Eudaimonia — conventionally rendered as ‘flourishing,’ ‘happiness,’ or ‘living well’ — occupies a structuring role in the depth-psychology corpus insofar as it designates the telos around which Greek ethical thought, and its modern inheritors, organize questions of the good life. The corpus treats the term not as a settled answer but as a site of productive contestation. Martha Nussbaum is the dominant voice, reading eudaimonia through Aristotle’s insistence that it requires actual activity, not merely virtuous disposition, and that it remains constitutively vulnerable to fortune, bodily impediment, and the withdrawal of philia. This anti-Kantian, anti-Stoic reading positions eudaimonia as irreducibly embedded in contingency — wealth, friendship, political community, and external goods generally are not mere instruments but constituents of the flourishing life. Against Nussbaum’s Aristotelian account, Arthur Adkins traces the philological and cultural genealogy of eudaimonia within Greek value-terms, showing how it clusters with agathos and kalon in a competitive, honor-saturated moral vocabulary that resists reduction to any categorical imperative. The Stoic reformulation — in which eudaimonia belongs entirely to the virtuous inner condition and is unaffected by external circumstance — figures in Nussbaum’s Hellenistic volume as a radical and finally unstable departure from ordinary belief. The tension between eudaimonia as activity-dependent and therefore fragile, and eudaimonia as self-sufficient and therefore invulnerable, runs through the entire corpus as its governing antinomy.
We agree, Aristotle says, that our end is eudaimonia; but we agree on just about nothing concerning it, except the name… ‘Both the many and the refined… believe that living well and acting well are the same as eudaimonia’
Nussbaum demonstrates that Aristotle grounds eudaimonia in activity rather than mere condition, making living well and acting well conceptually identical with flourishing.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
a life without them, even with all other goods, is so seriously incomplete that it is not worth living… philoi and philia will be parts of human eudaimonia and constitutive of, rather than just instrumental to
Nussbaum argues that friendship is a constitutive component of eudaimonia, not merely a means to it, vindicating the irreducible social dimension of flourishing.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
eudaimonia evidently needs the external goods as well, as we said. For many things are done through philoi and wealth and political capability, as through tools. And deprivation of some things defiles the condition of being makarion
Nussbaum shows Aristotle’s position that external goods are necessary conditions for eudaimonia, and their absence actively defiles the flourishing life.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
if we take all these things away, if we imagine a wise person living in the worst possible natural circumstances, so long as she is good and once good she cannot be corrupted — her eudaimonia will still be complete.
Nussbaum presents the Stoic counter-thesis: eudaimonia is entirely self-sufficient in the virtuous soul, immune to all external privation — a position she subjects to sustained critical scrutiny.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994thesis
The view that eudaimonia is equivalent to a state of pleasure is an unconventional and prima facie counterintuitive position in the Greek tradition… A very common position would be Aristotle’s, that eudaimonia consists in activity according to excellence(s).
Nussbaum establishes the Aristotelian activity-based conception of eudaimonia as the normative Greek position against hedonistic and purely stative alternatives.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
without the external goods, which are in the control of luck, it is not possible to be eudaimon… Where there is most insight and reason, there is the least luck; and where there is the most luck there is the least insight.
Nussbaum foregrounds the constitutive tension in Aristotle between practical reason’s aspiration to control and the ineliminable role of fortune in eudaimonia.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
The words considered above, then, clustering round agathos and eudaimonia, characterize the qualities which all at this period set before themselves as desirable, the ends which they proposed to themselves, and, more generally, the kind of life which they hoped to lead.
Adkins situates eudaimonia within the dominant cluster of Greek value-terms, showing it to be not a philosophical abstraction but the vernacular name for the culturally coveted life.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
The Nicomachean Ethics, as was said above, is a textbook on eudaimonia. That is undeniable; and yet from the second to the ninth book the aretai are described and evaluated not in terms of eudaimonia, but in terms of dei… and of ‘the kalon’.
Adkins identifies a structural tension in Aristotle’s ethics between the governing telos of eudaimonia and the operative normative vocabulary of dei and kalon that actually guides virtue-evaluation.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
If this is right, then the eudaimon person would never become basely wretched; nonetheless, he will still not be makar… such drastic upsets will be rare.
Nussbaum traces Aristotle’s careful distinction between moral wretchedness and the diminishment of eudaimonia, showing that catastrophe can impair flourishing without destroying virtue.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
pointing to several ways in which a good person could fall short of full eudaimonia because of events not under that person’s control… the eudaimonia of the person of good character is diminished through the frustration of good activity.
Nussbaum synthesizes Aristotle’s tragic exempla — Priam, Oedipus, Agamemnon — to show that eudaimonia is systematically vulnerable to uncontrolled external reversals.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
This openness is both itself vulnerable and a source of vulnerability for the person’s eudaimonia: for the trusting person is more easily betrayed than the self-enclosed person, and it is the experience of betrayal that slowly erodes the foundation of the virtues.
Nussbaum argues that the very virtuous openness required for flourishing is also the mechanism by which character, and thus eudaimonia itself, can be eroded by misfortune.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
there are many intrinsic goods without which life is less complete, and which, therefore, by the criteria of EN 1 will be parts of, not just means to, eudaimonia, while holding at the same time that some of these goods are higher
Nussbaum defends an inclusivist reading of Aristotelian eudaimonia as a composite of multiple intrinsic goods, resisting the intellectualist reduction to contemplation alone.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
The opponent says that a solitary or apolitical life is entirely sufficient for human eudaimonia if one has no need for the good things that the political supplies. Aristotle replies that the political is itself one of the good things.
Nussbaum reconstructs Aristotle’s argument that political community is intrinsically, not merely instrumentally, constitutive of eudaimonia.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
Aristotle presents his analysis of the situation in terms of the practical syllogism… Actions of the type X are kala, or are agatha, or are conducive to my eudaimonia (these formulations, for Aristotle, of course being synonymous)
Adkins shows that for Aristotle the predicates kalon, agathon, and conducive to eudaimonia are functionally synonymous within the practical syllogism, integrating aesthetic, prudential, and teleological registers.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Dikaiosune and sophrosune, in the sense in which these terms are ordinarily understood, have not been shown to be essential to eudaimonia; and in the peculiar Platonic sense t[hey have been so defined as to make this trivially true].
Adkins concludes that Plato’s redefinition of the virtues fails to establish their connection to eudaimonia on terms that would satisfy ordinary Greek moral understanding.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Aristotle naturally concludes that the eudaimonia which results from the practice of the non-theoretic aretai is only eudaimonia in a secondary sense.
Adkins critiques the Aristotelian privileging of theoretical intellect, which demotes the eudaimonia arising from practical and moral virtues to a lesser, derivative status.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Activity, energeia, is the coming-forth of that good condition from its state of concealment or mere potentiality; it is its flourishing or blooming. Without that the good condition is seriously incomplete.
Nussbaum articulates Aristotle’s energeia model: virtuous disposition without actualization is not eudaimonia but only its unrealized potentiality.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
Eudaimonia. See Human flourishing
Nussbaum’s index entry equates eudaimonia with ‘human flourishing,’ signaling her preferred translation and anchoring the term within her broader therapeutic-ethics framework.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994aside
The ordinary man, however, does not know what would lead him to ‘true’ eudaimonia.
Adkins notes the Platonic doctrine that most persons are ignorant of the conditions of genuine eudaimonia, requiring philosophical correction.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960aside
Making excellences and their activities — rather than, say, honor or success — the primary bearers of value… helps us to avoid seeing ourselves as, and being, mere victims of luck.
Nussbaum presents Aristotle’s strategy of grounding value in stable excellences as a way of achieving partial, but not total, immunity to fortune within eudaimonia.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside