Book 1
13
What has been said, therefore, demonstrates that all men ascribe happiness to three modes of life—the political, the philosophic, and the life of enjoyment.The Greek word is specially associated with sensual pleasures. Among these, the nature and quality of the pleasure connected with the body and with enjoyment, and the means that procure it, are not hard to see; so that it is not necessary for us to inquire what these pleasures are, but whether they conduce at all to happiness or not, and how they so conduce, and, if it be the case that the noble life ought to have some pleasures attached to it, whether these are the pleasures that ought to be attached, or whether these must be enjoyed in some other way, whereas the pleasures which people reasonably believe to make the happy man’s life pleasant and not merely painless are different ones.
14
But these matters must be examined later.The promised discussion does not occur, but see Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1153b 7-25. Let us first consider Goodness and WisdomSee Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1214a 33n.; but practical wisdom is specially implied here.—what the nature of each is, and also whether they themselves or the actions that spring from them are parts of the good life, since that they are connected with happiness is asserted, if not by everybody, at all events by all of mankind who are worthy of consideration.
15
Accordingly Socrates the seniorA younger Socrates was a pupil of Plato. thought that the End is to get to know virtue, and he pursued an inquiry into the nature of justice and courage and each of the divisions of virtue. And this was a reasonable procedure, since he thought that all the virtues are forms of knowledge, so that knowing justice and being just must go together, for as soon as we have learnt geometry and architecture, we are architects and geometricians; owing to which he used to inquire what virtue is, but not how and from what sources it is produced.
