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Why Eudaimonia Is Better Than Happiness

A concert pianist performs rapturously
It’s about what we do, not what we feel.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We all say we want to be happy, yet the pursuit of happiness often seems like a wild goose chase.

Perhaps the problem is not so much with us, or the world we live in, but with the very concept of happiness.

The ancient Greeks had a better idea. They called it eudaimonia, literally, ‘good soul’, ‘good spirit’, or ‘good god’. Although Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle each understood eudaimonia in somewhat different ways, they all regarded it as the highest good, often even as the very aim and purpose of philosophy.

What Is Eudaimonia?

Eudaimonia is often translated simply as ‘happiness’—but that can be misleading.

The word happy, which is related to happen and perhaps, derives from the Norse happ for ‘chance’, ‘fortune’, or ‘luck’. From Irish to Greek, most European words for ‘happy’ originally meant something like ‘lucky’—one exception being Welsh, in which it originally meant ‘wise’. Another Old English word for ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ was gesælig, which, over the centuries, morphed into our ‘silly’.

Eudaimonia, by contrast, is anything but silly. It has nothing to do with chance or fortune and everything to do with thought and design—with how we choose to live. Compared with happiness, it is a much deeper, fuller, and richer idea, often articulated in terms of flourishing or living a life that is worthwhile, fulfilling, and elevating.

All the major philosophical schools of antiquity, including even the Epicureans, regarded eudaimonia as the highest good. Like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, they differed over how it was to be achieved, but they all agreed that the aim of human life must be something higher or fuller than simple happiness.

Unlike happiness, eudaimonia is not an emotion but a state of being—or, especially for Aristotle, a state of doing. As such, it is more deeply rooted than happiness, and more stable and reliable. Although it leads to pleasure or satisfaction of the highest kind, it does not arise from pleasure, but from higher values and principles that transcend the here and now. The people of Athens put Socrates in prison, they even put him to death, but they did not and could not take away his eudaimonia.

Socrates on Eudaimonia

Socrates, it seems, equated eudaimonia with wisdom and virtue. In the Greater Alcibiades, he says that he who is not wise cannot be happy; in the Gorgias, that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man; and in the Meno, that everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness.

At his trial, Socrates gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honour as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul. ‘Wealth,’ he said, ‘does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.’

Socrates supplied the supreme proof that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man, for when the jurors condemned him to death, they only made him and his ideas as immortal as can be—and rather than appease them, which he could easily have done, he chose instead, very cannily, to abet them.

Plato on Eudaimonia

Plato broadly agreed with his teacher Socrates, and sought to answer an obvious objection: If virtue is the path to a flourishing life, why does injustice so often seem the easy shortcut?

In the Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon argues that most people are venal, but maintain a reputation for virtue and justice to evade the social costs of being or seeming unjust. But if a man could get hold of the fabled Ring of Gyges and make himself invisible, he would behave without restraint:

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

According to Glaucon, we behave justly not because we value justice, but because we are weak and fearful; while the unjust man who is cunning enough to seem just will get the better of everyone and everything.

In his magisterial reply to Glaucon, Plato famously conjures an idealised Republic to help him ‘locate’ (define) justice, first in the state, where it is larger and easier to pin down, and then in the individual. He argues that justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: if health in the body is intrinsically desirable, then so too is justice in the soul. For Plato, an unjust man cannot be happy because he is not in rational and ordered control of himself.

Aristotle on Eudaimonia

It is with Plato’s one-time student Aristotle, and his Nicomachean Ethics, that the concept of eudaimonia is most closely associated.

For Aristotle, a thing is best understood by looking at its end, purpose, or goal (Greek, telos—as in ‘teleology’ and ‘telomere’). The purpose of a knife is to cut, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what a knife is. The goal of medicine is good health, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what medicine is, or should be. If this is true of knives and medicine, might it also be true of us? Might we also have an ergon, or ‘distinctive function’?

Maybe we’ll come back to that.

If one follows Aristotle’s line of thought, it soon becomes apparent that some goals are subordinate to other goals, which are themselves subordinate to yet other goals. A medical student’s goal may be to qualify as a doctor, but this is subordinate to her goal of healing the sick, which is itself subordinate to her goal of making a living by doing something useful. This could go on and on, but unless the medical student has a goal that is an end-in-itself, nothing that she does is actually worth doing.

What, asks Aristotle, is this end-in-itself? This ‘supreme good’, he replies, is eudaimonia, and eudaimonia alone.

Eudaimonia, notice, is not just ‘happiness’, it’s salvation—the thing that prevents life from being an infinite regress of ends, as it so often seems. Only in eudaimonia does life become worth living in and of itself.

So, given its importance, what exactly did Aristotle understand by eudaimonia?

Whereas human beings need nourishment like plants, and have sentience like animals, our ergon—the thing that most makes us not something else, like an oak, a dolphin, or a baboon—says Aristotle, is our unique and god-like capacity to reason. Aristippus of Cyrene made much the same point when he chided a champion swimmer: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of boasting about what a fish or dolphin could better do?’ Thus, our supreme good is to lead a life that enables us to use and develop our reason, and that is in accordance with rational principles.

By living our life to the full according to our essential nature as rational beings, we are bound to flourish, that is, to develop and express our full human potential, regardless of the ebb and flow of our good or bad fortune.

To put this in modern terms, if we develop our thinking and imagining skills, if we guard against lies and self-deception, if we refine and master our emotions, we will, over the years, make better and better choices, do more and more meaningful things, and derive ever-increasing satisfaction from all that we have become and all that we have achieved, and are yet able to achieve.

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And the critical difference between relaxation and leisure.

In Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle outlines the nature of happiness, which, he reminds us, is the “end of living” or purpose of life. Happiness, he says, is not a disposition but an activity, or else it might belong to someone who slept through his whole life, or to someone suffering the greatest misfortunes.

Some activities, he continues, are chosen for the sake of something else, while others are chosen for their own sake. And it is among the latter that happiness is to be found, for happiness is not in want of anything. Activities that are chosen for their own sake are those from which nothing more is sought than the activity itself, and it is also of this kind that virtuous actions are thought to be.

It would be strange if happiness lay in amusement rather than in virtuous activity, for then man would toil and trouble all his life for the sake of nothing more than amusement. In truth, he amuses himself only so that he may exert himself. Amusement is a sort of relaxation, necessary only because of the impossibility of continuous activity.

Any chance person, even a slave, can enjoy the bodily pleasures no less than the best man; but no one assigns to a slave a share in happiness—unless he assigns to him also a share in human life. For happiness, as has been said, does not reside in sensual pleasure, but in virtuous activity.

Philosophic contemplation

Having established that happiness consists in activity that is chosen for its own sake, and especially in virtue, Aristotle argues that, of all such activities, it is philosophic contemplation that leads to the highest happiness.

The pleasures of philosophy, he says, are marvelous both for their purity and their enduringness. Man, more than anything, is distinguished by reason, and the life of reason is the most self-sufficient, the most pleasant, the happiest, best, and most godlike of all.

Indeed, the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must surely be contemplative. All life aims at God and eternity: plants and animals participate in the eternal through reproduction, but man comes nearer through philosophic contemplation. Contemplation and, therefore, happiness are the fruits of leisure, for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

To be happy, one does not need many or great things, and the life of virtue and contemplation can be practiced, indeed, more easily practiced, with but moderate means. The happy person is bound to seem strange, since the many and miserable only perceive, and judge by, external possessions.

Leisure in Politics

Aristotle returns to the subject of leisure in Politics. The state, he says, should aim at something more than mere survival or self-sufficiency:

Men must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure and peace are better; they must do what is necessary and indeed what is useful, but what is honourable is better … If it be disgraceful in men not to be able to use the goods of life, it is peculiarly disgraceful not to be able to use them in time of leisure—to show excellent qualities in action and war, and when they have peace and leisure to be no better than slaves.

To make time for leisure, virtue, and contemplation, Athenian citizens should have no part in agriculture or manufacturing—which are to be left in the care of slaves.

Discussion and relevance today

Anyone who loves his or her work, and who does it for its own sake, will agree with Aristotle: performing this activity, whether it be a job or a hobby, is a source of bliss. And if this activity can help or touch others, then our happiness is all the more complete.

But the most complete happiness comes from reflecting on the preferred activity, its purpose, and its meaning. For instance, it is a great thing to love gardening, but it is an even greater thing to understand why we love gardening, because it tells us something eternal and universal about what it is to be a human being, and connects us with everyone else who loves, has loved, or will love gardening.

Insightful and illuminating is the distinction drawn between time spent in amusement and relaxation, necessary because of the impossibility of continuous activity, and time spent in leisure, that is, in contemplation, friendship, and other virtuous activities.

Economic imperatives have led us to associate free time exclusively with amusement and relaxation, so that many people who retire, and no longer need to flop on a beach or in front of a screen, find themselves at a loss—essentially, because they have never been schooled in leisure (in fact, the Greek word for “leisure”—schole— is the root of our word “school”). But by conflating relaxation and leisure, we risk losing out on the fruits of peace and civilization, and, so, on the highest happiness.

As a moral philosophy, Aristotelian ethics, also called virtue ethics, is astonishingly modern, even futuristic, with people poised to have much more free time as robots take over from slaves and workers.

So much has changed since the time of Aristotle, and yet so little.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle

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Is There a Right Amount of Anger?

Golden musical notes, a beautiful harmony
Virtue, like music, depends not on the right amount, but on the right measure.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

This article is a faithful exposition of Aristotle’s account of virtue in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Aristotle’s account of moral virtue rests on a simple but demanding idea: that goodness is not something we possess by nature, but something we acquire through practice.

In Book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics (c. 330 BCE), Aristotle argues that moral virtues are formed through repetition. Unlike sight and hearing, which are given to us at birth, virtue is not in our nature. But neither is it contrary to our nature, which is adapted to receive it. Just as a sculptor becomes a sculptor by sculpting, so the virtuous become virtuous by exercising virtue.

One cannot define virtue with any precision because the goodness of a feeling or action is highly person- and context-dependent. All that can be said is that virtue, like strength, is undermined by a lack or excess of training. For instance, he who flees from everything becomes a coward, while he who runs headlong into every danger becomes rash. Courage, in contrast, is indicated and produced by the mean.

Moral excellence is intimately related to pleasure and pain. For it is in the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain that bad deeds are committed, and good deeds omitted. Hence, it is by pleasure and pain that bad people are bad.

There are three objects of choice, the noble, the advantageous, and the pleasant, and three objects of avoidance which are their contraries, the base, the injurious, and the painful. The good tend to go right about these, whereas the bad tend to go wrong. This is especially true of pleasure, which is common to the animals, and also contained in the advantageous and the noble. The good feel pleasure from the most beautiful, noble [kalos] actions, but the bad or not-good are often confused about what is most pleasant. It is harder to fight with pleasure than with anger, but virtue, like art, is concerned with what is harder, and the good is better when it is harder.

A person may perform an apparently virtuous action by chance or under duress. An action is only virtuous if it is recognised as being virtuous and performed for that sake by a person with a set, unvarying character. In sum, an action is only virtuous if it is such as a virtuous person would perform.

The Golden Mean

Three things are found in the soul: passions, faculties, and dispositions [hexeis]. As the virtues are neither feelings nor faculties, they must be dispositions: dispositions to aim at the intermediate, or mean, between deficiency and excess.

The principal virtues, together with their corresponding vices, are listed in the table below.

Aristotle's table of the virtues, with the golden mean, the excess, and the deficiency
Copyright Neel Burton

In any sphere, arriving at the mean is a form of success and worthy of praise. While it is possible to fail in many ways, it is possible to succeed in one way only, which is why the one is easy and the other is difficult. By the same token, men may be bad in many ways, but good in one way only.

So far so good, except that not every passion or action admits of a mean: for instance, not envy or murder. It is never a question of murdering the right person, at the right time, in the right way, for murder is neither a deficiency nor an excess, but always and intrinsically vicious.

The principal virtues along with their corresponding vices are listed in the table below.

In some cases, one vice can be closer to the virtue than the contrary vice, for instance, rashness is closer to courage than cowardice, and prodigality is closer to liberality than meanness. This is partly because the contrary vice, whether cowardice or meanness, is more common. Hence, people oppose not rashness but cowardice to courage, and not prodigality but meanness to liberality.

It is no easy task to be good. To increase the likelihood of hitting the mark, we should (1) avoid the vice that is furthest from the virtue or mean; (2) consider our vices and drag ourselves towards their contrary extremes; and (3) be wary of pleasure and pain.

For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle… anyone can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble.

The Golden Mean (Virtue Ethics) vs the Categorical Imperative vs Utilitarianism

Aristotle’s ethics differs fundamentally from the two great ethical systems that came after him. Utilitarianism asks, ‘Which action will produce the most happiness?’ Kantian ethics asks, ‘Which action accords with strict moral duty?’ Aristotle begins somewhere else entirely: ‘What kind of person should I be?’ For him, ethics is not primarily about calculating consequences or obeying rules, but about cultivating character. The virtuous person develops, through practice and experience, the subtle judgement to feel and act in the right way, to the right degree, at the right time, and for the right reasons. Instead of giving us a crude formula for making moral decisions, Aristotle asks us to become the sort of person who can make them intuitively.

Sometimes, we may somewhat miss the mark, for instance, get angry too soon or not enough, yet still be praiseworthy. It is only when we deviate more markedly from the mean that we become blameworthy.

We help others by being virtuous, but we also help ourselves, for virtue is a disposition to happiness, and happiness is the exercise of virtue.

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It is striking that the great thinkers, from Aristotle to Augustine and Mencius to Montaigne, devoted so much of their time and thought to friendship, but almost none of either to marriage. Grayling’s timely treatise reacquaints us with a great but forgotten good that promises to fulfil so many of our practical, intellectual, emotional, and metaphysical needs. The book principally consists of a history of the philosophy of friendship capped by an account of canonical, often homosexual or homosocial friendships such as that of Achilles and Patroclus and Jonathan and David, who, in the Bible, describes the love of Jonathan as “better even than that of women”. Throughout, Grayling seeks to define friendship and, in so doing, explores its many forms, facets, charms, and consolations.

Perhaps in a desire to be modern, relevant, or politic, Grayling seems to reject the classical notion that, at its best and most meaningful, friendship is a highly elitist good. For the greats, only virtuous men can be ideal friends. Aristotle famously says that, while there are many ways for men to be bad, there is only one way for them to be good, and it is precisely in this sense that an ideal friend is ‘another self’—a historically important notion that Grayling severally dismisses. Because they are all one and the same, virtuous men are predictable, reliable, and therefore worthy of one another’s friendship. In contrast, bad people are in some way unlike themselves, and just as likely to hate other bad people as anyone else.

In my opinion, Plato, whom Grayling underrates, advances by far the most subtle and sophisticated of all theories of friendship, one far superior even to that of Aristotle. Despite the extravagant praise that he lavishes upon friendship, Aristotle is quite clear that the best and happiest life is not that spent in friendship, but in the contemplation of those things that are most true and therefore most beautiful and most dependable. There is a contradiction here: if the best life is a life of contemplation, then friendship is either superfluous or inimical to the best life, and therefore undeserving of the high praise that Aristotle lavishes upon it. It may be, as Aristotle tentatively suggests, that friendship is needed because it promotes contemplation, or that contemplation is only possible some of the time and friendship is needed the rest of the time, or even that a life of friendship is just as good as a life of contemplation. So much for Aristotle, one might say.

Plato’s Lysis may seem to fail in its task of defining friendship, but one should never take Plato or his mouthpiece Socrates at face value. There is far more to the Lysis than a couple of interesting but misguided thoughts on friendship. By discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is not only discussing friendship, but also demonstrating to the youths that, even though they count each other as close friends, they do not really know what friendship is, and that, whatever friendship is, it is something far deeper and far more meaningful than the puerile ‘friendship’ that they share. In contrast to the youths, Socrates knows perfectly well what friendship is, and is only feigning ignorance so as to teach the youths: ‘…and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you…’ More than that, by discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is himself in the process of befriending them. He befriends them not with pleasant banter or gossipy chitchat, as most people ‘befriend’ one another, but with the kind of philosophical conversation that is the hallmark of the deepest and most meaningful of friendships. In the course of this philosophical conversation, he tells the youths that he should ‘greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius’, thereby signifying not only that he places friendship on the same high pedestal as philosophy, to which he has devoted (and will sacrifice) his life, but also that the kind of friendship that he has in mind is so rare and uncommon that even he does not possess it. If friendship ultimately escapes definition, then this is because, like philosophy, friendship is not so much a thing-in-itself as it is a process for becoming. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion. For Plato, friendship and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.

Just as philosophy leads to friendship, so friendship leads to philosophy. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s most important work on friendship (although not generally recognized as such—Grayling fails to mention it), Socrates and Phaedrus go out into the idyllic countryside just outside Athens and have a long conversation about the anatomy of the soul, the nature of true love, the art of persuasion, and the merits of the spoken over the written word. At the end of this conversation, Socrates offers a prayer to the local deities. This is the famous Socratic Prayer, which is notable both in itself and for the response that it elicits from Phaedrus.

Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. —Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

Phaedrus: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.

Plato may fail to define friendship in the Lysis, but in the Phaedrus he gives us its living embodiment. Socrates and Phaedrus spend their time together enjoying the beautiful Attic countryside while engaging in honest and open philosophical conversation. By exercising and building upon reason, they are not only furthering each other’s understanding, but also transforming a life of friendship into a life of joint contemplation of those things that are most true and hence most beautiful and most dependable. If only on the basis of his response to the Socratic Prayer, it is obvious that Phaedrus is another self to Socrates, since he makes the same choices as Socrates and even justifies making those choices on the grounds that their friendship requires it. Whereas Aristotle and Grayling try to tell us what friendship is, Plato lets us feel it in all its allure and transformative power.