Aristotle’s Good Life
We have a purpose, he said, and that purpose is to be virtuous.
Everything has a final cause, and that includes people. Our final cause as a human substance is to fulfill the purpose that is a part of that substance. Keep in mind, Aristotle is thinking in the mindset of 2,300 years ago. Aristotle’s idea that “we should fulfill our purpose” is not at all the idea we have today of the individualized self-fulfillment of “I should fulfill my personal goals.” We will have to wait another 2,100 years before we begin seeing philosophers thinking that individuals have unique desires and personal goals. Aristotle, and most people after him, thought of the human being as being of one substance, and each particular human person partakes of that essence. That means that we are essentially all the same. That reduction of people to particular instances of a single universal type was the dominant way of thinking about humanity until that assumption started to be challenged around 200 years ago.
Aristotle wrote that the purpose of all humans is to live a certain kind of life, something commentators have called “the good life.” For Aristotle, the notion of a good life is intertwined with morality, and morality is based on reason:
We state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of…
