Today's soundtrack is Marian Hill: Unusual.
This afternoon, I'm reading the ninth chapter of Aristotle's Ethics, in which he continues to examine goodness and happiness.
How do we attain happiness? Is it given to us or acquired? Happiness is achieved through the process "of study or application of our mental powers" (p. 44); thus, we can say that "happiness depends upon ourselves" (p. 44). Since "happiness [is] an activity of the soul" (p. 44), we do not say that beasts are happy; we do not call children truly happy, because "we cannot have happiness unless we have complete goodness in a complete lifetime" (p. 44). We cannot determine whether a man was happy until after his death.
