Being Toward Happiness: Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics

Abstract

The article sets a goal to show happiness in Aristotle's ethics as a concept revealing a condition for possible human development both in its ultimate stage, where a human completely actualizes his abilities, existing in maximum proximity to god, and in its right directed movement, when human nature opens up in all its bodily, rational and social diversity. Therefore, development is determined not by the reduction of the human to any aspect of his nature, but by its rationally found and expressed in terms of virtues harmony; thus the very being of human is aimed at happiness.

Aristotle considers core of happiness in the “assignment” or “characteristic work” (ergon) of the human. Here “slacker” (argos) is human who is deprived of the work as meaning, meaningless, not existed for anything and happiness is not already the gift of gods or the fortuity, but it depends on the state of human life, which is defined as perfect activity.

Therefore, in the most general sense, virtues can be called parameters of human actualization, in which ideal model is set as the one that can be actualized. At this point we get not merely an action, not a rational action, which distinguishes human existence from animal existence, but an ethical action – “deed” (praxis) as the action that reveals the human himself. Truly happy person is a person who is in the process of proper development.