Aristotle's "Exclusive" Account of Happiness
Ronna Burger
In Sim, ed., The Crossroads of Norm and Nature. Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.

"Once contemplation, with its virtue, sophia, has been assigned to the class of primary eudaimonia, activity in accordance with ethical virtue and prudence must be assigned the rank of secondary happiness. But such activities cannot be ordered under the higher end of primary happiness, at least not in the life of any individual; for it is essential to ethical virtue that the right actions be chosen for their own sake, not as means to some further end (cf. II.4 1105a34)." (BURGER, p. 88)

"Pursued for its own sake and accompanied by its own proper pleasure, most self-sufficient and leisured, as capable of continuity and as free from fatigue as is possible for human beings, this activity should constitute perfect happiness for a human being - *if* it occupied a 'complete length of life' (X.7 1177b25). The same translation of an activity into a lifetime with which the ergon argument concluded reappears now, bringing immediately in its wake an acknowledgement of the limits of human capacity: such a life would be higher than human, and if mind is divine, the life in accordance with mind would be divine in comparison with human life (1177b33).... Aristotle draws a stark and, in the context, startling conclusion: 'The nature of the human is not self-sufficient with regard to contemplation' (X.8 1178b33-34)." (BURGER, p. 90)

"Contemplative wisdom may be altogether other than political action; but those who are defined by their sharing of speeches and thoughts - the friends who 'philosophize together' (IX.12 1172a5) - engage in an activity that realizes at once the rational and the political nature of the human. If that double actualization belonged to this activity alone, it would, on those grounds, have a claim to the title of the exclusive human good." (BURGER, p. 92)

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