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Thursday Thirteen: Happiness and virtues
Apropos of my entry earlier this week, I was listening to a podcast that a good friend of mine recommended, Philosophy Bites yesterday, and the topic of happiness came up. What was being considered, however, was the Aristotelean view of happiness, which is pretty radically different from our modern view of happiness.
Now there's something to add to my argument from Tuesday, for the arbitrariness of what happiness is: the definition can change fairly radically over time. Consider for a moment some of the great dystopian novels of the 20th century--particularly Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World. In each of these cases, a fundamental assumption seems to be that, in some way or another, happiness is an objective phenomenon in some way. That is to say, it's not simply caused by pleasurable experiences or even the lack of bad experiences. It can't be obtained through drugs or entertainment or the like, but requires some real and substantive.
Now, this is not precisely how Aristotle differs from our modern conception of happiness, but he does seem to have in mind something different than how we feel at a particular moment in time. I'll try to lay it out as best I can, realizing that I'm by no means an Aristotle scholar, am getting this second hand, and am not sure I can entirely wrap my mind around it just yet.
For Aristotle, happiness seems not to be a psychological state at a particular moment at all--instead, it is a judgment made in respect of the whole life. In a sense, "the pursuit of happiness," then, is the pursuit of a lifetime, not something we seek from moment to moment. A question like "Are you happy?" would, I gather, be meaningless to Aristotle. You might, perhaps, be fortunate at a given moment--things might be going well for you, because you have your material needs met, you're healthy (enough), you have valuable friendships, doing some work that seems valuable, and whatever else seems necessary to be content with life--but for Aristotle that's not the same as happiness.
The real question might be something more along the lines of "Are you living in such a way to secure happiness for yourself?" And that's rather different in several ways from "are you happy?" One is a state of being, while the other is a state of living, a state of doing. As Mortimer J. Adler puts it:
happiness consists in accumulation, through the course of a whole lifetime all the goods -- health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc., that are essential to the per-fection of human nature and to the enrichment of human life. This requires us to make choices every day of our lives, and carry out our choices in action.
These choices, incidentally, lead to the Thirteen portion of this Thursday entry. Usually, I aim for a Thursday Thirteen that reveals something about myself, but coming up with these lists is taxing, and this seemed to go right with something else I wanted to write about. Part of Aristotle's understanding of our pursuit of happiness is that it rests on practicing the "virtues." It's important to note that these are not religious virtues and for the most part can't be practiced in isolation--they are social virtues. Moreover, these are not exactly lists of "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not." Instead, practicing virtue requires a careful consideration of balance: all of the virtues are a mean between two extremes. These are taken from another website:
1. Courage, which is neither cowardice nor rash eagerness.
2. Temperance in physical pleasures, which is neither excessive self-indulgence nor denying the pleasures of the senses.
3. In terms of getting and spending, there's "liberality," which is neither wasteful prodigality nor stinginess.
4. There's also a slightly different virtue of getting and spending, "magnificence" (which the guest on Philosophy Bites suggested had to do with thinks like funding public works) which falls between vulgarity or tastelessness on the one hand and being a miser, parting only grudgingly with money. I gather that, on the whole, it's basically the same spectrum as #3, just in the public sphere rather than the private.
5. Pride is a virtue, in that it's neither vanity nor excessive humility.
6. Likewise, there's "proper ambition," which is neither lacking all ambition nor being consumed by it.
7. Good temper is between being easily angered and being apathetic. In other words, there's a time for anger, but it shouldn't be the habitual reaction.
8. Truthfulness falls between boastfulness and understatement.
9. Wittiness is a virtue for Aristotle! It's neither buffoonery nor boorishness, apparently.
10. Friendliness is the virtue that falls between being quarrelsome and being a suck-up.
11. Modesty falls between shamelessness and shyness. I gather this largely comes down to being ashamed of the behavior that you should be ashamed of and not feeling shame for things about which you should not feel shame.
12. Righteous indignation is feeling properly about the fortunes of others: neither enviousness toward those who deserve and receive good fortune nor spitefully taking pleasure in misfortune. I gather you could also be righteously indignant at the good fortune of someone who doesn't deserve it or pleased when people who deserve bad fortune get what's coming to them.
13. These have all been "moral virtues," and since this is a Thursday Thirteen rather than a Thursday Twelve, I guess I should also mention intellectual virtues. I'll just throw them out there, though they seem rather different in kind from the moral virtues: scientific knowledge, artistic or technical knowledge, intuitive reason, practical wisdom, and philosophical wisdom.
Your thoughts are, as always, most welcome.
I sense a theme of balance in that list. I think that is pivotal to
happiness as a big picture.