Chapter 18

HAPPINESS

“But we must add ‘in a complete life’. For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.”

- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E), Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle 1953:I.7)

            At this point in the quest for meaning, our individual paths diverge. We have traveled as far together as the guidance of abstract philosophy can take us. From philosophy, we have produced a sketch of that for which we are searching. No one way of life now summons us; instead we must each construct our own way of life from the materials of emotional truth. Investigating the way of the philosopher was the easy task. Now we each face the much harder tasks of critically reflecting on our own lives and of transforming ourselves in response to this reflection.

            Many people think that the pursuit of happiness, not the quest for meaning, is the preeminent project of human beings. What is the relation between a happy life and a meaningful life? Should we pursue happiness instead of meaning in our lives? The answers to these questions depend, as we might expect, on how we understand happiness. We will investigate different understandings of happiness to see if one of them ought to be the preeminent human project.

Happiness, Emotion, and Judgment

            Happiness, in one sense, is a judgment of good fortune. The word “happy” comes from the Middle English word “hap” meaning luck or fortune. The word “hap” is now archaic, though the original meaning survives in the word “hapless” meaning luckless or unfortunate. A related meaning survives, however, when we talk of happy circumstances and mean to talk of fortunate or lucky circumstances. So a happy life, in this sense, is a lucky one. Nevertheless, this is not the sense of happiness whose pursuit we would think the highest end of human life.

            Happiness, in another sense, is an emotion. We can be happy about an event – a promotion, a celebration, a friend’s success – or we can be happy about a relationship. Sometimes emotional happiness is not directed on anything in particular. Then, happiness is a mood, the opposite of sadness and depression. Such happiness has the characteristics of an emotion: It has a feeling tone; there is something it is like to feel happy. It is based on beliefs and evaluations concerning our selves, the world, and the future. It concentrates our attention on everything that is favorable in ways that support our moods. In a happy mood, we see only the beautiful weather, our prospects of success, or the love of our intimates. We do not dwell on things that we lack. We do not think of jobs undone or of wants unsatisfied. Happiness brings a measure of peace.

            Happiness, though, is just one strong emotion among many. (Nozick 1989) It is a more intense emotion than gratification, enjoyment, or being pleased. Yet it is a less intense emotion than elation, delight, joy, euphoria, bliss, rapture, and ecstasy. If we think of happiness as only an emotion, then why should we think that the pursuit of this one emotion is the proper end of life? Why not pursue something stronger, yet from the same family, like joy or bliss? Why should we pick only from this family of emotions? Other strong, affirmative emotions are worth experiencing: Enthusiasm, wonder, reverence, pride, amazement, and awe, for example. These strong emotions help make a life feel meaningful. Why should they not be emotions worth experiencing in the same way as is happiness?

            We can also understand happiness, finally, as a judgment that we make on our lives as wholes. In this sense, it is an evaluation or affirmation of our life. The quest for meaning led to emotional judgments on our selves and the lives we commit to living. So also, the pursuit of happiness leads to making a judgment on our lives. What kind of judgment? Wayne Sumner suggests the following:

Being happy in this sense means having a certain kind of positive attitude toward your life, which in its fullest form has both a cognitive and affective component. The cognitive aspect of happiness consists in a positive evaluation of the conditions of your life, a judgement that, at least on balance, it measures up favourably against your standards or expectations. . . . The affective side of happiness consists in what we commonly call a sense of well-being: finding your life enriching or rewarding, or feeling satisfied or fulfilled by it. (Sumner 1996:145-146)

Being happy with our lives is more than just having an emotional response to our life. It is also more than just a thin, abstract judgment such as judging that a life is a long one, a lucky one, or even a good one. As Sumner says, happiness has both an emotional and a cognitive side to it. In our terms, being happy is an emotional judgment about our lives.

            Emotional judgments have the feature that they involve both cognition and emotion. A rational, evidential relationship exists between an emotion and the corresponding judgment. Someone’s admiration for his friend, for example, is evidence that his friend is worthy of admiration. Yet it is not conclusive evidence. He may have other reasons for not admiring his friend, other judgments that he has made about her or the reports and reactions of mutual friends. Over time, and perhaps through discussion with friends, he can bring his emotions and evaluative beliefs into harmony, changing either emotion or belief as his understanding increases. Emotional judgments, in this senses, have both an affective and a cognitive side.

            What kind of emotional judgment is being happy? The obvious answer is that being happy is to judge that your life is worthy of the emotion of happiness. This simple answer does not really advance our understanding of happiness very far. As well, it fails to respond to Nozick’s point that the emotion of happiness is just one fairly strong emotion among many, all of which matter in life. What about enjoyment, wonder, contentment, respect, esteem, or even humor? Are they not also important emotional attitudes to have toward life? Nor can a life be happy if a person is afraid of it, ashamed of it, or if he resents ever being born. Is it not also important to avoid certain emotional attitudes toward your life? Why should we want to pursue just one emotion toward our lives as a whole? Do we not want our lives to engage all our emotions? Is happiness just a one-dimensional judgment or is it, instead, multidimensional?

Happiness as Multidimensional

            Often philosophers define happiness in terms of life-satisfaction, judging that we should be satisfied with our lives. For example, Mark Kingwell writes that happiness is “. . . the self-applied criterion of rational satisfaction; am I living a life that I can judge worth living?” (Kingwell 1998:305) And again, “Happiness is not about feeling good all the time. It is, rather, about the ability to reflect on one’s life and find it worthwhile – to see it as satisfactory.” (306) This definition makes happiness a one-dimensional judgment that life as a whole is satisfactory, but it immediately raises the question of how we are to understand “satisfaction.”

            “Satisfaction” could mean either desire-satisfaction or emotional satisfaction. Running these two meanings together can mislead us into thinking that a one-dimensional definition of happiness is possible. The satisfied-desire theory is embedded deep in our cultural environment, and avoiding thinking in its terms is difficult. This theory of value underlies the system of economic markets inside which we live our lives. Because of its cultural hegemony, we slip into seeing the world in its terms. It leads us to think that satisfaction has only one dimension – getting what we want. If the satisfied-desire theory were a true one, we could use it to make one-dimensional judgments on our lives as a whole. Recall, however, the problems with the desire theory. Desires are always directed on the future, and they are, at best, fallible guides to happiness. Desire-satisfaction is not sufficient for happiness because sometimes we can misjudge what we want and be disappointed. Desire-satisfaction is not necessary for happiness because we sometimes, by happenstance, get what we did not want and find that it makes us happy.

            So the sort of satisfaction with life as a whole that constitutes philosophical happiness must be a judgment of emotional satisfaction. Yet it cannot be a judgment concerning just one emotion because, as we have seen, the likely candidate would be the emotion of happiness, and that is an inadequate candidate. Many emotional judgments are involved in determining whether we are philosophically happy. So we see that happiness is multidimensional; we do not judge our lives along just one dimension. Happiness is a multifaceted thing.

            Now we can start to see the relation between the pursuit of happiness and the quest for meaning. The philosophical quest for meaning has taught us the way to understand a meaningful life. Let us review this one last time, but in a way that makes a comparison to happiness easier.

Meaning as Multidimensional

            The quest for meaning advanced in two stages. First, we investigated whether anything could truly matter. Second, we investigated how our lives as a whole could be truly meaningful.

            In the first part, we concluded that the search for what truly matters involves both the heart and the head. We take what appears to matter, as shown by our individual and collective emotional responses, as evidence for what truly matters, for what is truly worthy of these responses. We found that things, people, and events matter in many different ways, not all of them positive. They can be admirable, amazing, delightful, enjoyable, fascinating, honorable, loveable, surprising, and wonderful. Also, they can be annoying, contemptible, disappointing, embarrassing, horrible, infuriating, regrettable, sad, shameful, and worrisome. All these are ways of mattering.

            The important point to see here is this: Because mattering is so diverse, we cannot put the various dimensions of mattering together into one overall judgment. When we took the path of the emotions, we abandoned any hope of making global assessments of how much things matter. We cannot put together three judgments of someone as admirable, amazing, and annoying, into one overall judgment. Our friend is just admirable, amazing, and annoying. When we say our friend matters to us, we are being imprecise and making only a vague summary of our evaluations.

            The various dimensions of mattering are not measurable on the same scale, and we cannot combine them into one judgment. Consider this analogy. Suppose something happened three meters to my right and four meters above my head. We can combine these two spatial dimensions (away and up) into one measure of how far away it happened; the answer is five meters away from my head. Suppose also that it happened six minutes ago. We have no way (outside Einstein’s theory of special relativity) of combining the dimensions of space and time (five meters in space and six minutes in time) into one overall “distance.” It just happened six minutes ago and five meters away. That is the best we can do. Similarly we cannot combine our emotional judgments of our friend. The best we can do is to judge that our friend is admirable, amazing, and annoying.

            The situation would have been different, as we noted above, had the satisfied-desire theory been right. Then mattering would have had only one dimension – how much events satisfied our desires. Then we could have made judgements of overall mattering.

            However, it did not turn out that way. Satisfied desire leads to a dead end. So we cannot make overall judgments about what matters. In fact it can be misleading to say that the quest for meaning is a quest for what truly matters, unless we understand “mattering” as merely summarizing a whole range of emotional judgments. Things do not matter in just one way.

            In the second part of our investigation of meaningfulness, we examined emotional judgments regarding our lives as a whole. We saw that our task was to become persons truly worthy of a range of life-affirming emotional judgments. Our task is to become persons worthy of admiration, esteem, love, and respect and to lead lives worthy of admiration, enjoyment, and pride. Our task is to avoid lives that are contemptible, frustrating, humiliating, regrettable, sad, and shameful.

            Notice that, again, we have no one dimension of meaningfulness or meaninglessness. We make no one overall, global judgement. We make only particular judgments regarding esteem, respect, shame, and so on. We do not make a single, thin, abstract judgment on our lives. Instead, we make an assortment of thick, concrete, emotional judgments. Again, the term “meaningful” does no more than summarize this assortment of particular judgments. Meaning has no essence; the term “meaningful” does not have a definition.

            The term “meaningful” is analogous to a term like “winner.” We know what it means to win a game of chess, win a game of football, or win a game of solitaire. Each individual game has a definite criterion for winning, but the criterion is different in each game. Winning a football game is very different form winning a solitaire game. Being a winner has no essence; the term “winner” is a vague and imprecise way of summarizing what happens in individual games. It is not important that we do not have a criterion for winning in general if we have a criterion for winning each game.

            We have not been investigating just one sort of emotional judgment, that of being meaningful. We can find no single emotion that we might describe as feeling meaningful. Feeling meaningful is not just one emotion among many, nor is it one emotion that is somehow more important than the others.

Happiness, Meaning, and Truth

            Now we can see how the quest for meaning and the pursuit of happiness converge and diverge. They converge because judging a life either happy or unhappy involves the same emotional judgments as judging a life either meaningful or meaningless. No one judgment – neither satisfaction nor meaningfulness – decides the issue. Properly conceived, each involves the whole domain of our emotional life, and the judgments that we form on it.

            Happiness and meaning diverge, though, in the following way. Meaning requires, as happiness does not, that our emotional judgments be true. We can still be happy with our lives even when our judgments are false. Sumner writes:

Consider the woman who for months or years has believed in, and relied on, the devotion of a faithless and self-serving partner. Her belief concerning a crucial condition of her life – a state of the world – was false. . . . If you asked her during this period whether she is happy, she will say that she is; if you ask her if her life is going well for her she will say that it is. If you ask her how she sees the same period after the delusion has been exposed, she will probably say that it now seems to her a cruel hoax and a waste of that part of her life. . . . She may resent the fact that her happiness was bought at the price of an elaborate deception, but happy she was all the same. Wasn’t she? (Sumner 1996:157)

Yes. During her relationship she made all the emotional judgments that amount to judging her life a happy one. In each case, she predicted that if she had a true understanding of her life, then she would feel these emotions. She might have been justified in these predictions, given the evidence available to her. Yet her predictions were false, and because they were false, her life lacked meaning. If she had known the truth about the conditions of her life, then she would have judged it wasted, and she would have resented, not loved, her partner.

            The quest for meaning is both more rigorous and more risky than the pursuit of happiness. Meaning requires not only that we rationally judge our lives to be worthy ones, but also that we be right in these judgments. The quest for meaning requires that we reflect critically on our selves and the lives we lead. Then it requires that we reconstruct our lives to be compatible with true emotional judgments. A meaningful life, a life transformed in accord with emotional truth, will be a happy one, but the converse will not always be true. Where happiness is based on falsity, it fails to construct meaning. Meaning, in rough summary, is true happiness.

            Meaningfulness is radically diverse. Life has no one meaning for all human beings. Meaningfulness is not universal; instead, it is particular to an individual. Within an individual life, no One Big Thing is the source of meaning in that life; instead meaning is highly diverse. Nor are things and lives meaningful in just one, unitary, way; meaning is as plural as the emotions through which we form our judgments.

            Full appreciation of the last point, the plurality of meaning, has important consequences. First, no standard exists outside our emotional judgments by which we can divide their objects into favorable/unfavorable, life-affirming/ life-demeaning, valuable/valueless, worthwhile/worthless, or meaningful/meaningless. These are all just rough characterizations without explanatory value. It does not add anything to the judgment that a life is shameful to say that it is worthless or meaningless. The direction of explanation is the other way around. We understand that something is meaningless because it is shameful, contemptible, or disgusting; our emotional judgments are themselves the standards for being meaningful or meaningless.

            Finally, the quest for meaning is now itself transformed. We no longer have just one thing – meaning – for which to search. We must replace the abstract task of finding meaning with a host of more particular tasks. We must find that which is truly worthy of astonishment, awe, and reverence. We must find people who are truly worthy of love and admiration, and events that truly occasion joy and delight. We must construct characters and lead lives that are truly worthy of respect and esteem. Only in these particular tasks will we succeed in our quest for meaning.