The Relationship Between Happiness And Money
Happiness, Aristotle argues, is the one thing sought for itself and for which everything else is done. Everyone seems to agree on this, even if their reasons for doing so might vary. The problem then becomes how to explain what this happiness means, for, as he points out, different people have different interpretations of happiness, based on their own understanding of it. Some ("men of the most vulgar type") argue that happiness is pleasure; others ("of superior refinement and of active disposition") equate it with honour; still others see it as the pursuit and acquisition of wealth (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I).
As to this last, Aristotle comments:
The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for this is merely useful and for the sake of something else (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I, Chapter 5, 1096a).
In effect, Aristotle is dismissing all these definitions of what happiness is as self-evidently wrong because they are not ends in themselves. Having also dismissed other functions that we have in common with plants and animalsùgrowth and nutrition and that of perception, Aristotle goes on to say:
There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as ôlife of the rational elementö also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean. Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle ... human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk I, Chapt. 7, 1098a).
The thesis statement for this paper is that Aristotle is very correct in stating that there is no connection between happiness and money (or Ã...