A Practical Guide to Happiness A Practical Guide to Happiness E-Book

Will Buckingham

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 197

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Apply the wisdom of philosophers to become a happier person.  What is happiness? What makes you happy?Is there more to life than happiness? Learn to cultivate your taste for pleasure, free yourself from the various disturbances of life, and overcome irrational expectations that cause distress. Go with the flow and rediscover the joy of existence. Filled with exercises, tips and case studies, this Practical Guide will enable you to see happiness in a new light, with the help of the world's greatest minds

Leseprobe

First published in the UK in 2012

by Icon Books Ltd,

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ISBN: 978-184831-363-7 (ePub format)

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Text copyright © 2012 Will Buckingham

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Avenir by Marie Doherty

About the author

Will Buckingham is a philosopher and novelist. He is the author of the novel Cargo Fever, and the philo­sophy book Finding Our Sea-Legs. He has a PhD in philosophy­ from Staffordshire University. He has taught both philosophy and creative writing, and is currently senior lecturer in the School of Humanities at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Contents

Title page

Copyright

About the author

Introduction: the secret of happiness?

Part I: What is Happiness?

1. The philosophy of happiness

2. What we talk about when we talk about happiness

3. A science of happiness?

4. Calculating happiness

5. Happiness and ethics

Part II: What Makes Us Happy?

6. Some approaches to happiness

7. Aristotle: excellence, flourishing and virtue

8. Epicurus: a small pot of cheese

9. Diogenes the Cynic: the life of a dog

10. Stoicism: mastering our judgements

11. Thomas Aquinas: that old time religion

12. Buddhism: getting away from suffering

13. Traditions of meditation

14. Śāntideva: happiness and compassion

15. Confucius: ritual

16. Zhuangzi: a philosopher of uselessness

17. Mencius: a different kind of happiness

Part III: Beyond Happiness

18. More to life?

19. Cutting happiness down to size

20. Cockaigne

Further reading

Introduction: the secret of happiness?

In brief

We might think that we want to be happy, or that we want to discover the secret of a happy life, but what do we mean when we say this? In this introductory chapter, we will look at three fundamental questions about happiness. Firstly, ‘What is happiness?’; secondly, ‘What makes us happy?’; and finally, ‘Is there more to life than happiness?’

A secret of happiness?

Today, happiness is a booming industry. Where once psychologists were concerned with cataloguing mental illnesses and all the things that might go wrong with our minds, today they can often be found talking about things like character strengths, virtues and how we might lead the good life. Where economists once concerned themselves only with their balance sheets, these days they write about happiness as an indicator of the state of the nation. Even politicians are getting in on the act, proclaiming that they’re in the business not only of building wealthy nations, but also of building happy nations. And if you go to your local bookshop, you’ll find countless books promising you that, if you only part with your hard-earned cash, nestling within those pages you’ll find the secret of happiness itself.

Introducing Happiness is not one of those books. This isn’t because I know the secret of happiness but out of mean-spiritedness would rather keep it to myself. It’s because there’s something a bit suspect in the idea that there’s any such thing as the secret of happiness. Instead this is a book about what happiness might be, about why it matters to us, about the problems with happiness, and about how some of the best philosophical minds of the past have not only asked questions about what happiness is, but also provided various kinds of tools and advice to help us live happier lives.

The first thing that this book aims to do, then, is to ask some tricky (but interesting) questions about the nature of happiness. When we start to look more closely at happiness, we’ll find that it’s a much more complicated business than we might have first thought. Even asking an apparently simple question like ‘Am I happy now?’ can start to tie us up in all kinds of knots and puzzles.

Think of the last time you felt happy (or, if you’re happy now, pay attention to this happiness­). Now ask yourself some of the questions below:

What kind of thing is happiness? Is it a physical feeling, a state of mind, or an emotion? Is it all of these things? Or is it something different? How, in other words, do you know that you’re happy?Can you be both happy and unhappy at the same time? Can you be happy but dissatisfied?Are you always aware of how happy you are? Does it make sense, for example, to say, ‘I was happy, but I didn’t know it’?

If you ask these questions with an inquiring mind, and ask them repeatedly, you might start to suspect that it’s not always very clear what we mean by ‘happy’. And the more you think about them, the more the questions around happiness seem to multiply.

However, this book isn’t just about theoretical questions. Happiness matters to us not just in theory but also in practice;and so this book aims to find practical solutions to some of the puzzles around the different ideas of happiness.

You can do the practical exercises in this book on your own; but it might be more interesting, and more fun, to find a friend so that you can explore some of these exercises together, and so you can discuss the questions raised along the way.

Happiness clearly matters to us, and the very fact that you picked up this book suggests that you have not only a theoretical interest in happiness, but also what philosophers sometimes call an existential interest in happiness. In other words, you want to know about happiness because happiness is something that you aspire to, something that matters not just in the abstract, but for your very existence.

Three questions

When it comes to philosophical approaches to happiness, among the many questions that we might ask, there are perhaps three that stand out. The first, and the most obvious, has already been hinted at: What is happiness? Is happiness a matter of being satisfied with our life? Is it a matter of pleasure? Or is it about having a life that’s fulfilling? A little thought shows that these things don’t always coincide. I might recognize, for example, that my life isn’t particularly fulfilling at the moment, but I might be satisfied with it nevertheless. Or I might have a life filled with pleasure, but feel strangely dissatisfied. Or else I might think that pleasure really isn’t that important, but care a great deal about fulfilment.

To see how complicated the question of happiness is, you only have to think about the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) who, agonizing over his decision whether to marry or not, decided that in the long run he would be ‘happier in his unhappiness’ if he didn’t marry. So he didn’t. Kierkegaard is associated in particular with the philosophical movement known as ‘existentialism’, and his books are well known for their strangeness and their extraordinary literary style.

Recent research, incidentally, suggests that Kierkegaard’s decision may not have been the best gamble, and that the married tend to be happier, at least in a limited sense, than the never-married. However, before you use this as a reason to propose, the divorced fare rather worse than the never-married: you have been warned.

Leaving aside the issue of marital advice, here I want to focus on the apparent contradiction in the idea that you could be happy in your unhappiness. What does this mean? Are happiness and unhappiness mutually exclusive? Is Kierkegaard happy in one sense and unhappy in another? Is this a contradiction in terms? And, had Kierkegaard made the opposite decision, might he have gone on to be unhappy in his happiness?

The most important lesson we can draw from this, of course, is that it’s best, if at all possible, not to become romantically involved with philosophers. But another lesson is that happiness is by no means straightforward, and that perhaps the word ‘happiness’ (not to mention ‘joy’, ‘pleasure’, ‘cheerfulness’, ‘good cheer’ and so on) may mean all kinds of things in all kinds of different contexts.

This question about what happiness actually is, is one that has preoccupied philosophers for centuries, and they are still arguing over how best to define it. Even if we can’t resolve these arguments, if we’re going to explore happiness at all, it will be useful to be aware of some of the philosophical problems that have been raised down the ages. So the first section of this book, called ‘What is Happiness?’, will look at some of the theoretical problems that we encounter when it comes to thinking about happiness. Along the way, I will be asking you to engage in various thought-experiments to help the philosophy along: these don’t require you to leave the comfort of your armchair, but nevertheless demand that you think through the issues for yourself.

The second question that we need to ask about happiness arises out of the first, and that is: What makes us happy? The way we go about answering this question will depend, to some extent, on the way that we choose to answer the first question. It was George Bernard Shaw who famously said that you should not do to others as you would wish to be done to – the famous ‘golden rule’ of moral philosophy – because they might have other tastes. Perhaps your idea of fun is mortifying the flesh in a hillside hut, sleeping on a bed of nails and drinking only thin gruel; or perhaps you think that the ultimate happiness involves a couch, several bunches of grapes, a quantity of wine, and a gaggle of willing acolytes to tend to your every bodily need. One of the challenges of thinking and talking philosophically about happiness is that of being able to account for this human variation. But as much as we’re different and unique, we’re all in many ways the same; so despite Shaw’s warnings, we might expect that, in general at least, there are some broad principles that we can discover about happiness and how it might occur.

To explore happiness as fully as possible, we need to think not only about how different we are from each other, but also about how much we share and how we’re often alike.

When it comes to these broad principles, however, I don’t want you to take my word for it. After all, it’s your life and your happiness, and if you really want to explore these questions, you’ll need to do it yourself. So the second part of this book is called ‘What Makes Us Happy?’ and is more directly practical than the first part. Think of the second part as a series of practical experiments in happiness, drawn from the philosophers of the past. These experiments may sometimes require you to get up out of your philosophical armchair and actually try things out. In this part of the book, I will be drawing on philosophical and practical approaches to happiness from the pleasure-loving Epicurean philosophers to the strange Chinese vagabond Zhuangzi, from practices of Buddhist meditation to the practical wisdom of Aristotle. Being experiments, not all of these approaches may work. It’s up to you to see what works and what doesn’t. Nevertheless, some kind of first-person experience is essential if you want to really get to grips with the questions in this book.

Many of the practical approaches we will explore here represent not only different approaches to happiness, but also different ideas of what happiness might be and what the ‘good life’ might look like.

In the third part of the book, called ‘Beyond Happiness’, I will be looking at a final question: Is there more to life than happiness? After all, it’s perfectly possible to imagine an idea of the ‘good life’ that’s also an unhappy life. Perhaps we might think that a good life is a life in which we sacrifice happiness in this life in favour of a hoped-for life to come. Or we might think that happiness makes us shallow and that if we brood deeply on life, then we’ll realize that we are not and cannot be happy; and that this truth is more important than superficial happiness. Or we might suspect that there are good and noble reasons for us to cultivate not happiness but unhappiness: after all, there are many things that take place in the world that we perhaps should not put up with, and putting happiness above all other values might have all kinds of unwelcome results. So in this third part I hope to raise a number of questions about wider implications of the ways that we think about happiness.

At the end of the book I will make some suggestions for further reading, so that you can explore some of the ideas raised here in more depth. There’s a huge and growing body of scholarship on happiness in a wide variety of disciplines, from social science to philosophy, and from psychology to politics. Unfortunately, much of this research is buried in obscure and often expensive journals. Fortunately, there’s also a good quantity of thoughtful material written for a more general audience and, as a result, much more easily accessible. I will limit my recommendations to those things that should be easy to track down.

Not a single thing

One thing I will be arguing again and again in this book is that happiness may not turn out to be a single thing, and that there are various kinds of things that we call ‘happiness’, not all of them mutually compatible. I will also be making the case that happiness is not the only thing that we might hope for or aspire to. Sometimes it’s said that there’s only one mountain but many roads that lead to the top. However, when it comes to giving shape to our lives, there may be a great many mountains, and the various roads we might tread may lead to very different destinations. Many philosophical approaches to happiness are tied in, either explicitly or implicitly, with the question of what it is that makes a ‘good life’, but there’s no reason to believe that there’s only one form of the good life.

Ideas of happiness are almost always tangled up with ideas about what it is that makes a ‘good life’.

This is, when it comes down to it, why claims to have found the secret of happiness are suspect; and it’s also why you shouldn’t expect to find that the ideas in this book all fit together neatly into a whole. But what you should find is that, through trying out the various approaches and experiments, you’re able to ask some interesting questions about what it means to lead a good and happy life. By the end of this book, you may of course be happier. I hope, at least, that you will not be unhappier. But what I hope most of all is this: that you will have a deeper appreciation and understanding of what it means for us to talk about happiness; that you will have a degree of greater scepticism when it comes to those who make claims that they have ‘discovered’ the secret of happiness; and that you will have a better appreciation of some of the mountainous territory that is the philosophy (and science, and psychology, and economics) of happiness, and how it might be possible to find your way through this territory, so that you’re better able to decide where it is that you want to take yourself.

Part I

What is Happiness?

1. The philosophy of happiness

In brief

In the popular imagination, philosophers aren’t known to be particularly cheerful individuals. In this chapter we’ll explore the long bias in Western philosophy towards gloom, and we’ll also ask why a philosophical approach to happiness might nevertheless be useful.

Gloomy philosophers

Several years ago I was talking to a philosopher friend. ‘Surely,’ I said in the midst of our conversation, ‘it’s not philosophically more correct to wake up with a heavy heart than it is to wake up full of joy.’ My friend paused. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said, ‘but if you want to argue that, you will have most of the Western philosophical tradition against you.’

This isn’t entirely true. As we shall see later, there are some philosophers in the West who have escaped this habit of gloom. Nevertheless, it remains the case that Western philosophy seems to have about it a rather gloomy cast of mind. Nobody goes to sit in on a philosophy class because they think it might cheer them up. There’s also a broader tendency to equate depth and profundity with gloom, and any kind of optimism or good cheer with shallowness. This seems to me like a mistake. There is such a thing as shallow gloominess, and there is perhaps also such a thing as profound good cheer. Or, to put things differently, there’s no clear necessary connection between the emotional tone of one’s thinking and its depth.

Are sadness and gloom necessarily more profound than happiness? Can you think of any things (books or films, for example) that might support this idea? Can you think of any that are both cheerful and profound?

Nevertheless, Western philosophy has tended, for better or worse, to err on the side of gloom. As the philosopher Hegel once said, happiness is simply not the kind of thing that great philosophical minds are given to. In fact, Hegel claimed that although one can survey the history of the world from the point of view of happiness, if one does so, then the pages are blank. There is no history of happiness: history itself is a tale of misery and woe and struggle.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) is one of the best-known German philosophers. He’s important for his understanding of the relationship between philosophy and history, and his philosophy was a great influence on that of Karl Marx. He wasn’t known to be particularly cheerful.

So if we’re going to ask about the philosophy of happiness, we need first to ask whether this philosophical bias may have something in it. Perhaps it is more philosophically correct to steer clear of happiness. And of all the philosophers in the West, the one who is perhaps most famed for his pessimistic outlook, and who best exemplifies this tendency to equate gloom with philosophical depth, is the German philosopher Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Hegel.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) taught, like Hegel, at the University of Berlin. Notoriously, he scheduled his lectures at the same time as those of Hegel, but was furious to find that nobody turned up to his own lectures. Schopenhauer is most famous as a philosopher of pessimism.

It was Schopenhauer who wrote that ‘Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated or recognized as an illusion. The grounds for this lie deep in the very nature of things.’ This is a philosophical claim: there are reasons for pessimism, he says, that are rooted in the very nature of things. If we think that we’re happy, in other words, then we’re simply not thinking hard enough. We’re deluded, subject to an illusion. So what reasons does Schopenhauer give to be cheerless?

Reasons to be cheerless

There are essentially two reasons that Schopenhauer gives for his claim that pessimism is the way to go. The first draws on our experience. ‘If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering,’ he writes, ‘then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.’ For Schopenhauer, we treat every misfortune that befalls us as an exception; but when we look more broadly, we see that misfortune itself is the general rule, even if it comes in many different guises. Pain ultimately outweighs pleasure. Schopenhauer encourages us to try a short thought-experiment to put this claim to the test. The experiment goes something like this:

Imagine a scene from a wildlife documentary in which a lion is eating an antelope. Try to think your way into the scene to imagine the lion’s pleasure and the antelope’s suffering, and ask yourself:

Does the suffering of the antelope outweigh the pleasure of the lion?Does this mean that suffering in general outweighs pleasure in general? If so, why? If not, why not?

Now try to find some problems in Schopenhauer’s argument by thinking of any situations in which pleasure or happiness manage to outweigh even extreme pain. For example, you might think of somebody who is in considerable pain from an illness, but who claims nevertheless to be happy. Do these act as good arguments against Schopenhauer or not?

For Schopenhauer, if we contemplate the lion and the antelope, we should come to the conclusion that it’s absurd to set our sights on happiness, because happiness doesn’t go very far at all, while suffering opens up before us like an abyss. We should stop looking for happiness, and set our sights on making the best of the bad job that is living in a world full of suffering.

Philosophical pessimismis the idea that there are good reasons to believe that the world is made in such a way that suffering is the general rule.

The second reason Schopenhauer gives for his pessimism is philosophically deeper. Without getting caught up in too many technicalities, we can say that Schopenhauer, like the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and like philosophers in the West ever since the time of ancient Greece, was preoccupied with the gulf between how things actually are, and how they appear to our perceptions.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) lived in Königsberg, now known as Kaliningrad. His work explored not just what we can know about the world, but also the limits of our knowledge. He’s considered among the greatest philosophers in all of the European tradition.

For Schopenhauer, nature consists of an ‘outer’ aspect of physical causes and surfaces and also an ‘inner’ dynamic that he calls the ‘Will’. You could see the Will in Schopenhauer’s thought as a surging, impersonal force that runs through everything, fashioning us and our desires. How do we know there is such a thing? Because, Schopenhauer says, we have inner, first-person experience of this Will. While we see all other things in terms of their appearances, we experience ourselves from the inside as not just a bundle of appearances but an existence that struggles and surges and clings to survival. And if we have such an inner dynamic, we can conclude that it’s not just us