Things people get wrong about Aristotle: External Goods
It’s common to believe that Aristotle thought a happy life would include external goods like wealth, honour, and political power in addition to virtuous activity. According to this view Virtue is the greatest of human goods, but happiness consists in a combination of virtuous activity with other things.
It would be convenient to attribute this view to Aristotle for at least two reasons.
Firstly, it is in keeping with many of our pre-philosophical intuitions about happiness. We know that money cannot buy you happiness by itself and that our thoughts and actions make the biggest difference, but it’s also intuitive to think that circumstances of our lives make our lives better. Secondly this interpretation of Aristotle seems to offer a neat contrast to Cynic and Stoic Views according to which Virtue is the only good.
On the contrary, however, Aristotle explicitly rejected this view.
Aristotle’s actual view
Let’s listen to what Aristotle actually says.
We set down as self-sufficient that which, by itself, makes life choiceworthy and lacking nothing, and such a thing we suppose happiness to be. What is more, we count happiness to be the most choiceworthy of things while not counting it as one of those other things since if it were counted among them it is clear that it would be more choiceworthy with the tiniest amount of additional good.
In the same chapter he brings his argument to this conclusion:
The human good comes to be disclosed as a being-at-work of the soul in accordance with virtue and if virtues are more than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue.
So it is clear that, Aristotle, cannot hold the view that happiness consists in external goods in addition to virtuous activity. If it did, then being-at-work in accordance to virtue would fail his ‘self-sufficiency’ test because it would be improved upon by the tiniest addition of wealth or political agency.
Given that it’s ruled out so early in Aristotle’s argument, where then do people get this strange idea about Aristotle?
Why it appears we need wealth to be happy
I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact that Aristotle’s dialectic methodology is poorly understood. Aristotle’s method entails that he must take seriously our pre-philosophical intuitions about the importance of external goods in living well. Accordingly, he considers several ‘appearances’ of happiness from the perspective of the Athenian audience.
For to some people it seems to be virtue, to others practical judgement, and to others some sort of wisdom, while to others it appears to be all these things combined with pleasure, or not without pleasure, while others include external goods alongside these. Some of these things are said by many people and from ancient times, others by a few well-respected men and it is reasonable that neither of these groups would be wholly mistaken, and that they would be right on some point at least or on most of them.
It’s important to recognise that Aristotle is methodologically charitable to ‘appearances’ and viewpoints which may seem to oppose his own and begins all his works by reviewing and ascribing credibility to many viewpoints that he ultimately doesn’t endorse. For Aristotle, truth is found when all the apparently conflicting views are taken together and with qualifications made consistent. So it’s important to consider all the views Aristotle considers starting with the Cynics.
Our statement is consonant with the ones who say that happiness is virtue or a certain virtue, since being at work in accordance with it is part of virtue. But presumably it makes no small difference whether one supposes the highest good to consist in the possession (of virtue) or in it’s use, that is in the actively maintained condition or way of being-at-work. For even if the the actively maintained condition is present it is possible for it to accomplish no good thing, for instance in someone who is asleep or in someone incapacitated in some other way, but if ‘being-at-work’ is present this is not possible, for necessarily the one who is at work in accordance with virtue will act and will act well. Just as in the Olympic games it is not the ones who are most beautiful or strongest who are crowned but those who compete (for it is some of these who are victors), so too among the beautiful and the good it is the ones who act rightly who become accomplished people….
Few Cynics would endorse a ‘virtuous’ life that consisted of no virtuous deeds; so Aristotle’s comment here can be considered a refinement of the Cynic view as opposed to a refutation of it. While you can abstract virtue away from a life lived virtuously… in reality that’s not how life works. Life is for living and virtue is for ‘being-at-work’. Even the disposition to be virtuous, is for Aristotle an actively maintained condition. So Aristotle clearly thinks his view is highly consonant with those who call happiness virtue.
He is somewhat less conciliatory in his appraisal of hedonism. Nevertheless, an activity in accordance with virtue is also the most pleasant activity.
So the life these [virtuous] people live has no need for additional pleasure as a sort of appendage but has pleasure in itself, for no one would call anyone just who did not delight in just actions.
Again these comments are a refutation of the view ascribed to him that virtuous people are better off if they also eat pleasant cheese. It is important to remember that again Aristotle’s point is that the pleasure of acting rightly, makes the pleasure of eating cheese superfluous. Therefore, it doesn’t make life better at all. From these passages it still couldn’t be clearer.
However the confusion enters in the next section in which he considers the third perspective, which is that external goods are necessary for happiness:
It appears that there is an additional need of external goods, as we said, since it is impossible, or not easy, to engage in beautiful actions if one is not equipped for them. For many things are done by way of instruments, by means of friends, wealth and political power…so this is why some people rank good fortune on the same level as happiness while others give that rank to virtue.
Note also that there are three important qualifications in this statement.
Firstly, the external goods appear to have instrumental value in performing virtuous actions. Instrumental goodness and goodness are not additive and so the appearance isn’t that external goods such as political power make life better so long as they are pursued justly. Rather political power should only be pursued to the extent that it is necessary to execute acts of justice.
Secondly, note that Aristotle says that “some” deeds are “more easily” performed with instruments. That means that he is at this point leaving open the possibility that in fact there are virtuous deeds that can be performed without the aid of instruments. That certain acts of political justice require political agency is not a particularly controversial claim; high ranking Roman Stoics who did not even use the word ‘good’ for externals were famous for killing themselves whenever they lacked the political power to perform their civic duties. However, it’s also clear that many of us don’t face such dilemmas. So it wouldn’t follow from this claim on its own that all virtuous living is made impossible by the lack of these externals.
Finally, by contrast to Cynics, whose view Aristotle actually endorses, this heavily qualified endorsement of the utility of externals is actually only an ‘appearance’ at this stage in the argument. Appearances have a lot of weight for Aristotle, but they aren’t knowledge itself; they only point us towards it. It is strange, therefore, that people don’t attribute to Aristotle an unqualified endorsement of Cynicism or Hedonism but they attribute to him an unqualified endorsement of the need for externals in attaining happiness.
Why the happiest life does not require wealth
If we are to continue reading to the end of Aristotle’s argument in Book 10 of the Nichomachean Ethics we find that Aristotle is not entirely convinced that external goods themselves are necessary for a perfectly happy life.
“And what is referred to as self-sufficiency would be present most of all in the contemplative life, for while the wise and the just person and the rest are in need of the things that are necessary for living, when they are sufficiently equipped with these things, a just person still needs people toward whom and with whom he will act justly but the wise person is able to contemplate when he is by himself and more so to the extent that he is more wise. He will contemplate better, no doubt, when he has others to work with , but he is still the most self-sufficient person.”
It would be (another) mistake to take this point as a contrast between a wise and a just person as though a wise person might also be unjust. The wise and the just man are the same person in different circumstances. He is made glad by his justice acts when he has occasion and means to act justly but he is made happy throughout his whole life because he has wisdom.
People can also have wisdom in a limited way that enables them to act virtuously in a political life; but when they are exiled or otherwise cut off from society they become miserable. These people can be called happy and virtuous — but only in a limited way. Aristotle has made it clear from Book 1 that complete Happiness should last a lifetime — and should not require other things to make it better.
According to Aristotle in Book 10, Eudaimonia — which is complete Happiness — actually requires only “the things that are necessary for living.” Is wealth required for living? Is political power, or honour, or friends? Not really — or certainly to no significant extent.
To be sure, there will be some level of material necessary to bring about the physical and mental development of a human capable of philosophy. These will have to be provided with leisure to spare upon an activity that essentially serves no consequent purpose. But Aristotle’s philosopher doesn’t require the political and material capital necessary to live a political life well and beautifully. For instance, Aristotle thinks a virtuous political leader must make magnificent personal gifts out of his own wealth to the city and furnish it with a navy or with theatrical performances. However, while sacrificing wealth for the common good requires wealth: contemplating that your good is something held in common with others does not.
And, importantly, while these necessary materials for life are entailed by Aristotle’s definition of happiness as something we live out — they are not in his definition itself.
Aristotle’s comments about material necessity are more like the physical background to ethical activity as opposed to an additional ethical imperative. To give a complete analysis of happiness Aristotle always mentions all four sources of motion and change. Matter is always present in all natural activities — living a flourishing human life is no exception. It is not without matter that the rational eudaimonic agent acts. However, the agent, and the defining activity of the agent and that-for-the-sake-of-which the agent acts is a human life lived in accordance with rational intellectual activity.
So, why then did it ‘appear’ back in book 1 chapter 8 as though wealth and political power were necessary for happiness? I suspect that it appears this way because people who truly are happy without these things are so rare:
“But such a life is greater than that which accords with a human being for it is not insofar as one is a human that he will live in this way but insofar as something divine is present in him…”
In the NE Aristotle is taking his political trainees through a dialectic process that ends up at a level of wisdom which they will probably not actually attain. But, because the purpose of his ethical treatise is practical not theoretical it’s important that he start from positions that a well trained Athenian citizen finds plausible and that he takes this soul as far up the path to complete Happiness as possible.
Where along this path you choose to settle is up to you. Interpreters of Aristotle that settle for the apparent truths he begins with in Book 1 are like noble but unreflective pupils who may do many beautiful things and attain a fine and good career in a flourishing polis, but will never discover from Aristotle’s ethics the best life that there is on offer.
