Happiness Murmur

Aristotle thought it was the goal of life. George Harrison believed it was a warm gun. The framers of the US Constitution thought it was something worth pursuing, and the large woman driving too slow in the fast lane with the bumper sticker thinks it is yelling, "Bingo!"

I'm referring to happiness. It's an elusive and very elastic word, and as the examples above show, anyone can use it any way that they want. When I first read Aristotle's deal on happiness, I more or less got the point. It was only after I'd read a bunch of other guys analyzing Aristotle's thesis that I became confused.

I Googled Aristotle this morning just to brush up, and I was confronted by a bunch of know-it-all's telling me that this is what Aristotle meant, not that, and "of course Aristotle didn't mean what we mean today," and on and on and on. Which I think is a load. When I read his discussion on happiness years ago, I thought it was a little windy, but I got the gist: people want to be happy. Happiness is not a state of being, it is an activity of the soul. There was some more stuff in there about not disgracing your ancestors, but by that point I had achieved true happiness: I'd found something else to do besides read more Aristotle.

Not that Aristotle's message isn't uplifting. Nietzsche's version of life's main pursuit (power), reads a lot more depressing than Aristotle's does. Problem is, Nietzsche's sounds more true, because happiness is such a subjective idea.

When I say, "happy," you could envision all kinds of things. Maybe it's the wife and kids. The new job. A nice car. A long vacation with a supermodel. Whatever, they are all symbols of a state of being (at the time you drive the car, sleep with the model, so forth) you could call "happiness." But the dictator has his choice words, too: torture, death, mayhem. Brutal power. And it makes him "happy."

The more I look at it, the more I think that life's pursuit is a combination of the two, with a little more of the pie belonging on power's side. It is possible to have power without happiness, but not the other way around. Though Orwell said that a boot in the face (forever) is the ultimate symbol of power, one could disagree with that. Power doesn't always have to be something evil or distasteful. Power is simply power. Power over one's life, or what we might call freedom.

It depends which person's life we're talking about, and what they perceive as happiness. Hitler's quest for happiness as an activity of the soul couldn't be further from Mother Teresa's, but at one time or another I bet they were both truly happy.