Sugar Blossom

The Science of Happiness

The word “happy” is familiar. It isn’t especially philosophical. It
expresses a concept, happiness, that we take ourselves to understand
at least to some degree. “Are you happy?,” one woman asked
another in a coffee house not long ago. “Well . . . ,” the second
began, “Well, yes, but certain things bother me”; then she was
unfortunately interrupted and didn’t finish, and when she spoke
again it was about something else.

Early in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle cites a saying of the
Athenian statesman Solon: “Call no one happy until he’s dead.”
Aristotle takes himself to be able to deploy the concept. He elaborates
Solon’s point. The fortunes of a person’s descendants affect
his happiness, Aristotle says, at any rate for some time: “[it would]
be odd if the fortunes of the descendants did not for some time
have some effect on the happiness of their ancestors” (1100a29-31;
emphasis in the original).

Many people nowadays would probably hesitate to say that your
grandchildren’s fortunes can affect your happiness or your wellbeing,
but most people don’t object to saying that what happens to
your grandchildren can affect your interests.

The two ideas just mentioned - the women’s and Aristotle’s -
don’t fit with each other quite smoothly. But on the other hand they
don’t belong to two completely different ways of thinking either.
It would be clearly wrong, I think, to say that in them the word
“happy” expresses two different concepts.

To be sure, the first woman would have been pretty shocked if
the other had replied, “Your question’s a bit premature, don’t
you think? Come back and check some time after I’ve been dead
for a while, and see how my grandchildren are doing.” On the
other hand, the women and Solon wouldn’t have any trouble
understanding each other’s remarks, or the standpoint from which
they’re made.

Moreover the respective points of the two remarks are plainly
connected with each other. It seems obvious that the woman’s
question about the present, “Are you happy now?,” has something
important to do with what Solon recommended asking about
someone after his life is over: “Was he happy?” On the other hand
it’s hard to say just what the connection is.

Moreover the concept clearly seems to be important. Aristotle
says that happiness is “the human good,” and that everyone aims
at it for its own sake and for its own sake alone (NE I.7). The role
of the concept didn’t change much between Aristotle’s time and
Freud’s. Speaking, in Civilization and its Discontents, of “what men
themselves show . . . to be the purpose and intention of their lives”,

Freud said,
What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to
this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to
become happy and to remain so. (2005: 25)

That’s as plausible a thing to say (though some will disagree with it)
now as it was then.