Page 9 - GALIET OF BEAUTIFUL UNOIA AND EUDAIMONIA: ARISTOTLE IV

More often than not, there seems to be a general consensus about what “happiness” means. When we say that we feel happiness, usually we mean a sense of being really pleased or being profoundly satisfied 3⁄4 that we have everything that we could possibly want or have dreamed of. And then, there is that tragic element lurking at us behind the curtains. There are the sudden reversals of fortune, those “peripeteias,” the recognition or “anagnorisis” and the suffering or “pathos” of life that affect our happiness by altering our destinies with Sophoclean or Shakespearean terror to recite, almost intuitively, those heartrending, unforgettable lines of Hamlet “to be or not to be 3⁄4 that is the question: whether ‘tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them...and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to...”1
Once tragedy strikes us, we think of the quality our lives take from its end, for a tragedy, since ancient times, is characterized bythemassesasastorythatdoesn’tendhappily. ForAristotle, tragedy means the “imitation of a serious or sorrowful action”
1 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
•9•