Latest News
Headmaster's Monday Morning Address
By
May 22, 2008 - 1:15:34 AM

Aristotle, Happiness and Wealth

I spoke to you last week about that most elusive of goals: happiness. The statistics suggest that there is no relationship between wealth and happiness - or rather, that it might take rising levels of wealth just to maintain a constant level of happiness. I also argued that one of the elusive things about happiness is that, the more one concentrated exclusively on its attainment, the less likely one was to achieve it. Whilst this sounds like a depressing conclusion, I offered a ray of hope: happiness can be attained, but is best achieved by being absorbed in something useful, losing oneself in something worthwhile.

Wealth, too, is an elusive concept. What is it to be wealthy? If a person has a million pounds in the bank, but never touches it, are they really wealthy? Or if one owns a huge mansion, but never lives in it – surely in those cases, one is no more wealthy than if one didn’t own the mansion, or have that money in the bank? What this suggests is that wealth is not so much what one has, but what one does with it. A man who has a thousand pounds and spends it on a once-in-a-lifetime trip – to Ecuador, let’s imagine, to use a school-related example, or to Ghana, or to California – that man is a rich man indeed: the experiences, the lessons learned, the development in his character through being exposed to an enrichingly different experience, that is true wealth. So if you would like to know how wealthy a person is, you need to ask not how much money a person has in the bank, but how they have spent their lives.

This idea is associated with the wise teachings of the philosophers who state that a rich person is he who has enough. A few weeks ago, I interviewed a candidate for a teaching post here – she was a delightful lady from the Philippines. She pointed out to me the differences in the perceptions of poverty in the UK and in her own native land when she was growing up. One’s view of what constitutes wealth is relative – what is considered wealthy in one country, or even in one era, may not be regarded as wealthy in another. So if a man has modest needs, and frugal habits, then so long as his resources provide enough to meet both his wants and his needs, then he is a rich man. But the man is poor who, despite owning millions, yearns for more because he feels he cannot have enough. In particular, he is poor if he feels he lacks the things that money cannot buy: those unpurchasable treasures like friendship, love, good health, the ability to sleep at night – all of these, even if they do not in and of themselves constitute happiness, are indispensable to the possibility of it.

So in thinking about happiness and wealth, it might be more productive if one uses different words: more accurate, more substantial, less baggy words, which denote what one really means. Instead of the baggy concept of ‘happiness’, we may get somewhere if we concentrate on ‘satisfaction’ or ‘achievement’. Aristotle knew this to be the case. The classical Greek word which he used, ‘eudaimonia’, translates as ‘human flourishing’ – an altogether less baggy concept. It suggests purposeful activity of some kind: doing, making, helping, learning, developing, achieving. Many of these also involve social interaction: getting on with people in shared tasks towards a collective goal. As Ruskin once remarked: “a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel”. This, alas, characterises too many people. If we are entirely wrapped up in ourselves, we may not attract much in the way of satisfaction or achievement.

The true equation between happiness and wealth, Professor Grayling concludes, is in fact not the causal connection which people assume to be the case. It is not that money or wealth causes happiness, but rather, that happiness is wealth. But this isn’t wealth in the form of money or possessions, which as we have seen may not lead to happiness at all. True wealth, as Aristotle recognised, is about the richness of one’s experiences: singing an anthem in front of a packed Salisbury Cathedral, or winning the county hockey championship, or completing the Three Peaks challenge. The wealth of one’s experiences will always bring pleasure in being recalled – and that is true wealth. It can never be quantified, only felt. And, unlike material wealth, we don’t need ever more of it in order just to maintain a constant level of happiness. Instead, if you have this sort of wealth, the wealth of a life of flourishing achievement, insight and growth, it will reap a lasting sense of satisfaction, which material wealth cannot.