February 11, 2005
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Hauerwas’s Virtues class is currently working through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; as I mentioned with Hauerwas’s Christians Among the Virtues, he thinks Aristotle is an interesting–though not complete–resource for thinking about Christian ethics. Read along in book 1 (of ten) with me:
Aristotle’s main question in this Ethics is what the good life is and how it is obtained. The word he uses, eudaimonia, has no good English translation anyway, and his deployment of the concept makes clear that it isn’t what it means in Greek, either. It kinda sorta means happiness, but Aristotle is clear that one can only judge, towards the end of life, whether one has been “happy”–so it has more the sense of looking back and recognizing that one has lived well. Children and the young can’t possibly obtain “eudaimonia,” because one needs a full life. (This is a fascinating idea–and perhaps one which begins to be at odds with a Christian approach to evaluating a life.)
Virtue or ethics had long been associated with happiness in Greek philosophy. The Stoics were particularly interested in this; their driving outlook was that one’s own virtue was the one stable ground for happiness, because it was the one thing that could never be taken away against one’s will. If one’s family all die, one can still respond virtuously to that event and thus not have ULTIMATE happiness taken away. (This is where they get the idea that remaining only loosely attached to people and things is important–if you love your own virtue, but merely appreciate your family, your money, your position, whatever, you can always be happy. Augustine flirts with this, by the way, but later abandons it.)
Now, Aristotle shares this concern of protecting the (potentially) virtuous man (more later on why it’s a man) from misfortune; he to wants to base the quest for happiness on something that is as stable and independent from fortune as much as possible. Unlike the Stoics, however, he will not divorce happiness entirely from fortune: “No man can be happy on the rack,” he insists. So, he wants to say, it is true that a man might suffer calamity from which there is no recovery–nothing can prevent the virtuous man from losing his “eudaimonia” this way. But perhaps virtue is a way to protect against smaller misfortues; perhaps the life of virtue can be a rock on which to stand, even if not an utterly immovable one.
