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2HAPPINESS, LIVING BLISSFULLY AND BEAUTIFULLY, IS SAID TO CONSIST MAINLY OF THREE THINGS WHICH SEEM MOST DESIRABLE: SOME SAY WISDOM IS THE GREATEST GOOD, SOME HONOR, AND SOME PLEASURE. SOME ALSO DISPUTE THE MAGNITUDE OF THE CONTRIBUTION MADE BY EACH OF THESE ELEMENTS, SOME DECLARING THE CONTRIBUTION OF ONE TO BE GREATER, SOME SAYING WISDOM IS A GREATER GOOD THAN HONOR, SOME THE OPPOSITE, WHILE OTHERS REGARD PLEASURE AS A GREATER GOOD THAN EITHER. AND SOME CONSIDER HAPPINESS TO BE A COMPOUND OF ALL, OR OF TWO, OF THESE, WHILE OTHERS SAY IT CONSISTS OF ONE ALONE.
Is happiness success at work? Fame? Power? A few million in high-yield, safe investments? The respect of one’s peers? Having more toys than everyone else in your yacht club? An afternoon in a secluded mountain glen smelling wildflowers with the one you love? Lusty sex? Good health? Or is happiness “all of the above,” “none of the above,” or “fill in the blank”? Of course, the practical answer is: “It all depends on whom you ask.”
Aristotle acknowledges that happiness typically is defined in personal and relative terms: His fellow Athenians defined it as whatever made them feel “blissful.” Today, thinking about happiness still brings out the relativist in nearly everyone. We each speak of happiness—more precisely, the source of happiness—as the ultimate among all forms of personal preference.
But Aristotle refused to accept the common wisdom and was convinced he could demonstrate that happiness has a definite meaning and definable source. His argument found favor 2,200 years later with Thomas Jefferson, whose famous Aristotelian phrase “the pursuit of happiness” is indelibly engraved in the memory of most every American. It’s difficult to cite another historical figure more fully Aristotelian than the third president of the United States. Jefferson echoed nearly every aspect of Aristotle’s views on ethics, politics, and the good life, even the few manifestly misguided ones. Because most of us believe that Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness is a worthy endeavor, it is incumbent on us to learn what he and Aristotle meant by those words. In so doing, we discover the relevance of Aristotle’s definition of happiness to the challenge of effective life planning.
In my own struggle to identify what would make me happy, I did what teachers often do when intellectually puzzled: I turned to my students for help. I asked several classes of MBA students to define what, in the final analysis, they wanted from their careers and lives. Most of these ambitious young people replied with variations on the old “I just wanna be happy” theme. In this regard, they were fervent Jeffersonians who revered the author of the Declaration of Independence because he said they had a right to pursue happiness. When I asked these young people what precisely they were pursuing, some of their lists featured beaches, beer, Beemers, and blondes.
But is it true that the Sage of Monticello had material and sensual pleasures in mind when he penned that lofty phrase about the right to pursue happiness? It turns out we know exactly what Jefferson meant because he was an Aristotelian through and through, so, as they say, “you could look it up.” That’s what I did with a perusal of passages Jefferson underscored in his copies of Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, which still grace the shelves of the Library of Congress. Because it is unlikely that readers of this book will have an opportunity to haunt the stacks in the Madison Building, here’s a translation of what it says in Jefferson’s leather-bound, Latin volume of the Ethics: Happiness is “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete … and in a complete life.”
Even in translation, that’s not very helpful. It’s abstract, general, and certainly doesn’t conform to the way moderns think. In fact, almost everyone associates happiness with the mental state of “feeling good.” However, Aristotle says it is “an activity.” He elaborates, explaining that happiness is the “highest of all goods achievable by actions.” Apparently, happiness is something we do rather than something we feel. Then he says it is an activity “in accordance with virtue.” Not even my students would talk about a day at the beach in terms of virtue.
Aristotle’s happiness is something one accomplishes, more a product of our moral actions than a psychological condition. Moreover, it is neither fleeting nor a momentary thing; it is not measured by the hour, day, or week, nor is it a postponable gratification enjoyed at retirement. Instead, it is a complete life led in accordance with virtue. As I stood in the stacks on Capitol Hill reading Jefferson’s book, happiness sounded more like a duty than an inalienable right. What Aristotle and Jefferson mean by happiness turns out to be so counterintuitive that our initial reaction is to assume they must be wrong. Everybody knows happiness is about feeling good now, or as soon as possible.
To see how Aristotle arrives at his unconventional definition, we need to reflect on where he starts. He begins his analysis with one of his many hierarchies: Happiness is the highest good in the hierarchy of all the things that are good for us. How do we know happiness is the greatest of those many and various goods? Because it is the “only thing we seek for its own sake and never for the sake of something else.” By this he means no one would ever say, “I want to be happy in order to be rich” or “I want happiness in order to be powerful, beautiful, or respected.” Thus, happiness must be the highest end we seek.
In most cultures, we find the same common sense and practical idea of happiness: It is the highest end being sought in this life. When we were growing up, we read about a cowardly lion who said, “I want to be brave in order to be happy,” about an airhead scarecrow who said, “I want to be smart to be happy,” and about a rusty-hearted tin man who wanted friends (love) in order to be happy. Although stories in other times and cultures differ, the relationship of cause to effect is the same. In the myths of ancient Greece that Aristotle was taught in his youth, no one, neither mortals nor the gods, wanted happiness in order to get something else.
If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate, the process would go on to infinity so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.
Translation: If happiness is not the “chief good,” the alternative is, logically, absurd. Comedian Henry Youngman captured that absurdity when he asked, “What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.” As the son of the cowardly lion, John Lahr says, “No one courts fame out of happiness.” Therefore, happiness must be the supreme end to which we aspire, and every other good must be a means to that end.
My students are at least in line with Aristotle when they identify happiness as the goal of their careers and lives. But will the sensual and material goods they seek make them happy if they obtain them? Plato thought they would. He believed that material boys and girls were made perfectly content by an abundance of such goods as beer and Beemers. Aristotle grants that such goods may bring momentary pleasure, and that there is nothing wrong with a modicum of such pleasure. Nonetheless, he would argue that my students would not be truly happy if they had those goods because they still would need other goods, as well. If so, what other goods would my sensually satiated students be missing?
Here’s the question Aristotle poses: What is the full complement of goods all people need to be happy? In answering, Aristotle begins with basics. He states a self-evident proposition: Though human desires differ, we all have the same needs for food, water, clothing, shelter, and good health. This is also a clue to what Jefferson meant by the phrase “all men are created equal.” Because all humans are equally members of the same species, all have the same basic needs. For example, both Aristotle and Jefferson believe that everyone needs other people; we need others for love, family, friendship, and a sense of community.
Aristotle says normal people need not only the companionship of others, they need it more than just occasionally, much as having enough food for only one day is insufficient. In his most-quoted line from Ethics, Aristotle writes, “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so, too, one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.” Thus, to say particular people are happy, we have to be assured they have adequate food, clothing, and shelter throughout the course of their lives and some companionship from the time they are young until the end of their days. Can we call people happy who don’t possess at least these few necessities for most of their lives?
Aristotle is aware of individuals who “stand alone,” lone wolves who don’t seem to want or need anybody else. But he tells us that such people must be “either gods or beasts” because their behavior is so contrary to the norm for our species. To him, the needs of a few social misfits who behave in non-human ways are not valid indicators of what people need in order to be happy. Exceptions don’t invalidate the self-evident rule that the majority of the species has a small set of needs in common.
For the most part, what Aristotle says is common sense, but at the same time, it can be counterintuitive. He makes us want to argue with him: Wait a second, Aristotle. If the measure of happiness is a complete life well led, how come we so readily attribute happiness to children? We say children are happy, Aristotle explains, “by reason of the hope we have for them” and not by virtue of what they have accomplished, because “even the most prosperous may fall into great misfortune” as they grow older. He anticipates most of our objections. First, he grants the obvious: A complete life well led requires an element of good luck; the happiest of youngsters have a lot of time ahead of them to encounter sources of misery and woe. Even people who are happy in their mid-fifties aren’t home safe: Aristotle describes Greeks in antiquity who were seemingly happy, but as they grew older, terrible luck befell them. They lost their money, their friends died, and, when they grew ill or prematurely feeble their children abandoned them. Aristotle asks, Could one say such once-fortunate people led happy lives? No, only if individuals have had (a) material basics, (b) good friends, and (c) good luck throughout most of their lives can we begin to say they are happy.
Still, Aristotle says such fortunate people are happy only in the way an elk might be said to have led a good life if it lived to old age, in good health, in a peaceable herd, in a vegetation-rich predator-free forest, having mated often, and never having wanted for food or drink. He concedes that humans share that kind of basic contentment with other animals. But he reminds us that humans aren’t simply animals. We want more than basics. The long march of human civilization is about our species’ collective desire to have more than bread on the table, animal skins on our backs, a lean-to shelter in winter, and sex on the hoof. Humans clearly won’t be satisfied with a life in which only their animal needs are met. They want something more. Plato says they want more goodies. But is it really desire for material things that separates us from beasts, and if not, what does our species truly strive for?
Aristotle tells us “each thing is made for one purpose only,” and as we have seen, that purpose for humans is the exercise of our capacity for higher-order reasoning. He says what we strive for is to develop that capacity. Happiness, he thus asserts, comes from trying to make ourselves the best humans we are capable of becoming. Because that conclusion isn’t obvious, and to better understand Aristotle’s reasoning, let’s fast-forward a few millennia to examine briefly how modern psychologists define the source of human happiness. Their efforts may help clarify what seems obscure.
Although many psychologists view happiness as a subjective feeling associated with hedonistic pleasures, a number who are Aristotelian in orientation argue, instead, that happiness is the objective result of how we live. One of the strongest Aristotelian definitions of happiness was offered by Erich Fromm, who employed the Greek word the Ancient used for happiness, eudaimonia, to make a distinction between
those needs (desires) that are only subjectively felt and whose satisfaction leads to momentary pleasure, and those needs that are rooted in human nature and whose realization is conducive to human growth and produces eudaimonia, or well-being. In other words … the distinction between purely subjectively felt needs and objectively valid needs—part of the former being harmful to human growth and the latter being in accordance with the requirements of human nature.
As Fromm explains, Aristotle’s highest good, eudaimonia, has little to do with the feelings of pleasure and contentment typically implied in modern usage of the word happiness. In fact, what he means by happiness is something like the deep sense of satisfaction one gets when one grows as a human being. And that turns out to be approximately what many modern psychologists mean when they describe happiness. For example, although the psychologist Abraham Maslow was not as avowedly Aristotelian as Fromm was, his famous “hierarchy of needs” corresponds with Aristotle’s hierarchy of goods. Maslow posited that humans progress up a ladder of needs, starting with the basics: food, water, and clothing. His hierarchy culminates with self-actualization, the state of fulfilling one’s potential. Aristotle never uses the term self-actualization, but his highest good, the development of our uniquely human capabilities, amounts to roughly the same thing. Yet, Maslow and Aristotle aren’t exactly on the same page. For example, Aristotle complicates matters when he elaborates on the nature of the good at the top of his hierarchy:
If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the best thing in us. … That activity is contemplation.
The words I italicized—virtue, the best thing in us, and contemplation—require explanation. Although they seem dated and subjective, in fact these concepts are surprisingly consistent with the latest scientific research about the nature of happiness. In the 1990s, psychologist Martin Seligman initiated a research effort designed to discover how people can better move up Maslow’s hierarchy. Some 60 psychologists have taken part in this research, and they are learning that happiness isn’t simply genetic or a matter of luck or circumstances. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it isn’t caused by social standing, wealth, or even living in garden spots (so much for my African isles Geographic Solution).
Counterintuitively, the research indicates that happiness can be learned, and, therefore, there are things one can do to make oneself happier. Having good relationships with others helps, as does setting a progression of life and career goals. Another source of happiness is learning to do things that are good for you; for example, learning to enjoy healthy food in sensible quantities. Some of this research directly validates Aristotle’s theory that happiness entails an entire lifespan and amounts to “the striving for perfection that represents the realization of one’s true potential.” In the end, the researchers find that people are made happy by pursuing “what is best in them.” Seligman concludes that happiness is “the emotion that arises when we do something that stems from our strengths and virtues.” In sum, Seligman and his colleagues have reinvented Aristotle’s concept of happiness as a virtue that derives from developing the best thing in us.
Similarly, Aristotle’s concept of contemplation has been dressed up in modern psychological lingo. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion that happiness equates with “flow” is one of the hottest ideas in psychology today. To him, flow is the ineffable feeling enjoyed by creative artists and writers when they are so absorbed in what they are doing that they lose track of time and place. In this blissful condition, one doesn’t think about anything else, and all worries and concerns are set aside. Skilled athletes call this being “in the zone.” Weekend warriors have enough of a taste of being in the zone to appreciate the blissful feeling Michael Jordan must have gotten when totally wrapped up in a game of basketball. Watching him in action, we saw the pleasure in his eyes. But one needn’t be a sports star to get into the zone. My aunt Virginia tells me she gets the feeling while painting ceramics. I have experienced it writing these chapters. I know I have been in the zone when I look at the clock and discover I have been at work for many hours, though it felt like minutes.
In part, Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” comes from doing what we love to do. And the Aristotelian test of good work is that you would do it even if you weren’t paid. Although this definition fits professional sports to a tee, the problem is that no one can play basketball 24/7 or engage in high-level competitive sports for all one’s life. The recently retired Michael Jordan now must come to grips with what Aristotle understood long ago: Contemplation is the only activity that is absorbing “good work” for all one’s life. Unfortunately, contemplation sounds like what former California governor Jerry Brown did when he meditated or what Einstein did while creating elegant equations. Though Aristotle’s notion covers those activities, it also includes other forms of positively absorbing mental work: playing a piano, woodworking, solving a scientific problem in a laboratory, and hundreds more sources of bliss.
One might expect that economists would be among the least likely of professionals to find bliss at work, given the materialistic nature of the subject they contemplate. Yet history records no better example of being in the zone than the behavior of the author of Wealth of Nations. When Adam Smith was living in Scotland in the 18th century, he would lose track of time and wander for hours all over Glasgow and into the adjacent countryside. One day, while contemplating some peculiarly elusive economic concept, the absentminded Smith was observed to stumble headfirst into an especially noisome sewage ditch. When later asked about the golden years he had spent in solitary contemplation, Smith called them “by far the happiest and most-honorable part of my life.”
There is, in fact, a new field called “happiness economics,” which has demonstrated that people who become rich don’t get any happier as a result, largely because they are on a “hedonic treadmill” which causes them continually to want more as they acquire more. Some of this is silly: The Economist cites one study concluding that the degree of marital happiness can be quantified by subtracting the number of spousal spats from the frequency of intercourse! Laugh we may, but the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics was shared by Daniel Kahneman, who, by way of an experiment in which students picked their favorite flavors of ice cream, demonstrated that most people cannot accurately predict what will make them happy.
If that is true, Michael Jordan may find an unexpected source of bliss now that he is retired from basketball and taking on mental work. Granted, when Jordan tried in his late thirties to change from the pursuit of physical pleasure to the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction, he failed. He discovered he couldn’t get into the zone and went back to the hard courts in search of satisfaction, concluding he was “born to play basketball.” But that doesn’t mean he can’t learn to find bliss in contemplation. If Aristotle is right, Jordan failed the first time because he had tried contemplation only once, and because he was too young when he did.
I speak with some confidence because I was once like Michael Jordan. I was never rich, handsome, talented, or famous, and although I am nearly 6'2", even in my prime I couldn’t dunk a basketball. Yet I once shared a weakness in common with His Airness: youth. I discovered the importance of this passing similarity when, at age 50, I resolved to pick up a copy of Plato’s The Republic and finally read what Aristotle’s teacher had to say. To my surprise, the next day I found a dog-eared copy of the book in my study. When I began to leaf through it, I noticed that someone had underscored numerous passages in the text and written helpful comments in the margins. Most surprising, whoever had made those notes had done so in my hand!
After a long search of my memory, I recalled taking an introductory philosophy course in my junior year of college. In the end-of-course evaluation, I had dinged the professor because he hadn’t been helpful in explaining the most difficult texts I had ever encountered. I had blamed him for my lack of understanding (and mediocre grade), but now, as I reread his lecture notes (dutifully transcribed by the young me), I discovered he had been an insightful commentator on Plato’s classic. The real problem had been my immaturity. I didn’t get it when I was 20—but, in hindsight, I now understand that the fault had been my own. Because I had so little life experience in 1965, there had been no context within which I could make sense of Plato. Not only that, I subsequently forgot having read The Republic and, thus, made no use of its wisdom over the next 3 decades. Now I found the book a relatively easy read, full of useful insights, and relevant to organizational and political issues I had struggled with over the years. At one moment, I caught myself thinking, “I wish I had read this earlier.”
Most of us are not yet ready to pursue happiness à la Aristotle when we are young, and when we are ready to do so, we must discipline ourselves to try to find pleasure in activities we tasted but found unpalatable in our youth. The work of psychologist Erik Erikson and others supports Aristotle’s conclusion that contemplation is the one blissful activity we all can engage in for all of our lives and the one we appreciate and benefit most from as we grow older. In sum, modern psychologists have validated much of what Aristotle intuited. But unlike modern researchers, he reached his conclusions by way of reasoning, observation, and a touch of religious faith.
Aristotle observes a duality in the “souls” of humans. He calls the best in us “divine,” or most like “the gods,” and the worst “beastly,” or animal-like. In some ways, his “divine” and “beastly” categories of souls correspond with Freud’s “ego” and “id” aspects of our psyches. And to become happy (Aristotle) and healthy (Freud), both believe we should try “to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.” But what exactly must we do to be more divine and less beastly, to develop a healthy ego strong enough to keep our id in check? Here the psychiatrist and the philosopher differ: The former prescribes analysis, the latter contemplation.
Aristotle again starts with the fact that humans are animals, but, he optimistically observes, we are “the best of the animals.” Setting us apart and above the others is our ability to engage in abstract thought. But that isn’t of much practical use. How should we spend our time if we want to be less beastly and more divine? Aristotle’s answer, “in contemplation,” is not helpful, particularly when he says that activity has “no direct use.” Ethereal contemplation seems a bit like the subject of the famous Cambridge University toast to the study of higher mathematics: “May it never be of any use to anyone.” Indeed, because mathematics is the most abstract form of reasoning, Aristotle cites it as the prime example of contemplation.
So is that it? To get more human and less beastly, we should study Boolean algebra? A fuller reading of the Ancient leads to a broader definition of the concept he uses to distinguish us from beasts. For starters, humans differ from animals in the way we perceive time. Beasts are ahistorical: They know nothing of the generations preceding them and think nothing about the future facing their kind. Only humans understand that they had grandparents and know they may have grandchildren who will live on after them. And we are never more uniquely human than when, living in the present, we are conscious of both the past and the future. Indeed, when we are fully conscious in this way, we are most godlike in Aristotle’s view. Hence, studying history, and planning to create a better future, are preeminently human and virtuous forms of contemplation.
Although Aristotle was the first scholar to engage consciously in empirical research, he also speculated on the activities of the gods. He wonders what daily activity they engage in: Are the gods like animals, struggling over territory and mating rights, devoting their every effort to satisfying basic instincts? Or, are they like us? Do they have bad habits? Do they imbibe too much, or are they greedy? Aristotle answers “No” to all of the above. Because humans worship the gods, he assumes that the gods must be worthy of our respect. Hence, they can’t be like us, struggling with urges to overindulge in fish cakes (the Athenian equivalent of ice cream), and trying to stay on the wagon and out of the way of temptation with our neighbor’s spouse. So are the gods then engaged in practical matters, as in business and finance? He answers: “Will not the gods seem absurd if they make contracts and return deposits?” Please, the gods do not concern themselves with matters of profit and loss!
But they must be doing something. They are, Aristotle supposes, engaged in deep contemplation about the most theoretical, abstract, and, therefore, most difficult and important moral issues: What is right and wrong? What is justice? How should the universe be ordered? Aristotle concludes that the gods spend their leisure time in such contemplation and, if we wish to be more than animals, that we should follow their example.
In sum, we are least beastly when we engage in moral deliberations and when we use our uniquely human ability to make distinctions based on abstract reasoning. Thus, contemplative activity is “the best thing in us,” and we act the most godlike when we seek to understand the great ideas that have troubled the minds of humans in all cultures and eras. Moreover, we are free to act godlike if we so choose, because the divine capacity for contemplation is present in all our souls.
Aristotle also says we are virtuous when we engage in contemplation. Virtuous people partake in theoretical and abstract reasoning not simply to find answers to great questions, but to find real pleasure in the asking. “All men by nature want to know,” he tells us. Because the ability to know is the best thing about humans, he concludes that reasoning well should be our highest goal. Additionally, trying to reason well brings us virtue because, in doing so, we pursue excellence, which Aristotle equated with “the highest good.”
In practical terms, Aristotle was teaching Athenian leaders the importance of excellence. To achieve excellence, they needed to develop the capacity to engage in disciplined explorations of profound questions—ones that illuminate basic truths and examine fundamental questions about the human condition. He observed that business and political leaders of his era spent too little time on, and attached too little importance to, such issues. Those leaders lacked virtue because they neither saw the need to build their own capacity to contemplate nor believed it important for their followers to do so.
The leadership practices of Theodore Roosevelt provide a useful illustration of Aristotelian excellence. Throughout his life, T.R. invariably made full use of his inherited wealth and social standing as the means to living a full and good life, developing his talents, and serving society. Before he was 40, Roosevelt made his mark as an author, cowboy, civil servant, and soldier. He never met a subject he wasn’t curious to learn more about. He made serious study of paleontology, ornithology, mammalogy, criminology, technology, geography, and history, in addition to his major field of geopolitics. Over his life, he read some 20,000 books, ranging from Aristotle to Tolstoy and, in his spare time, wrote 15 of his own, not to mention all his own public speeches and scores of long and loving letters to his children. But the youngest president depicted on Mount Rushmore was far from bookish. He was an avid horseman, tennis player, boxer, mountain climber, and bodybuilder who never walked anywhere he could run.
Roosevelt’s goal was to leave the world a better place, and to that end, he tirelessly advanced the causes of conservation, democracy, and political reform. He was a work-in-progress until the day he died, constantly seeking new knowledge and experience and using it to test and refine his ideas. Although he was principled—some said opinionated—when presented with facts and sound analysis to the contrary, he was willing to admit he was wrong and to change course accordingly. When faced with the challenge of creating national policy to control monopolies, T.R. threw himself into the study of antitrust, working long hours to master a field about which he had little previous knowledge. As the result of applying his reason to the subject, he arrived at a position different from his party’s. More concerned with doing the virtuous thing than satisfying campaign contributors, T.R. was Aristotelian to the extreme.
Aristotle warns that leaders cannot achieve excellence unless they pursue “noble and divine” objectives. But what is a “noble” objective? Because humans have the unique ability to ask “what is justice,” leadership excellence entails trying to create a society or organization aimed at justice. To attempt less is to be less than human, less than excellent, less than virtuous, and less than noble. Put positively, leaders who try to create a good life for others exercise the noble human capacities that lead to a good life and happiness for themselves.
Aristotle doesn’t propose that leaders should abandon practical matters and just think great thoughts. Instead, they should make the link between their practical actions and the consequences of those actions on others—in particular, the extent to which such actions allow their followers to pursue happiness. An Aristotelian assessment that certain leaders lack virtue is not based on disagreement with their policies; instead, it is reserved for those who make policy mindlessly, without the full application of moral reasoning. The issue isn’t right or wrong; instead, it is thoughtful or thoughtless. Aristotle appeals to disciplined minds of all ideological persuasions.
At a minimum, Aristotle counsels leaders to devote their leisure time to the pursuit of excellence rather than amusement. When their workday was done, influential Greeks typically headed to places of entertainment where they would unwind with food, wine, sex, and a board game akin to checkers. People then, like now, believed they worked in order to play. They equated happiness with fun and games, with going to the equivalent of a bar after work to hang out with their buddies.
Aristotle tried to teach Athenian leaders that happiness couldn’t be separated from the rest of their lives. They wouldn’t be made happy by what they did after work or on vacation. By extension, modern businesspeople who slave all day in order to come home at night and console themselves with gin are not happy, even if the gin gives them momentary pleasure. And people who lead unfulfilling lives throughout their working years will not make themselves happy or their lives full by retiring to a country club, even if their passion is playing golf. Aristotle has a different view of the relationship between amusement and happiness:
Happiness does not lie in amusement; it would, indeed, be strange if the end were amusement, and one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one’s life in order to amuse oneself. Remember, everything we choose we choose for the sake of something else—except happiness, which is an end. So to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of another activity.
Here Aristotle endorses the conclusion that we should amuse ourselves in order to refresh ourselves in order that we may exert ourselves again. In his view, amusement and relaxation are means, unlike happiness, which is an end in itself. Thus, Aristotle has no problem with fun and games when those are used briefly to restore us for more virtuous pursuits. However, when amusement is viewed as an end, it leads us off the virtuous path. “I live in order to go to the beach and have a good time” is quite different morally than “I go to the beach when I am mentally exhausted, and a good swim helps to restore my energy.” Aristotle rejects the former as vice but includes the latter expression of pleasure as a legitimate part of happiness. He specifically rejects sensual pleasure for its own sake, concluding that hedonists are no better than animals. He tells us we can’t achieve the good by following animal impulses, for if we could, drunks, satyrs, and gluttons would be excellent and happy.
Aristotle asks: To what end can we best put our leisure time? He grants the common wisdom that we work hard to buy leisure time in which to pursue happiness. But then he challenges us to consider the following: If we waste our precious leisure time on amusement, are we not wasting our best opportunity to find happiness? Don’t we need that free time for study, for contemplation, to reflect—in sum, to seek excellence?
This argument is hard for moderns to follow because Aristotle draws distinctions we don’t usually make between amusement, leisure, and work. To Aristotle, the most valuable time of our lives is leisure time because that’s when we can be most truly human. If our work is dull, routine, repetitive, or physically arduous, Aristotle calls it beastly. In an ideal society, he says that all such work will be done by animals or machines and, with remarkable prescience, predicts that bad work in the future will be automated. He says a goal of a good society should be to maximize work fit for humans, work that intrinsically allows those who do it to grow, learn, develop, and become more “divine through contemplation.” Here, again, modern psychology has reinvented Aristotle. In the 1950s, industrial psychologist Frederick Herzberg posited, “Man has two sets of needs … his need as an animal to avoid pain and his need as a human to grow psychologically.” Consequently, he argued that jobs should be “enriched” to minimize animal elements and maximize human ones.
Aristotle says that when we are engaged in good work—studying, learning, creating, analyzing, inventing, teaching, solving problems, researching, discussing great ideas and moral questions—we are not engaged in work at all. These activities are, in fact, leisure. Here’s a way to test the quality of your own work: If you can’t get into “the zone” while doing it, it is work/work. When engaged in drudgery, the hands on a clock seem to stand still, but time flies when engaged in leisure/work.
This is the crux of Aristotelian ethics, so we should make clear what he is saying: Since we want to be as much like the gods as possible, we should engage in “noble and divine” activities as much as we can. If we have to do work/work—if we can’t avoid it, and he recognizes that most of us can’t—we should reduce to a minimum the amount of time we must spend at activities that machines and animals should be doing.
My father, a teamster warehouseman, understood this. His role model was a fellow San Francisco laborer, longshoreman Eric Hoffer, who, at the end of his workday, headed directly to the library. Hoffer heeded Aristotle’s dictum that one should maximize leisure/work by exerting oneself as much as practically possible in efforts to develop intellectual capabilities. This is not to say there is no dignity in working with one’s hands, but as my father explained, “Most manual laborers work with their backs, not their hands.”
The difficult decisions we make every day about how we will use our limited time are the stuff of Aristotelian ethical exercises. He says virtuous people choose to use their scarce free time on activities that lead to their development as complete humans. For many of us, this comes down to a tougher choice than Eric Hoffer faced: the question of how much golf we should play. Doubtless, most of us have a long way to go to fulfill our golf potential; however, in an Aristotelian reckoning, that capacity is both limited by our natural abilities and diminishes as we grow older. In contrast, Aristotle says our most important and rewarding human capacity is to learn new ideas and, especially, to apply that learning to helping and teaching others. That capability is not only far less tapped than our golf capacity, it actually increases as we accumulate life experience.
Aristotle doesn’t say we shouldn’t play golf or that golf is bad. Instead, he would ask, does golf equal happiness? He would answer that golf may be a contributing factor to one’s happiness, but that if you treat it as the highest good, you may be in great trouble—for example, if you develop an illness that prevents you from playing. Moreover, even if you are lucky enough to play until you are in your nineties, the question is, Will that alone cause you to consider your life meaningful? A great number of people who lead full lives play golf and play often (novelist John Updike, for example), but golf isn’t what gives purpose and meaning to their existence. The question then is, How much golf? And Aristotle would answer: As much as you need in order to refresh yourself, but not so much as to prevent you from doing the developmental things that will bring true happiness in the long term.
If mere amusement isn’t the best use of our time, shouldn’t we then spend it developing our greatest talent? Aristotle answers yes and no. Yes, men and women who are born with a high aptitude for science, mathematics, and spatial thinking obviously should study to become the best engineers they are capable of becoming and never be satisfied with the depth of engineering knowledge they possess. But no, such people still will be unidimensional, having failed to develop all their potential in the arts and social sciences, for instance. While their potential may not be as deep in those fields, they nonetheless have almost unlimited potential in terms of breadth. They can study Chinese, history, ecology, psychology, anthropology, and learn to play the piano. Likewise, an artist will find a lifetime of learning about science, engineering, business, and technology in any good library. And for both the engineer and the artist, there is no limit to the contemplative challenges awaiting them if they choose to grapple with such profound questions as, Am I leading a good life? and Am I doing the right thing? To Aristotle, men and women who devote as much of their lives as possible to fulfilling their potential in such ways are engaged in true leisure, which he calls philosophy, and are on their way to being happy.
Alas, the world isn’t organized to facilitate our personal pursuits of happiness, and workplaces aren’t the only institutions structured in ways that mitigate against the fullest development of individuals. Ironically, the policies of universities also are narrowing and limiting. As management guru Tom Peters points out, not only is this bad for individuals, it undermines the practical purposes the educational system is designed to serve:
I’m angry that I attended Cornell as an undergraduate for five and a half years and basically never made it out of the engineering quad into the liberal arts part of the school. I spent the ages of 18 to 23 there and literally came out a functional illiterate. I think I’ve talked to every engineering dean in the 37 years since I graduated and told them all, “You didn’t educate me, and I’m pissed off.”
The 60-year-old Peters stands as a contemporary Aristotelian, thanks to his high-energy, midlife pursuit of the broad education he missed in his youth. He did the virtuous thing by organizing his own adult life to realize his full potential. Significantly, his self-taught knowledge not only broadens his personal perspectives, it adds a deeper dimension to his writings on management.
Catherine Dain is another contemporary Aristotelian who, in her fifties, disciplined herself to pursue the highest good. In her twenties, she began a typical business career as a stockbroker; then, in her thirties, she obtained an MBA for reasons of career advancement. But in her early forties, she discovered that learning more was more fulfilling than earning more, so she started teaching in the California State University system, which gave her a built-in excuse to study a variety of new subjects. Along the way, she discovered she had an untapped talent for writing, which she then developed to the point where, beginning in her late forties, she produced the series of highly entertaining Freddie O’Neal detective novels.
Not ready to quit growing, in her late fifties Dain took a plunge that few women her age dare to take: She decided to scratch an old itch and become a stage actress. Admitting that the roles open to her now are not as glamorous as they would have been in her twenties (“Actually, I end up playing someone’s mother”), she finds this far more satisfying than not being on the stage at all. What allows Dain to have the courage and discipline to continually try new things? “People say ‘life is short,’” she explains, “but they’re wrong: Life is long. It is too long, in fact, to get trapped doing something you hate and too long to not fill it doing things you love.”
The danger in citing such examples is that Aristotle might appear anti-business or, heaven forfend, anti-academic. He is neither. In fact, he is simply pro-stretching ourselves. Instead of doing what we have always done, instead of making an extra buck, writing yet another academic article, playing another round of golf, he encourages us to try new things, learn new skills, and learn about new places and new people. Here are some examples of midlife stretching he might applaud:
A corporate executive who quit business to devote his energies to creating sculpture
A respected professor who embarked on serious study of the jazz harmonica and now plays regularly with a professional blues band
Eight business and professional women who started a formal study group, initially focusing on an area they knew little about: the Middle East
A humanities professor who became an entrepreneur
Each of those individuals made a conscious choice to develop an untapped capacity; in each case, a different capacity. Because growth for a professor may entail starting a business, and growth for a business executive may entail becoming an artist, each of us must pursue happiness in our own way. Yet, Aristotle says, even such adventurous personal choices are not enough to constitute a good life. In addition, virtuous men and women pursue what he calls “the complete good.”
Aristotle calls Homo sapiens the “reasoning animal.” Then, somewhat confusingly, he says “the highest good” of reasoning is not “the complete good.” He argues that it is not enough merely to possess the capacity to reason, and not even enough to develop it. In addition, to be virtuous, we humans must use our reasoning capacity. That is because we are also “political animals” who must apply our continually developing talents and abilities to meeting the needs of our communities. In Aristotelian language, In addition to philosophy, virtuous men and women also engage in the practical world of politics.
With that two-pronged requirement in mind, we may summarize Aristotle’s overarching philosophy of virtue, excellence, and happiness: There is a moral difference between just living, on the one hand, and living well, on the other. Virtue enters the equation when we make the conscious choice to strive for excellence. Individuals become virtuous to the extent that they choose to develop their many talents and capacities, particularly their highest-order reasoning abilities. And, in their public personas as leaders of communities and organizations, they “complete their virtue” to the extent that they provide conditions under which others can pursue happiness and achieve excellence, as well. Hence, a woman with a high aptitude for accountancy should work not only to become the best accountant she is capable of becoming, she must also work to become the best human being, in toto. She must develop all facets of her talents and abilities to the full extent throughout her entire life, and then apply them for the good of her fellow workers and community. That stretching is “the complete good.”
When Jefferson declared “the pursuit of happiness” to be “a natural right” for “all men,” he was citing contemporary notions recently advanced by Enlightenment figures Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Those great thinkers argued that the majority of commoners in Europe at the time were denied the opportunity to realize what was best in them because the resources needed for that pursuit were reserved for the privileged few. Any aristocrat, no matter how thick-skulled, could attend Oxford, but only rarely were middle-class youth admitted, and the university’s hallowed halls were completely off-limits to the working class. In the Declaration, Jefferson proclaimed that a new social contract was being drawn up in America, a major tenet of which was that every young man, regardless of station, would be free to make of himself all he was capable of becoming. Almost from the moment Jefferson penned those words, critics noted that his category of “all men” did not include slaves of African descent; indeed, it did not include the wives and daughters of the European men who signed the Declaration.
In this, Jefferson was a perfect Aristotelian, because the Ancient, too, had not extended the promise of happiness to Athens’s slaves (who were ethnic Europeans and Middle Easterners) or to the city-state’s free Greek women. Aristotle believed that entire castes were inherently incapable of the reasoning needed to engage in contemplation; and though he acknowledged that his own wife and daughter had the latent capacity, he thought it proper that they lack the “authority” to engage in philosophy and politics.
In refuting Aristotle’s inaccurate assessment of the capabilities of women, Harriet Taylor Mill found that the most powerful argument she could muster against the Ancient was his own philosophy of happiness. In 1873, Mill argued that the greatest tragedy resulting from the inferior social status of women was the unrealized potential of half of humanity. For all of history, women had been denied the opportunity to participate in politics and philosophy, the very activities Aristotle called “most human.” Hence, to allow women to contribute their higher-order reasoning skills to society, and to allow them the same opportunity for happiness as men, Mill advocated that women be allowed to vote, hold office, and serve in the learned professions. Mill cited the Declaration, explaining what America’s founders had in mind when they used the famous words “all men are created equal”:
We do not imagine that any American democrat will evade the force of these expressions by the dishonest and ignorant subterfuge that “men” in this historical document does not stand for human beings but for one sex only; that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are “inalienable rights” of only one moiety of the human species …
In clear Aristotelian terms, she explained that the pursuit of happiness was shorthand for the process by which individuals develop their God-given capacities. Hence, societies in which women and members of denigrated castes, classes, and races were denied the right to realize their potential were inherently unjust. In effect, members of those groups were denied their humanity.
Mill thus simultaneously offered an elegant explication, and refutation, of Aristotle. She was able to do so because she understood that happiness was not a relativistic concept. In the Declaration, Jefferson used the term exactly the way Aristotle had 2 millennia earlier: as shorthand for the fulfillment of the highest-order human capacities. Nonetheless, Jefferson and Mill changed Aristotle’s intent in one significant regard. To Aristotle, the pursuit of happiness is a duty, and the crime is to be born with the greatest of all natural capacities and not to use it. Hence, he believes we each have a responsibility to develop our innate capabilities, for who could be called happy who had failed to become as truly human as he was capable? To Mill, in contrast and distinction, the real crime is denying anyone the opportunity or right to become as fully human as possible. One must add that it was a shortcoming on Aristotle’s part not to see happiness also as a right, as it was a shortcoming of Mill not to see it also as a duty. And, finally, Aristotle and Jefferson both were wrong to exclude any human from the right or duty to pursue happiness.
Unless one wishes to ignore Aristotle and Mill, there is but one way to understand “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration: It refers to the process of realizing one’s full potential. Though relativistic readings might serve to justify other, preconceived notions of happiness, they simply don’t work in light of Jefferson’s acknowledged debt to Aristotle and Mill’s debt to them both. Hence, happiness is not about pleasure, feeling good, or anything else on the list of possibilities with which we began the present inquiry. And, thanks to Mill’s clarification, the duty and right to pursue happiness applies to every human being. Understanding her emendation thus removes the political correctness objections to Aristotle, voiced by David Denby and others, and allows all men and women to benefit from the Ancient’s philosophy.
In light of what we now understand about Aristotle’s view of happiness, we have sufficient information to decide for ourselves if we agree with him. We can flip back to the list of alternative sources of happiness found at the beginning of this chapter and ask about each if we believe it would bring us happiness. For example, can we expect to find happiness through the possession of expensive toys? We know that many people claim to be perfectly happy leading a materialistic life, but the question for each of us to ask ourselves is: Will I find happiness that way?
The answer isn’t simple or obvious. In fact, I have a friend—I’ll call him Bill—who says he will be “perfectly happy” when he owns a Mercedes convertible. I would say he was joking if his actions weren’t consistent with his words. And when Michael Jordan “unretired,” he seemed to believe that the only source of happiness for him is found on a basketball court. And neither Bill nor Jordan seems to believe it possible to “get into the zone” by developing their interests more fully and broadly, by asking profound questions, by seeking to lead a full life as Aristotle defines it. But we must ask if they are right in general and, in particular, if their conclusion is accurate as far as we are personally concerned. We each need to ask ourselves, When am I truly in the zone? How can I get there more often? How can I organize my life so I can be in the zone as I grow older? These questions are not easy, but they are important. Particularly in our fifties, we need to know if Aristotle is correct that the true source of happiness is the development of what is best in us. For if he is wrong, we need to identify the actual source before it is too late.
The burden of proof is on Aristotle because most of our experience tells us he is wrong. We remember what a drag it was trying to learn calculus in high school, so how can any sound-minded person conclude that using our brains is the source of happiness? Aristotle does not dismiss such doubts, nor does he discount the powerful sources of resistance to his notion of happiness. He will grant that contemplation doesn’t sound like much fun and will concede that we do find pleasure playing golf, and do find it easier to coast in idle than to engage our minds. And he acknowledges that we have the right to say, “Leave me alone. I know what makes me happy (and it’s not heavy lifting in the library).” But, as the bumper sticker says, we shouldn’t believe everything we think. Aristotle says we will no longer be satisfied with frivolous activities once we fully understand how true happiness derives from serious contemplation.
That’s what I learned about the pursuit of happiness from rereading Aristotle. But, of course, that isn’t what most of us believe, and it isn’t the way most of us live.