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Happiness

Deconstructing Happiness

Abdullah Rayhan breaks down ‘happiness’ with Boethius, Kierkegaard & Montaigne.

“Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?
This happiness feels foreign to me.
I am accustomed to despair.”
Forough Farrokhzad

We seek psychotherapy to deal with distress, sadness, depression, and psychological dimensions that are beyond our reach. Even after going through counselling we are seldom left with the satisfaction we deeply crave. This is where philosophy comes in.

To Socrates, philosophy was basically about finding the best way to live a life. He watched how life functions within society and examined the influences that shape it. Ever since his time, philosophers have continued to develop myriad further perspectives on human existence, from stoicism to romanticism, positivism, utilitarianism, existentialism, Hegelian, Kantian, you name it. But apart from some insights into the nature of existence, what help do they offer us? Existential philosophy will constantly remind you of life’s futility; systems of ethics will keep painting idealistic portraits all to no avail. At the end of the day, they do not necessarily help you deal with the emotional struggles drowning your heart within a blurry tumult.

Fortunately, practical applications of philosophy do exist. Consider Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480-524CE). Unjustly thrown into prison, awaiting execution, he wrote a classic: On the Consolation of Philosophy. Last year, when I was at my lowest, estranged from everything I adored, all prospects of happiness ruined, abandoned to face monstrous adversities with a heavy bleeding heart, I found Boethius consoling.

Boethius appearing inside a letter at the beginning of his book The Consolations of Philosophy, anonymous, c.1385

Boethius

There are other sources of consolation available in philosophy. Camus or Sartre may comfort you with their assurances that you can construct meaning by your own efforts, saying that as your life has no inherent meaning, you are free to give it meaning yourself in any way that you like. Jeremy Bentham will tell you how to establish collective contentment. Kant will give you formulas to maintain peace. But few of them give a clear picture of what happiness essentially is. This makes Boethius a rarity. He doesn’t adhere to any false hopes, he rejects all things that are constructed, yet, through his transparent honesty, he shows a path that can lead toward organic satisfaction. Not laced with any grand promises of universal fulfillment, just simple reasoning advocating for individual contentment.

Boethius basically invites us to contemplate the nature of happiness. He directly questions the idea of happiness we so intimately endorse. Boethius asks you:

“Do you really hold dear that kind of happiness which is destined to pass away? Do you really value the presence of Fortune when you cannot trust her [Fortune] to stay and when her departure will plunge you into sorrow? And if it is impossible to keep her at will and if her flight exposes men to ruin, what else is such a fleeting thing except a warning of coming disaster?” (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, Prose 4)

We consider ourselves lucky when we get our desired happiness. But, ‘being fortunate’ cannot be the standard that constructs happiness. In Boethius’ words, “happiness can’t consist in things governed by chance” mainly because there’s no guarantee it will last. He argues that nothing that is ephemeral, transient, and temporary can be of any value in terms of happiness as when that happiness essentially goes away, it brings in a heap of sorrow that is sometimes too much to bear. In this way, fortune’s smile is “a warning of coming disaster.” Thus, happiness brought by luck is not the blessing it appears to be.

He further asks if something temporary can really be claimed as one’s own. Boethius’s voice renders one mute when he states, “I can say with confidence that if the things whose loss you are bemoaning were truly your own, you could never have lost them.”

A significant portion of Boethius’s argument is about the transience of happiness. If happiness lies in what’s temporary, then isn’t misery temporary as well? Boethius puts this with clarity and force.: “If you do not consider that you have been lucky because your onetime reasons for rejoicing have passed away, you cannot now think of yourself as in misery, because the very things that seem miserable are also passing away.”

Boethius inspires you to wonder about the nature of misery. We are miserable, sad, melancholic usually because we had a taste of happiness in the past, which is missing at the moment. This absence is what is causing our misery. Had we not had that happiness before, we wouldn’t have the misery that’s choking our heart with a suffocating grip. This is the reason Boethius called happiness “a warning of coming disaster.”

Think about it. Someone else currently living a hard life similar to yours may not be experiencing similar misery as you because they haven’t had the past happiness you’ve had, and so they do not miss it. Thus, neither happiness nor misery operate according to any strict blueprint; rather they are formed by one’s own experience and are interdependent. Boethius puts it very eloquently saying, “There is something in the case of each of us that escapes the notice of the man who has not experienced it, but causes horror to the man who has […] Nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.” We lose our ability to “bear it (despair) with equanimity” because of our past interactions with pleasant experiences.

Perhaps you would relate to Boethius in terms of misery though not in an entirely literal sense. Boethius had everything. A beautiful wife, two affectionate children, popularity, respect, authority, and enough money to live without ever worrying. Yet, because of a false accusation, he was suddenly deprived of it all and was imprisoned. His happy life became a dark pit of despair. Maybe your misery too is born because of its contrast to the time when you were happy. Now think about it for a moment. Initially, Boethius was devastated in his cell because he previously had a satisfying life. Had he previously lived like a homeless person with nothing of his own, the confined space of that very cell might have appeared tolerable because of the roof over the head and chunks of food on the plate no matter how dim and damp the dark roof, or how stale the stenching food. It shows how subjective the texture of happiness is.

Boethius deconstructs the common perception of happiness, breaking it down to a rather ‘mundane’ prospect of life, contrary to our belief of it being a significant one. He believes our idea of happiness itself is laced with misery. He proclaims, “how miserable the happiness of human life is; it does not remain long with those who are patient, and doesn’t satisfy those who are troubled.”

So, if happiness indeed is of the nature that inevitably leaves one unsatisfied, then does happiness deserve to be rated so highly? Boethius disagrees. He presents a compelling argument for this, saying, “If happiness is the highest good of rational nature and anything that can be taken away is not the highest good – since it is surpassed by what can’t be taken away – then Fortune by her very mutability can’t hope to lead to happiness.” It is the unreliability of our perceived idea of happiness that makes it a futile hope with little to no value.

So, if happiness is something that is transient, unreliable, and can never offer the contentment it promises, then is happiness really something to chase after? “Happiness which depends on chance comes to an end with the death of the body” (Boethius). Thus, to cling on to happiness is to cling on to a slippery rope dangling above an abyss. You cannot do anything to make this notion of happiness fruitful in the sense you believe it to be. Boethius thinks it’s foolish to attempt to make this ineffective happiness endure and persist. He words it differently saying, “what an obvious mistake to make – to think that anything can be enhanced by decoration that does not belong to it.” Thus, again, the problem lies with the way we shape the notion of happiness.

Most people will tell you that the best formula for happiness is a combination of romantic love and successful career. But is it really true? If you have understood Boethius, you probably realize that these temporary agents (romantic partner and career) cannot make you content for long. Something not entirely your own cannot give you that stable contentment you crave.

Kierkegaard by Athamos Stradis

Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Denmark’s greatest philosopher, was an early precursor of existentialism. Though his most direct statement about happiness is a bit wordy, it has a touch of grim humour:

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both.” (from Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard)

Anyway, you get the idea. Kierkegaard and Boethius clearly intersect at certain points. Happiness obtained through reliance on factors external to ourselves will never be permanent or make one content. Again there is the argument that we must base our happiness on resources within us, and Kierkegaard contends that for this reason we cannot pursue it too directly. He says, “the door of happiness opens inward, so one should keep aside a little to open it: if one pushes, they close it more and more.” One should not use any external force to influence happiness, or as Kierkegaard puts it, the door of happiness will “close more and more.”

Kierkegaard reaches such a conclusion because he too believed happiness as we usually understand it is transient and that this can be a cause of despair. Boethius wittily points out that when we don’t have happiness, we strive and struggle to attain it – and then, once we have attained it, we become anxious to preserve it because no matter how much we enjoy happiness, at the back of our mind we remain ever-aware of its temporary and fragile nature. This is why Kierkegaard says all our efforts at happiness are ultimately doomed to lead to regret.

Montaigne by anonymous c.1578

Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) skewers this human tendency more pithily: “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” In other words, as being in happiness always contains the risk of losing the happiness, this fear actually prevents one from ever fully attaining that state of mind. Montaigne is widely regarded as the inventor of the essay. The word comes from the French word essayer, meaning ‘to try’ or ‘to attempt’. His short and engaging pieces of writing on different philosophical subjects are ‘attempts’ to clarify them rather than dogmatic statements of theory. His book collecting them is simply called Essays (Essais) and again we find similar ideas on obtaining true contentment by relying on our own internal resources. Montaigne closely focuses on the nuanced foundation of, as he sees it, true happiness. He concedes that social and material and even metaphysical attainments can make us happy, but not genuinely as we want it to be. He suggests:

“We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can, but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop wholly our own.”
(Montaigne’s Essais, Book 1, Chap. 39: ‘On Solitude’)

So like Boethius, Montaigne recommends not relying for our happiness on anything that itself may be impermanent. Rather he tells us to ‘reserve a back shop’. This ‘back shop’ is an inner sanctum, some profound part of ourselves that remains untouched by the outer world, free from all kinds of external interference. He calls this back shop a space “wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.”

Kierkegaard too advocates for a contentment that arises from within rather than from external influences whose essential nature is transient. Kierkegaard’s view is that silence, solitude, and introspection are embedded within us, and can help us reach that contentment we idealize as happiness. He perceived all kinds of fleeting satisfactions as becoming reasons for eventual dissatisfaction and advises us to focus on those good things that remain untainted for eternity, like intellect and truth.

Boethius, Kierkegaard and Montaigne all agree that inner contentment is better than the temporary ecstatic sense of euphoria that external good fortune brings. Boethius advocates for this internal stability with the best wording:

“If you are in possession of yourself you will possess something you would never wish to lose and something Fortune could never take away.”

This internal stability, according to Boethius, comes from one’s power of reasoning, because this alone has the ability to make one indifferent to their own fate. Intellect can make one recognize that there cannot be any prospect of contentment in things that are unstable, and everything that fortune brings is laced with this toxic instability. By fortune, Boethius does not mean a sudden stroke of good luck that solves all of our problems, but rather everything good that happens to us without our own effort, whether it’s a small gift from a loved one, or the smile of a baby. These make us happy, yet these are external forces. Fate intervenes in our life, leaving us with little to no control over our own selves. We can’t prevent a baby from smiling, and we won’t go out of our way to stop a loved one from offering us the flowers in which they have invested so much thought, but when babies smile at us no longer (perhaps because our face has lost its charm), or when no one is left to offer us even a single blossom, this is when we are sure to experience a desolation that is enough to break our already shattered heart. Boethius asks us to foresee all this with clarity and courage, then use our intellect to locate what’s unstable and help us grip onto only what’s inherently ours.

Across the thirteen centuries that separate them, three very different philosophers from very different intellectual traditions express overlapping insights about happiness and unhappiness. Each comes down ultimately to the notion that the reason we are not happy isn’t because we aren’t constantly chasing happiness but rather because we have a mistaken conception of what happiness is. Happiness is not the greatest good, nor is it anything to die for. It is, as clichéd as it may sound, something present within all of us. All one has to do to access it is have an open mind and reach within oneself with honesty. This being so, one doesn’t have to ‘imagine’ Sisyphus happy; rather Sisyphus is ‘happy’ for real and for eternity.

Abdullah Rayhan is a lecturer of English Literature based in Bangladesh.