The Pursuit of Happiness
PUBLIUS
Perspectives THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS BY PUBLIUS I Publius, intended to write only one posthumous. Federalist paper when I composed "To Form a More Perfect Union" (NL, July 13-27), on the...
...happiness is social and, generally, is vassal to the superego...
...Because Aristotle saw man as a social being, he assumed a close connection between Politics and Ethics—the titles of his two most famous books...
...We have no word to describe man qua man, person as person...
...Happiness is a "we," not a "me," concept...
...Federalist paper when I composed "To Form a More Perfect Union" (NL, July 13-27), on the "aristocracy of manufacture...
...But isn't that self-evident...
...I Publius, should like to propose a new American word (I prefer "American" to "English" for my personal historic reasons) called "manness" or (to stay abreast of the times) "personness," to help us understand "happiness" in its Aristotelian sense...
...It appeared unseemly to equate "property" with "life and liberty," especially in light of a long history during which individuals had used their property to deprive others of life or liberty, or both...
...Perhaps the confusion between pleasure and happiness derives from an inadequate translation of the originalGreek word, eudaimonia, for we do not really have an appropriate American equivalent...
...Benjamin Franklin...
...He quotes the proverb: "In justice is summed up the whole of virtue...
...Salomon mused for a moment...
...Book Three, IV...
...Nevertheless, since "virtue" is the nearest thing we have to "personness," we could say that the "pursuit of happiness" is the pursuit of the virtuous life...
...I, Publius, read the word "happiness" in a different context, based on the original text of our mentor, Aristotle...
...The potential ambiguity is that this can mean "feeling good" or "doing good...
...Aristotle discusses many virtues in his Ethics, but he reserves a special seat for "justice," as "the sovereign virtue...
...I asked what it meant...
...Put negatively, Aristotle says that injustice consists of "assigning to one's self too much of what is generally good and too little of what is generally bad...
...A mensch," he said thoughtfully, "isn't just a human being...
...politics delves into the various manifestations of this ethical urge (a constitution...
...The phrase is, unfortunately, subject to many meanings...
...That last word was bothersome...
...It was virtus, the trait of behaving like a "man" (Latin, vir...
...Put positively, "justice is the good of others...
...Pleasure is personal and, as often as not, is the slave of the id...
...Others interpret the phrase more narrowly to mean laissez faire—the unfettered right to fatten one's face or fortune with no regard for the fate of others...
...Without justice, the pursuit of personal happiness becomes a mockery of the public happiness that we dearly treasure...
...Happiness was the condition of a moral man living the good life of a social being...
...We were also not prepared to respond rationally to propertyless men with muskets should they come to believe that property is an inalienable right...
...Without justice for all, freedom becomes a travesty, a license to engage in a Hobbesian war of each against each...
...Indeed, some have cynically suggested that it is purposefully vague, a rhetorical flourish that can mean all things to all people...
...He refers to his Ethics as a "kind of political science, " the study of man in the polis...
...If, in closing, I may be granted a momentary departure from my customary expository presentation, I should like to illustrate my point with what I believe is a relevant anecdote...
...It was not to be confused with the chase after sensual stimulation or private Nirvana...
...Basically, eudaimonia means "a state of good spirit...
...He is someone who acts like a human being is supposed to act.' 1 would sum up that "the pursuit of happiness" is the life-long effort to live like a mensch...
...It means 'human being,'" he said...
...Yes," said Salomon, "that Dr...
...For these reasons, I, Publius, feel compelled to speak out for a second time to inform future generations that when we spoke of the "pursuit of happiness," we meant the pursuit of the moral, the just, the ethical life...
...As practical men, we further recognized that to fight the revolutionary war we would have to rely on the arms of many who had no property...
...Hence, to pursue eudaimonia (happiness) means to pursue the ways of a man who wishes to do good—yes, to be a do-gooder, if you please...
...happiness answers to conscience...
...Ethics is the practice that holds the polis together ("to form a more perfect union...
...Happiness, the end we all stri ve to achieve, lies in the performance of those deeds that are appropriate to man's nature as a social being...
...Since the word was not English, Greek or Latin, I asked whether it was Hebrew...
...We have many words describing a person's physical and character traits, such as "smallncss" or "kindness...
...Pleasure responds to craving...
...We were intimately acquainted with his ideas, and his phrases had special meaning to us...
...Without justice, a "more perfect union" of the nations of the world might well become a "more perfect" tyranny upon the earth...
...In a conversation I had with my copatriot Haym Salomon, more than 200 years ago, I was extolling the virtues of Dr...
...To the extent that anthropos (generic man) fails to fulfill his appointed role as that political animal (zoe politika) he is unethical...
...I hoped to initiate a discussion about appropriate institutional vehicles for a future where the economy is a global factory in a global village...
...These and similar variants envision happiness as a solipsistic exercise, an involvement with self, an indulgence in amour propre— usually in the insouciant style of an absolute monarch, a dissolute yuppie or, even, a happy hermit...
...The Romans, in their male-oriented world, did have a word that essentially referred to "manness...
...I asked...
...I return with this second posthumous paper because I fear that my purpose will be frustrated by a popular misunderstanding of a phrase in the Declaration of Independence...
...The original draft of the document whose Bicentennial Year we are now celebrating stated that among our "inalienable rights" were "life, liberty and property...
...If we did, we could flatly declare that the "pursuit of happiness" is a person's search, in action, for "personness," an acting out of nature's intention, a way for a human to be what a human should be...
...That is why we found it only natural, with our classical background, to decide that once we formed "a more perfect union" the very next thing we had to do was to "establish justice," the queen of the virtues...
...To Aristotle, the first reading would be repulsively vulgar and the second divinely noble...
...In that vein, "pleasure" and "happiness" are generally opposites...
...In Federalist Number 51,1 stated that "Justice is the end of government.' In this syllogism, then, the "pursuit of happiness" is really the "pursuit of justice," including the all-important Aristotelian concept of "distributive justice"—namely, a fair sharing of wealth and honors among fellow-citizens...
...Franklin is a real mensch...
...In this pursuit, man is obeying the decree of nature, according to Aristotle, because he is doing the thing he is created for as a "political animal," as a citizen of the city-state...
...In that paper, you will recall, I proposed to broaden the concept of union, to extend our governmental boundaries beyond the United States and create a political instrumentality able to curb the tyranny of wealth, embodied in global corporations...
...No, it is Yiddish," said Salomon...
...As Aristotle stated in his Nicomachean Ethics: "most people" are deceived into thinking that "happiness" is "pleasure which appears to them to be a good although it is not...
...I, Publius, always understood the " pursuit of happiness "tobethepursuit of this public happiness...
...Pleasure springs from desire, happiness from dedication...
...We—my confreres and I—did not look upon Aristotle's pronouncements as the empty echoes of an antique philosopher...
...Our English derivative is, of course, "virtue...
...For that reason, concludes Aristotle, "we call just anything that tends to produce or conserve the happiness of a political association...
...The phrase is "the pursuit of happiness," a concept that for many implies the inalienable right to pursue self-interest and self-aggrandizement with minimal, if any, restraints imposed by any nation, let alone some newly contrived supranational entity...
...to the extent that he acts with an awareness that he is part of a greater entity—the polis—he is a good person, a soul in pursuit of eudaimonia...
...Yet something evaporated in the translation: "virtue" appears to have lost some of its virility and taken on the overtones of a prissy piety...
...So for these and other reasons, we decided to strike out "property" and to insert "the pursuit of happiness...
...We spoke about "the pursuit of happiness" in its classical ethical and political sense...
...In both, he searched for the good—whose highest condition is "the association which we call the State, the association which is political...
...The notion was "to form a more perfect union" consonant with the requirements of these trying times on a shrinking planet...
...it can mean "in good spirit" or "of good spirit...
...It is derived from eu, "good," and daimon, "spirit" or "divinity...
Vol. 70 • October 1987 • No. 14
