Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition
University of Chicago Press, 1958

"[E]udaimonia means neither happiness nor beatitude; it cannot be translated and perhaps cannot even be explained. It has the connotation of blessedness, but without any religious overtones, and it means literally something like the well-being of the daimon who accompanies each man throughout life, who is his distinct identity, but appears and is visible only to others. [fn18 cites Oedipus Rex 1186ff, concluding that 'the misery of the mortals is their blindness toward their own daimon'] Unlike happiness, therefore, which is a passing mood, and unlike good fortune, which one may have at certain periods of life and lack in others, eudaimonia, like life itself, is a lasting state of being which is neither subject to change nor capable of effecting change. To be eudaimon and to have been eudaimon, according to Aristotle, are the same, just as to 'live well' and to have 'lived well' are the same as long as life lasts; they are not states or activities which change a person's quality, such as learning and having learned, which indicate two altogether different attributes of the same person at different moments. This unchangeable identity of the person, though disclosing itself intangibly in act and speech, becomes tangible only in the story of the actor's and speaker's life; but as such it can be known, that is, grasped as a palpable entity only after it has come to its end." (ARENDT, pp. 192-193) [PSA: this is connected to the significance of bios as opposed to zoe.]

"[T]he innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse. Unlike human behavior ... action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis. [fn33: The reason why Aristotle in his Poetics finds that greatness (megethos) is a prerequisite of the dramatic plot is that the drama imitates acting and acting is judged by its greatness, by its distinction from the commonplace (1450b25). The same, incidentially, is true for the beautiful, which resides in greatness and taxis, the joining together of the parts (1450b34ff).] .... Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement. It is this insistence on the living deed and the spoken word as the greatest acheivements of which human beings are capable that was conceptualized in Aristotle's notion of energeia ('actuality'), with which he designated all activities that do not pursue an end (are ateleis) and leave no work behind (no par' autas erga), but exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself. It is from the experience of this full actuality that the paradoxical 'end in itself' derives its original meaning; for in these instances of action and speech the end (telos) is not pursued but lies in the activity itself which therefore becomes an entelecheia [PSA: culmination], and the work is not what follows and extinguishes the process but is imbedded in it; the performance is the work, is energeia. Aristotle, in his political philosophy, is still well aware of what is at stake in politics, namely, no less than the ergon tou anthropou (the 'work of man qua man'), and if he defined this 'work' as 'to live well', he clearly meant that 'work' here is no work product but exists only in sheer actuality." (ARENDT, pp. 205-207)

In a discussion of Metaphysics 1025b25ff and 1064a17ff, Arendt observes that "episteme poietike ... immediately precedes and leads to theoria" and that "the reason for this predeliction in philosophy is ... that contemplation and fabrication (theoria and poiesis) have an inner affinity and do not stand in the same unequivocal opposition to each other as contemplation and action. The decisive point of similarity, at least in Greek philosophy, was that contemplation, the beholding of something, was considered to be an inherent element in fabrication as well, inasmuch as the work of the craftsman was guided by the 'idea,' the model beheld by him before the fabrication process had started as well as after it had ended, first to tell him what to make and then enable him to judge the finished product. Historically, the source of this contemplation, which we find for the first time described in the Socratic school, is at least twofold. On one hand, it stands in obvious and consistent connection with the famous contention of Plato, quoted by Aristotle, that thaumazein, the shocked wonder at the miracle of Being, is the beginning of all philosophy. It seems to me highly probable that this Platonic contention is the immediate result of an experience, perhaps the most striking one, that Socrates offered his disciples: the sight of him time and again suddenly overcome by his thoughts and thrown into a state of absorption to the point of perfect motionlessness for many hours. It seems no les splausible that this shocked wonder should be essentially speechless, that is, that its actual content should be untranslatable into words. This, at least, would explain by Plato and Aristotle, who held thaumazein to be the beginning of philosophy, should also agree - despite so many and such decisive disagreements - that some state of speechlessness, the essentially speechless state of contemplation, was the end of philosophy. Theoria, in fact, is only another word for thaumazein; the contemplation of truth at which the philosopher ultimately arrives is the philosophically purified speechless wonder with which he began." (ARENDT, pp. 301-302)

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