Section 12: A happy life is prized rather than praised

These questions having been settled, let us consider whether happiness _[10] is among the things that are praised or rather among the things that are prized (since clearly it is not to be placed among capacities).

Everything that is praised seems to be praised because it is of a certain kind and is related somehow to something else. For we praise the just or brave person, and in general both the good person and virtue itself, because of the actions and functions involved. _[15] And we praise the strong person, the good runner, and so on, because he is of a certain kind and is related in a certain way to something good and important. This is clear also from the praises of the gods. For it seems absurd that the gods should be referred to our standard, but this is done because praise involves _[20] a reference to something else.

But if praise is for things such as we have described, clearly what applies to the best things is not praise, but something greater and better, as is indeed obvious. For what we do to the gods and the most godlike of men is to call them blessed and happy. And so too with good things. No one _[25] praises happiness as he does justice, but rather calls happiness blessed, as being something more divine and better.

Eudoxus, [a philosopher,] also seems to have been right in his method of advocating the supremacy of pleasure. He thought that the fact that pleasure is not praised, even though it is something good, indicated that it is better than the things that are praised, in the way that God and the good are better than things that are praised, _[30] because it is by reference to these that all other things are judged.

Praise is appropriate to virtue, for as a result of virtue people tend to do noble deeds, but encomia are properly given to acts of virtue, whether of the body or of the soul. But perhaps an exact account of these matters is more proper to those who have made a study of encomia. To us it is clear from what has been said that a happy life is among the things that are prized and complete. _[1102a1]

This also seems true from the fact that a happy life is a first principle, since it is for the sake of a happy life that we all do everything that we do, and the first principle and cause of goods is, we claim, something prized and divine.