- character, eudaimon, hero -


Eudaimonia (Greek: εὐδαιμονία) is a classical Greek word commonly translated as 'happiness'. Etymologically, it consists of the word "eu" ("good" or "well being") and "daimōn" ("spirit" or "minor deity", used by extension to mean one's lot or fortune). Although popular usage of the term happiness refers to a state of mind, related to joy or pleasure, eudaimonia rarely has such connotations, and the less subjective "human flourishing" is often preferred as a translation.

According to Hannah Arendt, we have lost the meaning of the ancient saying that no one can be called eudaimon before dying. We translate eudaimon as happy or blessed, but the term eudamonia indicates neither happiness nor blessedness. The word indicates rather "blessedness, but without any religious overtones, and means literally something like the well-being of the daimon who accompanies every man throughout life, who is his distinct identity, but appears and is visible only to others. (...) The essence of who someone is "can come into being only when the life departs, leaving behind nothing but a story." This unchangeable identity of the person, that only death rescues from change, renders anyone eudaimon, by giving them their story.

Arendt claimed that the disclosure of "Who somebody is or was," can be known "only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography." In this context, the hero of a story is merely the person about whom a story is told, not someone who has achieved great things. And it appears that Arendt believed an individual can achieve some from of greatness simply by being the hero of a story in this more restricted sense.

"The hero the story discloses needs no heroic qualities... The connotation of courage,... is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one's own."

Arendt went so far as to insist that the "extent of this original courage," that is the courage to risk disclosure, "without which action and speech and therefore, according to the Greeks, freedom, would not be possible at all, is not less great and may even be greater if the 'hero' happens to be a coward." Presumably it would take greater courage for the coward to risk disclosure because he is more likely than others to disclose what is shameful. 

This places action in a new light. As a vehicle for disclosure it need do no more than reveal the "who" of the agent, which is essentially a story or biography. "Every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end..."


"The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie—the truth lies outside, in what we do. (Zizek)