Comment
Aristotle leaped into the human into the essence of human nature and found a way to live a life of happiness in a truly human sense. This way he asserted is living and acting in accordance with virtue. He defines virtue as the intermediate between the deficiency and excess of some trait of personality or the way of acting. Although, it does not dwell in all of the traits and actions since there are the ones which are inherently bad, and neither the deficiency nor the excess of such quality or action will result in virtue (such as treachery, murder, etc.) In my opinion, the two crucial components of the virtue are its nature and its manifestation. The nature of virtue consists in finding the right intermediate between the deficiency and excess since it is different in all the situations. The second component, manifestation, is whether after finding the right way of acting a person would discipline herself to actually act according to this way.
Response
Aristotle is considered one of the founders of the modern Western philosophy not for nothing as his contribution to the philosophical thought is indeed tremendous. His view of the human happiness and the right way of acting resulted in the foundation of the whole ethics system which is named for its essence – the ethics of virtue. In his work, Aristotle speaks to intelligent people and does this to further promote their wisdom because he described the content of happiness and virtue while the dynamic aspect of actually finding and experiencing them he left upon each individual.
Aristotle asserts that there are three ways of living – the way of growing and nutrition, the life of perception and pleasure, and the life of reason and happiness (Aristotle 53). The first is characteristic of plants, the second of animals, and the third one of humans. As he points out, the life of clinging to pleasures cannot be the highest achievement of man as there are higher ends that can be reached. Wealth, honor, and other external attributes are also not the end of human aspirations as they are only means to achieving happiness. The happiness itself is the only end, and it comes from within, and particularly from exercising virtues. The virtues Aristotle defined as the mean or the intermediate in certain traits and actions such as fearlessness, money spending, honesty, etc. Here, however, lies the trick and the problem that Aristotle left for each individual to solve for herself. He straightly claims that the virtue is not the arithmetic mean but rather lies somewhere in between. The task of finding out the right intermediate for each individual situation and acting in accordance with it is the manifestation of virtue. And the amount of virtue exhibited by a person is the precision in finding the intermediate and the excess. The closer the action is to the best of the possible the more virtuous the person is. The problem here is that this closeness to perfection or virtuosity can be assessed only subjectively as the perfect option is known only to the perfectly virtuous person. However, how can a person be judged to be perfectly virtuous? This is indeed a far more complex question. Nevertheless, the more important is the feeling of improving the own accuracy of judgement about the acts one is to accomplish as Aristotle completed his work not to be memorized as the philosopher but to provide people with the guide to living their lives in happiness.
Works Cited
Aristotle. "Happiness And Virtue". 51-59. Print.
