Facts and Arguments about the Introduction of Initiative and ...

a learning relationship, they do not try to maintain any outward
‘dignity’ or to maintain status or age prestige and the
like. It should even be said that my subjects share a quality
that could be called ‘humility’ of a certain type. They are all
quite aware of their own worth, so that there is no humbleness
of the cringing or of the designing and calculating type.
They are equally aware of how little they know in comparison
with what could be known and what is known by others.
Because of this it is possible for them without pose to be
honestly respectful, and even humble, before people who can
teach them something that they do not know, or who have a
skill they do not possess. (...) These individuals, themselves
elite, select for their friends elite, but this is an elite of character,
capacity, and talent, rather than of birth, race, blood,
name, family, age, youth, fame, or power. Most profound, but
also most vague, is the hard-to-get-at tendency to give a certain
quantum of respect to any human being just because he
is a human individual...” (Maslow 1950, 1973, p. 193-194)
Maslow considers the ‘self-actualizing person’, therefore, as
an essentially democratic being. By contrast, the authoritarian
disposition is an attitude that springs from the lack of
gratification of the basic needs.
Maslow’s characterisation of democratic and authoritarian
personalities corresponds with Putnam’s distinction between
‘civicness’ and ‘amoral familialism’.
It is noteworthy that people and societies of both types seem
to perpetuate and reinforce themselves. Democracy and civic
sense generate more democracy and civic sense. On the other
hand, according to Maslow, authoritarian personalities will
cause society to become less democratic. They transform society
into the image of the social jungle in which they believe –
in which the strong take unrestrained advantage of the weak.
Aristotle on happiness
Neither democracy nor economic activity are goals in themselves.
They are only important to the extent that they serve
human happiness and human welfare. Good politics does
not have to make people happy, but politics does have the
duty to remove social barriers to the creation of happiness.
But what is happiness?
Aristotle gave one of the oldest definitions in his Ethica Nicomachea.
The Ethica Nicomachea is his maturest work in the
area of ethics, and its very first book is devoted to the question
of happiness. Aristotle begins with the straightforward observation
that human beings perform a very wide range of different
actions, with very diverse goals. A medical treatment is,
for example, aimed at healing; the saddler’s work is intended
to manufacture a saddle etc. But the immediate aims are, in
their turn, subordinate to other, wider or higher objectives.
The saddler makes the saddle for the same higher reason as
the horse-breeder rears a horse: specifically, to make [horse]
riding possible. But why do people strive to ride horses? Aristotle
asked himself: is there not some highest, ultimate goal
behind all these intermediate aims? Is there something that
we strive for because it is simply good in itself? For Aristotle,
the ultimate goal was happiness. Money and riches, for example,
are not desired for their own sake, but because they are
believed to bring happiness. Happiness, on the other hand, is
a goal that needs no further explanation.
In what does this happiness consist? In order to discover this
Aristotle goes in search of what it is that makes us human;
2
what it is that distinguishes us from animals or plants. Happiness
is to be found in those acts which are in harmony with
the true nature of the human being and which therefore need
no further justification. And because humans are in essence
social and moral beings, Aristotle arrives at the definition of
happiness as “…a certain activity of the soul in harmony with
virtue.” In a deeper sense, virtuous acts – which are always
ultimately one or other form of readiness to help others – are
gratifying in themselves. Our real connectedness to and involvement
with ‘the other’ is our happiness. Aristotle’s view
accords with Maslow’s theory of meta-needs: the happiness
of the fulfilled (in Maslow’s terms: ‘gratified’) human consists
in the readiness to help (Aristotle’s ‘virtue’).
However, Aristotle also knew that many people hold other
views, and that the same person can hold different views in
different situations. Aristotle was perfectly aware of the importance
of what Maslow calls the ‘basic needs’: “Yet (…) [happiness]
needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible,
or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment. In
many actions we use friends and riches and political power as
instruments; and there are some things the lack of which takes
the lustre from happiness, such as good birth, goodly children,
beauty; for the man who is very ugly in appearance or ill-born
or solitary and childless is not very likely to be happy, and
perhaps a man would be still less likely if he had thoroughly
bad children or friends or had lost good children or friends by
death. (…) then, happiness seems to need this sort of prosperity
in addition; for which reason some identify happiness with
good fortune, though others identify it with virtue.”
Aristotle’s concept can be reformulated in Maslow’s terminology
as follows: as long as the basic needs are not gratified,
the pleasure that ensues from satisfying these basic needs
can be experienced as a substitute for the real happiness
which results from the gratification of the meta-needs, i.e.
from the striving for connectedness.
Aristotle did not believe that happiness ensues from satisfying
the basic needs. Adequate satisfaction of the basic needs
is an essential but not sufficient prerequisite for happiness.
People also have the meta-need to behave virtuously and to
strive for ‘the good’. This means that at a general societal
level they need democracy, because people must be able to
strive for ‘what is beautiful in themselves’ in this area of life
too (see 4-2). Frank (1997) is quite correct in observing that
the majority of people would rather be a dissatisfied Socrates
than a fully satiated pig. The pig does not know happiness
because it cannot strive for ‘the good’; but it certainly
knows the pleasure of satiation. In 1954, Olds and Milner
discovered that the stimulation of certain parts of the cerebral
cortex of rats seemed to cause an intense feeling of
pleasure in these rodents. The rats lost their interest in everything
else if they were enabled to create this stimulation
for themselves. Ng (1997) suggests that we could make a
substantial leap forwards in realising ‘happiness for all’ by
providing people with the technical possibility for such continuous
cerebral cortex stimulation. Such mass production
of ‘happiness’ would be inexpensive and very environmentally
friendly. There’s only one problem: human happiness
has very much less to do with such guaranteed pleasure than
much advertising would often have us believe. Happiness is
not the same thing as pleasure. Being happy means: being
able to be creative and helpful. Frank’s and Ng’s questions
clearly show that Aristotle is correct in his concept of happiness,
regardless of how idealistic and utopian his assertion
may appear at first sight.