What was Aristotle's secret of happiness?

Aristotle held that being happy is the same as living well and doing well – it involves fulfillment of potentials inherent in each individual human. From this perspective, happiness is activity in conformity with virtue. It is acquired through practice in much the same way as one might learn an art or craft. Aristotle’s view rests on the view that emotions are not inherently good or bad. Virtue lies in avoiding excess or deficiency:

“For example, one can be frightened or bold, feel desire or anger or pity, and experience pleasure and pain in general, either too much or too little, and in both cases wrongly; whereas to feel these feelings at the right time, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right purpose and in the right manner, is to feel the best amount of them, which is the mean amount - and the best amount is of course the mark of virtue. And similarly, there can be excess, deficiency, and the due mean in actions. Now feelings and actions are the objects with which virtue is concerned; and in feelings and actions excess and deficiency are errors, while the mean amount is praised, and constitutes success; and to be praised and to be successful are both marks of virtue.” Nicomachean EthicsBook 2.

Aristotle acknowledged “happiness does seem to require the addition of external prosperity”, but he regarded notions that happiness can be identified with wealth, pleasure, health, honour or good fortune as superficial.

Aristotle’s view also differs from the modern view of happiness as a state of contentment, as satisfaction with life, or as the absence of symptoms of depression.

Many psychologists maintain that since Aristotle’s teachings on happiness were about ethics - how people should live their lives – they have little relevance to the question of what makes people happy. Subjective well-being research has been dominated by the view that happiness is about the balance between pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Even the use of life satisfaction, which has some cognitive content, has been grounded largely in utilitarian philosophy. More recently, some researchers have sought to introduce eudaimonic considerations by asking respondents about feelings of autonomy and competence, the quality of personal relationships and whether they feel that their lives are meaningful.

Aristotle would not have accepted a distinction between living a virtuous life and living a pleasant life. He maintained: “happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of all things”. Similar views have been expressed by some modern philosophers. For example, Neera Badhwar writes: “the integration of emotional dispositions with intellectual (especially deliberative dispositions), which is required by virtue, makes virtue highly conducive to happiness, since a common source of unhappiness is conflict between our emotions and our evaluations” (Well-being, Happiness in a worthwhile life, p 152).

Can Aristotle’s view about the desirability of minimising the excess or deficiency of emotions be tested empirically? Some conditions need to be met before empirical testing is possible. First, we need a measure of human flourishing. In the absence of anything better, we might need to be prepared to accept some standard measures of life satisfaction, for example, as an indicator of human flourishing. Second, we need to be able to accept that the individual is an appropriate judge of “right feelings”, so that any excess or deficiency of emotion can be measured as the difference between right feelings and actual feelings. I’m not sure whether Aristotle would have accepted the second condition, but I don’t have a problem with it.

Some such testing has been reported in a recent article entitled ‘The Secret to Happiness: Feeling Good or Feeling Right?’  by Maya Tamir, Shalom H. Schwartz, Shige Oishi, and Min Y. Kim. The study was based on a cross-cultural sample of 2,324 participants from 8 countries around the world. The researchers used statistical analysis to explain happiness in terms of the discrepancy between desired and actual emotion. Their analysis controlled for experienced emotion, desired emotion and some other variables. They measured happiness both as life satisfaction and the absence of depressive symptoms. The analysis focused on four categories of emotion: self-transcending emotions (love, affection, trust, empathy, compassion); negative self-enhancing emotions (anger, contempt, hostility, hatred); opening emotions (interest, curiosity, excitement, enthusiasm, passion); and conserving emotions (calmness, relaxation, relief, contentment).

As expected, the researchers found that people were happier the more they experienced pleasant emotions and the less they experienced unpleasant emotions. However, they also found that people were happier when they experienced smaller discrepancies between the emotions they experienced and the emotions they desired.

In accordance with the Aristotelian prediction people were happier when they felt the emotion they desired, even when that emotion was unpleasant.

The authors concluded:

“The secret to happiness, then, may involve not only feeling good but also feeling right.”

The authors note that their findings are consistent with two different interpretations: happiness is related to experiencing the emotions one desires, or happiness is related to desiring the emotions one experiences. In either case it may be reasonable to speculate that awareness of a discrepancy between desired and experienced emotion leads people to engage in struggles that make them unhappy – whether they are struggling to change their cognitions or their emotions.

What advice would Aristotle offer to a person who felt unhappy as a result of a discrepancy between desired and experienced emotion? Would he tell that person to obtain cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help bring their emotions under the control of reason? He certainly emphasized the importance of practical reason, so he might have seen merit in CBT.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the context in which Aristotle advocated “right” emotions was more about the nature of virtue than about the emotional benefits of self-control, even though he recognised the latter aspect. In modern terms, it seemed to me that Aristotle’s discussion of the virtue of emotional moderation translates to a discussion about values. The message I take is that to have lives worth living we need to look our values and to behave like the persons we want to become.

Is PERMA the be all and end all of human flourishing?

I have a high opinion of Martin Seligman. He has dedicated much of his working life to developing a scientific understanding of the factors that enable individuals to thrive. His focus is on developing effective interventions that people can apply to themselves. He is not afraid of writing for the popular market and becoming known as an author of self-help books, but I think history will remember him for his contributions to scientific research.

Seligman’s latest book, ‘Flourish’ combines a practical focus on helping people to live better lives with the story of his contribution to the development of positive psychology, his views on what it means to flourish and a most informative discussion of relevant research findings. The best review of the book I have found so far is by Christine Duvivier.

The purpose of this post is to focus on what I see as a shortcoming in ‘Flourish’, namely the central idea that well-being theory has only five elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment – i.e. PERMA. Why these five elements and none other?

Seligman arrives at PERMA by asking one of the questions that Aristotle asked, without apparently recognizing that Aristotle also asked this question. Seligman actually seeks to distance himself from Aristotle because he no longer likes the idea that happiness is the be all and end all of everything.

The question that Seligman seems to have borrowed from Aristotle is: What is the good that we choose for its own sake rather than because it makes a contribution to something else that we value? Aristotle’s answer was happiness. Aristotle also asked another question: What is the good that when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing? I think he meant: What is it that makes life meaningful? Again, Aristotle’s answer is happiness. But, what Aristotle meant by happiness was more than just positive feelings, emotional well-being or life satisfaction. According to Aristotle, happiness is flourishing. Flourishing is the good that we choose for its own sake.

It seems to me that Seligman is saying the same thing when he says that the elements that comprise well-being (PERMA) are the goods that we choose for their own sake. Seligman’s formulation cuts out happiness as an intermediate step, but what Aristotle meant by happiness (which in any case is probably a poor translation of the word he used) doesn’t have much to do with the smiley face stuff that Seligman is seeking to distance himself from. Seligman’s main problem with the ‘h’ word is that it appears to be inextricably bound up with being in a cheerful mood - critics of his use of the concept ‘authentic happiness’ claimed that he was attempting to redefine happiness by dragging the desiderata of engagement and meaning into the concept. He also has a problem with life satisfaction because mood determines more than 70 percent of how much life satisfaction an individual reports. (I don’t see this as a devastating criticism, however, because most of the time it would be fairly safe to assume that mood variations wash out in calculating averages over large numbers of respondents.)

Seligman makes the strong point that well-being is more than just feeling good: it is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relations and accomplishment in your life. He also makes the point that public policy aimed only at subjective well-being is vulnerable to the ‘Brave New World’ caricature in which governments promote happiness by encouraging people to use ‘soma’ (p 26). In my view, even though there is no immediate risk that governments will go that far, there is a real danger in some parts of the world that they could order people to take more leisure on the grounds that they think that will make them happier.

Aristotle’s identification of flourishing as the good we choose for its own sake, takes us to the question of how we can flourish. His answer was that it is ‘only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently that we have lives blessed with happiness’. Now, this obviously poses the further question of what it means to develop our truly human capacities. What it means for a human to flourish has a lot of things in common with what it means for a sheep or some other animal to flourish, but it also has distinguishing characteristics. I think we should also be open to the possibility that what it means for one individual to flourish will differ from what it means for another individual to flourish. Indeed, Martin Seligman recognizes this in his emphasis on the differences in signature strengths that people display.

At this point it might be helpful to go back to look at the question that Seligman has borrowed from Aristotle to see precisely how he framed it to obtain the answer he obtains. Seligman suggests that well-being theory ‘is essentially a theory of uncoerced choice, and its five elements comprise what free people will choose for their own sake’. I applaud the idea that well-being is about what free people choose. It seems to me that idea has the desirable quality of recognizing truly human capacities for individual self-direction. We couldn’t say that the well-being of a sheep is about what an individual sheep would freely choose because it will instinctively stay with the mob. Humans are also social animals but, as Seligman recognizes, individual human flourishing sometimes involves opposing the mob. (At one point in this book Seligman tells the story of a true hero, Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, who threatened to open fire on Lieutenant William Calley and his men if they didn’t stop their massacre of civilians at My Lai in 1968.)

I agree with Seligman that the five elements he has identified are elements that individual humans choose for their own sake. One of these elements ‘meaning’ is actually something that sheep would not aspire to have. My problem is that an important element is missing.

The important missing element that is integral to our individual flourishing and sought for its own sake is control over our own lives. I find it interesting that Dan Gilbert, another famous psychologist, has argued that our passion for control of our own lives is sought as an end in itself rather than for the quality of the future it buys us. Gilbert suggests that ‘human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world in the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed’ (‘Stumbling on Happiness’, p 22). I leave it for readers to guess the name of the psychologist, with initials M.E.P.S, whose research Gilbert refers to in support of that research finding.

However, we do don't need a psychologist to tell us that our desire to have control over our own lives is integral to our flourishing as adult human beings. It must be obvious to everyone that an adult human is the kind of creature that cannot be said to be fully flourishing if important personal decisions are taken out of her control so she does not bear responsibility for them. Moreover, there is evidence – discussed in my last post – that the feelings we have of control over our own lives is not just a personality trait or a feeling of mastery of some elements of our lives, but it reflect our level of satisfaction with the amount of freedom we have in our lives. The countries in which a high proportion of people feel a great deal of control over their lives also tend to have a high proportion of people who are satisfied with the amount of freedom in their lives.

That is the end of my outburst. I hope it doesn’t put anyone off reading ‘Flourish’. In some respects this seems to me to be a better book than ‘Authentic Happiness’ which was itself a very good book. I look forward to reading Martin Seligman’s next book, which I think has the potential to be even better than this one.

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Postscript:
My next post: 'Why can't we have a realistic basis for optimism?' is also about 'Flourish'.

Why think about the meaning of happiness?

Around 2,345 years ago Aristotle wrote: ‘Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence’. My initial response, when I read that, was that Aristotle had exaggerated the importance of happiness. After learning more about his view of happiness, however, I now think he may have been right.


In my view the most important reason why people should spend some time thinking about the meaning of happiness is because this may help them live happier lives. I hope the reasons for this will become obvious as I briefly discuss different views about the meaning of happiness and what Aristotle would have thought about those views.

First, happiness is a positive feeling. This kind of happiness has been measured Daniel Kahneman and others using surveys which ask people what they were doing at various times during the previous day and how they felt – whether happy, anxious, angry etc. - while doing those things. Those kinds of surveys show that we tend to be least happy when doing things like commuting and most happy when doing things like socializing.

The happiness we obtain from socializing is not the kind of happiness that Aristotle had in mind when he suggested that happiness is the meaning and purpose of life. Aristotle recognized our need for amusement, but he said ‘... it would be strange if our end or purpose in life was just to seek amusement’.

The second view I want to discuss is that happiness is satisfaction with life. Attempts are made in the World Values Survey and elsewhere to measure this kind of happiness. These surveys ask people to rate how satisfied they are with life as a whole, for example, in terms of a number from 1 to 10.

That may seem unlikely to produce sensible results. Nevertheless, the responses to these survey questions do seem to make sense when averaged over large numbers of people. The results tend to line up with what we would expect from a priori reasoning about what factors might be important for satisfaction with life. The people who are most satisfied with their lives tend to have relatively high standards of living, good relations with other people, good health and a strong sense of achievement.

I think the American humourist Josh Billings, who lived in the 19th century, got the importance of some of these factors in perspective when he said: ‘Health is like money, we never have a true idea of its value until we lose it’. The same is often true of our relationships with other people and the sense of achievement that many of us obtain from our work and our hobbies. We may not be conscious of how valuable these things are to us until we lose them.

It is interesting that the factors necessary for humans to have high life satisfaction are also important for other animals. We can’t ask them to provide a numerical rating on their satisfaction with life, but it seems reasonable to assume that they too have more satisfying lives when they have a high standard of living (appropriate food and shelter), good relationships with other animals and their owners and good health. They even seem to need a sense of achievement: I know of a cat that seems to gain a sense of achievement from bringing home rabbits that it catches on its hunting expeditions and leaving them on the door mat for its owners; and sheep dogs seem to obtain a sense of achievement from rounding up chooks in the farm yard when there are no sheep available.

When Aristotle wrote that happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, he had in mind something more than just life satisfaction. He wrote that it is ‘only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently ... that we have lives blessed with happiness’. What he had in mind is that happiness is the practice of virtue: "the virtuous activity of the soul in accordance with reason". Aristotle regarded philosophical wisdom as the highest form of happiness.

At this point I part company with Aristotle. With the benefit of modern scientific knowledge it seems more appropriate to identify truly human capacities with our ability to reflect upon our own lives, our attitudes and our emotions. Developing our truly human capacities is realization of potential. It involves developing:

• our sense of personal identity - who we are and what we are becoming, what we like and dislike and what we identify with;

• an awareness of our own attitudes and emotional responses to things that happen to us and of our ability to manage our feelings;

• an awareness of the characteristics of our own individual personalities – for example, whether we have a natural inclination to think the glass is half full or half empty; and

• our own sense of humour. In the words of Oscar Wilde: ‘Life is too important to be taken seriously’.

So, we need to spend some time thinking about the meaning of happiness in order to develop an understanding of what happiness means to each of us as individuals. In the words of the song, ‘happiness is different things to different people’.

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This post is based on a speech I gave last week at the inaugural meeting of the South Coast Gourmet Toastmasters.