[Sethomas]

Well, the problem with talking about eudaemonia in, say, a graduate philosophy class where you’ve been assigned homework where you are to nitpick how Plato used the term versus how Aristotle did or how the Pre-Socratics might have thrown it out, is that academics aim not to build but to dissect. At one level it’s the 9-year-old curious child who takes apart his clock to see how the gears run, and at one level it’s the disturbed adolescent who kills his cat to see what its intestines look like. We might dissect what we love, and we might dissect to learn to love, but we can’t lovingly dissect.

Eudaemonia was the rage in 4th Century BCE Athens, and it stayed integral until Scholasticism. With Humanism, however, teleology shifted from “what is it to be the greatest person” to “how can we better understand what makes us so great”. Nietzsche used his equivalent term for “ascetic” as if it were a homonym for a word meaning “one who fucks his own mother while looking at explicit images of his own son”, if that’s any indication of the direction philosophy took.

With Existentialism, philosophy was redefined in such a way that even non-existentialists would agree with their assertion that personal fulfillment is far too subjective for any positive attributes to be employed in describing it, even if we all agree that fulfillment should be positive and we have a mutual understanding of what all is good and what all is bad. Right now, if you were to impose a definition of eudaemonia without prefacing "someone important in a land, far, far away in a time long, long ago said...", you'd be accused of misconstruing an intrinsically nebulous ideal into a prescribed absolute and they'd make fun of you long after they stop publishing your books.


Hence, the modern scene treats eudaemonia just as I treat the Ontological Argument: we agree with its premise (they agree in such a thing as fulfillment, I agree there is a God) and we are interested in its methodology and impact (they think Aristotle would have been cool if not for the whole pedophilia thing, I wonder how the hell Anselm pieced the whole thing together), but neither of us take it seriously as a means to making any kind of assertive conclusion.

I guess I’m trying to skirt the issue of saying it, but I’ll give up and say it: the history of philosophy is a vital part of the modern curriculum, philosophy itself is dead. The history of philosophy has led us to interesting roads, especially in ethics metamorphosing into moral theory and epistemology into cognitive…whatever. Nobody philosophizes anymore. Some would say that it’s hubristic to posit that anything philosophical hasn’t already been said, but even to face the risk of being called hubristic there’s really no avenue by which philosophy can be spoken any longer.