Aristotle's Definition of True Happiness: Contemplation, Not Pleasure

Key facts

• Aristotle affirms that true happiness and pleasure are indissociable, but happiness is not a life of simple gratification or pleasant amusements.
• For Aristotle, relaxation serves to restore energy needed to dedicate oneself again to meaningful and pleasant activities.
• Happiness lies in a life sufficiently provided with the assurance of leisure time, allowing continuous realization of our nature regarding our most godlike capacities.
• An essential feature of happiness is the objective realization of our human nature, which transcends the constituent elements that make up our bodies.
• Through human intelligence, inquiry can be made into the most primary and universal principles of being—those furthest removed from sense perception and experience.
• Humans can apprehend the indubitable logical principles upon which all sciences rest and are capable of internally directed, self-originating, voluntary action.
• The specifically human act of understanding involves the mind integrating within itself the form, the inner reality, of the intelligible object perceived.
• Aristotle proposes three conditions for happiness: it must be the most estimable and ultimate end, chosen solely for its own sake; it must be self-sufficient; and it must be most final and complete.
• The life of speculative contemplation, which continuously researches and marvels at the deepest strata of being, is the activity most conducive to happiness and richest in pleasure.
• For Aristotle, pleasure is a quality that arises from the optimal and unobstructed exercise of our perceptual and intellectual capacities.
• The contemplative life dedicated to understanding what is most general and primary is the most fulfilling and satisfying activity, proper to our species.
• Aquinas reasoned that the desire to continuously contemplate immutable, all-embracing truth can only find its objective fulfillment in God, in an everlasting state.
• Petrarch, in On My Own Ignorance, says that Aristotle saw happiness the way a night owl sees the sun: only its rays in the distance, and not the sun itself.