The principal idea with which Aristotle begins is that there are differences of opinion about what is best for human beings, and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement. He insists that ethics is not a theoretical discipline: we are asking what the good for human beings is not simply because we want to have knowledge, but because we will be better able to achieve our good if we develop a fuller understanding of what it is to flourish. In raising this question—what is the good?—Aristotle is not looking for a list of items that are good. He assumes that such a list can be compiled rather easily; most would agree, for example, that it is good to have friends, to experience pleasure, to be healthy, to be honored, and to have such virtues as courage at least to some degree. The difficult and controversial question arises when we ask whether certain of these goods are more desirable than others. Aristotle's search for the good is a search for the highest good, and he assumes that the highest good, whatever it turns out to be, has three characteristics: it is desirable for itself, it is not desirable for the sake of some other good, and all other goods are desirable for its sake.
Aristotle thinks everyone will agree that the terms “eudaimonia” (“happiness”) and “eu zên” (“living well”) designate such an end. The Greek term “eudaimon” is composed of two parts: “eu” means “well” and “daimon” means “divinity” or “spirit”. To be eudaimon is therefore to be living in a way that is well-favored by a god. But Aristotle never calls attention to this etymology in his ethical writings, and it seems to have little influence on his thinking. He regards “eudaimon” as a mere substitute for eu zên (“living well”). These terms play an evaluative role, and are not simply descriptions of someone's state of mind. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/#tocMeditation is seeing well into living well.
* Umwelt
In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal".[1] The term is usually translated as "self-centered world".[2] Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment. The subject of umwelt and Uexküll's work is described by Dorion Sagan in an introduction to a collection of translations.[3] The term umwelt, together with companion terms Umgebung (an Umwelt as seen by another observer) and Innenwelt (the mapping of the self to the world of objects)[4], have special relevance for cognitive philosophers, roboticists and cyberneticians, since they offer a solution to the conundrum of the infinite regress of the Cartesian Theater.
—Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt
‘Monsters’ also signal borderline experiences of uncontainable excess, reminding the ego that it is never wholly sovereign. Many great myths and tales bear witness to this. Oedipus and the Sphinx. Theseus and the Minotaur. Job and Leviathan. Saint George and the Dragon. Beowulf and Grendel. Ahab and the Whale. Lucy and the Vampire. Ripley and the Alien. Each monster narrative recalls that the self is never secure in itself. ‘There are monsters on the prowl’, as Michel Foucault writes, ‘whose form changes with the history of knowledge’. 1 For as our ideas of self-identity alter so do our ideas of what menaces this identity. Liminal creatures of the unknown shift and slide, change masks. We are of the earth, they whisper, autochthonous. We are carriers of the mark of Cain, hobbled by the Achilles heel of a primal unconscious. Monsters show us that if our aims are celestial, our origins are terrestrial. They ghost the margins of what can be legitimately thought and said. By definition unrecognizable, they defy our accredited norms of identification. Unnatural, transgressive, obscene, contradictory, heterogeneous, mad. Monsters are what keep us awake at night and make us nervous during the day. And even when they claim as in Monsters Inc. that ‘they only scare because they care’, they still scare.
(—from, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness by Richard Kearney)So, we look around to locate what, for now, we will desperately be afraid of, hate, and cruelly diminish.
THE WELL OF GRIEF
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.
“Reification” is the term for becoming fixated, or getting stuck or trapped in one mode of perception, or the singular “point-of-view”, and this is what we refer to as “narcissism”, which I’ve referred to as being “trapped in the mirror” or the phantom called “self-image”. Reification means that consciousness and perception lose their fluency and fluidity and becomes rigid like stone or fossil, which is the condition I’ve referred to as “the arrogance of ignorance”. That rigidity of perception and perspective is usually what we mean when speaking of “Selfhood” or of ego-nature and identity.
That is certainly one of the things I take from the meaning of “post-historic man”, who is no longer able to enter into these various legacy structures of consciousness without losing his marbles and why the “culture of narcissism” is synonymous with the “empathy deficit”.This chilly morning with no marbles.
(—from Gebser’s Empathetic Epistemics, blog, The Chrysalis) https://longsworde.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/gebsers-empathetic-epistemics/