Aristotle Book I
In my personal opinion, happiness is different for everyone. For example, someone may see having a family and being financially stable as being happy. Whereas others would be happy living a wealthy life but not having such a big family-based life. I believe that there are many different ways to perceive “happiness” and I don’t believe that there is only one “happiness”.
Aristotle gives four prominent types of life, wealth, political, pleasure, and contemplative. He describes how there is a “good” in most things and that we can distinguish the difference between the “good” and the “bad” things. He explains that the life of wealth, or money-making, is useful but not “good”. The political life, or life of honor, he states is based off of other people rather than yourself so it will never be able to make you happy. The life of pleasure he describes is more for simple minded “beasts”, more for animals not humans. The contemplative life he states as more useful since we are able to understand our consequences for our actions.
I personally do agree with most of what Aristotle is saying but u believe that it can go more in depth than he is describing. I see it as “happiness” isn’t just one thing but a combination of all of the lifestyles he has given. For example, the money making lifestyle, is not a “good” life I agree, but I believe that a bit of wealth can help you to reach “happiness”. I feel like this is the same for everything.
Aristotle explains eudaimonia as happiness but refers to it more as being successful. It can also be translated to flourishing. Aristotle explained how everything strives for eudaimonia, and how every organism’s action is to try to obtain eudaimonia.
Aristotle goes on to describe how every action you take is to get to one “Chief Good”.(I,7) He states that there can be only one chief good, and that all of your actions should lead to that good at some point. He explains that in having more than one chief good, that there will be moral conflicts between the two. I both agree and disagree with him here. I agree with that, if you try to achieve two things at once that at some point, they will interfere with each other. I disagree in the way the I feel like it is possible to have two “Chief Goods”, but that both have to be similar. For example, you can’t say that you want to spend more time studying AND eat healthier, because if you devote more time to studying than you are left with less time to plan healthier meals.
