philosophy and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works....
agrees with Aristotle that eudaimonia is the highest good. However, unlike Aristotle, he identifies eudaimonia with pleasure. Epicurus presents two main arguments. The first defends the claim that pleasure is the only thing that people value for its own sake. The second, which fits in well with Epicurus' empiricism

Empiricism

In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "theory of knowledge"....
, supposedly lies in one's introspective experience: one immediately perceives that pleasure is good and that pain is bad, in the same way that one immediately perceives that fire is hot. Thus, as something immediately apparent, no further argument is needed to show the goodness of pleasure or the badness of pain. Although all pleasures are good and all pains evil, Epicurus does not believe that all pleasures are choiceworthy or all pains unchoiceworthy. Instead, one should calculate what is in one's long-term self-interest, and forgo what will bring pleasure in the short-term if doing so will ultimately lead to pain in the long-term.

The Stoics believe that virtù is necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. Virtù consists of living according to Nature, so eudaimonia is achieved by living according to Nature's will. However, no one (except the fictional "sage") can ever achieve perfect virtù, and everyone is always equally and completely vicious. The best a non-sage can do is to act "befittingly," or in the same way that a perfectly virtuous sage would in the same situation. No one will ever achieve perfect virtù, and therefore eudaimonia, but one can approach it.

Eudaimonia

Greek philosophy

See also

Further reading