This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

H — Happiness

Happiness, felicidad, bonheur, felicitá. Few words inspire, so universally, such conceptual abundance and at the same time such ambiguity. Happiness has never been absent from Western thought. Eudaemonism to the ancients, the notion in the Latin distinguishes between happiness as external fortune on the one hand and internal fact on the other. For Socrates, happiness is an interior phenomenon that is identified with virtue. Aristotle, as one might expect, transforms happiness into an external action that operates according to reason. For hedonists, happiness is pleasure and pleasure is happiness. The Epicureans are more specific: we take pleasure in external life, but if we want to be happy let us not succumb to its charms. Democritus identifies happiness with serenity (ataraxia) and serenity with stability and the expulsion of desire, fear, and physical pain.

The English utilitarians (Hobbes, Bentham, Mill) give happiness its more modern, straightforward, and, arguably, dogmatic meaning. What is useful is good. However, we generally (and erroneously, I believe) consider the French Revolution to be responsible for the consecration of the brand of happiness that has prevailed from the eighteenth century onward in the West and all its peripheral societies. The founding laws of the United States of America declare this as its citizens’ right — if not the right to happiness itself, then its less presumptuous equivalent, the pursuit of happiness. This enlightened right rapidly fused with a kind of Puritanism that rendered happiness the great aspiration of the United States, but also turned the nation into the Manichaean bearer of happiness as good versus evil. In our own times, we have witnessed the supreme example of this concept: the United States as the self-proclaimed axis of good (and thus the axis of happiness) pitted against the axis of evil (and thus the source of all misery). One side defines itself through the good-happy synonymy and all nonadherents to this belief are relegated to the evil-unhappy synonymy.

The current situation on the international stage illustrates yet again — as if the horrors of the twentieth century did not suffice — the ambiguity of happiness. One need look no further than the films of Leni Riefenstahl or the newsreels of Soviet congresses and public rallies to see a vision of “happiness” amidst a sea of smiling, sun-kissed faces. Andrei Blinov, hack writer of Socialist realism (also known as Zhdanovism), published a novel entitled Happiness Cannot Be Sought Alone. What he meant, of course, is that happiness requires the cooperation of the faithful, disciplined multitudes who are unable to conceive of happiness of their own accord, without the direction of Party and Chief.

But it is true that individual happiness must be incorporated into the social sphere, whether you call that phenomenon solidarity, or even pity. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had a profound understanding of the significance of this dimension of happiness. The great Spanish historian Carmen Iglesias addresses the issue directly in her book Razón y sentimiento en el siglo XVIII (Reason and Emotion in the 18th Century). With Montesquieu in mind, Iglesias poses the following question: How can we reconcile individual freedom with “social happiness”—without which individual happiness is incomprehensible, at least in the eighteenth century? Montesquieu would no doubt invoke “an institutional articulation that protects the freedom of the individual and reconciles it with a certain prosperity of the State, as a guarantee of the material well-being of the citizens or social happiness.”

Condorcet is the thinker who examines Montesquieu’s balancing act between personal and social happiness and transforms it into myth — a dangerous myth on all counts, for it is one that unites happiness and progress, and regards progress to be something inevitable, fatal, and ascendant. We are condemned to achieve progress and the degree to which we achieve it will determine our degree of happiness. And so Condorcet tells us we had better be happy, whether we like it or not, because the laws of progress are ascendant and inexorable. It was Nietzsche who had to remind us, with his characteristic critical pessimism, that happiness and history rarely coincide. Rousseau, to whom Amado Nervo could have dedicated the verse he dedicated to Kempis—“Jean-Jacques, what evil for me you have wrought / with that book you wrote”—proposes a social contract, let us not forget, that is based upon a pessimistic vision of the disintegration of the modern world, which renders each and every individual an unhappy being. But then, were we ever happy? In the state of nature, the philosopher tells us, happiness is as fleeting as a bolt of lightning. Beyond his perspectives as a philosopher-politician, however, Rousseau is also, without a doubt, the father of Romanticism and the exaltation of happiness in the erotic realm, the pleasure of the senses, the recklessness of a Byron, the suicide of a Werther. .

Romanticism, however, is more than just a seminal literary school. It also gives rise to a dangerous political theory that champions the recovery of a lost totality as a method for achieving happiness. Karl Marx will call this alienation. But the praxis of the two extremes (that is, right and left) will call it totalitarianism. Adorno warned us of this in advance: “A liberated human race will never be a totality.” The retrograde fantasies of a return to some kind of happy past (the Golden Age myth) serve as the foundation for the elaboration of futuristic fantasies about “the happy identity of subject and object.”

The great tragedy of the modern age has been the loss of tragedy as it existed in antiquity. What I mean is that the alienation brought on by inevitable, ascendant progress as a condition of happiness has led us to the perplexing paralysis of Panurge’s sheep when history proved to us how very easily happiness could be sacrificed on behalf of totalitarian political systems that promised total happiness, though only in exchange for total submission.

I see two paths — equally difficult, perhaps impassable — that we may embark upon to arrive at a new concept of happiness for our times. The more arduous one calls for a restoration of the tragic spirit. The tragic perception harbors no illusions regarding the evil that men are capable of inflicting upon one another. The tragic hero transgresses. But, as Anaximander reminds us, he purges his excesses in accordance with “the laws of time.” Tragedy is the “law of time” that the Mediterranean thinker identified to redeem the fallen hero and reestablish the order of the city through catharsis, the manifestation of which resolves the conflict between freedom and inevitability, and thus grants us, through an understanding of ourselves and of those around us, the measure of happiness that is our due.

The more accessible path is one that affirms identity without undermining diversity, that ensures the preservation of identity while still defending the respect that diversity deserves. It is all too easy to point out, ad nauseam, the various modern-day obstacles strewn across the path of this equilibrium between diversity and identity: political obstacles, social obstacles, personal obstacles, informational and educational obstacles, et cetera. Yet can we conceive of a reality that does not encompass both the personal gratifications that associate “happiness” with creativity, eroticism, filial love, bed and board, home and hearth, those little things that are as much our true “nation,” as José Emilio Pacheco describes in his great poem “Alta Traición” (High Treason), as are the social or collective gratifications of good government, administrative integrity, public security, the right to dissent, and the faculty to elect?

Yet we must not fool ourselves either. In the personal sphere alone, can we conceive of a happiness that is unsullied, sooner or later, by the death of a beloved, a fissure in a romantic relationship, a fidelity betrayed, a friendship broken?

Precisely for this reason, happiness is an ambiguous, critical, and at times disguised word whose true nature can only be revealed by the light of love.