1

4th Annual Platsis Symposium

University of Michigan
September 16, 2005

Title:
Abstract:

"Two Senses of Eudaimonia"

If, as Aristotle argued, 'eudaimonia' is that for the sake of which

other actions are performed, it is important to grasp the state of
'happiness' envisaged. Classical sources, from Homer to
Herodotus, make clear the fundamental differences between
ancient and current conceptions of the flourishing life.
Two Senses of Eudaimonia
Daniel N. Robinson
Oxford University

I.
The term human nature is a weighty one, not to be settled either by the
dictionary or by the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry. If it is to be settled at all, even
provisionally, it is by way of human history; the history of what human beings have said
and thought and done, their reasons for doing so, their own estimation and our estimation
of how these endeavors might be judged in the ripeness of time. The question at the
center of the matter will always be whether the various undertakings, at the end of the
day, reflect a form of life somehow right for the creature living it. Did it keep the bird
aloft, the fish at home in the deep and the human personWhat? The right words here
are elusive. The Greek word made famous to posterity by Aristotle is . Often
rendered as happiness a rendering that would be less confusing had modernity not
restricted happiness to a set of sensations and moods (closer to the Greek ) it is

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sounder to translate it as flourishing.
One of the eminent Greeks treated in Plutarchs Lives is the poet and wise lawgiver, Solon (c. 640-561 B.C.), who was called upon to judge the sort of life rightly
regarded as flourishing. A most interesting if doubtful encounter is staged by Plutarch,
who has Solon invited to Sardis by the incomparably wealthy Croesus, the last king of
Lydia. Eager to astonish and impress Solon, Croesus displays his treasures, curious
and valuable either in beauty of colors, elegance of golden ornaments, or splendor of
jewels as we learn from our translators.1
Conspicuously unimpressed, even revolted by the ostentation, Solon is then drawn
into conversation by Croesus who asks if Solon had even known of a man more fortunate
that Croesus himself. Solon says he has known such a person; Tellus, a plain but upright
Athenian who sired good children and who died in battle in defense of his country.
Croesus presses on: Who, after Tellus, would Solon rank as the most fortunate? To this,
Solon offers two names, neither known to Croesus: Cleobis and Biton. These were the
sons of a temple priestess, living in Argos. Their mother had duties in the temple of
Hera, but facing lateness owing to the fact that the oxen had not been yoked for the
journey. The boys yoked themselves, carried their mother over miles of rocky soil,
arriving exhausted but on time. Now asleep in the temple, they did not hear their mother
supplicating Hera to grant these fine young men the greatest blessings possible for
mortals. Hera granted the wish, for Cleobis and Biton never awakened. On this account,
they had already attained the greatest flourishing possible for mortal life, and thus died in
a state as close to eudaimonia as our natures permit.
1

Plutarchs Lives. J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne, trans. Cincinatti: Applegate Publishers, 1855; p. 82

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On this account, it would be entirely beside the point to ask just what feelings
the two had as they drifted into sleep. One might guess that the dominant one was
exhaustion. Their status in the judgment of Solon was established by the character that
had formed within them and, thus, by the manner in which their lives on the whole
proceeded, with no guarantee that every hour or day would be happy.
If all this sounds alien to contemporary sensibililities it may be owing to the
profound influence David Humes philosophy would come to have in shaping our notions
of utility, value, worthiness, right and wrong the entire content of what we are pleased
to call our ethical and moral precepts and the foundation of a flourishing life. Consider in
this connection the famous passage in Humes An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals. He writes in Sec. 1,
The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces characters and
actions amiable or odious, praise-worthy or blameable; that which
stamps on them the mark of honour or infamy, approbation or censure,
that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our
happiness and vice our misery; it is probable, I say, that this final
sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature
has made universal in the whole species.
Thus does Hume and since the time of Hume, a whole army of philosophers and
psychologists base notions of happiness and flourishing on the sentiments one has
about the events that mark out the days of ones life. To speak of Humes influence is, of
course, not to suggest that philosophers and psychologists committed to a given theory of
the good life have explicitly adopted Humes theory. Rather, Humes is one of the
clearer and more compelling voices of the so-called Enlightenment which would
confine knowledge to that which only experience and observation can verify and

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authenticate. Accordingly, if there is something real about happiness or flourishing or the
right sort of life, it must be something accessible to the senses, something felt. And it is
this that Solon rejected, even as Croesus attempted to equate good fortune with externals.
This is not the occasion for a serious critique of Humes theory. As notions of
this sort go, Humes is probably the best argued, the deepest philosophically. This much
credit granted, there is at least one sense in which the entire idea is hopelessly
implausible and was seen to be so by G. E. Moore eighty years ago.2 (His appraisal of
Humes theory will, mutatis mutandus apply to derivative accounts whether these are
based on Strawsonian reactive attitudes or Simon Blackburns Humean wine now
bottled under the label expressivism.3 In whatever incarnation, it is a strange thesis, and
no less so for its widespread appeal.
Assuming that Hume is correct in connecting happiness or flourishing to the
regard in which we are held by others, and especially their estimation of our moral worth,
we would need some scale or scheme of morality which, again on Humes account, must
be based on utility. But utility on this same account refers to what finally appeals at the
level of sentiment or feeling. We begin to see the theorys stress points when we
acknowledge at the outset that persons making judgments of fundamental worth
understand themselves to be expressing something different from personal aversions,
pleasures or whims; something different from utility itself or the things that might make
one happy.

G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies. (1922) London: Routledge; especially ch. 4, Humes philosophy.
For Peter Strawsons reactive attitudes, see Strawson, Peter. 1963, reprint 1993. Freedom and
Resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy 48, pp. 1-25; reprinted in Perspectives on Moral
Responsibility, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, eds. Ithaca : Cornell U. P., pp. 45-66. Simon
Blackburns expressivism is developed in his Ruling Passions (1999) Oxford: Clarendon Press.
3

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Now, beyond this, the question G. E. Moore raised is whether the reference of all
moral or ethical ascriptions, is simply and solely...a certain feeling. If this were the
case, Moore concludes, it would follow that, all the ideas with which Moral Philosophy
is concerned are merely psychological ideas. In addressing the question, Moore finds, at
least tentatively, that the sentimentalist thesis is opaque both as a moral psychology and
as a philosophical doctrine. What troubles him can be recast in the following five steps:
1. Following Hume and the Sentimentalists, when I judge an action or event to be
morally wrong I am judging it to be the sort of action or event that tends to excite within
me feelings of, say, indignation.
2. When I judge one action or event to be clearly more wrongful than another, I
am actually basing the judgment on my estimation of which would create a greater
indignation were both to occur at the same time.
3. When you make these judgments, you are estimating how the action or event
would tend to excite feelings in you.
4. As neither of us has any means by which to know such tendencies in the other,
there is simply no basis on which either of us can make sense of how the other is using
words such as wrong. Moral terms as such could not rise higher in their import than a
kind of noise.
5. It follows then that between two such persons, there is absolutely no such
thing as a difference of opinion on moral questions.
To attempt to rescue the thesis by noting Humes reliance in the universal
distribution of the relevant sentiments is then and again to be unable to raise serious
differences of opinion on moral questions for now the potential disputants share the same
sentiments. Clearly, a theory of value that forecloses serious disputes cannot be taken too
seriously, whatever its influence.

II.

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The part of Humes theory that not only rehearses the dominant perspective of his era
but deserves greater respect today than it receives is just his essentialism; but not at the
level of sentiment for, even if sentimental dispositions are more or less comparable in all
human beings, it is not at the level of sentiment that the grounding of a flourishing life is
to be found. All too briefly, I would say that to speak of something having an essential
nature, at least as Aristotle would intend this to be understood, is to speak of what it is to
be a certain kind of thing. As Aristotle used it, the term essence is explicated by the
phrase to ti ein einai the what it is to be something. The something falls under a
universal category. Thus, a cat is an animal, but were there no such taxa as plants and
animals, there could be no cats. This is not to be confused with Platonic notions of true
forms, thought to have ontological standing apart from their actual instantiations.
Rather, Aristotle here notes degrees of kinship as expressed in the form of similar
appearance, similar modes of behavior, similar responses to the environment. Thus, the
sense in which Coriscus is a man is different from the sense in which Coriscus is
musical. Coriscus is essentially an instance of what it is to be a human being, but
merely accidentially musical, along the way.
Famously, Aristotle took the to ti ein einai of human beings finally to include
centrally a rational animal, disposed naturally to social and political modes of life and
able to base actions and choices on rational deliberation. The To ti ein einai for this kind
of creature includes at its core fitness for the rule of law. It is to be a specific kind of
creature, arising from the natural order of things, as does the polis itself. It is to be an
active creature whose identity cannot be reduced to a name or title. Think only of
Aristotles reference to the statue of a physician with a hand that is a physicians in name

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only. No, the physician is such only when doctoring; only when the rational deployment
of hard-won skills combine with temperamental factors and the framing of worthy goals
lead to an activity that might last for moments or be seamlessly woven into a whole
lifetime. Absent from this account are Maslovian peak emotional experiences. Absent,
too, is any reference to earned degrees, IQ points, income, job satisfaction, even tenure!
There is no flourishing life, properly so called, unless what flourishes is
something to be proud of in the first instance, and where the pride is of that proper form
Aristotle discovers in persons of virtue; a pride that is proportionate, internal, rightly
earned. There is much to be learned from sampling persons attitudes about what they
relish or deplore, what they want and what they hope to avoid, whom they admire and
what they hope for, both for themselves and their loved ones.
What is to be learned, however, is the character and overall level of humanity
attained by a given time, a given culture. Surely were all the Concentration Camp
Commandants in all the camps of Europe to have proclaimed, as one, their joys and sense
of fulfillment in completing the horrific project of the Nazis, nothing would change as to
the proper assessment of them and their goals. I cite this striking and macabre instance to
draw attention to the ultimate uselessness of polls and questionnaires, sampling statistics
and the transparent absurdity of actuarial approaches to an understanding of the needs
and the possibilities inherent in human nature.
Famously, Aristotle contended, through systematic argument and analysis, that
actions have as their ultimate end just this flourishing. The actor aims at what is taken to
be some good, but the aim here may be directed at what is finally an illusion of sorts. It

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is, to use Aristotles terms, through a corruption or perversion of ones nature that one
might act in behalf of what is merely an apparent good. The actual goods of life for
Aristotle are not, as he called them, the idle abstractions featured in Platos philosophy
but the actual, practicable goods achieved within the domains Aristotle called
.4 It is customary to translate these as politics, economics
and practical wisdom respectively but, again, these are words now so freighted with
modern and technical connotations as to be misleading. What Aristotle is identifying as
the basic goods those goods from which the lesser ones are derived are the gift of a
special form of civic and domestic life, and that developed excellence of character by
which one has a lordly command over the appetites and passions.
The essential elements or dimensions of such a life are at once aesthetic, civic,
interpersonal, moral and transcendental. Each of these dimensions gives shape and depth
to the rest; each to some extent depends on the rest; each must gain its existence from the
actual and deliberated strivings of a given life. How interesting that what we are pleased
to call modern psychology, even psychological science, has so very little of
consequence to say about any of these dimensions! This cannot be for want of
precedents. William James wisely recognized, in what he called The Varieties of
Religious Experience, the ubiquity and power of the transcendental in human life
wherever it is found. Entire epochs have been named after the dominant aesthetic genres
brought into being by the genius of music, literature, art and architecture. The very
history of law, the history of political and social development, is a set of footnotes to
those major moral and ethical imperatives that serve to ground a meaningful life so
much so that life itself is often sacrificed out of duty to just such imperatives. In all of
4

Eudemian Ethics, 1218b 14

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this, there is so much consistency some of it dreadful, some of it sublime as to leave
little doubt but that this is a history lived by a certain kind of entity; less a protean and
passive object on which evolution might set to work than an active, searching, selfconscious entity able to take hold of mere chance and transform it into destiny. And
when these powers have thus succeeded, what is discovered is what the ancients knew so
well; that ones character is ones destiny.
Of the dimensions so briefly noted, it is perhaps the political or civic that calls for
the greatest attention, chiefly because of the regulative influence it can have over all the
rest. Consider what at first would seem to be a trite example: Zoning laws. But then
consider the fate of domestic and neighborly life in the absence of such laws. At a more
obvious level, consider the laws of taxation in relation to charitable contributions and
patronage. Suppose no tax relief were available to those otherwise willing to donate
great works of art to public places, or significant funds to institutions of higher learning.
It is not necessary to rehearse the manifold ways in which political reality can and does
dictate the terms of aesthetic and moral life, even the terms of religious life. And each of
these in term shapes and defines the rule of law and thus the lives permitted and
encouraged by it. What should be clear from all this is that the fundamental science on
which a plausible and systematic psychology might be built is surely not neuroscience,
but history itself, and especially those chapters in human history that mark out the
significant developments in the civic realm. It is within these chapters, and the book of
history as a whole, that one finds all the examples needed for a defensible classification
of forms of life worth living and forms of life running counter to human nature itself.
Needless to say, the major chapters of this book center on Athens in the fifth and fourth

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centuries B.C. With this in mind, I turn to the cluttered and now dubious realm we are
pleased to call higher education and its part in its place within the framework of
eudaimonia.

III.
What we are pleased to call higher education must be distinguished from other
forms of learning or training. Presumably, the distinguishing feature cannot simply be
the number of years students have devoted to the cultivation of their abilities for, in that
case, the longer one works at the grinding wheel or in the paint shop, the higher is his
education. Indeed, if no more than time were required, a students education would
become progressively higher if, for example, the third grade were repeated over and
over again. No, what the term refers to is the study of things that are themselves higher;
higher in the order of abstraction, higher in that plane of thought and of action at which
hopeful and worthy lives are lived.
Understood in these terms, higher education found itself a century and a
half ago on a collision course with what the general public took to be reality, as in the
real world. It would be rash to attempt to date the actual collision with any precision.
Perhaps a date at least as apt as any other was October 4, 1957 when the Western
democracies awakened to the news that the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, all 23
inches of it, with an orbiting lifetime of fifty-seven days. This event, more than any other
in recent times, seemed to vindicate criticisms that had been directed at colleges and
universities for decades; namely, that the prevailing curriculum of study, except for the
parts that were expressly pre-professional, were irrelevant to life, indifferent to the real

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needs of society, out of step with the modern world, plagued by the perspective of the
Prep Schools headmaster, etc. The arch adversaries in Russia knew better than to
squander the national brainpower on idle chatter about matters that simply do not matter.
Within a decade, now stimulated by the civil rights movement and an unpopular war,
criticism moved to a decidedly shrill part of the register, dismissing all traditional
features of higher education as simply irrelevant.
All this, of course, had been said before, often by persons who, as beneficiaries of
higher education, should know better. Consider in this connection John Lockes
influential Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692). After speaking of the value of
apples in the diet and the regular washing of feet in cold weather, after offering wise
alternatives to corporal punishment, and then finally turning to the formation of character,
Locke rebukes those parents who,
have a strange value for words, when preferring the languages of the antient
Greeks and Romans to that which made 'em such brave men. (Part III, Sec. 71)
He then concludes the section by warning against an education that would trade, your
son's innocence and virtue for a little Greek and Latin.
Later in his essay, Locke returns to this theme:
Latin and learning make all the noise; and the main stress is laid
upon his proficiency in things a great part whereof belong not to a
gentleman's calling; which is to have the knowledge of a man of
business, a carriage suitable to his rank, and to be eminent and
useful in his country, according to his stationA great part of the
learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe, and that goes

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ordinarily into the round of education, a gentleman may in a good
measure be unfurnish'd with, without any great disparagement to
himself or prejudice to his affairs. (Sec. 94)
With this in mind, and recognizing the constraints of time and place,
Locke observes that,
since it cannot be hop'd [the student] should have time and
strength to learn all things, most pains should be taken about that
which is most necessary; and that principally look'd after which
will be of most and frequentest use to him in the world.
We see as early as the Age of Newton, and in the writing of Newtons
most committed disciple, an impatience with attention to the remote past at the
expense of a future now able to benefit from the achievements of science and the
practical arts. The college that teaches best is the college of experience where the
very facts of life work on the receptive mind to forge a wisdom that can never be
acquired from books.
Consider again Lockes reference to A great part of the learning now in
fashion in the schools of Europe. The learning in fashion, as Locke put it, was
the bequest of the first great and true universities established in the High Middle
Ages. These evolved from the Abbey schools mandated in the Ninth Century by
Alfred the Great in Britain and by Charlemagne on the Continent. By the
Eleventh Century some of these, notably the one associated with the Cathedral of
Notre Dame in Paris, were already centers of serious scholarship and teaching, the
participants organizing themselves as a universitas. This University of Paris, by

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the twelfth century, would come to define the genre; so much so that when St.
Ignatius of Loyola judged his scholarly preparation to be hopelessly defective, he
took himself to Paris. It was the great University of that city that would later
provide him with the very framework for that Ratio Studiorum that would be the
centerpiece of Jesuit education until our own lifetime the centerpiece of what
Locke called the learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe.
What Ignatius found at Paris was higher education, by Roman Catholics and for
Roman Catholics, but no less universal in its reach for all that. Whether to defeat heresies
or promote papal authority, whether to serve princes or thwart the infidel, the earliest
Catholic universities were predicated on certain assumptions readily found both in the
lines and between the lines of what was taught. From the first, the atmosphere of higher
education was alive with criticism; with the "Sic et non" that conduces not to skepticism
but to inquiry; with the viva voce which every aspiring don must endure as more
seasoned minds test and taunt for the purpose of cleansing and empowering. Note that
Thomas Aquinas, single-handedly and carefully examined some ten-thousand objections
to positions he would then defend. So deep and developed were his arguments, so
thoroughly and brilliantly did they expand and enrich criticism itself, that his works were
suppressed for decades following his death. Nonetheless, he earned faithful and utterly
prepared intellectual disciples who carried his teaching far and wide. It was one of his
own pupils who would educate a student inspired to perfect his mind in order to sing
properly to the love of his life. The student was the author of The Divine Comedy.
Let me return for the moment to Ignatius of Loyola. He was not simply studying
in Paris for some seven years. His principal collegiate affiliation within the University
was Sainte Barbe which, by the time of his arrival, had taken the lead in developing the
long-opposed program of humanistic study, and chiefly the study of classical Greek and
Latin sources. These were understood as foundational for all other studies. But

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defenders had to argue this curriculum into being. One might say that what they were
arguing into being was the spirit of the Renaissance itself. Thus, as early as 1542,
Ignatius is found writing to students in the Society that it is to be their Latin studies that
will ground all the rest, and that these studies are therefore mandatory. The study of
Greek would soon be added and for the same reason. All this was in specific opposition
to prevailing practices at Italian colleges where students were free to choose to study
whatever they wished, in any order and, we might surmise, with no compelling purpose
or reason. It is worth mentioning that none of these colleges would figure in any
significant way in the subsequent history of higher education. They are known today
chiefly for their futility.
I should say that by 1600 there were nearly 250 Jesuit schools. The earlier
curricular reforms which yielded the first version of the Ratio Studiorum, had already
required students to master the particulars of the major subjects and made sure that
erudition would never be a figleaf for superficiality. Nothing in this project was
understood to be sectarian, for a common humanity erases the traditional barriers of
sect and party. The author students were required to study and formally imitate under the
earliest versions of the Ratio was Cicero. All in all, in the long and still intense struggle
between urbanity and provincialism, it would be the university that would revise the
maps of thought and set loose the instructed mind.
Well, back to Sputnik again, and then to Darwin, before I conclude. It is thanks to
Sputnik that the American college and university came to host what now is called big
science, once the exclusive preserve of the largest corporations. After Sputnik, there
was less room for, less patience with the mere dilettante. Vocation gave way to
profession, and profession to career. The ethos of the academic world, for so long
collegial and perhaps even a bit unworldly, metamorphosed into something ever more

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focused and, yes, ever more entrepreneurial. America entered something called the
Space race, thought at the time to be an event within that larger and macabre Olympiad
known as the Cold War. With all this going on, and in light of the stakes, there could be
little room for Latin or Greek.
But what could any of this have to do with eudaimonia?

Alas, there is always

something going on and, if only for this reason, it may be that there must always be room
for a literature, a culture, a means of self-critical appraisals found in purer form within
the classical context. If Sputnik awakened the complacent West in the middle of the
twentieth century, it was Darwin who did the same a century earlier. By the time his
Origin of Species appeared, the divorce between science and the humanities was
effectively complete; so much so, that when the Birmingham Technical Institute, thanks
to a large gift from Josiah Mason, emerged as the University of Birmingham, the very
terms of the gift would include the stipulation that classics not be taught!
The Founders Day address was given by Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwins
bulldog and one of the most acute intelligences of the Victorian era. Huxleys address
could have been given on October 5, 1957, the day after Sputniks first complete orbit. It
might just as well have been given in 1694, to honor Lockes discerning comments on an
education worth having. Huxley discharged his duty with confidence and controlled
enthusiasm. He paid a handsome compliment to Josiah Mason for his prescience, and
then tested his audience with a question: Suppose a youngster hoping to have some good
effect on the world had to choose between two curriculums while at University: One,
says Huxley, featuring a pair of dead languages, perhaps of use to some future reviewer
of books; the other, based on the laws and principles of science by which one can

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comprehend the operations of the natural world. Huxley took this to be an easy question.
Is there any doubt, he asked, in anyones mind as to which of these should be chosen;
anyone, he says, except that Levite of Culture, Matthew Arnold.
It would not be long before Arnold accepted the challenge and published his
instructive essay, Science and Culture. Arnold politely acknowledged Huxleys
authority as a man of science, not to mention a prince of debaters. He then shares with
his readers some lines he has read in Darwins Descent of Man, where we learn that,
our ancestor was a hairy quadruped, with pointed ears and a tail,, probably
arboreal in his habits.
Arnold is prepared to accept this characterization of human ancestry. But he goes on to
note that, regarding this poor chap, this hairy quadruped with pointed ears and a tail, no
doubt arboreal in his habits, there must have been something in him that inclined him to
Greek!
The point should be clear enough. In that most insistent of duties the duty to
know oneself, to examine ones life and ones world and ones place within it and duties
obligations to it we are tempted to reduce the burden by finding a shortcut. Thus might
we look past human history to something far more remote where the hairy quadruped
finds his way by unreflecting instinct and a not yet fully lit deliberating intelligence.
Thus thinking of ourselves as products of evolution, mere items within a collective
gene pool designed without a designer, we are able to suspend the classical impulse to
self-perfection, the classical exercise of self-criticism. But this is but a lazy evasion that
soon must confront the real reality of the lived life. It is at this point that our focus is
nearer to the facts of the matter; nearer to the Athens of Pericles, to the troubling

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dialogues brilliantly staged by Plato, to Aristotles schoolroom, with its incredible
panoply of methods and subjects so wondrously integrated. Our focus becomes still
sharper, fixing the minds eye on the Greek tragedians and the real sense in which ones
character is ones destiny and, at the same time, is made by us, not for us. We then step
back to scan the larger and less personal terrain over which entities very much like
ourselves traveled. We listen carefully and hear them utter maxims to each other,
followed by knowing nods and even ironic smiles. Polis andra didaskePolis andra
didaskeMan is shaped by the polis, taught by the polis, tested by the polis. We
are reminded that it is in the fashioning of our institutions that we knowingly dispose
ourselves to one or another form of social life, family life, a life of friendship and bonds
of affection. It is in the forming of these bonds, and the grounds of principle on which
they depend, that real meaning and real significance can be wrested from an indifferent
and merely physical cosmos.
In Odyssey, Homer sings the lamentations of Odysseus and Penelope, so long
separated by war. Undone by his crew, he now fills his days in intimate association with
a sea nymph, Calypso. She seeks to enchant him. She reminds him of how many years
have been added to Penelopes now troubled life. She then offers him that which no
mortal can win for himself: Immortality. If he stays with her, he will never age, he will
know neither illness nor decrepitude. But it is a vessel that bargains for, choosing his
own humanity over divinity; choosing, that is, to preserve Odysseus, husband of
Penelope; to preserve himself.
It is a higher education that pulls us up out of the flotsam of the moment and
allows us to see further, to see more clearly where weve been, what weve done, who we

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are, who we might become. Higher education is not professional or pre-professional; it
cannot be reduced to a formula and it cannot be extracted from a reading list. It is hostile
to the short-answer and regards a true-false question as banal. It exposes to bright light
all forms of counterfeit: Ingratiating talk as the counterfeit of teaching; rote learning as
the counterfeit of thought; mere opinion as the counterfeit of judgment; enthusiasm as the
counterfeit of princple.
I would argue that all this was well understood by Aristotle and readily translated
by him into that ethical school weve dubbed perfectionism. Aristotle himself was at
sixes and sevens as he contemplated the best form of life, the form most closely
approximating eudaimonia. In Cleobis and Biton he would have found fine examples of
the right life as the active life. What was missing, we have reason to believe, was the
contemplative life; a life devoted to the study and comprehension of all that is really
worth knowing. Here, the activity is for its own sake and not designed to achieve
something else. As such, he says, it is a god-like life, one lived on the Isle of the Blest.
But contemplation in this sense is not at the expense of activity; it is its
forerunner, its preparation, its constant critic and judge. The doctors aim is to relieve
suffering and secure good health. The thinkers aim, too, is to secure a form of mental
health and civic health; to refine law and order the polis in a manner that allows it to
teach and guide.
Perhaps under prevailing conditions such an education is simply beyond the
resources material, personal, even moral resources of our colleges and universities.
Perhaps the now universal practice of counting publications and tracking grant revenue as
the means by which to establish and reward members of a faculty is so deeply entrenched

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that there can be no genuine community of scholars, no systematic and disciplined
examination of the moral dimensions of life. Perhaps the very organization of todays
colleges the cadre of vice presidents and deans and assistant deans, the lethal vapors of
political correctness, the sheer indifference to vulgarity in all its forms, and especially its
architectural forms perhaps all of this has gone too far to be reversed. If so, then
todays Odysseus might reconsider his options, choosing happy distraction over a brief,
dangerous and painful life whose only claim is that it is his own.