ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter I drew out the basic structural feature of the lives of persons. We saw that the arche that renders human life intelligible is eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is, in other words, the source of intelligibility in our lives - it is what ultimately bestows purpose and meaning on life. Indeed, it is precisely because eudaimonia is this fundamental arche that with an understanding of it - a practical understanding primarily - we should be able to decide what in our lives is relevant and what not; we should be able to understand our lives and organize the different components of our lives, including the emotional aspect. In short, a relatively sophisticated understanding of eudaimonia should determine a direction for our lives understood as wholes (the whole is determined as such in relationship to the common telos). This, at any rate, is what follows from an Aristotelian account of the structure of our lives such as the one presently being developed.
