Good Life according to Aristotle

During our Ethics seminar class, Fr. Ashley introduced us to live a good life through different philosophers from China and the West. The one great philosopher Aristotle also had a way to live a good life. He said that as human as we are all of us long to live a good life. To do so we are in search of the highest good, that is money, honour and pleasure. Aristotle says that all this good does not satisfy us fully. All these are not the way humans should go about since they are actually performed by animals. We are blessed with rationality and so we are obliged to use it.

The most important element that is necessary is contemplation and learning which we get through intellectual virtue through our experiences and also through certain principles. We all have attended schooling and during those days we gain lots of knowledge but we can’t put it into our practical life. To live a good life we need to put all our intellectual knowledge into our dealing with our practical reality.

To live a good life we require society. We can’t live an isolated life without society. It is society that transforms us. We take many resolutions and none of them are fulfilled but with other’s we are able to perform some of them. So the first responsibility of the state legislature is to help people to progress from bad to good. Therefore, at the end Aristotle said that the state should have the gift of rationality to guide the people of the state.

We need to use our rationality to decide what is good and bad and to make the right choices in order to live an authentic and a good life and to cultivate good habit.

Cl. Trevor Rodrigues SDB