From Astrology to Film to God to Music to Prozac to Yoga

‘What is happiness?’ is a question over which human beings have spilled rivers of both ink and blood. Perhaps there are few things that ‘define’ a human being as distinctively as the views that she holds regarding this matter. What a person takes happiness to be governs (and sometimes even determines) the way she lives, the professions she takes up, the people she meets, talks to, befriends, and lives with, the food she eats (and don’t eat), the skies she walks under, the places she visits, the books she reads, and the music she listens to : in short, the very pattern of existence that she chooses. Often, it turns out that the easiest way of ‘getting to know someone’ is by asking him/her : 'So tell me, what do you mean by happiness?'

In what follows, I do not offer what might be called a ‘normative’ definition of happiness. That is, I do not make the strong claim that if and only if a person has X, Y and Z, can she be said to be ‘happy’. Rather, I make the weak claim that most people who regard themselves to be happy usually seem to associate their happiness with X, Y and Z. I believe that ‘happiness’ goes with (at least) six elements : to feel good, to be able to maintain pleasant experiences continually, to know the ‘truth of the matter’, to have the capacity to achieve, to be content with what we are, and finally to be involved in inter-personal relations.

(1) 'To feel good' : This is perhaps the most basic level at which we call ourselves 'happy'. St Augustine (354 - 430 AD) was once walking through the streets of Milan when he saw a beggar laughing with joy. He pondered that he, anxious to get a job in Milan, was not as ‘happy’ as the beggar. In other words, happiness cannot be understood apart from the felt quality of our experiences. We take pleasure when our desires are satisfied, and are displeased and anxious when they are frustrated. This could either be a first-order desire, for example, to watch a movie, or a second-order desire to keep away from watching movies during exams. The subjective mental states of joy, happiness, despair, and misery constitute what is usually called ‘happiness’. In short, nobody can be called happy unless she is satisfied with her life from the inside-out (this is the point about Augustine and the beggar). This is the most common answer given to the question, 'What is happiness?'

(2) 'To continue to feel good' : Simply to feel happy in the sense (1) is not ‘happiness’. To be truly happy, we must not be continuously distracted by the thought that our pleasant experiences will pass away. The last meal of a condemned man may be a gastronomic delight and may make him experience pleasant emotions in sense (1), but that is hardly what we would understand by ‘happiness’. Sometimes we may even have to choose between conflicting desires : should a singer eat ice-cream right now and spoil her voice or give up the ice-cream and go for her recording tonight? In other words, we cannot pick out the experiences of a person at one spatial-temporal location and call her happy. An alcoholic may be happy during the appropriately-named 'happy hours' at a pub, but once again his happiness has to be understood within the wider scope of his life. That is, there must be a certain element of continuity in the happiness understood in sense (1). This does not mean that we have to be happy all the time : only someone living in a fool’s paradise would think that to be possible. What it does mean, however, is that happiness in sense (1) is not the complete story because it understands the satisfaction of our desires in a too one-dimensional manner. To be happy in sense (2), on the other hand, means that we are in a state in which our pleasant experiences can be, more or less, sustained over a period of time.

(3) 'To know the ‘facts’' : As they always teach you at school, ‘go for the bare facts’. (Though whether or not ‘bare facts’ have ever existed is another debate in itself.) Happiness in senses (1) and (2) still does not give us the ‘whole picture’. To be truly happy, I must know the truth of the matter. Consider this example. I am an Austrian nuclear scientist working on an atomic bomb, and I am given a splendid mansion with many cars and a massive laboratory. So I work day and night to make the bomb and I consider myself happy in the above two senses. Firstly, I am experiencing pleasant emotions in utilising my knowledge and I have been having these emotions over a period of say one year. The party high command, however, has more sinister plans for me. Once I have made the bomb, I am to be shot on the charge of selling my secrets to the Russians. Can I be called ‘happy’ in this case? In other words, before calling ourselves happy, we must consider the possibilities of ignorance and deception. Therefore, it is not enough to continually have pleasant experiences : what is even more important is that these experiences must not be delusional. Experience in itself does not make for happiness, and knowing the truth is a crucial aspect of our well-being, the truth not only about ourselves but also about the world, our place in it and our destiny (in whatever way we conceive it). A manic depressive or a drug addict can experience moments of pleasurable emotions but these cannot be equated in a straightforward manner with ‘happiness’.

(4) 'To be able to achieve' : Once we have formed our own conception of what the basic significance and meaning of life is (not that there is any unanimity on this matter : you could be a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu, an atheist, a Marxist, an agnostic and so on), we should be able to pursue certain ends or goals in life as laid down by our distinctive world-view. Our well-being cannot depend solely on what happens to us (this is why happiness as understood in senses (1), (2) and (3) is inadequate) : this will reduce us to vegetative life. As self-reflective beings, we should also be able to strive for goals that we believe constitute our understanding of human nature. So if I believe that my goal is to become a music director, it is in the very process of developing certain skills and qualities along the way that I feel the worthiness of my existence. That is, happiness is not simply a matter of ‘happenings’ but also of ‘doings’.

(5) 'To be content' : Happiness in senses (1)-(4) comes very close to ‘defining’ the term, and yet not close enough. One important element of happiness is contentment. Contentment is paradoxically the giving up of the continuous striving for happiness. Our satisfactions and our achievements not only contribute to our happiness but also pose a threat. No matter how happy we are, we will eventually want something more, something that lies beyond our grasp. This is in fact how the consumer industry works : first create an artificial need and then see the dollars pouring in. To be happy, therefore, at some point we must be content with whatever we have (once again, this is the point about Augustine and the beggar). We have to accept the risks of living and the limited security that we have. Contentment is in its basic sense a question of humility, humility not in the sense of abject servility but in the sense of a willingness to accept and affirm the reality of the limitations inherent in our finitude. We find ourselves immersed in complex social matrices of conflict, hatred, and struggle and it is impossible to always achieve just what we want to. We must at some stage confront the inevitability of failure.

(6) 'To live in a community' : Anyone with the slightest of sociological tendencies will be rather displeased by my account of happiness so far because I have focused entirely on the individual aspect of happiness. A little thinking on the question of happiness will reveal that it is only by being involved in constitutive and communal relations that we get to learn the range of satisfactions, doings and experiences that go towards a happy life. In some cases, we can get along with 'mere association' as in a corporate boardroom meeting but in many others, we may also be engaged in deeper constitutive relationalities. Given the basic social context of human existence, it may be difficult to lead a truly good human life apart from the irreducibly communal goods such as friendship, family, and civil society. Mutuality not only enables intense happiness but is also the most important background condition for meaningful and worthy endeavours. In conjunction with (5) above, moreover, our own contentment is inextricably bound with the contentment of those who live around us. In other words, we see the indispensable value of constitutive relations to our self-understanding and to our pursuit of that elusive entity called ‘happiness’.