Aristotle

Yes — you’ve put your finger on the spine of Aristotle’s ethics. Those four words aren’t just vocabulary; they mark different ways of being human and different kinds of excellence. Aristotle is very precise here, and modern summaries often blur distinctions he worked hard to keep clear.

Let’s go slowly and cleanly.

1.

Technē (τέχνη)

—

making / craft / know-how

What it is

• Rational skill aimed at producing something

• The knowledge of how to make rather than how to live

Key features

• Has an external product (a table, a poem, a ship)

• Can be taught

• Can be evaluated by the quality of the product

Examples

• Carpentry

• Medicine (as craft of healing)

• Sculpture

• Rhetoric (often treated as technē)

Ethical status

• Value lies outside the activity itself

• You can be excellent at technē and still be morally vicious

A brilliant shipbuilder may be a terrible human being.

2.

Methodos (μέθοδος)

—

a way of inquiry

What it is

• Literally: a path toward something

• A systematic way of investigating a subject

Key features

• Not a virtue or skill itself

• A structured approach to knowledge

• Varies by subject matter

In ethics

• Aristotle insists ethics does not admit mathematical precision

• Ethical method must respect:

  
  

  • variability

  • circumstance

  • human complexity

• 
  

“We must be satisfied to indicate the truth roughly and in outline.”

Crucial point

• Ethics has a different methodos than geometry or physics

• Expecting certainty in ethics is a category mistake

3.

Praxis (πρᾶξις)

—

action / doing / living

This is the heart of Aristotle’s ethics.

What it is

• Action whose end is the action itself

• Living activity, not production

Key features

• No external product

• Exists only in doing

• Always involves choice (prohairesis)

Examples

• Being just

• Acting courageously

• Telling the truth at the right time

• Friendship

Contrast with technē

Technē

Praxis

End is outside

End is internal

Can stop once made

Continues as long as one lives

Product-focused

Character-focused

4.

Eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία)

—

flourishing / living well

Often mistranslated as “happiness.” That’s far too thin.

Literal sense

• Eu (good) + daimōn (guiding spirit)

• A life that goes well as a whole

Aristotle’s definition

“Activity (energeia) of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life.”

Key features

• Not a feeling

• Not a moment

• Not pleasure alone

• A lifelong pattern of excellent praxis

Requires

• Virtue (aretē)

• Practical wisdom (phronēsis)

• Some external goods (health, friendship, basic fortune)

How they fit together (this is the real insight)

Aristotle’s hierarchy:

1. Technē → makes things

2. Praxis → is living

3. Methodos → studies praxis appropriately

4. Eudaimonia → the telos (final end) of praxis

Or in one line:

We use methodos to understand praxis,

we cultivate virtue through praxis,

not through technē,

and the result, over a whole life, is eudaimonia.

Why this mattered so much to later thinkers

• Aquinas integrates this into Christian moral theology

• MacIntyre revives praxis vs technē in modern ethics

• Hannah Arendt uses praxis to critique modern instrumentalism

• Sufi and virtue traditions resonate strongly with this framework

This is why Aristotle still feels alive: he refuses to reduce ethics to:

• rules

• techniques

• outcomes

• feelings

One-sentence synthesis

Technē makes, praxis lives, methodos inquires appropriately, and eudaimonia is the flourishing of a whole life lived in virtuous action.

If you’d like, I can:

• map this onto Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)

• compare Aristotle with Stoics or Kant

• or show how phronēsis ties the whole system together