In 2024, the Lyceum Institute this thoughtful interpretation of a perennial difficulty in interpreting Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, presented by Joseph M. Cherny, PhD Candidate at the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX. Mr. Cherny asks: how is happiness self-sufficient? Does it find fulfillment in one good, or a collection? With a careful linguistic analysis (of both Aristotle’s Greek and Aquinas’ Latin), we find an escape from this thorny dilemma.
Lyceum Institute Colloquium
The Self-Sufficiency of Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics
St. Thomas’ Commentary as an Aid to a Contemporary Dilemma
ABSTRACT: W. F. R. Hardie’s 1965 article “The Final Good in Aristotle’s Ethics,” launched a debate about how much Aristotle meant to include in happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics. Hardie argues that some parts of the work suggest that happiness will turn out to be a collection of goods, no one of which is the end of the others—an “inclusive end”—but ultimately in Book X, Aristotle restricts perfect happiness to contemplation alone—a “dominant end.” In this paper I will discuss some of the apparently contradictory texts in the Nicomachean Ethics motivating this dispute, as well as some problems for each view. I will focus on one text at greater length—the Book I passage on the self-sufficiency of happiness—and attempt to correct a misinterpretation of this text in light of St. Thomas’s Commentary. I will then discuss what I take to be St. Thomas’s account of Aristotelian or connatural happiness—an account that is more nuanced than the extreme dominant and inclusive accounts.
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