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 1976. 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.
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
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
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
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.
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.