Page 10 - GALIET OF BEAUTIFUL UNOIA AND EUDAIMONIA: ARISTOTLE IV

(spoudaios).2 This expresses a sense that life comes out well despite the vicissitudes and challenges we are bound to encounter in our journeys on earth. This conflict between feeling happy “at any given moment” and being happy “for a lifetime” implies that we must, as rational beings, constantly choose between those momentary pleasures of the flesh and that everlasting happiness, between “having an excellent time” and “leading a life of excellence.” Then, there is also the fact that we perceive our world in binaries: however much we experience stillness, plenitude or serenitude in those rare moments of felicity or “felicidad,” we are condemned to feel sorrow afterwards.3 Happiness, thus, in its temporary and permanent nature, seems to elude us precisely because it does not endure.
In the Nichomachean Ethics,4 Aristotle argues that of all the notions of types of lives that seem to conduce to happiness, true
2 Aristotle’s Poetics. Chapter 6. Spoudaios, translates as serious and sorrowful. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
3 William Blake, in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, says that “excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps.” (xviii). Blake, William. The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake. Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” New York, Anchor Books, Random House, 1988.
4 Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
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