(Previous: Eudemian Ethics I.3.)
Most of the claims and impasses will be cleared up if we can beautifully trace the boundaries of how fulfillment needs to be conceived - whether it is solely a matter of your personhood having a certain quality (as some of the older sages maintained) or whether indeed you must have a certain quality but especially so must your actions have a certain quality.
We can differentiate among ways of life. Some of them lay no claim to that kind of success, but seriously strive solely after the necessities, such as those which are all about burdensome crafts and making money and handicrafting (by "burdensome" I mean those undertaken solely to maintain a good reputation, by "handicrafting" those which are sedentary and done for wages, by "money-making" petty trading for buying and selling things).
Just as three things are reckoned as contending for fulfillment (the ones that we said earlier are the greatest goods for human beings - excellence and wisdom and enjoyment), we see also that there are three ways of life, to which everyone with the liberty to live as they please makes a commitment: civic involvement, the love of sagacity, and enjoyment.
Of these the love of sagacity tends to be about wisdom and attention to truth, civic involvement about beautiful actions (which arise from excellence), and enjoyment about bodily pleasures. This is why, as we said before, different people differ in who they call fulfilled.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, when asked what kind of person was the most fulfilled, said "none of those you would suppose, but someone who would seem strange to you". He answered this way because he saw that the person who asked the question couldn't conceive of calling someone fulfilled who wasn't high and mighty and handsome or rich, whereas he perhaps thought that someone living free of pain and purely with regard to doing right, or someone taking part in a divine sort of attention, was as blessed as a human being could be said to be.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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