Happiness

The Republic addresses the question of whether the just life is the happy life, a question put to Socrates by interlocutors who argue that injustice, carried off successfully, yields more advantage than justice. Plato's answer is that happiness, properly understood, is not a matter of external advantage at all but of the soul's internal condition. The happy person is one whose soul is well-ordered, with reason governing spirit and appetite; the miserable person is one in whom appetite or passion has displaced reason from its natural rule.

The tyrant, who seems to represent the highest degree of worldly success, is on Plato's analysis the most wretched of men. He is enslaved to his own desires, which multiply insatiably, and his soul is in a condition of inner war. The philosopher, by contrast, whose desires are governed by the love of wisdom and of the good, lives in a harmony that no external misfortune can destroy. In the Philebus, Plato refuses to identify happiness with either pleasure alone or wisdom alone; the good life is a mixed life, in which pleasure is present but ordered by knowledge. The relation between Plato's account of the good and his account of happiness is treated in the chapter on GOOD AND EVIL.

Happiness, on this view, is not a feeling but a condition: the achieved harmony of the soul's parts under the governance of reason. Whether this harmony can be maintained without some external goods and without the favorable circumstances that allow philosophy to flourish is a question that the Republic itself raises through the image of the philosopher who descends from contemplation to serve the city. The bearing of external goods on happiness is taken up more fully by Aristotle.

Plato establishes the objective connection between virtue and happiness that the subsequent tradition will largely accept, contest, or attempt to restate. Aristotle will preserve the connection but give it a more naturalistic and empirically grounded form; Augustine will transform it by insisting that only the vision of God, not any natural harmony of the soul, can constitute the happiness for which human beings are finally made.

Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics by observing that every art, inquiry, action, and pursuit aims at some good, and that there must be a highest good for the sake of which all others are sought. He identifies this highest good with happiness (eudaimonia), and at once notes that while everyone agrees that happiness is the supreme end, there is great disagreement about what it consists in. Some place it in pleasure, some in honor, some in wealth; the philosophical task is to determine which account, if any, is correct.

Aristotle's own account rests on the notion of a characteristic function. As each kind of craftsman excels in the performance proper to his art, so the human being has a characteristic activity, and happiness consists in performing that activity well and over a complete life. The distinctively human activity is the activity of the soul in accordance with reason; happiness, therefore, is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. It is not a state or a feeling but an activity. Aristotle is also careful about the role of external conditions: happiness requires not merely virtue but a sufficiency of external goods, health, friends, and a measure of prosperity, since certain virtues cannot be exercised without them. Luck is not indifferent to happiness, even if virtue is its substance.

In Book X, Aristotle argues that the highest form of happiness is the life of contemplation, which is also the most self-sufficient, most continuous, and most pleasant of the virtuous activities available to a human being. The contemplative life is as close as a human being can come to the divine condition, since the divine intellect is thought to engage in nothing but contemplation. The relation between this claim and the earlier account of happiness as virtuous activity more broadly is one that commentators have long disputed. Whether Aristotle means to rank the contemplative life above the practically virtuous life, or to present both as forms of human happiness, is considered more fully in the chapter on KNOWLEDGE.

Aristotle's account gives happiness its most fully developed classical formulation and sets the terms within which most subsequent discussions proceed. Aquinas will incorporate the essential structure while subordinating it to a supernatural end; Kant will object that an ethics built on happiness confuses prudence with morality; and Mill will attempt to recover happiness as the sole criterion of right action, while distinguishing pleasures by quality as well as quantity in a way that echoes Aristotle's preference for the contemplative over the merely sensual life.

Epictetus, reasoning from the Stoic premise that good and evil lie entirely within the will, draws from it a doctrine of happiness that departs sharply from the Aristotelian account. If what is truly good is only what lies within our power, namely our own judgments, desires, and assents, then happiness must consist in securing what is within our power and remaining indifferent to what is not. The person who places happiness in health, wealth, reputation, or any external condition has placed it in something that fortune may at any moment remove; such a person is constitutively at the mercy of circumstances and therefore never genuinely free.

The discipline Epictetus prescribes is the separation of what is "up to us" from what is not. The body, possessions, social standing, and the opinions of others all fall outside our control and are, in the strict Stoic sense, indifferent. The life of desire directed toward such things is one of chronic anxiety and disappointment. By contrast, the person who desires only what is within the power of the will, and accepts what is outside it with equanimity, has found a happiness that no external event can disturb. "Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are." Happiness so understood is a form of self-sufficiency, the condition of needing nothing that fortune can withhold. The question of whether this self-sufficiency is compatible with the duties of friendship and civic life, which even the Stoics affirm, is one that the tradition has pressed with some persistence.

Aristotle had argued that happiness requires external goods because certain virtues cannot be exercised without them; Epictetus denies this, holding that the genuinely virtuous person is happy regardless of outward circumstance. The disagreement reflects a deeper one about the nature of virtue and its relation to external conditions, which is considered more fully in the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE.

The Stoic account of happiness as internal self-sufficiency is taken up by Augustine, who finds in the Stoic inner citadel a genuine insight into the soul's capacity for independence from circumstance, but argues that the Stoic makes an error in imagining that the will, by its own unaided effort, can achieve the freedom it seeks. The will's very attempt to make itself sufficient, Augustine holds, is a form of pride that reveals the depth of the need it is attempting to deny.

Plotinus takes up the question of happiness in the fourth and fifth treatises of the First Ennead and treats it in a manner that is at once a continuation of Plato and a deliberate departure from Aristotle. He accepts the common inheritance that happiness is the end of human life and that it consists in the perfection of what is highest in us. He denies, however, that the goods of fortune, health, long life, bodily comfort, the presence of friends, are parts of happiness in any strict sense. They may accompany the happy life or may be absent from it without altering its inmost quality, for the life in which happiness consists is the life of the intellect in its contemplation of the intelligible, and what happens to the embodied person does not reach the contemplative self.

The characteristic move is Plotinus' test of two wise men, one favored by the world and the other stripped of every external good. He asks whether we should not call them equally happy "if they are equally wise," and answers that we should. The wise man has withdrawn into the self that is proper to him; what the world takes from him is not his, and what it gives him is not what he lives by. There follows a portrait of the sage that reads as the extreme form of an idea already present in the Stoics but pushed by Plotinus toward a further metaphysical ground. Epictetus places happiness in the will's acceptance of what fortune brings, while Plotinus places it in the intellect's participation in what is above fortune altogether. The discipline is similar in practice; the doctrine beneath it is different. The bearing of this account on the life of contemplation is treated in the chapter on WISDOM.

The difficulty of the position is one Plotinus does not minimize. If the happy life is the life of contemplation, and if the embodied person has genuine human concerns that are not reducible to contemplation, then the sage is either indifferent to his own concerns, which seems inhuman, or he is happy only in part, which seems to concede what Plotinus wishes to deny. Plotinus meets this difficulty by distinguishing the inner man from the whole composite of soul and body, and by locating happiness only in the inner man. The composite is subject to disturbance and loss; the inner man, fixed on the intelligible, is not. Whether this distinction can be sustained in the way Plotinus requires is one of the standing questions his later readers have pressed.

The thought that the inmost self may be untouched by what happens to the person is inherited by Augustine, though Augustine insists that the inmost self finds its rest only in God and not in its own contemplation. Aquinas preserves from Plotinus the conviction that perfect happiness consists in an intellectual vision, and transposes that vision into a Christian register in which it becomes the beatific vision of the divine essence. In both of these inheritances, what Plotinus supplies is the metaphysical conviction that the happy life is not vulnerable to what fortune can do.

Augustine begins from the observation that all persons desire happiness, a point on which Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are in agreement with him. His divergence concerns what happiness requires and where it can be found. The pagan schools, he argues in the nineteenth book of the City of God, have proposed a variety of candidates, virtue, pleasure, contemplation, self-sufficiency, but each has located happiness within the scope of this life; and this life, Augustine holds, is too pervaded by evils, uncertainties, and losses to sustain any happiness that merits the name. The wars, the diseases, the bereavements, the social ills that any honest account of earthly existence must acknowledge make it impossible to maintain that any condition available in this life is genuinely the happiness that human beings seek.

True happiness, on Augustine's account, must be perfect and secure. A happiness subject to loss is not the final rest that all desire seek; and since all temporal goods are subject to loss, temporal goods cannot constitute the ultimate happiness. What human beings seek, when they seek happiness in wealth or pleasure or honor, is a good that could not be taken from them; and only the eternal good, the vision and enjoyment of God, answers to that description. This is why Augustine's opening sentence of the Confessions is at once a prayer and a diagnosis: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee." The restlessness of desire, which drives the pursuit of every earthly good in turn, is itself the indication that the end capable of satisfying it is not to be found among created things.

The classical virtue of the philosophers is not simply discarded in this account but relocated. Virtues are real, and their exercise is a genuine good; but they are ordered, on Augustine's view, to an end they cannot by themselves reach. The happy life is not the Stoic sage's self-sufficiency, nor the Aristotelian flourishing of a complete life, but the beatitudo that consists in the eternal enjoyment of the highest good. The bearing of this account on the question of virtue and its relation to grace is considered in the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE.

Augustine reorients the entire discussion of happiness by insisting that the supreme good is not accessible within the limits of natural life and natural reason. After him, every thinker working within the Christian tradition must situate happiness between nature and grace, between the goods attainable by unaided reason and those given by divine gift. Aquinas will attempt the most systematic reconciliation of the classical and the Christian accounts, arguing that natural happiness and supernatural beatitude are related as imperfect to perfect, as foretaste to fulfillment.

Aquinas opens the moral portion of the Summa Theologica with an extended consideration of the ultimate end of human life, since all human action is ordered to some end, and the inquiry into what that end is must precede the analysis of the acts and habits through which it is pursued. His answer distinguishes two kinds of happiness: an imperfect happiness, attainable in this life through the exercise of virtue and especially of contemplation, which corresponds to what Aristotle had described; and a perfect happiness, attainable only by grace and only in the life to come, which consists in the direct vision of the divine essence.

The distinction follows from Aquinas's analysis of the human intellect. The intellect, he argues, has as its natural object the truth of being as such; no created good, however excellent, can satisfy it fully, because every created good is limited and finite, and the intellect's restlessness will not be quieted until it attains the infinite truth itself. The vision of God's essence, the beatific vision, is the only object adequate to the intellect's unlimited desire for truth, and therefore the only happiness that is fully and completely final. This conclusion echoes Augustine's doctrine of the restless heart, though Aquinas gives it a characteristically intellectual emphasis. The relation between intellect and will in the constitution of happiness is a question on which Aquinas acknowledges that there has been disagreement, and his own position is that the beatific vision consists primarily in an act of the intellect rather than of the will.

Imperfect happiness, attainable in this life, has several forms. The active life of moral virtue is one; the contemplative life of the intellect, which Aristotle had praised in Book X of the Ethics, is a higher form of the same. But even the best contemplative happiness available to a human being in this life falls short of perfect beatitude, because it is always partial, interrupted, and dependent on conditions that may fail. Natural reason and natural virtue prepare the way; grace alone conducts the soul to its end. The bearing of this account on the question of the relation between philosophy and theology is considered in the chapter on THEOLOGY.

Aquinas gives the medieval synthesis its definitive expression: natural happiness and supernatural beatitude are related as imperfect to perfect, as beginning to fulfillment, and as the work of nature to the gift of grace. The question of whether this synthesis preserves or transforms the Aristotelian account is one that those who have tried to recover classical ethics within a secular framework have continued to find pertinent.

Montaigne approaches the question of happiness with a skepticism directed at the philosophical systems that have addressed it. He has read Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Augustine, and he has found that their doctrines, however ingeniously constructed, do not deliver what they promise. The pursuit of virtue as the Stoics define it is too austere to be sustained; the beatitude that Augustine describes is beyond what the philosopher can verify; the eudaimonia that Aristotle prescribes belongs to an account of human nature that Montaigne's own observation of himself and others leads him to question. What is left, after this skeptical reduction, is the more modest project of living one's own life attentively and without pretense.

The Essays are the record of this project. Montaigne takes himself as the subject of inquiry not because he regards his own experience as universal but because it is the experience he has most direct access to, and because self-knowledge seems to him a precondition of any honest account of what happiness might mean for a particular person. He insists that pleasure is not base and that the goods of ordinary life, of the body, of conversation, of sleep and digestion and the slow accommodation to one's own aging, are genuine goods that deserve attention rather than disdain. The philosophical tradition has generally treated such goods as either instrumental to higher ends or as obstacles to them; Montaigne treats them as part of what a complete and honest account of human life must include.

"Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately." The person who has achieved this modest mastery, who has come to terms with his own ignorance, corporeality, and mortality, and who finds in the ordinary conduct of life a source of satisfaction that requires no system to justify, is, on Montaigne's account, as close to happiness as human nature can reasonably aspire. The relation between this account and the classical accounts of virtue and happiness is considered in the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE.

Montaigne marks a turn in the discussion by detaching happiness from any systematic account of virtue or of the soul's destiny and grounding it instead in the individual's attentive relation to his own experience. Locke will move in a similar direction by treating happiness as the maximum pleasure a person is capable of and making it the practical end that governs all deliberate choice.

Locke's account of happiness appears in the long chapter on power in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he is concerned with the psychology of voluntary action. Happiness, he writes, "in its full extent is the utmost pleasure we are capable of." Misery is its opposite. What moves the will in any particular case is not the abstract prospect of happiness but the felt uneasiness that accompanies the absence of some desired thing; and it is from this uneasiness, rather than from reason's vision of the good, that the spring of voluntary action flows.

Locke is careful, however, to distinguish between the immediate satisfaction of a present desire and the larger happiness that a rational agent ought to seek. The capacity to suspend the execution of desire, to step back and examine which pleasures are genuinely greater and more lasting, is what Locke regards as the foundation of liberty. Without this capacity of suspension, persons are at the mercy of whatever desire happens to be strongest at the moment; with it, they can govern their choices by reason's estimate of where the greater happiness lies. This includes, Locke acknowledges, the happiness of the next life, which revelation describes and which is of an incomparably greater duration and degree than any pleasure available in this one. The rational person will therefore weigh the claims of temporal pleasure against those of eternal happiness with the same care, and more, that he brings to comparing temporal goods with one another.

On the question of whether happiness is the same for all persons, Locke is more cautious than Aristotle or Aquinas. He acknowledges plainly that "everyone does not place his happiness in the same thing," and that men may choose different things and yet all choose rightly, since happiness is relative to individual constitution and circumstance. This concession to individual variation is one of the points at which Locke's account diverges most clearly from the classical tradition that had sought a single objective definition of happiness applicable to all human beings. The bearing of this disagreement on the possibility of a universal moral science is considered in the chapter on GOOD AND EVIL.

Locke's treatment prepares the way for utilitarianism by establishing pleasure as the appropriate currency of moral evaluation and by making happiness, understood as maximum pleasure over time, the practical end by which the rationality of choices is to be assessed. Mill will carry this framework forward while attempting to address the objection that a doctrine of happiness as pleasure fails to do justice to the qualitative differences among human satisfactions.

Kant's position on happiness is defined by a sharp distinction between two questions: what a rational being must do in order to be worthy of happiness, and what a rational being must do in order to become happy. Morality answers the first question, and happiness has no place among its grounds or principles. An ethics of happiness, whether Aristotelian or utilitarian, confuses the two questions and produces what Kant calls a "pragmatic" rather than a genuinely moral doctrine of conduct. Morality commands unconditionally; the prospect of happiness, even the prospect of one's own perfect happiness, cannot be the motive from which a morally worthy act is performed.

Kant's analysis of happiness leads him to doubt that it can even serve as a principle of rational prudence. "The notion of happiness," he writes, "is so indefinite that although every man wishes to attain it, yet he never can say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes." To determine what would make him truly happy, a person would need to know the consequences of every possible choice for the whole of his life, and this knowledge is not available to finite creatures. Happiness, as a practical aim, is therefore less determinate than Aristotle and Mill supposed; and its very indeterminateness is part of what prevents it from functioning as a first principle of ethics.

Yet Kant does not simply dismiss happiness from his moral philosophy. In the Critique of Practical Reason, he argues that the highest good, for which morality gives us reason to hope, consists in the union of virtue and happiness: the condition in which those who are morally worthy are also made happy in proportion to their worthiness. Since this condition cannot be guaranteed by nature and cannot be brought about by human effort alone, Kant postulates God and immortality as the conditions under which it would be realized. The moral person does not aim at happiness; but morality would be incoherent if there were no rational ground for hoping that virtue and happiness would ultimately be reconciled. The bearing of these postulates on Kant's account of religion is considered in the chapter on THEOLOGY.

Kant severs the connection between virtue and happiness that Aristotle had established and that the classical tradition had largely maintained, insisting that these two questions, though ultimately to be reconciled by divine governance, must be kept strictly separate in any adequate moral theory. Mill will object that this separation, carried to its conclusion, produces a morality that is indifferent to the actual welfare of persons and that can therefore give no rational account of why any action is required rather than merely permitted.

Mill defends the principle that happiness is the sole criterion of right conduct and that morality stands or falls by its tendency to promote or diminish it. Actions are right in proportion as they tend to produce happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse. This is what Mill calls the Greatest Happiness Principle, and he holds that it is the implicit standard by which most serious moral judgments are in fact made, once the confusion of means with ends is cleared away. The case for making it explicit rests on the observation that happiness, unlike any proposed alternative criterion, is the only thing that persons desire for its own sake: everything else they desire is desired either as a means to it or as a part of it.

Mill's argument requires him to address the objection that a doctrine making happiness, understood as pleasure, the supreme end is fit only for animals and degrades the dignity of human aspiration. His response is the distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Not all pleasures are of equal value, even setting aside their intensity and duration; pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and moral sentiments, and of the imagination are qualitatively superior to mere bodily satisfactions, and persons who have experienced both invariably prefer the former. The competent judge is one who has knowledge of both kinds; and "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." In this way Mill attempts to incorporate Aristotle's preference for the contemplative and the moral life within a utilitarian framework, though without Aristotle's teleological account of human nature. The relation between Mill's qualitative hedonism and Aristotle's account of happiness is considered in the chapter on GOOD AND EVIL.

The utilitarian standard, Mill insists, is not the individual's own happiness but the greatest happiness of all affected parties, reckoned impartially. The moral agent is called to calculate consequences for all sentient beings as a disinterested spectator would assess them, with no greater weight given to his own satisfaction than to that of any other person equally affected. This requirement of impartiality connects the pursuit of happiness to social and political reform, making the utilitarian principle a standard for legislation and public policy as well as for individual conduct.

Freud will press a question that Mill's optimism about the compatibility of individual happiness and social life does not adequately address: whether civilization, by its very structure, requires a degree of instinctual renunciation that makes the happiness envisaged by the Greatest Happiness Principle largely unattainable, at least as a permanent condition rather than as a transient satisfaction.

The fifth book of The Brothers Karamazov places at the center of the novel's argument a speech that Ivan Karamazov delivers to his brother Alyosha, the parable of the Grand Inquisitor. A Cardinal of the Spanish Inquisition encounters Christ, who has returned silently to a sixteenth-century Seville, and addresses him through the night in the cell to which he has been confined. The Cardinal's charge is not that Christ was wrong but that he loved human beings too much to give them what they actually want. What the multitude seeks, the Cardinal says, is not the severe freedom of conscience Christ offered but bread and the relief of no longer having to choose. The Church, having understood what the multitude seeks, has taken this burden from them and has given them in exchange a happiness appropriate to their nature, the happiness of the weak, the fearful, and the many.

The argument is put in the mouth of a figure the reader is meant to reject, but Dostoyevsky takes care that the rejection should not come too easily. The Cardinal's description of human beings as desiring happiness more than freedom, and as willing to surrender their most spiritual possessions in exchange for the material security and the communal identity that remove the terror of individual existence, is not presented as a caricature but as a possibility that any honest examination of social life must reckon with. The Cardinal does not pretend to offer happiness of the kind Aristotle described or Aquinas anticipated; he offers the kind of happiness that modern philanthropy, modern politics, and modern religion alike are capable of supplying. Against this offer Christ remains silent, kisses the Cardinal on his bloodless lips, and departs. The silence is not an argument but a refusal to engage the Cardinal on the Cardinal's own terms, for on those terms the Cardinal has already won. The relation of this refusal to Dostoyevsky's larger account of liberty is treated in the chapter on LIBERTY.

The implication for the inherited discussion of happiness is considerable. The tradition has largely assumed that the question is how human beings are to attain the happiness that is their due. Dostoyevsky asks instead whether the happiness human beings most reliably seek is one they ought to have, and whether a gift that satisfies this seeking is a gift or a betrayal. Mill's utilitarianism, which had proposed to maximize happiness across a population, receives in the Cardinal's speech a critique it is not clear it can answer. If happiness is the criterion, and if the happiness the multitude prefers is that of the herd, then the utilitarian calculus may require the very arrangement the Cardinal describes. Kant had already argued, on different grounds, that happiness cannot be the principle of morality; the Cardinal's speech gives the Kantian worry a narrative form no philosophical argument had supplied.

Freud later gives a psychological version of the Cardinal's sociological insight, arguing that civilization requires the renunciation of instinct and that the renunciation generates discontent of a kind that no reform can reach. Dostoyevsky's contribution to the great conversation about happiness is to have raised the possibility that what human beings most consistently pursue under the name of happiness is a condition incompatible with what they also, and at some depth, most need.

Freud opens Civilization and Its Discontents with the observation that what persons want, above all, is to be happy: to experience strong pleasures and to avoid suffering. This much he grants to the tradition from Aristotle through Mill. But his analysis of the conditions under which happiness is pursued and the conditions under which it can be attained leads to conclusions very different from theirs. Human beings are subjected to suffering from three directions: from the body, which decays and requires constant management; from the external world, which is indifferent and often hostile; and from relations with other persons, which are the most painful source of suffering of all. Happiness in any intense or lasting form is not the ordinary condition of human life; it is episodic, obtained in moments of sudden satisfaction after a period of accumulation, and therefore necessarily brief.

Civilization, which is the collective arrangement through which human beings protect themselves from nature and from one another, makes this situation worse in a specific way. The conditions of social life require the renunciation of aggression and the redirection of desire; and this renunciation, which Freud regards as the price civilization necessarily exacts, does not neutralize the drives that are suppressed but turns them inward, producing the superego and the guilt that accompanies it. The more morally scrupulous the person, the more severe the superego and the greater the guilt, since the aggressive impulses that could not be directed outward are turned against the self with corresponding force. There is thus a structural antagonism between civilization and happiness: the security and cultural achievement that civilization provides require the systematic frustration of the very instincts whose satisfaction would be most directly productive of happiness. The relation between this argument and Freud's account of conscience is treated in the chapter on GOOD AND EVIL.

Freud does not conclude that civilization is a mistake or that the instinctual renunciation it demands could be avoided. He regards both the instinct toward life and union and the instinct toward death and dissolution as permanent features of human nature, and civilization as the product of the former's long contest with the latter. But he insists that the discontents civilization produces are structural and not to be overcome by any redistribution of goods or reform of institutions. Happiness, understood as the sustained satisfaction of strong desire, "is not included in the plan of creation."

Freud brings the long discussion of happiness to a sobering conclusion. Where Aristotle proposed a complete life of virtuous activity, and Mill proposed the greatest happiness of the greatest number as an attainable social goal, Freud proposes that happiness, in any robust sense, is a transient achievement at best and that the honest analyst of human nature will not expect more from civilization than the moderation of suffering. Whether this conclusion is entailed by Freud's premises, or whether it reflects assumptions about instinct and culture that may be contested, is a question that his successors have continued to debate.