The Paradox of the Pursuit of Happiness

Wilfred M. McClay

It’s almost impossible to speak about “happiness” in a general way without sounding like a child, or a cynic, or more likely a purveyor of tired and shallow truisms. The problem is that while happiness is a subject of central importance to our existence, and a matter of irrepressibly consuming interest, many of the most reliable truths about it may easily come across as disappointingly flat and trite and commonplace. But there is one maxim that is the exception to this rule: Happiness is a matter of having the right expectations.

Because of this, ideas have everything to do with happiness. The pattern of expectations to which the pursuit of happiness conforms itself at any given time—that age’s vision of feasible felicity, so to speak, and the means one uses to reach it—is itself a product of the dominant ideas of the time in question: ideas about life, death, God, nature, causality, moral responsibility, and human possibility. In a word, what we believe about the world’s structure and meaning will determine what we think happiness is, and how we can act to gain it for ourselves. What we believe provides the basic structure of what we expect.

It was the advent of what we call “the Enlightenment” that marked a decisive break with earlier history, creating the idea of happiness that dominates our own time—an idea which envisions happiness as something that all human beings can rightly aspire to, in the here and now, as a natural expression of their natural human endowment.

By the time of the American Revolution, the “pursuit of happiness” was one of the “self-evident” truths to which Thomas Jefferson felt free to recur in writing the Declaration of Independence. There is, in a word, no more characteristically modern assumption than the belief that it lies within our power to find happiness.

Yet the story does not end there. There are immense difficulties with this modern regime of self-generated happiness. It’s a regime filled with paradox. The self-conscious pursuit of happiness often leads to un-happiness, an unhappiness that is only intensified by the perception that one’s unhappiness is entirely one’s own responsibility—precisely because we assume that happiness is, or should be, something within our power to achieve for ourselves. So the experience of being unhappy, which is bad enough in itself, is rendered even worse by the sense of failure that attends it. Not only are you unhappy, but it’s your fault that you are.

And in its most sophisticated expressions, the Enlightenment project has led to a renunciation of the very possibility of happiness, as in these cheerful words of Sigmund Freud: “The program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled.” Even on those occasions when Freud was more optimistic-sounding, his mechanistic prescriptions do little to enhance our sense of human dignity and purposefulness: “Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido.” One can be grateful Jefferson didn’t put that into the Declaration.

All of which suggests that the ancient Greeks and earliest Christians knew things about man that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them. Indeed, one might ask: Has modern man’s self-conscious pursuit of happiness made happiness that much harder to achieve?  

Wilfred M. McClay, a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum, is professor in humanities and history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This piece is adapted from his feature article on Implications, “A Short History of Happiness.”

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Character and Ethics, Faiths and Worldviews, Society, Fri 15 Dec 2006