The Eudaemonic Dead? Hmm. That sounds like an ancient Greek psychedelic folk rock band.
Not to get too fine-grained about it, but two things here. One is that Eudaimonia is a property of a complete life, but the Sophoclean tag that Aristotle appropriates, if I recall corrected, changing the meaning to his own purposes, "Call no man happy until he is dead," is just meant to indicate that you have to wait until the end of your life to see if the whole is eudaeminoc, that nothing has happened before you died to bollocks up your self-realization, like a late discovery that you killed your father and married your mother, or some other typically ancient Greek faux pas.
But that doesn't mean you have eudaimonia _when you are dead_, you don't any anything when you are dead. Your are, in the immortal words of Monty Python, an ex-parrot. Or in those of Bob Dylan, you're not there. The dead, Homer says, have nothing; I don't recall whether Aristotle quotes Homer's dead Achilles (from the Odyssey), who explains to Odysseus that he would rather be poorest slave alive than the king of the dead (paraphrase), but that was a perfectly conventional sentiment for the ancient Greeks and one that fits with Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia,w which after all is a characteristic of a _good life_, something you don;t have when you're gone.
Second, according to Aristotle that you have to be fortunate to have eudaimonia, but that's only a necessary condition. The thought is that if disaster befalls you, and you are rendered destitute crippled or are enslaved or do an Oedipus Rex, then you cannot be said to have been happy, but simply avoiding these bad things because you have been fortunate will not itself make you eudaimonic, or make your life eudaimonic, if you don't otherwise develop your capacities, participate either in public life (Nich Ethics Bks I-IX) or philosophical contemplation (Bk. X), have practical wisdom, friends, and generally do the other things that constitute human good.
Of course I might be talking through my hat. I haven't seriously studied Aristotle for twenty years, well maybe 15, the last time I taught Nich Ethics, and my only attempt at writing on this topic was for a Junior Paper in college probably thirty years ago. Yeech. I did write it for Michael Frede, though -- you could say I started at the top and went steadily downhill. Not very eudaimonic of me, but who's complaining?
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Eudaemonia is a characteristic that applies to
> people
> even when they're dead and there's no more self.
> "Fortunate" might be a better term.
>
> --- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
> which
> was
> a renaissance of Aristotle's notion of eudaemonia,
> which is probably
> more
> accurately translated into contemporary terms as
> "self-development" or
> "self-flourishing."
>
>
>
>
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