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What Is Eudaimonia?

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Abstract

Eudaimonia, or human well-being and flourishing, occupies the same role in Western thought that traditional enlightenment does in Buddhism. This chapter elucidates Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia in depth. It then illustrates how Aristotle continues to inform virtue ethics and understandings of well-being in contemporary philosophy through examining the work of Neera Badhwar, Daniel Haybron, Damien Keown, Daniel Russell, and Valerie Tiberius. It also illustrates how Aristotle informs understandings of well-being in modern psychology through examining the work of Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and positive psychologists such as Martin Seligman. The questions of (1) whether virtue and happiness are both necessary for well-being and (2) the relationship between subjective well-being and living an objectively good life recur throughout the chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

  2. 2.

    Arthur Reber makes a strong (although not invincible) argument for single-cell eukaryotes possessing sentience. Daniel Nicholson makes an even stronger case that the self-organizing activity of biological cells can’t be understood in purely mechanistic terms. See Arthur Reber, The First Minds: Caterpillars, ‘karyotes, and Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), and Daniel Nicholson, “Is the Cell Really a Machine?” Journal of Theoretical Biology 477, No. 21 (2019):108–126.

  3. 3.

    Aristotle, “Nichomachean Ethics,” translated by William David Ross, in Richard McKeon, Introduction to Aristotle, 2nd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 363–364. The words “happy man,” “happy state,” and “happiness” are translations of makarion (blessed with good fortune/skill), eudaimon (a person who possesses well-being), and eudaimonia (well-being), respectively. The English word “happy” doesn’t quite capture the meaning of the original Greek.

  4. 4.

    Daniel Haybron points out that Aristotle’s well-being is not the same thing as smiley-faced happiness. Haybron thinks a lot of confusion results from confounding three separate “folk” uses of happiness: (1) happiness as a fleeting pleasant emotion, (2) happiness as a disposition to experience positive emotions in appropriate contexts, and (3) happiness as in “having a happy life.” Haybron distinguishes between happy lives and good lives. There are things that may be more important than happiness that also contribute to making a life a good one. Being a decent human being is one of them. See Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  5. 5.

    We will return to the parallel between Aristotelian sophia and Buddhist prajñā in Chap. 4.

  6. 6.

    Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 360.

  7. 7.

    Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 509.

  8. 8.

    “Half the Holy Life,” (in the Maggasaṃyutta or Connected Discourses on the Path), in The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 1524.

  9. 9.

    Nicholas White, A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 173.

  10. 10.

    Paul Bloomfield, The Virtues of Happiness: A Theory of the Good Life. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  11. 11.

    Endorsing the idea that there are optimal ways in which adult human moral development normally proceeds doesn’t require one to endorse Aristotelian teleology in full. Owen Flanagan has suggested the existence of “natural teleologies.” The kind of creatures we are and the limited range of conditions under which we can survive and thrive (including a large and diverse but limited range of cultural variants) constrain and limit (1) the number of possible maturational and developmental pathways from first to second nature that can occur and that (2) reliably lead to objectively good and subjectively happy lives. See Owen Flanagan, Moral Sprouts and Natural Teleologies: Twenty-first Century Moral Psychology Meets Classical Chinese Philosophy (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2014).

  12. 12.

    Henry Sidgwick, The Method of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981).

  13. 13.

    For a tour-de-force examination of the historical evolution of modern ideas concerning personhood and individuality, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  14. 14.

    Amod Lele, “The Birth of Qualitative Individualism,” Love of All Wisdom (blog), November 11, 2018. http://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2018/11/the-birth-of-qualitative-individualism/

  15. 15.

    Neera Badhwar, Well-Being: Happiness in a Worthwhile Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8.

  16. 16.

    Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  17. 17.

    Valerie Tiberius, Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  18. 18.

    G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, No. 124 (1958): 1–19.

  19. 19.

    Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

  20. 20.

    Philippa Foot, “Moral Arguments,” Mind 67, No. 268 (1958): 502–513.

  21. 21.

    Philippa Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 59, (1958–1959): 83–104.

  22. 22.

    Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  23. 23.

    Daniel Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  24. 24.

    Badhwar, 20.

  25. 25.

    Badhwar, 50.

  26. 26.

    Badhwar, 150.

  27. 27.

    Badhwar, 225–6.

  28. 28.

    Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness.

  29. 29.

    Damien Keown, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 21

  30. 30.

    Mukul Shamra, “A Heart of Darkness,” The Economic Times, August 17, 2012. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/vedanta/a-heart-in-darkness/articleshow/15523741.cms, para 1.

  31. 31.

    Valerie Tiberius, Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

  32. 32.

    Tiberius, 40.

  33. 33.

    Tiberius, 63.

  34. 34.

    Tiberius, 171.

  35. 35.

    Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness.

  36. 36.

    Carl Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).

  37. 37.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Thomas Common, trans. (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2016), Part 4, Chapter 61. Retrieved at: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/n/nietzsche/friedrich/n67a/chapter61.html

  38. 38.

    Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–396.

  39. 39.

    Of course “archetypes” are kinds of potentials. Jung’s anima, for example, represents a man’s potential to develop his feminine side. These are potentials that are too tightly tied to Jung’s specific model of the unconscious to fit in well with mainstream psychology, however.

  40. 40.

    Maslow, 375.

  41. 41.

    Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Washington, D.C.: Oxford University Press and the American Psychological Association, 2004).

  42. 42.

    Peterson and Seligman, 3.

  43. 43.

    Nansook Park, Christopher Peterson, and Martin Seligman, “Strengths of Character and Well-Being,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 23, No. 5 (2004): 603–619.

  44. 44.

    One shouldn’t give too much weight to these findings since our momentary judgments of how satisfied we are with our lives may be poor proxies for how well our lives are actually going. Researchers often employ life satisfaction ratings because they’re easy to obtain. You simply ask an informant to rate his or her life satisfaction on a ten-point scale. Daniel Haybron catalogs many of the problems associated with life satisfaction ratings, including their unreliability over relatively short periods of time and how easily they are affected by context and adventitious factors. See Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 86–91.

  45. 45.

    Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness (New York: Free Press, 2002).

  46. 46.

    Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, “Hedonia, Eudaimonia, and Well-Being: An Introduction,” Journal of Happiness Studies 9 (2008): 1–11.

  47. 47.

    Deci and Ryan, 2.

  48. 48.

    Edward Diener, Shigehiro Oishi & Louis Tay (eds.), Handbook of Well-Being (Salt Lake City: DEF Publishers, 2018).

  49. 49.

    Michael Steger, Todd Kashdan, and Shigehero Oishi, “Being Good by Doing Good: Daily Eudaimonic Activity and Well-Being,” Journal of Research in Personality 42 (2008): 22–42.

  50. 50.

    Steger, Kashdan, and Oishi, 40.

  51. 51.

    Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Free Press, 2011).

  52. 52.

    Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).

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  1. White Plains, NY, USA

    Seth Zuihō Segall

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Segall, S.Z. (2020). What Is Eudaimonia?. In: Buddhism and Human Flourishing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37027-5_3

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