Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
"I drink, therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!
Who’s the most important western philosopher of all time? If you ask the experts — and the philosophical website at this link does — the winner seems to be Aristotle.
Aristotle had some amazing and important ideas about happiness that remain popular and influential to this day. His most important and enduring work is called the Nichomachean Ethics. It’s the first thing I dove into in graduate school and I still love it.
One of the most important questions for this substack is the nature of happiness. Conveniently for me, Aristotle addresses happiness immediately in the Nichomachean Ethics. Everything I’m going to talk about comes from the first five chapters: Book I, Chapters I - V. (Quotes are from the Project Gutenberg version, which is free online at this link.)
What is happiness?
Diving straight in.
Aristotle starts by noting the disagreement as to the nature of happiness:
For some say it is some one of those things which are palpable and apparent, as pleasure or wealth or honour; in fact, some one thing, some another; nay, oftentimes the same man gives a different account of it; for when ill, he calls it health; when poor, wealth: and conscious of their own ignorance, men admire those who talk grandly and above their comprehension. Some again held it to be something by itself, other than and beside these many good things, which is in fact to all these the cause of their being good. (Book I, Chapter II)
This, frankly, is genius. Two thousand years later, we still have the same questions about happiness. Is happiness the same thing as pleasure? As wealth? As honor? (These are only examples; other possibilities occur to us with a few seconds’ reflection.) When you’re poor, it seems like you’d be happy if only you had money ... and when you’re sick, you’d obviously be happy if you could just be healthy again. And maybe, we begin to suspect, happiness is something different from any of those: it’s the thing that makes all of the good things in life ... good.
Aristotle thinks it’s uncontroversial to say that happiness is closely related to the good life. What makes up a good life? Well, he says, we can all agree that some things in life are better than other things. It’s good to have friends. It’s good to experience pleasure. It’s good to be healthy, to be rich, to be respected, to be loved. We could go on and make a longer list of these things if we wanted, and we could argue about what belongs on the list and what doesn’t. But we agree there’s a list.
But what is the best thing? Among all the goods, which is the best or the highest good? Aristotle’s argument is pretty simple. The highest good is the thing that we seek for its own sake, and not for the sake of other things.
Why do I go to school? To learn things. And why do I want to learn things? To be educated. And why do I want to be educated? To improve my knowledge, my awareness, my self-awareness ... also, perhaps, to improve my attractiveness to others, my social status, my future income.
Why, in turn, do I want those things? Where is this chain of reasoning taking us? For most of us, including Aristotle, the end of the line of this kind of thinking is always happiness. I want those things because they are a part of a happy life and I want to be happy. Happiness is the highest good of life, or otherwise stated the final good: it’s the thing we seek in everything that we do.
Notice the lack of reversibility. I seek to be healthy in order to be happy. But I do not seek to be happy in order to be healthy. Or take wealth. Most of us are interested in making and saving money, because we think that will bring happiness. But we don’t seek to be happy in order to achieve financial independence. That wouldn’t make any sense.
So happiness is the highest good of life, and it is the final good of being human, and those two statements mean the same thing. Aristotle says: “Happiness is manifestly something final and self-sufficient, being the end of all things which are and may be done.”
Let’s stop for a second and make one brief but important point about linguistics.
Aristotle uses the word eudaimonia, a Greek word that can be translated as “happiness” but also as “flourishing.” Eudaimonia is a wonderful state of mind, yes. It is also an excellent way to be – in fact, the best way to be. The happy person is also a flourishing person, and the flourishing person is also a happy person. These two ideas sort of smoosh into each other in Aristotle.
So, what is happiness? What does it mean to flourish? And then the prior question: How can we even begin to think about such a thing?
Aristotle reasons as follows.
Happiness is the final good of life: we choose everything else for the sake of happiness. We’ve established that much. To understand what happiness is, he then makes an analogy to “different actions and arts.” His examples: medicine is an art. “The art military” is an art. House-building is an art. (This is all in Chapter IV of Book I.) Other classical examples would include farming, horsemanship, the arts, the law, music, etc. More modern examples would be things like automobile design, HTML coding, online gaming, forensic accounting, real estate appraisal, podcasting …. whatever.
All of these things, Aristotle says, have different Chief Goods. He defines the term in the very first sentence of the book:
"Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, “that which all things aim at. (Book I, Chapter I)
For Aristotle, happiness is the Chief Good of life itself.
But parts of life also have their own Chief Goods. For medicine, the Chief Good is healing. Everything doctors do, they do in order to heal their patients. If I cut you open with a knife, and I’m a doctor, then the reason I’m doing that is in order to heal you. (By contrast, if one may put it this way, the Chief Good of murdering is to cause death, and if I’m cutting you open with a knife in the pursuit of that art, it’s a different story.)
In the military, the Chief Good is victory. In house-building, the Chief Good is to build a house. (These are Aristotle’s examples.) Other things that have Chief Goods, according to Aristotle, are the parts of the body. The Chief Good of the eye is to see. The Chief Good of the ears is to hear.
In all of these things, Aristotle says, their Chief Good “resides in their work.” The Chief Good of a statue-carver is the statue, which inherently “resides in the work” done by the statue-carver. The Chief Good of an html coder is a useful and attractive website, which “resides in the work” of the coder. The Chief Good of the hand is to grasp things, which “resides in the work” of the hand. And so on.1
Now comes an important move. Given that happiness is the Chief Good of humans, if we want to know what happiness is, we’re going to need to know what is the work of humans. (Aristotle uses “Man” instead of “humans” in the translation, but let’s skip past the historical-linguistic details behind that choice.) Our Chief Good, as humans, must necessarily reside in the work that we inherently have, simply as humans.
But, you will object (as philosophers have objected through the centuries): people do not, as such, have a single work. We all do different things. I’m a real estate appraiser, not a computer programmer; you’re a translator, not a nanny.
Obviously, a lot turns on the notion of “work” and what it means. Some translations prefer the word “function” to work. One philosopher who has recently defended Aristotle, Christine Korsgaard, argues that “function” in Aristotle does not mean “work” or “purpose” but something akin to “a way of functioning” — how a thing does what it does.2
Aristotle’s argument goes like this:
Are we then to suppose, that while carpenter and cobbler have certain works and courses of action, Man as Man has none, but is left by Nature without a work? or would not one rather hold, that as eye, hand, and foot, and generally each of his members, has manifestly some special work; so too the whole Man, as distinct from all these, has some work of his own? (Book I, Chapter V)
So happiness is our Chief Good. As such, like the Chief Good of anything else, it must reside in our work (or function, or way of functioning).
Aristotle reasons that our work must be something that is specific to us as humans: something that is not shared with other creatures.
What then can this be? not mere life, because that plainly is shared with him even by vegetables, and we want what is peculiar to him. We must separate off then the life of mere nourishment and growth, and next will come the life of sensation: but this again manifestly is common to horses, oxen, and every animal. There remains then a kind of life of the Rational Nature apt to act.... (Book I, Chapter V)
In these few sentences, Aristotle disposes of an absolutely massive set of possible answers to what happiness could be. In my view, he runs straight past the correct answer without really looking at it. But his reasoning is straightforward. Every work, every art has its own Chief Good. Healing is the Chief Good of medicine, but it is not the Chief Good of house-building. Beautiful web pages are the Chief Good of html coding, but they are not the Chief Good of farming. The specifically human good must thus also be something that is specific to us as humans, and not shared by other creatures.
For Aristotle, everything has its own Chief Good, which is not the Chief Good of anything else. Eyes see, they don’t hear. Feet allow us to walk, and hands allow us to hold things, and that difference is critical to understanding the difference between feet and hands.
Given this principle, humans must of course have their own Chief Good, and it must not be the same as the Chief Good of other living things. Plants, animals, and humans all “share the work” of simply being alive: and so the Chief Good of humans must not be that. Animals and humans “share the work” of having sensations: and so the Chief Good of humans must not be that. Only humans are rational, and so the Chief Good of humans (a.k.a. happiness) must have something to do with rationality.
In Korsgaard’s view, Aristotle’s conclusion can be stated as follows. The way human beings (as human) do things is by making rational choices. That’s what separates us from the animals, and so it’s important to the nature of the kind of thing that we are. The Chief Good of humans (a.k.a. happiness) is not merely a result of rational choice, but consists in rational choice itself.
In short, rationality constitutes the most important facet of what it means to be a human being. And, not surprisingly, happiness itself — human flourishing itself — consists in rational choice.
From happiness to goodness (a.k.a. ethics)
I studied ethics in graduate school, and so we were primarily interested in how happiness relates to ethics. In particular, the question is the relationship of happiness to the good life: the life of virtue.
A useful summary of Aristotle’s concept of the good that we learned in graduate school goes something like this:
Happiness (a/k/a human flourishing) consists of the activity of the rational aspect of the soul in accordance with virtue — and if there are multiple virtues, then in accordance with the highest virtue.
Happiness turns out to be an activity of the rational soul, conducted in accordance with virtue or excellence, or, in what comes to the same thing, in rational activity executed excellently
and
Thus when he says that happiness consists in an activity in ‘accordance with virtue’ (kat’ aretên; EN 1098a18), Aristotle means that it is a kind of excellent activity, and not merely morally virtuous activity.
The suggestion that only excellently executed or virtuously performed rational activity constitutes human happiness provides the impetus for Aristotle’s virtue ethics. Strikingly, first, he insists that the good life is a life of activity; no state suffices, since we are commended and praised for living good lives, and we are rightly commended or praised only for things we (do) (EN 1105b20–1106a13)
When I was in grad school, I was extremely interested in trying to work out the relationship between the idea of happiness (or flourishing) and the question of what it means to live your life well and virtuously. It’s kind of a cool idea, and I wanted it to be true. I wanted happiness to be the sort of thing you could pursue, that you could come to be excellent at, and that you would be a better person as you became better at it. Happiness as the end of a road, and virtue as the same end of the same road but seen from a different angle. (Be happy or be amazing? Why not both?)
What didn’t strike me at the time, at all, is how important (and questionable) it is to claim that happiness is all about rationality — that human happiness and thinking are closely related. Of course, I was in grad school, pursuing a Ph.D. and hoping to get an academic job, so maybe that makes sense. But it’s weird to me now that I never really questioned that aspect of Aristotle’s thesis.
Quick summary of Aristotle on happiness
Happiness is the Chief Good of our lives: it’s the thing we seek, explicitly or implicitly, in everything that we do throughout our lives.
Different types of creatures have different Chief Goods (and hence, to the extent that they can be said to be happy, their happinesses are fundamentally different from each other.)
In humans, happiness is closely related to rationality, precisely because rationality is the quality that separates humans from all other creatures. The highest happiness is all about living one’s best life, a.k.a. a virtuous life, which in turn consists precisely in the proper exercise of one’s rational faculties.
My thesis is that Aristotle’s account of happiness is terrible and wrong!
Have I presented this entire description of the nature of happiness, only with the intention of knocking it down? Indeed I have.
It’s all awful. It’s all wrong. It all needs to be thrown out.
Aristotelian happiness is never directly pursued … and never arrives
For Aristotle, everything that we do, our whole lives long, is done in pursuit of happiness. Literally every activity! This would seem to make happiness the most important thing in the world.
There’s a useful saying, though: if everything is x, then nothing is x.
“If everything is important, then nothing is.” ― Patrick M. Lencioni
If everything is a “national security” priority, nothing will be
Similarly, I would say that if everything is about happiness, then nothing is about happiness.
Aristotle’s account turns happiness into the only thing we do not ever pursue directly! It’s something we are encouraged to take for granted, something that naturally results from our other pursuits.
Most of us are Aristotelian in this respect, even today. We do everything that we do, at least in our imaginations, for the sake of happiness. Happiness is something to work for, to achieve: it’s something we hope to see tomorrow, or a year from now, or twenty years from now. We go to school to get a good job, we get a good job to have money, we get money so we can quit working so much, and maybe one day we’ll retire and then we’ll be happy.
A different path to happiness — but the same basic pattern — was recommended at Jane Austen’s time. As a young woman of means, you are urged to seek accomplishments. You learn to sew, to play the piano, to read and discuss poetry, to paint, and so on. Why do you do all of these things? In order to attract a man — the right sort of man, an intelligent, well-bred, rich man who appreciates such things. You attract him with your accomplishments, you marry him, and then … you’re happy.
A similar pattern was in place during the early, pre-feminist 20th century. The enticements necessary to land a man were different, but for many women the high point of their life was supposed to be their wedding day. (The day a child was born could of course be a secondary “happiest day of my life.”)
All of these patterns are broadly Aristotelian. We pick some future date, defined by some outcome, and we decide that we will be happy then. We spend out life doing other sorts of things, things that are inherently not very happy, on the theory that they will bring us happiness on that future date.
Then when that future date arrives, we’re shocked to find that we are not actually happy!
What went wrong? Everything!! The whole account is wrong!! Throw it all out!
You spend your whole life patiently waiting for happiness — expecting that all the sacrifices you make, all the work you do, will one day result in happiness. But it never, ever does.
If you’re not happy today, why do you think you’re going to be happy tomorrow? Because Aristotle promised? Society promised?
It’s all lies. Seriously. Throw it out.
Humans, animals, rationality, happiness
Aristotle claims that human happiness is a fundamentally different sort of thing from human happiness. This belief was very common at his time. In the ancient world, it was believed that humans are not at all the same sorts of things that animals are. This is why, if you’ll recall, Aristotle dismissed the possibility that happiness could be comprised of sensation. Sensation can be the highest good for animals, but never for us.
But now it’s the 21st century! We have science. We can study evolution. We know that humans are literally animals. We are mammals! We are primates! We know this.
And yet, despite the fact that we now know that we are literally animals, we still seem to believe that we have nothing to learn from animals about happiness.
In my view, human happiness and the happiness of at least most other mammals are precisely the same thing. Non-human mammals have emotions that are created by limbic systems that are very similar to those in humans.
We can be happy (or, more often, unhappy) for reasons that animals cannot. But the happiness or unhappiness itself is the same emotion, the same reality.
We are taught that our rationality, our ability to think, makes our happiness special, or different, or something. But our rationality is separate from our happiness. The two things are in completely different parts of the brain, which evolved at different times! The two aspects of the brain — of the self — have very little to do with each other.
Your dog can be happy. Your cat can be happy. Their happiness is, at bottom, the same sort of thing as your happiness.
Your dog and your cat are not very good at thinking. They spend very little of their time actively thinking about things. They find happiness without it. You and I can do the same.
More than that: your dog and you cat have never once in their lives found happiness by thinking harder. I’m pretty sure that you and I haven’t either.
Thinking super hard about my problems can feel like a path to happiness. So can repeatedly pounding myself on the head with a block of wood. It feels so good when I stop!
Thinking is not the path to happiness
The happiest people are not the people who think the most. Happiness does not result from thinking.
The prescriptions to help with serious unhappiness have nothing to do with the mind. As I wrote just the other day,
People who are extremely unhappy, suffering from anxiety or depression: what do therapists tell them to do? Go for a walk. Do some yoga. Breathe and pay attention to the breath. Go to the gym and really exhaust yourself for a while. Find someone you love and give them a hug.
When you realize “I’m unhappy,” and then your next thought it, “I need to think about this problem for a while” or “the real problem is that I’m not thinking right” or anything like that … just stop! Your unhappiness has nothing to do with your thoughts. It’s not rational! Feel your feelings instead. Happiness is a feeling. If you want to experience it, pay attention to your feelings.
What is real happiness?
I think the nature of real happiness can be summarized in this little comic. I’m reproducing the important panel below, just for the people who refuse to click through and read the whole thing.
This is from SMBC comics, which I read every day (highly recommended). The artist is Zach Weinersmith, and I’m going to call him Zach even though we’ve never met. Zach has red hair, and his red-haired characters are very often stand-ins for himself. (In the very early comics, it’s not sure whether or not Zach knows this about his comics, but later he starts to comment on the pattern.)
So this seeker stands for Zach, at least to a degree. But look at the man’s posture, and the pettiness of his phrasing: “I want it now.” There’s self-mockery here: a suggestion that only an infant or a moron or a self-centered asshole could want this. (The final panel of the comic, where our redhead agrees that alcoholism is the closest he’s going to get to happiness: that’s a different kind of self-mockery.)
And yet he does want it. We all do. We’re just scared to admit it.
I want to unironically endorse the sentiment in this comic panel. This is what we mean by happiness. A perpetual sensation of contentedness.
Happiness would be a situation in which, no matter what we’re doing, we are experiencing calm/acceptable/OK sensations, right now — all the right nows, all the time.
We don’t demand, or even want, a constant super-duper “wheeee” state of happiness. Just contentedness.
And yes, we’re willing to make an exception for tragedies great and small. I don’t expect, or even want, to be happy on the day that my father dies (or even my cat). I don’t expect to be happy if my village is on fire, or I’m being tortured, or whatever. In that kind of situation I’m going to be unhappy, and I expect to be unhappy, and that’s fine and appropriate.
But if nothing awful is going on right now, I should be contented right now. Why not? Anything less is a disappointment. And that disappointment, experienced every day, is just one more form of unhappiness.
Beddhism in a nutshell (today’s version)
Rationality is great. Thinking is super important. Without these things we are not fully human. I agree with Aristotle on all of this.
But thinking/rationality is, at best, orthogonal to happiness. It is, at best, a very minor help on the road to healing mental illness.
Happiness is like anything else. It’s a part of life, not all of life. You’re not going to find it if you don’t seek it out.
Real happiness is feeling good (or at least basically OK) about almost everything, almost all the time. It is a feeling (or set of feelings) in the body.
Mental illness, a.k.a. extreme unhappiness, is a state in which you feel terrible about almost everything, almost all the time. Different people have a variety of explanations for that state — what it means, how you arrived at it, what you should do to get out of it. Those explanations may be more or less correct. But the fundamental reality of mental illness is that you feel bad! It’s in your body, not your mind.
Ordinary unhappiness is a state of feeling worse than it seems like you should, almost all the time. A state of unexplained tension, unexplained sadness, unexplained worry. Inexplicable levels of anger or shame or guilt or embarrassment. (Why are these things here, now, all the time? Because we’re unhappy. Because we haven’t found happiness. Because we haven’t looked.)
Happiness, unhappiness, and mental illness: all of these are located in your feelings, in your sensations. Precisely in that aspect of the self that Aristotle refused to look at.
How do you find real happiness? How do you cure your mental illness? How do you improve the nature of the sensations in your body?
For myself, I can only do the one path. Feel your feelings. Pay attention to the sensations in your body.
Buddhists appear to have found another path! The details are similar to beddhism but also importantly different. But the end of the Buddhist path appears to be the same happiness: a sense of calm, peace, contentment, experienced in the body, more or less all the time.
The Buddhist path has thousands of years more history, millions of times more adherents, and approximately a bazillion times more credibility than beddhism. I highly recommend it, if you can do it. For me, I’m stuck with beddhism. So far so good.
Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think … if you feel like it.
I’m only now realizing that the phrase “mode of being” in my last post is pretty much the same thing as what Aristotle means by “resides in the work.”
Korsgaard, Christine M. 2008. Aristotle's function argument. The Constitution of Agency, 129-150. Oxford: Oxford University Press