What is Happiness?

1. What is Happiness? Feraco Search for Human Potential 10 December 2010

4. Kant and Emerson • Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness. Immanuel Kant • We are always getting ready to live but never living. Ralph Waldo Emerson • Were we always wired the way Emerson suggests we are? • Is Kant right?

5. Teleology • Aristotle – one of our great minds – took what we call a teleological approach to “good” • Telos: Greek – meanings vary from “bullseye” and “goal” to “purpose” • To him, something was good when it “fulfilled its destiny” – when it completed a goal, when it lives up to the expectations that led to its importance to begin with • After all, if you don’t seem to be aiming at a target, why would anyone care if you missed?

6. Sending Out Signals • If I tell you that I plan to teach about a “good book,” I’m really signaling to you that the book satisfies my criteria for goodness • Perhaps I’ve decided it’s a “good book” because I believe books have to contain exciting moments in order to be good (and it has them), or because I decided that good books need interesting characters (and it has them) • However, if you believe that “good” books have to have a predictable story/an ending that “doesn’t make you think” (which it doesn’t have), you won’t think the book is very good at all • Your expectations for the book are different from mine

7. Back to Death Cab • This explains the “Death Cab Paradox” – we judge it differently because we have different expectations for the music we hear (i.e. you need songs to have energy, or to be technically difficult – but I need them to have melody and good lyrics) • Teleology, therefore, allows us to give things purposes of our choosing – and for us to be alternately satisfied or disappointed by how well something lives up to that “reason for being” • This, in turn, allows us to develop morals and ethics • Remember that we established that morals and ethics, for good or for ill, provide us with a framework for our interpretations – and therefore our goals!

8. Morality as Means • Our goals become our reason for being – and our sense of satisfaction becomes dependent on how well we live up to our expectations and hopes for ourselves • Without goals, we have nothing to aim for, and therefore nothing to make us satisfied • Our goals can be inwardly directed (something that satisfies us) or outwardly directed (something that satisfies someone else) • In short, our morality becomes the means by which we can earn happiness

9. We Can Be In Control • If our morality is determined by both choice and experience, then one could argue that we all control whether we’ll be happyEmerson’s and Kant’s quotes seem more interesting in this context • On the one hand, we have to live at some point – we have to do something instead of just talking about it, or we’ll never satisfy those goals • On the other hand, we can still be happy if we plan as well as live; we may not achieve full satisfaction all at once, but we’ll always be hitting some benchmark (before moving on to the next goal so we can experience new happiness!)

10. Deontology (Sounds Fun?) • Now let’s move on to Kant’s argument; can those goals become the ways in which we make ourselves worthy of happiness? • Kant was what we call a deontologist – someone who believes that goodness grows out of morals, rather than the other way around (which we argued earlier) • According to Kant, morality meant that you acted on the basis of what you were expected to do alone – meaning that you were really pleasing to a teleologist!

11. Expectation Imperatives • Unfortunately, Kant also believed that anything other than an “expectation imperative” made an action immoral • Therefore, if you run around the track because your coach expects you to go run around the track, you’ve acted morally – but if you ran just because you wanted to enjoy it, you’ve compromised your morals because it’s not your duty to have fun! • Talk about relative values – we were confused about whether Death Cab for Cutie or One Tree Hill could be “good,” and now Kant wants us to look at ourselves completely differently! • It’s an interesting way to look at both happiness and morality, if you think about it

12. Does Laziness Exist? • Many resist deontology specifically because it seems to deem spontaneous, independent happiness as unhealthy – whereas teleology views it as the natural outgrowth of meeting one’s own expectations • In this case, the pursuit of happiness is incredibly important – rather than making our morals determine our level of satisfaction, we switch the relationship around • If you notice this, it’s easy to see how humans can become worthy of happiness in their own eyes – just adjust your morals, and your goals will adjust as well • It’s the reason why people can be satisfied while underachieving – they’ve changed their morals to the point that true excellence no longer matters

13. Intermittent Surprises • If you have no goals, Aristotle doesn’t believe you can be truly happy • You can be pleasantly surprised – but is a life spent waiting for intermittent pleasant surprises really worth living? • True happiness seems to result from effort – the satisfaction that’s earned is better than the satisfaction that’s handed outIn other words, it’s better to be the arrow than the leaf • After all, the vast majority of you decided that it was important to make your own moral code – and to make your own decisions rather than allow someone to control you, even if that control led you down a comfortable path

14. Shaping Happiness • In this way, choice, morality, and happiness seem interrelatedIf we have free will, we can decide how to interpret our experiences • We can allow those interpretations to shape our morals • Our morals, in turn, shape our future choices • By shaping our choices, our morals shape our goals – and our goals shape our happiness!

15. Not So Fast… • That said, things may not necessarily be so simple • We may not have free will • We do things that violate our morals or our ethics; sometimes we attempt to rationalize these actions, while at other times we don’t even try • We can go through life passively, drifting leaf-like from day to day without even noticing the passing of time – or that we’re not growing • We make the choices that ordinarily bring us happiness harder; by procrastinating, for example, we stain the “fun things” we do in the meantime with a hidden dread, a knowledge that everything gets worse when this experience ends

16. The Free Will to Fail • If happiness is such an important human concern – and if great minds seem to have devised ways to find it – why do we still sabotage ourselves? • In this case, we can blame our ability to choose incorrectly – the free will to make a bad decision • This is a choice that, judging by our discussions, you treasure – so this is OK! • In short, we may love pursuing happiness successfully – but we seem to love our ability to be disappointed almost as much, because that disappointment both seems to validate our free will…and to make our successes all the sweeter • “You need to know bruises to know blessings, and I have known both.”