Nicomachean EthicsStudy Guide

Every art, every inquiry, every action aims at some good. Aristotle says that first, at the Lyceum around 350 BCE, and the notes take the name of his son Nicomachus. The question is not whether you want a good life but whether you can name the good you are already aiming at. Happiness is not a mood that arrives when circumstances improve. It is an activity you can fail at while still believing you are succeeding.

The figures in the argument are not a novel's cast, but they behave like one. There is the flourishing person, whose life is a practiced excellence rather than a lucky feeling. There is the man of practical wisdom, who can see what this particular situation requires and is not rescued by a rulebook. There is the akratic, who deliberates, names the better act, and still follows appetite. There is the just person, who will not take too much in a bargain just because no one is watching. He sorts three kinds of friends: the useful contact, the pleasant companion, and the rare person who wishes you well because of who you are. Aristotle had already spent twenty years at Plato's Academy and had tutored Alexander. He is writing for people who will have power, money, and the chance to waste both.

Book I refuses pleasure, wealth, and honour as the highest good and locates eudaimonia in the function of a human life: activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, over a complete life, because one swallow does not make a summer. Book II says you become just by doing just acts, the way you learn the lyre by playing it. Book III makes you own the character those acts have already built, even when the later stages of a habit are as hard to see as the progress of an illness. Book IV tests the mean in money, honour, anger, and truth-telling. Book V treats justice as a state that makes you do and wish what is just, not a slogan you apply to other people. Book VI names practical wisdom as the faculty that issues commands about what ought to be done here, now. Book VII watches the incontinent person know the act is bad and do it from passion anyway. Books VIII and IX refuse to call every useful alliance a friendship, then insist that no one would choose to live without friends even with every other good. Book X returns to pleasure as a rudder for the young and still will not let pleasure be the destination.

Aristotle never treats virtue as a list of commandments, or happiness as a prize for holding the right opinions. He refuses the easy handbook where a formula tells you what courage looks like on Tuesday. The mean is relative to us. The same danger asks different things of a timid person and a reckless one. Weakness of will is not a mystery once you see it as a habit built in the wrong direction. Friendship of utility dissolves when the use runs out, and he is not sentimental about that. The ending is not a conversion scene. It is a claim that the best human life includes both the shared work of justice and friendship and the quieter activity of reason, and that neither one lets you skip the years of practice.

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