Pleasure and Happiness

Book 10 opens by returning to pleasure. Eudoxus had argued that pleasure is the chief good because all creatures pursue it — the very universality of the pursuit is proof of its value. Aristotle gives this argument more respect than it usually receives, partly because of Eudoxus's personal moral character (he was thought immune to the bias of being a pleasure-lover), but ultimately rejects it. Pleasure is not a process toward a natural state — not the movement of eating when hungry — but an activity: the unimpeded exercise of a faculty in its proper condition. Different pleasures are distinguished by the activities they accompany; the pleasures of philosophical contemplation are as different from the pleasures of bodily sensation as the activities themselves are different.

Having settled the account of pleasure, Book 10 turns to the question the Ethics has been building toward: which kind of life most fully realises eudaimonia? Aristotle's answer is the contemplative life — the life of theoretical reason directed at the highest objects, which the gods themselves engage in and which humans share only in flickers. Contemplation is self-sufficient (it depends on nothing external), continuous, most pleasant, and most divine. If any life is happiest, this is it. But Aristotle immediately qualifies: such a life is too high for human nature as embodied, social, and political. Insofar as we are all of those things, we live a second-best life — the life of moral and civic virtue — and the Ethics has spent nine books taking that life with full seriousness.

Book 10 ends with one of the most important transitions in Western philosophy: the hand-off to the Politics. The good of the individual, Aristotle says, cannot be fully realised inside the individual alone. It requires the right kind of community — laws, education, institutions that form citizens well from childhood. The question of what makes a good city is the subject of his next inquiry. Read together, the Ethics and the Politics are not two separate works but one continuous argument: ethics is incomplete without politics, and politics without ethics is mere technique.