Further reading
The literature on happiness is vast and grows not just by the day but by the hour. It’s impossible to keep up with everything that’s published on the subject. The following section aims to give you a sense of some of the more interesting books and ideas.
All of the books recommended here are available on the general market. There’s also a lot of scholarly research on happiness – there’s even a Journal of Happiness Studies, which is filled with excellent articles. However, scholarly articles can be hard (and, more to the point, expensive) to track down for the general reader, so I’ve focused on those books and articles that are more widely accessible.
Introduction: The passage from Kierkegaard comes from his later papers dated 24 August 1849, and is reprinted in the entry for 1841, the year of Kierkegaard’s decision not to marry, in the sadly out of print (but still relatively easy to track down) The Journals of Kierkegaard 1834–1854 (Fontana). Some good general books on happiness are as follows: economist Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Penguin); The Happiness Equation by Nick Powdthavee (Icon); Darrin McMahon’s The Pursuit of Happiness (Penguin); Sissela Bok’s Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (Yale); Daniel Nettle’s brief but informative Happiness: the Science Behind your Smile (Oxford) and the companion volume by Dylan Evans, Emotion: the Science of Sentiment (also published by Oxford); The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt (Arrow); Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (Harper Perennial); and Richard Schoch’s The Secrets of Happiness (Profile).
Chapter 1: Schopenhauer’s thoughts on happiness can be found in Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin).
Chapter 2: The Kant passage comes from The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. There are several translations, including the one included in the collection Ethical Philosophy (Hackett).
Chapter 3: For positive psychology, read Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness (Nicholas Brealey Publishing) and Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis (Arrow). Or visit authentichappiness.com
Chapter 4: More on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) can be found on the Authentic Happiness website (see the weblinks section). Utilitarianism and Other Essays (Penguin) is a good collection and includes extracts from Bentham.
Chapter 5: Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life (Blackwell) is an interesting, if complex, exploration of philosophy and ancient experiments in living. Mill’s autobiography is widely available in various editions.
Chapter 6: Among the books that take a broader approach to happiness, one of the best is Richard Schoch’s The Secrets of Happiness (Simon & Schuster).
Chapter 7: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is readily available in various editions.
Chapter 8: It’s relatively easy to get hold of the collected writings of Epicurus. I’ve used The Essential Epicurus (Prometheus Books). There’s also an edition called The Epicurus Reader published by Hackett.
Chapter 9: An excellent source for Cynicism is William Desmond’s book Cynics (Acumen).
Chapter 10: There are several translations of the Enchiridion available, including one by Dover Thrift Editions, one from Prometheus Books, and a full translation in Michael Morgan’s bumper Classics of Moral and Political Theory (Hackett). Other Stoic books, such as Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, are readily available.
Chapter 11: The essay on Thomas Aquinas by Umberto Eco is in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (Vintage). For the extracts from Aquinas that concentrate on happiness, read Treatise on Happiness translated by John A. Oesterle (Notre Dame University Press)
Chapter 12: Matthieu Ricard has written an introduction to happiness from a more or less Buddhist perspective simply called Happiness (Atlantic). There are innumerable introductions to Buddhism available, but for brevity and clarity Michael Carrithers’ The Buddha (Oxford) remains worth reading.
Chapter 13: For a good, contemporary introduction to meditation in the Buddhist tradition, try Change Your Mind: A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation by Paramananda (Windhorse Publications). The material on the research into meditation and happiness comes from Owen Flanagan’s The Really Hard Problem (MIT Press).
Chapter 14: For Śāntideva, one of the most accessible translations is the Oxford World Classics version of The Bodhicaryāvatāra (Oxford).
Chapter 15: For Chinese thought in general, an excellent place to start is Sarah Allan’s The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue (SUNY). Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont have produced a good philosophical translation of Confucius called The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (Ballantine Books).
Chapter 16. There are lots of translations of Zhuangzi or Chuang-tzu. Burton Watson’s Chuang-tzu, the Inner Chapters (Hackett) is a classic; and there’s a more recent translation by Brook Ziporyn (Hackett). The book by François Jullien from which the quote comes is Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness (Zone Books).
Chapter 17. Bryan W. Van Norden’s translation of Mencius, Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Hackett) is elegant and clear. For Mencius in particular it’s worth reading Sarah Allan’s book as well (see above).
Chapter 18: Recent criticisms of what I have called ‘the religion of happiness’ include Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta) and Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to be Happy by Pascal Bruckner (Princeton).
Chapter 19. Isaiah Berlin’s essays are collected together as The Proper Study of Mankind (Pimlico). The Journal of Happiness Studies is the place to find a lot of the debate about happiness.
Chapter 20. The quote, again, comes from the Penguin translation of Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms. There’s a book-length study of the Land of Cockaigne called Dreaming of Cockaigne written by Herman Pleij (Columbia University Press).
Websites
The following websites may be useful or interesting.
Authentic Happiness: The UPenn positive psychology website, with lots of questionnaires and activities (requires free login): http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/
Action for Happiness: A ‘movement for positive social change’: http://www.actionforhappiness.org/
The ‘Are You Happy?’ Project: An interesting global project asking participants the simple question: ‘Are you happy?’: http://theareyouhappyproject.org/
Philosophy Bites: A good philosophy website and podcast with some material on happiness and on the philosophers covered here: http://www.philosophybites.com/
The Happiness Formula: A webpage and set of resources from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/