Happiness Read online

There is also no doubt that Epicurus taught that “Pleasure is the most important thing in life” and that we shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting it. But he taught a lot of other things about pleasure, as well. He taught, for instance, that what we want is often not what we need.

  If life is about getting as much pleasure as possible, we ask — and rightly so — does it really make any difference whether we need what we have or not as long as we find it pleasant? Like alcohol or money or travel or drugs. To Epicurus it mattered a great deal. What we really need, he said, are friends, intentional communities of like-minded people, freedom from want, self-sufficiency, and the reflective life that enables us to discriminate between good pleasures and bad.

  So, to get those things — what he had defined as the real components of happiness — Epicurus himself left the city, gathered a small, reclusive community around him, and concentrated on developing the very elements of life that he recommended to others. The conundrum is, Should we do the same?

  The question raises some serious challenges to this age. Even the things Epicurus says we really need — depending on what we give up to get them — may not be really good for us in the end. We want friends, for instance, but when we spend too much of our time going to parties to attract them, we stand to lose a lot of other goods as a result. We want to be part of a group, but how much do we drink to be accepted by one? We want to be happy, but how often do we ask ourselves whether buying pleasure is really making us happy or simply distracting us from concentrating on becoming that fullness of ourselves, that rational excellence, that Aristotle talked about as essential to happiness?

  Living a life of pleasure, we discover thanks to Epicurus, is very serious business. It means that we must think carefully about what gives us pleasure in life. Then we must attend closely to whether those pleasures are really leading us to happiness or only deterring us, in the long run, from achieving it — just as too much chocolate will in the end make us sick, too much spending make us poor, too much drinking make us senseless.

  If we really knew what we needed in life, we would waste little time on things whose fugitive surge of pleasure led nowhere, was quickly dissipated, did nothing to develop in us the fullness of our potential. As Epicurus said, “It is impossible to live pleasurably without living prudently, honorably, and justly; or to live prudently, honorably, and justly without living pleasurably.” It’s not one or the other; it’s one and the other. And therein lies the great challenge of “the pursuit of happiness.”

  chapter 28

  Happiness Is Pursued,

  Not Achieved

  I looked up “the pursuit of happiness” on Google.com this morning. There were 14,900,000 results. On the other hand, there were 25,400,000 items under the phrase “the achievement of happiness.” Either way you look at it, a lot of people are searching for the kind of life fulfillment the philosophers say is of the essence of being human. And a lot of people claim to know how to get it.

  Some of them offer it through courses in attitudinal change. Some of them want to help us alter our brain waves. Some of them want to put us on a diet. Whatever the system, happiness is big business. But is it a skill?

  The point seems clear: happiness has something to do with being willing, if we do not already consider ourselves truly happy, to participate in the process of changing ourselves. Happiness, it seems obvious, is a choice, a focus, a discipline, an attitude of mind. But the question remains eternal: Is happiness really achievable? Can we ever really get to the point of being truly “happy” — or, better yet, having gotten there, can we really keep it?

  If the question is whether or not happiness is a permanent state, the answer is often more confusing than the question. Most people, in fact, have learned somewhere along the line that happiness would someday be permanent — but not here. Only on some other planet, in some other state of being, could we ever hope to be forever happy, totally free of emotional darkness. But that answer offers little guidance to life as you and I live it. What’s more, it posits a lot of other questions for which we would like to have answers but for which we have little or no evidence to study. Would we want total freedom from suffering, from angst, from struggle, if we got it? After all, some emotional darkness is often the very step we need to provoke us to strive for even greater levels of happiness. I struggled with paralysis and life changes for four long years but without those experiences and restrictions and forced reviews of life and directional changes, I would not be doing what I’m doing right now, about which I am very happy.

  Or is it closer to the truth, more realistic, more within the bounds of experience to accept the notion that happiness simply comes and goes? Maybe we’re doomed to keep chasing the ineffable forever, like Sisyphus, whom the gods condemned to roll to the top of a mountain a boulder that immediately rolled back down again.

  The question is a recurring one in philosophy, and from the very beginning of organized philosophical debate it’s been a topic that ended in a split decision.

  Having made the point that pleasure and happiness are two different things, the philosophers turned their attention to a second philosophical problem: whether happiness was a shifting and tenuous quality of daily life or the final evaluation of the whole of life, as Aristotle had implied. If happiness is a quality of daily life, then all we need to do to determine whether or not we’re happy is to count up the happy days and compare them to the number of unhappy days. The greater number wins.

  But even then, what will we count as happiness — events of the moment or the contours of a lifetime? If I were a winning jockey who then became a prize-winning writer because my legs became paralyzed in a fall off a horse, am I happy or not? Or what if I was not happy when it happened but because of it I am happy now? In either case, which counts in the scale of things? Am I happy or unhappy?

  Philosophers grapple with the implications of it all. If we take the position that only events of the moment count as happiness — meaning surges of good feeling or feelings of pleasure — then happiness comes and goes and cannot be achieved. Nor, it seems, is it arithmetical or cumulative.

  In that case, happiness becomes ephemeral, the matter of a minute, gotten before we knew it, gone because we could not control the time. Like a wedding day, maybe. Or Christmas morning with the children.

  If we take the position, though, as Aristotle did, that happiness is always a thing of the past — a long-term awareness of the personal impact and conditions of our lives rather than simply its isolated events, we can achieve happiness but never know how happy we’ve been till life’s end. Like forty years after the wedding day, despite all the ups and downs of it, the couple proclaims how happy they’ve been together just raising the family. Like our memories of the joy of a lifetime of Christmases as we watched the children of the family themselves become more and more generous, more and more loving over the years. Happiness surprises us with its eternal, underlying presence even though we did not have either the insight or the experience to see it as it developed.

  Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century English philosopher, concluded that though we may pursue happiness, we can never achieve it. “There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here,” he wrote, “because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire.”

  Hobbes clearly considered happiness to be a state of mind, a quality of soul, but because life is an exercise in change, he assumed that there was no kind of tranquility that could be eternally sustained in the face of continuing difficulties, losses, or disappointments of desire along the way.

  That assumption, however, implies that we are at the mercy of our passing fancies or the vagaries of life. Whatever happens to us externally, this position asserts, changes our degree of internal satisfaction. From this perspective, we are simply reeds blowing in the wind, victims of what happens around us despite the strength of soul within us.

  The argument s
eems superficial, if not specious, indeed. When my happiness lies in a future of programming computers to make medicine more effective for others, how can the pain of cancer surgery and chemotherapy necessarily take that away? If I’m telling the truth and my happiness lies in the presence of my adoring, fun-loving children, a drop in the stock market surely cannot destroy those relationships and the emotional security they bring.

  The problem is that Hobbes doesn’t seem to be able to imagine anything that is greater than the sum total of things with which life confronts us. What poets would say about that would be at least as interesting as the theory itself. After all, who doesn’t know how much the human being is able to give up, to take on, to suffer through for the sake of love. Who of us hasn’t ever chosen the bird in the hand for reputed numbers of them in the bush? Who of us hasn’t chosen the slow path to success through education, perhaps, rather than the quick fix and the dead end job — and been happy that we did, however difficult the grind of it?

  The problem is obvious. Whether happiness is possible, is able to be achieved, depends on whether we see it as a state of mind or a sensation, a feeling state not without pain, perhaps, but full of lasting and palpable pleasure. Can we look back over our life to this moment and say simply, as God says in the Book of Genesis at every step of creation, that “It was good”? Can I look at everything that has happened in my own life, evaluate what happened because of it, and say of it, as God said, “It was good”? Can I look at the marriage and say in the end — however it turned out — that doing it “was good”? Can I look at life as I have lived it to this moment and say, “It was good”?

  In that case, the achievement of happiness has as much to do with the way we both manage and evaluate our responses to life as it does all the particular things that have happened to us as we went. Philosophers down the ages have explored that possibility, too, and found it intriguing — but not totally convincing.

  The Greek Stoics, three hundred years before Jesus, were philosophers who did not shrink from defining the management of attitudes, of desires, as the basis of happiness. The virtuous life is the only happy life, they taught. Moral virtue is the single good, and everything else in life — status, wealth, honor, and health — are neutral. The happy person is the good person.

  Tell that to a lot of good people who, in the face of troubles and frustration and pain, suffer from the very fact that they have been good all their lives and still find themselves plagued with unhappiness. “What did I ever do to deserve this?” they demand of life and God and goodness, as if life and happiness were a game of merit, highest player wins the happiness prize.

  Later, in the nineteenth century, Immanuel Kant took essentially the same position when he argued that “the good will” is the seat of happiness. And nothing else. Nothing else counts. But if that is the case, there are a lot of good-willed people who live lives depressed, defeated, and full of anger about being denied their right to the great bargain of life — good will for a pain-free existence.

  Mohandas Gandhi in our own day put it this way: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

  So the question remains for us to answer for ourselves yet today: What does it mean to have “the good will,” to live the virtuous life, which the philosophers say are essential to the achievement of a permanent state of happiness?

  For these philosophers, happiness comes from the inside out, not the outside in. It is what is in us that counts in the end. After I manage to bear all the pain and difficulty that life demands of us — the divorce, the abandonment, the collapse of my fortunes, the ruin of my reputation, the end of my health — only I myself can possibly resurrect the happiness factor in me. But to do that, I must know what it is, what it really depends on, what I must summon in myself to make it possible again.

  chapter 29

  Happiness Is Possible

  but Not Guaranteed

  It’s hard to forget those cataclysmic moments in life when everything we once called good and beautiful, lovable and safe, secure and promising suddenly ended. Stopped. Died or disappeared or abandoned us in mid-air. Just when we never thought it would happen.

  It’s even harder to think at those moments that life will ever be the same, that we will ever be happy again.

  Then the whole question of happiness becomes at best a myth, at worst a cruel and haunting myth. Then we come to understand how easy it is to believe that happiness is a mirage, an illusion, impossible. Something we’ve made up to avoid admitting the basic tragedy of life.

  And yet, the idea of happiness clings to humanity across the centuries like a tenacious angel in the dark.

  The early philosophers all believed that happiness was the natural end of life — one way or another — but that the gods had a final say in it. Luck and chance played a part, even for Aristotle, who conceded that no one could control the externals of life but that all of us could control ourselves.

  For centuries after the Greeks, Christianity, too, taught that whatever the nature of happiness in this world, we were all destined, if we lived well in this one, to be happy in the next. Since those things were givens, the certainty of them meant that there was no need to question what was behind the pain and sufferings of this life or what the continual, recurring, irrational dimensions of human pain meant to the whole notion of human happiness.

  With churches in ruin after the Reformation and theologies in flux, however, the nature of “the good life,” the definition of virtue, was more confused than ever. The advent of science and its explanation of natural things as natural rather than displays of an angry or moody God triggered a new skepticism about old ideas. The rise of a new commercial middle class not “born to the cloth” or subject to “the divine rights of kings” sparked a whole new wave of both initiative and independence across Europe. What system could a person trust to be true? What answers could be assumed on face value? What was the secret to happiness when everything — and anything — was possible now?

  All of society was in turmoil — disdainful of the past, reluctant to take much of anything as givens any longer. All of life — religion, governance, social systems, and truisms of every kind — began to be systematically rethought. Happiness was no longer a matter of class. It might even be a matter of being human rather than of being rich or powerful or clerical or even male. New voices spoke; new ideas emerged; a new world began to come into view, a happier world for everyone.

  Ideas long taken to be absolutes were under reexamination for the first time in centuries, just as in Greece, when the capricious old gods began to wane in influence, philosophy — the search for the nature of life and goodness based on reason and independent of religion — flourished.

  Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican monk with a towering intellect, had already integrated the work of Aristotle into Christian thought. The Greek philosophers were then already part of European intellectual life. Their conceptions of happiness were already available both as a backdrop and as a starting point for the most ambitious project of the age: the initial “happiness project” that would, in time, change the very nature of the goal of government.

  On the religious scene, then, the rumblings of new thought were no less cataclysmic. The theological answer to the nature of happiness, once clear, would now, ironically, become the starting point for starting over: God willed happiness for everyone, the church taught. In this world, however, in the light of natural disasters and social inequities, suffering was a given. So, the medieval church concluded, happiness came to those who, despite that suffering, lived a life faithful to the dictates of the church and so were promised happiness in the world to come.

  When the “age of faith” crumbled, however — the centuries in which a single religious worldview held sway in both church and court — the question of happiness appeared on the European intellectual agenda once more. The philosophical approach t
o happiness emerged again. Could happiness be achieved in this life as well as in the next? And if so, how?

  More importantly, if happiness was not a thing of the next world only — if, in fact, there were no next world at all — what would take its place? Thinkers began to grapple with the unthinkable: What were human beings left with to navigate their way through life? If, by whatever means, for whatever reason, we are, as citizens of Mother Earth, simply abandoned to our own designs in a world in chaos and governments in shambles, what did that mean for life now, for us here? The very fulfillment of life depended on the answer to such questions. Happiness, after all, depended on it. And so began a search for new answers to put in the place of other-world guarantees and this world’s definitions of virtue.

  The effect of this upheaval remains the undercurrent of our own society and our own lives to this day. We live between the poles of “all shall be well . . .” and “what’s the use?” It is a slippery slope on which to attempt to build a productive, mentally healthy, happy life.

  “All shall be well . . .” is far too easily interpreted to mean that if we wait long enough maybe something good will happen to us. Then, we become purveyors of a “magic moment” kind of existence. We live life by not living it at all. Instead we hunker down and wait for the hard parts of life to go by, the unhappy moments to disappear, the cloud to lift from our victimized life. Then my happiness depends on someone else, on something outside myself. Then, I take no responsibility for my own happiness at all.

  But that is no way to deal with unhappiness. On the contrary. That approach is akin to standing in rising water and hoping that it never reaches my neck but never even attempting to open the logjam that is creating the situation.

  To be human is, the surveys are clear, to seek happiness. Science says we both need happiness and have the innate capacity for it. Positive psychology says that we can enhance our own happiness. Philosophy says that the possibility of happiness lies in goals set for our lives. The conclusion: there is simply nothing to be gained by doing nothing while the water continues to rise around us. What we do at a time like that may not be the best thing we could have done, but at least, in the interests of being fully human, it is better than doing nothing at all.