Frederic Lenoir - Happiness: A Philosophers Guide

HAPPINESS: A PHILOSOPHERS JOURNEY

First published in France as Du bonheur: Un voyage philosophique
Copyright 2013 by Librairie Arthme Fayard
Translation copyright 2015 by Andrew Brown

First Melville House printing: April 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lenoir, Frdric.
[Du bonheur. English]
Happiness : a philosophers guide / Frdric Lenoir ; translated by Andrew Brown. 1st ed.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-61219-439-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-61219-441-7 (ebook)
1. Happiness. I. Title.

B187.H3L4613 2015
152.42dc23

2014040205

Design by Christopher King

v3.1

So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it.

Epicurus

For many years, Ive been planning to write a book about happiness. And for many years, Ive kept putting it off. Although the quest for happiness is probably the most widely shared thing in the world, it isnt easy to write about it. Like many people, Im irritated by the way the word is used here, there and everywhere, especially in advertising, and by the flood of books that claim to provide recipes for happiness. The question of happiness is forever being discussed: eventually it gets worn down and loses its edge. But although its become so commonplace, and seems so simple, its still an enthralling question, one that involves a whole skein of factors not easy to untangle.

This stems from the very nature of happiness: In some ways, it cant be grasped, any more than wind or water. No sooner do you think youve got hold of it than it slips

Another difficulty arises from the notably relative character of happiness: it varies with each culture and each individual, and, in every person, from one phase of life to the next. It often takes on the guise of things we dont have: for someone who is ill, happiness lies in health; for someone who is unemployed, its in work; for some single people, it lies in being a coupleand, for some married people, in being single again! These disparities are heightened by a subjective dimension: artists are happy when practicing their art, intellectuals when handling concepts, romantics when they are in love. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, shed considerable light on this point when he noted:

In this, [the individuals] psychical constitution will play a decisive part, irrespectively of the external circumstances. The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships with other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be more self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes; the man of action will never give up on the external world on which he can try out his strength.

This is one of the reasons why there is no recipe for happiness that would work for everybody.

So is all philosophical reflection on happiness futile? In my view, not at all. However interesting it may be to emphasize and understand the elusive, relative and subjective character of happiness, this is not the end of the story. The laws of life and the way human beings function also have a major impact on happiness, and these can be grasped both through traditional philosophical reflection and through several scientific approaches: psychology, sociology, biology and the cognitive sciences. And if, in the twenty-first century, philosophers have anything new to tell us about the subject that hasnt already been said by the thinkers of the past, this will probably be the result of their drawing on the findings of contemporary science. They will also benefit from bringing together different types of knowledge (even the most ancient), since these days, fortunately, we have access to the thoughts of the sages of all the great cultures of the world. Pythagoras, the Buddha and Confucius would have been able to hold a dialogue with each other, as they were probably contemporariesbut geographical and linguistic barriers would have rendered any such encounter highly unlikely. However, in our day, such an encounter can indeed take place, as we can compare and contrast those of their texts that have been handed down to posterity. And we can make the most of this opportunity.

Because the ancients were convinced of the random and, in the final analysis, fundamentally unjust character of happiness, the various etymologies of the word almost always invoke a notion of luck or favorable destiny. In Greek, the word for happiness, eudaimonia, can be taken to mean having a good daimon. These days, we would say having a guardian angel, or being born under a lucky star. In French, bonheur comes from the Latin bonum augurium: good omen or good fortune. In English, happiness comes from the Icelandic root happ, luck or chance, and there is indeed a large element of luck in being happy, if only because happiness is, as we shall see, to a large degree based on our sensibility, on our biological inheritance, on the family and social environment in which we were born and grew up, on the surroundings in which we develop and on the encounters that mark our lives.

If this is so, if we are inclined by our nature or fate to be happy or unhappy, can thinking about happiness help us to be any happier? I believe so. Experience, supported by several scientific studies, shows that we also bear a certain responsibility for being (or not being) happy. Happiness is out of our control and yet depends on us.

So it is a philosophical journey, in this broader sense, that I would like to propose to the reader. There is nothing linear about the route, which wont be following the chronological order of the authors lives or the emergence of concepts: this would be conventional and boring. It is, instead, a ramble, the most exciting imaginable, with many questions and concrete examples on the way. On this journey, the reader will encounter the analyses of various psychologists as well as sciences latest contributions. It is, above all, a journey in which, through questions and answers, drawing on various rules for living and spiritual exercises, the reader will be walking alongside those giants of the pastfrom the Buddha to Schopenhauer, via Aristotle, Chuang Tzu, Epicurus, Epictetus, Montaigne and Spinozawho have contributed to the eternal investigation into, and practice of, the happy life.

Before embarking on this philosophical journey, I would like to dwell for a while longer on the question of happiness as it arises today. It is evident, and at first sight quite astonishing, that there is a striking contrast between the popular appetite for such questionswidely echoed in the mediaand a lack of interest, and even a certain disdain for them, among a large proportion of intellectuals and academics. Robert Misrahi, one of the best commentators on Spinoza, and the author of a fine, personal work on happiness, ponders it in these terms:

These days we are witnessing a really strange paradox. Even though, in France and throughout the world, everyone aspires to a concrete happiness that can assume myriad forms, philosophy devotes itself to formal studies on language and knowledge, unless, deigning to come down to more everyday issues, it focuses on the tragic sense of life.