7
7IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, AT LEAST NOT EASY, TO DO NOBLE ACTS IF ONE IS UNEQUIPPED. IN MANY ACTIONS WE TAKE, FRIENDS, WEALTH, AND POLITICAL POWER SERVE AS THAT INSTRUMENTAL “EQUIPMENT.” FURTHERMORE, THE LACK OF CERTAIN INSTRUMENTAL GOODS—SUCH AS BEING BORN TO SUCCESSFUL PARENTS, HAVING GOOD CHILDREN AND GOOD LOOKS—WILL TAKE THE LUSTER OFF OUR EFFORTS TO FIND HAPPINESS. FOR ONE WHO IS EXTREMELY UGLY IN APPEARANCE, ILL-BORN, SOLITARY, OR CHILDLESS IS NOT LIKELY TO BE HAPPY. AND HE IS STILL LESS SO IF HE HAS EXTREMELY BAD CHILDREN OR BAD FRIENDS, OR IF HE LOST GOOD CHILDREN AND FRIENDS BY THEIR EARLY DEATH.
While rereading Aristotle, I reached the point where I was ready to take on a subject more concrete than virtue. I was relieved to discover that he has a lot to say about a host of practical subjects ranging from leadership to philanthropy to business partnerships. I don’t know why I had never noticed this before or why these ideas seem not to be cited in textbooks, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a practical side to the Ancient I hadn’t been aware of. In fact, if it is utopia you’re after, read Plato. Or if you think the material world is just an illusion, dip into the writings of the 18th-century philosopher Bishop Berkeley. Aristotle, in contrast, ultimately leads you to what is practical and real. For example, he asks how likely it is you will be happy if you are (a) born into wretched poverty, (b) so ugly you can’t find a mate, (c) cursed with having thoroughly bad children, or (d) left alone because your good friends or children have died young? He says, no matter whatever else you might have, if you’ve got those woes, finding happiness won’t be easy.
His positive scenario for happiness is equally nonidealistic and down to earth. He knows that practical people won’t pursue a vision of the good life if it strikes them as abstract, unattainable, or unattractive. He understands that the only goals sensible men and women will pursue are familiar, attainable, and desirable. For most of us, those goals include a modicum of wealth, honor, health, family, love, friends, and, perhaps, good looks. Such instrumental goods can give anyone an advantage in the pursuit of happiness, as scions of the Rockefeller and Kennedy families demonstrate. Although those who come from the right families—those with wealth, powerful friends, and attractive children—have a leg up in the pursuit of happiness, those goods are not sufficient, as many a Kennedy and Rockefeller has shown. Nor are such inheritances necessary, as countless self-made Horatio Algers have demonstrated. Thus, the items on Aristotle’s list of instrumental goods are nice-to-haves, but they affect happiness most significantly when they are absent from our lives rather than when present. However …
Aristotle says everybody needs good luck.
Many things happen through fortune, differing in the size of their impact: among those with good fortune there are small things, and these obviously do not affect the scales of life. But when many great things turn out well they will make life more blessed, for by their nature they add adornment, and one’s use of them turns out to be fine and excellent. But if they turn out the opposite way, they reduce and destroy blessedness, for they bring pain and impede many activities.
If we lose our wealth, or contract cancer, or our children die, it is hard to be happy. Aristotle knows firsthand about Dame Fortune’s fickle finger: Having buried a young wife, he is sensitive to the fragility and contingency of happiness. He is no Stoic. He recognizes that if a loved one dies, it hurts deeply, and you are diminished by the loss. Depending on circumstances, you may never again be completely happy. Conversely, good luck is always a boon, even to virtuous people.
But Aristotle also recognizes that good luck, in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily bring happiness. If it did, there wouldn’t be those stories about miserable lottery winners. In Aristotle’s view, what matters is how one uses good fortune. Luck may be necessary, but it is no substitute for virtue (somehow Aristotle manages to sneak virtue into a discussion of luck!). He says we all need enough good fortune to provide the financial freedom to decide how to conduct our lives, but we still must choose to pursue the good. Moreover, virtue can offer some security in the event of misfortune: Cyclist Lance Armstrong possessed the virtues needed to cope with the misfortune of life-threatening cancer, and Galileo’s dedication to the highest good enabled him to brave misfortunes in his old age that would have been debilitating to most people.
Aristotle wonders about the extent to which we make our own fortunes. He sees examples of dumb luck: the equivalent of the village idiot who wins the lottery or today’s employee of average intelligence who is in the right job at the right time and is granted valuable stock options. Similarly, he puzzles over why fortune will smile on only one of several equally talented individuals. Numerous explanations are offered to explain that frequently observed occurrence: “Some people are naturally lucky,” “people get what they deserve,” and “life is a craps game.” All things being equal, Aristotle goes with the latter explanation. Bad people, stupid people, mindless people, and lazy people may benefit from blind luck and win lotteries; good, smart, morally deliberative, and hardworking people may get struck with bad luck, lose spouses, have strokes, and see their wealth stolen from them.
Yet there are times when we make our own fortune or misfortune. In terms of doing the right thing morally, chance favors the prepared mind. A chronic adulterer might get lucky and never be caught in the act, but a faithful spouse runs no risk of such embarrassment. So, in some ways, we can control our fates. Through use of reason, we can choose to do things that are likely to lead to happiness and not do things that have a high probability of making us unhappy. The outcome isn’t guaranteed, but such reasoning greatly increases the odds in our favor.
But no matter how lucky a morally lazy person may be, he or she has no chance of finding true happiness as Aristotle defines it. We confirm this by observing what happens when people with bad moral habits win the lottery and by reference to individuals who get rich through hard work but are morally unprepared for their success. So Aristotle concludes that luck is a necessary, if insufficient, requirement for happiness. But as important as luck is, it is no substitute for the highest of all instrumental goods.
“Without friends, no one would choose to live even though he had all other goods,” Aristotle writes, adding that a virtuous person “does many acts for the sake of his friends and country and, if necessary, dies for them.” Aristotle’s strong views on friendship might come as somewhat surprising, particularly in light of what he calls the “highest good”: the development of one’s own individual potential. As individual development seems such a relatively self-sufficient activity, we might think Aristotle’s good life would be a solo affair. But his advocacy of contemplation doesn’t mean he favors isolation, monasticism, or ascetic retreat. He is no advocate of rugged or any other form of individualism; he is, instead, a communitarian. Although self-development is the “highest good,” he reminds us that it is not the “complete good.” To achieve completeness, we must be fully contributing members of a community. We develop our individual abilities not for selfish ends but because others benefit when we do so. To Aristotle, friendship is the bond in all human relationships, from the family through the community to the state: “Friendship seems to hold states together.” This makes sense when we recall that Aristotle believes humans are “political animals” who, as members of a community, are all “friends,” conscious of each other and solicitous of the desires and concerns of others.
To Aristotle, the cardinal virtue of friendship is a broad category including relationships in one’s community, in political life, and at work. Ideally, one’s spouse and children are also one’s friends. The Greek word for friendship, philia, means “affection for one’s associates,” as in Philadelphia, “the city of brotherly love.” Aristotle has strong opinions about the depth of affection one should have for, and how broadly one should define the category of, one’s associates. Indeed, it is jarring when reading Aristotle for the first time to find that he applies the same Greek word for love to the various relationships of husband and wife, parents and children, leaders and followers, as well as to relationships among friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Yet, Jesus Christ spoke of love in the same broad way 400 years after Aristotle.
Aristotle says the essence of virtuous friendship is selflessness: With a true friend, “we wish what is good for his sake.” But not all friendships are selfless and virtuous. Some are based on pleasure. Young people, in particular, seek pleasant relationships. They say, “Charlie’s my friend because he’s fun to be around.” And many adult friendships, particularly business relationships, are based on utility. In friendships based on pleasure or utility, the individuals involved wish for what is good for themselves and not what is good for their friends. Aristotle says such relationships are fragile: “Those who are friends for the sake of utility part when the advantage is at an end, for they were lovers not of each other but of profit.” He says that problems also arise in friendships when participants have dissimilar purposes for the relationship: for example, when one party loves the other virtuously, and the other sees the relationship solely in terms of utility. Such friendships are doomed to bad ends, as when we seek to be friends with famous or powerful people, hoping to have some of their honor rub off on us. There is neither virtue nor stability in such relationships.
True friendships, Aristotle asserts, are characterized by permanence, deep familiarity, frequency of interaction, and generosity. It helps if friends have similar interests, tastes, and desires, although they needn’t agree on everything. The minds of virtuous friends need be in accord only on basic values and ends, on what the good life entails. Aristotle says you have to be virtuous to be a good friend, for such a friend will “desire the good for the other.” In contrast, bad people have trouble keeping friends; they come into conflict and competition with others because they seek “more” for themselves. Ultimately, friendships are based on trust, the test of which is the conviction of each friend that the other “would never wrong me.”
Equality is often but not always a characteristic of friendship. Similarity of age helps to build friendship because of the inherent equality of such relationships. Because young people are almost always unequal beneficiaries in relationships with elders, as in mentoring relationships, few young people are true friends with those who are far older; such relationships serve the utility of the younger. Indeed, when relationships are inherently unequal, as with parent and child, Aristotle says the one who has more power gives (loves) more. Likewise, when good people are in positions of authority, as leaders and bosses, they give more than they get in return. A good leader “will look not to his own interests but to those of his subjects,” and a “tyrant pursues his own good.” Thus, the degree of virtue in the utilitarian relationship between leaders and followers “depends on an excess of benefits conferred” upon the latter.
Aristotle says friends are indispensable. We need them because we aren’t gods who can get through life alone, sitting in perfect contemplation. Instead, we are animals who, by nature, live in groups and need other people for purposes of survival. Practical work activities require social cooperation. But we also need friends for higher purposes because humans are “political animals,” as well, with the quasi-divine capacity for speech. To Aristotle, speech is the outward manifestation of our reasoning capabilities, the purpose of which is to enable us to participate with others in political deliberations. Because politics is part of our nature, we have a moral obligation to engage with others, to participate in our own governance, and to share in collective deliberations about what is right and just for all members of our community. Thus, to govern best, we need virtuous friends with whom we come together to discuss the well-being of all members of the organization or system in which we participate. Such discussions are bridges between philosophy and politics, between thought and action, between the highest good (our personal moral development) and the complete good (creating justice in our community).
In such discussions, friends are also instrumental to our happiness. As we have seen, to gain wisdom one must devote considerable time and effort to discover what is good, just, and true for oneself. Each of us has to learn to “see aright.” Because Aristotle believes that people, collectively, have a sense in common of what is good and bad and right and wrong, it is therefore useful to partake with others in our moral development. Friends are invaluable sources of right desire. We learn from friends through moral deliberation and discussion, and through them are better able to be ethical and virtuous than if we are socially isolated.
Humans become excellent, Aristotle says, when we learn to reflect on moral experience. He adds that we often do this best with help from our friends. In particular, friends help us overcome our lack of self-discipline. The biggest obstacles on the road to happiness are the distractions of apparent goods, distracting pleasures that cause us to lose sight of our real goals. Friends help us to stay on the high road, help us to habituate ourselves to pursuing the good. So it helps to have friends who are predisposed to virtue. Instead of saying, “Let’s go to our local tavern for a brew,” true friends will engage us in virtuous thoughts and activities. Aristotle says it’s easier to resist temptations to go to the pub if your friends aren’t interested in getting sloshed.
This is a not-so-subtle critique of the symposia, or drinking parties, frequented by Socrates and Plato. At those events, friends seeking pleasure would gather at a watering hole where the first business of the evening was deciding the degree to which their wine would be diluted; if they drank it without any water, everyone would get so drunk that there was little hope of serious conversation. Aristotle thinks wine always should be extremely watered down. He acknowledges that friends find pleasure sharing “bodily delights,” but he adds that they find the greatest pleasure in sharing their virtue. The pleasure found in sharing a bottle of wine with friends is not getting plastered but, instead, the intellectual and moral benefits of good company. In all cases, he says that those higher pleasures of drinking with others far outweigh the apparent pleasure of drinking alone.
As my teacher, Mortimer Adler, never tired of reminding his students, Aristotle believes “reading alone is as bad as drinking alone.” That’s because Aristotle believes “life in common is … knowledge in common.” Although the task of pure contemplation can be done alone, the virtuous person “can perhaps do so better if he has fellow workers.” Aristotle suggests that conversations among equals over dinner can be profound learning experiences because, in such settings, we are willing to share our insights, take intellectual risks, and try out ideas whether fully baked or not. Hence, friends are necessary for the life of the mind because they act as sounding boards and critics of our bright ideas. That’s why our best friends will be equals, people who are not reluctant to tell us when we are all wet or when we’re slightly damp.
In this regard, Aristotle says we see ourselves most clearly through the eyes of others: “We can contemplate our neighbors better than ourselves, and their actions better than our own.” We see the vices and virtues of others more clearly than we can see our own; and they, likewise, can see us better than they can see themselves. We learn what not to do when we watch friends screw up, and we learn the ways and rewards of virtue when we observe them behave well. Because so many of the choices people make are unconsciously self-destructive to happiness, a priceless value of friendship is that friends provide mutual mirrors in which they can see each other’s actions, thus helping each other to avoid the pitfalls of denial and self-deceit. Consequently, a requisite of happiness is having friends who wish to be in a candid, sharing, intimate relationship:
So the happy person needs to be conscious of the existence of his friends, and this will come about through their living together and sharing in discussion and thought; for this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of humans, not just browsing together side by side like cattle.
If we need such good friends, how many should we have? Aristotle answers, “as many as are sufficient for living together … sharing in discussion and thought.” We need as many friends as can be close enough to have shared interests and can trust enough to engage in deep discussions. The number of virtuous relationships is thus limited by the bounds of intimacy: How many people can you really know who can know you well in return? A person with “thousands of friends” is probably a person with no true friends. Or, if one is like Hugh Hefner, there is no limit to the number of “friends” one can use because they are being used for purposes of pleasure, not virtue.
Although the number of true friends is limited, Aristotle says it is probably insufficient to have only one because that overly limits the range of ideas and perspectives to which one is exposed. A person with only a single friend may not be willing to really have anyone challenge his ideas. Moreover, such a guarded person probably lacks the virtue of trust. In the end, Aristotle tells us that the right amount of friends is the number that most fosters our development. If we are always in a crowd, we will not have sufficient occasion to read and to contemplate; if we are always alone, we will never test our ideas, and we will not contribute to society. So how much time should we spend alone and how much time with friends? Again, the trick is finding the right balance: as much time in each activity as needed to maximize our self-development and our contribution to the community.
In sum, Aristotle says, “Virtuous friends are the greatest of external goods.” We need them in times of adversity (for support) and when things are going well (to share our good fortune). A virtuous person will not turn to friends only when he is in trouble, because that transforms the nature of the relationship into one of utility. Moreover, virtuous people recognize that they need friends when fortune is kind, because they need others on whom to bestow the benefits of their wealth and power in order to ennoble those goods. He tells us we cannot be virtuous if we horde such goods, use them for selfish purposes, or use them merely as instruments to gain “more.” We need friends to be the recipients of our good fortune; in effect, they are the objects of our virtue. Aristotle concludes that humans are social animals who need others; and, therefore, the person “who stands alone is a beast or a god.”
After reading Aristotle on friendship, it clicked in my head in the middle of the night that I had basically been a loner all my life, and perhaps that accounted for some of my unhappiness and for the difficulties I was having breaking bad habits and learning to enjoy more virtuous ones. I remembered what the sports writer Jim Murray once said of Kareem Abdul Jabbar: “No man is an island, but Kareen gave it a shot.” Perhaps not coincidentally, at the time of this insight, I had been reading about and even teaching about the merits of group over individual organizational leadership. My colleague and mentor, Warren Bennis, had cowritten a fine book, Great Groups, in which he and David Heenan described several dissimilar circles of “friends,” all of which had in common the importance of the group to the success of its individual members. He cited such diverse examples as Walt Disney’s early studio and the group of scientists at Los Alamos who created the atomic bomb. I also had read Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, in which he showed that the pragmatic American way of looking at the world, among both left- and right-wing thinkers, was developed by a “school” of friends in the era following the Civil War. All of this is in keeping with the thesis of Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies, which argues that, almost without exception, all major thinkers and innovators throughout history have been members of movements of friends (and friendly rivals), from neo-Confucianism to German Idealism to French Impressionism. That thesis is further supported by Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, which deals with an 18th-century circle of friends including such noted inventors, scientists, and industrial innovators as Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestly, and Erasmus Darwin, who formed a kind of Aristotelian intellectual support group, encouraging each other and acting as sounding boards for the others’ ideas. Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live from New York recounts how the early Saturday Night Live cast of Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and Bill Murray were a close-knit group of friends who got by (and high) together. The more I read and thought about it, the “path-breaking” loner was a myth; and almost all the great philosophers, artists, writers, and religious thinkers had been a part of some group of friends, mentors, and disciples.
Friendship turns out to be yet another subject on which modern social science has reinvented Aristotle. Economist Richard Easterlin’s data demonstrates that earning more money doesn’t make people happier, but spending quality time with friends and loved ones does; and psychologist Sonja Lyubormisky’s research shows that happy people have more friends. In The Pursuit of Happiness, David Myer cites data correlating strong friendships with individual self-esteem and career satisfaction. Echoing Aristotle, he uses the methods of social science to show that “We humans are made to belong.” And, like Kareem, I was trying to go it alone!
Although I had been teaching the merits of shared leadership, I wasn’t getting much traction with the notion among business executives. Indeed, the successful business leaders with whom I worked almost all subscribed to the belief that leadership is, by necessity, a lonely activity, a singular noun. Moreover, the dominant view among scholars in the field of leadership studies is that leadership is a one-person show. Plato had called it “a rare trait typically possessed by only one person” in any society, an individual with a unique lock on wisdom and truth.
Aristotle wrote Politics to refute his teacher. He thought Plato’s view led to ineffective leadership at best, tyranny at worst. Because wisdom is never the sole province of one person, Aristotle argued that a good society would share leadership as broadly as possible, instead of concentrating power in the hands of a single person, no matter how smart or virtuous he or she might be. But Aristotle’s arguments fell on deaf ears because Plato’s view coincided with the kind of leadership most people saw in practice: one-man rule. Indeed, Aristotle’s concept of shared leadership seems counterintuitive: For most of history and in most places, leadership has seemed to be an individual trait and activity.
But is it really? When we speak of leadership, the likes of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. spring to mind. Yet, in fact, during the struggle for Indian independence, Gandhi was surrounded and supported by dozens of other great leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, without whose joint efforts Gandhi almost certainly would have failed. Lest we forget, far from doing it all himself, King’s disciples included such impressive leaders in their own right as Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, Coretta Scott King, and Ralph Abernathy. As with Gandhi and King, ditto Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington: Almost every great leader throughout history has listened to and shared power with “friends.” When the facts are assembled, even the most fabled “solitary” leaders were supported by a team of other effective leaders. In his youth, Winston Churchill read the Ethics and consciously modeled his proclivity for shared leadership along Aristotelian lines.
In the business world, American corporations are often portrayed as shadows of the “great men” who sit in chief executive chairs. Fortune magazine cover stories are more likely to be about Jack Welch or Bill Gates than about GE or Microsoft. Business schools dutifully conform to the common wisdom: Leadership is studied and taught by focusing on the characters, biographies, and “charisma” of a single leader—the CEO. If team concepts are discussed at all, it is not in leadership courses. In terms of best practices, it is assumed a single person must be held accountable for the performance of a corporation and for each of its subsets. This individual focus isn’t always wrong; rather, it blinds young executives to the existence of other models and causes them to discount the many examples of shared leadership running counter to received wisdom. Worse, it causes them to miss out on the value of having friends who can provide the all-important mirror reflection on themselves.
Aristotle identifies the main benefit of shared leadership: No one individual, no matter how gifted, can be right all the time. As the past CEO of Champion Paper, Richard Olson, explains, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” In large corporations, there is simply too much work for one person, and no one individual is likely to have all the skills needed to do it all. History shows that businesses dependent on a single leader run considerable risk: If that individual retires, leaves, or dies in office, the organization may lose its continuing capacity to succeed. Witness the performance of General Motors after Alfred Sloan, ITT after Harold Geneen, and Polaroid after Edwin Land.
Amana Corporation’s chief executive, Paul Staman, recently explained the benefits of shared leadership: “It allows more time for leaders to spend in the field; it creates an internal dynamic in which the leaders constantly challenge each other to higher levels of performance; it encourages a shared leadership mindset at all levels of the company; it prevents the trauma of transition that occurs in organizations when a strong CEO suddenly leaves.” Significantly, Staman is one of four coleaders at Amana. When Amana’s Gang of Four are asked what makes their unusual arrangement work, they identify an Aristotelian “shared set of guiding principles, and a team in which each member is able to set aside ego and ‘what’s in it for me’ thinking.” That’s what the Ancient has in mind when he talks about friendship being selfless.
The practice of shared leadership, though rare, is not new. Despite broadly held views to the contrary, history provides successful examples of shared political power. In its declining years, the Roman Empire was ruled by two “caesars,” one in Milan, the other in Constantinople. In imperial China, real power was wielded not by the person on the throne but by the meritocratic Mandarin class of leaders. And there are examples of shared leadership in major U.S. corporations, as well. The aura of high-profile operators like Jack Welch and Harold Geneen causes the general public to believe that leadership is an aria sung by a prima donna, obscuring the famous duets of the business world sung by HP’s William Hewlett and David Packard, and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Charles Munger. Intel has been run by leadership teams from day one. Various combinations of “friends”—Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andrew Grove, and Craig Barrett—have shared leadership roles, offering constructive criticism much in the way Aristotle describes.
If Aristotle is right about this, why do so many American businesspeople try to go it alone? For example, after driving Oracle’s chief executive, Ray Lane, out of the company, Larry Ellison began to centralize his control of the organization, transforming the nature of its leadership more and more into a one-man show. This is paradoxical because, questions of virtue aside, Ellison’s behavior seems self-defeating in terms of his own goals. The business press in 2002 was full of reports that investors were growing wary of owning Oracle stock because of his increasingly one-man rule. Ellison seems unaware that his stand-alone posture causes some observers to say he identifies with the gods! Why has Ellison done so? We cannot know his motivations, but we do know that talented, successful people often subscribe to the myth that they are, by nature, self-sufficient. In fact, such people often believe they have no choice but to stand alone. To them, good, trustworthy friends are nearly impossible to find.
How and where can one find the depth and breadth of friendship Aristotle found during his formative years in Macedonia? Because communities of virtuous friends are unlikely to form naturally in modern, impersonal societies, they must be sought out or, failing that, created. For example, between 1950 and 1996, groups of 15 to 20 professional men and women would gather at the Aspen Institute for 2-week seminars created by Mortimer Adler to replicate the Aristotelian model of virtuous friendship to the extent possible and practical. Participants were typically in their late forties to early fifties, roughly Aristotle’s age when he found his own community of friends. They read philosophical, political, and literary texts and discussed their relevance to creating a good life for themselves and a good society for others. Because the seminarians were away from work and other distractions, they were able to focus on what each other had to say, learning to listen carefully in a way that is unusual among busy folk today. They met in the mornings to formally discuss the readings, then spent afternoons and evenings in informal discussions during hikes and over meals. The seminars were not touchy-feely therapy groups; nonetheless, honest and close relationships were formed that often lasted long beyond the end of the seminar. One group continues to meet annually to refresh themselves some 25 years after their first trip to Aspen.
Although such seminars may sound like the pastime of retirees, dilettantes, and humanists, in fact busy professionals not only can engage in them, they can benefit greatly from interactions with others from different backgrounds. For example, contemporary Aristotelian David Eisenberg is a distinguished professor of biology at UCLA, a true scholar who publishes in his field’s top journals. Yet he doesn’t let the narrowing demands of academe prevent him from becoming truly learned and, then, applying his learning to the needs of the broader society. He is a first-rate teacher at a research university not known for its undergraduate teaching and is actively involved as a leader in LA’s cultural and political life. David is also the founder of a high-tech startup company and a serious bike rider (in his fifties, he and his daughter pedaled across the breadth of the entire United States). He and his wife, Lucy, a successful lawyer, not only read novels and serious nonfiction, they discuss them in “salons” they host for their Aristotelian “friends”—professionals, politicians, and scholars. The Eisenbergs’ example illustrates how seminars, study groups, reading clubs, literary salons, and the like can be designed to meet the need identified by Aristotle for friends to engage in collective deliberation. Indeed, I wonder how many readers of this book are regular members of such “good groups.”
There is no reason to wait until one is middle-aged to join a circle of virtuous friends. The stated purpose of the Henry Crown Fellowship program is to help high-potential business leaders in their thirties and forties to develop their leadership skills and to encourage them to ask Aristotelian questions about community service while still young enough to pursue the complete good in the middle of their professional careers. Each class of Crown Fellows assembles regularly to read and discuss classic works by the likes of Plato, Locke, Hobbes, and, of course, Aristotle, along with modern texts on leadership and ethics. The seminars afford these busy young leaders the opportunity to think about and discuss what it means to lead the good life. But at a deeper level, the real value of the program is that it allows those who are toooften solo operators to interact rigorously with a group of peers, much as Aristotle did with his friends in Macedonia.
Crown Fellows don’t just talk about their experiences; they work together to find ways to create a good society in their businesses and communities. Each accepts responsibility to initiate a community project under the mentorship of a more experienced leader, then they share with each other what they learned from their efforts. According to program founder and director, Keith Berwick, the Fellows often learn that giving money is relatively easy; they find it much harder to make effective gifts of their time and talents. Indeed, their discussions often turn to the difficulties they experience defining what people in their communities really need. My favorite of these projects was initiated by economist Peter Reiling, CEO of the nonprofit TechnoServe, who started a program to develop leadership skills among entrepreneurial people in Africa.
When I have spoken with some of these young executives, I have found it encouraging that so many of them have a better grasp of the ethics of helping others than do most business leaders of my generation. Crown Fellows are Aristotelians-in-waiting, often citing friends, family, and “making a contribution” as being as important as money in their personal searches for happiness. Here’s how Reiling defined happiness:
For me, the key components of happiness are a strong and happy family, good health, a comfortable but not lavish physical existence, good friends, intellectual stimulation (the ability to pursue my curiosity), and the ability to use the opportunities afforded to me, by luck of birth and circumstances, to help others realize their own potential. Did I mention my 1962 Chevy Impala convertible on a sunny fall day? A heaping pile of Maryland steamed crabs? Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde? Or a hike in the Marin Headlands?
Crown Fellow John Rogers, CEO of Ariel Capital, seeks to lead a life balanced between family, friends, work, sports, and community service: “I measure happiness by the length and quality of friendships, and the measure of that quality is mutual respect.” Unlike many busy executives, Rogers will drop everything in the middle of a workweek to travel out of town to compete in a 3-on-3 basketball tournament. When he stays home, the native Chicagoan serves on four private and four public boards, including the board of commissioners of the Chicago Parks District. He seeks to be an unobtrusive and unselfish civic leader and believes he can be most effective to that end by creating wealth: “Money gives me options I wouldn’t otherwise have.” And Rogers seems to exercise those options often and thoughtfully, as in his creation of the Ariel Education Initiative to provide quality educational options to inner-city kids, including the Ariel Community Academy, a fully-funded primary school. Rogers also has cut all of his employees into the financial action of his investment firm so they, too, can contribute to their community, and they, too, can become virtuous.
Another young business leader, Laurence Belfer, COO of Belco Oil and Gas and cofounder of Harvest Management, a money management firm, also attempts to divide his time meaningfully between work, family, friends, and community activities. For example, he serves on the board of HELP, Housing Enterprise for the Less Privileged, the nation’s largest provider of housing for homeless families, with an annual budget of $40 million. A voracious reader, Belfer says the most important lesson he has learned from books is that happiness is not something to be put off until tomorrow. As he puts it in Aristotelian terms, “Happiness is a journey, not a destination.”
Crown Fellows are neither naturally nor accidentally leading virtuous lives. Aristotle’s point, and the purpose of the Crown Fellowship program, is that it takes conscious effort over a period of years before one can become disciplined to seek the highest and complete goods, and to do so, we need a little help from our friends. The Crown Fellows I’ve interviewed demonstrate that it isn’t necessary to wait until middle age before getting started.
When I took the mid-course examination at the end of the previous chapter, I was pleased to give myself improved grades in terms of my personal development. When lost in the act of writing, I was slipping into “the zone” and, in the process, often was able to forget about my needs for approval. Thanks to Aristotle, I was learning that my personal route to happiness was to scribble, scribble, scribble. But I also saw that I was only halfway there; although I was working on achieving the “highest good,” I was not yet pursuing the “complete good.” How could I effectively address this shortcoming? If a test of the highest good is one’s ability to get into the zone while doing something, what is the comparable test for the complete good? In other words, how would I know if I were engaged in a virtuous activity that entails true friendship? As I furiously leafed through the Ethics trying to find Aristotle’s test of the virtue of activities we engage in with others, it occurred to me that he might say I should begin by asking myself the following kinds of questions:
What activity do I engage in with others that gives me so much pleasure that I lose my intemperate desires in the process?
While engaging in that activity, do I learn moral lessons about myself from observing others?
Is the purpose of the activity “for the sake of others,” for the benefit of friends?
While taking part in this activity, do I apply the fruits of my individual growth to the development of others?
As I tried to answer those questions, I saw that I was missing the kind of friendships Aristotle found when he participated in an intimate relationship with equals who, to their mutual benefit, shared ideas and experiences. In modern society, one might expect to form such friendships at work; but when I thought about it, I had to admit I seldom found such friendship among my university colleagues. In particular, most interactions with individuals from my own discipline amounted simply to work/work and did not involve elements of mutual growth or leisure/work. Worse, professorial meetings often deteriorated into exhibitions of power, ego, and mutual contempt; and academic one-upmanship is not what Aristotle had in mind by friendship. The few rewarding experiences I have had in academia were with individuals from different fields who came together to study a cross-disciplinary problem. Unfortunately, such gatherings don’t occur naturally at large research-based universities, where working outside one’s discipline is associated with dilettantism.
Nonetheless, a few contemporary Aristotelians in the academic community have the courage to create truly developmental activities across departmental boundaries. For instance, English professor Ronald Gottesman is known in his field as an editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and author of numerous books and articles related to literary criticism. But Ron’s friends and students also know him as an expert on cinema (he has written about Orson Wells, Sergei Eisenstein, and King Kong); a clinical psychoanalyst; a lecturer on aesthetics, robotics, jazz, and Native American art; and a consultant to the National Council on Aging and the Walt Disney company (he provided inspiration for the cover of one of their annual reports). He most recently served as editor in chief of the critically acclaimed three-volume encyclopedia, Violence in America.
In 1975, when Ron arrived at the University of Southern California, he put aside his specialized work to found USC’s Center for the Humanities. While other professors were dedicated to careers of reducing useful learning to the point of irrelevance, Ron invited professors not only from the humanities but from the sciences and the professions, as well, to join him in making his center a truly Aristotelian community in which scholars worked together on significant interdisciplinary issues, ranging from business ethics to urban unrest. Outsiders to university life often assume such activities occur on campuses as a matter of course, but in fact Ron had to struggle mightily to overcome opposition from discipline-bound faculty and, especially, narrow-minded administrators who dislike threats to departmentalization. But for the sake of friendship, Ron was willing to bear the cost of such unpopularity. Here’s what Ron said to his colleagues and students on the occasion of his recent retirement:
Hundreds of millions of people the world over are concerned with an economy gone sour. It is to these perplexed and perturbed I wish to speak some words of economic advice: Invest in friends. There is no other instrument that pays such high returns. I figure that I have an average investment ratio of 5 to 1 based on the past 30 years that I have known many of you. Some years I have neglected certain items in my portfolio—neglected to call, to write, to e-mail, to console, to encourage, to hug—to simply say I love you.
I can’t tell you how much I regret this neglect, this all-to-human failure to imitate the dyadic dance that begins at birth and sustains us throughout life. We need each other, but perversely we neglect each other. Every day we have an opportunity to exercise friendship, to make huge returns on a tiny investment, but foolishly we relapse into sleep and forgetting. Please take my advice to heart—forget bonds, forget stocks, forget gold—invest in friendship.
At age 66, Ron left academia to start an online art gallery specializing in Australian Aboriginal art. He understands that if growth for a career businessperson entails adding an element of “the life of the mind,” growth for a career intellectual may mean adding an entrepreneurial element to create a well-balanced life. His students call him an “edupreneur.”
Ron’s courageous efforts to bridge disciplines at USC were contagious: I recall a series of particularly rewarding meetings in the late 1970s with a group of professors from law, engineering, physics, mathematics, business, the humanities, and social sciences who gathered to search for creative solutions to the energy crisis. In the process, I learned a great deal about a broadening range of issues I would never have been exposed to had I stayed comfortably immured in my own academic department. It was then, more than at any other time, that I loved being a professor, loved university life, and laid a foundation of nontraditional learning I have been building on ever since.
I also had gotten into a communal version of the zone at the regular meetings of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, chaired by Mortimer Adler. Clearly, I was in over my head with that distinguished circle of friends, the most remarkable aspect of which was that they listened to each other and felt free to respectfully disagree. As accomplished as they each were in their respective fields, they nonetheless were equals in the group, engaging in a process of mutual teaching and learning. But as great as that experience was, it is impossible for me to recreate it, and it isn’t the kind of friendship most of the businesspeople I deal with on a daily basis would find rewarding. As was I, they would be intimidated.
Indeed, the more I thought about it, the most rewarding groups of friends I have had were the “ordinary” people I met at Aspen seminars. There, I have been fortunate to spend time with men and women, roughly my age, from business, government, labor, and nonprofit organizations who, collectively, shared in the high of mutual intellectual discovery. And it was just such deep human interaction that I found missing from my current life. It also occurred to me that such opportunities are missing, in general, from the lives of most members of my generation. Few of us have places where we can gather in a structured setting with friends our age to discuss issues that matter to us.
So I committed myself to finding a way to interact more often with new friends in a formal way. I soon adopted as my model a group of 10 couples, most in their fifties and sixties, who for the last 5 years have been gathering, once or twice a year for a few days each time, to discuss plays, poems, novels, and other works of art. Led by two remarkable contemporary Aristotelians, Geraldine and Charles Van Doren, this group of true friends has met in culturally stimulating locales in Europe and the United States to engage in shared reflection and renewal. Following the Van Dorens’ example, in the summer of 2004, I joined with author Joan Peters to gather a group of new friends with the intent of working together to write our life plans. We began our effort the way in which I suggested readers should begin thinking about their life plans: by each of us drawing a map of the trajectory of our lives and sharing it with the group.
We then spent most of the next 5 days discussing works of literature that explored the major milestones and landmarks on life’s journey that Aristotle identifies as important. We discussed plays (Euripedes’ Medea, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Miller’s Death of a Salesman), short stories (Joyce’s “The Dead,” Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Hemingway’s “The Big Two-Hearted River”), poems (Shakespeare’s sonnet “like as the waves make toward the pebble shore / So do our minutes hasten to their end,” Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Dickinson’s “I died for beauty”), films (Wild Strawberries, Holiday, The Barbarian Invasions, City Slickers), and books (Iris Origio’s The Merchant of Prato, Simone DeBouvier’s The Second Sex, Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? ). We also found it useful to discuss readings by H. D. Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold about how nature consoles and delights us. In particular, we benefited from discussing Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life, which describes how the couple created a new life apart from urban pressures and modern technology (we decided that wasn’t for us). And it helped us to discuss works that caused us to see the familiar afresh and make the familiar foreign, such as John Berger’s About Looking, Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, Anthony Storr’s Solitude, and Sue Bender’s Plain and Simple. As Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” In discussing these works, we found ourselves raising some profound questions we never had imagined we would be exploring in the company of others:
How important is proving oneself?
Is ambition necessary, or is it a trap?
What is appropriate ambition?
How can art and nature heal us and prepare us for our next adventure?
How can we learn to live bravely in the face of adversity?
What gives coherence to our lives?
When is it time to return to the less practical interests we put aside early in our careers?
What should we now learn to do and to do well?
In trying to answer such questions, we each candidly confirmed that our own pursuits of happiness hadn’t been cakewalks. But we also concluded, in hindsight, that our various struggles, setbacks, and sacrifices were best seen as inescapable potholes and detours on what were ultimately satisfying journeys along the road to maturity. As we each made our ways along that path, we had come to appreciate what T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote, “Old men ought to be explorers.” Middle-age women, too, we found. At the end of the week, we all were able to work more confidently on our life plans and, with a little help from our friends, were able to flesh out the parts of our maps that dealt with our futures. We helped each other to create life plans designed to transport us, in Ron Gottesman’s words, from the youthful activities of accumulation, ambition, and achievement to the satisfying renewal, realization, and redemption of maturity.
Aristotle, a sexist by contemporary standards, nonetheless believes that spouses can be “true friends.” He writes that men and women form natural bonds for the purposes of pleasure (sex) and utility (sharing familial workloads) and that adding the presence of children strengthens those bonds. He says childless couples “part more easily.” He also observes that some marriages go beyond pleasure, utility, and the raising of children to become true friendships. On marriage, Aristotle writes, “This friendship may also be based on virtue if the two parties are good.” If a man and wife have a relationship based on intellectual equality, and if they act out of mutual respect “for the sake of the other,” he concludes that they can become true friends and “will delight in the fact.”
It turns out that Aristotle, often accused of being “all head and no heart,” believes in the possibility of romantic love (within marriage, yet!): “Love is a sort of excess of feeling, and it is the nature of such only to be felt towards one person.” Of course, Aristotle had sown wild oats in his youth; but, by all accounts, he was loving and faithful to his wife, Pythias, and, after her death, to his companion, Herpyllis. There is some evidence that both women helped him to identify the good and to habituate himself to temperance and self-discipline. In the final analysis, that may be why he includes the marriage relationship in his category of friendship, claiming there is nothing more positive one can say about a spouse than that he or she remains a close and true friend throughout one’s life.
Aristotle recognizes that having a bad marriage, like having selfish and ungrateful children, will tarnish an otherwise happy life; nonetheless, he thinks marriage and family are both worth the risk. Although he had made the acquaintance of happy single people and childless couples, on the whole he feels they are at a disadvantage compared with married people, particularly those with kids. He thinks it would be hard to pass his deathbed test with flying colors if one is alone. Experience leads him to conclude that older, single people almost always regret not having found a life partner, and childless people usually regret not having kids, if only for the instrumental good of having someone to care for them in their old age.
But to Aristotle, family members, like all friends, are not merely instrumental goods who serve our needs. We also have responsibilities to them, in particular, to desire what is good for their sake. He says this starts with how we raise our children, what we teach them, and how we model the roles they will someday play. It is through familial interactions that children first see the consequences of right desire and through which they begin to form an ethical conscience, even if it will not be developed fully until long after they leave their parents’ care. We return to some implications of that in subsequent chapters. Modern psychologists, of course, have similar things to say about families, and many of their studies show a correlation between family life and happiness. But again, Aristotle isn’t concerned about whether or not we “feel good” about our families. Instead, he wants us each to ponder the question: “What role does a family play in a complete life well led?”
Among contemporary men and women who, in my reckoning, live Aristotelian lives, some are rich, others not, some are well educated, others not, some are Republicans and some Democrats, and some are very religious while others are not religious at all. Of those defining characteristics, religion is the most problematic. It might appear that religion fulfills exactly the same ethical role as philosophy, and, if so, one could find virtue and happiness simply through religion and skip the intellectual work involved in philosophical analysis. Indeed, we have noted the compatibility of Aristotle’s thinking with the ethical precepts of monotheism that led early Moslem and Christian scholars to adapt his teachings to the tenets of their respective religions. Moreover, his writings are compatible with the new religious ideas of his own era—Zoroastrian, Confucian, and especially Buddhist. With regard to his “Way of Practical Attainment,” the Buddha taught, “A man is foolish to desire privileges, promotion, profits, or honor, for such desires can never bring happiness but will bring suffering instead,” which, in language and intent, is almost identical to what Aristotle teaches a hundred or so years after Siddhartha Gautama’s death. Moreover, the general consistency of Aristotelian and Buddhist thinking is apparent in the Dalai Lama’s contemporary writings on happiness: In both Buddhism and Confucianism, following the “middle way” of moderation and temperance leads to virtue.
Such similarities also can be noted between Hinduism and Aristotelianism, particularly in the writings of modern Indian sages Swami Vivekananda, J. Krishnamurti, and, of course, M. K. Gandhi. The Bhagavad Gita says Hindus must perform their karma (duty) in line with their dharma (moral philosophy governing all actions to do good) and do so to the very best of their abilities without reference to whatever rewards may follow. In other words, Hindus must act not for praise, honor, money, or public opinion. Their actions and the logic behind those actions should be reason enough to perform at the very highest level their minds, bodies, and souls can deliver. Dharma is, it seems, akin to virtue, and the Aristotelian lesson of the Gita is that it is morally fraudulent to do something, even the right thing, for the wrong reason.
Thus, one can be an Aristotelian and also be a believing Buddhist, Christian, Moslem, Hindu, or Jew. (In Chapter 10, we see how Aristotle’s thoughts are consistent with a bit of Judaic theology.) Yet one also can be an Aristotelian and, at the same time, unreligious and nonbelieving. That’s because Aristotle was a philosopher and not a prophet or priest. In the final analysis, religion is based on faith and philosophy on reason. The two paths to finding meaning may end up in the same place, but their methods are distinct and shouldn’t be confused. It is enough for the Buddha to assert that greed is a vice; it is necessary for Aristotle to demonstrate that it is so. And the act of moral reasoning is not the same as obeying a religious precept. In sum, religion is no more a substitute for philosophy than philosophy is a substitute for religion. Aristotle found the two to be necessary, instrumental goods in his own virtuous life.