Aristotle II: "Happiness"

As I mentioned before, my first beef with Aristotle is promoting this fallacy of false compromise throughout all of Western thought.  The second idea is the absolute infallibility of happiness.

I've talked before about my multiple criticisms of happiness as a good that we should all try to achieve.  My next criticism, and this sidles in with Aristotle, is what even is happiness?  The definition that Aristotle gives for happiness--eudaimonia--is not what people think of when they think of happiness.  Even when they agree that they wouldn't want to pump themselves full of heroin, and then smugly sit back in the comfort that they are going after eudaimonia, in my experience they still are going after happiness in the hedonistic sense.  Granted, it's more of an "arbitrary exception hedonia", but really under what I see, I see no difference between this and what is essentially hedonia.

(but then again, I've already gone into my beef with "happiness")

The problem, I think, comes in how Aristotle defined happiness:

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence” -Aristotle

How do most people really define happiness?  Probably like so:

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory." -Albert Schweitzer

Say a person decides his goal in life is to study Platypuses. So, he goes through a lot of pain studying and making and compiling this humongous tome on platypuses. After 10 years he is finally finished. It gets a few reviews that say it's alright, and immediately after the man dies. The apparent paradox is that in one sense the man lived a horrible life suffering in the Australian savannah. However, the Aristotelian notion says that he is happy.

Simply creating a new definition for happiness, and then claiming that you should follow happiness, to get out of the logical v. emotional conflicts is a nice intellectual trick--if it weren't downright fucking dishonest.

Moreover, this definition of happiness leads to circular reasoning.  According to my rendition of Aristotle, virtuous thought supposes that a virtuous persons has a fairly explicit conception of "happiness" or eudaimonia. Thus a person can use that to create virtuous thought and thus virtuous action to produce a good, or eudaimonia.