to Terms with Happiness
My objective is to provide a new backdrop against which to measure the wisdom or utility of specific government policies. I propose to use the concept of the pursuit of happiness for that purpose, considering the constituent conditions that enable us to pursue happiness and then asking how these conditions may be met.
This is easily said and not even very controversial as long as “happiness” has not yet been defined except as the good-that-one-seeks-as-an-end-in-itself-and-for-no-other-reason. The task in this chapter is to fill in the concept of happiness with enough content to permit us to talk about the pursuit of happiness more specifically.
Happiness from Aristotle to the Self-Anchoring Cantril Scale
There is a curiously common assumption that everyone has his own idiosyncratic notion of what constitutes happiness. One contemporary scholar writing a book on the causes of human misery begins with a casual aside that “On the score of happiness, it is difficult to say anything more than that its sources seem infinitely various, and that disputes about tastes are notoriously hard to resolve.”1 To illustrate his point, he mentions “the happiness to be had by making other people miserable,” apparently assuming that distinctions between sadism and other forms of human pleasure are arbitrary inventions.2 Or there is the friend who, when told that I was writing a book dealing with the pursuit of happiness, assumed that I must necessarily get bogged down in what he viewed as the California school of happiness, sitting on the beach waiting for the perfect wave.
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The assumption that definitions of happiness are idiosyncratic is curious because the oddball definitions are always the other fellow’s. It is as if everyone recognizes the degraded concept of “happiness-as-feeling-good” that dominates popular usage, and assumes that that’s how everyone else looks at it, while at the same time harboring (perhaps even a little guiltily) a private inner understanding of happiness that is close to the classical understanding.
In practice, the level of agreement about what constitutes happiness is remarkably broad—an assertion you may put to the test by turning to the end of this chapter and seeing whether you can tolerate the working definition I employ. If you can, you may skip this chapter without loss except the pleasure of knowing what good company you are in. The purpose of this chapter is not to persuade you of a particular understanding of happiness but to indicate, briefly and nontechnically, how recent has been the retreat from a common intellectual understanding of human happiness. For centuries, there was a mainstream tradition in the West about the meaning of happiness which I will call Aristotelian. In the eighteenth century, an alternative (which I will call Lockean) began to develop that nonetheless maintained an undercurrent of agreement about how men achieve happiness. It was not until the twentieth century that social science dispensed with the intellectual content of both traditions and began to define happiness by the responses to questionnaire items.*
THE ARISTOTELIAN MAINSTREAM
“We adopt Aristotelianism as our framework,” writes a historian of the idea of happiness, “because it is the most complete and elaborate theory, because it asks the most questions, considers the most alternatives, and combines this amplitude with serious attention to consistency and proof.” And, he adds, it also is unquestionably the most influential of the understandings of happiness, dominating the Western tradition until the eighteenth century and continuing to stand as the point of reference against which any alternative must be assessed.3
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Aristotle’s disquisition on happiness is found in the Nicomachean Ethics. He begins by developing the concept of happiness as the ultimate good-in-itself that proved to be such a unifying bedrock for subsequent writers. Every activity, he writes, has a good that is its own particular end. In medicine, the good to be achieved is health; in strategy, the good is victory; in architecture, the good is a building, and so on.4 In modern idiom, everything we do can be said to be “good for” something.
Aristotle uses this commonsensical beginning to ask, Why seek any particular good? Why build the building, cure the disease, or win the victory? Any particular activity permits two answers: One engages in the activity for the sake of the thing-itself, yes, for there is something intrinsically satisfying in any good thing, but one pursues it as well for the sake of something else. Happiness is the word for that state of affairs which is the final object of these other goods. It is unique because it is the only good that we always choose as an end in itself and never for the sake of something else. “Honor, pleasure, intelligence, and all virtue we choose partly for themselves,” Aristotle writes, “for we would choose each of them even if no further advantage would accrue from them—but we also choose them partly for the sake of happiness, because we assume that it is through them that we will be happy. On the other hand, no one chooses happiness for the sake of honor, pleasure, and the like, nor as a means to anything at all.”5
To call the highest good “happiness” is “perhaps a little trite,” Aristotle acknowledges, and he proceeds to specify its content more exactly. To do so, he invokes a characteristic of man that today is sure to provoke an argument. He asserts that man is distinctively rational. The unique proper function of man, Aristotle argues, the one that sets him apart from all other creatures, is delineated by human intelligence. Happiness cannot be understood, nor can it exist, without reference to behavior ordered by intelligence—that is, without reference to rationality—any more than the proper function of a harpist can be understood without reference to the playing of a harp. “The proper function of man, then, consists in an activity of the soul in conformity with a rational principle or, at least, not without it.”6
For Aristotle, “conformity with a rational principle” means something far more complex (and realistic) than an icy, mathematical
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calculation of odds. There are instead two forms of wisdom, “theoretical wisdom” and “practical wisdom.”* Scientific knowledge advances by means of theoretical wisdom, but the achievement of happiness is bound up much more closely with practical wisdom, or, as Aristotle defined it, “the capacity of deliberating well about what is good and advantageous for oneself.”7 Such deliberation is not a scientific process. Indeed, it could not be, for every actor and every situation is different from every other, and every action is interpreted differently and redounds differently depending upon the peculiarities of persons and circumstances. General laws of behavior thus must always be interpreted according to the particular situation. The quality that permits these interpretations to be made rightly and then acted upon appropriately is practical wisdom. When a statesman makes a decision—Pericles is for Aristotle the embodiment of the ideal—he must call upon his store of practical wisdom. So also must businessmen in making investments for the future, a parent in dealing with his children, a young woman in choosing a husband. None of these judgments can be made adequately through scientific reasoning alone; all must be informed as well by the broader, more diffuse wisdom that is equally, but differently, part of man’s unique gift of rationality.
The more highly developed one’s practical wisdom, the better the effects of one’s actions for oneself and for mankind—a thought that leads to another key aspect of Aristotle’s presentation, the link between thought and action. Aristotle’s point does not demand that a man necessarily act on every conclusion or intention that forms in his mind. (He may know that rain is predicted and wish not to get wet, and yet still not carry his umbrella to the office.) But a man who typically divorces intention from action has in some profound sense shut himself off from human society, for a society cannot function at all if its members systematically fail to base their actions on their judgment. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes, “Were anyone systematically inconsistent in this way, he
