Ah well, as I said, it's been a while. I even remember the first passage, now that you call my attention to it. I should have looked it up, but I had to run to work. In that case I should have kept my mouth shut. However, Aristotle acknowledges in the second passage the doubts (some have) that the dead share in any good or evil, while he says in the first passage that "both good and evil are thought to exist for a dead man" -- compounding my negligence by not doing further research, I see a certain tension between these passages. Aristotle also has a way of talking about what is "thought" (widely by the Greeks? by people in general? by philosophers?) without always being entirely clear about whether he agrees or not, even where he registers an argument. So in the first passage he gives an argument that the good and bad can befall the dead because they are objective, just as good and bad can befall the living whether or not they know about it, but in the quoted passage he falls short of saying that he endorses the argument rather than just noting that some (many?) people accept it. And the uncertainty is magnified in the second passage where Aristotle takes not of the doubt, and then seems to suggest that "even if anything good or evil penetrates to [the dead]" it must be weak or negligible," not such as to change whether the dead are happy or not which sounds on one hand less noncommittal than the observation "it is thought," but it's not clear from the passage as quoted whether Aristotle is saying that the (mis)fortunes of our friends have little or no effect on our well-being when we are dead because they are not ours, or because when we are dead, it's doubtful that anything good or evil penetrates far enough to us to reverse the happiness or unhappiness that characterized our lives. These passages are, in short, rife enough with ambiguity to generate many more millennia of interpretive discussion.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > But that doesn't mean you have eudaimonia _when
> you
> > are dead_, you don't any anything when you are
> dead.
>
> Yes, you do. Nichomachean Ethics Book 1, 10:
>
> ...both evil and good are thought to exist for a
> dead
> man, as much as for one who is alive but not aware
> of
> them; e.g. honours and dishonours and the good or
> bad
> fortunes of children and in general of descendants.
> And this also presents a problem; for though a man
> has
> lived happily up to old age and has had a death
> worthy
> of his life, many reverses may befall his
> descendants-
> some of them may be good and attain the life they
> deserve, while with others the opposite may be the
> case; and clearly too the degrees of relationship
> between them and their ancestors may vary
> indefinitely.
>
> Book 1, 11:
>
> That the fortunes of descendants and of all a man's
> friends should not affect his happiness at all seems
> a
> very unfriendly doctrine, and one opposed to the
> opinions men hold; but since the events that happen
> are numerous and admit of all sorts of difference,
> and
> some come more near to us and others less so, it
> seems
> a long- nay, an infinite- task to discuss each in
> detail; a general outline will perhaps suffice. If,
> then, as some of a man's own misadventures have a
> certain weight and influence on life while others
> are,
> as it were, lighter, so too there are differences
> among the misadventures of our friends taken as a
> whole, and it makes a difference whether the various
> suffering befall the living or the dead (much more
> even than whether lawless and terrible deeds are
> presupposed in a tragedy or done on the stage), this
> difference also must be taken into account; or
> rather,
> perhaps, the fact that doubt is felt whether the
> dead
> share in any good or evil. For it seems, from these
> considerations, that even if anything whether good
> or
> evil penetrates to them, it must be something weak
> and
> negligible, either in itself or for them, or if not,
> at least it must be such in degree and kind as not
> to
> make happy those who are not happy nor to take away
> their blessedness from those who are. The good or
> bad
> fortunes of friends, then, seem to have some effects
> on the dead, but effects of such a kind and degree
> as
> neither to make the happy unhappy nor to produce any
> other change of the kind.
>
>
>
>
>
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