Aristotle opens Book 1 with a claim that still organizes every serious life: every art, inquiry, action, and pursuit aims at some good. Ends differ. Some are activities themselves; others are products better than the work that made them. Medicine aims at health, shipbuilding at a vessel, strategy at victory, household management at wealth. Subordinate crafts serve master arts the way bridle-making serves riding and riding serves strategy. If there is a highest end we want for its own sake, and if desire is not to run forever without landing, that end is the chief good. Knowing it, he says, is like giving archers a mark. Politics in the broad sense looks like the master art: it orders which sciences a city should teach, legislates what we should do and avoid, and aims at the human good on a civic scale, finer when secured for a community than for one person alone.
He warns that ethics cannot be as precise as mathematics. Fine and just actions fluctuate in opinion; wealth and courage have ruined people. An educated mind asks only as much exactness as the subject allows. Young people, or anyone still ruled by passion, are poor hearers of political science because the aim is action, not trivia. Then he names the verbal agreement: both the many and the refined call the highest practicable good happiness, living well and doing well. They disagree about its content. The vulgar chase pleasure; people of active refinement chase honor; some prize virtue itself; others chase money. Pleasure suits beasts more than citizens. Honor depends on those who bestow it. Wealth is useful for something else. Contemplation he postpones. Against friends in Plato's school he also rejects one abstract Good itself above every category. Goods differ in kind; a weaver is not helped by gazing at the Form of the Good; doctors heal this patient, not Health Itself. What we need is a good human beings can achieve.
The function argument is the pivot. A flute-player or sculptor has a characteristic work, and excellence means doing that work well. Eyes and hands have functions; so, Aristotle argues, does a human being. Nutrition belongs to plants; perception to animals. What remains distinctive is an active life of the rational element, and life in the sense of activity, not mere capacity. Human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete, across a complete life. One swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day make a person blessed.
He checks the account against common beliefs. Goods of the soul outrank external goods; happiness is living and doing well; it belongs to activity, not to a sleeping or idle possession of virtue. At the Olympic Games the crown goes to those who compete, not to the merely beautiful or strong. Virtuous action is pleasant to lovers of the noble, yet happiness still needs external equipment: friends, resources, political power, and the absence of crushing deficits such as solitude, childlessness, or the loss of those we love. Some therefore confuse happiness with luck; Aristotle refuses that shortcut. Happiness may be godlike, but it is won by virtue, learning, and care, not left to chance. Oxen and horses are not called happy; boys are congratulated only for hope. Complete virtue needs a complete life, because fortune can overturn prosperity, as Priam's story shows.
Solon's counsel to call no one happy until we see the end raises a hard question: can the living be called happy at all? Aristotle will not wait for the grave to speak of activity. Success and failure do not swing with every gust of fortune; virtuous activities are more lasting than scientific knowledge, and the truly good person bears chances becomingly, as a good general uses the army at hand. Great misfortunes can crush and maim happiness, yet nobility can still shine through when someone bears them without numbness. The happy person will not become miserable by doing hateful acts, though Priam-level disaster may block full blessedness. Friends' fortunes matter weakly even after death, but not enough to flip happiness into its opposite. Happiness is prized, not merely praised: it is the first principle for the sake of which we do what we do.
Book 1 closes by turning from the target to the soul that must hit it. The student of politics studies virtue in order to make citizens good. The soul has an irrational and a rational element. The nutritive part has no share in human excellence. Desire can fight reason, as in incontinence, yet it can also listen, as a child listens to a father. That split yields intellectual virtues such as philosophic and practical wisdom, and moral virtues such as liberality and temperance. The search for true happiness ends with a map: activity of a rational soul in line with complete virtue, aided by external goods, over a whole life. The next work is how character is formed.
