In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle stated that the goal of life is happiness (in the original, eudiamonia), but for him the term meant something different than what it does for us. In a helpful essay available on the web here, Ian Johnson describes eudiamonia as having the sense of being successful at life or living well. For Aristotle, living well means to live virtuously, which in turn means to live in accord with the function or purpose of human beings. Everything, whether alive or not, has a particular function, and its worth consists in showing excellence in that function. For Aristotle, the proper function of humans “consists in an activity of the soul in conformity with a rational principle.” (1098a) To show excellence in the function that is proper to humans is to show virtue; thus, Aristotle indicates that “happiness is a certain activity of the soul in conformity with perfect virtue.”
So, in Aristotle’s view, the person who had a sense of well-being but was not virtuous would not be happy. The concept of eudiamonia refers to happiness that grows out of living properly, of living the sort of life that is consistent with our makeup as humans. As such, it is a life of engagement in meaningful activity, the sort of life that is not only pleasant but deeply satisfying.
As noted in my previous post, Daniel Nettles argues that we shouldn’t use the term happiness in this sense because it imports a moral element into the term. But why shouldn’t there be some such element? When people say, “I want to be happy,” do they really just mean that they want to have a reasonably high frequency of positive moods throughout their lives? Don’t they also mean at least in part that they want to be able to evaluate their lives as meaningful and fulfilling? I think they do, and so include eudiamonia as part of my understanding of happiness.
Life Assays 
August 13, 2008 at 7:46 pm
This is great, Bob, thanks for hosting this discussion.
I think you’re right that meaning and fulfillment are part of happiness, and perhaps essential parts. Durkheim, for example, argued that a life lived without compelling purpose would lead to despair (‘anomie’) as we realized that we were slaves to our own whims. And conversely Weber claimed that we are essentially meaning-seeking creatures, so that a life of mere routine would be an “iron cage.” (He contrasted this with the calling.)
It seems like Nettles wants to reserve the word ‘happiness’ for reference only to subjective emotional states? So as soon as there’s something larger at stake, that word no longer applies?
August 13, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Oops, a close-parenthesis got caught in the smiley converter… :p
August 14, 2008 at 1:41 am
Quite a few (but not all) of the psychologists researching happiness do restrict it to just a subjective report of emotion. Sometimes it’s phrased as ‘life satisfaction,’ but even that seems to miss quite a bit of what I think should be included.
Thanks for describing what Durkheim and Weber said about meaning and purpose as they relate to happiness. When Weber talked about the calling, was he referring to the Protestant idea of vocation? I like how Luther and Calvin made vocation key to having a meaningful life.
August 15, 2008 at 1:53 am
Happiness is possible within ecstatic shifts of energy that can be translated by the nature of our experiences. Is happiness an intoxicating hallucination? (It took me a very long time to develop this ideation. And so, I am very very happy.
August 15, 2008 at 12:22 pm
A hallucination is a perception that occurs in the absence of sensory input, whereas an illusion is a distortion of input. So I would say, no, happiness isn’t a hallucination, but there’s a good case to be made that happiness is an illusion.
August 16, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Isn’t it true that a hallucination is a false perception, a delusion is a false belief (so happiness could be a delusion), and an illusion is acting as if something that you wished were true, is true (and so happiness could be an illusion or a self-deception)?
August 17, 2008 at 12:40 am
Right, Weber was talking about Protestant vocation. His argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was that by emphasizing virtuous, self-denying effort in this world in pursuit of a higher calling, Protestants paradoxically built a rigorously rationalized and ‘disenchanted’ modernity in which we are forced to race the rats without calling or meaning – thus, the ‘iron cage’.
Along these lines I like this post by Will Wilkinson on “the theory of optimal disenchantment.” The question is “whether there is an optimal level of realism about the physical world, human nature, and our relationship to the universe” somewhere on the continuum between “an extremely superstitious and mythical conception of the universe and human nature [and] a rigorously empirical conception of the universe and human nature defined by some complete future science.”
This optimal point may or may not be the same for everybody. For example platonists of various kinds, most notably Leo Strauss and his students (among them Allan Bloom of Closing of the American Mind fame) think that only a small elite are intellectually and emotionally capable of handling the truths of disenchanted empiricism, and thus that it is best for the masses to be kept in a state of ignorant bliss.
August 17, 2008 at 1:00 am
Collette, Bob and Lynda, could you say more about what grounds you would use to judge someone else’s subjective emotional states as distortions?
August 17, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Lynda and Carl,
I was using the psychiatric concept of illusion to get to Voltaires comment on illusion and happiness (“Happiness is an illusion, only suffering is real.”) I thought the connection was amusing, but I guess it didn’t come across that way.
In the psychiatric mental status exam, an illusion is a perception that involves a distortion of some stimuli. That’s a little different from your usage, Lynda, though your usage is probably closer to the usual, non-technical understanding of the term. If you’re suggesting that we are habitually have distorted ideas about the world around us and that even our satisfaction or lack thereof with our lives is based on such distortions, I would agree.
As Carl implies by his question, it’s not happiness per se that we can judge as a distortion. However, it’s not hard to demonstrate that the subjective sense of happiness is quite subject to biasing influences. In one study, researchers found that people’s reports of how happy or satisfied they are with their lives are higher when they are asked the question on sunny days as opposed to rainy days. We tend to think of happiness as having a firmer foundation than the local weather conditions, but apparently not.
August 17, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
August 18, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Carl says: Collette, Bob and Lynda, could you say more about what grounds you would use to judge someone else’s subjective emotional states as distortions?
Lynda says: Accuracy, given the concrete evidence of their lives. For example, someone who insists that they are happy (states that they are happy), but all evidence suggests otherwise. Happiness could be a form of self-deception (“smiley-faced Christians” immediately come to mind as an example).
Bob: Emory University just came out with a new and (I think) interesting study on Happiness. I’ll put a copy in your box.
August 19, 2008 at 2:37 am
Bob, I missed that (a)llusion. Nice.
Lynda, fair enough, I’d be inclined to answer the same way. But this supposes that we aren’t also subject to interpretation bias and that we’re better at assessing the contents of others’ lives’ concreteness than they are.
A case that gives me pause is the one where people who grew up really, really poor talk about how happy they were. This can’t be accurate, poverty is concretely bad. Then if they say that they’re miserable now that they’re ‘successful’, that’s also inaccurate, because success is concretely good. Well, it turns out there’s a misplaced concreteness here.
If we see poverty as a concretely abusive situation (or better, if we see it as one that might not be abusive as a matter of legitimate interpretation) it’s not a big step from this to being forced to accept that a masochist could only be truly happy during the beatings.
Maybe the problem is that we want to talk about the nature of the good life and we’re using happiness to stand in for that. A psychotic killer may gut her victims joyfully, but that happiness is not an indication of all good things?
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