Eudemian Ethics

While there are many different things as to which it is not easy to make a right judgement, this is especially the case with one about which everybody thinks that it is very easy to judge and that anybody can decide—the question which of the things contained in being alive is preferable, and which when attained would fully satisfy a man’s desire. For many of life’s events are such that they cause men to throw life away,for instance, diseases, excessive pains, storms; so that it is clear that on account of these things any way it would actually be preferable, if someone offered us the choice, not to be born at all.

And in addition, the kind of life that people live while still children is not desirable—in fact no sensible person could endure to go back to it again.

And further, many of the experiences that contain no pleasure nor pain, and also of those that do contain pleasure but pleasure of an ignoble kind, are such that non-existence would be better than being alive.

And generally, if one collected together the whole of the things that the whole of mankind do and experience yet do and experience unwillingly, because not for the sake of the things themselves, and if one added an infinite extent of time, these things would not cause a man to choose to be alive rather than not alive.

But moreover, also the pleasure of food or of sex alone, with the other pleasures abstracted that knowledge or sight or any other of the senses provides for human beings, would not induce anybody to value life higher if he were not utterly slavish, for it is clear that to one making this choice there would be no difference between being born a beast or a man;

at all events, the ox in Egypt, which they reverence as Apis, has a greater abundance of such indulgences than many monarchs.

Nor likewise would anyone desire life for the pleasure of sleep either; for what is the difference between slumbering without being awakened from the first day till the last of a thousand or any number of years, and living a vegetable existence? any way plants seem to participate in life of that kind; and so do children too, inasmuch as at their first procreation in the mother, although alive, they stay asleep all the time.

So that it is clear from considerations of this sort that the precise nature of well-being and of the good in life escapes our investigation.

Now it is said that when somebody persisted in putting various difficulties of this sort to Anaxagoras and went on asking for what object one should choose to come into existence rather than not, he replied by saying, For the sake of contemplating the heavens and the whole order of the universe. Anaxagoras therefore thought that the alternative of being alive was valuable for the sake of some kind of knowledge;

but those who ascribe bliss to Sardanapallus or Smindyrides of Sybaris or some of the others living the life of enjoyment, all appear for their part to place happiness in delight;

while a different set would not choose either wisdom of any kind or the bodily pleasures in preference to the actions that spring from goodness: at all events, some people choose those actions not only for the sake of reputation but even when they are not going to get any credit.

But the majority of those engaged in politics are not correctly designated politicians, for they are not truly political, since the political man is one who purposely chooses noble actions for their own sake, whereas the majority embrace that mode of life for the sake of money and gain.

What has been said, therefore, demonstrates that all men ascribe happiness to three modes of life—the political, the philosophic, and the life of enjoyment. Among these, the nature and quality of the pleasure connected with the body and with enjoyment, and the means that procure it, are not hard to see; so that it is not necessary for us to inquire what these pleasures are, but whether they conduce at all to happiness or not, and how they so conduce, and, if it be the case that the noble life ought to have some pleasures attached to it, whether these are the pleasures that ought to be attached, or whether these must be enjoyed in some other way, whereas the pleasures which people reasonably believe to make the happy man’s life pleasant and not merely painless are different ones.

But these matters must be examined later. Let us first consider Goodness and Wisdom—what the nature of each is, and also whether they themselves or the actions that spring from them are parts of the good life, since that they are connected with happiness is asserted, if not by everybody, at all events by all of mankind who are worthy of consideration.

Accordingly Socrates the senior thought that the End is to get to know virtue, and he pursued an inquiry into the nature of justice and courage and each of the divisions of virtue. And this was a reasonable procedure, since he thought that all the virtues are forms of knowledge, so that knowing justice and being just must go together, for as soon as we have learnt geometry and architecture, we are architects and geometricians; owing to which he used to inquire what virtue is, but not how and from what sources it is produced.

But although this does happen in the case of the theoretical sciences, inasmuch as astronomy and natural science and geometry have no other End except to get to know and to contemplate the nature of the things that are the subjects of the sciences (although it is true that they may quite possibly be useful to us accidentally for many of our necessary requirements),

yet the End of the productive sciences is something different from science and knowledge, for example the End of medicine is health and that of political science ordered government, or something of that sort, different from mere knowledge of the science.

Although, therefore, it is fine even to attain a knowledge of the various fine things,all the same nevertheless in the case of goodness it is not the knowledge of its essential nature that is most valuable but the ascertainment of the sources that produce it. For our aim is not to know what courage is but to be courageous, not to know what justice is but to be just, in the same way as we want to be healthy rather than to ascertain what health is, and to be in good condition of body rather than to ascertain what good bodily condition is.