In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray
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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 or she would soon become unintelligible to those around them. We should not know how to respond to
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them, for we could no longer hope to identify either what they were doing or what they meant by what they said or both.”8
To repeat: The more highly developed one’s practical wisdom, the “better” the effects of one’s actions for oneself and for mankind. To be “better” in this way is also to be more virtuous—practical wisdom, Aristotle concludes, is both a virtue in itself and also the progenitor of virtuous behavior. And, to return to our original theme, practical wisdom facilitates happiness. It allows one to “deliberate well about what is good and advantageous for oneself,” as well as to fulfill that most human of functions, the exercise of intelligence. For Aristotle, intelligence (or rationality), virtue, and happiness are all interlocked. In this passage from the chapter in which he initially defines happiness, he puts the relationship this way:
In other words, the function of the harpist is to play the harp; the function of the harpist who has high standards is to play it well. On these assumptions, if we take the proper function of man to be a certain kind of life, and if this land of life is an activity of the soul and consists in actions performed in conjunction with the rational element, and if a man of high standards is he who performs these actions well and properly, and if a function is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the excellence appropriate to it; we reach the conclusion that the good of man is an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue, and if there are several virtues, in conformity with the best and most complete.9
It would be unfair to leave Aristotle’s view of happiness at such an abstract level, however. Happiness as he envisions it is not at all austere or abstract. On the contrary, it is consistent with what “is commonly said about it” by ordinary people, Aristotle writes. It is pleasurable, for example, in that “the sensation of pleasure belongs to the soul, and each man derives pleasure from what he is said to love.”10 Elsewhere (see especially bk. 10), Aristotle clarifies the nature of pleasure and, as might be expected, he emphatically rejects an identity of pleasure and happiness: That happiness is pleasurable does not mean that pleasures constitute happiness. But the happy man enjoys himself, and the happier he is, the more he enjoys himself.
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Aristotle adds that at least some resources (money, for example) are also necessary for happiness, and such things as personal attractiveness and good birth are helpful. But happiness as Aristotle develops the concept is not something to be reserved only to the rich or the brilliant. Even if the highest happiness is reserved to the wise, “it can attach, through some form of study or application, to anyone who is not handicapped by some incapacity for goodness.”11 In this context, Aristotle makes another point that is especially relevant: Just because you are not enjoying the most ideal happiness you can imagine for yourself does not mean you cannot be happy. Misfortunes may occur in the life of any person, no matter how wise and virtuous, but “if, as we said, the activities