In her new book on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Lorraine Pangle explores Aristotle's inquiry into the good life. Can happiness be rationally pursued? Or is it a matter of chance or divine allotment? Do we live best by subordinating the passions to reason's charge? Or is desire a better guide, soliciting reason's assistance? Does happiness consist primarily in the exercise of moral virtue, philosophic contemplation, or both?

Examining questions that have perplexed generations of scholars, Pangle offers a fresh approach not simply through careful attention to the inquiry's dialectical nature (10), but through her own lively dialogue with Aristotle. She takes seriously Aristotle's exhortation to “fill in his outline,” and the result is a delight for his and her readers alike. Especially impressive is the way in which she, following Aristotle's lead, speaks to the often hidden and contradictory hopes and fears of her readers, unveiling the self-deception the Ethics aims to expose and reform. This approach illuminates Aristotle's frequently overlooked teaching regarding the connections between thinking and feeling, and between theory and practice, and helps her readers better understand Aristotle and themselves.

Aristotle begins this education in self-knowledge with his observation of the universal human desire for happiness. We seek happiness as our end, or perfection. Evoking our hopes for completeness, Aristotle invites us to search for what can make us happy and whole, making us aware that we harbor such hopes and helping us to evaluate their coherence.

His preliminary findings highlight how conventional candidates for happiness fall short: pleasure reduces us to animals; honor is only a sign of our dependence on others and uncertainty about ourselves; and virtue cannot guarantee fortune—even the virtuous can die prematurely (25). Our hopes for happiness, in fact, reach beyond our mortal limits. At their root is our nagging awareness that we and our loved ones will die, regardless of how we live. But our longing for complete happiness is so powerful that we are led to hope that a good life will merit eternal happiness. Are our hopes for completeness, which often manifest as religious hopes, rational? Aristotle warns his most attentive readers, Pangle suggests, that their “yearning for completeness . . . casts a long shadow over such happiness as is possible, and likewise renders perfect clear-sightedness most difficult” (50).

Redirecting our focus from what nature does not give us—completeness—to what nature does give us—capacities to think and act—Aristotle inquires into virtue, which entails acting well for its own sake, even or especially when doing so brings no benefit to oneself or others (38, 52–53, 103, 227–28). But does sacrificing for no beneficial end make sense (121, 130, 139)? Aristotle's investigation of moral virtue uncovers its shiftiness under rational scrutiny. Nor does natural justice offer a more reasonable guide to living well, since it is “all changeable” (166). Living well requires understanding the complex hierarchy of human goods and what is possible in any given circumstance.

“Active wisdom,” as opposed to theoretical wisdom, governs the realm of changing human goods, and hence might guide us to happiness (204–5). But without knowledge of unchanging principles, could one know how to act and live well (200)? Aristotle begins with conventional distinctions—between making and acting, eternity and change, theory and practice—Pangle suggests, to initiate a dialectic necessary for a genuine science of human nature (218–19).

After apparently accepting the distinction between reason and passion through the first six books of the Ethics (54, 184), Aristotle assesses the phenomenon that most seems to support it: the satisfaction or denial of desires one knows to be bad. In her final and most interesting chapter, Pangle argues that Aristotle's investigation of self-control and, especially, its absence underscores the inseparability of thought and desire. It is not possible to theoretically understand what is good without experiencing and desiring it fully (270). Such knowledge must be “woven into the fabric of one's soul,” which takes practice (249). As a companion volume to Virtue and Knowledge: The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Pangle's study of the moral foundations of Aristotelian political philosophy finds that Aristotle fundamentally agrees with Socrates's radical claim that virtue is knowledge, but disagrees with his rhetorical approach (3, 8–10, 266). Socrates “moves too quickly to his conclusions” (249), failing to account fully for the experience of the majority—including serious students of philosophy—who occupy “a strange and strangely important middle ground between ungrounded true opinion and full effectual knowledge” (244).

On the surface, Pangle's book gives the impression that Aristotle presents the moral life and the philosophic life as alternatives. While the gentleman confusedly pursues virtue for its own sake, secretly hoping for reward (50, 252–53), the philosopher exercises virtue in service to philosophy, “an activity more self-sufficient and truly end-like” (234). Pangle's argument is more nuanced than this dichotomy suggests, however, since not only is “active effort . . . essential to clarity of thought,” but “contemplating what is good and seeing it clearly necessarily sets us in motion” (243). Our best exemplar of this is Aristotle himself, whose philosophic project “is not simply its own end but aims to give guidance to lawgivers, statesmen, educators, and potential philosophers” (274). Why does Aristotle seek this other end, beyond the end of philosophic activity itself? Perhaps just as Aristotle suggests “that thinking and feeling may truly be just two different aspects of, expressions of, or ways of considering the same movements of the soul” (54), philosophy and moral excellence are both aspects of the highest life.

Pangle does not go so far as to draw such a conclusion, leaving unanswered, as Aristotle does, whether “we are not made so as to find our happiness in a mix of active and contemplative seriousness and even play” (274). So, too, does she leave open the extent to which the human desire for completeness is self-deluding. Initially, she interprets Aristotle as counseling against this powerful yearning, since it tempts us to hide from the reality of our mortality, blinding us to our true good, which lies within the human limits of birth and death. Hence, on Pangle's reading, Aristotle raises the possibility of an afterlife not to express uncertainty about death's finality but to redirect readers’ attentions (49). For Pangle, moreover, Aristotle's counsel against yearning for wholeness applies not only to the moral life but to the life of philosophy, “the human life that most truly partakes in divinity.” She asks: “Will this hope prove more solid than Priam's, or is it, like his, a child of the inability to come to terms with the inescapable limits mortality imposes on us?” (233).

Pangle nevertheless concludes on a more positive note. By her book's end, the wholeness possible through philosophy becomes more transcendent, and in her final word on the matter, Pangle finds Aristotle teaching that, however much we ought to make our home in the world, “we are right to divine that what is the very best in us somehow transcends, somehow must transcend this plane. . . . We can be true to ourselves only when we strive, in one such way or another, to reach the divine” (275). In the end, does Aristotle counsel against religious pursuit? Is the highest life incompatible with hope for what is beyond our human limits? Or is the deep desire for the divine that we hear in St. Augustine's cry in fact part and parcel of the philosophic life?