Happiness Read online

  chapter 32

  Pleasure and Happiness:

  The Difference between Them

  The maximization of pleasure,” utilitarianism’s seminal thesis, unleashed a maelstrom of confusion and tension into the middle of a society just beginning to come to terms with happiness as its apex and its fulcrum. If happiness was the central purpose of life, the pivot around which the average life spun, then we had another problem. Which of the two types of happiness, first described by the Greeks centuries before the Enlightenment philosophers, were we talking about: hedonic happiness or eudaimonic happiness?

  Hedonic happiness, the first definition of happiness, deals with the simple elimination of pain and the maximization of delight. Or to be more direct: hedonic means that we do what feels good — whatever its effect on us or on anyone else. If I like it, it’s good for me. If it feels good, it is good. It is also, then, an absolute for me.

  Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, considered pain and pleasure to be the two basic and absolute values in the world. Therefore, he argued, the function of government is to assure the most pleasure for the most people. The pleasure principle, he felt, should be the final measure and arbiter of all decisions in all categories. The problem became, what pleasures?

  Hedonic happiness, after all, is not based on physical pleasure alone.

  John Stuart Mill, a strong supporter of Bentham and one of the finest thinkers of his age, took pains to point out that spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic pleasures are higher than the pleasures of the body. In other words, opera is a higher pleasure than mud wrestling.

  The distinction may be subtle and even arguable, but the principle is clear: there are some pleasures that simply engage more of the rationality of a person than others. Some pleasures use more of our higher faculties than others. Some pleasures make us more fully human than those others that cater only to our physical responses.

  In the middle of a culture that struggles with the definition and acceptability of “freedom of speech,” for instance — with the difference between child pornography and Peter Paul Rubens’ Nude — the differences between the two levels of pleasure are not lost on people. Nor the courts. Nor the church. Nor, in most cases, are they lost on parents who seek to cultivate within their children an appreciation for the highest levels of pleasure and the need to develop the highest level of human response.

  The Greek philosopher Epicurus, for instance, whose love of pleasure is commonly, and incorrectly, associated with Epicureanism — meaning the unbridled devotion to physical pleasure alone — himself lived an abstemious life concentrated on reflection and simplicity. His answer to the question of how a person should pursue happiness was to recommend the adoption of an ascetic way of life.

  Happiness as pleasure, it seems, then, is, at least to philosophers, about more than the gratification of the senses. John Stuart Mill pointed out the distinction this way: “it is better,” he said, “to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

  The conflict between the two approaches to pleasure marks the history of utilitarianism in the modern world. What we can allow in the name of rightful pleasure and what we cannot allow struggles between two equally correct but opposing understandings of what it means to legislate for “the maximization of pleasure for the greatest number of people.”

  It leaves society with a number of unanswered questions and an equal number of endless possibilities. For some, it implies things like the legalization of marijuana. For others it requires the public financing of the arts. The pressures for each multiply yearly on the public level. But on the personal level, the pressure can be even worse. Learning to choose between the two or, alternatively, to support both takes a great deal of reflection about the real meaning of happiness. More importantly, it has something to do with guiding our own choices as we go through life. Will we legitimate both levels of pleasure or only one of them?

  If we allow what we know to be harmful to the development of a human being, how can we possibly be legislating for happiness? But then, who decides what is harmful and what isn’t? At one time in history, divorce was called harmful and was forbidden. At another time, usury was considered to be taking advantage of the poor and was also made illegal. At still another period of history closer to our own, some people tried to outlaw public drinking but allowed heroin and other addictive anodynes. And now it is just the opposite.

  No doubt about it: serious reflection on the difference between happiness and pleasure is an essential component of life.

  One thing we know already is that physical pleasures pale quickly. They refuse to satisfy for very long. They send us seeking for more intense tastes, stronger physical reactions, and the total satiation that we mistake for satisfaction.

  What’s more, excessive physical pleasure leads in almost every instance to great risks to physical health, to mental stability, to general welfare, and to moral boundedness. They endanger people — initially, at least — as well as delight them. That cannot be the makings of happiness.

  Unlike Bentham, then, Mill concentrated more on maximizing happiness — what Aristotle taught was both “doing well and living well” — rather than on the pursuit of pleasure. But many of us learn too late the distinction between the two. We take for granted that what makes us feel good must be good for us. But that is a very short road. The price of the personal pursuit of pleasure alone can be a very high one. Instead of developing a cultivated taste, we run the risk of becoming glutted. Instead of love, we court lust. Instead of security, we get greed.

  When we finally discover that what we counted on to make us happy — the bigger car, the more expensive house, the finest silk shirts, the biggest rings, a smorgasbord of food and drink — when buying more of each does nothing to relieve the pain that comes when pleasures fail to please and chasing after other thrills wears us out, we find ourselves right back where we started. Then it’s time to ask all over again and again, if necessary: What is happiness and how do I get it?

  One of the major outcomes of the formulation of Bentham’s pleasure principle is that it has plunged the world into a search for other definitions of happiness beyond pleasure. It challenges each of us to formulate other criteria for the evaluation of behavior, including our own. We need to look at the consequences of our actions on others. We need to ask ourselves whether we really have a “right” to wallow in pleasures that pollute the environment around us, physically, culturally, spiritually. We need to look at the values on which we are basing our lives and ask how it happened that food became more important to us than exercise, that alcohol became more important than sobriety, that self became more important than family. We have to wonder if values aren’t a more important gauge of choice than pleasure for its own sake.

  The Greeks defined eudaimonia as happiness based on “godly spirit,” remember, on divine direction and good spirit, on the best, most spiritual, responses of which the human being is capable. This, the sages say, is the happiness we’re really looking for. This is the happiness, Aristotle says, that lasts.

  It is looking for the happiness that lasts when sensations fade that is the ultimate goal of life. It is this which makes us wonder at smiles on the face of the poor, of magnanimous giving in the lives of the rich, of the lack of interest in material things in the lives of the spiritual. It is this freedom of spirit and strength of soul for which we pine and because of which no amount of physical deprivation can destroy us, from which no amount of physical delights can distract us.

  Happiness:

  The Eternal Goal

  chapter 33

  The Good Life:

  The Happiness That Lasts

  Perhaps the most intriguing dimension of the happiness question is that it is one of the most perduring topics of all times. Every generation seeks it out. Every civilization defines it for themselves. Every single human being
has to answer it alone and individually. We may, as the scientists tell us, be wired for happiness but it is clear that, wiring or no wiring, we are still likely to spend the better part of a lifetime trying to figure out what it is for ourselves.

  Almost 2,300 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his own pursuit of the meaning of happiness, looked at every dimension of the human life. What happiness meant for each dimension — its emotional growth, rational insights, and moral obligations — was both different and the same. What is needed for each aspect of life, he argued, is meant to serve the highest purpose of the human life.

  Happiness, Aristotle says — along with other philosophers of the time — is related to doing well and living well. Because the human being is distinguished by the ability to reason, being happy has to do with achieving the greatest degree of excellence in accordance with reason. The basketball player does everything possible to hone her skills, to win, but not by tripping her competition. Then how? What is “excellence in accordance with reason”? Most of all, how do you know, by those standards, if you are happy or not? Is happiness the result of living a life of pleasure, a life of effective activities, or a life of philosophical reflection?

  Aristotle made a distinction between what feels good on one level and what are the greater, more human goods on another. What makes us happy in one dimension of life, he knew, could well disturb the balance and function of our lives in other areas. To those who defined happiness as the pursuit of pleasure, as living well and free of pain, for instance, he was quick to point out that pleasures came on two levels. On one level, the physical reigned. On the other level, the aesthetic, the appreciation of the beautiful, held us enthralled.

  There is a difference, he told us, between the kind of happiness that comes from eating a piece of chocolate and the physical impact of being bathed in the excitement of a deep red and golden sunset. It is the difference between the physical thrill of sex or drugs or alcohol and the spiritual impact of great music, impelling art forms, the power of nature, the rhythm of poetry.

  Animals, we realize, when we follow Aristotle’s reasoning, can relish a bone just as we relish a steak, but animals cannot analyze literature or prefer one symphony to another. There are pleasures and then again there are pleasures. Some satisfy the higher nature of human life. And yet, neither of the two types of pleasure is lasting.

  So, to confuse lasting happiness with the continued stimulation of increasingly diminished physical pleasures on either level is to doom ourselves to frustration. The drug addict burns out too much of the brain, wastes too many levels of human life to be truly happy, really content, deeply satisfied with life, full of a secure sense of well-being.

  In sum, happiness, Aristotle argued, has got to be more than physical, or else there are too many elements of human existence that stand not only to be ignored but even to be put into danger. Like friendship and courage and wisdom and excellence. Like the development of the fullness of our humanity.

  It is virtues — the strength of the soul — Aristotle teaches, that complete the search for happiness. It is the development of the best of human nature in us, not the worst or the lowest or the least, that makes us truly happy. Virtue — self-control, courage, and justice, the qualities of mind and soul — is the real measure of eudaimonia, of happiness, of right living.

  Virtue, to Aristotle, is its own reward, and the reward is contentment and serenity, wholeness and integrity, authenticity and a sense of being in command of ourselves at all times, of being, in William Ernest Henley’s words, “the captain of our souls.”

  “To thine own self be true,” Shakespeare writes, “and then thou canst not be false to any man.” Then, with souls straight as arrows, however much determination it takes, however much constancy in the face of social pressure it demands, our souls live at rest in us.

  It is this that saves us from becoming lackeys of our “daimons,” the lower spirits that tease us into accepting less of ourselves, that allow us to live under a lower ceiling of satisfaction and appreciation than the human soul requires to be whole.

  This is what it means to live a life beyond the grasping for power and wealth. This is the mark of those whose sense of honor lies within themselves and is not sought from the approval of others. This is what makes us fully developed adults, true wisdom figures, and, in the end, really happy.

  This commitment to the higher self is what saves us from the bar of shame. This is what protects us from the grief of loss for what we were meant to be but have failed to pursue. This is what warns us away from the “if-only” disease that can plague us all the way to the grave.

  Loving pleasure but not depending on it as the measure of happiness, doing well in life as well as doing good, striving for excellence in all we do and being strong in virtue in the face of evil is, Aristotle teaches us, the summum bonum, the height of good, the truly great life, the deeply happy state of being alive.

  Happiness, it is clear, is not unbridled passion or giddy delight in the marshmallow clouds of life. Happiness is a state of mind arising out of a sense of spiritual rightness and transcendent purpose in life. It gives life meaning, a reason to get up in the morning. It provides the sense of direction that guides our choices and prods our steps every day of our lives. Otherwise, Aristotle warns, we can easily sink into a maelstrom of pleasure without purpose. A lost life. An empty existence. A confusion of things with happiness.

  Unlike pleasure, the sudden burst of sensation that comes like electricity and goes just as quickly, happiness is a state of soul, a quality of spirit. It carries us beyond and over the hard times, secure in the authenticity of what we’re doing and who we are becoming. Happiness, then, can sometimes only be appreciated by looking back over all the times of our life and saying with the God who created us, “This is good.”

  chapter 34

  Religion: A Finger

  Pointing at the Moon

  Sociology tells us a great deal about what people hope for in life. Neurology gives us even more information about the role of the brain in controlling our emotional systems. Psychology of late has begun to concentrate on how a person can deal with life in more balanced and positive ways rather than resort to unhealthy defense mechanisms and unproductive patterns of coping with the vagaries of life. The great philosophers critique one another and life in general with their various definitions of the components of happiness and leave us to choose between them.

  But there is something else to consider: What, if anything, does the average person learn about happiness from religion, the only discipline whose entire intent is to describe eternal happiness?

  The storytellers put it this way:

  Once upon a time some disciples begged their old and ailing master not to die.

  “But if I do not go, how will you ever see?” the master said to them.

  “But what can we possibly see with you gone?” they insisted.

  With a twinkle in his eye, the holy one answered, “All I ever did in my entire life was to sit on the river bank handing out river water. After I’m gone, I trust that you will notice the river.”

  The lesson rings true: what teachers teach us while they live is one thing; the quality of what they leave us to think about for the rest of our lives is another. Religion is the institution that sets out to teach us what it takes to guide us through our entire lives. But what is it?

  What does religion say about happiness? And are those things in conjunction with what the social sciences and the philosophers themselves have to say about what it means to live a happy life?

  A second story warns us of the real challenge to the ability of average people to identify the elements of happiness for themselves.

  A seeker said to the holy one, “Holy one, I am intent on the spiritual life. May I become your disciple?”

  And the master answered, “You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day
you open them you will see that there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone else.”

  “But if that is the case,” the seeker said, “what then is a master for?”

  “The purpose of a master,” the holy one replied, “is to make you see the uselessness of having one.”

  Religion, unlike any other system on the planet, sets out to teach us how to live, how to make choices and come to decisions that are, in the end, eternally good ones. However much religion may have dabbled in other systems along the way, it is not about governance or economic security or intercultural relationships or the business of national growth. It is the only institution on the planet that makes happiness primary and takes happiness seriously. Religion, in fact, puts happiness first and foremost, beyond everything else on its agenda. Religion purports to be about what Aristotle insisted was the very essence of happiness — the meaning and purpose of life.

  The great religious figures and texts of all time and all traditions, given their valuations of life as we know it and the human being as they define it, determine, at least obliquely, what aspects of life seekers need to consider in their personal “pursuit of happiness.”

  The question for each of us, of course, is, to what degree does religion, any particular religion, require and direct us to those dimensions of life that make us fuller, more human, human beings? In what way does any particular religion give us more certainty in regard to what we’re about in life? If religion is about happiness, it ought, surely, to make us happier in our ability to live it well.

  Because all religions purport to be a way of life, as well as a theology or philosophy of life, the questions they raise about happiness abound: To what degree, for instance, does religion enable people to live life fully? To what extent does religion encourage the pursuit of happiness here as well as in some other life to come?