6. Some approaches to happiness
In brief
Happiness has been a central preoccupation of philosophy from the very beginning, not only in the West but also in India, China and further afield. Many philosophers asking about happiness have not been content only to theorize, but have also explored various experiments in living to put their ideas into practice.
In the next section of the book, we’ll explore a number of practical approaches to happiness. I don’t guarantee that all of them will actually have the effect of making you happier. In fact, I don’t guarantee that any of them will do so. But taken together, these approaches to happiness make up some of the most interesting answers that have been given to questions like What is happiness? and How can we lead happier lives?
In the chapters that follow, while I will draw upon philosophers familiar from the Western tradition, I will also explore other ways of thinking about happiness from traditions outside European thought, in particular Buddhist ideas, and ideas from China. Different philosophical traditions have very different preoccupations, and so by exploring a range of these, we can call into question some of the cultural assumptions that we have inherited from our own tradition.
Some aspects of happiness itself may in fact be determined by culture. What’s meant by happiness in Britain, for example, may not be quite the same as what’s meant by happiness in China. One interesting case is the question of whether happiness and sadness are mutually exclusive. It’s generally considered in the West that they are. For example, in his book on happiness, the economist Richard Layard says that happiness and sadness exist on a scale: the happier we are, the less sad we are, and vice versa. This is, of course, useful to those who want to try to measure happiness on a tidy sliding scale. But although this view of happiness seems to be the norm in the West, there’s evidence that ‘dialectical emotions’, emotions that can be both positive and negative, are much more common in East Asia. This kind of cultural difference has implications for how we think about happiness in general.
My aim in these chapters is not to provide a coherent view of how we might go about leading happier lives, but rather to explore some of the diversity of the answers that have been given to the question of what it is to live happily and well. And, for each of the approaches that follows, I have set out some practical exercises so that you can not just think about the questions raised by these different traditions, but also do something about them.