I am perplexed by the question of our relation to time and happiness. On the one hand, our lives are undoubtedly made up of present moments that succeed each other. There is no going back. Eventually, my tomorrows come to an end, and I assume that time will no longer exist for me. At that time, there will be no ‘me’ to be happy or unhappy, to experience pain or pleasure. Excluding the miracle of an afterlife, the discussion of happiness involves only the time that lies between birth and death.
How can we look at a human lifetime? One way is to look at it as the ‘times’ of our life. I was young once, and that was a time of my life. Today is another time in my life, and the days succeed one another in a regular fashion. There is a sense in which we never leave the present moment. However, another way to look at the time of one’s life is to imagine it ‘as a whole.’ I say, ‘imagine’, because it is literally impossible to view your life as a whole. To do that you would have to be able to read your own obituary. Yet, we may ask ourselves today if our lives ‘as a whole’ embody the values we hold most dear?
What have these different views of a lifetime to do with happiness? Are we to be happy in the moments of life that succeed each other, or is happiness a quality of life as a whole. Philosophers have divided on this question. The Hedonists believe that the happy life is one in which there is a quantitative preponderance of pleasures over pains in the course of a lifetime. All we actually have are the moments of pleasure or pain in our lives, and these moments have a subjective quality about which we are rarely confused. Therefore, the best plan is to structure one’s life in such a way that a train of pleasures and enjoyments are the norm, and pains come along as infrequent visitors.
From another point of view, hedonism looks too easy and too subjective. Pleasures involve the satisfaction of desires, but are all desires, and the pleasures that accompany their satisfaction, worthy of pursuit? Some lives that contain many pleasures might not be worth living. I love the example of the Roman Emperor, Diocletian, who retired to his country estate and whiled away the rest of his life tearing the wings off flies. Is this human happiness? Who is to judge and by what standards? Values besides pleasure come in here.
Aristotle clearly believes that the pursuit of pleasure, unguided by good judgment, is not sufficient for happiness. It is not that the happy person has anything against pleasure as such, but rather allows some pleasures and avoids others. Wisdom tells us that the pleasures of drink are often followed by hangovers and of food by upset stomachs. Aristotle sensibly advises moderation in all things.
Also, there is the old traditional distinction between the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’ pleasures. The lower pleasures are animal or physical pleasures, more like pleasurable sensations than thoughts. The higher are the pleasures of the mind, of art, theory or the like. We have to learn to appreciate the higher pleasures, and develop our sensitivities beyond physical sensations. So, though I would not call them ‘higher’ or ‘lower’, I do recognize a distinction between those pleasures that primarily involve introspected pleasurable sensations in one’s body, and those that rely more on perception and thought than raw sensations.
If we are to vet the pleasures of the moment so as to attain true happiness, then we must have a standard by which to judge those pleasures that are part of a truly happy life and those that are not. Here, Aristotle also has a position that can help us. For him, the truly happy person lives a long and honorable life, pursuing and attaining a degree of moral and intellectual excellence. We ought to live our lives as advised by our reason, and our reason has care of ourselves as a whole and over a life time. Thus we can judge how well we are doing in living the kind of life that, with a bit of luck, will be happy overall. It is true that the happiness of a philosopher like Aristotle is heavy on the supreme value of Reason in the determination of excellence. As self-directing, the happy person gains a measure of autonomy and control over his or her own thoughts, emotions and feelings. Of course, Aristotle finds the highest happiness in the exercise of theoretical reason, and thus values the joys of learning above the pleasures of the flesh.
We may not agree with Aristotle about the nature of happiness, but he does succeed in showing us how to question the hedonist’s account. How important is the pleasure or pain of the present moment when viewed in the light of a lifetime? The present moment, though it is all we actually live through, seems to be more important when we are young, and not so important when we are older. Many of the favorite things of my youth no longer interest me as much. Other things have taken their place. I hope my judgment is better now than it was then. I can put the present more into the perspective of a lifetime than before. Perhaps this is one reason that Aristotle believed that the young cannot be truly happy, no matter the undoubted pleasures of youth. As he wrote so beautifully, “One swallow does not a summer make.” A happy life overall is about achieving something which, in one’s own opinion, is worthwhile. It is having purposes that give life meaning, with pleasures and good times as just two of the ingredients of a good and happy life.
The idea that happiness can be defined in terms of the satisfaction of desires, or that it is somehow an accumulation over time of episodes of pleasure is clearly misconceived. In the days when I drank I could spend days taking pleasure from the satisfaction of meeting my desire for alcohol. But the short-term pleasure was purchased at the expense of a deeper, structural unhappiness. Sometimes the connection between pleasure and happiness is more perverse than common sense would have it.
I think there is a related and important point to do with the concept of “harm”. Secular moral systems make use of this concept without ever bothering to discharge what the concept means.
It’s a little strange to say that people who claim to be happy are not “truly” happy.
People know when they are happy.
Now what makes me happy has more in common with what makes Aristotle happy than with what makes the crowd celebrating their team’s goal happy, but different things make different people happy. I’m always skeptical about theories which claim that people do not “really” experience what they claim to experience.
As to the relation between happiness and pleasure, if you’ve even been in prolonged physical pain, the pain-relief is not only pleasurable, but produces a happiness, an inner peace that the Dalai Lama would envy.
“People know when they are happy.”
Really? People might ‘know’ whether or not they are experiencing something consistent with their current understanding of the nature of happiness and what it feels like to experience happiness, but that in no way implies that their grasp of the nature of happiness is correct or even more viable than average.
To say that people who claim to be happy are not “truly” happy is very different than saying people do not really experience what they claim to experience. Their claims regarding happy experiences are made within a completely different frame of reference than the Aristotelian one. The English word “happiness” is multivocal and difficult to define let alone recognize in any absolute or comprehensive sense. Perhaps “content” or “satisfied”…or maybe even fulfilled would be more accurate terms to describe the experience to which many casually apply the term happy when speaking of the general situation in life. But, I am skeptical of any theory that is not critical of the ability of the majority of people to accurately gauge and express their “happiness” in anything like the sense that Aristotle would recognize.
Are there any relatively objective criteria that define human flourishing? (Is it possible for anything to be relatively objective?) I don’t think it strange at all to say that many people might be unreasonably settling for the satisfaction and contentment they get from meeting the expectations manufactured by the socio-cultural context they happen to live in instead of striving for the profound intersection of ontology, existentialism, and axiology that Aristotle gestures towards when he examines eudaimonia.
On the other hand, I am not optimistic that there is a metric that can measure the degree to which humans flourish. I’m not sure if the the idea of human flourishing in that sense is even sensical. Is there any way in which it might be coherent with an anthropology predicated on biological evolution?
“People know when they are happy” is trivially true if interpreted as “People know what they mean when they use the word happy in a specific context.” When used in the context above though, it does seem that most people have no idea whether they are happy or not.
Dan: What evidence do you have that most people have no idea whether they are happy or not, unless we accept Aristotle’s definition, which I don’t?
Amos, the easiest way to provide evidence that people don’t know if they are really happy or not would be to compare their experience with the true definition of happiness revealing the discrepancies. My point, though, was that happiness understood in the context of Aristotle and Jeff’s comments belies simple definition and is what makes it so unlikely that many people really know whether or not they’re happy. I enjoyed Jeff’s comments because they recognized the complexity of the question of happiness and utilized the distinction between the immediacy of the present and the cumulative backdrop of the past to explore potential definitions.
It is my impression that very few people appear able to define happiness in the sense that Aristotle explored. The multivocal nature of the English word happiness makes it easy to slip into equivocation when trying to defend any specific connotation, and I believe that lack of precision in the language is itself a weakness that provides evidence of at least the majority of English speakers’ unfamiliarity with the idea. Assuming, though, that we are addressing the same question asked by Aristotle (namely that of defining Eudaimonia), I find it rare to encounter someone who has examined themselves and humanity to the extent that they can offer a reasonable opinion on what it means for humans to flourish.
You seem to suggest that happiness is a phenomenological given that can be recognized intuitively by those who experience it. Though that might be accurate when happiness refers to physiological sensations of pleasure and well-being (I won’t argue with anyone who claims that high serotonin and endorphin levels make them happy in an important and wonderful sense, and this type of happiness is subjective in so far as the events that produce these feelings vary between individuals), the philosophical thread given impetus by Aristotle’s Ethics wrestles with a much broader question that at least initially resists description in terms of pleasure and pain or any other basic feeling.
Many (including Aristotle) attempting to figure out the nature of Eudaimonia recognize that minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure (including pleasure in the form of peacefulness) must be taken into account at least to some extent but don’t alone adequately characterize a flourishing human.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that people need to be able to understand happiness at least to some extent in order to “truly” know they are happy in this sense. I would argue that the better someone can articulate a definition of happiness grounded in a plausible and coherent philosophic perspective (especially a clear anthropology) the more likely they are to have justified belief regarding their own personal happiness.
This also reveals the analog nature of happiness. There are degrees of happiness; there aren’t just happy people and unhappy people but ranges or degrees of happiness that can only be articulated meaningfully with respect to particulars.
Dan: For me, flourishing and happiness are not necessarily the same.
Happiness is phenomenological, while flourishing is fairly objective (criteria for flourishing may vary according to the culture).
What you say is worth discussing. Back later.
For me happiness is a kind of threshold. A level of the mind that is above the general notion of pain. We tend to think of pleasure almost always from the perspective of a mental healthy person. Although we sometimes feel grieve; a person with a depression values and sees life totally different.
This got me thinking and I realized that there is a kind of threshold that simply put gives me (let me say this on personal title) an awareness of being untouchable; of being not negatively affected by the turbulence caused by the outside world; the others. In this state of mind I feel happiness even when this is disturbed by minor setbacks in life. In music we have this ground tone the baseline. And this threshold for me is like that baseline. Above or under it there is the difference.
People all have characters or a biological predisposition and maybe happiness has a lot to do with this predisposition being met to a certain degree. And all this can be on an unconscious level. Like when we grow up we hardly see the difference between ourselves and the outside world. The time we realize that we are mortal in contrast to the time we think life is without an end and a year is endlessly long. But all these things are in fact mental stages. And time is needed to overwrite the memories or the triggers to the events that caused our state of unhappiness.
Jeff,
I was mostly in agreement with you until the end. Throughout my life I lived for the future. I was aware of it and was troubled by doing that, but I convinced myself it was natural. After all, isn’t everyone’s lot to worry about ones future job, children’s schooling and future, etc? It occurred to me recently, I’ve never been so riveted to the present as I am now, and this is the way I read most of the people in my (retirement) community. I’m not even aware of living in the past at all. Actually, your statement about the present moment doesn’t make sense to me.
As for putting the present more into the perspective of a lifetime than before, do you really do that? I don’t see any reason to muck up the present (or past) with anything.
Jeff,
Where you wrote “The present moment . . . seems to be more important when we are young . . .” I said in my comment I didn’t understand it.
I believe I understand the difficulty. Miscommunication. I now believe you were speaking of the hedonistic approach to living in the moment rather than the existential. But I’ll still stand by my answer even though I had the latter understanding in mind. As one grows older pleasures shift from the sexy, showy, flamboyant, glitzy . . . and become easier to satisfy at the moment.
Dan,
Don’t be beguiled by technical slapstick and say that serotonin, dopamine, etc, are responsible for happiness. How would you (and others) know what they are responsible for unless you had already decided the matter beforehand?
We can say that “some people don’t know what happiness is” - but NOT because they do or don’t know what happiness “really” is, but because they have got the public definition wrong. There are no private definitions, after all. Language is public.
John,
Thanks for another trivial truth: Language is public. I agree. I’m probably beguiled in many ways but definitely not in the sense you’re concerned with. I never said that the chemical definition of happiness applies to anything but the narrowest of definitions of the English word. I was hoping to be interpreted as pointing to the need for at least asking the question of what happiness as defined by Aristotle means in a somewhat objective sense. So far, the only ones to reply have emoted irrelevantly as to what they believe happiness is “to them.” Even though language is public, there are many publics. Is there any way that happiness (in the sense of human flourishing) can be defined that applies to all human publics. Has anybody here actually read Aristotle and appreciated his question?
By saying that “langugae is public” I was alluding to curious statements such as “what happiness means to me”.
That’s a trap we can fall into. Happiness, in the first instance is a public word in the public domain. If we didn’t know what it meant for me and you then we wouldn’t know what was meant by statements like “what happiness means to me”.
Serotonin etc are the physical correlates (not relationships) of what we already know to be true. They provide no further information about emotions or even about the correlation. As part of a reductionist program, the appeal to chemicals in the brain can have no epistemological value or exchange.
I agree with Amos: “People know when they are happy.” Happiness I think is a state of mind in which a person is satisfied with the way he is living and so the person knows it. Happiness has nothing to do with one’s material prosperity.
Happiness is being at peace with oneself. It is not being a slave to your past self or the image of your future self.
Dear Jeff,
thanks for an interesting post! I’d say happiness is about meaning; pleasure and flow are welcome, as long as they are appropriate. Yes, it is possible that the younger we are, the more we sacrifice in the name of short term pleasure.
I haven’t seen any situation where a person can be really happy in the present moment at the expense of the future; but saw a number of situation where pleasure comes at the cost of future pain, pain of loss of the pleasure itself plus the conseguences of inappropriate pleasure.
Thanks and pls leep posting on the topic!
frank