Happiness as the life well lived
Based on my assumption that people want to be happy, I will now examine
and defend the argument that the way to attain and maintain happiness is
through living well. I will use the “flourishing” model of living well to show
how happiness can be yielded from pursuit of optimum functioning. This,
clearly, is no new argument. The idea that happiness is to be found through
living in a certain way is present in all the leading religions of the world.
The book of Psalms representing both Christian and Jewish thought opens thus;
Blessed (Happy, fortunate, prosperous, and enviable) is the man who
walks and lives not in the counsel of the ungodly (following their advice,
their plans and purposes)… But his delight and desire are in the law of the
Lord…And he shall be like a tree firmly planted by the streams of water, ready
to bring forth its fruit in its season…everything he does shall prosper (and come
to maturity).[1]
By this account, the happy person is one who ignores the ways of the
world and lives by the law of God. This excerpt is a good example of religion
teaching that a life lived around a certain teaching guarantees one of
happiness.
Religions are not the only ones that have taught that people can find
happiness through living in a certain way. As discussed in my introduction, the
philosophers of Ancient Rome believed and taught the same thing. Epicurus, for
example, represents a whole school of thought built around the idea that there
is a certain way of life by which people can attain happiness. In fact, the
ethics and laws that govern human societies mainly exist to serve this purpose;
to guide societies in preserving their collective happiness. “We cannot say
that something is good unless we can say what is good for, and if we can
examine all the main objects and experiences that our species calls good and
ask what they are good for, the answer is clear: By and large, they are good
for making us feel happy.”[2]
While religions and philosophies seem to agree that there is a way of
life that leads to happiness, they do not always identify the same things as
leading to happiness. Just as there were a number of competing philosophies in
Ancient Rome spreading theories about the happy life, so are there competing
religious teachings on how happiness is to be attained. Fortunately, happiness
has recently become the subject of scientific inquiry. Positive psychology is a
new academic field that seeks to investigate, scientifically, the nature of
happiness, and what people can do to attain or increase their happiness. Here,
I explore one model of happiness that represents not only positive psychology
but actually a combination of positive psychology theory with fields like
sociology, philosophy and public health.
Flourishing
The concept of “flourishing” is perhaps the
most significant contributions of positive psychology to the ongoing
discussions about happiness. Flourish is obviously an English word that
predates positive psychology. It means “to grow well; to be healthy and happy,
thrive.”[3] Flourish
is synonymous with words such as bloom, develop, succeed, blossom and bear
fruit. Theorists in positive psychology have built on this dictionary definition
of the word flourish a construct that means “to live
with an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness,
generativity, growth and resilience.”[4] This
kind of life, I argue, is the way to happiness.
In his book Flourish, Seligman, the founder of positive
psychology, traces his own transformation from thinking about happiness to
thinking about well-being thus:
I used
to think that the topic of positive psychology was happiness, that the gold
standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of
positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the
topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for
measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology
is to increase flourishing.[5]
This thesis is not concerned with the metamorphosis of Seligman as a
scholar or that of the field of positive psychology. The important idea that I
develop from the above quote is that, just as positive psychology has transitioned
from being concerned with happiness to being concerned with flourishing, anyone
interested in the attainment and maintenance of happiness should also look at
happiness from a broader perspective. That is, a perspective that looks beyond
what happiness is to explore the broader life in which happiness can be
regularly realized. Seligman changed his goal from happiness after realizing
that, happiness (positive feelings of pleasure and contentment) results
naturally from a live well lived. Below I explore one model of living well
(flourishing) in detail.
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