[MUSIC] Living well. Now that we understand what Aristotle means when he asks what is the goal of life, we can turn to consider his answer to this question. An easy but not very informative answer to the question he says is to say that our ultimate goal in life is to do well. Or to live well. Everyone agrees that this is our goal in life, Aristotle says at the opening of Chapter Four of Book One of the Epics. But the hard question about which there is plenty of disagreement, he says, asks what counts as living well or doing well. But before we turn to consider the disagreement, let's ask how living well or doing well could function as the ultimate goal of everything you do in life. Think about all the things you pursue for their own sakes. Music, sports, friendship, family, career, and so on. When Aristotle asks what you are doing in pursuing all these different goals, he's like a stranger who has never seen a soccer game, asking, what are you doing, running around and kicking that ball all over the field? Why don't you just pick it up and take it where you want it to go? When you answer the stranger's question, I'm playing soccer and it's against the rules for anyone but the goal tender to touch the ball with their hands. You are pointing to a practice with its own rules and standards. Standards that constrain the way you are running around and dealing with the ball. Playing soccer isn't just a name for all the things you happen to be doing on the field, but that something governs or guides what you do. That's what a goal does. Okay, so can we suppose that standards for living well or for doing well play the same kind of guiding or governing role in our lives as we pursue other goals like friends, family and the like. Think about it this way, there are ways you could promote your musical goals that I bet you wouldn't take. You could play your grand piano during the middle of the night in your apartment in a densely populated building. But you wouldn't do that, I bet. But why not? Especially if you're a night owl or an insomniac and you have a big performance coming up and could use the practice. You wouldn't because it would be inconsiderate for the other tenants on the building. On a more serious front, there are things you could do to advance your friends' or your family's interests. But that you think are wrong, unethical, or immoral. You could use your access or influence to sabotage the other applicants for the job or internship for which your own child has applied. But you don't. Because that would be wrong. You could steal the data of a rival researcher to ruin her chances of being offered a position that you want for yourself. But again, you don't do it. Why not? Getting the job would be a great career move for you. And you care a lot about your career. Once again, you don't because you think it's wrong. What you're doing here is appealing to a set of standards for conduct, for action, that are not standards for how best to help your friends or further your career, but rather, a set of standards that apply to any action you might take in pursuit of any of your goals. These standards are for what Aristotle would call living well in general. It just doesn't fit with the standards you have for leading a good life, that you inconvenience your neighbors or cheat or steal to help yourself or your friends. So living by such a set of standards thus plays pretty much the same guiding role in your life as the rules of soccer play in guiding the conduct of a particular soccer match. So even without knowing what the standards for living a good life are, we can see how they can function as the goal of your life. They are what guide you as you make choices in pursuit of all the subordinate goals you have and you wouldn't want to promote any of those other goals if it meant not living up to those standards. Now, of course, there was plenty of disagreement about the standards for leading a good life. For example, Socrates insists, in The Apology, that one's ultimate guide in life should be the standards of justice. He says a person should look to this alone whenever he does anything. Whether his actions are just or unjust. Thrasymachus by contrast thinks that the standards of justice are only for weaklings. He advocates the values of dominance and exploitation. That's his conception of what living well consists in. Now before we turn to Aristotle's own views about what living well consists in, we have to take up a terminological matter, so that we avoid a common misunderstanding of Aristotle and of the ancient ethical tradition quite generally. That is we have to talk about happiness. Now happiness is a word in English that is commonly used to translate the Greek term eudaimonia. When Aristotle says that everyone agrees that living well and doing well are the goals of life, he indicates that this is what the term eudaimonia means. Thus the easy but uninformative answer to the Telos question on which everyone agrees, is as he puts it that eudaimonia is the final good. Here's what he says. "As far as its name goes most people virtually agree on what the goal of life is. Since both the many and the cultivated call it happiness, eudaimonia, and suppose that living well and doing well are the same as being happy. But they disagree about what happiness is." Now the translation of eudaimonia by happiness is imperfect. Since in english happiness does not typically mean doing well or living well. Some prefer the translation flourishing which does mean doing well. But that has a fairly biological flavor to it. Think of the plant that flourishing on your window sill if you're taking good care of it. So, flourishing, I think, is too narrow to capture all that might fall under living well. It's hard to think of Socrates saying that he wouldn't be flourishing if he committed an act of injustice. But the problem with happiness, the main problem, is that happiness, in English, typically does mean something that eudaimonia absolutely does not mean. Happiness, as we tend to think of it is a state of mind. A feeling of satisfaction or contentment which we contrast with sadness, depression, or disappointment. But eudaimonia is not a name for a state of mind or a feeling. There are those in antiquity who think that eudaimonia consists in pleasure. In a feeling of equilibrium or contentment and we'll examine their views when we come to the Epicureans. But this is a substantive and controversial philosophical thesis about what living well, what eudaimonia amounts to. It's not a dictionary definition of eudaimonia. Even those who reject the thesis that pleasure is the goal of life, still accept the thesis that eudaimonia, happiness, is the goal of life. But that's because eudaimonia, simply means living well. And does not imply anything about the correct standards for living well. Indeed some later philosophers will go on to claim that the person can be happy, that is eudaimon, even while suffering excruciating torture. They aren't claiming that it could be pleasant to suffer torture but rather that one can live a good life even in these conditions. Now that position, which the Stoics will defend later, is itself highly controversial. But that's because it is a substantive thesis about what eudaimonia, or living well, consists in. And it's one that Aristotle will reject. Okay, with those preliminaries out of the way, we can now turn to see how Aristotle thinks there are standards for living well. That is, for eudaimonia.
