Nicomachean Ethics Book 1 Notes

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

Book I, Section 1

• Every craft, inquiry, action, and decision aims at some good.
• The good is what everything seeks.
• Ends differ: some are activities, others are products.
• Products are better than activities when they are apart from the actions.
• Different actions, crafts, and sciences have different ends (e.g., health for medicine, a boat for boat building, victory for generalship, wealth for household management).
• Some pursuits are subordinate to others (e.g., bridle making to horsemanship, horsemanship to generalship).
• Ends of ruling sciences are more choiceworthy than subordinate ends, as lower ends are pursued for the sake of higher ends.
• It doesn't matter if ends are activities or something apart from them.
• If there is an end we wish for because of itself, and because of which we wish for other things, and we don't choose everything for the sake of something else (to avoid infinite regress), this end is the best good.
• Knowledge of this good is important for our way of life, helping us to aim at the right mark.
• We should try to grasp what the good is and which science studies it.
• Political science is the most controlling and highest ruling science.
• Political science prescribes which sciences should be studied in cities and by whom.
• Even honored capacities like generalship, household management, and rhetoric are subordinate to political science.
• Political science legislates what must be done and avoided, so its end includes the ends of other sciences, making it the human good.
• The good of the city is greater and more complete than the good of an individual.
• Seeking these goods is a sort of political science.

Book I, Section 2

• Discussion should be perspicuous enough to accord with the subject matter.
• Fine and just things examined by political science vary and seem conventional, not natural.
• Goods also vary, causing harm to some (e.g., wealth or bravery leading to destruction).
• Truth indicated roughly and in outline is sufficient, since the subject holds good usually, not universally.
• Claims should be accepted as holding good usually.
• The educated person seeks exactness to the extent the subject allows.
• It's mistaken to demand demonstrations from a rhetorician or accept persuasive arguments from a mathematician.
• A good judge in an area is educated in that area, and the unqualifiedly good judge is educated in every area.
• Youth is not suitable for political science because they lack experience.

Book I, Section 3

• A youth tends to follow his feelings and will not benefit from political science because it focuses on action, not knowledge.
• Immaturity in character, not age, is the issue; immature people don't benefit from knowledge.
• For those who accord with reason, knowledge of political science is beneficial.
• Preliminary points: the student, how claims are accepted, and what we propose to do.
• Every sort of knowledge and decision pursues some good; political science seeks the highest good achievable in action.
• Most people agree the highest good is happiness, equating living well and doing well with being happy.
• People disagree about what happiness is; the many think it's pleasure, wealth, or honor.
• The same person changes his mind based on circumstances (e.g., health when ill, wealth when poor).
• When ignorant, people admire grand ideas.
• Some wise people think there's a good in its own right that causes all other goods.
• Examine current beliefs or those with arguments for them.

Book I, Section 4

• Difference between arguments from principles and toward principles.
• Like a race course, an argument can start from or lead to principles.
• Begin from things known, either to us or without qualification.
• Begin from things known to us, requiring upbringing in fine habits to study fine and just things and political questions.
• Begin from the belief that something is true; if apparent, begin without knowing why.
• Well-brought-up people have or can acquire the beginnings.
• Hesiod: best to grasp everything yourself, noble to listen to one who has spoken well, useless to do neither.
• People reasonably conceive the good (happiness) from their lives.
• Three most favored lives: gratification, political activity, and study.
• The many see the good as pleasure, leading a life of gratification, appearing slavish.
• Cultivated people see the good as honor, pursued in political life, but it's too superficial.
• Honor depends more on those who honor than the one honored; the good should be our own and hard to take.
• People pursue honor to convince themselves they are good, seeking honor from prudent people for virtue.
• Virtue is superior to honor.
• Virtue may be the end of the political life, but it's incomplete.

Book I, Section 5

• It's possible to possess virtue but be asleep or inactive and suffer misfortunes; no one would call this happy.
• The life of study will be examined later.
• The moneymaker’s life is forced, not chosen for itself; wealth is merely useful for another end.
• Arguments against the idea of a universal good.
• Better to examine the universal good and what is meant by it.
• Inquiry is unwelcome because those who introduced the Forms were friends, but truth is paramount.
• Philosophers prioritize truth over friends.
• Those who introduced this view didn't mean to produce an Idea for any series with prior and posterior members (e.g., numbers).
• Good is spoken of in substance, quality, and relative; substance is prior to relative, so there's no common Idea over these.
• Good is spoken of in as many ways as being: in what-it-is, as god and mind; in quality, as virtues; in quantity, as the measured amount; in relative, as the useful; in time, as the opportune moment; in place, as the right situation.
• The good cannot be a common and single universal because it's spoken of in multiple types of predication.
• If things have a single Idea, there's a single science of them; if there were an Idea of good, there'd be some single science of all goods, but, in fact, there are many (e.g., opportune moment in war is generalship, in disease medicine).

Book I, Section 6

• If Good Itself and good have the same account of good, they don't differ; no point in appealing to Good Itself.
• Good Itself is no more of a good by being eternal; a white thing is no whiter if it lasts a long time.
• Pythagoreans place the One in the column of goods.
• Arguments aren't concerned with every sort of good.
• Goods pursued and liked in their own right are one species; those tending to produce or preserve these goods are goods because of these.
• Goods are spoken of in two ways: in their own right and because of these.
• Separate goods in their own right from useful goods and consider if goods in their own right correspond to a single Idea.
• Goods pursued even on their own are prudence, seeing, some pleasures, and honors.
• Nothing except the Idea may be good in its own right, making the Form futile.
• If other things are also goods in their own right, the same account of good will have to turn up in all of them, like whiteness in snow and chalk.
• Honor, prudence, and pleasure have different accounts precisely insofar as they are goods; the good is not something common corresponding to a single Idea.

Book I, Section 7

• Good isn't like homonyms resulting from chance.
• Good is spoken of from the fact that goods derive from one thing or all contribute to one thing, or by analogy (e.g., sight to body, understanding to soul).
• Leave these questions for another branch of philosophy.
• The same is true about the Idea; even if there's some one good predicated in common, or some separable good, itself in its own right, that's not the sort of good a human being can achieve in action or possess, which is what we're looking for.
• Better to know the Idea to improve the goods we can possess and achieve in action; if we have it as a pattern, we'll know better about the goods that are good for us.
• This clashes with the sciences; each aims at some good but leaves out knowledge of the Idea.
• It's a puzzle what a weaver or carpenter gains from knowing Good Itself, or how one becomes better at medicine or generalship from gazing on the Idea Itself.
• The doctor considers not even health universally, but human health, and the health of this particular human being being treated.
• Return to the good we're looking for and consider what it could be.
• It's one thing in one action or craft, another in another (e.g., medicine, generalship).
• The good of each action or craft is that for the sake of which the other things are done; in medicine, it's health; in generalship, victory; in house-building, a house.
• The end is the good achievable in action; if there are more ends than one, the good will be these ends.
• Since we choose some ends (e.g., wealth, flutes, instruments) because of something else, not all ends are complete; the best good is something complete. If only one end is complete, the good we're looking for is this end; if more ends than one are complete, it will be the most complete end of these.

Book I, Section 8

• An end pursued in its own right is more complete than an end pursued because of something else; an end never choiceworthy because of something else is more complete than ends choiceworthy both in their own right and because of this end.
• An end always choiceworthy in its own right, never because of something else, is complete without qualification.
• Happiness seems complete without qualification; we always choose it because of itself, never because of something else.
• Honor, pleasure, understanding, and every virtue we choose because of themselves and for the sake of happiness.
• Happiness is never chosen for their sake, or for the sake of anything else at all.
• Happiness is complete from self-sufficiency; it suffices for a person, parents, children, wife, friends, and fellow citizens, since a human being is a political animal.
• Limit must be imposed; extending the good to parents’ parents and children’s children goes on without limit.
• Self-sufficient when all by itself it makes a life choiceworthy and lacking nothing; that's what happiness does.
• Happiness is most choiceworthy of all goods, not counted as one good among many; adding even the smallest of goods would make it more choiceworthy.
• Happiness is complete and self-sufficient, since it is the end of the things achievable in action.
• The best good is happiness; need a clearer statement of what the best good is.
• Grasp the function of a human being; the good depends on its function.
• The carpenter and leather worker have functions; does a human being have no function?
• Like eye, hand, foot, and every bodily part has its function, may ascribe to a human being some function apart from all of these?

Book I, Section 9

• Living is shared with plants; the special function of a human being is not nutrition and growth.
• The life of sense perception is shared with animals.
• The remaining possibility is the life of action of the part of the soul that has reason.
• One part of the soul has reason as obeying reason; the other has reason as itself having reason and thinking.
• Life is spoken of in two ways (capacity and activity); take a human being’s special function to be life as activity, since this seems to be called life more fully.
• Human function is activity of the soul in accord with reason or requiring reason.
• The function of a kind of thing is the same in kind as the function of an excellent individual of the kind.
• Add to the function the superior achievement in accord with the virtue; the function of a harpist is to play the harp, and the function of a good harpist is to play it well.
• Human function is a certain kind of life; this life is activity and actions of the soul that involve reason; the function of the excellent man is to do this well and finely.
• Each function is completed well by being completed in accord with the virtue proper to that kind of thing.
• Human good is activity of the soul in accord with virtue, and indeed with the best and most complete virtue, if there are more virtues than one, in a complete life.
• One swallow doesn't make a spring, nor does one day; nor does one day or a short time make us blessed and happy.
• This is a sketch of the good; draw the outline first, and fill it in later; in such cases, time discovers more, or is a good partner in discovery.
• Crafts have improved this way; anyone can add what is lacking in the outline.
• Remember previous remarks; do not look for the same degree of exactness in all areas, but the degree that accords with a given subject matter and is proper to a given line of inquiry.
• Carpenter’s and the geometer’s inquiries about the right angle are different; the carpenter restricts himself to what helps his work, but the geometer inquires into what the right angle is.
• Avoid digressions that overwhelm our main task.

Book I, Section 10

• In some cases, it's enough to prove rightly that something is true, without explaining why.
• This is so with principles, where the fact that something is true is the first thing, the principle.
• Principles are studied by induction, perception, habituation, or other means.
• Find them out by means suited to their nature and work hard to define them rightly because they carry great weight for what follows.
• The principle seems to be more than half the whole and makes evident the answer to many of our questions.
• Examine the principle not only from the conclusion and premises, but also from what is said about it.
• All the facts harmonize with a true account, whereas the truth soon clashes with a false one.
• Goods are divided into three types: external, goods of the soul, and goods of the body.
• Goods of the soul are goods most fully, and more than the others (actions and activities of the soul).
• Correct in saying that some sort of actions and activities are the end; the end turns out to be a good of the soul, not an external good.
• The belief that the happy person lives well and does well agrees with our account, since we have virtually said that the end is a sort of living well and doing well.
• All the features people look for in happiness appear to be true of the end described in our account.
• Happiness seems to be virtue, prudence, wisdom, or these, or one of these, involving pleasure or requiring it to be added; others add in external prosperity as well.
• Some of these views are traditional, held by many, while others are held by a few men who are widely esteemed.
• Reasonable for each group not to be completely wrong, but to be correct on one point at least, or even on most points.

Book I, Section 11

• Our account agrees with those who say happiness is virtue in general or some particular virtue because activity in accord with virtue is proper to virtue.
• It matters if the best good consists in possessing or in using (a state or an activity that actualizes the state).
• Someone may be in a state that achieves no good—if, for instance, he is asleep or inactive—but this cannot be true of the activity.
• Olympic prizes are not for the finest and strongest, but for the contestants; only those who act correctly win the prize; the same is true in life.
• The life of these active people is also pleasant in itself because being pleased is a condition of the soul (and hence is included in the activity of the soul).
• Each type of person finds pleasure in whatever he is called a lover of.
• What is just pleases the lover of justice, and in general what accords with virtue pleases the lover of virtue.
• The things that please most people conflict because they are not pleasant by nature, whereas the things that please lovers of the fine are things pleasant by nature.
• Actions in accord with virtue are pleasant by nature, so they both please lovers of the fine and are pleasant in their own right.
• These people’s lives do not need pleasure to be added to virtuous activity as some sort of extra decoration; rather it has its pleasure within itself.
• Someone who does not enjoy fine actions is not good; no one would call a person just if he did not enjoy doing just actions, or generous if he did not enjoy generous actions, and similarly for the other virtues.
• Actions in accord with the virtues are pleasant in their own right.
• These actions are good and fine as well as pleasant; they are good, fine, and pleasant more than anything else is, since on this question the excellent person judges rightly, and his judgment agrees with what we have said.
• Happiness is best, finest, and most pleasant, and the Delian inscription is wrong to distinguish these things.

Book I, Section 12

• 'What is most just is finest; being healthy is most beneficial; but it is most pleasant to win our heart’s desire.’ For all three features are found in the best activities, and we say happiness is these activities, or rather one of them, the best one.
• Happiness needs external goods to be added; we cannot easily do fine actions if we lack resources.
• In many actions we use friends, wealth, and political power as instruments.
• Deprivation of certain things— for instance, good birth, good children, beauty—mars our blessedness.
• Happiness would seem to need this sort of prosperity added also.
• Some identify happiness with good fortune, and others identify it with virtue.
• Is happiness acquired by learning, habituation, or some other form of cultivation? Or is it the result of some divine fate, or even of fortune?
• If the gods give any gift at all to human beings, it is reasonable for them to give us happiness more than any other human good, insofar as it is the best of human goods.
• Even if it is not sent by the gods, but instead results from virtue and some sort of learning or cultivation, happiness appears to be one of the most divine things, since the prize and goal of virtue appears to be the best good, something divine and blessed.
• If happiness comes in this way, it will be widely shared; anyone who is not deformed in his capacity for virtue will be able to achieve happiness through some sort of learning and attention.
• It is better to be happy because of virtue than because of fortune; it is reasonable for this to be the way we become happy.
• Whatever is natural is naturally in the finest state possible; the same is true of the products of crafts and of every other cause, especially the best cause; it would be seriously inappropriate to entrust what is greatest and finest to fortune.
• Happiness is a certain sort of activity of the soul in accord with virtue, and hence not a result of fortune.

Book I, Section 13

• Of the other goods, some are necessary conditions of happiness, while others are naturally useful and cooperative as instruments but are not parts of it.
• The conclusion agrees with our opening remarks; we took the goal of political science to be the best good and most of its attention is devoted to the character of the citizens, to make them good people who do fine actions.
• We regard neither ox, nor horse, nor any other kind of animal as happy; none of them can share in this sort of activity.
• A child is not happy either, since his age prevents him from doing these sorts of actions; if he is called happy, he is being congratulated simply because of anticipated blessedness; happiness requires both complete virtue and a complete life.
• It needs a complete life because life includes many reversals of fortune, good and bad, and the most prosperous person may fall into a terrible disaster in old age.
• If someone has suffered those sorts of misfortunes and comes to a miserable end, no one counts him happy.
• Should we count no human being happy during his lifetime, but follow Solon’s advice to wait to see the end?
• If we agree with Solon, can someone really be happy during the time after he has died? Surely that is completely absurd, especially when we say happiness is an activity.
• We do not say, then, that someone is happy during the time he is dead, and Solon’s point is not this absurd one, but rather that when a human being has died, we can safely pronounce that he was blessed before he died, on the assumption that he is now finally beyond evils and misfortunes.

Book I, Section 14

• Even if someone has lived in blessedness until old age and has died appropriately, many fluctuations of his descendants’ fortunes may still happen to him; some may be good people and get the life they deserve, while the contrary may be true of others, and clearly they may be as distantly related to their ancestor as you please.
• It would be an absurd result if the dead person’s condition changed along with the fortunes of his descendants, so that at one time he would turn out to have been happy in his lifetime and at another time he would turn out to have been miserable.
• It would also be absurd if the condition of descendants did not affect their ancestors at all or for any length of time.
• We must return to the previous puzzle, since that will perhaps also show us the answer to our present question.
• Let us grant that we must wait to see the end, and must then count someone blessed, not as now being blessed during the time he is dead but because he previously was blessed.
• Would it not be absurd, then, if, at the very time when he is happy, we refused to ascribe truly to him the happiness he has?
• Such refusal results from reluctance to call him happy during his lifetime, because of its ups and downs; we suppose happiness is enduring and definitely not prone to fluctuate, but the same person’s fortunes often turn to and fro.
• If we take our cue from his fortunes, we shall often call him happy and then miserable again, thereby representing the happy person as a kind of chameleon, insecurely based.
• It is quite wrong to take our cue from someone’s fortunes; his doing well or badly does not rest on them.
• A human life, as we said, needs these added, but activities in accord with virtue control happiness, and the contrary activities control its contrary.
• The present puzzle is further evidence for our account of happiness; no human achievement has the stability of activities in accord with virtue, since these seem to be more enduring even than our knowledge of the sciences.

Book I, Section 15

• The most honorable among the virtues themselves are more enduring than the other virtues, because blessed people devote their lives to them more fully and more continually than to anything else; this continual activity would seem to be the reason we do not forget them.
• The happy person has the stability we are looking for and keeps the character he has throughout his life; always, or more than anything else, he will do and study the actions in accord with virtue, and will bear fortunes most finely, in every way and in all conditions appropriately, since he is truly ‘good, foursquare, and blameless.’
• Many events are subject to fortune; some are minor, some major; minor strokes of good or ill fortune will not carry any weight for his life.
• Many major strokes of good fortune will make it more blessed; they naturally add adornment to it, and his use of them proves to be fine and excellent; if he suffers many major misfortunes, they oppress and spoil his blessedness, since they involve pain and impede many activities.
• Even here what is fine shines through, whenever someone bears many severe misfortunes with good temper, not because he feels no distress, but because he is noble and magnanimous.
• Since it is activities that control life, as we said, no blessed person could ever become miserable, since he will never do hateful and base actions.
• A truly good and prudent person, we suppose, will bear strokes of fortune suitably, and from his resources at any time will do the finest actions, just as a good general will make the best use of his forces in war, and a good shoemaker will make the finest shoe from the hides given to him, and similarly for all other craftsmen.
• The happy person could never become miserable, but neither will he be blessed if he falls into misfortunes as bad as Prima’s; nor will he be inconstant and prone to fluctuate, since he will neither be easily shaken from his happiness nor shaken by just any misfortunes.

Book I, Section 16

• He will be shaken from it, though, by many serious misfortunes, and from these a return to happiness will take no short time, at best, it will take a long and complete length of time that includes great and fine successes.
• The happy person is the one whose activities accord with complete virtue, with an adequate supply of external goods, not for just any time but for a complete life.
• Add that he will also go on living this way and will come to an appropriate end, since the future is not apparent to us, and we take happiness to be the end, and altogether complete in every way.
• A living person who has, and will keep, the goods we mentioned is blessed, but blessed as a human being is.
• Since happiness is a certain sort of activity of the soul in accord with complete virtue, we must examine virtue because that will perhaps also be a way to study happiness better.
• The true politician seems to have put more effort into virtue than into anything else, since he wants to make the citizens good and law-abiding.
• We find an example of this in the Spartan and Cretan legislators and in any others who share their concerns.

Book I, Section 17

• The examination of virtue is proper for political science; the inquiry clearly suits our decision at the beginning.
• The virtue we must examine is human virtue, since we are also seeking the human good and human happiness.
• By human virtue, we mean virtue of the soul, not of the body, since we also say that happiness is an activity of the soul.
• The politician must in some way know about the soul, just as someone setting out to heal the eyes must know about the whole body as well; this is all the more true to the extent that political science is better and more honorable than medicine; even among doctors, the cultivated ones devote a lot of effort to finding out about the body; hence the politician as well as the student of nature must study the soul, but he must study it for his specific purpose, far enough for his inquiry into virtue; a more exact treatment would presumably take more effort than his purpose requires.
• We have discussed the soul sufficiently for our purposes in our popular works as well as our less popular; we should use this discussion; we have said, for instance, that one part of the soul is nonrational, while one has reason; are these distinguished as parts of a body and everything divisible into parts are?
• Or are they two only in definition, and inseparable by nature, as the convex and the concave are in a surface? It does not matter for present purposes; consider the nonrational part; one part of it, i.e., the cause of nutrition and growth, would seem to be plantlike and shared with all living things; we can ascribe this capacity of the soul to everything that is nourished, including embryos, and the same capacity to full-grown living things, since this is more reasonable than to ascribe another capacity to them.
• The virtue of this capacity is apparently shared, not specifically human; this part and this capacity more than others seem to be active in sleep, and here the good and the bad person are least distinct; happy people are said to be no better off than miserable people for half their lives.
• This lack of distinction is not surprising, since sleep is inactivity of the soul insofar as it is called excellent or base, unless to some small extent some movements penetrate to our awareness, and in this way the decent person comes to have better images in dreams than just any random person has; leave aside the nutritive part, since by nature it has no share in human virtue.

Book I, Section 18

• Another nature in the soul would also seem to be nonrational, though in a way it shares in reason.
• In the continent and the incontinent person we praise their reason, that is to say, the part of the soul that has reason, because it exhorts them correctly and toward what is best; they evidently also have in them some other part that is by nature something apart from reason, clashing and struggling with reason.
• Paralyzed parts of a body, when we decide to move them to the right, do the contrary and move off to the left, the same is true of the soul; incontinent people have impulses in contrary directions; in bodies, admittedly, we see the part go astray, whereas we do not see it in the soul; nonetheless, presumably, we should suppose that the soul also has something apart from reason, countering and opposing reason; the precise way it is different does not matter.
• This part as well as the rational part appears, as we said, to share in reason; in the continent person it obeys reason; in the temperate and the brave person it presumably listens still better to reason, since there it agrees with reason in everything; the nonrational part, then, as well as the whole soul apparently has two parts; the plantlike part shares in reason not at all, the part with appetites and in general desires shares in reason in a way, insofar as it both listens to reason and obeys it; this is the way in which we are said to ‘listen to reason’ from father or friends, as opposed to the way in which we ‘give the reason’ in mathematics; the nonrational part also obeys and is persuaded in some way by reason, as is shown by correction, and by every sort of reproof and exhortation.
• If we ought to say that this part also has reason, then the part that has reason, as well as the nonrational part, will have two parts; one will have reason fully, by having it within itself; the other will have reason by listening to reason as to a father; the division between virtues accords with this difference.
• Some virtues are called virtues of thought, others virtues of character; wisdom, comprehension, and prudence are called virtues of thought, generosity and temperance virtues of character; when we speak of someone’s character we do not say that he is wise or has good comprehension, but that he is gentle or temperate; we also praise the wise person for his state, and the states that are praiseworthy are the ones we call virtues.