Dear Dr. Adler,

Is worldly success necessary for happiness? In our society we tend to estimate other people in terms of success, and we usually measure that by the amount of material wealth they have been able to accumulate. But I wonder if we aren't setting up a false idol. Is human happiness really measurable in terms of material success?

E. D.

In my previous discussions of happiness, I pointed out that it consists in a life made perfect by the possession of all good things -- all the things that human beings need in order to lead fully satisfactory lives. The material goods of wealth are included among these good things, as well as moral and intellectual goods. But, as every one knows, you can have too much of certain good things, and that is why wealth raises a particularly difficult moral problem.

In its most general meaning, success consists in the attainment of any goal, purpose, or desire. If we achieve some measure of the happiness we strive for, we are successful. But, as you point out, many people today think of success almost exclusively in terms of accumulating worldly goods. When the notion of success is limited to this, success is not the same as happiness, for material goods cannot by them selves make a man happy. In fact, they may prevent him from being successful in the pursuit of happiness.

The ancient as well as the modern world was well acquainted with the view that material wealth was the be-all and end-all for man. But philosophers such as Aristotle observe that this is a very narrow and distorted view of human life. He sets up a scale of goods in which wealth occupies the lowest rank, ministering to the needs of the body and subordinate to the goods of the mind and of character.

Aristotle's evaluation of wealth roughly corresponds to the popular saying that money is not important unless you don't have any. You need certain material things in order to keep alive, and since you must keep alive in order to lead a good life, a certain amount of material goods is indispensable. But since living well goes way beyond merely keeping alive, material goods alone cannot make a life worth living.

Aristotle makes an important distinction between two kinds of wealth-getting. The first kind is familiar to any housewife. It is the process of acquiring enough wealth to maintain a family in decent style, that is, with a reasonable supply of the means of subsistence and the comforts and conveniences of life.

The other kind of wealth-getting seeks to accumulate money for money's sake. Some persons, Aristotle observes, think that their sole object in life is "to increase their money without limit . . . The origin of this disposition in men is that they are intent upon living only, and not upon living well." Such men, Aristotle maintains, may succeed in be coming as rich as Croesus, but like Croesus they may end their lives wondering why wise men like Solon do not look upon them as happy.

Plato, like Aristotle, holds that the man who "shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth" will end up miserable. "To be good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time," Plato thinks, is impossible. This is certainly the view of the Gospel verse which says that a rich man has as hard a time getting into the Kingdom of Heaven as a camel through a needle's eye.

But such remarks must not be interpreted as meaning that material possessions are wrong in themselves. What is wrong is to make wealth the be-all and end-all of life -- to become possessed by one's possessions. The Bible inveighs not so much against wealth as against the covetousness and greed that it arouses in men.

The prophets and the Psalms vividly depict the moral blindness which often accompanies the possession of great wealth. But it is St. Paul who makes the essential point quite clear. St. Paul does not say that money is the root of all evil. He says that it is the love of money which leads men to their moral destruction. Obsession with material success leads to spiritual failure.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Dear Max,

Mr. Chrucky prefers to believe that the ground of his argument is reliable and that of Mr. Zoccoli's is not.

Causality cannot be both non-temporal and temporal, he asserts. Why, pray tell?

He thus introduces a proposition we must accept on faith in his say-so, a question-begging inductive leap. It may be self-evident to him, but it is not to those who recognize that the existence of the temporal requires necessarily the existence of the non-temporal.

Mr. Chrucky believes that his perspective is faith-free. It isn't. The Enlightenment, in the guise of supplanting metaphysics, smuggled in its own unproved metaphysical belief, namely that only science can yield reliable knowledge about the human condition. Metaphysical realism holds that a truth need not be empirical to be reliable, and that empiricism can deceive a truth-seeker with its blinding premises.

The contorted nature of his formulation reflects the intellectual difficulties one confronts when he attempts to disprove truths apprehensible to metaphysical realism.

Dave Seng, echoing Mr. Zoccoli's view correctly cited other propositions whose character can be denied only by similarly strained, self-deceiving argument: "the world has existed for more than five minutes," "I had breakfast this morning," and "it is wrong to torture babies for fun."

It would be interesting to see a disproof of these clearly realistic, self-evident propositions as well.

The existence of God is a given to all but those who accept as a matter of faith that it is not.

Charles E. Warman

Dear Mr. Weismann,

I have enjoyed reading The Great Ideas Online very much. The essays, whether by Dr. Adler or by someone else, are intellectually stimulating. They help me rethink my views on important issues such as the good life and the existence of God.

As a Christian myself, I don't think I need any philosophical justification for my faith in God, because it does not occur to me to question His existence or the reality of His presence and works in human history. But as a thinking person, I do think I should be able to give good -- even philosophical -- reasons for my belief in the Christian God, simply because there are unbelievers who constantly question the possibility of His existence.

I am therefore very interested in the philosophy of religion. Besides reading works in this field by Dr. Adler (his How to Think about God), I have also been reading works by Dr. Gordon H. Clark, an American philosopher and theologian who passed away in 1987. I really want to know what Dr. Adler think of Dr. Clark's Christian philosophy. According to Dr. Clark, Christian philosophy is the only tenable philosophy because it is based on the revealed truth of God rather than on speculations by fallible humans.

Wing-Chiu Ng
Hong Kong

Dear Wing-Chiu,

Unfortunately, Dr. Adler informs me that he is not familiar with Dr. Clark's work. On the other hand, I would recommend that you read Dr. Adler's book Truth in Religion: The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth.

Max,

being so busy I have only just now completed reading the article by Mario Zoccoli. Since Paul Harrison in his follow-up response did such a terrific job of refuting Mr. Zoccoli, I will not address those points. There are however a few points that I would like to cover having to do with the so-called Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

1) Theoretical/hypothetical physicists are not monolithic on this issue. Some would contend that there's a trend away from the Big Bang origins model and some would contend that it has been refuted.

2) Mr. Zoccoli's arguments do not need to rest on this theory i.e. they do not follow with necessity rather alternate and more viable explanations (in my view) are available with much stronger linkage which don't require a 'force fit'.

3) It seems inappropriate to assume the truth of the Big Bang theory as 'a given' especially in light of the serious flaws ** in this theory.

a) So-called theoretical physicists typically fail to respond to even these few criticisms without resorting to science fictionalizing e.g. 'cold dark matter' etc., etc.

thanks,

Scott Ullen

**
1) The missing mass of the universe problem.
2) An explosion producing order and complexity.

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