Q: Is happiness important?

Depends what you mean by

"happiness"
Susan Dwyer
Teaches Philosophy, University of Maryland

People regularly report caring about happiness mostly their own and
often that of their children, spouses and friends. But the fact that
happiness matters to the average person does not settle the question of
whether happiness is important. Trivially, if a person cares about
happiness, then it is important for him. But is there a more substantive
story to be told about the importance of happiness generally?
If there is, it will depend upon what happiness is, where this is not the
same as what things cause happiness. This distinction aligns with a
disciplinary split in contemporary happiness research. Psychologists, who
want to measure happiness in order to test the efficacy of various
interventions designed to increase or sustain happiness, typically stipulate
that happiness is something they call subjective well-being, and then
head off into their labs or into the field, surveys in hand, to discover how
subjects self-reported feelings vary by time of day and on the basis of the
activities in which they engage, for example. Philosophers, by contrast,
continue to argue about what happiness itself consists in.
Two long-standing and familiar philosophical accounts of what happiness is
are hedonism and the life satisfaction view. The former holds that
happiness just is the experience of pleasure; it takes happiness to be a
particular kind of psychological state that has a distinctive feel, or
phenomenology. The latter holds that a person is happy just in case she
makes a particular judgment about how her life is going (well or not-so-

well) relative to other things she cares about, for example, social status or
wealth.
Each of these views has the singular attraction of making an assessment
of ones happiness rather easy: I need only introspect to see how I am
feeling; I need only do a quick inventory of my lifestyle, say. But notice
that this kind of relativity Im happy if I feel I am or positively assess my
life renders happiness utterly unimportant in the big scheme of things.
How any particular human feels or assesses her life is of no general
significance whatsoever.
Now, some people might be claim to be untroubled by this result. But as
Daniel Haybron has persuasively argued, when we wish happiness for our
children (in particular) we wish for them something more something
deeper than that they will, on most days feel pleasure or feel good about
their lives. (See The Pursuit of Unhappiness, Oxford University Press,
2008.)
Haybrons heftier account of happiness what he calls the emotional state
theory holds that happiness refers to a persons overall emotional
condition. A persons emotional condition is more than simply how she
feels at any given time, it has to do with how she is, in general, likely to
respond emotionally to the world, to others, and to her life. On this view,
roughly, a person is happy if she endorses her life, if she is meaningfully
engaged in activities and relationships, and, if she is attuned, that is, feels
at home in her life and in the world.
Haybrons view of happiness is one, I think, that warrants the claim that
happiness is important. Clearly, it is an improvement over both hedonism
and the life satisfaction view, since it does not reducing happiness to
contingent, idiosyncratic feelings and it does make an assessment of ones
happiness dependent on something else that one cares about. But more
than this, the emotional state view articulates a conception of happiness
that has to with the whole person not just with her psychology. What we
do, how we are have as much, if not more, to do with a happiness that
matters than how we feel.

In this respect, Haybrons view hews closer to an ancient idea of

happiness. And, no, I do not mean Aristotles notion of eudaimonia
(typically translated as flourishing) developed in his Nichomachean
Ethics. Rather, I have in mind the notion of samadhi (bliss) found, among
other places, in the Bhagavad Gita.
T
he Gita essentially a dialogue between the warrior, Arjuna, and his
(Divine) charioteer, Krishna outlines an entire philosophy of life, informed
by the teachings of the Upanishads and by the metaphysics of the
classical Indian school of Philosophy known as Samkhya. The point of the
Gita is to explain the most fundamental source of human suffering and to
offer advice about how to escape from such suffering and thereby
reachsamadhi.
Of necessity, Ill be brief, but I hope not too misleading, here. According to
the Gita, the primary cause of our suffering is our ignorance (avidya) of
our true nature, which is pure consciousness. Human beings mistakenly
identify with their desiring selves. Acting from this moral-psychological site
we are ensnared in cycles of wanting, temporary satisfaction, often
disappointment, and typically, endless craving. Liberation from this
ensnarement is possible by resolutely acting in accordance with ones
duties without attachment to the results of our actions. The more attached
to the results of our actions we are, the more we fuel our motivation for
particular outcomes and achievements, the farther we keep ourselves
from true happiness.
In Chapter 18 of the Gita, Krishna distinguishes between three types of
happiness, each of which corresponds to one of the three gunas (modes of
physical substance). We experience tamasic happiness when we are
slothful and passive. We experience rajasic happiness when we are
actively engaged in satisfying our desires acquiring things, achieving
social status and wealth, for example. And we are capable of being sattvically happy if we acknowledge that our True Self is not our contingent ego,
enmeshed in the nexus of desire, but instead pure consciousness.
In this all too brief description of the notion of happiness developed in
theGita, I have emphasized being happy over experiencing

happiness. Samadhi freedom from suffering is not a mere feeling. It is a

type of existence, and perhaps the highest (best?) kind of existence
available to creatures like us.