On Happiness

By David F. Lloyd - Vision Insights and New Horizons - U.S.A.

Winter 2007 Issue

Social scientists have studied negative emotions—anger, depression, low self-esteem, suicidal tendencies and their ilk—for years. By contrast, happiness is a fairly new area of research, as a recent wave of books shows.

The three offerings reviewed here try to shed light on happiness from varied perspectives. We ask: What can we learn about the elusive quality of happiness to help us understand and attain more of it? Are there keys to happiness?

Richard Schoch’s *The Secrets of Happiness* is a good place to start. A professor of history and culture at the University of London, he examines the pursuit of happiness during the past three millennia, particularly in philosophy and religion, and asks what lessons can be learned for today.
Happiness is difficult to define, and Schoch asks some hard questions. Circumstances often conspire to make life difficult, even miserable: whence happiness in such cases?

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Schoch’s tour starts with English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who promoted the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as determined and managed by enlightened government. But Bentham’s theories have some difficulties. First, happiness cannot be quantified with any precision. Second, Bentham viewed pleasure as the best measurement of happiness, ignoring the moral dimension: What of conscience and character? How do these fit into the happiness equation?

Bentham’s disciple John Stuart Mill (1806–73), at first in full agreement with his mentor, later softened his approach, writing that people become happy “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

Next Schoch takes us back to Epicurus (ca. 341–271 B.C.E.), whose name has entered the English language in the word epicurean, someone who is devoted to sensual enjoyment or, more specifically, one who takes great pleasure in fine food and drink. Epicurus has, however, been much misunderstood, according to Schoch. The true Epicurean was restrained and self-controlled, accepting “negative pleasure” as well as “positive pleasure”; that is, “not eating because I am full, not drinking because my thirst is quenched,” and so on.

The theme of focusing away from self and desire, common in Eastern religion and philosophy, is the next exploration. Yoga, for example, teaches that its three ways—knowledge, duty and loving devotion—are what determine happiness, not satisfying physical and material desires. Buddhism maintains that “life is suffering” and propounds the law of karma, by which “everything has a cause.” So to remove suffering we must remove its cause: desire. “Nirvana is an experience of not: not being chained to desire, not having attachments and, therefore, not suffering.”

In his lightning journey through philosophy and religion, Schoch includes the Roman Catholic saint Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) as one who had something to say about happiness—though strangely, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and its eight “beatitudes” (the Latin root of which means “blessed” or “happy”) is little more than a footnote to the discussion of Aquinas’s writings.

Schoch notes that the Roman Catholic theologian’s immense but unfinished summary of theology (Summa Theologiae) says happiness “is the ultimate end of human life,” “does not consist of earthly goods,” “consists only in the vision of God,” “has requirements,” and “is possible only in heaven.”

He understands Aquinas to mean that everlasting happiness or “eternal beatitude . . . is the true end of human life,” because “God created us to be happy.” But what does this mean? According to Schoch, Aquinas is referring here to the beatific vision: “This sense of drawing near to God is the core of Aquinas’s vision of happiness.”

The next stop is the mystical branch of Islam, Sufism. Like other mystic, ecstatic religions, Sufism holds that each individual finds his or her own path to enlightenment by merging with something beyond self over a long period of training. But Schoch concludes that “the mystic view of happiness is elitist. It’s not that the mystics are deliberately seeking to prevent most of us from becoming happy, but that true happiness can come only to those select few who are versed in the ways of imagination and intuition.”

Moving on to Stoicism, he suggests that “when we feel that too much of what we face day after day is beyond our control, we might well take heart in the Stoic teaching that happiness resides only in those things we can control: our thoughts, intentions and outlook.”

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Finally, surveying Judaism, Schoch grapples with an obvious dilemma: we must contend with difficult and painful circumstances to get a handle on happiness. He brings us now to the age-old question: if there is an omnipotent God, why does He allow men to suffer?

In the biblical story of Job, God not only hides His face but, as Schoch sees it, “almost on a whim” allows Satan to visit extreme suffering on the innocent man. Covered in painful, oozing boils, bereft of his family and worldly goods, and condemned by his friends, Job cries out “Why?”

God ultimately reveals to Job how great He is, and how superior His thinking is, above that of even the wisest and most perfect of men. Schoch finds in this story “an almost cosmic definition of happiness. . . . Through this parable of suffering we see happiness in an unaccustomed light—as bound up in our search for the meaning of life when life seems most meaningless.”

He writes, “God’s indifference is not a disapproving judgement upon us, not a punishment or sign of his anger. It is, rather, part of his divine nature: he is the God who hides. And he hides for a reason that we have come upon again and again—our freedom.

To be good we must choose to be so; but to choose, we must be free.” But again, is this about happiness or about surviving through misery? Schoch believes it is the former, that it is this freedom to choose to be good that gives us the “freedom to forge our happiness.”

In the end, he proposes that “the happy life is . . . one of ideals, of symbols of something higher, greater, deeper and vaster than ourselves. . . . We want to envision something that surpasses our selfish desires, that outstrips merely personal goals; and then we want to attain it.”

Schoch’s readers could be forgiven for concluding that his book might have been better titled Secrets of Coping with Unhappiness: Three Thousand Years of Avoiding the Bad Life. He succeeds well in demonstrating how tenuous any grip on happiness has often been, even among those who practiced the strategies about which he writes.

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The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life. Richard Schoch. 2007 (paperback). Profile Books, London. 288 pages.

The Science of Happiness: How Our Brains Make Us Happy—and What We Can Do to Get Happier. Stefan Klein. 2006. Avalon Publishing Group, Marlowe & Company, New York. 320 pages.

Making Happy People: The Nature of Happiness and Its Origins in Childhood. Paul Martin. 2006 (paperback). HarperCollins, Harper Perennial, London. 320 pages.