Happiness: Who's line is it anyway?

The first thing that any careful discussion of happiness has to deal with is the fact that the term happiness has many distinctive uses. We speak of happy moments and happy lives. Thoughts about what would count as happiness may conjure visions of pleasure on the one hand, and success or achievement on the other. At times, we might think that happiness is just getting what we really want. Sometimes we say that happiness is what really matters in life; other times, we say that there’s more to life than mere happiness (as when we claim that someone is happy when she shouldn’t be). At the root of the term, of course, is the notion of hap or happenstance, and so happiness is also connected to the notion of good fortune, or luck (blame me for spending too much time on the internet perhaps trying to quench my thirst for knowledge albeit it's omnipresence).

And yet we often think of happiness as something that is not simply a matter of luck, but something that we can bring into our lives by effort, money, pleasure etc etc. Claims that any one of these ways of using the term happiness points toward the correct definition of happiness are mere assertions, which turn a blind eye to the other ways we use this term to successfully communicate something about a moment, a person, or the ideal of happiness itself. It is quite easy, when discussing the nature of happiness, to descend into a verbal quibble which simply has no principled resolution.

If we try to take some particular way of thinking about happiness and make it our standard, then we always run into problematic cases. That’s what my experience says………..

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