Happiness Read online

  The questions are not idle ones. They do, in fact, make all the difference to the way we choose to live our lives. They are not the province of dewy-eyed poets or dilettantes of the leisured classes. On the contrary. These questions — whatever we take them to mean — ring true to this day for all of us. Drug dealers and shady bankers and dishonest used car dealers, they tell us, “do very well for themselves.” But is that real happiness? Can we ­really be “happy” if we ourselves are dishonest? Was Bernie Madoff happy or was he simply clever?

  On the other hand, does “living well” mean living posh or living organized lives or living a full life? What is a full life anyway?

  The answers to those questions plague us all the days of our lives. Nor can they be explained on a survey. If you ask me if I’m happy right now and I answer yes, exactly what did I say to you? That I have a good deal of money, that I have a lot of freedom, that I have a beautiful house, a well-ordered life, a life of spiritual and artistic depth, or a good stock broker?

  The answers to those questions lie under layers of misunderstanding and multiple levels of interpretation. Answering them, in fact, is the task of a lifetime. But having the sense to ask them from time to time is even more important. On the basis of the questions we ask and the answers to them at which we finally, finally arrive will depend the very direction and goals of our lives.

  It is the many questions that philosophers have asked about happiness for hundreds and even thousands of years that point a culture in the direction of its greatness or its decline. The answer the Romans gave to the question, what is happiness? was “bread and circuses” — in our language, lots of good food and fun. Until, eventually, noble Rome, despite its patricians and rhetoricians, ignored the price to be paid for grandeur and excess and fell into stagnation, decline, and decay.

  * * *

  The answer to the question, what is happiness? in our own world runs from having enough to having everything, from being nationally secure to being globally invincible, from having the perfect family to finding personal, even unbridled, license and calling it freedom.

  Indeed the world would be well served to decide for itself, at this crossroad between nationalism and globalism, between nuclear devastation and international terrorism, between financial excess and financial collapse, just what being happy requires. Then, all of us and each of us can really be free to concentrate on “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in ways that do not obstruct the happiness of others.

  chapter 26

  Happiness from There to Here

  The question of the pursuit of happiness has a long but shaky history in the Western world — as much in terms of its philosophical evolution as in its elusiveness on the personal level. A subject that contemporary society now considers primary and explores with passion did, nevertheless, lie relatively untouched — at least philosophically — for centuries. From the time of the Greek philosophers, roughly 500 bce to 500 ce, little or no serious public attention was paid to the subject in the West until the late eighteenth century. And it is to the Greeks that we still advert when we want to know what the great minds of history had to say before us about the subject.

  Greek philosophers immersed themselves in the problem of the meaning of happiness for almost four centuries. Whole schools of philosophical thought revolved around different aspects of the question as well as different approaches to the answers. Just as modern society looks to distinct schools of medicine for answers to our physical problems — to osteopathy and chiropractic, to acupuncture and holistic therapies, to biofeedback techniques and nutritionists — the Greeks set up various philosophical academies to pursue the questions of life. What it meant to be happy and how to get it were constant questions among early Greek thinkers. Whole schools of thought — the Cynics, the Skeptics, the Epicureans, and the Stoics — emerged to dissect the problem and answer the question.

  The themes of each were distinct, and their approaches were nothing if not fascinating. What’s more, from the point of view of moderns, the answers are intriguing if for no other reason than that remnants of those answers are still very much alive in the thinking of our own age — often even in our own. Most of all, they are also still as uncertain.

  The Greeks took five major and basically distinct positions on the issue of happiness.

  First, some schools of thought argued that pleasure was the essence of happiness. The heaping up of pleasurable experiences to the point of garnering more pleasure than pain in life was, they maintained, the measure of a happy life.

  The strains of this approach to life still echo clearly in our own twenty-first century. Drugs, alcohol, sexual excess, conspicuous consumption, escapism, and overindulgence on every level create a strong undercurrent in the culture. But at the same time, depression rates rise daily, suicides increase, and all-round life satisfaction scores teeter tenuously in the winds of recession. Surely happiness is a more stable concept than that. Or, otherwise, how is it that we marvel at the happiness levels of those who do not live in consumer societies?

  Second, other Greek philosophers argued that physical pleasure was, at most, a fleeting sensation that had little or nothing to do with happiness itself.

  These groups advocated what is both an ideal and a fear in today’s society. Asceticism and denial, long a religious value, has now become commonplace. Counselors suggest sexual abstinence, for instance, not for the purpose of gaining self-control but for the purpose of increasing pleasure by denying it to ourselves for specified periods of time. It is a “starve and gorge” approach to life that has nothing to do with finding happiness in anything other than pleasure, but makes pleasure the be-all and end-all of life — but differently. Nothing changes: life is still about pleasure but in more measured ways. Whether or not it is possible to be happy without having pleasure is never considered here.

  A third group of Greek philosophers contended that happiness lay in the total elimination of desires and that pleasure ought to be avoided entirely for fear of losing happiness in the pursuit of happiness. “Desirelessness,” these groups taught, was the only sure state of happiness. What we do not desire we cannot grieve. Rather than learn to find happiness in the sheer exhilaration of life itself, this approach depends for its effectiveness on teaching ourselves not to want what we may not get.

  In a society where “desire” is part of the very fabric of the culture, learning to live within the boundaries of “enough” becomes a great spiritual discipline. In a society consumed by a need for power, status, wealth, physical satisfaction, and independence in a culture that touts all of them, the ability to curb baseless desire has got to be of the essence of genuine happiness. Whether “desirelessness” itself is enough for the attainment of genuine happiness, though, remains to be seen.

  A fourth group of Greek philosophers insisted that happiness lay in living “in agreement with nature,” seeking nothing beyond the bare necessities of life and refusing any artificially created or conventional needs beyond it. The sparse life — the life of survival on bare necessities — fails to nourish either the capacity for pleasure or the kind of happiness that does not depend on the pleasures of the body. In this approach to happiness, both the body and the mind are deprived of the capacity for pleasure which is itself one of the gifts of life. The problem here is, can the fullness of happiness possibly exist where the gifts of life are totally denied?

  Finally, some groups simply suspended all belief in any system promising the happy life. Since nothing can be known for certain, they reasoned, to consider anything as certain is to run the risk of being disappointed in it. Therefore, believe nothing and you cannot possibly be disillusioned when it is disproved. Not to know, they maintained, is what is really important to know if we are ever to be truly happy. What the mind does not know, this philosophy argues, the heart cannot grieve in its absence. Disappointment is impossible. Belief is impossible. Speculation is impossible
. The full capacity of the mind is impossible.

  This kind of “happiness” throws people back onto their own resources. If nothing can be trusted outside the self, the self becomes a shrine to life. But what kind of life is it in which truth is unknowable and all systems are untrustworthy? That, it seems, must surely make for an uncomfortable, if not anxious, evaluation of life itself.

  Aristotle, on the other hand, the greatest Greek philosopher of them all, saw pleasure — the physical sensation of satisfaction — as part of the happy life but not necessary at all to the achievement of happiness. To be happy, Aristotle taught, it was necessary to live “the good life.”

  This kind of happiness, Aristotle argued, came only from living a life committed to the achievement of human excellence in ourselves — to being utterly rational in our choice of behaviors rather than foolishly sensual as we went through life. It meant building a life based on the kind of virtue or wisdom that chose the higher good in all situations. It meant giving our lives to the most meaningful issues of our times. It meant having a purpose in life.

  Happiness, to Aristotle, was not a matter of the moment. It was not the garnering of isolated and ephemeral pleasures, as helpful as these may be when we have them. Instead, happiness, to Aristotle, depended on our being able to look back over life and know that we had lived it dedicated to three things: first, the fullness of human development; second, the achievement of human goodness; and third, to the best and most meaningful of purposes.

  In other words, the goal of life, in Aristotle’s mind, was commitment to developing the perfect mind in the perfect body for the sake of attaining the highest of human aspirations and achievements. For Aristotle, happiness was not self-satisfaction. On the contrary. Aristotle’s definition of happiness included every facet of life, including its social and moral dimensions.

  Happiness, for Aristotle, was a matter of being the best we can be in every dimension of life and in all of it for something beyond the aggrandizement of the self. It is the total individual-communal model.

  It means being thoughtful about our decisions, high-minded in following them, and moral in their pursuit. Then, if we do these things, we will, in Aristotle’s words, have “lived well and done well.”

  Or to put it another way, if we want to be happy on Aristotle’s terms, we cannot live an irrational, dissipated, thoughtless and purposeless life. We must give everything we do all we have in us to do it well. Then, he says, we will be contented with life.

  These six qualities — virtue, rationality, pleasure, contemplation, disdain for the conventional, and the refusal to believe in any answers of any system as sure roads to happiness — continued to be popular approaches to the problem of happiness for almost 1000 years, from 500 bce to 500 ce. And then, suddenly, discussions such as those ceased to be of interest anymore.

  With the widespread acceptance of Christianity in the West and the closing of the Greek academies of philosophy that followed it, happiness became a matter for the next world, rather than this world with its joys and inequities, its potential and its oppressions, its social ills and social glory. Instead, the discussions turned to sin and suffering, to commandments and punishments, to doing the will of God and earning our way to heaven. Eternal happiness, not earthly happiness, became the new goal.

  It took almost ten more centuries before a whole new way of looking at the purpose of life and the status of the human being emerged. With little or no warning of its coming, but spurred on by the academic and theological turmoil of the Reformation in the sixteenth century and the overthrow of monarchies in the eighteenth century, the subject of happiness suddenly burst into public awareness once more, and is with us still.

  In fact, happiness then became the touchstone of everything and was extolled everywhere — in poetry, in literature, in sermons, in marriage, in music, and in political science.

  The writings of the ancient Greek philosophers became as fresh as yesterday’s news. And more than that, neoclassicism, this new rendering of old concepts or principles, became the staple of Western thought. This was nowhere more obvious than in the writings of the French Revolution and in the very constitution upon which the political philosophy of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” of the new United States of America would be based. Happiness had become a staple of human thought.

  Happiness became again the determining political and social value of the day.

  The old questions reemerged with a vengeance: What exactly was happiness? What would be the measure of its meaning? How would we recognize happiness if we ever saw it? How would we all know exactly what we were looking for here, in this life, let alone set out to get it?

  Those questions have not changed. They remain to our own day.

  * * *

  Surveys that purport to measure the happiness factor of individuals or groups or states or even nations are based on something. But on what? One study, in the kind of medical disclaimer found in drug advertisements, says quite clearly that the components used to identify happiness in its poll of states relied on responses to questions about employment, taxes, salary levels, and house ownership — a far cry from Aristotle’s configuration of the components of real happiness.

  Are those things what this society means — what you and I mean — when we’re talking about what we seek when we seek happiness?

  And if not, what shall we seek now? What is happiness really about today? Today’s philosophers, too, have a variety of answers. Choosing from among them will certainly affect what the world looks like to the next generation just as the choices of the one before this one touched us.

  So, what are some of the issues and what are some of the answers, and where do you and I stand in the midst of them?

  chapter 27

  Happiness and Pleasure

  The man who owned the local chocolate factory in a small town in Australia always posted openings in the help-wanted section of the daily paper that ended with the line, “Employees may eat as much chocolate as they want without cost.” It sounded like a very generous perquisite to an already generous salary. It didn’t take long for workers to figure out, however, that after the first two weeks on the job, almost no one was eating chocolate anymore.

  It isn’t that the workers were highly disciplined or even highly moral. On the contrary. The owner was simply a better philosopher than they were, or they would have realized long before they hired on that they were being offered no fringe benefit at all. The philosophical principle in question was actually a very simple one: however much we like a thing, there is such a thing as a saturation point. Beyond that point anything — everything — ceases to be pleasant. It’s called “enough is enough.”

  Pleasure, we discover, is a steadily decreasing experience. Five minutes on a wildly gyrating, whirling ride at the local theme park may certainly be pleasant, wonderful, and exciting; fifty minutes on the same whirligig — head aching, stomach sick, body turning, music blaring — would be excruciating. At the end of the day I may be happy I went to the park, but I also remember the painful part of a pleasant experience that I never want to repeat again.

  When television ads show faraway beaches and hanging hammocks, it is highly unlikely that the person watching on a living room couch in Wisconsin in February will be philosophizing about the difference between pleasure and happiness. “If I could go to a place like that on a day like this,” we say, “I’d be so happy.” But would we? Really?

  That question has tantalized philosophers for centuries. Nor is the answer clear yet.

  Some things about it are clear, however. If happiness is a state of mind and pleasure is a physical response to a particular stimulus, physical or mental — as in “The thought of the beach in the winter time can be a pleasant thought” — then happiness and pleasure are completely different qualities of life. If eating chocolate drops gives me pleasure, the first bite of the first piece may
be ecstatic. But the first bite of the fiftieth piece of chocolate after that is not pleasant at all, free or not.

  The point is that the very things we often think will make us most happy are the very things which, in the end, give us the least pleasure of all. Happiness is a general sense of well-being, of basic human contentment, an awareness of “rightness” about life. Pleasure, on the other hand, is a physical response to a particular occurrence. No pleasure can be sustained indefinitely. However good it may have been at the outset, it promises to lose its major quality — the ability to meet our own rabid but quickly satisfied desires. Once a desire is satisfied — once my back is scratched — to go on scratching it is an irritation. It can’t be satisfied again, unendingly. Then, the philosophers tell us, we simply begin to search for the next desire to satisfy.

  Epicurus, the fourth-century Greek philosopher from the island of Samos, is often accused of identifying happiness solely with pleasure. But that’s not true. “Pleasure,” he said, “is the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.” It is the conjunction of those two things that makes the difference. Pleasure was a necessary part of happiness, Epicurus argued, but physical pleasure was not the be-all and end-all of life. “The one who is not virtuous can never be happy,” he wrote.

  Clearly, Epicurus did not believe in the “Epicureanism” that is incorrectly named for him. Epicurus believed in pleasure, but he did not define it as a physical sensation alone. The absence of pain in the body must be accompanied by the absence of trouble in the soul, he taught, for a person to be truly happy — even when we accept the idea that pleasure is the goal of our existence.