Peace of Mind: The Battle

Can we 'choose' happiness or is it a matter of of circumstance and genes?

By PAUL BESTON 

New parents are sometimes asked whimsically what they want for their children when they grow up. The safest reply, and most common one today, is: "I just want them to be happy." Another possible reply, often unspoken but certainly part of most parents' thoughts about their children's future, might be: "I just want them to be good."

In such a way, parents routinely join an age-old debate about the human condition: Should striving for happiness be a goal in itself or does moral virtue trump personal contentment? If we're good, will happiness follow? And what does it mean to be happy, anyway?

Edel Rodriguez

In "Exploring Happiness," Sissela Bok writes that her purpose is not "to find happiness, still less to prescribe steps for others to take to achieve it, as to explore what we can learn about its nature and its role in human lives." In pursuing this more modest goal, she is amply successful: "Exploring Happiness" would do well as a small textbook for a course in the intellectual history of happiness or as a reader's guide for anyone eager to look into the subject for himself. The range of thinkers whom Ms. Bok consults is truly impressive: Socrates, Seneca, Augustine, Aquinas, Petrarch, Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Diderot, Bentham, Mill, Thoreau, Marx and many more besides. It is hard to imagine how anyone else, in fewer than 200 pages of text, could better encompass so much Western thinking about a question so important to the way we live.

One of Ms. Bok's recurring themes is the need to strike a balance between "resilience" and "empathy" in our efforts to find happiness for ourselves or to create a world in which happiness is possible for both ourselves and others. Today's self-help and positive-thinking gurus, she laments, often urge us to "choose" happiness while neglecting the moral ramifications of our choices. But as she observes, choices involve trade-offs: If we are not careful, we may preserve our happiness by increasing the unhappiness of those around us. "To avoid the self-protective drive to shut out awareness of the needs of others," she writes, "resilience must be counterbalanced by empathy, the capacity for fellow-feeling and compassion."

Ms. Bok, a moral philosopher whose previous books include "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life" (1978), does not see happiness as an end in itself, a pursuit that justifies itself when a state of happiness (in whatever form) is finally achieved (by whatever means). There is, she insists, an ethical dimension to all efforts at finding happiness or personal contentment. "Pursuits of happiness that abide by fundamental moral values," she writes, "differ crucially from those that call for deceit, violence, betrayal." It may seem an obvious point, but if happiness were an end in itself, it would excuse all sorts of behavior, including not only "deceit, violence, betrayal" but also mere selfishness or the little cruelties that can be, unfortunately, a part of everyday life.

Ms. Bok clearly stands against such forms of malicious happiness, so to speak, but this is one of the few value judgments she is willing to make in "Exploring Happiness." Rather she warns against the enduring tendency to "slip into unreflective, one-dimensional conclusions" about what constitutes happiness, citing the dangers of what literary critic I.A. Richards called "premature ultimates"—the broad generalizations that, Ms. Bok writes, "bring investigation to an end too suddenly."

Excerpt: 'Exploring Happiness'

By Sissela Bok
Yale University Press,
218 pages, $24

Click to read an excerpt from the book.

Her even-handedness is commendable, but her unwillingness to take a position—in the midst of so many varying answers to so many difficult questions—can be frustrating. For example, there are those who favor the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, which closely connects happiness with virtue. And there are those who hold, as did Kant, that virtue doesn't lead inexorably to happiness and that happiness doesn't necessarily suggest virtue. Ms. Bok presents both arguments without saying which one seems the most persuasive to her, or the most wise. Does she trust today's sometimes utopian-sounding social scientists who seem so confident that they can "measure" happiness? Does she believe, as did Freud, that human happiness is ultimately unattainable, or rather, as Bertrand Russell argued, that happiness can be "conquered" through individual effort? It is impossible to say.

Russell's claim points to the role of the human will in the quest for happiness—how much is in our control? How much can human agency achieve? To address the matter, Ms. Bok revisits the memorable correspondence between René Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher, and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia.

Descartes and the princess were close epistolary friends who decided to read together Seneca's "De Vita Beata" ("On the Happy Life"). Like Russell after him, Descartes believed that melancholy could be overcome through the efforts of the will. He formulates three rules for contentment: Follow reason in knowing what to do and not do; refuse to allow passion to overcome reason; and resist desiring things that lie beyond your reach. It sounds good, but Princess Elisabeth wasn't buying it: She protested that some people, because of circumstances or temperament, are not able to work their will to the extent that Descartes describes. Moreover, all of this willed positive thinking, she felt, would make us more prone to self-deception and weaken our efforts at virtue.

The debate between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth is timeless. By contrast, the study of the "science" of happiness, especially the neuroscience of brain chemistry, belongs distinctly to our own age. Here Ms. Bok reminds us that there really is something new under the sun: Studies of the way that areas of the brain react to different stimuli provide insights into the organic causes of consciousness and emotion. Even if no scientific approach can ever fully account for the complex states of mind and soul that human beings experience, neuroscience clearly marks an advance in our understanding. As the psychopharmacology revolution attests, brain chemistry plays a role in our sense of well- being. Princess Elisabeth would not have been surprised.

Ms. Bok also makes use of psychological studies to explore happiness. She describes what the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell called, in 1971, the Hedonic Treadmill, the idea that most people seem to achieve a balancing of emotional states, rarely getting too high or too low and rarely maintaining extremes for long. Twenty-five years later, David Lykken and Auke Tellegen proposed that we arrive at an equilibrium because we have happiness "set points" that we naturally return to. Unfortunately, they observed, some of us have more advantageous set points than others, mostly because of our genes. Later critics, armed with new genetic studies, argue that set points are not fixed and can be altered. Our genes, they maintain, do not control our reality so much as interact with it. This is a more comforting thought and probably has the benefit of being closer to the truth.

In the end, Ms. Bok believes, science, philosophy, art and personal experience all have worthwhile things to tell us about happiness. She reminds us that human beings have sought happiness in all times and circumstances, even when faced with poverty, disease and war. There is thus a great deal of wisdom to draw on.

Still, our modern fixation on happiness may be inseparable from a peculiarity of our historical circumstance: namely, our affluence. He who worries over happiness in itself has probably already secured his dinner. That's something to be happy about, if you're so inclined.

—Mr. Beston is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.