 OK. So now we're doing some real philosophy with Aristotle. I'm not going to spend any time talking about his biography and so forth. We'll plunge right into the first book of his Nicomachean ethics. And I basically want to have a discussion, so I've created a very thin presentation so that your questions and comments can take the lead. But I will give an outline of the contents of this book. So it begins with the observation that essentially all rational activities have some end, have some good that they are pursuing. And the examples are pretty straightforward. So for example, if you're making a bridle for a horse, then you're making equipment that makes it easier or more pleasant for whatever to ride a horse. If you are arranging horses in a military formation for the sake of having your cavalry fight in war, then the goal that you're pursuing is something like victory or advantage. If you're building a ship, it's transportation. If you're building a house, it's protection against weather and intruders. And this can apply not just to the names of arts, but to our own individual decisions. So why did you get up this morning? Why did you come to class? What's the point? Now, some of you may just be irrationally, you may not know why you're here. Yeah, why do I find myself here all of a sudden? Or you're just following a schedule or somebody else told you to do it. Your parents said, make sure you go to every single class. And so you're just obeying, carrying out somebody else's ends. But if you're here for a rational reason, then you had some end. Now, I won't kid myself and say that that end is learning or insight or even doing philosophy, although I'd be pleased if that was the point. But let's assume that you're here because you want to pass the class. And I require people to be here in order to pass the class. OK, well, so passing the class is some kind of good. But what's the end of that? What's the purpose in passing the class? Well, you might say, so I can earn a degree. So I can get the degree. Well, why do you want to earn a degree? What's the point in doing that? Well, so that I can get a job. Well, why do you want a job? Well, so that I can earn a living and support my self and my family. Well, why do you want to support yourself and your family? And eventually you say something like, well, because I want to be successful or because I want to be happy. And providing for my family and myself is the means of becoming happy. Now, at that point, it would be stupid for me to keep asking this why question. Why do you want to be happy? This line of questioning comes to an end somewhere. If it didn't, if you wanted to be happy so because when you're happier, you get better sleep. When you get better sleep, it enables you to wake up in time in order to show up for class or something. And we had a circular thing where we had an infinite number of reasons why we were pursuing everything. But you may as well have not gotten out of bed and showed up to class. Either way, it's an irrational thing. So if it's rational, there's some end to the process that we can say is the goal of it. And we can talk about structuring the things we do and the arts that we have into essentially architectonic structures. So we can say that the general who's planning the war and how we're gonna defeat the Spartans has an overall goal or good of victory or maintaining freedom of Athens or whatever. And that is the overarching goal for the sake of which the general gives instructions to the cavalry leader to make sure that these horses and these people wielding weapons on horses are organized to a certain extent. And then that cavalry leader who needs to carry out that end gives instructions to the equipment maker and the bridal maker that says, make equipment that enables us to maneuver a horse like this. And then the bridal maker gives instructions to the metal maker who says we need a metal in this kind of shape and to this extent. And that person gives instructions to their subordinate until we have some actionable item. But what we don't find is organized structures, activities, arts and so forth that have no end or no purpose. So all of them have some end or some purpose and all of them can be structured hierarchically as indicated. Now in the second chapter, Aristotle says that if we ask ourselves what is the most architectonic art, the one that makes whose good governs all of the other goods then an answer we might give is politics because even these high level ends like strategy and victory and freedom and things like that, in order to decide which of those ends are gonna be pursued, politicians make the decision. Yes, we're gonna assemble a cavalry in order to support our military effort in such and such place. Or yes, we're gonna devote these resources to building these buildings which will give people protection from weather and intruders, et cetera. So politics is really where the highest level ends come into consideration. What's the point in doing anything at all? And politicians are the ones that not only make decisions about the highest level ends but the ends that apply to and affect the most number of people. So it's as if politics is the overall play, a politician plays the role of the overall architect of what's happening who then has several subordinates that determine how to move the cranes, how to dig the dirt, how to set the walls and the foundation up, what the planning of the rooms is and so forth. And so since all these other activities are supposed to be subordinate to politics, it's considered the most architectonic art. Now in the third chapter, Aristotle makes a point about the degree of precision that is to be expected in a discussion of politics and political science. And he also talks about who the appropriate audience of such a discussion is. Now on the second point, first, the proper audience really shouldn't be young people. So we're sort of confused by what we're doing here, he says, because young people are very good at things like mathematics but they're very bad at politics, he says. And the reason for that is that politics requires a lot of experience and that's exactly what young people don't have. And then he also is prisoner to this myth that mathematics, the young are especially good at mathematics because they have longer attention spans and quicker minds and so forth. But the overall point he wants to make is that there is a different degree of precision expected in a discussion of ethics or political science than there is in mathematics. And it would show a want of education to expect the same degree of precision in an account given by a politician as the degree of precision we would expect from a geometrician or a mathematician in general or somebody doing physics. These domains have different degrees just as we wouldn't accept plausible reasoning from a geometer. Like if we said, what's the interior angles of a triangle add up to? And they said, I don't know, it's something like between 100 and 300 or so. We would not accept that kind of reasoning. But by the same token, we would not expect a mathematically precise account of everything we were saying about politics, like how many people need exactly what degrees of happiness in order to be considered successful and so on. Now the main point of this book is to discuss what the overall human end is, what the purpose of it in general. So what the real reason why you got up out of bed this morning and the real reason why you showed up in this class. It's kind of a puzzling thing. So how do we figure it out? And Aristotle points out in this fourth chapter that there are commonly held views about what the overall end is. And these differ from the views that wise people have. But the problem is that there's disagreement among the wise as to what it is. So in other words, there's widespread disagreement on this point. One thing that there is agreement about is the nominal aspects. We all agree that there is some end, as I pointed out in the analysis of the first two chapters. And in English, we'll use a term like happiness or success or prosperity or something. So when I was going through that whole train of, why are you trying to get a job? Why are you trying to support your family? And you ultimately give some answer like, because I want to be a successful person or because I want prosperity or I want happiness. I don't want to be a miserable person or I don't want to be an impoverished person or a failure or something like that. So the Greek term, according to Aristotle, is eudaimonia for this agreed upon almost platitudinous term that we all agree puts an end to the incessant questioning of why you're doing something. There is some end to it. And this is the name that we give for the end. The problem is that there is no agreement on what the actual constituents of that end are. So some commonly held candidates, some people think it's just about pleasure. Now, we saw a philosophically sophisticated view about that when we were talking about Aristipus and the Heedness. They think that happiness or success is just a sum total of how much pleasure or joy you've had over your whole life. Other more high-minded people, or at least they act that way, say that it's something like honor and being an honorable person. Other people say it's about virtue or excellence. It's really showing yourself to be a capable good person in certain domains, like being a just person, being a courageous person, being a self-controlled people. Aristotle dismisses the sometimes stupid people who say, no, the whole point is making money. And do we have any business students in here? Because I often get the pushback on this point from them. Aristotle says, that's too stupid to consider, because making money is only instrumental towards some other end. Like you want to make money so that you can spend it and have a lot of pleasure, or because you want to spend it on honorable things, or you want to spend it in order to be a just person and pay your debts, or because you have some other concept of happiness. But you're not actually saying an end if you say, the purpose of my life is to make money. You haven't yet come up with a coherent explanation for what the end is. That's just, that's like saying, the point of my life is getting up in the morning. Or the point of my life is going to class. The point of my life is getting a degree. That's just a stupid thing to say because there's actually some further end that's guiding it. And that itself cannot possibly be your ultimate motivation. So these are commonly held views. And Aristotle actually thinks there's something to each of those. None of them actually give a complete answer. And most people don't bother to think about it beyond that. But there's something to each of those that he wants to try to salvage in his own theory about what the overall end is. He wants to capture what must be true in those commonly held views, even the one about making money. Now, one sophisticated view that he rejects out of hand is a view put forth by his teacher, Plato, who gives us a long and elaborate account in several different places of a generic or abstract or universal concept of the good. And Aristotle says that, I mean, it was really interesting what he says here because he was a member of Plato's academy and he's very influenced by Plato's philosophy. But he says here, it's difficult to criticize this theory because it's put forth by friends of ours. But we need piety requires us to care more about the truth than about making our friends feel good. So we're going to have to destroy this view. And then he gives like 25 arguments that show it's wrong. And I won't go into all of them. I think the most convincing one is the one where he says this abstract or generic conception of the good is absolutely useless for any art. I can explain if I'm making equipment for horses or I'm doing architecture or I'm doing medicine, I need a notion of good. So I need a notion of health in the case of medicine. And I need a concept of protection or security from weather and intruders if I'm building buildings. I need a conception of security or strategy if I'm doing military things. But a generic notion of the good, an abstract philosopher's conception of the good is useless for any of those individual arts. And furthermore, it's useless for any individual life. It doesn't give any guidance as to how to make any decisions or anything like that. Yeah. A direct criticism of the rationality of this universal good. Because if you can't say that it is rational, then it has no end, which means based on his argument on what is, like everything works towards a eudonia, like an end, all of those abstract or generic goods would just be supported to that. Yes, well in theory, Plato thinks you can illuminate, you can explain somehow what all of those other individual particular goods are in each of the arts, in each decision that we made by having some generic concept of the good, some kind of insight into what the good is, perhaps a mathematical like notion or what he draws analogies to in the republic, saying it's like the sun and things like that. And Aristotle says, that's just all worthless. That doesn't tell us why anybody makes any decisions or why artists construct anything the way they do. They all have specific notions of the good, which are relative to the activities that they're engaged in. And so we need an account of the good, which is not so generic that it's going to be able to explain every conceivable decision, because then it explains nothing. And so it's not that he thinks, I mean this criticism isn't exactly that it's irrational, it's just that it's useless. And when we're doing ethics, it's really important that things be useful because we're not doing this just for the sake of gaining some kind of insight or knowledge about it. We do ethics in order to live better. The goal isn't, just like in banking or business school, the goal isn't to learn about money, it's to actually become wealthy. And in medicine, the goal isn't just to learn about what health is in the abstract, it's to produce health and reduce disease. So generally in ethics, it's not to figure out an abstract notion of what living well is, but to live well. That's the only reason to actually do ethics. And this universal abstract notion of the good does not help us live well or make any decision so there might be something metaphysically to it, but it's useless as far as ethics is concerned. So here's how Aristotle tries to get at what the final end of all action is. He says, we do agree that there is this name for what that good thing is, eudaimonia, but it's just a platitude. That's just like a hallmark card that says everybody wants to be happy. It doesn't tell us anything, it just gives us a place-holding term that we can then scrutinize and figure out, okay, we agree on that, but the question is, what is eudaimonia? What is it actually amount to? Okay, and as we will see, almost every Hellenistic school accepts this framework that the overall goal is something like happiness, they have totally different views, however, on what constitutes happiness. But in Aristotle's analysis, there's a couple of criteria that apply to a meaningful notion of eudaimonia. The first is that it has to be a final good, that is an end, that is worth pursuing for its own sake, and that nothing is more desirable to it. In fact, nothing can be added to it to make it any better, because if there is something more desirable that goes beyond it, then whatever that thing is added to it becomes the truly final end. And the next point is that it has to be self-sufficient, and it can't be improved by adding anything. So it needs finality, and it needs to be a self-sufficient good. So the question is, what is the final and self-sufficient good for a human being? And Aristotle's technique for answering this question is to raise another question. What is the function of being a human? What is a human's real task or work as a human being? Now that might sound like a kind of strange question, but he makes it seem more motivated by drawing several comparisons. So a flute player has a good or an end, an architect has a good or an end, a doctor or somebody practicing medicine has an end. All of those kinds have a function or an end or a task or a job, whether it's entertainment in the case of flute playing, building structures that protect us against weather and intruders in the case of the architect or healing and reducing disease. In the case of the doctor, every one of those has some good or end that is unique or appropriate to it. Furthermore, if you take the parts of the human body, the eye, the hand, the foot, the heart, lung, whatever it is, each part has some function. So the eyes have a function of seeing. The hand has a function of grasping. The heart has a purpose of circulating blood. The foot has a purpose of walking. The lungs have a purpose of respiration. And we don't think that the purpose of the heart is the same as the purpose of the lung or the eye. We think that there is some unique and specific function for it. So we can, by induction, conclude that a human being must have a function that is unique and appropriate to it. It would be absurd if specific kinds of humans had functions, but humans in general didn't have a function, and it would furthermore be all the more absurd if the parts of us all had specific functions, but this added up to a functionless, endless thing itself. If there wasn't some overall function that governed what all of those individual ends could do. So let's figure out what is the unique and appropriate function that applies to human beings. Well, perhaps it's stuff like life, nutrition, growth, and so forth. He says, well, that's not actually unique to humans, even plants have all those functions. So it's not merely just growing up and having your body mature in the right way and then enjoying a lot of nutrition. Despite these people that are obsessed with diets or obsessed with bodybuilding or something, they're essentially living the life that is appropriate according to Aristotle to plants by focusing on those kinds of ends. What about perception, pleasure, and enjoyment? Those aren't unique to humans because even animals have all those. So we don't want to have our end be the same as the end for pigs and cows and insects and so forth. So it's not going to be any of those capabilities. But if we add up all of the capabilities that we have and then we eliminate those that we share with plants and animals, we're basically left with one kind of capability that they don't have. And that is some kind of activity involving reason or rationality. Sets us apart from plants and animals so the overall end must be some kind of activity, some kind of rational activity. And then at the very end he says, but we have to add rational activity in a complete life. This is somewhat of an obscure statement. For one swallow does not make a summer, which means that you can't just say, okay, I've done some rational activity, I passed that midterms and now I've got the overall end of being a human taken care of. Now I can just do whatever I want. It's actually the state that we're talking about with eudaimonia, happiness, prosperity, success or whatever is actually something we judge over an entire lifetime. And as we'll see, it's even things after you're dead can affect whether you're said to be happy in this sense. So we're talking about assessing an entire life. Was Aristotle as an individual happy and successful in eudaimonia? Was Napoleon Bonaparte a successful happy eudaimonia person? So it's very important that we are not talking about a temporary state like you were happy this morning and then you came and you had to sit in a philosophy class so now you're sad and miserable but afterwards you're gonna go meet your boyfriend and then you'll be happy afterwards and then you'll be sad when you have to take a test or something but then you'll be happy when you go out drinking later. This has nothing to do with the temporary psychological state of happiness and sadness. We're talking about overall prosperity or success measured for a human being over an entire lifetime. Now he says this account of it being some kind of rational activity over a whole lifetime is corroborated by our commonly held views. So commonly we hold that there are mental or psychological or goods that apply to the soul, goods that apply to the body and goods that are external to us and as far as goods of the soul go a successful person has these. They both fare well and do well and they have virtues that are the result of activities implying reason. Whether we're talking about moral virtues like self-control or justice or intellectual virtues like prudence, knowledge, intelligence and so on. Good to the body, yes pleasure is important because we think that the successful prosperous person enjoys life and takes pleasure in employing reason and doing virtuous activities. So somebody that's really miserable does apparently virtuous things that's really miserable. They give to the poor not because they enjoy doing that but because they're trying to impress somebody else or they're obligated for doing it that's not really the kind of success that we're talking about. And then he admits that external goods have some role. So in order to carry out this rational virtuous activity you actually need certain external goods without which it's impossible to do this. So in other words you need some wealth, you need some status, you need money in order to manifest the virtue of generosity, you need military equipment and in fact war isn't so forth in order to be courageous, you need contracts and so forth in order to be just. All of those are external to yourself. So he's got a kind of maximal view, we need goods of the soul, goods of the body, we need external goods, it's some mixture of all of those things because in order to sustain this idea of rational activity over an entire lifetime goods of each of those kind are gonna be required. Okay, then in the ninth chapter he asks what the causes of bringing about this happiness or success conceived of in this way. Who is it that gets rational activity, activity in accordance with reason over their whole lifetime? Maybe it's just a matter of nature, like you're born with the right genetics, certain people just are born more intelligent, more rational, more reasonable, more successful than other people, just like some people are born more beautiful and others are more ugly, some people have great stature, some people don't. But Aristotle says that's very problematic because we don't wanna think that success or prosperity is outside of our control. We wanna think that it's in our control but if it's totally just up to nature that would be like saying it's up to fate whether you end up being a successful or prosperous person. In that case there's no point in doing ethics, there's no decisions you can make, there's no way you can change or alter your life. What about the gods? Maybe those who are happy and successful are just those people that the gods happen to bless. Well that would have the same problem as nature, it would be outside of your control, it would be something that happens to you, not something that you do, and also there's a problem about why the gods would favor some people and not others if not on the grounds that they favor those who engage in rational, virtuous activity. What about luck? If it was just up to luck whether you were a prosperous successful person or not? Well again, success would be outside of our control, that would be a very defective arrangement he says if we entrusted what was highest most noble in the entire purpose of being a human just came down to what happened to luckily happen to you. So what he would like to do is focus on those aspects of prosperity or success that are a result of learning, training, education and habituation as it were creating a second nature not just the one you were born with or that the gods happen to bless you with or that you happen to get lucky enough to have but how this is transformed into something else, something that's essentially good, virtuous, rational and so forth. Now that causes raises several questions about the influence of luck because just because we'd like to be able to focus on those other things doesn't mean that luck doesn't have any impact. And one way to think about the importance of luck is to think about the idea of posthumous destiny. When we're deciding whether Napoleon or Socrates was a successful, happy person we look at what happened over their whole life and even what happened to them after their life. So part of the reason we think Socrates is so successful is not just because he was put to death but having been put to death because of rational activity that was also virtuous, just and courageous and so on because of all of that, because he was able to engage in that, then he had this enormous influence. He caused the generation of all kinds of philosophical schools, the Academy, the Stoics, the cynics, all these people that were influenced by him. In fact, he basically created philosophy itself and so this looks like a huge part of why we consider him a successful, great person is because of what happened to him after he died and in general honors, dishonors and the successes and failures of the projects that we plan in our own life and even what happens with our children seem to affect whether we say this was a good or bad life overall. But in that case, clearly we're vulnerable to the phenomenon of moral luck that is becoming unsuccessful or even successful because of things that happened to us outside of our own control, like what our children do or what becomes of the projects that we set up in our own lifetime. Now, that issue of posthumous destiny focuses the mind on the key issue, but the issue is actually much more general than what happens to us after death. Sorry about this. And I'm gonna need this. Okay, because lots of things can happen to us in life that are outside of our control that we would clearly say upset or ruin our happiness or success. For example, if there was an unjust regime difficult to imagine but suppose our politics really went south and we had a kind of tyrant in power running the country, okay? If something like that happened then people started being imprisoned against their will. They tried to cross a border or something. Let's put, separate their children from them, put them in cages and so forth. Now, are we gonna say those people are prosperous and successful and happy? If you're put into a political prison for the rest of your life, is that a happy place to be? How about if you're being tortured? You get tortured for the rest of your life. So Aristotle says, not here in book one, but in book seven, an extremely important quote. Those who say that the victim being tortured on the rack or the person who falls into great misfortunes is nevertheless happy, successful, prosperous, you diamond. If he is good, are whether they mean to or not talking nonsense. So Aristotle says, it is clear that your overall happiness or success can be ruined by things outside of your own control. Okay, let me pause there and there's lots of discuss there. But while I am loading this to have a diagram I wanna show you any comments or questions on that so far. So raise your hand if you have a question or a comment. George, yes, I see maybe I'm wrong, I'm mistaken. I see a type of contradiction in this philosophy. It seems like that first he says there is a objective or there is a purpose for anything which has been created. First then there is a purpose for the eye to see. There's a purpose of every thing in the nature that the good use had the purpose. Well, let me stop you there. He doesn't say everything in nature has a purpose. That argument just said each of the parts of our body have a purpose. There may very well be purposeless things happening in nature. So if even we take that point, then concerning the human existence it seems like that he says that the purpose is happiness. Okay, let's say the purpose is happiness. Well, my point is, first of all, he noticed that human being has been created and then he just figured out, okay, let's put what's the reason that he's created. So I guess that the happiness, only happiness take as a reason of the whole human existence. It's not any small, satisfactory answer. So it seemed like, let's say that for instance, God created me. Okay, let's not make that assumption because he doesn't make that assumption. If we make that assumption, we're gonna be led down a totally different road because if we make that assumption, then that's like saying God is an artist. Okay, and then we have to ask what the ends of that art are. This is we ask what the ends of a military art or architecture of medicine are. Okay, but we're not in any position to speculate about what the art that God has in mind is. We can't even figure out what the purpose of human existence is. So how can we have any purchase in that arrangement? And it has nothing to do with Aristotle. He doesn't think that God created people. Okay, so we just can't make that assumption. Now, to some extent what you're saying is very similar to Aristotle. It's a bad answer to say, if I ask you what the end of the overall purpose of human life is, it's a lame answer to say, happiness or success, success is the point. Because then we have to actually figure out what we mean by success. I mean prosperity. What does prosperity mean? Does it mean just wealth? Or does it mean wealth with pleasure? What if you have a lot of wealth, figure a miserable person? Like a lot of just as many wealthy people are miserable as poor people are enjoying their lives and so on. So he agrees with you to that point. Just saying happiness is just the term we're using for whatever that ultimate end is. And he has established that there must be an end. Just because there must be, if there are ends of our parts, it would be absurd for parts to have an end, but not a whole to have an end. So he's essentialist, let's say. He's essentialist. Well, I hesitate to say that because I don't know what you mean by essentialism. And I think you're gonna try to lead me down into talking about Hegel or Sartre and all these people that you throw at me at the end of classes. I don't know what essentialism means. So I don't know if he really has that view. But he does think that there is a fact of the matter about what the end is. It's not just what anyone thinks is. I think the point of my life is doing this. No, that's not an adequate answer. There is some scientific anthropological answer to what the end is, according to him. And we saw the method that he uses to get that, to go through what our different capabilities are to eliminate those that aren't unique. And then find what is unique about humans. Humans are rational. This is why we call our race on the sapiens. Okay, so we need some kind of rational activity. And that is gonna be, what it is to be successful as that kind of animal is going to have to do with that kind of activity. And you had a question, yeah? As I said, was Plato alive during your course? Yeah, Aristotle was a pupil of Plato's. Well, that's hard to tell because we don't know anything. We can't figure out the chronology of the works. And so some people think that certain works of Plato may have been responding to things Aristotle was saying when he was in the academy, but we can't really say that with any certainty. Okay, other, yeah? I have a clarifying question. Yeah, sure. A self-sufficient good, that means that it's inherently good or provides happiness by itself, right? So this is not transportation. So it's not lacking something. Right, or how I interpreted it was everything is for to bring another something else. Something is a transportation for adding something else to your life. But that self-sufficient good would be good in itself. Yes. So for the sake of doing that. That is correct. Then would we be able to say that for a human, eidemonia is defined as the ability to reason, so for as long as we're... No, no, it's not the ability to reason. Okay, it's not just the ability to reason. Because lots of people are miserable and not happy, not successful, not prosperous, not eidemonia, that have the ability to reason. Okay, and it's not even the activity of reasoning, because the activity of reasoning, people, lots of people engage in activities that involve reasoning that are still miserable. But it has to be an activity that involves reasoning. Okay, but that doesn't mean it's sufficient just to say, okay, I'm reasoning now, so I've reached Aristotle's ultimate end. This, first of all, these other components are necessary, external goods, goods of the body, goods of the soul. So it's certain kinds of activity involving reason. Okay, now, but the first point you made is very good and is very right, that there's a difference between, we can make a distinction between instrumental goods that are only valuable if they bring about other ends. Money is an example of that. Money is not an end in itself, it's just something that's an instrument that can be exchanged for other things that are, as you put it, ends in themselves. So pleasure is an end in itself. I don't need, if I'm watching a sunset and I'm enjoying it, and you say, why are you doing that? Why are you just sitting on the beach watching that thing? And if I, all I can say is, well, I enjoy it, it's a wonderful experience. And it would be stupid to say, why do you want an enjoyable, wonderful experience? What's the point in doing that? Because I've given you an end of my activity, so it explains rationally why I'm doing it. Okay, so we need to distinguish between instrumental ends, things we only do in order to bring about some other end. We don't just equip horses for the sake of having bridles on horses. We do it so that it makes it easier to ride, and we make them easier to ride so that we can employ them in war. And we employ them in war so that we can protect our freedom or whatever. And then at some point we get to an end that is sufficient to explain this. I don't need to give you a further reason why I want freedom or something. That is its own end. So what we need to do is find what that end is in the case of overall human life. Find that state that it no longer makes sense to ask why you want that and why you're trying to bring that about. But once we get to that point, then we understand why all the other instrumental things have been done. Okay, and then we've reached the final thing. And then as you mentioned, it has to be self-sufficient. So it can't need further things in order to be considered successful. Although it already needs quite a few things in Aristotle's view. So you need some modicum of wealth. You need some freedom. You need friends. You probably need a good political arrangement in the city that you're living in. And you need some health. So you need these goods of your body. You need some beauty as well. And then what's really important is you need, again, not just to be using reason any which way, but using it in a way that makes you intelligent and wise and courageous and self-controlled and just and things like that. Okay, so there's lots of different components and this isn't gonna give us a simple answer like Aristipus does and says, forget all that stuff. The whole point is just sequence of pleasures. Just go out and get pleasures and have as many of those, have something pleasurable for lunch and then go drinking after that and then listen to some music and then have sex and then sleep for a long time and then sleep in. And then when the idea of coming to class comes, skip that and go to a movie that you wanna see and so on. So that's a much simpler view of what happiness is, but Aristotle doesn't think that's adequate. He doesn't actually think that we should call people that engage in that kind of thing successful, prosperous, eudaimone, doesn't even really think we should call them happy people in the strict sense. Okay, other questions, yeah. Is politics considered the best way to achieve eudaimone? Well, it is instrumentally important to achieving it. Okay, so some people need to be doing politics, otherwise we won't have a society that makes it possible for anybody to be successful or prosperous in his view. And then other people need to engage in politics because that's what they really enjoy and that's what they're good at and it's like how some people need to be doctors and other people need to be architects because that's what they enjoy doing and they use their reason for it and there are people that are just well suited to being politicians. Like Barack Obama wouldn't be a happy person doing anything but politics, okay. But we also, but doing politics doesn't guarantee that you get eudaimonea automatically at all. In fact, it could result in misery depending on the political situation. So just doing politics, the activity of politics in the abstract does not. But politicians have to set up the circumstances that make it possible for us all to be successful or happy and that's why they have the most architectonic, art of all and if they don't create the right kind of society and the right kind of political situation then nobody can be miserable, okay. So everyone living in Syria is miserable right now and that's because the political situation is so miserable. Nobody can be eudaimone if you're in a war torn tyranny and so forth. It's just outside of the realm of possibility. Now what is interesting about that claim that no one, it's ridiculous to say that somebody as long as they're a good person can be happy or successful or prosperous even if they are captured by a tyrant imprisoned for their life and being tortured. The interesting thing about that is that that is exactly a point that both the Stoics and the Epicureans contradict Aristotle on and they claim that it is possible for a wise person to be eudaimone even while being tortured on the wrap and they might like grimace and they might actually cry while it's happening and so look like they're not enjoying it but as long as they're a wise person in the Stoic view as long as they're a virtuous person we will consider that to be a happy successful person no matter what you say and the Epicureans have a different way of making that argument. But the reason why would somebody wanna make such a counterintuitive claim such a crazy claim that you could be happy even while being tortured on the wrap? The reason is because you wanna come up with a philosophical view that is invulnerable to this problem of moral luck.