The Permanence of Virtuous Activities: Aristotle's Meaning

To explain why virtuous activities are the most permanent in human lives, Aristotle first determines what people are likely to live and act for. Establishing that the person's main goal in life is to achieve happiness, he then proceeds to provide the definition of happiness and how it is best achieved in its purest, most durable form. What emerges is the direct connection between acting virtuously and achieving happiness, and as the pursuit of happiness is the most natural and enduring human activity, so virtuous activities can be considered the most enduring among those people are able to perform. As applied to Aristotle's concept of the polis, the permanence of virtuous activities ensures the endurance of the political community, since the actions of many, when combined, constitutes the actions of the polis. Finally, in expounding on virtuous activities, Aristotle appears to criticize the very rich for seeking the means to an end rather than an end itself.

Aristotle argues that people ultimately seek pleasure through their actions. By pleasure he does not necessarily means physical pleasure, but rather all the things that make one feel good. This is exactly what Aristotle calls it: "the good achievable by action, and if there are more than one, these will be the goods achievable by action" (Politics). Some of these goods, such as honor, reason, pleasure, and the like, are in themselves an end to a person's actions, as they are desirable for themselves. Still, most of these are sought so, in achieving them, a person would be happy. Happiness, therefore, is the ultimate end of human activities, as "no one chooses [it]... for anything other than itself" (Politics).

Being happy provides a person with the most pleasure in life, and thus actions aimed at achieving happiness should be the most common a person undertakes throughout one's life. Since Aristotle identifies virtuous activities as the ones allowing the achievement of most happiness, it stands to reason that they would be repeated again and again throughout the person's life, which naturally makes them more enduring than those actions not taken with happiness as the ultimate end in mind. In fact, a person is more likely to achieve happiness, or a state close to it, even when the circumstances are not particularly happy ones, as long as he reacts to these stressful moments in life with virtuous activities.

Money, on the other hand, is merely the means to some other end, regardless of whether this end is achievable by other actions or not. Actions in pursuit of money are not automatically considered as lacking virtue, so long as this money is used to provide personal sustenance and comfort for the moneymaker as well as enable him to perform actions that do lead to entities, like the aforementioned ones, that are the end unto themselves and ultimately lead to happiness. In other words, Aristotle is not condemning actions in pursuit of money out of hand. He does appear to condemn such actions when this pursuit is taken to excess, and money becomes an end of a person's activities. Since money by nature is just the means and cannot be an end of human activities, the actions of pursuing money for the sake of money can and should be considered unnatural, and thus reprehensible, according to Aristotle.

As far as the endurance of virtuous activities affects Aristotle's 'polis', it must be considered that Aristotle defines the polis as the sum of its parts; in other words, the goodness of the polis is fully dependent on the goodness of its citizens. While "it is possible to be a good citizen without possessing the excellence which is the quality of the good man" (Politics), a good person, on the other hand, will universally be a good citizen because he possesses the two virtues essential for this: temperance and justice, required equally for those who rule the polis and for those who are subjects in it.

It is clear from this analysis that Aristotle considers the pursuit of happiness to be most successful and most enduring when done through virtuous means, and that it can be achieved on both personal level and public level through interactions of virtuous individuals within the dynamic structure of the political community that they share.