In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray

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      [print edition page 15]

      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.

      [print edition page 16]

      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 determine a man’s life, no supremely happy man can ever become miserable, for he will never do what is hateful and base.” He will act in the ways that bring happiness, “just as a good shoemaker makes the best shoe he can from the leather available.”¹²

      The prescriptions that flow from Aristotle’s analysis sound familiar to modern ears. If your parents taught you that lasting satisfaction comes from developing your talents to their fullest, doing your job as well as you can, raising a family, and contributing to your community, your parents were teaching you an Aristotelian course. By the same token, Aristotle has been viewed by modern critics as a defender of bourgeois values. Thus Bertrand Russell writes with unconcealed disdain that

      Those who neither fall below nor rise above the level of decent, well-behaved citizens will find in the Ethics a systematic account of the principles by which they hold that their conduct should be regulated. The book appeals to the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seventeenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling it cannot but be repulsive. . . .¹³

      Readers of Aristotle might well respond that in his evocation of courage as well as wisdom, justice as well as honor, he is calling forth not just “decency” or “respectability” but the very best that humans have in them. For that matter, it is not such a bad thing (or perhaps, such a common one) to be a decent, well-behaved citizen. It is easy to understand the resilience of the Aristotelian vision of happiness if only because it so closely corresponds to the evolving views of so many

      [print edition page 17]

      people who grow older, into “respectable middle age,” and try to figure out what is making them happy or unhappy. Aristotle’s view has, as a social scientist might say, a good deal of face validity.

      This underlying correspondence between Aristotle’s philosophy and everyday experience may account for why the Aristotelian framework was without serious competition for nearly two millennia. The advent of Christianity provided a religious branch of thinking about human happiness over which this book—after all a book about social policy and not a history of theories of happiness—must skip. It may be noted in passing, however, that in this area as in many others, Christian and especially Catholic theology owe much to Aristotle. For Aquinas, writing his Treatise on Happiness, Aristotle did not even need a name. He was simply and without peer The Philosopher.

      THE LOCKEAN REVISION

      An indispensable underpinning of the Aristotelian view of happiness was that all pleasures are not created equal; some are inherently superior to others. It is impossible for a person to make himself truly happy by stringing together episodes of sex, feasting, circuses, and idle good times. Beginning with the eighteenth century, an influential line of British philosophers discarded the underlying premise that pleasures can be ranked.^*

      The individual took center stage. An individual human being has inviolate rights, makes private decisions, and whether those decisions are “right” or “wrong” is a question that can be answered only by the individual who makes them. And so with happiness. It is not necessary, they argued, to assign a hierarchy of virtue or goodness to human activities. It is sufficient to say that human beings pursue their self-interest as they perceive it, including their understanding of such things as pleasure and happiness. How they perceive these things is not subject to validation by an outside party.

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      John Locke, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, was the first to voice this radically different approach to happiness. Happiness, he wrote, is sensible pleasure. Its lowest form is “so much ease from all pain, and so much present pleasure, as without which anyone cannot be content.” Its highest form is not any particular type of activity nor is it even categorizable by its virtue or lack of it. Rather, the highest form of happiness is simply “the utmost pleasure we are capable of.”¹⁵ Happiness is as happiness does; therefore no outside agent—such as a king, for example—has the right to interfere with the individual’s pursuit of those pleasures and satisfactions that have the most utility for his particular notions of what makes him happy as long as he harms no one else in that pursuit.

      The theoretical gap between the Aristotelian and the Lockean view of happiness yawns wide. But if one asks whether the Lockean view of happiness really did represent a major change in the way men viewed the question that concerns us—How are men to pursue happiness?—the differences between the British philosophers and the Aristotelians are far less clear. The same writers who propounded a radically new view of man’s natural rights, who overturned prevailing ideas about the rights of kings and aristocrats over common men, tended to give descriptions of private virtue and its connection with happiness that correspond quite closely to the Aristotelian one.^*

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