Aristotle on the Good Life: Living Well and Doing Well

Context

This sentence opens the substantive argument of the Nicomachean Ethics. After announcing that every pursuit aims at some good, Aristotle asks what the highest good is, and he notes that on the surface there is universal agreement: everyone calls it happiness. The ordinary person and the person of refinement say the same thing — that the good life is happiness, and that living well and doing well amount to being happy. The agreement, however, is only verbal. When asked what happiness actually is, the many say pleasure, the political sort say honor, and the contemplative say understanding. Aristotle uses this contrast to show that naming the goal is easy; specifying its content is the real philosophical work.

The phrase "living well and doing well" (eu zen kai eu prattein) deserves attention for two reasons. First, it makes clear that the good life is not a passive state but an activity — something one does, not something that happens to one. Second, it ties happiness to conduct, so that being happy cannot be divorced from acting well. Both ideas return at 1098a, where happiness is defined as activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and both separate Aristotle's account from the view that happiness is simply a pleasant inner feeling.

Significance

The passage is the clearest statement in the ancient tradition that the good life and happiness are the same thing under two descriptions. Aristotle is not offering a definition here; he is locating the question. He shows that everyone already agrees on the name of the goal, which means that the real disagreement — about what happiness consists in — is a disagreement about substance, not vocabulary. That framing has shaped two thousand years of debate, from the Stoic insistence that virtue alone suffices for the good life to the utilitarian claim that happiness is pleasure and the good life is its maximization.

Modern discussions inherit exactly this structure. Researchers distinguish subjective well-being, or how people evaluate their own lives, from objective accounts of flourishing that specify what a good life contains whether or not people happen to feel satisfied. Aristotle's sentence predicts the entire dispute: we all agree on the word, and the fight begins the moment we ask what it means. In that sense the passage is not merely an introduction but a diagnosis.

The practical upshot is equally important. If living well and doing well are the same as being happy, then the pursuit of happiness cannot be separated from the pursuit of excellence, justice, and friendship. A life spent maximizing pleasant feeling while neglecting how one acts would miss the target entirely. This is why Aristotle's ethics remains the touchstone for the contemporary philosophy of the good life and why this modest-looking sentence continues to be quoted wherever people ask what it means to live well.

Related Learning

• Read how Aristotle completes the definition in happiness as activity of soul and in his opening statement of the goal.
• Explore what is the good life, what is happiness, and how to live a good life.
• Continue with eudaimonia, the philosophy of happiness, and the Happiness & The Good Life learning path.

Sources

1. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925. 1095a17-20.
2. "Happiness." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/happiness/
3. "Aristotle's Ethics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/