Introduction: the secret of happiness?
In brief
We might think that we want to be happy, or that we want to discover the secret of a happy life, but what do we mean when we say this? In this introductory chapter, we will look at three fundamental questions about happiness. Firstly, ‘What is happiness?’; secondly, ‘What makes us happy?’; and finally, ‘Is there more to life than happiness?’
A secret of happiness?
Today, happiness is a booming industry. Where once psychologists were concerned with cataloguing mental illnesses and all the things that might go wrong with our minds, today they can often be found talking about things like character strengths, virtues and how we might lead the good life. Where economists once concerned themselves only with their balance sheets, these days they write about happiness as an indicator of the state of the nation. Even politicians are getting in on the act, proclaiming that they’re in the business not only of building wealthy nations, but also of building happy nations. And if you go to your local bookshop, you’ll find countless books promising you that, if you only part with your hard-earned cash, nestling within those pages you’ll find the secret of happiness itself.
Introducing Happiness is not one of those books. This isn’t because I know the secret of happiness but out of mean-spiritedness would rather keep it to myself. It’s because there’s something a bit suspect in the idea that there’s any such thing as the secret of happiness. Instead this is a book about what happiness might be, about why it matters to us, about the problems with happiness, and about how some of the best philosophical minds of the past have not only asked questions about what happiness is, but also provided various kinds of tools and advice to help us live happier lives.
The first thing that this book aims to do, then, is to ask some tricky (but interesting) questions about the nature of happiness. When we start to look more closely at happiness, we’ll find that it’s a much more complicated business than we might have first thought. Even asking an apparently simple question like ‘Am I happy now?’ can start to tie us up in all kinds of knots and puzzles.
Think of the last time you felt happy (or, if you’re happy now, pay attention to this happiness). Now ask yourself some of the questions below:
- What kind of thing is happiness? Is it a physical feeling, a state of mind, or an emotion? Is it all of these things? Or is it something different? How, in other words, do you know that you’re happy?
- Can you be both happy and unhappy at the same time? Can you be happy but dissatisfied?
- Are you always aware of how happy you are? Does it make sense, for example, to say, ‘I was happy, but I didn’t know it’?
If you ask these questions with an inquiring mind, and ask them repeatedly, you might start to suspect that it’s not always very clear what we mean by ‘happy’. And the more you think about them, the more the questions around happiness seem to multiply.
However, this book isn’t just about theoretical questions. Happiness matters to us not just in theory but also in practice; and so this book aims to find practical solutions to some of the puzzles around the different ideas of happiness.
You can do the practical exercises in this book on your own; but it might be more interesting, and more fun, to find a friend so that you can explore some of these exercises together, and so you can discuss the questions raised along the way.
Happiness clearly matters to us, and the very fact that you picked up this book suggests that you have not only a theoretical interest in happiness, but also what philosophers sometimes call an existential interest in happiness. In other words, you want to know about happiness because happiness is something that you aspire to, something that matters not just in the abstract, but for your very existence.
Three questions
When it comes to philosophical approaches to happiness, among the many questions that we might ask, there are perhaps three that stand out. The first, and the most obvious, has already been hinted at: What is happiness? Is happiness a matter of being satisfied with our life? Is it a matter of pleasure? Or is it about having a life that’s fulfilling? A little thought shows that these things don’t always coincide. I might recognize, for example, that my life isn’t particularly fulfilling at the moment, but I might be satisfied with it nevertheless. Or I might have a life filled with pleasure, but feel strangely dissatisfied. Or else I might think that pleasure really isn’t that important, but care a great deal about fulfilment.
To see how complicated the question of happiness is, you only have to think about the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) who, agonizing over his decision whether to marry or not, decided that in the long run he would be ‘happier in his unhappiness’ if he didn’t marry. So he didn’t. Kierkegaard is associated in particular with the philosophical movement known as ‘existentialism’, and his books are well known for their strangeness and their extraordinary literary style.
Recent research, incidentally, suggests that Kierkegaard’s decision may not have been the best gamble, and that the married tend to be happier, at least in a limited sense, than the never-married. However, before you use this as a reason to propose, the divorced fare rather worse than the never-married: you have been warned.
Leaving aside the issue of marital advice, here I want to focus on the apparent contradiction in the idea that you could be happy in your unhappiness. What does this mean? Are happiness and unhappiness mutually exclusive? Is Kierkegaard happy in one sense and unhappy in another? Is this a contradiction in terms? And, had Kierkegaard made the opposite decision, might he have gone on to be unhappy in his happiness?
The most important lesson we can draw from this, of course, is that it’s best, if at all possible, not to become romantically involved with philosophers. But another lesson is that happiness is by no means straightforward, and that perhaps the word ‘happiness’ (not to mention ‘joy’, ‘pleasure’, ‘cheerfulness’, ‘good cheer’ and so on) may mean all kinds of things in all kinds of different contexts.
This question about what happiness actually is, is one that has preoccupied philosophers for centuries, and they are still arguing over how best to define it. Even if we can’t resolve these arguments, if we’re going to explore happiness at all, it will be useful to be aware of some of the philosophical problems that have been raised down the ages. So the first section of this book, called ‘What is Happiness?’, will look at some of the theoretical problems that we encounter when it comes to thinking about happiness. Along the way, I will be asking you to engage in various thought-experiments to help the philosophy along: these don’t require you to leave the comfort of your armchair, but nevertheless demand that you think through the issues for yourself.
The second question that we need to ask about happiness arises out of the first, and that is: What makes us happy? The way we go about answering this question will depend, to some extent, on the way that we choose to answer the first question. It was George Bernard Shaw who famously said that you should not do to others as you would wish to be done to – the famous ‘golden rule’ of moral philosophy – because they might have other tastes. Perhaps your idea of fun is mortifying the flesh in a hillside hut, sleeping on a bed of nails and drinking only thin gruel; or perhaps you think that the ultimate happiness involves a couch, several bunches of grapes, a quantity of wine, and a gaggle of willing acolytes to tend to your every bodily need. One of the challenges of thinking and talking philosophically about happiness is that of being able to account for this human variation. But as much as we’re different and unique, we’re all in many ways the same; so despite Shaw’s warnings, we might expect that, in general at least, there are some broad principles that we can discover about happiness and how it might occur.
To explore happiness as fully as possible, we need to think not only about how different we are from each other, but also about how much we share and how we’re often alike.
When it comes to these broad principles, however, I don’t want you to take my word for it. After all, it’s your life and your happiness, and if you really want to explore these questions, you’ll need to do it yourself. So the second part of this book is called ‘What Makes Us Happy?’ and is more directly practical than the first part. Think of the second part as a series of practical experiments in happiness, drawn from the philosophers of the past. These experiments may sometimes require you to get up out of your philosophical armchair and actually try things out. In this part of the book, I will be drawing on philosophical and practical approaches to happiness from the pleasure-loving Epicurean philosophers to the strange Chinese vagabond Zhuangzi, from practices of Buddhist meditation to the practical wisdom of Aristotle. Being experiments, not all of these approaches may work. It’s up to you to see what works and what doesn’t. Nevertheless, some kind of first-person experience is essential if you want to really get to grips with the questions in this book.
Many of the practical approaches we will explore here represent not only different approaches to happiness, but also different ideas of what happiness might be and what the ‘good life’ might look like.
In the third part of the book, called ‘Beyond Happiness’, I will be looking at a final question: Is there more to life than happiness? After all, it’s perfectly possible to imagine an idea of the ‘good life’ that’s also an unhappy life. Perhaps we might think that a good life is a life in which we sacrifice happiness in this life in favour of a hoped-for life to come. Or we might think that happiness makes us shallow and that if we brood deeply on life, then we’ll realize that we are not and cannot be happy; and that this truth is more important than superficial happiness. Or we might suspect that there are good and noble reasons for us to cultivate not happiness but unhappiness: after all, there are many things that take place in the world that we perhaps should not put up with, and putting happiness above all other values might have all kinds of unwelcome results. So in this third part I hope to raise a number of questions about wider implications of the ways that we think about happiness.
At the end of the book I will make some suggestions for further reading, so that you can explore some of the ideas raised here in more depth. There’s a huge and growing body of scholarship on happiness in a wide variety of disciplines, from social science to philosophy, and from psychology to politics. Unfortunately, much of this research is buried in obscure and often expensive journals. Fortunately, there’s also a good quantity of thoughtful material written for a more general audience and, as a result, much more easily accessible. I will limit my recommendations to those things that should be easy to track down.
Not a single thing
One thing I will be arguing again and again in this book is that happiness may not turn out to be a single thing, and that there are various kinds of things that we call ‘happiness’, not all of them mutually compatible. I will also be making the case that happiness is not the only thing that we might hope for or aspire to. Sometimes it’s said that there’s only one mountain but many roads that lead to the top. However, when it comes to giving shape to our lives, there may be a great many mountains, and the various roads we might tread may lead to very different destinations. Many philosophical approaches to happiness are tied in, either explicitly or implicitly, with the question of what it is that makes a ‘good life’, but there’s no reason to believe that there’s only one form of the good life.
Ideas of happiness are almost always tangled up with ideas about what it is that makes a ‘good life’.
This is, when it comes down to it, why claims to have found the secret of happiness are suspect; and it’s also why you shouldn’t expect to find that the ideas in this book all fit together neatly into a whole. But what you should find is that, through trying out the various approaches and experiments, you’re able to ask some interesting questions about what it means to lead a good and happy life. By the end of this book, you may of course be happier. I hope, at least, that you will not be unhappier. But what I hope most of all is this: that you will have a deeper appreciation and understanding of what it means for us to talk about happiness; that you will have a degree of greater scepticism when it comes to those who make claims that they have ‘discovered’ the secret of happiness; and that you will have a better appreciation of some of the mountainous territory that is the philosophy (and science, and psychology, and economics) of happiness, and how it might be possible to find your way through this territory, so that you’re better able to decide where it is that you want to take yourself.