In Our Time - Happiness

Episode Date: January 24, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss whether 'happiness' means living a life of pleasure, or of virtue. It is an old question, and the Roman poet Horace attempted to answer it when he wrote; 'Not the owner of many possessions will you be right to call happy: he more rightly deserves the name of happy who knows how to use the gods's gifts wisely and to put up with rough poverty, and who fears dishonour more than death'. It seems a noble sentiment but for the Greek Sophist Thrasymachus this sort of attitude was the epitome of moral weakness: For him poverty was miserable, and happiness flowed from wealth and power over men, an idea so persuasive that Plato wrote The Republic in response to its challenge. What have our philosophers made of the compulsion to be happy? And how much does this ancient debate still define what it means to be happy today? Are we entitled to health, wealth and the pursuit of pleasure or is true contentment something else entirely? With Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University; Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, does happiness mean living a life of pleasure or one of virtue? It's an old question, and the Roman poet Horace attempted to answer it when he wrote, Not the owner of many possessions, will you be right to call Happy?

He more rightly deserves the name of Happy, who knows how to use the God's gifts wisely and to put up with rough poverty and who fears dishonour more than death. It seems a noble sentiment in that rather antiquated translation, but for the Greek sophist Frisimachus, this sort of attitude was the epitome of moral weakness. For him, poverty was miserable,

and happiness flowed from wealth and power over men, an idea so persuasive that Plato wrote the Republic in response to its challenge. What have our philosophers made of the compulsion to be happy, and how much does this ancient debate still define what it means to be happy today? Are we entitled to health, wealth and the pursuit of pleasure, or is true happiness something else entirely? Will me to discuss the philosophy of happiness is Angie Hobbes, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick,

an author of Plato and the Hero, Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University, an author to take but one book again of Being Good, and Anthony Grayling, author of The Meaning of Things and reader in philosophy at Birkbeck University of London. Angie Hobbes, the Greek word for happiness is, I believe, Imonia, Idamonia. What did they mean by it in general terms? You tell me how to pronounce it first, then they explain what it means.

Yes, but the basic meaning of Eudaimenea is having a good guardian spirit, and it comes to mean in practice something like flourishing or living an objectively desirable life. In other words, it describes an objective situation, rather than a purely subjective psychological state. There was even a debate about whether your eudaimeneer could be affected by what happens after your death. For instance, if you desire the prosperity of your descendants or for your name to live on, then whether or not these things actually occur could retrospectively influence your eudaimeneer.

It also seems to have been generally accepted that eudaimeneer is what we all do in fact aim at. It's what we ought, it is the chief human good. However, there was enormous disagreement about what it actually consists in, as you said. Is it the life of physical pleasure and material comfort? Is it the life of military and political success and status? Is it the life of rational virtue and contemplation? And the answer seems to depend on the particular author's view of human nature and the human psyche. After all, how can you know?

what it is for an individual human being to flourish unless you know what it is to be a human being. And these views about human nature also seem to underpin the other main questions the Greeks asked about eudaimeneas, such as, does it require a particular political and social setting? Is it best achieved by accepting your lot or striving to alter it?

Now, you're interested in Plato's views on everything, aren't you? So did he write about happiness? and if so, what was his concept? He certainly writes about Eudaminia, and to pick up what you said earlier in your introduction, he actually identifies Eudiamenir and virtue in terms of their both being the same state of one's psyche,

depending on whether the particular parts or faculties of your psyche are in harmony, in a state of psychic harmony or mental health. He believed that there are three basic, faculties to the human psyche, namely reason and the physical and material appetites and a self-regarding spirited element which is concerned with success and honour. And he thought that both eudaimeneer and virtue arise when these three parts work in harmony with each others when they are in tune and each part is performing its own particular function. However, though he doesn't include external such as wealth in his definition of eudaimeneer,

he does argue very strongly that usually eudaimeneer and virtue can only arise in the right political and educational setting, which is why he has his blueprint for an ideal state ruled by philosophers. It's a very rich theory because through the notion of harmony, he connects the notion of eudaimeneer and virtue with both beauty and mathematical proportion. It's also quite a dangerous theory in that the goal is not necessarily

to fulfil the desires we may happen to have now, but the desires we would have if we were properly educated by the philosophers. And if we obeyed the philosophers. That's right. Anthony Grayling, a philosopher who tries to make us obey him in weekly columns, how did this picture of happiness differ from that of Plato's student Aristotle? The difference, I suppose, is that Aristotle was much more interested in the seamless connection between questions of individual ethics and the kind of society in which the good life could flourish.

And so he had a much, much more practical set of concerns to look at when he tried to identify for people what it would be to be the person who achieved Eudaimenea. And the model he had in mind was that of the person who had what he described as practical wisdom. somebody who was able to identify the mean in any situation between extremes that would cause unhappiness or would be vicious in some way. And so you have a picture, a much more practical and more detailed picture in a way of what it would be like to be an individual living a life to which you dynia accrued. And he said that if you weren't able to be such a person, if you couldn't yourself exercise practical wisdom, then you should model yourself on such a person. Aristotle stressed rather more, let me see you'll have all, if I'm wrong, rather more than Plato had,

the importance of external factors like wealth. He married, as we're told, he married a wealthy woman, lived a life of certain comfort and ease, and that was part of his, that entered into his philosophy. Yes, it did, and it's created a lot of difficulty for commentators on Aristotle, really, the degree to which it's satisfactory to argue that external circumstances,

and in particular luck, because it does, might be a lucky happenstance that you were born into a rich family or met a rich woman or man for that matter whom you might marry. And can it really be a plausible feature of a good life, a good and flourishing life, even in Aristotle's sense, that it should depend so much on those sorts of circumstances? Can you tell us a bit about the philosopher Epicurus? He's associated with pleasure and luxury and good taste, and he's thought of as someone who's the father of hedonism,

and let everything go, let loose, say to yourself, drink, everything, so and so forth. Can you just place him in this argument? Well, Epicurus himself was not a person who thought that going clubbing and getting drunk and generally having what perhaps might now be regarded as a good time was likely to lead to Eudhiamenia. He took it that sitting under a tree on a sunny afternoon with your friends discussing philosophy, drinking water and eating dry bread was the very summit of happiness.

He had a very restrained idea of what pleasure is, and he thought that many of the conventional pleasures contain so much the seeds of pain in them that they very much must be avoided. So Epicurus himself wasn't an Epicurean in anything like the modern sense. But many among his disciples, and even indeed in the Roman world, for example, if you look at Cicero and others, they have a lot of critical things to say about the followers of Epicurus

precisely because they, even that early, had taken their Pecurean idea well beyond what its founder originally wanted. Simon Backburn, what do you see the problems with, the philosophical problems with hedonism are? Well, hedonism probably ought to mean the pursuit of happiness for its own sake, or the pursuit of pleasure sometimes, for its own sake. I mean, the problem with the pursuit of pleasure, I think Anthony has already indicated, namely that pleasures can be poisonous, they can be false pleasures, they can bring lack and ruin in their wake. Preasures can be cruel, like an implying serial killer could say, I get pleasure in this. Exactly, exactly, and your subjective state of taking pleasure in something may be a great shame, maybe a pity that you take pleasure in the things you do, and it may do yourself harm or others harm if you get your way.

Happiness, of course, is slightly more high-minded. Rather crudely, the stoics could be said to be opposed to, or, well, opposed to Epicurus. What did they stand for? And where did they get their power and their influence from? Well, Epicurus actually shared quite a lot with Stoicism. I mean, all the ancient schools, the Hellenistic schools, that is the later ancient world, shared, for example, a general ideal of something they called Ataraxia,

a general tranquility. You know, if you could only get yourself to be tranquil, not bother too much, then that was the beyond-end-all. And that can sound good, like Stoicism as self-command, as a sort of lofty indifference to the dreadful things that happened to you. It became a great Roman virtue, didn't it? It became a great Roman virtue. But, of course, it also, you know, looking at the flip side,

it can just look like stark insensibility. You know, you just don't care about things. So you get the Stoic, you know, if his son dies, you know, and somebody brings the news to the Stoic Sage, and the Stoic sage says, what's that to me? I did not believe that I had begat an immortal. Well, I mean, that's terrible.

You know, the man lacks ordinary human. feeling. And so what looks like self-command can easily you know, to a hostile witness would look like just apathy, a kind of sort of almost like sort of Alzheimer's, sort of just boh.

But why did it why did it, to use a common phrase, why did it catch on so much with leading Romans, most marked in the Stoic philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius in his book Meditations? Why did it appeal to them? Why did they try to carry out this philosophy.

Because it's a philosophy that helps people in war? Yes, I mean, it's not a bad thing, presumably to cultivate a certain kind of stoicism. I mean, we have the word. Angie Holmes. Surely it's important also to see Marcus Aurelius' ethical thinking in terms of his stoical framework and belief in a cosmos that is providential

and rationally coherent and rationally determined. We're all part of the greater whole, the greater cosmos. and as everything that happens to the cosmos as a whole is ultimately for the best. So everything that happens to us is ultimately for the best too, even if we can't initially perceive that. Hence your individual well-being will be best served if you strive to accept your lot rather than trying to alter it.

Providence is an important word there, yes. One important point is that the Stoics and Stoicism was, of course, the outlook of the educated people in the later classical world, especially in the Roman world, believed in social responsibility, in engagement in society, in their duties to the state and to their fellows, in ways that the cynics and the Epicureans

or the later Epicureans didn't. They were the hippies and the dropouts of their day, and for that reason, in fact, we're pretty savagely attacked by people like Cicero and Seneca. And so you do have this sense of social commitment on the part of the Stoics. They regarded themselves as being, bound in duty really to do their turn in the Senate and that kind of thing.

So it's a very natural follow-on that the Stoic principles or Stoic-like principles should have become our own. By the end of the classical world, as it were, the people that you've been very sporting to talk about so clearly and briefly, by the end of it, were the lines established about the discussion of what happiness was, had really external internal Or did new elements come in? Did Christianity for instance bring in a new element? Yes. Well, I mean, I think Christianity, in one respect, represents a return to a more platonic ideal, away from the civic sort of virtues of the Stoics and the Aristotelians even,

because in Christianity, what matters above all is your own state of grace, the state of your own soul. So you've got to struggle, you know, out of the cave, you've got to learn to see face to face, you've got to get out of the world of illusion. And that's essentially a personal project. So Christianity, I think, can be seen as, in a way, developing the, well, selfish is the wrong word, but the egoistic, the self-regarding virtues, the self-regard here means the state of your soul. It doesn't mean just you're selfish in a straightforward way. But that is an emphasis which changes things, changes everything.

Isn't it even more, that? I mean, I said it very tentatively. Is it even more that? He's actually saying happiness is somewhere else in time. It's literally off the planet. Literally off the planet, of the earth. Yes, I mean to an Aristotelian, for example, or Stoic, you know, going and sitting on a pillar in the desert,

would have seemed an absolutely incomprehensible thing to do, I think. At least that's my understanding of them. Whereas by the 4th century or 5th century AD, you're getting people who think that's just the way to get to God. And therefore to get to happiness. And therefore to get to happiness. Did Daryl Nessos bringing back humanism? Did they rediscover the body?

Angie Hobbes, did they rediscover the aristotle? sense of a fullest idea of happiness? Yes, well, the Roman Renaissance seems to have concentrated more on ideas of glory and greatness of the state rather than happiness. But in as far as there was a Greek renaissance via Erasmus and his circle, they did rediscover a Greek notion of Eudonir. And the classic text here would be Thomas Moore's Utopia. One of the characters in that says,

you're going to think this state is very strange because it's all based on a foundation of aiming for happiness, felicitas in the Latin, but it's a meaning of felicitas which, it's clear, is based on the Greek eudaimeneer. And at the end of the utopia, one of the characters says, but this is extraordinary if we follow out your prescriptions for eudaimeneer and living this communal life, we're going to have to get rid of the ideal of glory and greatness because there won't be any place for it anymore.

And it's on that sort of rather invivolent, ironical note that the utopia ends. So certainly via the Greek Renaissance, there is a strong return to platonic and Aristotelian ideals. And to take it a step further, just to take it, and continue on to integrate, and the Renaissance brings the idea that the outside world can be built for the happiness of man or woman, that you build palaces, you make paintings in order to bring greater happiness to the mind, bring greater pleasures, and that it is there. for pleasure to be made out of you,

rich enough and well off here, and all that sort of thing. Yes, indeed, because there's a more diffuse and indirect way in which the recovery, as it were, of man's embodiment in the world, man's existence in the material world, comes to seem good and valuable and appreciable again in the Renaissance period.

In two senses. One is that ideals of beauty, of physical beauty, of human beauty, of the beauty of the body, come back into focus with the art who like to concentrate on the figure, not in religious subjects so much, but certainly in their use of mythological subjects.

And also the sense of the pleasures of raiment, of food, as you say, of housing, of the way you plan a city and the way you adorn it, the way you put statues in public places so that people can enjoy the beauty of the human form. All these things are expressions of a recognition of the fact that our existence here in the material world, is something to celebrate and to enjoy and to rejoice in.

And this is a marked contrast to the austere and acetic ideals that perhaps derive from what Simon was saying there about the platonic idea. In one of Plato's dialogues, the Fiedrus, there's a rather striking image of a charioteer trying to get to heaven and steering a pair of horses, one of which wants to plunge back to the slime on Earth, and the other one which wants to get up into the Imperian where everything is pure and clean,

and that this idea of the sharp contrast between spirit and body is very much overcome in the Renaissance because they've reunited them in the way. They've said that the spirit infuses the body and the bodily life can be worthwhile. Simon Blackburn, is there a sense of regrouping in the Renaissance for a drive of which we are still part

after what constitutes the happiness we should seek or the happiness we should get? Is there an idea even then that it comes as a by-blower of something else? Well, I think by the end of the Renaissance, if you take, for example, Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, you do get the subjective turn, which we've been skirting around, I think, coming in. Could you develop that? Well, I think in Hobbs and still more so probably in Locke. Yes. I mean, both of them, especially Hobbs, is very down on the idea of a sum and bonum of a state of completeness.

Hobbes says very pithily, while we live, we have desires. And while there's desire, there's still something else to go for. There's not a completeness, there's not a state of finality. And so... So finality is not happiness in his... Well, I think he thought that in the preceding tradition there was some sort of vague vision of an ideal of harmony and everything was just so, and stasis could follow on.

There was nothing better to go for. That's the sum and bonham, the idea of perfection. And Hobbes says, no, there's no such state. Well, life is a life of desire. And desire brings in its... train, even if you satisfy it, you don't conquer it, you satisfy it. You know, it might bring fear of losing what you've got, or it brings other desires. So life suddenly becomes a restless kind of procession of desire.

And, you know, if it's your thing, do it. That's the sort of Hobbes-Lockian kind of tendency of thought. Locke says it's absurd to discuss whether there's more happiness in, you know, glory or in the monastery. people just like different things and some people need the glory in the city and the civil life and some people need wealth and some people need quiet and gardens and tranquility

it's just a subjective preference Angie briefly and then answer because I want to move on to Romatics Angie perhaps part of the story here is that there is less agreement in this period about what human nature might be now of course in antiquity different philosophers

disagreed hugely amongst themselves about what human nature consisted in. But they, by and large, seem to have agreed that there was such a thing, whether it's based on Aristotle's metaphysical biology or Plato's metaphysics of the psyche. And so the notion that Eudaimenea consists in actualising your potential as a human being

is the bedrock of their thought. And as we move away from that confidence, perhaps, in an objective notion of, a possibility of an objective, of human nature. We're taking what you call the subjective term. Yes, I think that's right. And it's certainly true that Christianity, for example,

or Christian Orthodoxy, at very least, had imposed the conception of what human nature is, what a human being is, and therefore what are human beings' duties are and what would conduce to the salvation of the soul, and that foreclosed, really, the kind of antique debate about it. And when, therefore, in the 17th

and 18th century, ethical debate revived, and it was no longer just a matter of casualistry, but again, the question of of principles that the whole problem about human nature came back into the forefront. There's a notion in the romantic, at the heart of romantic movement, that being unhappy is more important, or maybe the importance is the wrong word,

but more significant, more creative than being happy, and that happiness is rather a bourgeois, trivial thing. You were against that sort of happiness because in your unhappiness were the riches of Schubert's peace in dying of Keatsy's, half in love with Eastful death, of Coleridge's drug experiments and so and so forth. Yes, yes, the idea that the proper chap,

and certainly the romantic hero, is really unhappy, is, as you rightly say, a very important one. I think there are two versions of it. One, I think, harks back to a lost Garden of Eden. This is very... Trailing clouds of glory. Yes, exactly, and also, especially... I mean, Wordsworth and Coleridge got this from the Germans, of course.

there's a sort of sense of loss, of longing of nostalgia for some period of wholeness. Very, very dangerous idea, incidentally, because you see it resurging in Nazism. But that, I think, was there, and of course it can plug into the Christian myth. I think also then there's just a sort of elevation of the will. I mean, you're paving the way for philosophers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,

who take this notion of activity to mean that really the will is driving everything. And there's an elevation of the will. above things like reason or telos the aim of life, the reasonable life. I mean, just the brute exercise of will is... A couple of the idea of living dangerously. You're only alive if you're on the edge. Yes, exactly. Good, yes.

And of course that too, we saw some of the results of that in the 20th century. There's a very dangerous idea, I think. Andrew. Yes, I mean, one can also juxtapose that romantic, perhaps sentimentalisation of the tortured, romantic, creative hero. with an alternative view of artistic creation based on the need for an internal balance and music in your soul. I mean, I can think of a few creative geniuses

who, as far as we can tell from the outside, didn't necessarily live lives of troubled torment. Bach, maybe Jane Austen, Sophocles, Aristotle. So I think there is also an alternative tradition which says that some of the best artistic and scientific creation, comes from a state of harmony, not necessarily a state of disharmoning and dysfunction. But it's an idea that's been very substantially lost over the last two centuries, hasn't it? It's very part, even until the end of life, we have to say last century, it still seems a 20th century to me, but then there you go, that's the way it is.

Arguments that people have, you're not allowed to be happy if you're, if you're happy, you can't possibly any sort of artist. You automatically ruled out. But it has to be remembered that that concept was purely instrumental. I mean, it wasn't that the age. was to be unhappy or to feel suffering or struggling, that the point is that being in that kind of state is conducive to something else, which is the production of works that are intrinsically of great value. People who confuse, as so many do, the process with the product,

think that if they're unhappy and agonized and the lock of hair falls over the brow, that that's almost tantamount actually to doing something worthwhile. So there's a big difference between Beethoven, let's say, and his imitative. I might mention the Turner Prize in this context. Now, I want to get back to this brief, and for me, wonderfully illuminating history. I think we've got time for about one more move. But it takes us back to Plato, Andrew, so you'll be delighted about this.

It is the idea of utilitarianism, which Simon Blackburn referred to a few minutes ago. Everybody will know this quotation. The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation, which takes us back to a platonic notion. Now, how did they arrive at that, and what was the... effect of that because that goes back to Plato, but it also goes forward to the idea of engineering a society which eases into totalitarianism. So a good idea, in inverted commas, I'm risking a lot here by using that word, I know, in the 90th century becomes an evil idea, that's even worse,

in the 20th century, but it does go back to a philosophical notion in Plato. Can you just tie those three up together rather more elegantly than I did? I'm sure I can't. Well, benjamin's starting, Anthem is the founding father of classical utilitarianism, and his starting point is that each individual human being seeks their own pleasure. And he, in perhaps a not entirely Greek move, equates pleasure and happiness. He then, without particular philosophical foundation, argues that as we seek our own personal pleasure and happiness, so we're also committed to seeking the pleasure and happiness of the greatest number.

And to my mind, he never sufficiently justifies that. that. He certainly returns to the Greeks in getting a notion of happiness way back into the individual and political arena. Where he would differ from Plato is that he sees no difference between different kinds of pleasure or happiness. For him, as he famously says, quantity of pleasure being equal, Pushpin, a kind of ancient 18th century amusement arcade, Pushpin is as good as poetry. Now his student mill comes along and makes the truly platonial. move and says no, what we need is a distinction between different kinds of pleasure and happiness. The erected a hierarchy of pleasure.

Exactly so, exactly so. Bentham can be praised perhaps for his democratic anti-elitism. But Mill is very clear that again, back to Plato's views of human nature, that we have, as he puts it, higher and lower faculties in our psyche, and he believes that our reason and our imagination are simply higher human faculties than our capacity for physical pleasure. and rightly or wrongly, he puts artistic and rational kinds of happiness and pleasure above physical pleasure. He moves away from Bentham's weighing up of pleasures towards the notion. He says it's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig or a fool's satisfied. This weighing of pleasure, this weighing in measuring, come in on the night.

Come in a rummage around that for a few minutes, because it is fascinating. Do you think there are higher and lower pleasures that are going into an art gallery, and looking at paintings at the National Portrait Gallery or the National Gallery is better than going round to the cinema and seeing whatever films or Lord of the Wards. Well, yes, I mean, I think it's better, but then I have knowledge and understanding as a value. I'm not sure it's a value that derives from happiness.

I just wouldn't wish to live a life in which knowledge and understanding play the small part. Well, I know where I'm happier. One can be happier in various things. But, actually, the weighing of pleasure is something different, isn't it? Yes, it's a very, very difficult and ticklish one. And the fact is that most people who have made the effort to see the point, let's say, of opera or of painting, are in a difficult position because they say these are higher pleasures and we know because we're there. And how are they to be believed by the people who haven't followed the same route? Well, that's a very good question, and it's worth answering another time.

Thanks for Richard Anthony Grading, Simon Blackburn and Angie Hobbes. We'll be talking about WB Yates and mysticism next week. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this radio for. podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.