Philosophy

A complete life

Aristotle says one should judge happiness by looking at complete lives. I have always understood that to mean that one should wait until all the bad stuff that could happen has happened; most stories can be upended by some sort of surprise ending. I still think that is the most likely reading, but I can think of another that has some interest. Some people are pretty much complete in themselves: they have the equipment to execute the plans they make, to judge among the ideas they generate, to gather the information they need for the problems they face. They are like little all-in-one laptop operations, printer attached, modem included. Other people have some kind of gap: they can generate ideas, but they can't choose among them. Their plans exceed their implementation capacity. They need facts they haven't the patience to gather. These people are like chips -- pretty close to useless, apart from a motherboard.

Education spends a long time trying to make chips into laptops, to provide people with minimal self-sufficiency, and that is likely a reasonably noble project. But we have to hold on to the fact that someone specialized might do wonders as part of a larger whole and only ordinary things by himself or herself.

Plato in the Republic describes various kinds of people by first of all saying what they are in themselves and then by saying what they are when they take their proper place in a society that is made for them, that supplements and supports their particular talent. Perhaps this is what Aristotle means when he says that we must judge someone's happiness by looking at a complete life -- that a person's potential for happiness is only obvious when one sees what that person can do with appropriate support.