εὐδαιμονία

Eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία) compounds eu- (well, good — the same prefix as in 'eulogy' and 'euphoria') with daimon (spirit, divine being — the intermediate being between human and god) and the noun suffix -ia. Literally it means 'the state of having a good daimon' or 'good-daemonhood.' The daimon in Greek religious thought was a personal spirit, neither fully divine nor human, that accompanied and guided an individual — closer to a protective spirit or an internal guiding force than to a demon in the later Christian sense. To have a good daimon was to be well-directed from within, to have one's inner life in order in a way that expressed itself in external flourishing. When Greek philosophers appropriated the term as the name for the highest human good, they kept this sense of internal ordering: eudaimonia is not a pleasant feeling but a condition of functioning well as the kind of being you are.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics opens with the claim that every human activity aims at some good, and then asks what the highest good is — the one aimed at for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. His answer is eudaimonia, and the remainder of the Ethics is an extended analysis of what it consists in. Aristotle argues that eudaimonia cannot be a feeling or a momentary state: it is an activity — specifically, the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and in the case of the best human virtue, in accordance with reason. This means eudaimonia requires a complete life (you cannot call someone eudaimon while they are still young, because fortune may still undo them), requires external goods (friendships, adequate resources, civic participation), and requires the development and exercise of character virtues over time. It is not something you have; it is something you do, consistently, over a lifetime.

The translation of eudaimonia as 'happiness' is one of philosophy's most consequential mistranslations. The English word happiness carries connotations of pleasant subjective experience — of feeling good, of having one's desires satisfied, of being in a state of positive affect. Eudaimonia carries none of these connotations. An ancient Greek could acknowledge that a person was eudaimon while acknowledging that this person faced hardship, grief, and difficulty — because eudaimonia is constituted by how one engages with life, not by how life makes one feel. The Stoics pushed this further: for them, the person on the rack could be eudaimon if their character was excellent, because character virtue was the only true good. This is not a minor nuance but a complete reorientation of what we take flourishing to consist in.

Contemporary philosophy and psychology have returned to eudaimonia in part because the dominant modern frameworks for understanding wellbeing — hedonic approaches that measure wellbeing by pleasure and the absence of pain — have seemed increasingly inadequate. Positive psychology, welfare economics, and moral philosophy have all revived eudaimonic concepts to capture what is missing from purely hedonic accounts: the sense that a life can be going well or badly for a person in ways that have nothing to do with how pleasant it feels moment to moment. The person who is rich, comfortable, and perpetually amused but who is exercising none of their capacities, contributing to nothing, and developing no relationships of depth is, on the eudaimonic account, not flourishing — however happy they report themselves to be.