Happiness
Metadata
- Author: Tim Lomas
Highlights
The four well-being dimensions cover great expanses of territory. As such, discrete fields have emerged to attend to their various regions. There has traditionally been stronger emphasis on their negative territory, on curing or at least ameliorating illness. These are the prerogatives of fields such as medicine and physiotherapy for physical illness, psychiatry and psychotherapy for mental illness, social work for social illness, and religion and philosophy for spiritual illness. These fields can broadly be seen as respectively focused on discomfort, distress, strife, and anomie, though they are not only focused on these (medicine, for instance, also applies when people are not experiencing discomfort per se). These fields might ideally propel people into positive territory, but prioritize helping them reach the relative neutrality of zero (the absence of illness). This aim is reflected in Sigmund Freud’s remark that the goal of psychotherapy was mainly limited to turning “hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.”
Crucially, the absence of illness does not necessarily entail the active presence of health. A person might be relatively free of suffering, yet not thriving either. Instead, they may be languishing around zero—not ill per se, but not excelling physically, mentally, socially, or spiritually.
From the perspective of the dual continua model, mental illness and health are not mutually exclusive. Put another way, happiness is not incompatible with suffering. This is just as well, given that many thinkers and traditions view suffering as inherent to the human condition.
The distinction between mental and physical well-being, for example, is arguably an artifact of the “mind-body” dualism dominant in the West since René Descartes.9 By contrast, other cultures have made less rigid distinctions between these realms; indeed, in the West their close interaction is increasingly recognized too, as reflected in the identification of phenomena deemed psychosomatic.
Insofar as concepts like aljerre-nge can be understood and interpreted from a modern Western perspective—which is debatable—they appear to denote holistic, all-encompassing ways of perceiving all life as interconnected. Stanner also coined the term “everywhen” for this mode of understanding, embracing past, present, and future.
And from here hails the world’s oldest surviving work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, dated to around 2100 BCE. It illuminates the concerns of our forebears, revealing existential worries that remain of paramount importance—above all, how to become reconciled with mortality and find some happiness within our all-too-brief lives.
Taoism can be more recently traced to the I Ching (translated as the Book of Changes), which developed orally before crystallizing in written form around 1150 BCE. The text was formulated to help interpret divination practices, often involving the generation and analysis of hexagrams (permutations of six broken and unbroken lines). Central to the process is that hexagrams represent states of becoming rather than being. Their focal point is the “moving” lines; any that are dynamic or unstable and so herald the shift to a different hexagram.
Moreover, such states are not merely intellectualized concepts. Central to the Vedas is how to attain them. The Upanishads in particular focus on an experiential union between Ātman and Brahman. The former describes something like an inner spirit or soul, an unchanging essence beneath the contingent flux of personality. The latter is often depicted using terms such as Godhead or Ultimate Reality, usually conceived in panentheistic terms (i.e., not only immanent in the cosmos, per pantheism, but also transcending it). Their union is captured by the phrase Tat Tvam Asi (That Art Thou),
Moses ben Maimon (aka Maimonides), preeminent Jewish theologian of the Middle Ages, for instance, argued that fulfilling religious duties should result in simḥah (usually translated as gladness or joy).
Assuning lack of religion, will other tine of “work” or duty set us free? WIll work set us free?
Central to the dharma is the Four Noble Truths. First, life is pervaded by dukkha—often translated as suffering, yet perhaps better rendered as dissatisfaction (since Buddhism recognizes there are joys in life, but even these are imperfect). This is tempered by the second, however, which is that the cause of dukkha can be identified,
Aristotle undoubtedly has had the strongest influence on contemporary thought. Among his many contributions is the pivotal distinction between two forms of happiness: hedonic and eudaimonic.
reflects deeper forms of happiness arising through self-cultivation, which he defined as the “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.”19 Etymologically it refers to having a good daimōn, a guiding spirit or perhaps, from a modern perspective, one’s conscience.
The prevailing ideas on happiness in the Roman world tended to position it either as determined by fate (and hence beyond people’s control) or only amenable to influence by select people (e.g., wealthy, powerful men).
Some academic critiques and responses are so fundamental, however, that they constitute a real paradigm shift—in philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s terminology—and herald a new wave. This is so with one of the most challenging contentions faced by contemporary well-being science: that it is Western-centric, and so lacks the universal validity and scope toward which it strives.
as an international endeavor, its center of gravity has been the West and—following the Second World War—North America in particular, given the overall political, economic, military, and cultural hegemony of the United States.36 These dynamics have meant that concepts, priorities, and methods associated with US psychology have come to dominate the field. In turn, the contours of US psychology have been shaped by the predominant values and traditions of the United States. Tracing the patterns further back, the United States itself has been influenced by the historical currents mentioned above, particularly the Western lineages, from Greek philosophy and Christianity to the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
The first five forms considered here pertain primarily to feelings. By far the most widely researched form is hedonic happiness, sometimes also referred to as subjective well-being, a construct primarily developed by Ed Diener and colleagues.2 Essentially, this form is about feeling good. Yet subjective well-being is not unitary. It is usually interpreted as comprising two main aspects: affective and cognitive. The affective aspect means feeling good in life (i.e., positively valenced emotions), and the cognitive aspect involves feeling good about life (i.e., a positive appraisal of one’s existence).
Hedonic hapiness is divided into two: feeling good in life, and feeling good about life. However, feeling good about life Can be undeestood as evaluative happiness, anf thus not necessarily as part of hedonia.
Hedonic capiness then be wuabtified intw scales: positive and negstive happiness (joy/sadness).