Eudemonistic Ethics

Eudemonistic ethics, as critically mobilized in Ruda's text, designates the Aristotelian-inflected moral tradition that takes the human condition to be defined by a constitutive mixture of freedom and unfreedom — a blending of rational self-determination and natural, drive-bound causality. The concept is introduced not as a position to be defended but as a target of Hegelian critique: by grounding ethical life in the pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia), this tradition smuggles natural teleology into the domain of freedom, treating the drives and inclinations as legitimate sources of ethical orientation. For Hegel, this move produces what he calls "arbitrariness" (Willkür) — a pseudo-freedom that is in fact the captive of natural contingency, unable to distinguish genuine freedom from the mere play of inclinations. The mixture that eudemonistic ethics celebrates as the human condition is, on this reading, precisely what blocks access to a concept of freedom adequate to the subject.

The passage in Ruda deploys this Hegelian critique as a relay for a stronger, fatalist thesis: if eudemonistic ethics errs by universalizing natural causality into the sphere of freedom, the corrective is not a moderate renegotiation of that mixture but the recognition of the absolute impossibility of luck. Dissolving the hope that animates eudemonistic ethics — the hope that unknown outcomes might turn out favorably — means refusing the category of contingent possibility that sustains the happy-chance structure of fortune. The fatalist move thus radicalizes Hegel's critique: it is not enough to purify freedom from natural admixture; one must eliminate the very structure of hopeful anticipation that keeps the subject hostage to an imagined but unknowable future.

Within the source provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, eudemonistic ethics occupies a critical-diagnostic role: it names the philosophical error that the book's argument about fatalism is designed to overcome. The concept cross-references Freedom, Fatalism, Drive, Desire, and Dialectics in a tightly interlocking way. The Hegelian critique of eudemonism connects directly to the canonical concept of the Drive: what eudemonistic ethics naively incorporates as a natural and legitimate foundation — the drives, inclinations, the body's pressures — is precisely what Lacanian and Hegelian analysis identifies as belonging to a pre-subjective, non-free causality. The Drive, as defined in the corpus, is irreducible to natural instinct and is produced by the signifier's impact on the body; eudemonism's error is to re-naturalize this formation by treating drive-satisfaction as a guide to the good life. Similarly, the concept relates to Desire: eudemonistic ethics implicitly presupposes that desire can be oriented toward attainable objects of happiness, whereas the Lacanian account of Desire insists that desire is constitutively unfulfillable, structured around a lack rather than a positive goal.

The concept also positions itself against the canonical Dialectics: Hegel's critique of eudemonism is itself a dialectical move — exposing the internal contradiction of a position that claims freedom while remaining bound to natural determination — but Ruda's fatalist extension pushes beyond dialectical sublation. Where dialectics might reconcile freedom and unfreedom in a higher synthesis, the fatalist argument abolishes the mixture altogether by asserting the absolute impossibility of luck, foreclosing the hopeful contingency that the eudemonistic framework requires. The concept thus functions as a hinge: it is the pre-critical ethical position whose insufficiency motivates the book's central plea for a rigorous, non-eudemonistic account of freedom grounded in necessity rather than fortunate outcome.

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of FatalismFrank Ruda · 2016 (page unknown)

Hegel also criticizes eudemonistic ethics, which starts from the idea that the human condition entails a mixture of freedom and unfreedom … this very mixture, ultimately embodied in the natural drives, is what defines the category of arbitrariness.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it identifies the "natural drives" as the concrete embodiment of the freedom/unfreedom mixture, thereby linking the ethical critique directly to the question of drive (Trieb) and grounding the charge of "arbitrariness" (Willkür) in the body's causal insistence — this is precisely where Hegel's critique bites, since arbitrariness masquerades as freedom while remaining enslaved to natural determination.