Page 19 - GALIET OF BEAUTIFUL UNOIA AND EUDAIMONIA: ARISTOTLE IV

the constant exercise of one’s rational faculties as if it were a “constant practice” towards the highest form of the active life, the perfect, just, noble life: a fountain of philosophic dwelling.
However, even if we choose this life of philosophical dwelling on earth, we know that this Aristotelian “pill of happiness” has been excessively sugar coated. Aristotle spoon feeds us with a remedy that is also poison, the pharmakon, for even if we were to realize this form of ideal life, its function (ergon), its operation (energeia) and its culmination (entelecheia),8 we would have discovered, in the end, that there is no end to our labyrinthine existence, that, although we may have actualized our potential and reached its culmination in pursuit of the highest knowledge or highest truth, we still remain fallible beings. A life that is driven by theoretic problems in the pursuit of truth or knowledge becomes a life that is never fully satisfying because it is shrouded by uncertainty where neither the propositions of science or philosophy are infallible.
8 Aristotle defines the soul as the first entelechy of a natural body that has life in potentiality. (De Anima, II, 1, 412a 27-28). Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. De Anima. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
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