As individual people, when we choose the good our lives are better, happier, more productive and less complicated. This is a no brainer, we all know it because we are living with the consequences, positive and negative. Forming the habit of choosing the good is called moral character formation. This is an ongoing, life-long, simple lesson we began to learn in childhood but for some strange reason, we too often, young or old, insanely choose to be miserable.
This is my
story and probably yours as well. This popular understanding seems to be what
Aristotle in saying in the remainder of Book I but he makes it so damned
complicated. “Happiness is a kind of working of the soul in a way of perfect Excellence”.
Is perfect Excellence a goal or is it supposedly attainable? We are then taken into a confusing description
of the soul, rational and irrational, vegetative, etc. One thing is clear,
Aristotle’s understanding of soul is not our 2400 years removed understanding. Before
we pat ourselves on the back, 21th century man is equally confused
by soul talk, what it means to me is probably not what soul means to you.
Aristotle finishes well with a short paragraph on what he means by the Excellence of Man. Maybe, somewhere within this Aristotelian definition is an answer to the question, who are we? Some say, as does Aristotle, we are intellectual and moral beings who daily shape our own futures by our choices. Choices we make to think or not to think, choices for the Good or not. Welcome aboard!
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
