What is Happiness?

Below is an article that takes one of the popular modern approaches to the question of what makes us happy – and why. It’s certainly not a new field of enquiry. Every religion and philosophy has had something to say about it, if only to dismiss it as a serious topic. Not that many do that.

In the west alone we have a sustained investigation among the ancinet Greek and Roman philosophers, such as Epicurus (this is supposed to be what he looked like) and his followers, the Stoics, and a host of others.

I am most impressed with the Aristotlian idea  eudaimonea (worthwhile, flourishing, life) , but the general goal of many of them seems to be closer to Buddhism: ataraxia, or the state of being devoid of affect, desire – and anxiety. Not so much happiness as the avoidance of pain.

There’s also a political aspect to the question – what kinds of societies are those which promote human flourishing ?(assuming the aim is posed in such terms).

Perhaps though, Nietzsche was right when he said that happiness was not the goal of humans – only Englishmen. I doubt it though. Mind you, the thought is echoed by some Lacanians – not the bit about being English, but the idea that our goal is something other than pleasure, hedon.  Note how easy, and how misleadingly, we can slip from pleasure , conceived as a physical state,  to happiness, thought of as a way of life. They are clearly two different things. Perhaps further analysis would reveal that ‘other goal’ of the anti-hedon brigade to be, just a verson of eudaimonea? Not I suspect, the view that a Zizek or a Lacan would take. Think of their concept of the death drive, and the long shadow of Schopenhaurean pessimism that seems to accompany so much lacanian thought about the ‘ends of man’.

Whatever we take happiness to be, I do think the investigation is worthwhile (or I wouldnt be posting this). But I’d add a couple of caveats. One is that we ought not to allow economists to define happiness  for us. If we do that we are likely to end up with a crude version of utilitarianism – happiness as hedon, again. The other is that while we should follow the latest scinetific research (as below), we should not swallow the results – or the assumptions – uncritically.  Scientific research of the kind outlined below can be conducted in many ways, but it can lead the unwary into an ill considered reductionsm – of the kind that  assumes that a complex concept can always be  redescribed without loss  in entirely physical, biological manner; or into a set of speculations about our evolutionary past which resmble nothing so much as the Just-So stories of Kipling (how we came to need pleasure presented in the same manner as ‘how the leopard got his spots’). The former is part of the essence of scientific method, but needs to be balanced against other considerations; the latter is part of the current fashion for pseudo-darwinian ‘explanations’  for everything.

The Science of Lasting Happiness

Through controlled experiments, Sonja Lyubomirsky explores ways to beat the genetic set point for happiness. Staying in high spirits, she finds, is hard work

By Marina Krakovsky

Count your blessings every day? Not if you want to be really happy……Lyubomirsky had to lay some groundwork before she could go into the lab. Back then, happiness was “a fuzzy, unscientific topic,” she says, and although no instrument yet exists for giving perfectly valid, reliable and precise readings of someone’s happiness from session to session, Lyubomirsky has brought scientific rigor to the emerging field. From her firm belief that it is each person’s self-reported happiness that matters, she developed a four-question Subjective Happiness Scale. Lyubomirsky’s working definition of happiness–”a joyful, contented life”–gets at both the feelings and judgments necessary for overall happiness. (If a sleep-deprived new mom feels fulfilled but frazzled, and an aimless party girl feels empty despite loads of fun, neither would consider herself truly happy.) To this day, she rarely sees her studies’ participants; they do most exercises out in the real world and answer detailed questionnaires on the computer, often from home. To assess subjects’ efforts and honesty, she uses several cross-checks, such as timing them as they complete the questionnaires.

The research needed to answer questions about lasting happiness is costly, because studies need to follow a sizable group of people over a long time. Two and a half years ago Lyubomirsky and Sheldon received a five-year, $1-million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to do just that. Investigators have no shortage of possible strategies to test, with happiness advice coming “from the Buddha to Tony Robbins,” as Seligman puts it. So Lyubomirsky started with three promising strategies: kindness, gratitude and optimism–all of which past research had linked with happiness.

More from: The Science of Lasting Happiness: Scientific American.