8.2: Happiness

Let’s start with the idea of something mattering or being important. First notice the difference between something mattering to us and something mattering for us. Almost anything could matter to someone. All it takes for something to matter to someone is for that person to be concerned with it. Mattering to or being important to someone is pretty subjective. Stamp collecting might matter to one person but not another. Football matters to some people but not others. The difference lies entirely in what the various parties are concerned with, prefer, or value.

Mattering for is another matter. Eating well and getting exercise matter for your health whether you prefer to do these things or not. Participating in caring relationships matters for your psychological well being and this is arguably so even for relatively introverted people who enjoy their solitude. The notion of mattering for is not entirely subjective. And what matters for you is not relative to you in the way that what matters to you is. But mattering for is relational in a different way. There is a sense in which the idea of something mattering for you is incomplete. Things matter for your health, for your psychological well being, your happiness, your marriage, your career, your projects, or for the quality of your life. You don’t get to just pick and choose which things matter for your health or for your psychological well being. For these things at least, what matters for you is largely settled by what and who you are. It remains an open question whether what matters for our happiness is up to us or subjective in the way that what matters to us is subjective.

Do I get to pick and choose what matters for my happiness? Is what matters for my happiness a question of what matters to me? Assuming the good life is the happy life, the question we have before us now is whether or not happiness and the good life are subjective and relative to our values and preferences the way that what matters to us is. Popular opinion would seem to make short work of these questions and straightaway affirm the subjectivity of happiness and the good life. Surely different people enjoy different things depending on their preferences and values. And nobody gets to decide what I enjoy or prefer but me. So, concludes this line of argument, happiness for me and the good life for me are up to me.

Cultural norms of individualism and liberty probably feed a bias towards subjective ways of thinking about happiness and the good life. The American way of life at the beginning of the 21st century does seem to include an implicit view of the good life. We are indoctrinated into that view of the good life by advertising and media from a very early age, and our peers, similarly influenced, reinforce the programming. We are used to being referred to as consumers rather than citizens, or simply people. And consumerism might be as good a name as any for the philosophy of the good life that is standard issue in our culture. Consumerism as a philosophy of the good life tells us that what is good for us is just getting what we want. It’s a seductive view. Who could possibly object? We all want what we want after all.

No matter how seductive the conventional wisdom is, if we want to address questions about happiness and the good life philosophically we had better resist the urge to settle them by wishful thinking. A bit of critical thinking should get us past our culturally ingrained bias and at least suggest a more subtle and interesting appreciation of these issues. For starters, let’s look at cases where people really do get everything they want and ask whether these make for plausible examples of happiness and the good life. The spoiled child comes to mind. The spoiled child, by definition, is the child that always gets what he or she wants. But spoiled children are typically not very pleasant or happy. Closer to home, we are all familiar will instances where we get what we wanted and then find that we aren’t as pleased as we’d hoped. Even when we are well satisfied, we are generally not pleased for long. The next even more pressing want waits just around the corner and we are dissatisfied again until we are briefly sated by its attainment. Getting what he or she wants doesn’t seem to help the spoiled child either. Part of the problem might be that having your every wish indulged provokes insecurity. The spoiled child becomes completely and passively dependent on the parent who indulges, and the stakes are ever higher as the desires become more pressing. Clearly we can get what we want and still not be happy. This should be a pretty clear indicator that what we want is not a perfectly reliable guide to what will make us happy.

Perhaps we have said enough to debunk consumerism as a plausible theory of the good life. But in doing so we ran roughshod over an issue that might be worth exploring. We often suffer from internal conflicts between two or more of the many things that matter to us. It might be that losing a few pounds and being physically fit matter to me. And yet when the dessert cart comes around I give in to the temptation for chocolate. What I want at the moment might diverge from what really matters to me. Of course if I want the chocolate cake, then there is a sense in which it matters to me as well. So we are conflicted. Our wants also change. We get drawn in and in our craving we neglect other things that also matter to us. Our wants don’t just conflict, they seem to jostle and vie for the privilege of commanding our will. So when we choose among the various things we want, like losing some weight or enjoying a piece of cake, we might begin to wander whether there is some wise rational executive function in our mind that can systematically bring our competing desires into line with each other. Perhaps there is, but the effectiveness of this rational deliberative function varies significantly from person to person, and from period to period in the lives of the same person. It seems that among the people we know some do better and some do worse at resisting the temptation of the moment and staying motivated by what matters to them most. Even in our own lives, most of us can identify times when we exercised self-control more effectively than others.

So here’s what we have so far: There can be conflicts among the things that matter to us and some things matter to us more than others. We can do a better or worse job of resolving the various conflicts in favor of the things that matter more to us. When we do well at this we have willed rationally and exercised self-control. When we fail we fall victim to weakness of will. Based on this, it should be clear that self-control is a good thing. That is to say it’s a virtue. Self- control empowers us to act most effectively on what matters most to us. We are now in position to articulate another view of the good life, one that still doesn’t appeal to any external standards and makes the good life a function of what matters to us, but doesn’t simply make the good life a question of whatever I want or choose. The good life on this model is one where we reflectively weigh the various things that matter to us in a way that makes it possible to resolve conflicts among them in favor of the things that matter more to us and then exercise the virtue of self- control in formulating the will to act in accordance with those things that matter to us most. On this view, consumerism takes a step in the right direction by looking to what matters to us, but then fails to articulate a model for resolving conflicting values and desires and misses the virtues of rational deliberation and self-control in adjudicating these.

The next big question should be how do we determine what matters most to us? How do we settle the conflicts among our competing desires? Is this simply a matter of our choice? If so, then the whole structure we just articulated might be at risk of collapsing. If what matters to us most can be read off of what we choose, then the distinction between exercising self-control and being weak-willed simply collapses. Suppose we say that if I choose the chocolate cake, that can only be because that’s what matters most to me. If what matters to us is simply a question of what we choose, then there can be no such thing as weakness of will or self-control. So formulating a plausible view of the good life seems to require that we somehow reach beyond our subjective preferences, but it is not yet clear just how. Should some things matter more to us than others? It begins to look like we need to recognize some substantive difference between what matters to us and what matters for us. But it is not yet clear how to do so.

One thing does seem clear on the question, however: we don’t want to be told what is good for us. Settling on what is good for us shouldn’t be a matter of acquiescence to some authority, whether it is our parents, some tyrant, or the tyranny of popular opinion. If we don’t get to decide what matters for us, then it won’t do to have anybody else deciding for us. The possibility that remains open is that determining what matters for us is not a matter of anybody deciding, but instead a matter of us figuring it out. If this suggestion is on the right track, then questions about happiness and the good life are not subjective, that is, they aren’t matters for us or anybody else to just decide. Rather, they are objective in the way that scientific truths are. We have to investigate, discover, reason well, and figure out what is good for us. Enter Aristotle.

The Nichomacean Ethics

When we considered the consumerist conception of happiness and the good life we spoke of identifying what would make us happy. Notice that this way of thinking about happiness puts us in a passive position. Something outside of us does something to us, and it makes us happy. All that is required of us is to be fortunate enough to be in a position to receive this wonderful benefit. By contrast, for Aristotle, happiness is active. Things external to us might help or hinder, but ultimately, for us to be happy just is for us to be active in the right sorts of ways.

Aristotle identifies leading the good life with being happy. But happiness in the sense he has in mind is not just feeling happy or being in a happy mood. Moods and feelings are things that come and go in our lives. They are temporary states of mind. Aristotle is not interested in moods so much as what it means to live well. So we are after the idea of an excellent life. The Greek term Aristotle uses is eudaimonia and this might be best translated as living well and doing well. So when Aristotle identifies the good life with happiness, he has something more enduring and emblematic of a life in mind than just feeling good.

You might recall that Aristotle has a teleological view of the world. That is, everything has an end or a goal towards which it strives. He is inclined to understand the nature of things in terms of how they function in pursuing the ends towards which they are oriented. In this spirit, Aristotle would take goodness to be something we naturally aim at, something we are oriented towards by nature. So for Aristotle, the idea of the good life is understood in a naturalistic way. Aristotle conceives of ethics in a way that blends seamlessly into his broader paradigm for understanding the natural world. Goodness is an integral aspect of the natural world. What is good for a thing can be understood in terms of that thing realizing its telos.

The good life, conceived of as happiness in the broader enduring sense, is a goal or an end for a person’s life. But it’s an end of a particular kind in that it is sought for its own sake, not as a means to some further end. Aristotle refers to ends like this as final ends. In more contemporary language we might speak of things that are pursued for their intrinsic value, the value had “in itself” as opposed to things that are pursued for their instrumental value, their value in the sense of being useful as a means to other ends. Money, for instance, has instrumental value, but no intrinsic value. It’s a useful instrument for attaining other things of value like clothes or food. And these also may have only instrumental value toward yet further goals. The value of clothing is to keep us comfortable and make us look good. But clothes don’t have a value of their own independent of their usefulness towards these other ends.

The idea of things having instrumental value seems to presuppose that some things have value just for their own sake. Otherwise we seem to have a regress of value where many things are valuable as means to further and further ends, but at no point do any of these ends have any value of their own. So to make sense out of anything having any sort of value, it seems there would have to be some things that have intrinsic value or value in themselves. In the broadest sense,goodness is an end that has “to be pursued” built into it. Thus goodness, for the ancient Greeks,was a natural and obvious theoretical posit, needed to make sense out of any sort of talk of value. For humans, the kind of goodness that matters is the good life. So ethics in general is concerned with how to live well, how to lead an excellent life.

In the idea of flourishing, we have at least one familiar notion that should help us better understand how Aristotle sees the good life. Think about what it is for the vegetable plants in the garden to be flourishing. The flourishing tomato plant is one that grows vigorously without disease and is well on its way to achieving its natural end, growing lots of sweet ripe tomatoes.

In line with his teleological view of the natural world, Aristotle has it that the good for any sort of thing can be understood in terms of fulfilling its natural function well and thereby realizing its telos. So what then is the unique function of humans in terms of which our essence can be understood?

It seemed we had a pretty good idea of what it means for a tomato plant to flourish. Roughly it is for it to take in nourishment and grow. Biologically we might say its function is to photosynthesize, converting nutrients and CO2 into lots of sugar and oxygen (and, ultimately, tilthe). But we are essentially different from plants, so our function must be different as well. Aristotle entertains the idea that our function might be to satisfy our appetites. This much seems in line with the consumerist idea of the good life. But Aristotle rejects this too since it fails to separate us from barnyard animals. Perhaps as infants we are similar to animals in functioning only to satisfy our appetites, but then we outgrow this similarity. We might now see the consumerist conception of the good life as infantilizing us since it appeals only to how we function as infants, getting our appetites satisfied. But for Aristotle, how we function beyond the developmental stage of small children is important to understanding our telos as human beings. Ultimately Aristotle settles on our rational capacities. He takes the function of the human being to lie in exercising our rational capacities because these are the ways of functioning that are unique and special to humans. Humans are distinguished from others sorts of being by their ability to function rationally. For Aristotle, the human being essentially is the rational animal. The ability to reason is what sets us apart from other animals and this is what defines us.

Since for Aristotle, what’s good for us is not something we get to choose for ourselves, his idea of the good life might seem much less flexible and personalizable than the consumerist conception of the good life. But the apparent flexibility of the consumerist conception might be just that, only apparent. On the consumerist conception of the good life, the preferences that fix what is good for you are just given. What we want is taken as the starting point for thinking about what is good for us. For this reason, the consumerist philosophy affords no means of critically evaluating our wants. We just want what we want; that’s all there is to it. In our contemporary consumerist culture, any challenge to the aptness of our wants is received as grounds for offense, where our freedom to choose is compromised by someone else telling us what we should want. However, our desires are quite malleable. Our tastes are typically acquired and usually this happens without much critical reflection. Advertisers, and political pundits among others know this well. The most powerful institutions in our culture put immense and sophisticated effort into shaping and manipulating our desires. We are free to choose what we want as consumers, but only after our wants have been engineered with care by others that aren’t really concerned about what’s actually in our interest. In practice, the supposed freedom and flexibility of the consumerist conception of the good life is more illusion than reality.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s view of the good life as the life of actively exercising one’s rational capacities might be more flexible than it appears at first. Interpreted narrowly, Aristotle offers a highly intellectualized view of the good life. The good life is the life of the philosopher/scientist. It would not be unreasonable to suspect a bit of professional bias in Aristotle’s idea of what it is to live well. We might object that some people would rather work in the garden, ride bicycles, or practice yoga than just do philosophy all the time, and that this is a good way to live too. A reply that Aristotle can offer here (the reply I think he ought to offer) is to say, “very well, and any of these activities will contribute to your flourishing only if you engage your rational capacities and do them in thoughtful and inquisitive ways.” Many crafts, arts, and skills can be cultivated in ways that exercise and develop our rational capacities. A life spent working in the garden, riding bikes, doing yoga, or working as a plumber can be a flourishing life on this more liberal interpretation of Aristotle’s account. There are details to work out here concerning just what ways of life will exercise and cultivate our uniquely human rational capacities. But more generally, perhaps I can understand the good life as the active life of exercising and developing our uniquely human rational, capacities whatever specific endeavors and activities I ultimately identify as serving that end.

Once we have a thought out idea of what the good life is, there remains the issue of how to go about leading such a life. Through critical reflection on our nature and capacities we might discover (as opposed decide or choose) where our genuine interests lie. But then how do we bring ourselves to act in our best interest. What if it turns out that we don’t desire what is best for us? Are we then just fated for misery? Aristotle doesn’t think so. There is a degree of flexibility in our inclinations and preferences and we have some ability to shape these over time. On the consumerist conception, what matters for us is set by our desires and the theory of the good life is made to conform to them. On Aristotle’s view, the theory of the good life is developed according to what matters for us and this is set by the sort of being we are. So living well is a matter of bringing our desires into line with our interests. If Aristotle’s idea that we don’t get to simply choose what is best for us still seems at all stifling, your sense of personal autonomy might be replenished in appreciating how we are empowered to shape our tastes and preferences and gradually bring them into line with what we can learn about our interests.

We are creatures of habit. While this often presents an obstacle to acting on our considered interests, habit is also the means available to us for shaping our lives for the better. Recognizing that making some a change would be good for us typically doesn’t result in our immediately preferring it. Many of us, for instance, recognize that getting more exercise and eating better would be good for us. But thinking that more exercise would improve our lives doesn’t automatically result in feeling the urge to go for a run. Habituation, however, can bring our preferences and urges into line. People that regularly go for runs do often have the otherwise unusual urge to go for a run. Good habits are potentially as addictive as bad ones. And once we establish a good habit, that becomes what we prefer and what we enjoy the most. For Aristotle, the power you have to shape your life for the better lies in your ability to intentionally shape your habits. Once we have figured out what really is in our best interest by examining who we are and how we function, the key to being happy and living well is to mold our inclinations, preferences, and pleasures through habituation. The good life, which is also the virtuous life, will be the most pleasant life because it is the life in which our pleasures cohere rather than clash with our interests. The good life is one in which we have resolved the conflicts in our inclinations and pleasures and we no longer have things that matter to us fighting against things that matter for us. The truly virtuous person can wholeheartedly pursue what pleases her most because this will be well aligned with what is best for her. The affinity between Aristotle’s advice on how to live well and Frankfurt’s account of self-esteem should be easy to see here. Both would say living well is largely a matter of getting your desires, inclinations, and motivations to hang together in a unified coherent way. Where Frankfurt and Aristotle will differ is just in how that unified will gets oriented. Frankfurt would have our considered best interest be determined by what we love. Aristotle sees our considered best interest as settled by our nature as rational animals.

For Aristotle, to be virtuous is to have habitually established inclinations and preferences for actively exercising our human rational capacities. Virtue aims at flourishing. Habit, on this view, is quite literally character building. This way of thinking about virtue stands in sharp contrast to more popular conceptions where to be virtuous involves lots of self-sacrifice. We suffer from a Christianized notion of virtue that is more often than not associated with self-denial. To be virtuous in the popular sense means something like not overindulging in cheesecake or sex. But we are concerned with the idea of virtue as a kind of excellence. When Aristotle talks about virtue, he is just talking about the excellent character traits a person might have. What makes a character trait a good one is that on the whole, it contributes better to a flourishing life than constrasting traits. So life in accordance with virtue promotes human flourishing, and for this reason it is also likely to be the most pleasant.

Happiness, however, requires more than just virtue. It also requires some degree of good fortune. A person with a virtuous character who is also in a coma is not really flourishing. Likewise, a virtuous person who lives in a community of not so virtuous people faces a significant obstacle to flourishing. Living in community of fools might provide very limited opportunities for exercising one’s rational capacities. There would be no one to talk philosophy with for starters. More seriously, disputes could not be settled reasonably, but only through vicious maneuvering for dominance. Extreme poverty can be an obstacle to flourishing. Being always anxious about where your next meal is coming from could make leading the active life of the rational element a difficult proposition. But extreme affluence and luxury could present its own obstacles since they offers endless distractions, draw your attention to trifles, and ultimately render you passive and weak. How much and what kind of good fortune does leading the good life require? Perhaps we can’t give a very precise answer, but it might do to say that we require enough good fortune to give us ample opportunity to exercise our rational faculties.

Here is an excellent translation of Book 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a PDF: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/99036947.pdf

Here is the complete Nicomachean Ethics in a good, but older translation: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8438