The Good Life: Aristotle and the Moderns
It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the true function of man. It is proved to be so by man’s finding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or art; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, “The Function of Criticism”
[S]omeday, not too long from now, you will gradually become old and be cleared away.… Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
STEVE JOBS, Stanford University commencement
CHAMPIONS OF CORPORATISM AND THE NEW CORPORATISM have all thought in materialist terms—in terms of inefficiencies in production, wasteful unemployment, and costly fluctuations. Conventional champions of capitalism did too. The corporatists argued that the corporatist system was superior in these terms to the modern-capitalist system. They said the system would generally deliver higher productivity, less waste from unemployment, and, thanks to job protection, greater stability in individuals’ wealth, wages, and employment. In fact, the performances in these terms of the relatively well-functioning corporatist economies has proved at best roughly comparable to that of the relatively well-functioning modern capitalist economies in the last decades of the 20th century. To choose between the two systems we have to move on from the materialist perspective of classical political economy. The many words of praise here for modern capitalism tend to emphasize non material rewards: the stir of challenges, the satisfactions of testing and exploring, and the thrill of success. Exemplars of a well-functioning modern capitalism are seen as offering participants opportunity to find lives of sufficient richness, self-expression, and personal development. Corporatism is seen as a chilling doctrine that, in protecting people from each other, would stifle creativity, block initiative, and penalize nonconformism.
It is the strong dynamism of a well-functioning modern economy that accounts for its distinctive rewards. The engagement in its processes is its own reward—the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown. Of course, there are by-products—the transience of the work, the precariousness of the profit, the likelihood of failed attempts and even ultimate failure; also, the possibility of being defrauded or conned. These rewards and hazards are the pluses and minuses of the modern economy.
Present-day corporatists can reply that their system also brings good feelings and experiences—solidarity, security, and industrial peace. They constantly suggest that these are basic to a good society. Hence, the human significance of the rewards and the hazards of the modern economy have to be understood and appreciated to have a sense of the desirability or appeal of the modern economy—relative to a corporatist economy or any other sort. (Some say—many Marxists, though not Marx himself—that the nonmaterial matters little, if at all.) There can be no justification of a well-functioning modern capitalism if people do not want what it is good at offering. So there are fundamental questions that are logically prior to questions of what could be done and would be worth doing in America to reverse the decline of dynamism, to which the decline of job satisfaction and other recent malfunctions are arguably linked—questions that must take precedence to matters of fine-tuning, such as banking reform and the income tax schedule.
This chapter takes up the question: Which of the two sorts of economic systems would a person want for himself or herself: the concerted system for solidarity and the rest or the individualist system for exploration and all that? The system for protection or the system for dynamism? Have people long wanted the modern life, since even the dawn of modernity, and before it? (Other fundamental questions having to do with diversity and equity are the subject of the next chapter.) Are there higher dimensions of performance—dimensions of a good life—in which an economy must perform well to be deemed a good economy?
Questions of the “good economy” and the “good life” it serves are not familiar ground in political economy. As others have complained, socialist thought—the left—does not convey a conception of the desirable economic life—a life that socialists believed their preferred system would be best suited to serve. It sees every economy as a sausage machine, simply linking the hours the workers put in to the sausage that comes out—with close attention paid to how the output is divided among the workers. Corporatist thought has no truck with the good life of the individual either, focusing instead on national output and social harmony through “concertation,” social insurance for spreading wealth, and a cultivated spirit of solidarity.
The trouble with those latter perspectives on economic systems is that they overlook or deny the importance of the means to the ostensible ends—the processes and character of the economic system by which each day products are produced and jobs created. The means have consequences beyond the materialist results. Choosing one of the relatively modern economies spells differing pathways and resulting experiences, thus a string of modern rewards and hazards.
It may be asked what hope there is of arriving at a well-considered and widely agreed conception of the good life in view of the differences in what nations and generations chose. Nineteenth-century America drew boatloads of people with hopes of “making it” in new ventures and enterprises, while others chose to remain in Europe. By the end of the century the boatloads seemed more interested in corporatist and socialist practices, such as unionizing and raiding the profits. By the second half of the 20th century, people everywhere spoke of marshaling resources to solve the “real problems” of society. But changing choices do not necessarily signify changing values. It may be that the seemingly new wants are, in most cases, the creature of new conditions or a new capacity, as with those resulting from increased wealth or greater democracy. In recent decades, more and more people say they wish for a level of economic security not dreamt of a century ago. But these wishes have not taken into account a society’s adopting a system that, intentionally or not, slows down change. In judging the rival economic systems in the “economically advanced” countries of the 21st century, the right criteria are people’s fundamental, well-considered aspirations.
The humanities—especially philosophy and literature, but more recently psychology too—have things to say about the deepest desires and rewards. Over the millennia, humanists have thought about the ways of life that give the deepest, most lasting satisfaction, and they have accumulated several arresting insights. Their insights into the good life help us understand how an enterprising and innovative kind of economy began to sprout up once countries could afford it. (Just pointing to the falling away of restraints is not sufficient.) These insights take us a long way toward a justification for a society’s support of an entrepreneurial, innovative economy. If political economy does not learn what the humanities have to teach, it will be the poorer for that: It will continue to be unequipped to deliver the winning argument in the re-emerging debate over the modern economy.
The Humanist Concept of a Good Life
The concept of the good life—the idea of such a thing—starts with Aristotle.1 It means the sort of life that people, on reflection, would choose to the extent feasible—after non-elective goods such as food and shelter are obtained. In his book Nicomachean Ethics, which has a large readership to this day, he contrasts ways of life that are just means to an end with the good life, which is not a means to some end but rather an end in itself—lived for its own sake.2 To paraphrase his argument: people need food (by producing it or trading domestic products to get foreign food) as a means to energy, need energy as a means to build shelter and sheds, need those as a means to protect oneself and one’s produce against wet and cold, and so forth. Every final good—gourmet cuisine, haute couture, bel canto opera—is the end-point of a program or activity. Aristotle is interested in the ranking of the various “activities,” each culminating in some kind of final good. Aristotle credits to thoughtful people a sense of what the “highest good” is. His aim is to explain, or interpret, the ranking—at least the ranking that thoughtful, serious people exhibit with the life choices they make.
Aristotle recognizes that a certain amount of “moneymaking” is “forced” on society (1096a). This recognition might suggest he believes the good life is affordable only to an elite. He implies that, in his time, it was not within the reach of the less fortunate. But he never says—nor is there any reason to believe—that the good life will never be accessible at the bottom rungs of society. Aristotle also notes that slaves generally had slavery forced on them—his own teacher, Plato, might have been sold into slavery—so there is no basis for inferring that they lacked an innate desire or capacity for the highest good.
Aristotle implies that pursuit of the “good” by a person making his entire life on a deserted island, even a rich island, would not compare, generally speaking, to pursuit of the good “in cities”—in a society, in other words. Thus he recognizes the many interactions and complementarities at the level of ideas among people in a society. As a consequence, a society needs to decide what the good life consists of in choosing the economic institutions to support and the culture to transmit in school. Thus, “we should try to grasp, in outline at any rate, what the good is” (1094b). This insight exposes a weakness in the competing libertarian idea that the good life is one of freedom. There could be societies in which there is total freedom but a culture of crime, promiscuity, or drugs makes most if not all people unhappy.
Some of Aristotle’s finest passages are about what the good life is not. It is not doing the politically correct thing. That may be the objective of politicians, he says, but “it appears to be too superficial to be what we are seeking, for it seems to depend more on those who honor than on the one honored, whereas we intuitively believe that the good is something of our own and hard to take from us.” Next he argues that the good does not consist of virtues either. We require some virtues to pursue the good life successfully, but virtue is not sufficient in itself: you could be miserable being virtuous if you had no sense of the right track to be on—the one toward your happiness.
There is a way to live that is good for people, then. Whatever the particular conception of the good that a nation or people might have, the good life always means the inner condition, or state of mind and feeling, that people seek in the way they live their lives. (When referring to this state Aristotle uses the Greek word eudaimonia (1095b), the precise meaning of which comes up below.) This idea of the good life conveys a humanist spirit. This is not the idea of a godly life, such as the idea in some religions that men and women have the function of utilizing resources to survive and reproduce themselves in order that another generation might survive and reproduce, and so on over an indefinite future. The difference between the two concepts is the difference between a life of duty to god and a life of value to oneself. In this respect, Aristotle, writing in the 4th century BC, took a position very different from that of the Judaic scholars of the 1300s BC and later clerics.
Lest he be taken for a hedonist, Aristotle hastens to explain that, although the good life is something that humans strive for and find gratifying, a good life is not one of “amusement”: “It would be absurd,” he writes, “if [our] end were amusement and our lifelong efforts and sufferings aimed at amusing ourselves.… We amuse ourselves to relax … so that we can go back to do something serious” (1176b). Perhaps Aristotle is having a bit of fun with his student-age listeners. Surely we do not have to be slaves of the good life. We ought to allow ourselves a night at the opera or the movie house, even when it will not advance our life projects. Besides, you never know. As the work unfolds we may be struck with some insight for use in an as-yet-unknown future.
We see that Aristotle’s subject is the nature of the paths that are right for people. He does not hold that the good life is a life of freedom, as if it does not matter what people do with that freedom. Neither does he constrain the good path to one of the paths that society has already left open to individuals, as if it did not matter to him whether freedom was narrow or wide. (Perhaps Aristotle would have approved every increase in freedom that can be shared by all—every increase that does not constrict anyone else’s freedom. In any case, it was left to Rawls to write that book.)
Aristotle’s Conception of the Good Life
What is Aristotle’s own conception of the good life? In substantive terms, he characterizes it as the pursuit of knowledge. In his words, “[t]he best [thing] is understanding.… This activity is supreme, since understanding is the supreme element in us” (1177a). “Eudaimonia,” he writes, “[derives] from some sort of study.” Study is the “highest good,” he argues, largely because it requires “reason,” and reason is the main faculty that separates human beings from the other animals. He adds that this conception fits with his observation that eudaimonia is not felt by the other animals.3
The thrust of Aristotle’s argument, animals aside, is that, with increases in the ability to understand and the wealth with which to afford it, a person reaches increasingly the more elevated kinds of satisfactions rather than just enjoying more and more of the old ones. The satisfactions from the knowledge accumulated and from the pursuit of knowledge are at the top of the hierarchy of final goods. The higher the income level, the larger is the proportion of expenditure on these elevated pursuits. In this sense, they are the highest good.
The narrowness of the knowledge that Aristotle appears to regard as the “highest good” and whose pursuit is the “supreme activity” is out of tune with modern values. He appears to envision that the knowledge sought by people is solely an end, as distinct from a means, and that the pursuit of knowledge is an ascetic activity, practiced in a cloistered setting, perhaps stimulated by the occasional study group or conversation with a friend—the sort of activity carried on by mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and scholars, such as philosophers and historians. No doubt these narrow views of Aristotle’s derive from the narrowness of his background, having been confined to a world oriented around classical knowledge rather than practical knowledge, and around the classical way of acquiring it—by study.
There is another problem with the thesis in its original form. If the highest good is exclusively knowledge that is not used for anything, a society, as it becomes more and more productive or rich, will devote more and more time to the leisure activity of pursuing such knowledge, which has no commercial value in the marketplace. So the theory predicts that as hourly productivity increases in a country, we will observe at some point little or no further increases in the production and sale of goods—only steady further increases in leisure activity in the pursuit of knowledge. This is precisely the prediction made in the essay by John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1963)—an essay adorable to some and appalling to others. But we do not observe that outcome.4 The puzzle is obviously resolved, though, once we take a broader view of knowledge, and the one or two other things people seek alongside it.
Here we must move on to subsequent thinkers, though Aristotle is never far away.
The Pragmatists and the Good Life
Succeeding philosophers and writers, with no sense of being out of tune with the Aristotelian perspective, have focused on other kinds of knowledge and other kinds of activities in pursuit of such knowledge while bearing in mind Aristotle’s fundamental insights about the hierarchy of desires: the desire for knowledge and the place of knowledge as the most desirable good yet the last to be affordable.
Humanist writers and philosophers after Aristotle have introduced practical knowledge, a good that is definitely not valued just for itself—much of it informal knowledge, which does not make its way into documents. These humanists have also introduced the quite different kinds of activities that are carried on in gaining such knowledge and the worldly contexts in which such knowledge is pursued.
In one group there are the pragmatists—so named because they call attention to the ways that ends are pursued and the value that some ways may have and others may lack. (They are far from “pragmatic” about the pursuit of ends.) The pragmatists focus on knowledge acquired and used for the purposes of producing or acting in some way. People start their working life with a stock of knowledge, of course, and gain much new knowledge in solving the problems that typically arise. To succeed in their work or their business they have to be able to meet its technical demands: problem solving is a factor in one’s success. The considerable knowledge acquired in the process is generally gratifying, no matter that it was not sought for its own sake. It provides a sense of mastery and of standing on one’s own feet.
An early figure in this group is the poet Virgil, who was born of peasant stock in the Po Valley in 70 BC (some 300 years after Aristotle’s birth) and settled in Rome in the age of the emperor Augustus. Virgil’s well-known poem Georgics somehow came to be viewed as a primer on agriculture until fairly recently; but at a deeper level it is an ode to humanity and Roman culture.5 It speaks at length and admiringly of the vast knowledge the farmer acquires and draws upon in plowing, planting trees, tending cattle, and keeping bees. It expresses the farmer’s engagement in this work and his satisfaction at a successful harvest. This poem contains one of Virgil’s immortal lines: Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. (Happy is he who knows the causes of things.)
Voltaire fits well in this group. Writing in late 18th-century France, when the feudal manors were shrinking and opportunities for careers in business were opening up, he conveys the importance of a life of action—of work. As he dramatizes in his apparently imperishable book Candide, the action need not be for social causes or to right wrongs; Voltaire advises us to forget all that. Instead, he suggests that business life could be meaningful and amply rewarding. The stirring and touching finale for sextet and chorus of the musical Candide, composed by Leonard Bernstein with words taken from Voltaire by Stephen Sondheim, manages to condense much of Voltaire’s thought to four lines:
We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house, and chop our wood.
And make our garden grow.
Society, Voltaire is suggesting, lacks the wisdom, expertise, and benevolence to design, operate, and preserve the best of all possible economies. But although we know little about many important things, we can embark on careers, society permitting. All of us can have good lives building our own careers and businesses—and can thus end up with an economy that is good enough. Voltaire urges us to grasp that the knowledge and experiences we draw upon and the knowledge and experiences we gain along the way are likely to make such a life interesting and rewarding. (It is not surprising, then, that French economists were first to see a key role for the entrepreneur.)
In the middle decades of the 20th century closer attention was paid to the nature of the satisfactions deriving from the workplace and to the part played by the individual’s acquisition and use of private knowledge in those satisfactions. A pioneer is John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher and one of the lions of Columbia for decades. Dewey, anticipating Hayek, understands that ordinary workers possess considerable specialized knowledge of use in the course of their work. He emphasizes the human need to exercise this knowledge in problem-solving activity.6 Even the worker of ordinary education can be engaged in and can gain intellectual development from the formation of skills—a type of knowledge—arising from problems that are put to him or her in the workplace—or could be put to him or her if the workplace were desirably organized. Furthermore, Dewey seems also to grasp that each worker is apt to know things the others do not, so that there is a role for the workers sitting around a table working out for themselves the best solution to the problem of the day.7
The psychologist Abraham Maslow in a much-read 1943 paper drew up a hierarchy of human needs, starting with the most basic.8 In this hierarchy, he gives a place to the need to acquire “mastery” of a trade or skill—typically after some apprenticeship. This need comes immediately after the physiological needs at the base and, next up the ladder, security needs. Maslow also recognizes the need for an ongoing process of problem-solving, a process of “self-actualization.”
John Rawls, toward the end of his magisterial work on economic justice, sets out with great clarity the main theme of this literature on the good life—the “Aristotelian perspective,” as he dubbed it.9 One acquires knowledge over a career through the development of one’s “talents,” or “capacities,” which is the essence of one’s self-realization. And this self-realization, or as much of it as we obtain, is the central drive that every one of us has. Rawls’s forcefulness and clarity are on full display in his exposition:
[H]uman beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities) and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized or the greater its complexity.… [It] is a principle of motivation. It accounts for many of our major desires … Moreover, it expresses a psycho logical law governing changes in the pattern of our desires. [It] implies that as a person’s capacities increase over time … and as he trains these capacities and learns how to exercise them, he will in due course come to prefer the more complex activities he can now engage in which call upon his newly realized abilities. The simpler things he enjoyed before are no long sufficiently interesting or attractive.… Now accepting the Aristotelian Principle, it will generally be rational, in view of the other assumptions, to realize and train mature capacities.… A rational plan … allows a person to flourish, so far as circumstances permit, and to exercise his realized abilities as much as he can.10
A relatively recent contribution to this topic is that by Amartya Sen in his 1992 and 1999 books.11 There is something fundamentally missing, Sen suggests, in present-day thinking about the good life in the sense of Aristotle. Neoclassical economic theory, which is still taught (whether or not exclusively), takes “utility,” or happiness, to be a function of the bundle of consumer goods and leisure chosen, and this happiness could be seen as indirectly a function of the resources possessed. It is as if the economy’s actors all participate in a comprehensive once-and-for-all auction in which they will contract their entire future. Sen objects. In his “capabilities approach,” any fulfillment from one’s life will require one to acquire “capabilities”—capabilities “to do things.” And choosing which capabilities to try to acquire is part of the satisfaction. Thus he gives content to Marshall and Myrdal’s suggestion (cited in Chapter 3) that the jobs absorb the mind:
[Besides the indirect one there is a] connection between capability and well-being … making … well-being … depend [directly] on the capability to function. Choosing may itself be a valuable part of living, and a genuine choice with serious options may be seen to be—for that reason—richer.… [A]t least some types of capabilities contribute directly to well-being, making one’s life richer with the opportunity of reflective choice.12
Sen is not imagining some joy of choosing. He is pointing to the deeper satisfaction from being competent at selecting a new route if conditions change. (“Having won the lottery, I’m going to make the smart decision to quit the mine and take voice lessons.”)
There is another point, which may have been in the back of Sen’s mind. Rawls tacitly postulates a neoclassical world. There may be random events, but their probabilities are known. They do not get in the way of the fact that the prospect of “self-realization” has a clear meaning: it is how far you, he, or she would expect to get in your development—how far on the average, with repeated rolls of the known dice. But in a modern economy, some basic change in the shape of the economy is almost certain to have occurred within a generation, but we have no foreknowledge of what it will be. In that sort of economy, the sort of “self” a person develops in one scenario, or evolution, may differ considerably from that developed in another scenario. What is “realized” as one goes through life is not only the distance of one’s development but also the direction of one’s development. In this world, the “self” is neither fixed nor subject to fixed laws of motion, so the concept of the self is of no explanatory value. In Henry V, Prince Hal gives voice to the intense fluctuations possible in personal development, when, two years after his coronation and girding for his great battle with the French, he remarks, “I have turned away my former self.”
The Vitalists on the Good Life
The post-Aristotelian literature of the pragmatists stops short of saying some of the most important things about a good life. This literature is almost arid in portraying life at its best as one long series of pragmatic exercises in problem solving, which serve to keep us engaged and yield the satisfactions of mastery. This conception of the good life, though it has merits, makes no room for the thrill of imagining new possibilities and new conquests and the satisfactions that result if the “dreams” are realized—and the (lesser) satisfactions if they are not. Life lived to the full has always been richer than the pragmatist description. But it was odd that so narrow a version of Aristotle’s good life was being advanced at a time—from 1920 to 1970—when unprecedented numbers were having a much more colorful life. In the modern economies of that time, it hardly needs repeating, individuals were exercising their creativity in conceiving a new product and their imagination in forecasting its benefits to end-users; and teams were taking on the risks of attempting its development and its adoption.13 Is there, then, some other perspective on the good life that conveys what it feels like to be an actor in such a world and expresses the value that the actors in the modern economy place on participating in its processes?
A quite different conception of the good life was growing up from ancient times in parallel with the pragmatist version. It is the conception to which Columbia’s Jacques Barzun and Yale’s Harold Bloom gave the name vitalism. Some key figures and ideas were touched on in Chapter 4, but a fuller account is called for here. Until not long ago, students in European high schools and American colleges were introduced in the core curriculum to the vitalist literature of the Western canon. The earliest vitalist may be Homer, the Greek poet of the 12th century BC and author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These epic poems tell of ancient Greek heroes—their determination, courage, and patience.
Another early vitalist is the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, a larger-than-life figure of the Renaissance (and the protagonist of the Berlioz opera named after him). In his Autobiography he frankly relishes his creativity and revels in making it. Even today, a young reader could be taken aback by such powerful ambition.
In a slightly later period, Cervantes and Shakespeare dramatize the individual’s quest. The message of Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote—the “Man of La Mancha” with the “Impossible Dream”—is that a life of challenge and adventure is necessary for human fulfillment; and if the barren economy of the Spanish desert does not supply such challenges, one must somehow create them by one’s self—imagining them, if necessary. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince concludes he must act against the king if he is to be someone, aware that he may fail and may pay with his life. The play suggests an initial uncertainty over the king’s responsibility. (As the columnist David Brooks remarked, it is rare now that anyone will show he knows that what he is saying may not be true.) It suggests too Hamlet’s initial ambivalence about taking an action that would risk everything he has—his position and Ophelia. Bloom in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human lionizes Shakespeare as the complete vitalist—a “spacious mirror” in which we can all see ourselves.
In the 18th-century Enlightenment, such a view is reflected by some, though not all, of the key figures. David Hume, disputing the rationalism of the French, gives a crucial place to the “passions” in decision-making and to “imagination” in the growth of society’s knowledge. (Hume may be the first modern philosopher.) As already mentioned, Voltaire urged people to look for satisfaction in individual pursuits, to “grow your own garden.” Jefferson wrote of the “pursuit of happiness” and commented that people came to America “to make their fortune.” The term “pursue” conveys that seeking a fortune is more valuable than having one. The journey is the end.
At the dawn of the first modern societies, the Romantics were wild about exploration and celebrated discovery as well as the determination and perseverance it often takes. We all recall the line of John Keats on the moment when Hernán Cortés “stared at the Pacific … silent upon a peak in Darien” and that fierce stanza in William Earnest Henley’s Invictus: “It matters not how strait the gate/How charged with punishments the scroll/I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.”
Next there were the philosophers of modernity. No American philosopher wrote of vitalism with more energy than William James did. He saw great vitality with his own eyes. Born in New York City in 1842, he was witness throughout his life to the transformation of the American economy from relatively slow paced to explosively innovative. In his ethic, the excitement of fresh problems and new experiences are at the heart of the good life.14 If Walt Whitman is the poet of the American ethos, James is its philosopher.
At the turn of the century, the notion quietly arises that there is indeed a fixed self, but one does not start one’s adult life knowing very well what the needs of that self are. The thesis is that the journey of life is not simply advances, one after the other, in self-realization. Rather it is a journey of self-discovery. Through a series of trials and experiences we discover “who we are,” which may differ quite a lot from who we thought we were when we started. This approach to the good life is set out quite precisely by a successful singer-songwriter of our day:
This new album [Born This Way] is about rebirth in every sense.… It’s about being able to be reborn, over and over again throughout your life.… until you find the identity inside yourself that defines best who you are and that makes you most feel like a champion of life.15
The discovery of oneself (before one’s career is over) does not mark an end of one’s personal development. Maslow’s self-actualization and Rawls’s self-realization may well continue but will be better directed for having discovered oneself. That suggests that there is no need to postulate that the self remains fixed throughout all this discovery.
A raft of new ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche, the upstart German psychologist and philosopher, changed the way we think about motivation, even life itself. In a hundred aphorisms, he speaks of venturing into the unknown, overcoming obstacles, failing to overcome obstacles, and learning to persevere through adversity, and “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” In particular, he crystallized the weakness of the pragmatist approach to the good life. We are not really sacrificing for a future gain when we diet before going on our next film shoot or when we tighten our belts to help finance our entrepreneurial project. We are happy to be in a project that offers us so much, no matter that it demands much from us. As Nietzsche sees it, our work on such projects meets an inner need, not a need for some cash. He explains that the hurdles encountered in our projects are not costs on the way to materialist payoffs. Instead, overcoming obstacles is itself the source of the satisfaction. The projects are their own reward—the highest reward.16
The French philosopher Henri Bergson, a friend of James and likewise a witness to the high modernity of the 19th century, was another champion of vitalism.17 Picking up Nietzsche’s notion of people’s need for challenges, Bergson conceives of people energized by a current of life (élan vital) and organizing themselves for “creative evolution”—the title of his 1907 book. The theme with which he is now associated is that intense involvement in challenging projects transforms people, so that they are repeatedly in the process of becoming. The book Creative Evolution elevates this “becoming” far above mere “being.” There are almost always precursors, though: not only Nietzsche but also Montaigne, Henrik Ibsen, and Søren Kierkegaard, who held that to exist we must create ourselves.
There is little on personal creativity in philosophy. Nietzsche wrote of a person as carving out his or her own values—the lines between good and evil. But he does not speak of the great satisfactions of creating a symphony or a book or any other product (though Nietzsche, a lover of Wagner’s operas, was an amateur composer). Bergson clearly understands that creativity would no longer exist if we had reached a world of determinism. However, Bergson does not describe a creative life or show any appreciation of its interior rewards.
Some literary critics and biographers have seen creativity as a central subject of literary criticism. Lionel Trilling wrote of literature as the human activity “that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty.” Matthew Arnold, quoted at the start of the chapter, spoke of “the sense of exercising … free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or art.”18 Several writers have described the creative life and to varying degrees gotten inside the creators who were their subjects. It was a frequent subject of Arthur Koestler’s books, such as The Act of Creation (1964) and The Sleepwalkers (1968) on the making of modern physics. Irving Stone’s Lust for Life (1937) and Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth (1944) might be mentioned, both turned into films. Michael Leigh’s screenplay Topsy-Turvy explored the lives of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Yet we often turn to writers of fiction in hopes of finding an insight into the forces driving individuals—especially when there is a sense of new forces at work or old forces newly empowered. The interwar decades were a turbulent time, full of tectonic shifts and upheavals. Far from showing any slowing down after the historic triumphs from 1870 to the eve of World War I in 1913, America resumed its stunning innovation in the 1920s. In the 1930s, undeterred by the Great Depression, it posted a record-breaking rate of innovation. A few writers sought to reflect the exhilaration and intoxication felt in the process of such creation and discovery. An over-the-top novelist of the time made the attempt to express the mystery and thrill of exploration:
At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.19
Three decades later the expression “to boldly go,” thought to derive from this passage, became the mantra of NASA in the early years of the project to go to the moon.
The difference between the pragmatist take on the good life and the vitalist take is striking. The term “hurdle” is in the lexicon of both schools, but hurdles come up in contrasting ways. In the vitalist view, people are looking for hurdles to overcome, problems to solve: if you do not happen to meet any, you change your life so that you start meeting them. In the pragmatist view, people encounter hurdles in the course of being pragmatic—of working in an industry or profession that seems to offer the best prospects of success. The pragmatists do not specify what humankind wants to succeed at. They only say that, whatever a person’s career is aimed at, the person—unless very unlucky—will meet innumerable problems and solve a great many of them. Their engagement in problem solving is an intellectual side of the good life. The resulting mastery is another part of the good life: the part called achievement. The value of engagement and mastery could be seen as part of what Aristotle had in mind—just as Nietzschean overcoming and Bergsonian becoming could also be seen as having roots going back to Aristotle.
Vitalism—the doctrine of vitalism, regardless of the strength of vitalism in recently modern economies—is enjoying a revival, after decades of pragmatism. Early English translations of Aristotle’s Ethics rendered eudaimonia as “happiness.” That seemed right, since one would suppose that persons engaging in “study,” as Aristotle recommended, would take pleasure in gaining more of the world’s knowledge and feel delighted at knowing so much. And it diminished the human project to suggest that it was the way to “fun and laughter”—even if, in fact, it does cause jokes and smiles. However, some later scholars such as John Cooper have decided that a better rendering of the word is “flourish ing,” a suggestion later seconded by Thomas Nagel, although subsequent translators have gone on using “happiness.” If we adopt that translation of eudaimonia as “flourishing,” the Nicomachean Ethics is arguing that the good life is one of flourishing, while wryly recognizing that it is a fuzzy concept:
What is the highest good in all matters of action? As to the name, there is almost complete agreement, for uneducated and educated alike call it flourishing, and make flourishing identical with the good life and successful living. They disagree, however, about the meaning of flourishing.20
If we translate eudaimonia as “flourishing,” it broadens considerably what Aristotle meant by “study.” He must have thought that people would feel excitement at reading the fierce debates and experience a frisson of suspense at uncovering new evidence for or against controversial ideas. He must also have thought that a life of questing for knowledge is deeply fulfilling. (The sober Thomas Jefferson must have thought the same thing when declaring that people had a right to “the pursuit of happiness.”) So Aristotle must be reinterpreted. He is not so much an advocate of studying the physical world as he is a champion of searching, exploring, investigating, and experimenting in all areas—to the extent those things were possible in the 4th century BC. He emerges as the seminal thinker on mankind’s desire to flourish.
Some of the vitalist literature conjures up climbers and explorers interested in testing or proving things to a large public. Of course, a successful innovation is also a public thing. (A hermit’s invention is not an innovation.) But there are other vitalist models. Sen’s emphasis on “doing things” sounds a vitalist note. Another emphasis is found in recent work by the American sociologist Richard Sennett. He finds evidence in his interviews that many Americans want to feel embarked on a mission to “make a difference.” He gives the example of a nurse who preferred the front line in the emergency room of the big city hospital to more lucrative work as a temporary nurse. Sennett suggests these people have a deep need for a “sense of agency”—“vocation” was an earlier way to put it.21
The latest book on the subject is Flourish by Martin Seligman.22 He posits that mankind seeks “well-being.” But well-being, like freedom, is constructed of several elements, and, like freedom, it cannot be measured—only the elements can. (Seligman comments that the life satisfaction reported in household surveys captures our current mood but barely reflects “how much meaning” there is in our lives and “how engaged we are in our work.”) For Seligman, the elements are: satisfaction with life, engagement, personal relationships, meaningfulness, and an achieving life (that is, achievement for its own sake). Each element, he argues, contributes to well-being, is pursued for its own sake, and can be measured. This wide-ranging inventory of the ingredients of the good life is evidently the product of careful thought. However, it is missing the contribution of vitalism to “well-being” or whatever it is that humans want. Though Seligman enthusiastically uses the term flourishing, he does not recognize the high-level flourishing—testing, creating, exploring—that we associate with vitalism.
Is vitalism in fact a part of the prevailing ethic in the present age? Inferences based on people we know would not be reliable. The World Values Survey produced by the ethnographers Ronald Inglehardt and colleagues at the University of Michigan surveyed household attitudes and compiled the results in many countries during the years 1991–1993. “When you look for a job,” they asked, “do you look for opportunities for initiative?” Fifty-two percent of the total respondents said yes in the United States and 54 percent in Canada. “Opportunities for taking responsibility?” Sixty-one percent in the United States and 65 percent in Canada said yes. (In France 38 percent said yes to initiative, 59 percent to interestingness, and 58 percent to responsibility.) The pragmatist version of the Aristotelian ethic is also found in those surveyed. “Opportunities for interesting work?” Sixty-nine percent said yes in the United States, 72 percent in Canada.
Such large nations may be different. Are small countries more communal, less success-driven, than the large countries? Asked in the mid-1990s what the attitude of the public toward Iceland’s new entrepreneurs was, the economist Gylfi Zoega said, “They don’t feel bad about it. They are thinking only about how to achieve their own success.” So it is a live hypothesis that vitalism captures a crucial drive and its motivations importantly shape our experience and our resulting fulfillment in our society.
Aristotle, as noted, thought that the ethic named after him was a universal of human nature. Is the Aristotelian ethic—the vitalist and pragmatist versions included—predominant? It has never lacked rivals. Referring apparently to his country, the Italian economist Pasquale Lucio Scandizzo remarked that a life of contemplation also enjoys a following. There have always been people motivated by a desire to be of service to a group or to society, such as Doctors without Borders, or by a desire to express devotion, such as Bach with his cantatas. There are also lives of social entrepreneurship, such as the career of Florence Nightingale, and lives of sexual exploration or conquest, such as the Marquis de Sade and Casanova; but those lives are not counterexamples to vitalism’s power, only distinctive directions of it. In the minds of most, however, the materialist conception of the good life is a serious contender against the Aristotelian perspective and may in some countries be more prevalent.
In the materialist perspective, most people are driven by the desire to earn or profit in order to accumulate wealth or power. Wealth is accumulated until it can sustain a high level of consumption or a high level of leisure or both. China’s pivotal reformer, Deng Xiaoping, declared that “it is glorious to be rich.” In Calvin’s doctrine, earning wealth has God’s blessing, and a person’s attainment of wealth is a sign of God’s favor—the more the wealth, the greater is the favor. In America, major wealth accumulation is widely thought to be motivated by the pro-social uses to which it can be put. Yet two of the most common examples invite the Aristotelian interpretation that they were driven by a desire for knowledge. After creating his fortune at Microsoft, Bill Gates founded a colossal philanthropy aimed at trying out new tools to advance economic development in poverty-stricken nations. The German businessman Heinrich Schliemann drove himself to earn a vast fortune expressly to fund his subsequent search for the ancient city of Troy. The fortune made by many an entrepreneur could be seen as a mere by-product of an obsession to test a quirky idea, such as Ray Kroc’s McDonalds empire, in which each franchise was to have no scope for initiative—the antithesis of Hayek’s idea of the benefit from openness to on-the-ground judgment and the stress here on grassroots creativity. (Kroc’s successors backed away from the bee in Kroc’s bonnet.) The careers of George Soros and Warren Buffett are perhaps driven by desires to show that their understanding of asset markets and business investment is superior. Yet most people’s wealth accumulations, including outsize accumulations, may be aimed at un-Aristotelian goals: security, comfort, beauty, pride, respect, and the rest. In Freudian psychology there is the suggestion that careers of almost demonic intensity and huge ambition are a sign of some wound that the victim hopes to heal through achievement. Far worse off are those who, having made a great fortune, have no idea of how to use it in a rewarding way. The high suicide rate among present-day China’s new multimillionaires may be an example.23
However one comes out of the tangled motivations of earning and learning, creating and accumulating, few would deny that lives of earning and wealth accumulation do not offer the gratification and pride that lives of creation and innovation offer. The particular conception of the “highest good” we find celebrated in Aristotle, Virgil, Cellini, Nietzsche, James, and Bergson—the experience of flourishing—better captures the sort of life we admire and aspire to than does the ethic of Weber and the subsequent economists who extolled economic progress.
The ethic of flourishing is alive even today in the West, the materialist ethic and other ethics notwithstanding. It flowered with the scientific revolution that began around 1675; England’s Bill of Rights in 1689, which expanded rights against the king; and the Enlightenment inspired by Hume, Jefferson, and Voltaire in the mid-1700s. The prevalence of the Aristotelian ethic was necessary for the birth of the modern economies of the 19th century, whether or not it was the trigger or a further trigger. (The continuation of some modern economies could also be necessary for the survival of the Aristotelian ethic in other parts of the world.)
This chapter must not be read as implicitly suggesting that the arrival of a desire for flourishing lay behind the appearances of the modern economy in the 19th century or that the ebbing of this ethic lies behind the decline of the modern economy—of economic dynamism—in one nation after another in the 20th century. Aristotle firmly held that the desire for flourishing was a universal of human nature, though the opportunity was not necessarily there for everyone or every country. Chapters 9 and 10 entertained the possibility that elements of the economic culture have weakened over recent decades. But those chapters do not propose that there has been somehow a loss in desire to have a life of flourishing. At most they prepare us for the possibility of an erosion of the workplace attitudes requisite or helpful to economic dynamism. These chapters do adduce evidence of a resurgence of competing values, such as a communitarian or corporatist ethic and family values, not a loss of the modern desires.
The prevailing culture(s) and the prevailing ethic(s) are not the same things. People may lose—perhaps out of social pressure—some of the right attitudes required for meeting “good” wants of theirs that remain intact.
Implications for a Good Economy
We may suppose, as Rawls supposed, that a society seeks and builds an economy to provide mutual benefits for its citizens. So, as a life in pursuit of the highest good, or benefit, is termed by Aristotle the “good life,” an economy enabling people’s mutual pursuit of the highest good may be termed a good economy. An economy is good if and only if it permits and fosters the good life.
Where flourishing is a prevalent conception of the good life, the economy, to be good, must serve people’s urge to imagine and create the new, their quest to “act on the world,” in Hegel’s image, thus to seek to innovate, and their desire to pioneer new practice.
An economy that is good in this sense may be rife with injustices, of course. Many commentators and academics have recently suggested, though, that such a “good” economy is bound to create inequalities and cause deprivations for others preferring another sort of life. So this “good” economy is unjust. The next chapter sorts out and takes a position on the issues.
1. The next four sections grew out of a public lecture at Columbia in 2007. They were later the basis of my paper for the Festschrift collection Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, K. Basu and R. Kanbur (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. This chapter is a different development of the lecture, with departures, corrections, and deletions.
2. Following convention, page numbers refer to Immanuel Bekker’s classic edition of Aristotle (1831). A helpful edition is Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1999).
3. That last part could be questioned. Suppose that dogs, dolphins, or others did possess reason, as imagined in Gustav Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. That would not refute the proposition that knowledge is the “best [good]” and pursuit of it the “supreme activity.” The claim that eudaimonia is felt only by humans is not obviously necessary to Aristotle’s argument, though he appeared to think so.
4. Aristotle could not have been pleased with the finding of recent happiness researchers that, after a point, further increases in productivity do not add to reported happiness, a paradox I have discussed elsewhere. See, for example, Layard, Happiness (2007).
5. The change of interpretation is credited to Roger Mynors. See his Georgics by Virgil (1990). The quote is from verse 490 in book 2 of the Georgics.
6. His writings in this area run from his Human Nature and Conduct (1922) to Experience and Education (1938).
7. Dewey disapproved of Fordian mass production and hoped the workplace would be reformed again to provide the intellectual satisfactions of which it was capable. Of course, market forces have by now pretty much eliminated the assembly line—or, in many cases, moved it to Guangdong province.
8. Maslow, “A Theory of Motivation.”
9. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971, pp. 424–433).
10. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971, pp. 428–429).
11. Sen, Inequality Reexamined and Commodities and Capabilities.
12. Sen, Inequality Reexamined (1992, p. 41), italics added. Sen cites Marx and Hayek among several precursors who placed a value on freedom independently of outcomes.
13. The transition from mercantile to modern is made by one man—Robinson Crusoe—in Defoe’s 1719 novel. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 book Émile views Crusoe as having allowed only “necessity” to determine what he tackled. But once Crusoe secured food supplies and shelter, he did not simply solve the problems he met on a predetermined path: he succeeded in making pottery and adopted a parrot, neither a necessity, using his creativity and imagination.
14. William James wrote somewhere, “My flux-philosophy may well have to do with my extremely impatient temperament. I am a motor, need change, and get very quickly bored.” (Cited in Barzun, A Stroll with William James, 1983, p. 265.) By “motor” he did not mean anything like a mechanical device, as Barzun remarks.
15. Lady Gaga, interviewed in Fry, “Lady Gaga Takes Tea with Mr Fry” (2011, p. 12). The actor Alan Alda is also eloquent on this theme in his oft-quoted address at his daughter’s commencement: “Be brave enough to live creatively.… You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.… What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.” Quoted in his autobiography, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (2007, p. 21).
16. In Nietzsche’s view, each day’s advance with the project “must appear justified at every moment—or incapable of being evaluated, which amounts to the same thing.” (This appears in his posthumous notebook The Will to Power (1883–1888), which is not about power over other people but is analogous to the will to win the ball game. See the illuminating treatment of Nietzsche in Richard Robb’s 2009 paper, “Nietzsche and the Economics of Becoming.”
17. Bergson rose to fame with his 1907 book published in Paris and wider fame with the 1911 English edition, Creative Evolution. He was appointed to the College de France and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. (Incidentally, Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem Peer Gynt (1876) anticipates Bergson’s theme when the Button Moulder says, “To be yourself is to slay yourself.%/%But on you, that answer’s sure to fail;%/%So let’s say: To make your life evolve%/%From the Master’s meaning to the last detail.” The quote is from the 1980 English translation by Rolf Fjelde, p. 195.)
18. Respectively, Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950, p. xxi), and Arnold in his 1865 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” reprinted in Arnold, The Function of Criticism (1895, p. 9).
19. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1964, p. 291), written in 1927.
20. Nicomachean Ethics, I.4 1095a14–20.
21. Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006, p. 36). His main thesis is that the unfortunate mutations in modern capitalism over the past two decades have caused these people to lose their sense of dedication and direction.
22. Seligman, Flourish (2011). Another entrant in the vitalist literature is Jamison, Exuberance (2004).
23. “Suicide: Wealth Leaves Many Unhappy,” China Daily News, September 11, 2011, p. 1.