Happiness: Living with Excellence
Defining happiness is a good first step to finding it.
Are you happy?
That’s a tricky question.
For one, it supposes that we know what happiness is.
For another, it assumes that we can accurately measure our happiness.
Most writing on happiness assumes that we know happiness when we see it. We tend not to ask what happiness is, but how we can get more of it. We are interested less in the “what” of happiness and more in the “how” of happiness.
The answer to “how” usually involves some combination of health, work, and relationship advice. But, if we want to be happier, before answering the “how” question, we first need to answer the “what” question: What is happiness?
That is going to color our evaluation of any advice we receive.
And the answer to that question is surprisingly elusive.
Feeling Our Way to Happiness
For starters, we often think of happiness in terms of feelings.
On this view, to feel happy is to be happy. Pleasant feelings, like joy and excitement, make for happiness. For example, I feel “happy” when I am relaxing at home with my family. Unpleasant feelings, like sadness or anger, make for unhappiness. So, I feel “unhappy” when I am cut off in heavy traffic.
Feelings definitely have something to do with happiness. It would seem odd to describe someone who is depressed or angry as happy. To put it simply, happy people have lots of happy feelings and few unhappy feelings. This places some feelings into happy buckets (love, desire, joy, wonder, awe, excitement, hope) and other feelings into unhappy buckets (aversion, disgust, sadness, anger, despair).
The goal for happiness gurus, on this view, is to maximize positive affectivity and minimize negative affectivity. Exercising, praying, meditating, and spending time with friends makes us feel better, and thus happier. So we do these things with an almost mercenary intention to feel better and happier.
Happiness: Beyond Good Feelings
And yet, most of us are aware, on some level, that happiness is more than a feeling. We would not call the person who spends all his time at the movies or shopping or on social media a happy person. Something essential seems to be missing, even if that person would say that they feel happy in the moment.
Of course, part of the issue here is that a person who is addicted to this or that vice probably faces challenges in other parts of life. Maybe they are not able to do the work they need to support themselves. Perhaps they are not motivated to see friends and family and therefore feel lonely. Maybe they do not have any sense of deeper purpose and therefore feel lost or aimless in the world.
But let’s suppose that such persons did not experience negativity. Let’s suppose that they did, in fact, spend all day on social media, or shopping, or drinking cocktails at a fancy bar—without any negative effects. Even so, we would still not call them happy. Something essential about a good human life would be missing. And happiness would seem to go along with that “essential-ness” of life.
Ancient Approaches to Happiness
So where can we turn to think about happiness? There are a lot of places we could look, from modern psychology, to spirituality, to contemporary happiness gurus, but I am especially interested in ancient and medieval philosophers. And a number of ancient thinkers took a crack at the question. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, they do not all agree on the nature of happiness.
The Stoics said that it consists in apatheia, living with tranquility in response to the highs and lows of emotion, in right conduct. The Epicureans said that it consists in the avoidance of pain and the enjoyment of pleasure. The Cynics sought to live a life of virtue but one that flouted ordinary social conventions.
Still, each of these schools of thought more or less agreed that there were certain “ways of life” that could guide you to happiness. There were certain virtues or human excellences that would lead one to happiness. While different schools of thought disagreed about the virtues required for happiness, the mention of virtue, broadly understood as any kind of excellence, was a key part of the answer.
Aristotle on Happiness and the Good Life
From my perspective, at least, Aristotle offers a helpful reflection on happiness in his Ethics that highlights the centrality of virtue. From the start, he argues that everything and everybody is seeking after some good, defining the good as that which is perfective of us, and thus constituting our purpose or end in life.
It is not very fashionable to speak of good or bad these days. I suppose you can frame things in terms of effective or ineffective, helpful or harmful, healthy or unhealthy, productive or counter-productive. Be that as it may, I think we are still talking about the good: in relation to our health, our work, our relationships.
Take a silly example. The good for squirrels is to live a full squirrel life: collecting acorns, building cozy nests, starting squirrel families, preparing for the winter, weathering the cold season, and starting over again in the spring.
Now, supposing that there is a distinctively human good, what is it? For starters, we are living beings. And living itself is an activity. Life is a doing: we eat, we sleep, we grow, we sense, we think, we speak. Aristotle then looks for the activity that is proper to human living as such. We share with plants the ability to grow. We share with animals the ability to use our senses and to move around. But we do not share with any other living thing the ability and act of reasoning.
Reason is especially distinctive of humans. In virtue of reason, we lead a distinct kind of life. We do all sorts of things that other animals do not. We read and write books, chant poems, brew beer, translate languages, create beautiful art, discover mathematical proofs, build rockets, fly to the moon, and all the rest.
A Better Definition of Happiness?
So Aristotle’s proposal is that happiness, the distinctively human good, has to do with reason, the distinctively human capacity and activity. Happiness is an activity or proper function ordered to our proper good—but not merely an activity that we share with rocks, plants or animals. It is good to exist, to grow, to sense, to move, and so on. But that is not the perfection of human life.
Rather, the well-lived human life is going to be a reasonable or thoughtful one. This does not mean we need to sit around all day contemplating the highest truths of reality. In fact, Aristotle thought that such activity was more proper to the gods and very difficult for us. At best, we could live that way occasionally.
The goal, instead, is to imbue all of life with thoughtfulness, as a kind of measure and guide to our activity. The more we are able to do this, the happier we can become. And, funnily enough, someone with a very low IQ might actually live a more reasonable life than someone with a very high IQ, so the proposal is not elitist. It’s pretty clear that the intelligentsia are not the happiest of all.
The questions about happiness then become: How can I conduct my friendships in a thoughtful way? How can I thoughtfully engage in political life? How can I approach my work with thoughtfulness? How can I rationally respond to fear and danger that threatens me? How can I reasonably enjoy life’s pleasures, receiving them in their proper fullness, without getting carried away?
Such thoughtful activity is activity in accord with virtue (arete) or excellence. Consider the ease with which a concert pianist dances over the keys to create beautiful music. When performed with excellence, it engages the whole person, but also with a delight and joy. These are similar to the “good feelings” that come from living well, certainly not all of the time, but in those moments when enough pieces of life fit together. Imagine living life with that kind of mastery. That is the promise of happiness, life in accord with virtue, with human excellence.
With these excellences we can live well. Wisdom helps us make tough decisions. Justice measures our relationships with others. Courage allows us to respond to threats that challenge ourselves and the people we love. Moderation allows us to enjoy pleasure without getting overly distracted from the other goods of life. Specifying these virtues is also, incidentally, the specification of happiness.
Such happiness also occurs in a complete life. As Aristotle wrote, one swallow does not make a spring. (I guess you need many swallows to show that it is really springtime.) So also, happiness must be stable over a long period of time, indeed, over a lifetime. We also need good health, the ability to support ourselves and our family, the good fortune to share a life with family and friends, and the good luck to live or be born into a just and relatively stable political community.
In short: happiness is thoughtful activity, according to virtue, in a complete life. The modern notion in psychology of “vital engagement” begins to get at this idea. Happiness thus requires both virtuous living and the necessary goods for such a life. Of course, we can live honorable lives even without good fortune and the necessary goods of the body, but these are not happy lives in the ordinary sense of the word. Indeed, as the Athenian sage Solon observed, as reported by the Greek historian Herodotus: Call no man happy until he is dead.
Happiness: Where to Go From Here
So, happiness is a tricky thing to define.
Even these observations, hastily sketched, do not give us anywhere close to a full picture of what happiness is, let alone how we might get there. But I think it does give us some food for thought. First, happiness is not itself a good feeling, but good feelings do come from living well. Second, happiness is an activity, not a state of being that we arrive at once and for all. Every day is a fresh invitation to live well. In other words, the project of happiness is always ongoing and never complete. Third, happiness requires thoughtfulness that leads to mastery and excellence. This requires reflection about every aspect of life.
Finally, happiness is partly up to us, since we can practice the virtues of excellence. But happiness is also partly up to chance. After all, happiness requires good “hap” which, in Middle English and Old Norse, means good fortune or luck. The word for happiness in Greek, eudaimonia, does not really mean flourishing, but having a good daimon or guardian spirit (eu-daimon). So happiness is not entirely up to us. But we can aim for it. And if we fall short of happiness, we can still strive to live with honor and with excellence.
In the meantime, I wish you much good hap!