I was flicking through a book called "The Pursuit of Unhappiness" in Blackwell's recently and a thought happened. If philosophers have been discussing a subject for two thousand and more years and still haven't reached a conclusion, then they are discussing the wrong subject. Indeed, the very subject may be a distraction and a scam to stop us looking at the really important stuff.
Happiness is one such thing. Philosophers, psychologists and even politicians have been talking about it for upwards of three thousand years and getting nowhere. Everyone thinks it is important, and no-one can describe it. In surveys, most people in most countries say they are happy. If happiness is the state of a majority of people living in England, then either life in London is very different from life in any other town, or happiness really doesn't mean much. It may have started out as a respectable idea, but ever since it took up with the utilitarians, it's been staying out late and coming home drunk, smelling of politics.
Let's be a little careful here. My Chambers tells me "happy" means: "lucky; fortunate; expressing...content; well-being; pleasure, or good; apt; felicitous; carefree; confident; mildly drunk (slang)." This is not what therapists and counsellors mean, and it is not what your manager means when she asks you if you're happy in your job.
What they mean is that you are not feeling discontent, upset and wanting to be somewhere else. Therapists and counsellors deal with people who are miserable, discontent, depressed, obsessed, angry and a hundred other negative feelings. All of them wish not to suffer the pain of those feelings, and all of them will say that either they don't want to be depressed (or whatever) all the time, or that they "want to be happy". Used in this context, "happiness" is nothing more than the absence of whatever toxic and dysfunctional feelings we want to be rid of. Your manager wants you to say you're happy because then they don't have to worry about you. You don't need a pay rise, bonus, perks, training and development, or promotion, nor are you likely to up and go leaving them with an empty position the hiring freeze won't let them fill. Your partner in a relationship that has long been more habit than passion wants you to say you're happy because then you are not going to leave or have an affair and they don't have to bother with you any more than they aren't already. Politicians want the electorate to be happy so they will be voted in again and don't have to re-build the schools, make sure the hospitals are clean and staffed, let alone mend the roads and stop companies shipping jobs overseas.
I used to think that Gilbert Ryle's definition was about right: to be happy is to be doing what you want to be doing and not wanting to be doing anything else. I've always thought that sounded slightly like the state of mind of an Englishman tending to his garden, but you have to appreciate the subtlety of that "not wanting to be doing anything else". Now I think Ryle was really talking about a particular state of mind that used to be called "being absorbed" and is more trendily called "flow". To call this loss-of-self "happiness" is concept-stretching way past breaking point.
Most philosophers have understood that if happiness is to be the desired state of human life, there's a lot at stake when you define it. Especially if you include the aspect of contentment. That's why Aristotle was canny enough to separate happiness from mere pleasure and thus be able to equate happiness with virtuous action and living. Because if happiness is the goal of human life, then it can't just be a feeling, or else it could be satisfied by taking Soma, Aldous Huxley's happy drug in Brave New World, and tolerating the most awful injustices and atrocities. Isn't it good to be happy? Not if you can happily cheat your customers. Not if you're wilfully ignorant of facts that would upset you or deluded about your chances in the world. Is it good to be miserable? As long as you make the changes in your life you need to stop the misery. Don't I want people to be happy? Not if it means that in their colossal complacency they get dumber, fatter and uglier, and make the world a less pleasant place for the rest of us. There's nothing wrong with being happy, but there's more to life than feeling content. (Remember, when the Founding Fathers talked about the Pursuit of Happiness, they meant the practice of those occupations and pastimes that you want to do, they didn't mean getting high.)
If you're still not convinced that "happiness" has turned into a scam, recall the "research" by the New Economics Foundation allegedly showing that happiness increases with salary up to about the national median wage, and doesn't improve much after that. What an astonishingly convenient piece of research that is for employers - the largest of whom is the State.
Most people would, if asked, say they were happy: it's almost rude not to. It takes a John Stuart Mill to affirm that "it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied". When I think about it, I have been neither happy nor content in my entire life. Ecstatic, transported, absorbed, lost-in-wonder, giggling-in-mischief, relieved, entranced, amazed, laughing-my-socks-off, pleased, calm, rested, joyous... a hundred positive emotions, but never "happy". Maybe people who say they are "happy" just don't have the vocabulary to name accurately what they are feeling.
And maybe philosophers talk about happiness out of habit. It is, after all, just another state of mind. It's not even clear that it is a valuable state of mind. The question that philosophers should be asking is: what value do the various states of mind have? Even self-pity has its time. You can think of your current state of mind as a some kind of reaction to your circumstances. You can let yourself be conned by New Age pseudo-psychologists into thinking that you can make your state of mind what you want it to be - so that it's your fault you're miserable. Or you can view your state of mind as a tool to help you get done what you need to do. I can't think of one thing that happiness helps me get done, but I do like that light, cheerful feeling when the air is fresh, the sky is blue, the sun is shining and I'm in the South of France with a day job to come back to at the end of the holiday.
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