Choosing One’s Own Life. Individual Happiness and Political Expertise in Aristotle

The aim of this paper is to investigate the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics by examining the role of political expertise in the actualisation of individual happiness, and the extent to which the highest good pursued by expert lawgivers for the well-being of the political community is compatible both with individual choice as to how to live one’s own life and with the idea of a human ergon. In the first section of the present work I will try to provide evidences for the idea that the highest good which expert lawgivers seek to actualise in the polis is mainly of an ethical kind; a good which, as I propose to demonstrate, will be perfect and complete only when grounded in and supported by theoretical activity. In section II I will suggest that happiness, in Aristotle’s thought, is not a systematic composite of different ends, but involves the possibility of choosing between two different kinds of excellence for the sake of a happy life: the ethical and the intellectual. I intend to demonstrate that, notwithstanting the alleged superiority and higher perfection of intellectual activity, men can choose either or both as desirable in themselves