Page 20 - GALIET OF BEAUTIFUL UNOIA AND EUDAIMONIA: ARISTOTLE IV

This is no measure of permanent and everlasting happiness, either. It is also a life driven towards pursuing a futile goal: ultimate knowledge and ultimate truth. Peirce, in his collected papers, says that “there are three things that we can never expect to attain by reason: absolute certainty, absolute exactitude, absolute universality.”9 As such, we can’t attain entelechy, perfection, even if it were truly possible that we could actualize a life dedicated to contemplation. Furthermore, it is not clear whether, in Aristotle’s ideal life, the concept of “techne” enters his philosophy. For there is an artistic dimension to the life worth living; we are as it were, but not in Aristotle’s words, artistic beings of a self-creating nature, makers and creators of concepts, ideologies and objects and the whole perfectionist scheme in Aristotle’s ethics and psychology seems to be a way of getting a set of potentialities realized even more fully. The creative life is essential to happiness whether you are a romantic poet or a post-modern poet.
In my view, perhaps the happiest and most flourishing life is a harmonious and rich compound of Aristotle’s contemplative
9 Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers London: Harvard University Press, 1958. 1.141.
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