Education and the Pursuit of Happiness

Transcription

1 Education and the Pursuit of Happiness (1976) This analysis of the relation between education and the pursuit of happiness will surprise some readers and delight some too. Adler makes a distinction between two conceptions of happiness one psychological and nonmoral, the other ethical. He concludes that the role of education in the attainment of happiness is limited but vital. Adler also affirms here that the essential problem of happiness, like those of education, have valid solutions in moral philosophy and not in psychology alone. That there are right and wrong desires is not a strange idea even for those brought up in the permissive era of child rearing. But that right desires are determined solely by what is good for a person, that the good is universal, and that it defines happiness will be a revelation for some. The notion that there are right and wrong desires has almost disappeared from modern education because it sounds too authoritarian. But for the reader who keeps in mind Adler s definition that authority is reason and nothing else, the concepts of happiness, freedom, and human rights are restored to their full measure of strength, and the education required to secure them follows. What also becomes apparent from Adler s discussion is that the various negative reports about the relation between college education and income published in recent years miss the point. So does much of what passes for education. Education and the Pursuit of Happiness was the commencement address at the University of Denver, 29 May The analysis of happiness in relation to needs and wants is more fully developed in Adler s book on ethics, The Time of Our Lives. There he demonstrates the indefeasible relations between happiness, leisure, and education. G.V.D. The fact that your graduation from the University of Denver coincides with the bicentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence dictates the theme of this commencement address. We are all endowed, the Declaration tells us, with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It seems to me fitting, on this occasion, for us to consider how the education you have so far received has prepared you for the pursuit of happiness in the years ahead. To answer this question, it is necessary, first, to consider the meaning of happiness in order to discover the sense in which it is true to say that a just government is one that secures for all its people the rights and conditions that facilitate the pursuit of happiness. On the conception of happiness which is most prevalent in the modern world, and which, I fear, you yourself may hold, that proposition is not true. In fact, it would be impossible for government to do anything to aid and abet the pursuit of happiness on the conception of happiness that is current in the world today. That is possible only when happiness is understood in the sense in which it was conceived in antiquity in the Ethics of Aristotle.

2 After I have clarified the difference between these two conceptions and have persuaded you, I hope, that we must adopt the ancient view of happiness not only to make sense of the Declaration of Independence but also to give significance to your education, I will try briefly to indicate how your education should serve you in the pursuit of happiness. Let me turn at once to the two main conceptions of happiness in the tradition of Western thought. In both conceptions, happiness is an ultimate objective or end. It is something sought for its own sake, not as a means to some further good beyond itself. In both conceptions, a man is happy who has everything that he desires; the happy man is one who desire nothing more. But in one of the two conceptions, the one that predominates the modern times, happiness as an ultimate goal is a terminal end. This means that happiness is a goal that can be reached and enjoyed at one or another moment in the course of a life. The individual is deemed happy whenever, at a given time, he has satisfied all the desires that he happens to have at that time. Accordingly, he may enjoy or experience happiness at one moment, be unhappy at some later moment when his desires at that time are frustrated or unfulfilled, and again become happy at a still later moment. In the other conception of happiness, which prevailed in antiquity and the Middle Ages but has little currency in our time, happiness as an ultimate objective is no a terminal goal, but only a normative end. This means that happiness is conceived as the goodness of a whole human life and, therefore, as something which cannot be experienced or enjoyed at any moment during the course of a lifetime. A good life is one enriched by the possession or enjoyment of all the things that are really good for a human being to have. A good life as the end that human beings should seek is normative in the sense that it sets the norm or standard by which the individual s actions should be judged morally according as they promote or impede the individual s achievement of the end. The introduction of the words good and should seek calls attention to another, and even more fundamental, difference between these two conceptions of happiness. There is no reference to good or ought in the modern conception of happiness. It conceives happiness in purely psychological or nonmoral terms. It involves no distinction between good and bad desires, right and wrong desires. It involves no distinction between when men do in fact desire and what they ought to desire. Happy is the man who, at any given moment, has all that he desires regardless of what his desires may be good or bad, right or wrong. In sharp contrast, the ancient conception of happiness is not psychological at all; it is a purely ethical conception of the good life, and therefore one that involves the distinction between good and bad desires or right and wrong desires. As St. Augustine puts it, happy is the man who, in the course of a lifetime, has satisfied all his desires, provided he desire nothing amiss provided that the things he has desired are things really good for him and, therefore, are things rightly desired. We find in Aristotle a statement that dovetails with Augustine s. Aristotle said that good life is one that is lived in accordance with more virtue. Moral virtue consists in the habitual disposition to desire nothing amiss to act on right desires, and to avoid acting on wrong ones. You are probably wondering what is meant by right and wrong desires. To answer that question as briefly as possible, I must call your attention to the distinction between needs and wants. By needs, I mean those desires which are inherent in human nature and which, therefore, are the same for all human beings everywhere and at all times. By wants, I mean

3 those desires which arise in individuals as a result of the particular circumstances of their own lives. Hence on individual s wants are likely to differ from another s, and the differences in their wants are likely to bring them into conflict with one another. If you consider for a moment how you ordinarily use these two words, you will realize not only that you do understand the distinction between needs and wants, but also that the distinction enables us to understand the difference between right and wrong desires. Needs, as Lord Keynes astutely observed, are desires so basic that they exist without regard to what is offered in the marketplace and without an individual s comparing his own condition or possessions with those of others; whereas, in contrast, wants are desires that are induced by what is offered in the marketplace and are augmented and intensified by an individual s comparing what he has with the possessions of others. Needs are absolute; wants, relative. Needs are desires that may or may not be consciously felt, whereas wants are always consciously felt desires. It is impossible for anyone to be mistaken about what he or she wants, but it is quite possible for an individual to make the mistake of thinking that he needs something when, in fact, he only wants it because someone else has it. Almost all of us want things we do not need, and fail to want things that we do need. Needs are always right desires; there can be no wrong or misguided needs, as there can be wrong or misguided wants. What we want may be something either rightly or wrongly desires, whereas anything we need is something rightly desired. A man never needs anything that is not really good for him to have, but he certainly can and often does want something that is not really good for him. The truth of Augustine s observation that happiness consists in having everything that one desires, provided that one desires nothing amiss, can now be seen to mean that happiness consists in having all the real goods that are rightly desired because they are things every human being needs to lead a good life. To desire nothing amiss is to seek the satisfaction of only such wants as do not impede or frustrate the satisfaction either of one s own needs or of the needs of others. Such wants are benign or innocuous. All other wants are injurious or malignant. Moral virtue, as the habit of desiring nothing amiss, directs our choices among goods so that we seek all the real goods we need for our happiness and avoid satisfying any wants except those for apparent goods which are benign or innocuous. Which conception of happiness must be read into the Declaration of Independence in order to make what it asserts true rather than false? If happiness consisted in each individual getting what he wanted, it would be impossible for any government to secure rights that enabled each individual to strive for happiness, since one individual s wants may and often do conflict with the wants of others. On the psychological conception of happiness, desires are morally neutral; there is no consideration of whether they are right or wrong desires. To secure the rights that implement the pursuit of happiness on this conception would therefore involve a government in facilitating the satisfaction of wrong desires as well as right desires, without any differentiation between them. Only on the ethical conception of happiness is it possible for the government of a society to attempt to provide all its human members with the external conditions or enabling

4 means which they require in order to make good lives for themselves. Only on this conception of happiness, which involves an understanding of natural rights as rights to the real goods that each of us needs in order to make good lives for ourselves, is it possible for a government to implement the pursuit of happiness by all. The attainment of happiness, the achievement of a good life, is beyond the power of government to provide. It involves factors, such as moral and intellectual virtue, which are internal and within the power of the individual to acquire for himself. Yet even here external circumstances may facilitate or impede. Here, therefore, is where the influence of your training and schooling comes in. What do you need to succeed in making a happy or good life for yourself, and how has your training and schooling aided and abetted your efforts in this direction? The real goods you need can be summarized under seven headings. (1) You need the goods of the body physical health, bodily vigor, and the pleasures of sense. (2) You need economic goods, such as a decent supply of the means of subsistence, living and working conditions conducive to health, and opportunities for access to the pleasures of sense, and pleasures of play, and esthetic pleasures. (3) You need political goods, such as civil peace and political liberty, together with the protection of individual freedom by the prevention of violence, aggression, coercion, and intimidation. (4) You need social goods, such as equality of status and of treatment in all matters affecting the dignity of the human person. (5) You need the goods of personal association, such as family relationships, friendships, and loves. (6) You needs the goods of the mind, such intellectual virtues as knowledge, understanding, a modicum of wisdom, both practical and speculative, together with such goods of the mind s activity as liberal arts the skills of inquiry and of learning, the habits of critical judgment and creative production. (7) You need the goods of character, such moral virtues as temperance, fortitude, and justice, all of which are firm habits of not yielding to wants that will get in the way of your acquiring the goods you need. The training and care you received at home, together with the education and direction you received at school, have made some contribution to your acquirement of at least five of the seven classes of goods that I have just enumerated. Some of these goods I have in mind particularly the economic, political, and social goods we all owe to the good fortune of living in a technologically advanced constitutional democracy which, while still far from being a perfectly just society, has achieved a greater measure of justice for its people than almost any other society in the world. Our possession of some of these goods, such as the goods of the body and the goods of personal association, we owe to the blessings of good fortune. While we have some control over our acquisition of them, they are, initially at least, put at our disposal by favorable circumstances. With regard to the acquisition of wealth in all its forms, you may be tempted to think that you schooling was intended and designed to play a major role; you may even think that the primary reason for going to college and getting an education is that it will help you not just to earn a living, but to forge to the front in the race for the accumulation of worldly goods. This, I think, is an egregious error made by too many Americans today among them, educators and parents, as well as students in our colleges. There is, as you know, a great deal of talk about the relative inutility of a college education because it does nto guarantee that its graduates will become worldly successes in

5 monetary terms. There is also a great deal of talk about remedying this deficiency by substituting one or another form of narrow, specialized vocational training for a liberal course of study, broad and general in its outlines. All of this talk is, in my judgment, profoundly misguided, for the following reasons. In the first place, success in the pursuit of happiness cannot be equated with success in the accumulation of a vast amount of worldly goods. All that a man needs to lead a good life is a moderate amount of wealth. To have more than one needs is to have an excess that puts a great strain upon one s moral virtue, for it permits one to gratify wants that may not be innocuous and so may interfere with one s attainment of the real goods that one needs. In any case, the least important of all the reasons for going to college and trying to get an education is that it will help one to earn a living. While earning a living may be indispensable, it is at best only a necessary, but hardly a sufficient, condition of leading a good life. The most important reason is that it will help one to lead a better life than one might otherwise have been able to achieve. It can do that only to the extent that it contributes to the formation of the moral and the intellectual virtues. There may be other reasons for going to college, but unless the chief reason is to learn what needs to be learned in order to live well, in order to lead a decent human life, then one might have been better off perhaps, not to have gone to college at all. As I have just indicated, the principal contribution that institutions of higher learning can make to the pursuit of happiness is in the sphere of the virtues those interior goods of charcter and of intellect which are regulative of the way in which you conduct your life and act with respect to all other goods. I must add at once that even here the contribution that can be made by higher education is mainly limited to the sphere of intellectual virtues. For better or worse, good and bad moral habits virtues and vices are formed at an earlier age. Whether or not the individual forms good habits of choice and of action depends largely upon the influence of family and of friends. Try as they may, colleges and universities can do little to confirm good habits or alter bad ones; nor, since they are educational institutions, should this be held against them. The ancient Greeks were correct in their insight that the moral virtues, unlike the arts and sciences, cannot be taught in schools or be inculcated by teachers. We are left, therefore, with the formation of the intellectual virtues as the main contribution that institutions of higher education can make to the attainment of happiness by those whom they graduate. However, of the intellectual virtues, one wisdom is beyond the province or power of any school to cultivate. Wisdom cannot be attained in youth or during the prolonged immaturity of those who remain students under institutional auspices. Wisdom is the ultimate intellectual good that comes only with years of experience and after a lifetime of learning. The rudiments of another intellectual virtue understanding may be attained in school, but its development in depth is, like wisdom, a product of mature years and of sustained inquiry. It is, therefore, mainly with respect to the arts and sciences that colleges and universities can be expected to make their chief contribution to the individual s pursuit of happiness. While some acquisition of knowledge in the sciences and other fields of scholarship can be achieved in college and university, more must be acquired after graduation if the individual is to become truly learned in any particular field.

6 Since, for anyone to become an educated person, it is necessary for his or her learning to continue throughout a the lifetime that follows graduation from college or university, the most crucial contribution that these institutions can make is in the fields of the arts the liberal arts, which are the arts of learning and the arts which discipline our creative powers. If your education so far has given you a superficial introduction to the whole world of learning, if it has given you the skills you need to go on learning, skills that also help you to use your mind creatively, and if it has inspired you with a zest to use these skills to the utmost of your ability, then it has done for you as much as you have any right to expect. Whether, in the years ahead, you take advantage of the education you have received depends entirely on you. It will depend on the choices you make with regard to the activities or occupations that fill the free hours of your life. The chief ingredients of a life well lived are the activities of learning and of creative production. These two things learning and creativity constitute leisure, in sharp contradistinction to play, recreation, and idling as other ways in which human beings fill their free time. A good human life is one that is enriched by as much leisure as one can cram into it. The education you have so far received, which I hope you will enlarge by further learning, aids and abets your pursuit of happiness by providing you with the resources you need for filling your life with the highest leisure activities of which you are capable. If you do that and if, in addition, you are blessed by good fortune in other respects, then there is a reasonable chance that when you graduate from this world at the end of your life, it can be said that you r life was a happy one.