Only happiness matters, or eudaemonia with constraints
Only happiness matters. Not the legacy. When people discover your legacy, you’ll be dead. Like Kafka. Or Bach, or Lovecraft, or Emily Dickinson (in Hades, Achilles didn’t care about his immortal glory). Or you’ll be 60 years old, like Rothko. But in order to live happily, right here and right now, the thought of leaving a legacy brings peace and a sense of fulfillment. It’s not serving others that matters, but the sense of meaning and purpose that brings satisfaction and therefore happiness. If Mahatma Gandhi hadn’t enjoyed what he was doing, he would have quit fast.
In a well-balanced soul, it’s all aligned.
But happiness is a confusing word. The Greeks were more accurate in calling it eudaimonia, which is sometimes translated as flourishing.
Man is happy when he flourishes. What is flourishing? It is becoming everything a man can become.
No wonder the Greeks had only a vague semantic demarcation between words such as virtue, excellence, flourishing, and eudaimonia (happiness). See the Nicomachean confusion: What is virtue? What makes one happy. What is happiness? Living in accordance with virtue, and so on. Man is happy when he becomes what he can become. And since human nature does not differ greatly across most individuals, this means becoming excellent in universal human virtues: being courageous and just, wise and moderate, great-souled, and so on. It also means becoming what a particular individual can become. The latter part differs across individuals.
A few more peculiarities of the Greeks (Aristotle):
They considered happiness an activity, not a state of mind. In modern language, we would call it eudaimonic happiness, not hedonistic happiness.
By placing happiness at the center of the question, they deprioritized things that became more common in later ethical systems: duty, moral rules, and so on.
***
Attaining happiness is a tough quest.
I think life is probably best conceptualized as an open-world quest. The goal is to attain happiness. You don’t choose the character you are playing for. The character comes with constraints: personality traits and physical appearance. What we might call someone’s nature. And that is on top of universal human nature which is even less configurable. Second, there is no rulebook. The rules have to be figured out along the way. This is the basic gameplay.
First of all, there are constraints embedded in the universal human form. One does not have much control over whether he needs food, sleep, whom he finds attractive, and so on. One cannot spontaneously decide that starting from tomorrow he will adopt the lifestyle of a shrimp or a cactus and become perfectly happy.
For instance, Alasdair MacIntyre described the conditions for human happiness in the following way: humans are teleological, self-referential, other-directed, and so on.
The second constraint is physical appearance. One may be born ugly (like the dwarf Alberich, rejected by the Rhinemaidens), or with one arm, maybe too tall or too short, or with a low IQ. I was born with bad skin, bad hair, and a weirdly shaped nose, and I have to live with it.
I am reading Adolescence by Leo Tolstoy now. In its descriptions of social life in 19th-century Russia, it contains many portrayals of women of high society. Below is a description of a girl named Sonechka:
‘She was a very pretty brunette, with lively black eyes, with curly hair falling onto her bare little shoulders, and with a very sweet smile.’ ‘She was wearing a little pink dress with short sleeves, from which her white round arms could be seen’. ‘It seemed to me that nothing better than she could exist in the world’. ‘I was madly in love with her.’
Have you noticed? Sonechka is considered perfect because she was born with pretty eyes, curly hair, and slim shoulders. By contrast, see the description of the Princesses Kornakov:
‘The Princesses Kornakov were very ugly: one had a long face with large teeth and tiny eyes, the other a round face with a flattened nose and thick lips.’ ‘They were both so unattractive that I could not understand how anyone could take pleasure in dancing with them’. ‘It seemed strange to me that they could laugh and be pleased with themselves.’
Imagine how much easier the path to wealth and power in 19th-century Russia would be for Sonechka than for the Princesses Kornakov.
The third constraint is one’s personality. One has as little control over his inherited personality traits as over his physical appearance. You may be born normal, or you may be born weird and autistic (like me), and prone to depression. You may be cheerful and jolly, and happy merely existing. Or you may be born serious and intense, and happy only while doing something.
You have to figure out how to achieve the goal of eudaemonia with the particular character you are given.
You have to try and test things, and figure out what works.
It’s terribly hard. It often clashes with mainstream opinions. But the mainstream reflects average human traits. If you are not average at some trait, mainstream advice doesn’t work. That’s why becoming who you are requires the courage to go against the mainstream.
***
I often think about my parents – their idiosyncratic character traits, their fates, and their choices – and how much these contributed to their contentment with life.
My father is, by nature, very serious, disagreeable, and intense. He is also extremely fun, original, persistent, and intelligent. He succeeded in business, in a narrow niche that, in 1990s Russia, he essentially created himself (a ‘blue ocean’ strategy: if competition exists, discover a new field where it doesn’t). Entrepreneurship in a volatile environment was well suited to his creative thinking and his persistent, disagreeable nature. Today, he seems content with his life. But I can easily see how he might have failed in a bunch of other fields: as a kindergarten teacher or a social worker, a politician or a counselor, a diplomat or an HR manager. Instead, he found an activity suited to his idiosyncratic nature – and it laid a path to eudaimonia for him.
An opposite example is my mother. She is intelligent but not very outgoing, agentic, or open to new experiences. She probably has mild autism too. Her whole life, she worked as a bookkeeper. By retirement, she had almost no friends, interests, or hobbies. Needless to say, she does not seem happy or flourishing. I think she never discovered what might have brought fulfillment to an introverted, dutiful woman (going to academia? starting a book club? contributing to the public life of the city?) and instead simply went with the assumption that one’s professional job and private family life must be enough. It’s not. What works for the average person may not work for a particular individual.
Attaining eudaimonia is each person’s own responsibility. No one else will solve this question for you; they are busy with their own. It is one’s responsibility to figure out what brings happiness and joy, given the particular conditions one has been given – one’s character, appearance, predispositions, and circumstances.
The method is the following: to experiment and observe, to collect empirical data, find patterns, apply what is learnt, and repeat. In short:
As for me, based on simple empirical observations, I was probably most happy in the years 2020–2022, when I was working from home during COVID and occupying myself with reading, thinking, and doing creative projects (writing this blog, running a page about modern art). Before 2020, I was mostly busy starting a corporate career and working in an office with 4HL – not happy. After that, I was very busy with living rather than thinking or doing (Vita Activa). That period was adventurous and eventful, but not happy. The conclusions are fairly straightforward: what probably makes me most happy is the life of the mind, combined with creative endeavors and a lifestyle or environment that enables both.
I believe everyone is capable of similar experimentation and reflection.
If one’s personality deviates from what is considered the norm, or if one’s appearance does not conform to standards of beauty, then the task is to test, try, and observe what works, until happiness is figured out.
It is not an easy task.
It requires knowing yourself. The Socratic ‘Know thyself’. Through persistent introspection and self-reflection.
It requires being true to oneself. Following one’s daimon, the inner voice, and living authentically in accordance with the voice of one’s Dasein.
It is about the Nietzschean idea of becoming who you are. Realizing your nature and converting the space of potentiality into the space of actuality (Maslow’s self-actualization).
***
Happiness is the main goal.
The only system of ethics that accounts for the above is virtue ethics. It is about activities aimed at attaining virtue, or excellence, and through it – happiness.
It can be nothing else but virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics is simple. Strive for happiness. Strive for the best. The best can be defined in whatever way you choose. You can reconsider it later. I choose beauty, love, freedom, and truth. Someone else may choose justice. Other commonly mentioned virtues include courage, wisdom, and so on.
Deontological rules do not work because they apply the same standard to all people, regardless of individual nature. Live according to Kant’s categorical imperative: act only according to what you would want to become a universal rule of conduct.
But what happens when, in order to attain flourishing, a person needs to do something that is not universally acceptable?
Some examples. Werner Herzog had to steal a camera to make his first film. Neil Gaiman had to break the hearts of a few women to gather enough life experience to write his books. Under deontological ethics, neither of them would have been able to do this and flourish according to their idiosyncratic nature.
There are many other examples of the same. Leo Tolstoy was not kind to his wife. Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave his children to an orphanage. I often think about Russian politics: some of the brightest minds in the modern opposition are morally dubious. Mikhail Svetov, the head of the Russian Libertarian Party, only dates women 20 years younger than himself. Alexander Shtefanov, another talented Russian political activist, has been accused of abuse.
Consider this story about Bertrand Russell:
‘In the King’s Birthday Honours of 9 June 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he was given the Order of Merit, George VI was affable but embarrassed at decorating a former jailbird, saying, ‘You have sometimes behaved in a manner that would not do if generally adopted’.
And yet each of these individuals contributed so much to the collective experiences of humanity that it justifies them. Rousseau and Tolstoy contributed to the advancement of mankind in its quest for truth; Herzog – to capturing the wonder of human life, and so on. Svetov and Shtefanov have also contributed many great things to the Russian political discourse.
It’s better not to break rules, but breaking rules is sometimes justified. And it is only virtue ethics that allows for such exceptions and variations. The only objective constraint on one’s flourishing should be the prohibition of physical harm to others (see Kant: ‘every being has authority equal to mine’; every man is endowed with the capacity to set goals, choose reasons, and act according to principles; ‘humanity is an end in itself’ and cannot be harmed or violated). The rest is permissible. Broken hearts are permissible. Petty crimes are permissible. Weird sexual preferences are permissible. It is virtue ethics with constraints.
But the people I listed above were talented, conscientious, and virtuous. What happens if someone who is not virtuous uses their power to override moral law? That is the risk. If they are weak, they would be destroyed by their own conscience (in a culture of guilt – imagine the pressure). Only if they are sociopaths would they be unaffected. If the results or products of controversial actions are not used for anything good (as mentioned before: in a well-balanced soul, good ends and personal flourishing are aligned), those actions cannot be justified. The stakes are very high.
What is acceptable or not must be determined by wisdom. This is where such an institution as a council of wise men could be useful: giving judgment on actions that go beyond standard moral laws, examining behavior on an individual case basis, and evaluating whether one’s nature is balanced enough to break the rules for a good end. Too bad the institution of a council of elders has been lost. Now we have to simulate it ourselves through laborious and excruciating mental effort in moral battles within our own souls.
Still, happiness is the primary thing that matters. Even if it is happiness with constraints. Other theories don’t make sense.
Notes:
* The categorical imperative could potentially work here if it was downgraded to the status of a rule of thumb – something to apply in 90% of situations. But that is not how Kant devised it.
** I will not consider utilitarianism and consequentialism here (they are only scarcely applicable in fields such as military planning), because in the real world: 1) the consequences of actions are obscure and fundamentally unforeseeable; 2) the wellbeing of others is a meaningless concept, as it is fundamentally non-transparent (as opposed to one’s own wellbeing). Imagine if you were personally responsible for the happiness of your neighbor, or if my grandmother was personally responsible for the happiness of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. People can barely understand what each other feel or think, let alone how to make the entire humanity happy.