Aristotle's springs of delight

"When deciding a plan the most important principle is pleasure. Aristotle regards pleasure as a wonderful tool for scientific, social and psychological analysis of any kind. This is because he believes nature uses pleasure to help all sentient animals find and do what they need to flourish. Different animals are endowed with slightly different ways of feeling pleasure: asses like eating chaff, but dogs like hunting game birds and small mammals. Humans are remarkable because they evince such a diversity of pleasures, distributed across the population. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” You may like eating fish; your spouse pork sausage. But this wide diversity applies to far more than our taste in food. Aristotle argues that occupations which afford pleasure are the ones which we should all be aiming at: Life is a form of activity, and each person exercises his activity upon those objects and with those faculties which he likes the most: for example, the musician exercises his sense of hearing upon musical tunes, the student his intellect upon problems of philosophy, and so on. And the pleasure of these activities perfects the activities, and therefore perfects life, which all men seek. Men have good reason therefore to pursue pleasure, since it perfects for each his life, which is a desirable thing. Aristotle noticed that people who get pleasure from their work are almost always best at it. He says that only people who delight in geometry become proficient at it, and the same goes for architecture and all the other arts."

"Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life" by Edith Hall https://a.co/gSAD98Y