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Monday, March 04, 2019

Happiness as the stream of life


Money makes you happy by having it, not by trying to have it. We have seen this last week. However, what is happiness? Many authors have tried to answer this question, but for a basic understanding one falls back on Aristotle, as so often.
Following others, happiness is the highest good in life, so Aristotle. His reasoning is simple. We choose happiness as a goal only for itself and never for reaching another goal. It’s true that there are also other goals that are often set for itself, like honour, enjoyment or intellect, but even if we don’t choose them in order to become happy, we always assume that attaining these other goals goes together with being happy. Therefore we can say that happiness is the highest goal in life. However, saying so looks like a platitude, if we don’t define what happiness is. For otherwise we run the risk that we say, for instance, that I am not happy because I am depressed and I am depressed, because I don’t feel happy. Therefore we must define happiness that way that it can be taken independently of other feelings. Aristotle gives such a definition. Nonetheless, I’ll not quote it here. Instead I’ll give my interpretation of Aristotle’s approach of the idea of happiness, in order to avoid becoming entangled in a discussion what Aristotle actually means.
If we look at the example just given about the vicious relationship between being depressed and being happy, we see that this relationship is static: the state of being happy is related to another state such as being depressed in my case. It’s not the way Aristotle looks at the idea of happiness. Although he gives the impression that happiness can be seen as a state (especially when he discusses the question, whether or not we can judge whether a person was happy only after his or her death), in fact Aristotle’s approach is dynamic: For him happiness is in the activity of the soul that makes that this soul functions in an optimal way in view of its goals. It’s true that Aristotle adds yet the phrase “in a full human life”, and just this makes Aristotle’s dynamism again static in the end. But I think that I as a living person can ignore this phrase, since I cannot judge my whole life: At the moment that I judge, I have at least yet a while to go, and who knows what will happen yet that might completely reverse my judgment, as Montaigne says somewhere? The final judgment is up to others. I can judge only as I live right now and while I am still alive, giving my judgment from my own first person point of view. Seen that way, a person’s happiness is in his or her doing, in the acting, not in the achievements.
How then about the goals? Aren’t they important? Yes, as everybody knows they are. We set goals and once we have achieved them, we feel happy, even happier than before. But as everybody knows as well, soon this extra happiness will fade away. Happiness lasts three months as psychological investigations show. And then? Then we set new goals and we begin to focus on these new goals. And that’s the function of goals: they structure a person’s life. They make that a person’s life can stream, so to speak, and it’s just this streaming that makes us happy. How then about the money you have? Don’t keep it in your pocket but spend it, on experiences, for example. It will make you even happier than you are.

Source
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 4-12

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