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6 Psychological Eudaimonism: A Reading of Aristotle Overview. This chapter is an interpretative reconstruction of several key ideas in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, with some reference to Aquinas ’s Treatise on Happiness along the way. It will be intelligible to anyone who has read Aristotle; undergraduates may find the analysis of Aristotle ’s theory in section 1 useful quite apart from its role in my larger argument. section 2 concerns more advanced questions in the interpretation of Aristotle; section 3 presents in propositional form the model of human motivation to be critiqued in later chapters. Hence readers interested in following the main argument of the book without revisiting the Nicomachean Ethics in detail could simply read section 3, which provides the basis for discussion in the next two chapters. Introduction In this chapter, I prepare the way for an existential critique of a eudaimonist view of human motivation, taking Aristotle as my focus. I begin by framing what I consider to be the most defensible version of eudaimonism consistent with the erosiac conception of human motivation. I show that this is a plausible reading of Aristotle, although I am primarily concerned about the implications of the most defensible form of psychological eudaimonism itself, whether it is properly attributed to Aristotle or not. Since my goal is to describe the best version of eudaimonist moral psychology and then critique it, I sidestep some questions of textual exegesis by making charitable assumptions about Aristotle’s meaning that would require ‘‘at least a book’’ (to use Derek Parfit’s apt phrase) for a full defense. However, the resulting model of ‘‘A-eudaimonism’’ will clearly be Aristotelian in spirit. 171 172 Will as Commitment and Resolve This will be a sufficient basis for constructing the main existential objection to the eudaimonist project. 1. The Highest or Complete Good in Aristotle’s Eudaimonism The belief that human motivation is exhausted by the three states of orektic desire described in the previous chapter—instinctive impulses (D1), subjective preferences and inclinations (D2), and evaluative desires (D3)— provides the basis for Aristotle’s analysis of happiness as the embracing human goal. Despite the wealth of commentaries on this ideal, I think it is fairest to begin by summarizing Aristotle’s approach to the highest or complete good as I see it, with reference to the central controversy regarding the ‘‘inclusiveness’’ of the human good as our ultimate end. 1.1. Toward a Uniquely Ultimate End: Three Criteria for the Highest Good In his Nicomachean Ethics I (NE), Aristotle follows Plato’s Gorgias in critiquing two kinds of material egoism: the life aimed at pleasure and the life aimed at honor, power, and ascendance in political status over others. He generally follows Plato’s notion that virtue is the key both to true nobility (the kalon) and to happiness in its most holistic sense (involving a sense of overall wellbeing , the joy of excelling at all one is capable of doing, of having arrived in life, or having found one’s proper role). His ground for a normative analysis of the virtues is meant to be a better understanding of this ideal than Plato provided in his notoriously abstract and perplexing Form of the Good (eidos ta agathon), which is decisively rejected in NE I.6. Yet Aristotle’s approach is still to begin with what he considers to be the most general things we can say about human motivation and related branches of knowledge in order to move from these to more specific accounts of our natural goal. At the most general level, he begins a multipronged analysis that requires some reconstruction, since a particular branch of it will begin in one section of NE I, then pause while other topics are addressed, and then recommence later in other sections (which is unsurprising if the text we possess is the result of incomplete lecture notes, perhaps even redacted from more than one of Aristotle’s courses at the Lyceum). The analysis begins, famously, with Plato’s distinction between what I simply call ‘‘final’’ ends pursued for their own sake and things done at least partly as a means to such final ends (Rep. II 357b–58a). Final ends are then subdivided into activities done for their own sake and desirable products that are not themselves human activities (NE I.1 1094a5). Next we have the suggestion that the ends-means relation is relative: if X is a means to Y, [3.140.198.43] Project...

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