Download Stuart Low Trust Philosophy Forum: Philosophy and Happiness

Stuart Low Trust Philosophy Forum: Philosophy and Happiness
Part I: What Is Philosophy?
We began by reminding ourselves of what philosophy is. For more on this see the notes on Session 1
that are online, on the philosophy forum website here: http://www.slt.org.uk/philosophy-forum/. I
won’t repeat what’s said there about the kinds of questions that philosophy asks—have a look at
that handout if you can.
The word ‘philosophy’ comes from the ancient Greek word ‘philosophia’, which means ‘lover of
wisdom’. So how did the ancient Greeks think wisdom could be achieved?
Many of the great ancient Greek philosophers can be seen in a fresco by the artist Raphael called
“The School of Athens”, a huge picture painted onto the wall of a room in the Vatican (the Pope’s
residence in Rome) about 500 years ago, in 1510. Most of the people in the picture lived in Greece
around 2,500 years ago. If you didn’t get a copy in the session you can have a look at that it here:
http://www.ancientsites.com/aw/Article/813954.
The great father of philosophy in ancient Greece was Socrates. He’s pictured in “The School of
Athens”: he’s a little to the left of centre in a green/yellow tunic, with brown receding hair and a
beard. He looks to the left of the painting and is having an animated conversation with a few other
people. Picturing him having a conversation was no accident on Raphael’s part: Socrates never wrote
philosophy down. Instead, he believed that wisdom, insofar as it could be achieved, had to be done
through conversation or dialogue. Philosophers discussed fundamental and abstract questions by
giving each other arguments for their conclusions, and attempted to achieve wisdom through
reasoned dialogue. That is the model that we have taken in these sessions: they’re an interactive
exchange of opinions and reasons designed for us to learn from one another. For more on Socrates
look at the Session 1 notes.
At the end of the session I read from a recent article by a Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge (Jane
Heal) who is writing now, to show that this ancient conception of philosophy still survives today.
Heal wrote:
There is (or may be) such a thing as being wise. Being wise is a matter of having a good (or the right, or some
admirable) stance to the world, such that one apprehends, feels, acts in ways that are good (or right, or somehow
admirable). In this sense of “wise,” everyone is or ought to be a lover of wisdom. But philosophers (in our
tradition) are lovers of wisdom in the more specialised sense that they are in the business of pursuing wisdom by
1
considering discursively what it is and how to achieve it. Philosophers are in the business of laying these things
out in words and debating them.
The session this week was spent talking about happiness as philosophers, and bore that model of
philosophy in mind.
Now look back the centre of the “School of Athens”. There are two figures right in the middle of it
all. On the left is Plato, on the right is Aristotle. These are the two great figures in ancient
philosophy. If you look carefully at the book in Aristotle’s hands you can see some of the title. The
full title is “Nicomachean Ethics”, and it was written about 2,400 years ago. The end of the session
was taken up with a discussion of what Aristotle said about happiness in that book.
Part II: What is Happiness?
Before we got to Aristotle, we spoke about two more recent philosophers: Jeremy Bentham (1748–
1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). The first discussion question was: “Is happiness the same
thing as pleasure?”
Jeremy Bentham was someone who thought that happiness was pleasure: it was no more or less
than a feeling. He wrote that pleasure and pain “govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think”.
John Stuart Mill thought that happiness was pleasure, but thought that pleasure itself was not just
one simple thing: it could be divided into different types, where some types were more important
for happiness than others. For example, the pleasure that comes from friendship is not the same
kind of pleasure that comes from being tickled—the pleasure of friendship is not just more of the
same thing as the feeling you get from being tickled. Mill’s famous saying was "it is better to be a
human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied".
What he meant was that activities bring not just different amounts of pleasure, but different types,
and that the better types (what he called the “noble” pleasures—those that a human being could
have but a pig couldn’t) were more important for happiness. The kind of pleasure you got, and
therefore the happiness you got, couldn’t be separated from the nobility of the activity from which
the pleasure was extracted: so if you wanted to be happy, you should pursue more noble activities. I
leave it to you to decide what these might be.
One interesting side-issue that arose during discussion of this was what is sometimes called the
‘Paradox of Hedonism’. The ‘paradox’ is supposedly that the more you aim for pleasure the harder it
is to get. For example, suppose you’re looking to get more pleasure in your life, and decide to get it
by taking up a new hobby. So you decide to come to a philosophy group on Sunday afternoons, and
2
every time you’re deciding whether to speak you ask yourself “Would I get more pleasure if I
speak?” Or every time someone else spoke you thought “Did that give me pleasure?” If you went
about it that way, you probably wouldn’t get much pleasure at all. The right way to go about it is to
get interested in the discussion for its own sake. If you do that then you’ll get pleasure as a side
effect—but not if you aim for it directly.
Another question was on pleasure and ethics. A couple of people thought that you would get more
happiness out of doing things that you believed in, even if they were unpleasant—and the example
used was that those fighting the Nazis. It was pretty horrible doing it, but it might be said that it gave
you a kind of happiness. That led us on to the next question for discussion: “Do you think a really
nasty person could be happy?”
Part III: Aristotle
Aristotle was one philosopher who thought that in order to be happy you had to be good. His
discussion in the Nicomachean ethics began with the question of what made a good person. He
thought that to find out what made anything good you had to begin with a different question: what
is it for? Once you figure that out, you ask yourself what it would take to do that well. For example,
what makes a good knife? First ask what it’s for – and of course it’s for cutting. What do you need to
cut things well? You need to be sharp. So a good knife is a sharp knife.
Aristotle thought the same approach would work for people. So if you wanted to find out what a
good person was you had to begin by figuring out what we were for. That sounds like a very strange
question to modern ears, and in many ways it is. But Aristotle answered it like this. We couldn’t just
be for multiplying, or growing: plants and animals do those things too. What’s distinctive about us?
First, it’s our capacity to think and reason. But not only can we think about things, but we can decide
our actions based on what we think. That’s what’s distinctive about us. So a good person would be
somebody who did that well: in other words, someone who excelled at living and acting in
accordance with their reason. And that, thought Aristotle, was what he called (in Greek)
‘eudaimonia’. Eudaimonia literally means ‘well spirit’—and the modern English translation for that
word is ‘happiness’. So a good person was also a happy one.
This all sounds, as someone in the group said, a bit pie-in-the-sky. A lot of the plausibility of the final
theory comes from the detail, which it’s impossible to go into here. Aristotle spent a great part of
the book working out in detail what it was to think and act well, and that detail has a lot of power.
But let me say three things in favour of Aristotle’s broad approach—you can make your own minds
up as to whether it is plausible.
3
First, Aristotle’s ideas are actually used in modern cognitive behavioural therapy. That form of
therapy is the most popular on the NHS. One way in which practical reasoning (that is, reasoning
about how to act) can go wrong, Aristotle thought, is when you are weak-willed, or find yourself
having thoughts controlling your actions that you don’t endorse. For example, you know you should
give up smoking and are trying really hard, but your will gives in and you have a cigarette anyway.
Internal conflict in your reasoning is one way of thought going wrong that can lead to unhappiness,
and cognitive behavioural therapy attempts to teach people how to spot and then correct that. To
me it’s amazing that the most successful form of therapy around draws on ideas that are 2,400 years
old.
Second, on Aristotle’s view happiness is not something you can define without thinking about
human beings generally: about what we are, what we are for, and what it’s like for the lives of
creatures like us to go well. That has sounded quite plausible to some people: to merely label
happiness as ‘pleasure’ is too simplistic.
Finally, on Bentham’s definition of happiness anyone can be happy, because anyone can feel
pleasure—pleasure could come, for example, from being tickled. For Aristotle, happiness is not like
pleasure, because not just anyone can have it. Happiness, for Aristotle, is not a feeling, but a state of
being. It is therefore something that emerges from who you are. The only way to get to the state of
being where you become happy is through hard work and upbringing. Excelling and practical
reasoning requires training and habit; it needs particular patterns of thought and emotion. On
Aristotle’s definition, happiness is therefore something that’s very hard to get. But perhaps that
makes his definition all the more plausible…
4