The Greek notion of eudaimonia, which is a richer and I think less ambiguous concept than our typical conceptions of happiness, is nevertheless sometimes translated as “happiness,” which is understandable to the extent happiness has been formulated by some philosophers in terms welfare and well-being. But as Martha Nussbaum writes in a note on the Greek word in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986):
“Especially given our Kantian and Utilitarian heritage in moral philosophy, in both parts of which ‘happiness’ is taken to be the name of a feeling of contentment or pleasure, and a view that makes happiness the supreme good is assumed to be, by definition, a view that gives supreme value to psychological states rather than to activities, this translation is badly misleading. To the Greeks, eudaimonia means something like ‘living a good life for a human being,’ or as a recent writer has suggested, ‘human flourishing.’ Aristotle tells us that it is equivalent, in ordinary discourse, to ‘living well and doing well.’ Most Greeks would understand eudaimonia to be something essentially active, of which praiseworthy activities are not just productive means, but actual constituent parts [this could include virtuous actions as ‘excellences’ of character]. It is possible for a Greek thinker to argue that eudaimonia is equivalent to a state of pleasure; to this extent activity is not a conceptual part of the notion. But even here we should be aware that many Greek thinkers conceive of pleasure as something active rather that stative; an equation of eudaimonia with pleasure might, then, not mean what we would expect it to mean in a Utilitarian writer.”
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“It is philosophers who have the task of exploring what matters to us most—what is freedom? What is it genuinely for us to be happy? What is worth valuing and why?—but it is psychoanalysis that teaches us how we regularly get in the way of our own freedom, systematically make ourselves unhappy and use values for covert and malign purposes. Philosophy cannot live up to its task unless it takes these psychoanalytic challenges seriously.” — Jonathan Lear
“The parts of Freud’s writings that suggest some level of causal determination in fact coexist with his explicit view that one of the chief goals of psychoanalysis is to increase the patient’s ‘freedom’ (Freiheit), ‘autonomy’ (Selbstandigkeit), and ‘initiative’ (Initiative). Thus the aim of psychoanalysis is to ‘free’ (befrein) the patient from intrapsychic ‘chains’ (die Fesseln), which normally increases the patient’s ‘self-control’ (Selbstbeherrschung) and gives ‘the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or the other’ between conflicting motives. For Freud, it is the mark of a relatively healthy ego to be able to deliberate and exercise self-control and willpower in choosing and pursuing goals. [….]
Freud’s claim that the developed ego is guided by qualitative hedonism helps to bring out just how in his late writings ‘the programme of the pleasure principle’ is compatible with non-egoistic, and hence, moral behavior. This compatibility is largely a consequence of the fact that happiness as Freud uses the term for the goal of life is a different kind of end then the quantitative one of maximizing a single kind of agreeable feeling. ‘Happiness’ in life is an ‘inclusive end’ rather than a single ‘dominant end.’ That is to say, the activities through which it is sought are not means in an instrumental or neutral sense, but parts of a whole. To pursue happiness as an inclusive goal through such activities as artistic creativity, intellectual work, sensuality, love, and aesthetic appreciation is to enjoy each of these activities as contributing something qualitatively unique to a life plan. Insofar as these activities are means, it is in the sense of being constitutive of the comprehensive end of happiness in life as a whole. It is only through such activities that genuine happiness in the sense of ‘positive fulfillment’ is possible [Here we see Freud’s conception of ‘happiness’ is close if not identical to the classical Greek concept of eudaimonia, or at least several well-known conceptions thereof and which we might translate in the best sense to mean or imply the possibility of human fulfillment, the triune nature of which arguably entails, minimally and broadly speaking, freedom (as self-determination), human community, and self-realization. The converse of such human fulfillment could be said to found in the several senses in which Marx employs the concept of alienation throughout his writings.] [....] Freud does not construe narrowly, then, the happiness at which the ego aims as always involving a self-interested goal. To the contrary, persons are observed to find pleasure in a whole range of activities, including fulfilling the needs of others, and even in moral conscientiousness. For there is ‘satisfaction’ to be obtained in acting benevolently in accordance with one’s ‘ego ideal’ and ‘a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal.’”— Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991)
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We need not assume that freedom, at least insofar as it thought conducive to happiness, as a necessary yet not sufficient condition requires or implies “maximally unbounded and unburdened choice,” in correspondence with the classical Liberal belief that “people tend to fare best when they possess, more or less, the greatest possible freedom to live as they wish,” a belief Daniel N. Haybron views as central to “liberal optimism” or what I would term, perhaps more precisely, “libertarian (liberal) optimism.” This optimism, which rarely distinguishes between welfare, well-being and happiness, has an “elective affinity” with prominent features of capitalism wherein consumption (‘understood in a broad sense that includes aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as consumption of goods in the ordinary sense’) defines the best life for the individual and thus the more opportunities for and occasions of consumption are though to bring about pleasure and happiness. Liberal capitalism advocates the free choice of life-style, but “… forgets that the choice is to a large extent preempted by the social environment in which people grow up and live. These endogenously emerging preferences can well lead to choices whose ultimate outcome is avoidable ruin or misery. “
Please see Haybron’s The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008). For a taste of rather different understanding and interpretation of what freedom might or should entail, in other words, a conception that does not presuppose or assume the unconditional value of “maximally unbounded and unburdened choice.” See too Jon Elster’s Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and the essays collected in Jonardon Ganeri and Clare Carlisle, eds., Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010). On how this more modest (realistic?) conception of what freedom ideally entails is compatible with Marxist conceptions of self-realization and human fulfillment, see Elster’s article, “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Whether one believes in religion or not, we are all seeking something better in life—the very notion of our life is toward happiness. — The Dalai Lama
Happiness, it is said, is seldom found by those who seek it, and never by those who seek it for themselves. — F. Emerson Andrews
Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling. — Margaret Lee Runbeck
Most of us, I suspect, possess or cleave to a desire or wish to be happy. “Most of us” the requisite qualification because, in the words of the late Nel Noddings, “there are some gloomy souls who deny that happiness in our chief concern and claim something else as a greater good ….”1 We may even think our status as human beings or persons brings along with it (despite the awkwardness of the locution) a right to be happy, that the pursuit, as it were, of happiness is part and parcel of human nature or the human condition (and thus we may come to resent or at least get angry at those people or things we believe interfere with or are obstacles to our justified pursuit or just deserts). As for what happiness in fact is or consists of, we are not certain; at least we perhaps have only a dim conception, or a vaguely intuitive sense of what makes us happy. Happiness may embody or represent that which enhances our welfare and well-being, what makes life meaningful or brings self-fulfillment (or eudaimonia). We may want to define happiness so it is not circumscribed solely by “health, wealth, and the ups and downs of everyday life,” but the satisfaction of minimal criteria for material welfare and well-being may be a necessary yet not sufficient condition for happiness.2 Or we may be content to see happiness as simply the converse of suffering, of the absence of suffering (of various kinds). We may believe happiness is an occasional, momentary, episodic, indeed occurrent emotion or affective state (arising from more or less familiar gratifications or either well-known simple pleasures or complex pleasures).3 Or, we may view it more along the lines of a disposition (i.e., with a potential to be actualized), one that takes either the form of a mood (e.g., ‘he’s been rather happy of late’) or a general affective or even character trait, as in, “He’s such a happy person.” It might be the case that what we entertain as the “stuff” of happiness—no matter how assiduously, passionately, or obsessively entertained—is an illusion, a fantasy, an impossible desire or wish. What is perhaps more disturbing or frightening is to consider the possibility that the conscious wish or desire for happiness, to be happy, is routinely or ritually undermined by our unconscious, the appreciation or awareness of which may come to us all too late in life. More transparently, and in the words of the Dalai Lama, it may merely be the case that “we often employ misguided means in our attempts to be happy and wind up creating more causes for misery instead.”
In any case, it is likely that the desire or wish or intention to “be happy” is not one that can be directly sought, in other words, it is one with that class of mental states or states of affairs that cannot be (directly) willed, indeed, the deliberate pursuit of such states represents the irrationality, performative contradiction, or sheer folly of “willing what cannot be willed” (the late psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Leslie Farber). If that is true, and I lack sufficient reason to doubt it is not, then happiness is a welcome or unexpected by-product or side effect of some other action or activity, some other act or condition whose principal intention or motivation was not the desire or wish to be happy, even if happiness is somehow linked to or circuitously or indirectly caused by the original intention or primary motivation. Or it might be that we can only be happy when the desires or wish for happiness recedes, as it were, to the back of our minds, when we have forgotten the desire or wish to be happy, as we are no longer “self-conscious” about it, let alone obsessed with being happy (a Buddhist would put this in terms of not being ‘attached’ to happiness). Let’s assume for a moment that this is wrong, and thus that I’m able to deliberately pursue or perform or consume those (material or immaterial) things that bring me happiness, if only momentarily or episodically (this need not be simply the desire for instant gratification). In such cases, the happiness may itself be described as evanescent or degrading in intensity or quality over time, its character exemplifying what economists term “diminishing marginal utility,” its pleasures increasingly elusive to the point of vanishing altogether.
Whatever happiness is, it seems reasonable to hope that, at least in part, our happiness should be occasionally characterized as a consequence of seeing others happy, or of our ability to, as we say, make others happy. Put a bit differently, a portion of our happiness should be constituted by the joy or pleasure we find in witnessing the happiness of others, whether or not we have been complicit in or had anything to do with its outcome (which is verbally if not always honestly expressed when one says, ‘I’m so happy for you!’). See our last note below for this idea within Buddhism.
Notes
- From her important book, Nel Noddings, Happiness and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- On the apparent paradox of a precipitous decline of happiness in the midst of increasing plenty (or the putative pleasures of ample and conspicuous consumption), please see Robert E. Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000).
- “Yet attempts to account for happiness’s value in purely hedonic terms seems to miss something. They do not account for the appeal of criticizing hedonism on the grounds that it is psychologically superficial. It seems important to note the psychological depth of happiness, the fact that it involves more of our psychologies than just their phenomenal surfaces. Why? The answer lies mainly in the connection that happiness makes with the self.” Daniel M. Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008): 182. We need not assume here any essentialist notion or independent identity of “the self.” As the Dalai Lama points out, “[the] ‘I’ is designated in dependence on our body and mind, yet when we search for a findable thing that that is “me,” we can’t find it within the body or mind, the collection of the two, or separate from them.” Furthermore, “[a]lthough we cannot pinpoint anything that is the self, the existence of a person who creates causes and experiences effects is undeniable.” Please see, passim, The Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron (Bhikṣu Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Bhikṣuṇī Thubten Chodron) Approaching the Buddhist Path (The Library of Wisdom and Compassion, Vol. 1) (Wisdom Publications, 2017). While I’m not aware of any systematic treatments, anukampā, “sympathy,” is discussed in the first part of Harvey B. Aronson’s Love [his translation of mettā] and Sympathy in Theravada Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980). In Pāli, the term is said to literally mean “trembling along with” or “to vibrate towards.” I mention this because the notion of “sympathetic (sometimes ‘altruistic’) joy” or muditā, taking joy in the happiness or good fortune of others (the converse of envy), is one of the four “divine abidings” or “immeasurables” or “sublime attitudes” (both objects of meditation and virtues to exemplify), the others being mettā (loving-kindness or benevolence), karuṇā (compassion), and upekkhā (equanimity; cf. sophrosyne).
Further Reading: Chapter 15, “Caring about Oneself—Happiness and Sadness,” in Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000): 449-472.
“As one writer insisted, ‘Don’t mistake pleasures for happiness. They’re a different breed of dog.’ Certainly, upon first reading, ‘pleasure’ may sound disreputable, whereas ‘happiness’ sounds morally acceptable, thanks in part to the famous, if ill-understood phrase in the Declaration of Independence guaranteeing the citizen’s right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Perhaps because of the Declaration’s lofty aspirations, few have troubled to think through the connotations attached to the words ‘happy’ and ‘happiness.’ True, there is an idea behind Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, that money can’t buy enough contentment, just as ideas spur UC-Berkeley’s ‘Science of Happiness’ project and the academic revival of interest in phenomenology. But evidently, the modern preoccupation with happiness is a symptom of the industrializing and industrialized world. To today’s smart thinkers who equate ‘happiness’ with ‘being satisfied with one’s life as a whole’ (a state of being, rather than a response to a given stimulus), the early thinkers who are my subject would have replied that seeking such an ambitious and unattainable goal would likely end in dissatisfaction and greater unhappiness. Indeed, sheer overreach may have brought about the current Euro-American paradox; ergo talk of happiness is most prevalent in the very populations heavily reliant upon anti-depressants and opiates. It is moreover hard to ignore the disturbing racist and culturalist overtones of recent ‘Happiness’ projects, lodged in the universalist presumption that all cultures everywhere have replicated the same set of emotions and emotional triggers as US citizens today. …[T]he vocabulary for several American virtues relating to happiness (the virtue of ‘cheerfulness,’ for example [I would add ‘positive thinking’ and being an ‘optimist’]) do not seem to exist in the classical writings in China, though an absence of literary evidence does not insure that cheerfulness was absent from daily life.
The Ancients with clear-eyed, even brutal frankness noted the manifold ills to which all people are prey: sickness, decrepitude, death, natural catastrophe, and slander among them. Fully cognizant of the level of destruction that ill luck, bad timing, or vengeful powers can wreak upon the innocent, the thinkers discussed in these pages advised followers to devise and adhere to programs and practices that promised a fair chance of shielding people, as much as humanly possible, form the worst slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Each person, they said, can learn to give and take pleasure, despite the calamities that beset ordinary lives. In addition, those already favored by fortune may learn how to magnify their blessings. The closest counterpart to the modern tropes linking autonomy to pleasure is the continual profession by Chinese elites of their determination to avoid enslavement to other people and things. This admirable clarity about life’s constraints—so greatly at odds with American positive thinking—precludes mindless optimism. In consequence, no writings in classical Chinese, so far as I know, denote or connote ‘happiness’ either in its older Western sense of ‘favored by fortune’ or in its modern connotation of ‘a free state of blissful autonomy.’ The thinkers reviewed in this book would mock the fond hope that one can ‘stumble upon happiness.’” — Michael Nylan, The Chinese Pleasure Book (Zone Books, 2018)
Recommended
- Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1993).
- Bortolotti, Lisa, ed. Philosophy and Happiness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- Davies, William. The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015).
- Feldman, Fred. What Is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford University Press, 2010).
- Griffin, James. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Clarendon Press, 1986).
- Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- Haybron, Daniel M. Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Daniel Haybron, “Happiness,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/happiness/.
- Kahneman, D., E. Diener and N. Schwarz, eds. Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1999).
- Lane, Robert E. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000).
- Lobel, Diana. Philosophies of Happiness: A Comparative Introduction to the Flourishing Life (Columbia University Press, 2017).
- Noddings, Nel. Happiness and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- Sumner, L.W. Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1996).
- Wallwork, Ernest. Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991).
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