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18. More to life?

In brief

Happiness, it begins to seem, is not one thing but many. As a result, the various approaches to happiness explored in this book are not all compatible. In this chapter we look back over these various approaches and ask what are the implications of the idea that there may be different kinds of happiness.

At the beginning, I said that this wasn’t a book that aimed to provide you with the secret of happiness. Now that we’ve explored happiness in a wide variety of guises – from Zhuangzi dragging his tail in the mud to Aquinas’ claim that true happiness lies only in God, from Epicurus’ garden to the monastery of Śāntideva at Nālandā, and from the stoa of ancient Athens to the deforested Ox Mountain of ancient China – we can see why this might be. The various accounts of happiness that we’ve explored here are not all in harmony with each other. There are many kinds of happiness, in other words, and many forms of the good life. Attaining to Epicurean happiness is not the same thing as attaining to the happiness of the Stoics or of the Buddhists. To the extent that happiness is a possibility for followers of Zhuangzi and Confucius, the followers of these two thinkers are differently happy.

The different philosophical approaches to happiness we’ve been exploring here aren’t necessarily different approaches to the same thing. There may be different kinds of happiness, and if we want to be happy, we may need to choose which kind of happiness we’re interested in.

If you’ve tried out some of the practical exercises in this book, you may have discovered that it is indeed true that we can do things to help support our well-being (positive psychology), to nourish our lives (Zhuangzi), to free ourselves from the various disturbances of life (Epicureanism), to overcome irrational expectations that cause us distress (Stoicism), and so on. But you may also have discovered the various tensions between the differing conceptions of happiness.

Look back over the various approaches to happiness in this book. Here’s a brief summary of them to remind you:

Approach	Summary
Aristotle	Attaining to excellence by avoiding excess and deficiency.
Epicurus	Cultivating pleasure by choosing static over kinetic pleasures.
Cynicism	Living naturally and questioning conventional morality; becoming ‘cosmopolitan’.
Stoicism	Understanding the nature of things, and according our expectations with necessity.
Aquinas	Recognizing the limitations of worldly happiness; divine grace as an aspect of happiness.
Buddhism	Understanding the causes of suffering. Meditation as a means of cultivating calm and insight.
Śāntideva	Altruism as a means to happiness not just for myself, but for others as well.
Confucius	Ritual as a way of bringing harmony and order to our lives.
Zhuangzi	Cultivating uselessness, so that we can better nourish our lives.
Mencius	Exploring the political and social conditions that help nurture the ‘sprouts’ of virtue.

Now ask yourself the following questions:

Which of these approaches do you think is the most helpful?
Which is the least helpful?
Did you try any of the exercises? If so, which were the most useful, and which helped the least?
Which two approaches to happiness do you think are the least compatible with each other? What is it that makes them incompatible?

A religion of happiness?

Many of the approaches to happiness explored in this book seem to imply that much of our happiness is up to us. But how much is it up to us? In the past, happiness was often seen as a matter of chance, an aspect of our experience that might befall us almost by accident (the root of the word ‘happy’ is ‘hap’, meaning ‘chance’ or ‘luck’, as in ‘mishap’). But the proliferation of books claiming to reveal the secret of happiness suggests that the predominant view today is that happiness is almost entirely up to us. Somewhere along the way, it seems, happiness has been transformed not only into a project upon which we must embark, but also into a right that we possess, a duty we must fulfil, even a religion with its own creeds and orthodoxies and mantras and hopes of coming redemption.

However, when happiness becomes the ultimate goal of human life, we can begin to feel, if we aren’t beaming away beatifically like those strange gods depicted in the author photographs on the back of self-help books, that somehow our life has gone wrong and we’ve failed in the rush towards earthly happiness. And yet, if happiness is not one kind of thing but many kinds of thing, and if these different conceptions of happiness may all be, in their way, desirable but not necessarily compatible, then the idea that there’s such a thing as complete happiness and fulfilment must be a myth.

Go to your nearest bookshop (or look online) and browse through the books on happiness. Give yourself at least twenty minutes to see what’s on offer. Do these different books claim to offer the ‘secret’ of happiness? If so, what kind of happiness do they promise? And what do these books ask of the reader?

Now, thinking about the books as a whole, ask yourself if there is any truth in the idea that happiness has become a kind of religion. What might this claim actually mean?

The myth of perfect happiness

Sometimes, reading books about happiness, we can imagine that if only we were happy, all of our problems would be solved: we would become competent in any situation, resilient to all the world throws at us, able to rise above any misfortune. Books on happiness are often filled with such inspiring stories of overcoming the odds and remaining happy. However, not only may this idea of perfect happiness be incoherent (on the grounds that happiness can consist of a number of things, not all of which are compatible), it may also be unkind, because it demands of us something that’s very likely impossible – and then adds to any misery we’re already suffering the misery of knowing that we’ve failed in rising above it.

Seeing happiness as inherently limited, in other words, may allow us a greater happiness. In unburdening us from the perpetual demand to be happy, it frees us up to appreciate the various kinds of happiness that we do in fact experience, without seeing these kinds of happiness as in themselves deficient, as somehow not living up to our notions of perfect happiness. Kierkegaard talked about being happy in his unhappiness; but it’s even more common perhaps that we find ourselves unhappy in our happiness, because of a dream of a greater happiness that lies somewhere over the horizon.

Partial happiness (and all happiness in this world, as Aquinas knew, is partial happiness) might be happiness enough. And when we recognize this fact, we can begin to see that there are many other things, besides happiness, that also matter, that might be worth considering as aspects of the good life.

This, then, is the subject of the next chapter.