What Does “Happiness” Consist In?
Before moving on to consider a proposed alternative – a constructive, positive alternative – to
Schopenhauer’s pessimism, think about one aspect of Schopenhauer’s position that might hit
closer to home than his more general thoughts on cosmic meaningless, so to speak. I’m referring
to his argument that the suffering in human life outweighs any pleasure in life. This was implied
in his discussion of desire in The Vanity of Existence, but in the following reading, Schopenhauer
elaborates and, in the process, compares the relative unhappiness of the lives of human beings
compared to non-human animals. The second reading by Jules Evans (1978--) describes a
couple of attempts to revive an ancient response to the sort of pessimistic view of life
championed by Schopenhauer. For many people seem to think that Epicureanism (named after
the Greek philosopher Epicurus) is well suited to provide meaning in the lives of people who are
not just trying to survive under the demands of global capitalism … but are trying to be
“happy.”
On the Sufferings of the World, Arthur Schopenhauer
The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even
balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let
him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people
who are in a worse predicament than yourself. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as
a whole!
We are like lambs in a field, displaying themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses
first one and then another for his prey. So too, in our good days, we are all unconscious of the
evil Fate may have presently in store for us—sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or
dementia …
… In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the
curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a
blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times
when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as
yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old
age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: "It is bad to-day, and it will be worse
to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all."
I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless—because I speak the truth; and
people prefer to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then! At
any rate, do not ask us to accommodate our doctrines to the lessons you have been taught. Ask
them for a comforting doctrine, and you will get it.
Nevertheless, I have reminded the reader that every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction,
is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive
element of existence. It follows, therefore, that the happiness of any given life is to be measured,
not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering—from
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What Does “Happiness” Consist In?
positive evil. If this is the true standpoint, the lower animals appear to enjoy a happier destiny
than man. Let us examine the matter a little more closely.
However varied the forms that human happiness and misery may take, leading a man to seek the
one and shun the other, the material basis of it all is bodily pleasure or bodily pain. This basis is
very restricted: it is simply health, food, protection from wet and cold, the satisfaction of the
sexual instinct; or else the absence of these things. Consequently, as far as real physical pleasure
is concerned, the man is not better off than the brute, except in so far as the higher possibilities of
his nervous system make him more sensitive to every kind of pleasure, but also, it must be
remembered, to every kind of pain. But then compared with the brute, how much stronger are the
passions aroused in him! What an immeasurable difference there is in the depth and vehemence
of his emotions!
The chief source of all this passion is that thought for what is absent and future, which, with
man, exercises such a powerful influence upon all he does. It is this that is the real origin of his
cares, his hopes, his fears—emotions which affect him much more deeply than could ever be the
case with those present joys and sufferings to which the brute is confined. In his powers of
reflection, memory and foresight, man possesses, as it were, a machine for condensing and
storing up his pleasures and his sorrows. But the brute has nothing of the kind; whenever it is in
pain, it is as though it were suffering for the first time, even though the same thing should have
previously happened to it times out of number. It has no power of summing up its feelings.
Hence its careless and placid temper: how much it is to be envied! But in man reflection comes
in, with all the emotions to which it gives rise; and taking up the same elements of pleasure and
pain which are common to him and the brute, it develops his susceptibility to happiness and
misery to such a degree that, at one moment the man is brought in an instant to a state of delight
that may even prove fatal, at another to the depths of despair and suicide.
If we carry our analysis a step farther, we shall find that, in order to increase his pleasures, man
has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state
were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms;
delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand
and one things that he considers necessary to his existence.
And above and beyond all this, there is a separate and peculiar source of pleasure, and
consequently of pain, which man has established for himself, also as the result of using his
powers of reflection; and this occupies him out of all proportion to its value, nay, almost more
than all his other interests put together—I mean ambition and the feeling of honor and shame; in
plain words, what he thinks about the opinion other people have of him. Taking a thousand
forms, often very strange ones, this becomes the goal of almost all the efforts he makes that are
not rooted in physical pleasure or pain. It is true that besides the sources of pleasure which he has
in common with the brute, man has the pleasures of the mind as well. These admit of many
gradations, from the most innocent trifling or the merest talk up to the highest intellectual
achievements; but there is the accompanying boredom to be set against them on the side of
suffering. Boredom is a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it
is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are domesticated;
whereas in the case of man it has become a downright scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches
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What Does “Happiness” Consist In?
whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers a
singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a punishment by delivering
them up to misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will rush about in all directions,
traveling here, there and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they are anxious to
know what amusements it affords; just as though they were beggars asking where they could
receive a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles of human life. Finally, I may
mention that as regards the sexual relation, a man is committed to a peculiar arrangement which
drives him obstinately to choose one person. This feeling grows, now and then, into a more or
less passionate love which is the source of little pleasure and much suffering.
It is, however, a wonderful thing that the mere addition of thought should serve to raise such a
vast and lofty structure of human happiness and misery; resting, too, on the same narrow basis of
joy and sorrow as man holds in common with the brute, and exposing him to such violent
emotions, to so many storms of passion, so much convulsion of feeling, that what he has
suf¬fered stands written and may be read in the lines on his face. And yet, when all is told, he
has been struggling ultimately for the very same things as the brute has attained, and with an
incomparably smaller expenditure of passion and pain.
But all this contributes to increase the measures of suffering in human life out of all proportion to
its pleasures; and the pains of life are made much worse for man by the fact that death is
something very real to him. The brute flies from death instinctively without really knowing what
it is, and therefore without ever contemplating it in the way natural to a man, who has this
prospect always before his eyes. So that even if only a few brutes die a natural death, and most of
them live only just long enough to transmit their species, and then, if not earlier, become the prey
of some other animal,— whilst man, on the other hand, manages to make so-called natural death
the rule, to which, however, there are a good many exceptions,—the advantage is on the side of
the brute, for the reason stated above. But the fact is that man attains the natural term of years
just as seldom as the brute; because the unnatural way in which he lives, and the strain of work
and emotion, lead to a degeneration of the race; and so his goal is not often reached.
The brute is much more content with mere existence than man; the plant is wholly so; and man
finds satisfaction in it just in proportion as he is dull and obtuse. Accordingly, the life of the
brute carries less of sorrow with it, but also less of joy, when compared with the life of man; and
while this may be traced, on the one side, to freedom from the torment of care and anxiety, it is
also due to the fact that hope, in any real sense, is unknown to the brute. It is thus deprived of
any share in that which gives us the most and best of our joys and pleasures, the mental
anticipation of a happy future, and the inspiriting play of fantasy, both of which we owe to our
power of imagination. If the brute is free from care, it is also, in this sense, without hope; in
either case, because its consciousness is limited to the present moment, to what it can actually
see before it. The brute is an embodiment of present impulses, and hence what elements of fear
and hope exist in its nature—and they do not go very far—arise only in relation to objects that lie
before it and within reach of those impulses: whereas a man's range of vision embraces the
whole of his life, and extends far into the past and future.
Following upon this, there is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when compared with
us—I mean, their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment. The tranquillity of mind which
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What Does “Happiness” Consist In?
this seems to give them often puts us to shame for the many times we allow our thoughts and our
cares to make us restless and discontented. And, in fact, those pleasures of hope and anticipation
which I have been mentioning are not to be had for nothing. The delight which a man has in
hoping for and looking forward to some special satisfaction is a part of the real pleasure
attaching to it enjoyed in advance. This is afterwards deducted; for the more we look forward to
anything, the less satisfaction we find in it when it comes. But the brute's enjoyment is not
anticipated, and therefore, suffers no deduction; so that the actual pleasure of the moment comes
to it whole and unimpaired. In the same way, too, evil presses upon the brute only with its own
intrinsic weight; whereas with us the fear of its coming often makes its burden ten times more
grievous.
It is just this characteristic way in which the brute gives itself up entirely to the present moment
that contributes so much to the delight we take in our domestic pets. They are the present
moment personified, and in some respects they make us feel the value of every hour that is free
from trouble and annoyance, which we, with our thoughts and preoccupations, mostly disregard
…
Epicurus and the Art of Happiness, Jules Evans
I enter the Idler Academy in Westbourne Grove (an upscale mini-mall in London, England) and
browse the bookshelves, while a young shop assistant offers me a cup of coffee. Shortly
afterward, a slightly rumpled figure in a blue suit and sneakers emerges blinking from the
basement. “Oh, hi,” says Tom Hodgkinson, the forty-three-year-old founder of the Academy. “I
was just having a nap.” As part of the recent revival of ancient philosophy in modern life, some
enterprising thinkers have tried to establish philosophy “schools” in the ancient sense, where
ordinary people can gather, eat, drink, and learn about the art of life, just as they used to do in
Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and elsewhere. One such school is the Idler Academy, which Tom
set up in West London in 2011. He wants his Academy to combine the conversational buzz of an
eighteenth-century coffeehouse (with gourmet, free trade coffee, of course) and the sort of
leisurely philosophical enquiry practiced in the ancient schools of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and
the Stoics. It’s still early days, but it seems to be successful and the local businesses are, on the
whole, friendly and helpful to this unusual venture set up in their midst.
Tom’s new philosophy school is the latest experiment in a defiantly unconventional career. In
fact, “career” is probably the wrong word. “Career is a try-hard notion,” Tom has written. “It’s a
middle class affliction.” After studying philosophy at Cambridge, Tom’s misadventures began
with a job at a Sunday newspaper magazine in London. He hated it. He went from a student life
of leisure, partying, and punk rock to having to get out of bed at 7:30, commuting to work, and
spending most of the day in (what seemed to him) a joyless and soulless office where the
workers were forbidden to talk to each other. Looking back on it, he realizes he was perhaps “a
bit puffed up” after university but he nonetheless found the experience traumatic. “Your early
twenties are a weird time. Everyone is terrified of failing or not fitting in. Even the parties have
this horrible competitive edge: ‘What are you doing at the moment?’ Back then, all my friends
seemed to be more successful than I was.” He and his friends tried to escape the horrors of office
life by raving at the weekend, but the ecstasy comedowns “only heightened the misery on
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Mondays.” Eventually the Mirror fired him, but rather than be crushed by this setback, Tom
decided to strike out on his own path. In 1995, at the age of twenty-six, he set up an alternative
magazine, the Idler, which celebrated the Generation X ethos of leaving the rat race and pursuing
a life of pleasure, creativity, and political apathy.
The Idler ethos was anarchistic, but it was the sort of anarchy that didn’t threaten anyone with
violence. The magazine advocated opting out of capitalism’s conspiracy to make us defer the
pleasures of the present moment for the distant prospect of some future happiness. “The future is
a capitalist construct,” Tom declared. “We are kept quiet by means of the idea that, at some point
in the future, things are going to get better. But rather than waiting for the glory days of
retirement, let us take our pleasures now.” We should do as little work as possible, skive as much
as we can off the state and the economic aristocracy, and drink as deep as possible from the cup
of life — without, however, allowing any pleasure to become an addiction. “The key is not to
renounce pleasures, but to master them,” Tom wrote. The Idler philosophy was, from the start, a
strange combination of lifestyle journalism and self-help. It was, Tom argued, a cure for the
needless stress and anxiety of the rat race: “Idleness, doing nothing — literally nothing — can
help fight anxiety,” he assured his readers. Quite quickly, the magazine did well. And for
someone who openly extolled the pleasures of the slacker life, Tom was surprisingly busy, and
successful
… Tom’s Idler philosophy is eclectic but the defining influence is Epicurus. Epicurus was born
around 341 BC on the Aegean island of Samos. He served in the Athenian army for two years,
then devoted himself to studying and teaching philosophy. Epicurus lived during an unsettled
period of Greek history when the Greek city-states were under the fist of the Macedonian empire.
Rather than opposing the empire, Epicurus’s response was to advocate a philosophical
withdrawal from society. He told his followers: “When tolerable security against our fellow
humans is attained... [the philosopher should seek] a quiet private life withdrawn from the
multitude.” Intellectuals should strive to “live unnoticed.” So he and a handful of his friends
pooled their resources, and bought a house on the outskirts of Athens, near a river, set among
some olive groves, and established a philosophical commune which they called “The Garden.” A
sign above The Garden’s entrance read: “Strangers, here you will do well to tarry; here, our
highest good is pleasure.”
Pleasure, Epicurus taught, is the “alpha and omega of existence.” There’s no absolute good or
evil, only thoughts and acts that lead to pleasure, and those that lead to pain. Epicurus believed in
the gods, sort of, but thought they were idle beings who existed in a state of languid selfsufficiency in some far-off corner of the universe, entirely untroubled by human affairs. And we
should strive to become as untroubled and apathetic as the gods. Likewise, Epicurus was
convinced there was no afterlife where we might be rapped on the knuckles for following a life
of pleasure. An important part of his philosophy was the study of physics, particularly
astrophysics. Epicurus followed the fifth-century philosopher Democritus, known as the
“laughing philosopher,” in asserting an atomistic physics: the universe is a collection of atoms
swirling around according to mechanical laws, and when humans die we simply dissolve back
into this celestial stew of atoms. And yet, while we’re alive, through some incredible good
fortune, we have consciousness, and reason, and free will, and this means we have everything we
need to follow a life of happiness and pleasure. As Richard Dawkins put it in an ad on the side of
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London buses: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.”
Epicurus tells us, in short, that we’re only on this planet for a few years before we disappear, and
while we’re here there’s nothing we have to do. There’s no one we have to please. There are no
commandments we have to follow. We can choose simply to enjoy ourselves, rather than finding
reasons to be miserable. We can make the radical choice of happiness.
At the time, this was a rather scandalous suggestion. The other philosophical schools looked on
Epicurus’s philosophy of pleasure with deep suspicion, and threw all sorts of accusations against
it. It was claimed that Epicurus indulged himself in feasting and boozing until he was sick. It was
said he wrote erotic literature. It was rumored he and his followers indulged in all-night sex
parties. These accusations still stick. For example, the dictionary tells us that the definition of
Epicurean is “one devoted to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, particularly fine food and wine.”
Today, if you search for Epicurean schools on the internet, you will be directed to the Epicurean
School of Culinary Arts, which offers courses in “pro-baking,” “cake decoration,” and
“mastering chocolate.”
But the deeply entrenched, popular image of Epicureans is untrue. I must note that his Roman
disciples were a bit closer to what we think of today as epicures — they liked their wine, feasts,
and dancing girls, and would meet on the twentieth of every month to celebrate Epicurus’s
birthday with a philosophical banquet. Nevertheless, if Epicurus himself was a hedonist, he was
a very austere and rational one. He had few possessions, and kept to a simple diet of bread,
olives, and water. He wrote:
When we say that pleasure is the end and aim of life, we do not mean the pleasures of
the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as are understood by some through
ignorance, prejudice or wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of
pain in the body and disturbance in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of binge
drinking and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of culinary delicacies,
which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every
choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest
disturbances take possession of the soul.
Despite their rivalry with the Stoics [we will consider Stoicism in future classes], the Epicureans
shared with them a conception of philosophy as therapy. Both schools believed philosophy can
make us happier, by helping us remove the false beliefs which lead to emotional disturbances,
leaving us free to live a life of self-sufficiency and tranquility. Epicureanism might not be as
rigorous as Stoicism, but it still requires us to engage in a distinctive kind of work. “We must
exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness,” Epicurus wrote. It takes effort to achieve
a life of pleasure, because we often seek pleasure in the wrong places. We make bad choices, and
this leaves us emotionally agitated. So we must become rational hedonists out of rational selfinterest. “No pleasure is in itself evil,” Epicurus assured his followers, “but the things which
produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.”
Epicurus drew up a classification of human desires. “Of desires, some are natural, others are
groundless. And of the natural, some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only.” To
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achieve a life of tranquility, the Epicurean has to examine his or her desires, and ask if they’re
really natural and necessary, or not. They have to consider the pleasure it will lead to, and the
pain and inconvenience, and “measure the one against the other,” Take smoking. Nicotine makes
you think cigarettes are to die for — the addiction curls around your brain and into your thinking,
so your first thought in the morning, and every second thought throughout the day, is: “I can’t
wait to have a cigarette.” Sometimes, even while smoking a cigarette, you’re thinking, “I can’t
wait to have another cigarette.” And yet how pleasurable is smoking, really? Is it really worth all
the expense, bad health, and curtailed activity that comes with it? We have to measure the
pleasure against the pain. Or we might have a taste for champagne. But if we consume too much,
we ’ll be sick, and if we get habituated to it, we ’ll either have to work really hard to pay our
credit card bills, or suck up to rich patrons so they’ll buy it for us. Either way, we’ve become
enslaved by our taste for the high life. And there’s always the fear that we’ll lose our access to
the Dom Perignon and end up drinking Special Brew in an alley. To achieve more unbroken
tranquility, the rational hedonist learns to limit their desires to what is easy to achieve. “To
habituate oneself... to a simple and inexpensive diet supplies all that is needful for health, and
enables a person to meet the necessary requirements of life without shrinking... and renders us
fearless of fortune,” Epicurus wrote.
The fewer and simpler your desires, the easier it is to meet them, the less you have to work, and
the more time you have for hanging out with your friends. In fact, all you need for the good life
is some basic security, your health, your reason, and your friends. Epicurus put friendship at the
very heart of the good life: “Of the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness
throughout the whole of life,” Epicurus said, “by far the most important is the acquisition of
friends.” It was far more important to him than sexual love, which led to jealousy and all kinds of
emotional disturbances; or the family (he never married); or the state. Epicureans rejected the
corrupt city-state, and made their own little societies of friends. “Friendship dances around the
world,” Epicurus declared, “bidding us all awaken to the recognition of happiness” … .
… Could we set up Epicurean communities today? There have been some efforts in this
direction. The School of Life, which Alain De Botton and friends established in Bloomsbury,
England in 2008, was set up in conscious imitation of Epicurus’s Garden. De Botton wrote in the
Idler. “The example of the Garden has haunted me ever since I read about it at university. I too
have longed to live in a philosophical community rather than simply read about wisdom and
truth in a lonely study... So that’s how I and a few other philosophically minded friends came to
start our own version of the Garden in autumn 2008.” The School of Life, like the Idler
Academy, has a bookshop and a classroom where workshops and talks take place. De Botton
says that the School, like the Garden, “gathers a regular contingent of people, and together we
eat, hear lectures, go on journeys and, most importantly, attempt to live philosophically.” Tom’s
Idler Academy is also set up in the mold of Epicurus’s Garden, and a bust of Epicurus overlooks
the shop. In fact, there is a bit of rivalry between the schools. Tom says: “It’s like the Beatles and
the Stones. Friendly rivalry is good for creative people. I think there’s room enough for both of
us, and for more such places. I’d like there to be philosophy schools in North London, South
London, in other cities, in the countryside. Epicureans established philosophical communities
across the whole of the Roman Empire. This is just the beginning.”
Both these schools are wonderful additions to London’s cultural and philosophical life. Though
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of course, they’re both a long way from a school in the ancient conception. For one thing, neither
school gathers “a regular contingent of people” who eat together, philosophize together, and live
together. Neither school expects members to sell their possessions and pool their financial
resources. Nor are they expected to worship the godlike founder of the school, as Epicurus’s
followers did. Rather, various members of the public come in, pay around £30 to listen to a talk,
have a glass of wine and a discussion, and then go back to their private lives. The schools aren’t
really philosophical communities, in the sense of expecting their members to commit to a
particular way of life. Nothing is demanded of attendees except the entrance fee (perhaps if they
demanded more than that they’d be accused of being cults).
Could Epicureanism ever become more than a niche community? Could it ever be a philosophy
for the masses? That was never Epicurus’s intention. In fact, Epicureans don’t believe the masses
will ever take to philosophy, so they opt out of politics, and retire behind their gated
communities of pleasure. That could be a risky strategy: unless you have your own private
security guards and a basement full of guns, it helps to have the protection of a well-ordered
state. And more importantly, perhaps, it’s a rather selfish and un-civic solution to solving life’s
problems.
The most famous example of an attempt to turn Epicureanism into a genuinely political
philosophy was 19th century Utilitarianism led by Jeremy Bentham. He famously suggested that
governments should be guided by the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest
number.” Bentham, like Epicurus, insisted the goal of life was feeling good. If we could just
work out a way to measure pain and pleasure scientifically, then we could use this “happiness
calculator” to add up the moral value of every action and government policy. Bentham was
wonderfully anti-elitist. He famously declared that “push-pin is better than poetry,” because it
made more people happy. Government policy, therefore, should promote pushpin, and leave
poetry to the poets because whatever makes the most people happy, is good.
In the twenty-first century, this form of Epicureanism has been ably revived by Lord Richard
Layard and his political movement, Action for Happiness. Layard gave a “sermon on happiness”
at the School of Life, for instance, in which he suggested that the philosophy of happiness could
become a “new secular spirituality” to fill the hole left by the decline of Christianity. Since being
set up in 2011, Action for Happiness has amassed over 20,000 supporters globally. They
campaign for happiness lessons to be introduced in schools, disseminate advice on how to
maximize our good feelings, and take to the streets to give out free hugs.
The Action for Happiness movement has already won some notable policy successes, like getting
the British government to start measuring national happiness, which it started to do in 2010.
Layard has argued that happiness scientists can now accurately measure how happy individuals
are, and even how happy whole societies are, therefore governments should use this data to guide
policy, just as Bentham once dreamed. This modern form of Epicureanism has a political edge
that its ancient ancestor lacked, and is now influencing the highest levels of politics. For
example, it has taken simple well-being techniques from Epicurus and other ancient
philosophical “therapists” and disseminated them widely. Moreover, I’m very impressed by
Layard’s success in getting two British governments to commit over half a billion pounds to train
six thousand new cognitive behavioral therapists. That’s a huge achievement. And I admire the
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way Layard and his happy army have got us thinking about the meaning of life by providing an
explicit rationale for an answer, namely, “feeling good”: happiness is simply the presence of
pleasant feelings and the absence of painful feelings and Action for Happiness opposes those
traditional philosophical views that claim some forms of happiness are “higher” or “better” than
others. That’s elitist nonsense, Layard says. And when I asked him if he thought that meant that
XBox was better than poetry, because XBox makes more people happier than poetry, he agreed
… though did not go so far as to say the government should drop literature classes in school and
let the kids play Grand Theft Auto to their hearts’ content!
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