re you happy? I was eighteen years old when I was first asked that question. I didn't know what to make of it. It had never occurred to me to put the question to myself. My friend, it turned out, had been studying Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and perhaps other authors that one encounters in a sophomore course in philosophy.
        If a repairman asks, "Are you happy?" meaning "with the job," a straightforward answer can be given: "Yes," "No," or "This remains to be done." To answer the seemingly simple but probing question, "Are you happy?" may require considerable reflection and plunge one into the quagmire of self-analysis. Better, perhaps, to leave the question unanswered. No life is completely satisfactory, and to uncover life's largely unnoticed disappointments is surely the road to misery.
        Who has not experienced the joy of the moment: success on the athletic field, the beauty of a sunset, children frolicking in the snow, a hearty meal, or one of many carnal delights one finds depicted in poetry, fiction, and on the screen? Yet few would equate the fleeting pleasures of the moment with happiness, and who has failed to note that the pursuit of pleasure can be the source of great unhappiness?

THE AMERICAN FOUNDING FATHERS

hat said, it must be acknowledged that throughout the ages philosophers of note have seriously discussed the subject. Statesmen, too, have taken it upon themselves to address the conditions that promote happiness in the social order. Most U.S. citizens are familiar with paragraph two of the Declaration of Independence, written principally by Thomas Jefferson. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," it says, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The last phrase is reminiscent of one used by John Locke, an eighteenth-century British philosopher whose writings were familiar to many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Locke, however, did not use the word happiness; he spoke of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property." Which term, we may ask, speaks more realistically to the human condition? We know what the pursuit of property means, but what does it mean to pursue happiness? Indeed, can happiness be pursued? Benjamin Franklin, in a famous aside, quipped, "The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." ¹
        The Founding Fathers were Europeans either by birth or by direct lineage. The principles invoked in the Declaration of Independence have a long history both with respect to their formulation and their defense. The phrase "right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" clearly implied the right to live one's life as one wishes, to pursue goals one thinks best by one's own lights. Drawing upon the principles rooted in "right reason" found in the common-law tradition of English jurisprudence and recognizing a higher law of right and wrong from which human law is derived, the Founding Fathers outlined the moral foundation of a free society. Clearly they understood that it is not political will but moral reasoning, reasoning accessible to all, that is the foundation of any political system. It was only after articulating these and other moral principles that the founders turned to the mechanisms of government. Locke himself, as were the founders, was steeped in a tradition that dates to classical Greek and Roman philosophy, particularly to that of the Stoics. "We hold these truths," the Declaration of Independence proclaims, because they are our common intellectual patrimony.
        Locke, like the ancients, was more inclined to speak of the pursuit of property rather than of happiness. Of "life, liberty and property," Locke proclaims, the greatest of these is property. Property in Locke's sense may be rendered in today's vocabulary as "the fruit of one's labor" or "economic security." Why, then, was the phrase "pursuit of happiness" preferred to "pursuit of property," given that happiness is more ephemeral, more difficult to define, than property?
        Although personal well-being may entail ownership, there is something more important than property in the achievement of life's goals, a fact that may make the words in the Declaration better than Locke's formulation. Ancient treatises that discuss the nature of happiness rarely fail to notice the connection between virtue and happiness. In common, they recognize that happiness is the byproduct of something else and not something to be sought for its own sake.

ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF HAPPINESS

or the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384--322 b.c.), happiness was simply impossible without virtue. Happiness, he maintained, was an incidental experience consequent upon pursuing what is good and true. The idea of pursuing happiness for its own sake would have struck Aristotle as blatant hedonism. Although the prime text for Aristotle's views on happiness is to be found in the Nicomachean Ethics, one of the places in which Aristotle speaks of happiness is The Politics, where he is discussing the best form of government. "Now it is evident," he writes, that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily."²
        The wise state, like the wise man, will necessarily regulate itself in the light of the best end. Men, of course, differ about what ends or goods ought to be sought. Aristotle, like Plato before him, goes on to distinguish among external goods, goods of the body, and goods of the soul. The happy man must have all three. External goods, and to some extent bodily goods, come of themselves; chance, says Aristotle, is frequently their author, but the most important goods are those that must be cultivated. No one is just or temperate by chance. "Happiness," he tells us, "whether consisting in pleasure or excellence or both, is more often found with those who are most highly cultivated in their mind and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent, but are deficient in higher qualities." Happiness is the outcome of steady moral behavior coupled with a life of the mind, an intellectual life, a contemplative life in which one seeks knowledge of the highest things. All moral or intellectual virtues are abiding habits that are gradually acquired by repeating the same acts; they are like the technical skills found in the physician, the engineer, or the artist, acquired as a result of repeated acts over a period of time.
        Elsewhere Aristotle writes that friendship is desirable at all stages of life and the source of coherence in all communities from the family to political society. Yet he does not consider the relation to friends to be an essential constituent of happiness.³ Happiness remains bound to one's moral achievement< to which friendship, bound to circumstances, contributes only incidentally. For Aristotle, friendship can exist only between peers. With respect to the rearing of children, Aristotle recognizes that good birth contributes to the development of a moral life. The family, after all, is the basic community out of which the self-sufficient society of the city-state grows; it is the first cell in which the moral life awakens and develops.
        That acknowledged, it remains to be said that man is the author of his own destiny, of his ethical perfection, and consequently his happiness. The good life does not depend on fate or chance; it is achieved by each individual, whatever his circumstances of life may be. What is essential to a happy life is moral conduct becoming to one's status in life. All may be called to a life of piety, toward the gods, toward parents, and toward one's homeland. All may be called to speak truly and honestly in commercial transaction, but the conduct required of the statesman and the magnanimity expected of the wealth holder are at different levels from what is expected of the servant or fisherman. Virtues proper to the master are not those of the servant. Virtue as a moral habit also follows intellectual perception, and such knowledge varies with station in life.
        In speaking of virtue, Aristotle recognizes the distinction between intellectual and moral virtues. A virtue, intellectual or moral, is a good habit, something that is acquired through use and practice. There are good habits of the intellect, such as science and wisdom, and good habits to be found in the will, for example, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. (These distinctions were the starting point of moral philosophy through the ages until the Enlightenment.) Aristotle is convinced that "each one has just so much happiness as he has excellence [of character] and wisdom," and these do not depend on external goods.
        The point of this discussion, which at first may seem out of place in The Politics, is to show that the state that is most likely to be conducive to happiness among its citizenry is one that is wise and acts rightly. "Thus the courage, justice and wisdom of the state have the same form and nature as the qualities which give the individual who possesses them the name of just, wise or temperate."(33--36)
        Just as an individual can go wrong, so can a state under the influence of an ideology that leads it to inappropriate ends. We do not need to look into the distant past for examples of decay. The twentieth century provides many examples of social and political landscapes altered by the adoption of utopian principles that brought misery. An even more recent example is suggested by Theodore Dalrymple, who, on the editorial page of the December 18, 2002, Wall Street Journal, wrote, "The British have gone from being civil to savage in less than a lifetime." While he may be guilty of rhetorical exaggeration, he has noticed something that may be true of much of Western culture. Beliefs have changed in a relatively short period; truth no longer seems to be a value in the political arena. It has become common to say that society, not man, is responsible for behavior; that there is no difference between right and wrong; that the aim of society is to provide benefits for the needy; that the productive deserve less, others more; that the aim of government is not the preservation of the rule of law but the advancement of special interests. Ideas have consequences for good and for evil. The moral decline of the leading classes and of many elements of the intelligentsia, noticed not only by cultural historians but by the average reader, is beginning to have its social consequences.

THE STOICS

he Stoics (ancient philosophers of both Greece and Rome, c. 108 b.c. to c. a.d. 180), no less than Aristotle, stressed the relation between happiness and virtue. Happiness is not a subjective feeling but a virtuous state of being. "Live according to nature" is a famous Stoic maxim. Whose nature? Your nature, for that nature is rational. Yet it may direct action sometimes contrary to your primary, that is, undisciplined or natural, impulse. Aristotle recognized that man is the only creature in nature that has two sets of faculties that war against each other. Hence the need for moral virtue in order that the rational may prevail over and direct the sensory appetite. Like Aristotle, the Stoics identified happiness with a virtuous life, recognizing that happiness is not to be confused with a momentary or subjective feeling. A Stoic maxim may be rendered: "Call no man happy until he dies because one who is apparently enjoying a good lot may be doing so only temporarily; things may yet go wrong."
        A good life is a morally good life. Here the Stoic differs from Aristotle; for the Stoic, the meaning of the word good is confined to the morally good. In the Stoic view, the possession of natural things was thought to be irrelevant to happiness. To "live according to nature," another Stoic maxim, is to recognize that man's rational nature directs him on some occasions to accept what is contrary to his primary (that is, undisciplined) natural impulses.
        The Aristoteleans recognize that happiness requires something more than virtue. The Politics emphasizes the requirement of a just state for the flourishing of its people. Certain material advantages are a necessary precondition for the practice of virtue. In the Ethics, Aristotle writes that happiness requires external goods, "for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to play a noble part unless furnished with the necessary equipment. For many noble actions require instruments for their performance, in the shape of friends or wealth or political power. A man of very ugly appearance or low birth, or childless and alone in the world, is not our idea of a happy man, and still less so is one who has children or friends that are worthless, or who has had good ones but lost them by death." The happy man "will bear changes in fortune most nobly, and with perfect propriety in every way." Yet great and repeated successes that render life blissful depend on a just social and stable political order. Great and frequent reverses can crush and mar bliss both by the pain they cause and the hindrance they offer to many activities. Wealth, for example, though not a good, is not to be rejected or despised, for it allows virtue a wider field of action. It must, of course, be honestly acquired and properly used, and, Aristotle adds, to dispose of wealth is not an easy task.

A CHRISTIAN VIEW OF HAPPINESS

Christian point of view as represented by Saint Augustine (a.d. 354--430) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (a.d. 1224--1274) draws upon both Aristotle and the Stoics. In his famous "Treatise on the Will," St. Augustine asks, "Why are so few men happy when all want to be?" His answer is the same as Aristotle's. It is by living rightly that men merit a happy life. Happiness and unhappiness are a matter of reward and punishment. Those who live a virtuous life, a life in accord with eternal law, are those who are happy. Preferring the highest good over transitory goods such as riches, honors, pleasures, and bodily beauty, those who lead a life of intellect in pursuit of truth and wisdom will experience happiness. Augustine does not despise worldly goods (indeed, they are necessary); but the happy life--one that he sometimes equates with freedom--is one in which the desire for temporal goods is superseded by a desire for truth and wisdom, the condition of which is a morally upright life. Like Plato, Augustine affirms that education is the key. The highest good must be known to be pursued, but mere knowledge alone is not enough; the will must be rightly directed.
        Aquinas, following Aristotle but writing from a theological perspective, goes one step further. "Aristotle," he writes, "says that the ultimate happiness of man consists in the most perfect contemplation, the object of which is God, the highest intelligible thing that can be contemplated in this life. Beyond this happiness there is still another to which we can look forward in the future, whereby we shall see God as He is. This is beyond the nature of any created intellect."⁴
        Surveying the modern period, we find that emphasis is placed less on virtue than on the social conditions presumed to be a source of happiness. Philosophers in the utilitarian tradition of Jeremy Bentham have affirmed that we ought always to perform that action or implement that policy which will produce as its consequence the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Translated into social policy, this means that the state should seek the greatest possible quantity of pleasure with the smallest possible quantity of pain of the greatest number. According to Bentham and his followers, the enlightened social reformer will distinguish between higher and lower pleasures, but the emphasis is still on pleasure rather than on virtue.
        Returning to the Declaration of Independence, Locke's formulation may yet stand. Property is so bound to considerations of human nature that one cannot discuss human fulfillment without taking note of it. Locke, like Plato and Aristotle before him, affirms the connection between the realization of personality and the acquisition and development of private property; certain material goods are indispensable to a good life. Furthermore, in order to lead the life of mind proper to a human being, it is necessary to have health and those things that contribute to bodily well-being. Locke, like Cicero, makes the defense of private property the first obligation of the civic official.
        The reader may find it strange that in modernity we find the idea of private property to be at the root of political and economic evil. Such is the well-known cornerstone of theories advanced by Marx and Engels. The theoretical assault on property, Richard Pipes tells us in Property and Freedom, his authoritative study of the history of attitudes toward property, may have first occurred in France in the 1790s. He finds that Jacques Pierre Brissot was among the earliest philosophers to denounce ownership of private property as nothing other than "theft." In a work published under the title Code de la Nature, another French author using the pen name Morelly argues for the abolition of private property on the premise that the desire to possess it is responsible for vanity, conceit, ambition, deceitfulness, and hypocrisy. Morelly believed that with the abolition of private property it would be virtually impossible for man to become depraved or wicked.
        Speaking of what he calls the "antiproprietary shift," Pipes notes that the spread of democracy may have had something to do with the assault on the sanctity of private property. "For as the franchise was broadened and ultimately made universal, governments came to depend on the mass of voters who, owning little of anything, demanded from the state that it ensure a fairer distribution of the country's resources. This demand was eventually satisfied in democratic countries through such devices as death duties and the graduated income tax, the proceeds of which went to finance social welfare programs."⁵ But the twentieth century has taught us that welfare programs, when they aim to do more than alleviate temporary misfortune, tend to breed a dependent underclass. This is apparent not only in the United States, where well-meaning programs have created third-generation dependency particularly in urban centers, but in the "projects" characteristic of suburban Paris and other European cities, which have proved to be incubators of crime and a permanent underclass.
        Acknowledging that personal moral virtue is a key to happiness, we must also recognize that the state can do little to promote virtue in the people. On the other hand, the state, through regulation of property rights and the power of expropriation, can do much to undermine that other pillar of well-being--the right to acquire and possess legitimately earned property, which the ancients deemed the first duty of the state.

A COMPLEX NOTION

o matter how refined, the notion of human happiness is not a unitary, simple notion that could provide us with a criterion for making key choices. There are too many different conceptions of happiness and too many different modes in which happiness may be achieved. The happiness associated with one way of life may not be that associated with an entirely different mode. Aristotle leaves no doubt that the highest goods are the goods of intellect; they are the most lasting of goods and offer the greatest pleasure. "Human goodness," he writes in his Ethics, "means in our view excellence of the soul, not excellence of the body." He then relates this to qualification for leadership. "The true statesman seems to be one who has made a special study of goodness, since his aim is to make the citizens good and law-abiding men." The determination of what is appropriate to human fulfillment belongs to psychology, which itself is anchored in a metaphysics of human nature. Morality for Aristotle is nothing other than rules for self-perfection.
        Aristotle characterizes enjoyment as supervening upon successful activity. To excel is to aim to do something that will be enjoyable. Enjoyment, he cautions, provides no good reason for embarking upon one type of activity or another. What I enjoy will depend upon what type of person I am, and the sort of person I am depends upon my vices and virtues, education, and upbringing. Happiness, or eudaimonia, is not to be identified with wealth, honor, or pleasure but is rather a state of well-being consequent upon the lifelong practice of virtue, both intellectual and moral virtue. This judgment is to be endorsed through the ages.
        Saint Augustine, paraphrasing Aristotle, writes, "Some men are lovers of eternal things, others of temporal things. ... The happy life, that is, the disposition of the soul cleaving to the unchangeable good is the proper and first good of man."⁶ Can this judgment be gainsaid? Given that human nature and the natural laws governing human fulfillment have not changed since antiquity, the ancients clearly have something to say to us across the ages.

1. As quoted by Gary M. Galles, Washington Times, Jan. 17, 2002.
2. The Politics, ed. Steven Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), book 7, chap. 2, 1324.
3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), IX, 9, 1169b ff.
4. Summa Theologiae, I q.62, a1. For a comprehensive treatment, see St. Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness, trans. John A. Oesterle (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964).
5. Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 45.
6. Saint Augustine, De libero arbitrio, trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L.H. Hackstaff (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), book I, ch. 15.