We live in an age awash in a failed “pursuit of happiness.” Most of us ignore the intellectual component of living a full life and even more ignore the spiritual dimensions.
Past wisdom may help us find a way to real joy. Most of us have views on human happiness that would improve with a good reading of Aristotle’s Ethics. However, he is not infallible and a critical, though sympathetic reading reveals his limits and points in an even better direction.
For Aristotle, intellectual excellence is a rare thing and of ultimate value for the human being.
This is in direct contrast to Aristotle’s views on moral excellence. All human beings can obtain moral excellence. Like most Greeks Aristotle is optimistic about the human ability to achieve moral responsibility, at least to a certain point. There is no Christian notion of original sin in Greek thought. A Christian gladly concedes that education is good for humanity. It can magnify the common grace still present in the soul of each human being. However, education is not enough. There is a problem in the very being of humanity. Put in Aristotelian terms, our form is flawed though our matter, created by God, is not.
Aristotle believed that a wholesome life was possible based on a decent city providing a sound moral education. Humans may have different moral capacities, but if they are functioning well there is no reason why they should not be able to live good lives. While this is certainly more cheerful than the Christian perspective, it is also arguably less realistic. The history of the twentieth century, now thankfully concluded, was written in blood, much of it efficiently spilled by the most educated nations on the planet. They may not have been any worse behaved for their education, but they certainly did not seem much better. Now Aristotle might claim, with some justification, that the decline in the very Thomistic education, based in part on his Ethics, may have had a great deal to do with this situation. Still the century of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Saddam Hussein suggests that the Christian view that education alone is inadequate to provide reasonable moral fiber is more plausible than that of Aristotle.
Unlike moral excellence, intellectual excellence was not available to just anybody, even in a well run city. It is the potential highest good for those fortunate enough to both live in a place and time which could provide them with the necessary opportunities, education in moral virtue and blessed with the ability to make use of those opportunities. Much more than moral virtue, being excellent intellectually is a gift that not all human beings may fully be able to share. Those that can fully grasp the intellectual virtues are amazing humans.
These special human beings are not Aristotelian “supermen” but human in the fullest sense. A superman has something most men lack, such as the ability to see through walls, but the truly intellectually virtuous simply possess more of what makes a man a man than most. While traditional Christianity can recognize a hierarchy of gifts and even of spiritual insights, all human beings are equally human. This is not quite true for Aristotle as his intellectually gifted citizens have the ability to become the paradigm for what it means to be human.
Intellect is the chief function of man that is (so far as we know) unique to man amongst the animals. (The Aristotelian god may think, but He is not an animal.) Mankind uses moral virtue to get to intellectual virtue which is the exercise of mind. As the end of human existence, the function humans were designed to perform; it is also the perfect happiness. To think is to be a man and so to be happy. Intellectual excellence, the possession of intellectual virtues, is the whole point of ethics. Of course not all thoughts are created equal and some types of thinking make humans happier than others!
There are five intellectual virtues for Aristotle and they form a hierarchy. At this point, Aristotle’s ethics tie in nicely with his psychology and metaphysics. The two lowest virtues, techne and phronesis have as their subjects the changing objects of the world. Both apply universal principles to particular cases in their area of expertise. Techne includes such diverse arts as the art of sheepherding and the art of medicine. It seeks functional goods. Techne can be used by the other intellectual virtues to achieve the goals appropriate to each. Phronesis deals with the final goods of variable objects. Phronesis is the practical reason, the application of moral virtues, which allow a good man to live at peace in the city.
The remaining three intellectual virtues, episteme, nous, and Sophia, deal with objects that do not change. They have as a goal the discovery of universals. Episteme is Aristotelian science which, as we have discussed, deals with the nature of “things.” It is a derived and deductive science based on his discovery of logic. Nous is the intuitional insight that allows for the discovery of new first principles. Sophia subsumes both of these activities. It is the ability to contemplate the truth itself, no longer seeking the truth but meditating on it. Sophia is pure thought. The life of phronesis and moral virtue must always be a secondary happiness to it.
This is such a perfect happiness, really a divine activity, that it is almost impossible to imagine doing it all the time. The Aristotelian god who already knows the truth can be purely contemplative, but an entire life of pure contemplation seems impossible for men given their birth in ignorance of the truth. And yet Aristotle calls this life the best human life and the goal of human existence!
The best Christian ethic is able to complement and complete Aristotle by broadening the notion of flourishing and enrich his simplistic theology.
Scriptorium Daily co-writer J.P. Moreland has written extensively on this topic and I highly recommend his Lost Virtue of Happiness as a starting point.