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because we are unwilling to call the living happy owing to the
vicissitudes of fortune, and owing to our conception of happiness as something permanent
and not readily subject to change, whereas the wheel of fortune often turns full circle in
the same person's experience.
[8]
For it is clear that if we
are to be guided by fortune, we shall often have to call the same man first happy and then
miserable; we shall make out the happy man to be a sort of ‘chameleon, or a
house built on the sand.’1
[9]
But perhaps it is quite wrong to be guided in our judgement by the changes of fortune,
since true prosperity and adversity do not depend on fortune's favours, although, as we
said, our life does require these in addition; but it is the active exercise of our
faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its
opposite.
[10]
And the difficulty just discussed is a further confirmation of our definition; since none
of man's functions possess the quality of permanence so fully as the activities in
conformity with virtue: they appear to be more lasting even than our knowledge of
particular sciences. And among these activities themselves those which are highest in the
scale of values are the more lasting, because they most fully and continuously occupy the
lives of the supremely happy: for this appears to be the reason why we do not forget
them.
[11]
The happy man therefore will possess that element of stability in question, and will
remain happy all his life; since he will be always or at least most often employed in
doing and contemplating the things that are in
conformity with virtue. And he will bear changes of fortunes most nobly, and with perfect
propriety in every way, being as he is ‘good in very truth’ and
‘four-square without reproach.’2
[12]
But the accidents of fortune are many and vary in degree of magnitude; and although small
pieces of good luck, as also of misfortune, clearly do not change the whole course of
life, yet great and repeated successes will render life more blissful, since both of their
own nature they help to embellish it, and also they can be nobly and virtuously
utilized3;
while great and frequent reverses can crush and mar our bliss both by the pain they cause
and by the hindrance they offer to many activities. Yet nevertheless even in adversity
nobility shines through, when a man endures repeated and severe misfortune with patience,
not owing to insensibility but from generosity and greatness of soul.
[13]
And if, as we said, a man's life is determined by his activities, no
supremely happy man can ever become miserable. For he will never do hateful or base
actions,
1 Perhaps a verse from an unknown play.
2 From the poem of Simonides quoted and discussed in Plat. Prot. 339.
3 This distinction of the two values of good fortune recalls the two classes of external goods defined in 8.15,16 and 9.7.
Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 19, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1934.
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