The pursuit of happiness: Embracing freedom & authenticity can help improve quality of life
Aristotle first took on this question in his Nicomachean Ethics — arguably the first time anyone in Western intellectual history had focused on the subject as a standalone question.
He formulated a teleological response to the question of how we ought to live. Aristotle proposed, in other words, an answer grounded in an investigation of our purpose or ends (telos) as a species.
Our purpose, he argued, can be uncovered through a study of our essence — the fundamental features of what it means to be human.
Ends and essences
«Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good;» Aristotle states, «and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims.»
To understand what is good, and therefore what one must do to achieve the good, we must first understand what kinds of things we are. This will allow us to determine what a good or a bad function actually is.
For Aristotle, this is a generally applicable truth. Take a knife, for example. We must first understand what a knife is in order to determine what would constitute its proper function.
The essence of a knife is that it cuts; that is its purpose.
We can thus make the claim that a blunt knife is a bad knife — if it does not cut well, it is failing in an important sense to properly fulfil its function. This is how essence relates to function, and how fulfilling that function entails a kind of goodness for the thing in question.
Of course, determining the function of a knife or a hammer is much easier than determining the function of Homo sapiens, and therefore what good, fulfilling lives might involve for us as a species.
Aristotle argues that our function must be more than growth, nutrition and
