Eudaemonism Research Paper

Eudaimonia (Gluckseligkeit, prosperite, happiness) is thus one of the central concepts of ethics and moral philosophy. It has been cast in a variety of ways and points into a number of different directions. Happiness was, for once, conceptualized in subjective terms, with reference to the self, to the passions and affects, to the realization of one’s objectives, or of one’s overall life. Second, happiness can be cast in relation to the other, as friendship, love, recognition, as ethically founded intersubjectivity. And finally, there is a conception of happiness that takes all other conceptions for incomplete as long as there is no connection to the community and its political order. Even though this conception found its strongest expression in ancient philosophy, it has by far not disappeared from current discourse. In contrast, it may possibly even be claimed that this conception with its emphasis on justice as a precondition for happiness and the ‘good life’ presents, just as much as the reference to the self and to the other, an inescapable point of concern and a ‘utopian’ horizon of the philosophy of happiness.

In sum, then, the conceptualization of happiness shows a temporal tension between fulfillment across all of the life-span, on the one hand, and fulfillment in the sudden and epiphanic moment, on the other. Further, it is marked by a transcendental-religious tension that stretches from revelation, redemption and salvation to joy. It carries with it a political-socialethical tension between an individualistic view of self-realization and the conception of a good political order. Finally, a tension with regard to a theory of action is unavoidable, a tension that situates the singular human being between the capability to act autonomously and destiny. All these tensions can be traced back, in a variety of ways, to the heritage of Greek reason.

1. The ‘Classical’ Tradition

In the Nicomachean Ethics, engaging with Plato’s conception (Wolf 1996), Aristotle links the concept of eudaimonia to the three human life-forms: to pleasure, from which most human beings gain their view about what happiness is; to the service of the state; and to life dedicated to philosophy. Because the essence of human life lies in the pursuit of reason, neither profane enjoyment nor politics and the art of governing, but theorein is the highest in the hierarchy of human activities, in which eudaimonia can be realized. ‘Happiness is activity (energeia) in accordance with virtue’ (X, 7) and ‘the highest good reachable for human beings presents itself as the activity of the soul in the sense of its essential prowess (arete )’ (Aristotle 1934, I, 6, see Heidegger 1992). Theorein as an activity is not aiming at the cognition of just anything, but of that which is eternal. As such it is among the human activities the one that is the most persistent of all, independent of changes in the external circumstances. This activity is full of pleasure, it is so even most among all activities—on the one hand, because it is continuous; on the other, because it participates in the eternal that it gets to know. Theorein is not confined to any moment; such activity stretches across an entire life. Furthermore, to be active in the sense of theorein is a purpose for itself, the final purpose, that which is pursued for its own sake, since it does not produce anything that lies outside of itself; it is self-sufficient. Such autarchy, however, is possible only if the polis has provided the required means so that human activity can develop free of the concern for survival. For Aristotle, happiness is an eminently social and political matter, since under conditions of lack of resources no accomplished life is possible, and it is also not thinkable without friendship, without the relations to others. Thus, happiness is finally possible only within a just political community that is organized on principles of reason.

Aristotle, thus, linked happiness to human essence in need to be actualized, to the relation to others in friendship and to institutionally supported forms of living and acting together. With the disruption of the order of the polis as well as of Hellenic philosophy, in contrast, for the Stoa and for Epicureism (and as well for skepticism), eudaimonia becomes a concept that refers to purposes that now reside in that which is available to human beings. Eudaimonia is, then, the striving for whatever is available and, vice versa, emphasizes the diminution of demands and the avoidance of pain. The thought that happiness opens itself towards the humans only in a Stoic relation of radical distance to all that which is not at hand is alien to Epikur; nevertheless he, too, sees happiness neither in theorein nor in a goal-directed activity that finds its fulfillment in ethical and theoretical practice. Despite all differences between the ancient Greek schools of thought, they also show commonalities, such as in particular in the connection of virtue and happiness. Ancient Greek philosophies, as Kant stated, follow the same method in rejecting any validity to the assertion that virtue and happiness could be two separate elements of the highest good. They ‘consequently sought the unity of the principle in accordance with the rule of identity,’ even if they differ in the choice of the fundamental concept. ‘The Epicurean said: to be conscious of one’s maxim leading to happiness is virtue; the Stoic said: to be conscious of one’s virtue is happiness. For the first prudence was equivalent to morality; for the second, who chose a higher designation for virtue, morality alone was true wisdom’ (Kant 1993a, A 200, pp. 239–40 book II, chapter 2, p. 229).

2. Eudaimonia In The Philosophy Of Early Modernity

Conceptions of happiness in relation to individuals and to society changed profoundly during the period known as early modernity; these changes were part of broader reproblematizations in the moral and social philosophy of the time. Political thinking of this period introduces happiness as a component and as a means of politics and the symmetrical opposition of passion and reason enters into a conceptual relation with virtue and politics. Happiness becomes one of the key concepts of ethical-political thinking during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a thinking that at the same time reorders the relations between the concepts for affects and those for morality. No longer the affective drives of the human beings are the object under consideration, but rather human actions and the consequences of these actions. Affects as such are considered neither as good nor evil, it is rather individual selfishness and self-love (amour-propre) which moves into the center of concern. This focus generates the new problematique of moral philosophy: If it is the case that human beings pursue their happiness on the basis of their drives and affects, then it is the task of moral philosophy to determine how—despite that—a good social order can exist and be maintained.

The new emphasis on the individuals and their interests went along with a reconceptualization of the political. From now on, it was precisely their striving for happiness that made human beings inclined to subject themselves to the laws of the common order. This reasoning emerges in classical form in Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) Le iathan. Hobbes first determines ‘felicity’ as the attempt to completely accomplish the objectives of human desires. Since, however, all human beings hope to reach this goal, the one potentially turns into a danger for the other. To avoid such a situation of bellum omnium contra omnes, of ‘war of every man against every man,’ human beings assemble to form a state that itself embodies no longer any conception of happiness or of the good life, but that guards to prevent any situation from arising in which the various strivings for happiness collide in a violent manner.

At the end of this period, during which happiness remains the focal point of theoretical constellations, an attempt is made to indeed erect a polity that is committed to support its members’ striving for happiness. The American Declaration of Independence even declares the ‘pursuit of happiness’ to be a human right (Jefferson 1776). A historically novel compromise is here elaborated between a classic-substantive and an individualistic-instrumental conception of the state: the state respects the autonomy of the individual and the plurality of their views, but does not entirely renounce the proposition of a general guiding idea about the ‘good life.’ The individuals’ striving for happiness—to the protection of which the state has been created, exactly in the sense of the theories of delegation—in its sum produces the common good. This common good, however, is now in a particular way mixed with elements of a Protestant ethic, in which inner-worldly happiness, for example, as economic success, gains divine approval. This unique privileging of the pursuit of happiness as a human right, which cannot be found in European declarations, is rooted in a particular relation between the state and the citizens. It is nevertheless close to European conceptions in another respect, namely in understanding the citizen predominantly as an economic subject, a bourgeois in contrast to a citoyen, whose pursuit of property needs to be protected by the state, a protection that is considered as being the primary task of the state.

The utilitarianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth century similarly still places happiness in the center of moral and social philosophy. The ethics of utilitarianism considers individual—as well as general—utility as the purpose of action and sets thus ‘good’ synonymous with ‘useful.’ Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) calls for ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ as the collective goal; by promoting the well-being of all, the well-being of the individual is promoted as well. Morals and legislation are that art to regulate human actions such that to bring forth ‘the greatest possible quantity of happiness’ (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1789). Drawing on Bentham, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) considers the pursuit of the greatest possible happiness of all as the supreme goal as well (Utilitarianism 1861). On the one hand, utilitarism maintained a conception according to which the pursuit of happiness is the most important motive of human action, and it also kept the link between happiness and politics. What was added were amendments that had become historically unavoidable, namely the view that every human being determines their happiness in their own way and strive for it, and that everybody has the same right to do so. On the other hand, however, what was thus created was an aporia between the common good and the diversity of the human pursuits of happiness. This aporia was to be dealt with by assuming the comparability of the various individualized and subjectivized pursuits. Measurability and quantification were the tools to make the diverse compatible, since the state’s task to pursue the greatest happiness of the greatest number demanded the possibility of adding up the manifoldness of forms of individual happiness. Quantification of happiness is the attempt to maintain a measure for collective happiness by at the same time making only a minimum of substantive assumptions about happiness as such. Utilitarianism had inevitably to fail when radically subjectivized conceptions of happiness were to be compared to each other, measured and sublated in an overall concept of utility.

3. The Eviction Of Happiness From Philosophy: Immanuel Kant

In continental moral and political philosophy, the most systematic attempt to clarify the relation between action and happiness was undertaken by Immanuel Kant—it was at the same time an attempt with farreaching consequences for later philosophy. It had long been an objective of moral philosophy to demonstrate that there is no, and could not possibly be any, contradiction between ethical demands on the one side, and the pursuit of happiness (or of utility or interest) on the other. Thus, it had merged virtue and happiness into one, and stated that virtuous action promotes happiness at the same time. Kant radically breaks this connection of interest, virtue, and happiness.

Happiness remains for Kant as well a concept that has a basic influence on human action: ‘Happiness is ‘‘the satisfaction of all our desires’’; extensi e, in regard to their multiplicity; intensi e, in regard to their degree; and protensi e, in regard to their duration’ (1974a, II, B 834, p. 677 [p. 518]), ‘happiness is the state of a rational being in the world in the whole of whose existence e erything goes according to his wish and will, and rests, therefore, on the harmony of nature with his whole end as well as with the essential determining ground of his will’ (1993a, A 224–5). This concept, however, is not suitable as a foundation of moral philosophy, according to the following reasoning.

First, happiness can hardly be the true purpose of nature, since in such a case, human action would not be guided by practical reason, steering the will, but subjected to the instincts (1993b, BA 5, p. 20). Second, the concept of happiness cannot be determined unequivocally, since it rests on experience, which is never closed, on the one hand (1993b, BA 46, p. 47, 1993a, A 46, p. 133), and since, on the other hand, the ‘idea of happiness’ requires an absolute whole, a present and future maximum of well-being. The contradiction between the principled openness of experience and the idea of the accomplishment of happiness cannot be sublated within time. Furthermore, the conception of a reachable maximum of happiness is impossible, for two reasons. No sum of happiness can ever be added up, since only similar perceptions can be added up; feeling, however, is highly variable according to the manifoldness of being touched in the very intricate state of life. In addition, the nature of the human being can never halt and be satisfied in possession and enjoyment. The inclinations change, they grow, and they always leave an even larger emptiness behind them than the one one hoped to fill. (The dynamics of needs and their limitless character (apeiron) was already of concern for Hellenic philosophy.) The fact that each human being may have a specific view of happiness, and which furthermore may undergo change in the course of life, puts a further limit to any general determination of happiness. Happiness is ‘a subjective basic feeling of enjoyment of dissatisfaction’ (1993a, A 46, p. 133); a subjective feeling however, cannot be the foundation of general rules for action. As a consequence, thus, it is not possible to demand the agreement of the pursuit of happiness with moral requirements—which precisely was the former assumption: that namely the pursuit of happiness realizes ethical requirements since happiness resides only in morally virtuous action.

Such subjectivization separates happiness radicality from virtue and ethicality and subordinates it, as an indeterminate inclination, to the categorical imperative. ‘Act in such a way that the maxim of your will could always serve as the principle of a general law.’ It is no longer the pursuit of happiness that makes an action moral, but only the respect of the moral law and the obedience to duty, since it is only in them that human freedom is anchored. The categorical imperative refers the concept of ethicality back to ‘the idea of freedom’ (1993b, BA 102–3, p. 84). Free will is nothing but ‘autonomy, that is, the property of the will to be its own law’ (1993b, BA 97–8, p. 81). Happiness is accidental and not at our disposal, but freedom is effective ‘independent of external causes that determine it’ (1993b, BA 97–8, p. 81, BA 99–100, pp. 82–3). A human being does not act morally because he or she hopes for happiness—‘If eudaemonia (the principle of happiness) instead of eleutheronomia (the principle of freedom for inner legislation) is set as the foundation, the consequence will be euthanasia (the soft death) of all morality’ (1997, AIX, p. 506)—but because he or she follows the principle of freedom of inner legislation. This entails that morality has been robbed of the foundation on which it could ground itself, that is, the hope for the remuneration for moral action that would arrive at some point. And by implication the pursuit of happiness loses the justification that was derived from its link to morality. Simmel (1989, p. 253) called this the ‘mutual independence of ethicality and happiness.’ ‘If our ethical action,’ Simmel wrote, ‘were only a detour on the path to happiness, then the point of our freedom would show itself again interwoven with the dependence on the powers of being, without whose favors no happiness could be complete.’

The expulsion of the concept of happiness from the reach of moral philosophy has its counterpart in the eviction of happiness out of the realm of the political. For Kant, freedom has taken the place of happiness as the goal of politics—a concept driven further by romanticism, although setting out from the noneudaimonistic ways of reasoning in transcendental philosophy. Kant’s categorical imperative and the ideal of autonomy inherent in it expel the concept of eudaimonia from the main lines of philosophical discussion.

4. Redemption, Happiness, And Political Order

The emerging social sciences have started out from this rupture and have largely accepted it. In his theory of religiosity and morality, Durkheim re-interprets happiness and recognizes it only in religious experience, in moments of ‘collective effervescence,’ of selftranscendence and loss of self. Happiness is seen as the experience of being-one-with-oneself or of being submerged in the world, as a ‘feeling of strengthening’ (Durkheim 1981, p. 291), as the subjective ‘oceanic feeling,’ which Freud (1994) considers without any comprehension. Simmel, too, considers spiritual salvation (Seelenheil) as a state in which complete harmony with the world has been achieved, a state that shows the full liveliness and inner touchability of the perceived, the immediate being (Simmel 1995). ‘Happiness, as a relation of transcendence, thus has two fundamental forms. It exists as the experience of either oneness or otherness, as the dissolution of all difference, or as the apprehension of, and unconditional surrender to, absolute difference’ (Ferguson 1992, pp. 11–12). Such experience turns into an articulation of social integration, which at the same time rests on individual feeling and, again, connects the individual with the other and with a ‘holy’ collectivity, the ideal community of justice.

Within the main line of critical theorizing, that is, in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the subjectivization of happiness is further radicalized. The foundational character of the aporias that result from the dualism of individual and society is rejected. Instead, the joint attack of liberalism (bourgeois ideology) and capitalism is held responsible for the destruction of the link between freedom and happiness.

Happiness is privatized in ‘administered society’ and under the reign of ‘culture industry,’ and it becomes the expression of societally determined false consciousness. Due to the horror of the circumstances, individual happiness becomes nothing but the dreadful arrangement of a petty-bourgeois idyll with its swollen sentiment. The bourgeois promise of happiness arising from property and possession—already denounced by the romantic critique of the revolution as the abandoning of the shaping of the world according to the ideas of reason in favor of the demands for material happiness on the part of the bourgeoisie—becomes under conditions of inhumanity a curse. The promise of the commodity turns into pale appearance; in the totality of objectivizable socioeconomic relations, the connection between the individual, happiness, and society is interrupted and the promise of happiness only admitted as aesthetic experience (Adorno). But, within the same critical tradition, and by appropriating critically Freud’s reflections on the pleasure principle and the reality principle, Herbert Marcuse (1955 1966) aims at developing a social theory that elaborates on a conception of possible happiness and permits the critique of both, the societal circumstances as well as the empirically existing conceptions of happiness. ‘The concept (of happiness) denotes a more-than-private, more-than-subjective condition; happiness is not in the mere feeling of satisfaction but in the reality of freedom and satisfaction’ (Marcuse 1955/1966, pp. 103–4). The concept of happiness has to be liberated from bourgeois conformism and relativism; even the singular human beings cannot be ‘judge of their own happiness’ under these circumstances. It is precisely the task of critical analysis to show the ‘possibility of a happier real constitution of humanity’ beyond the existing ‘false happiness.’

In another line of critical thinking, Walter Benjamin turns political time, directed towards happiness, into the key element of his philosophy of history. ‘The image of happiness … is tainted by time through and through … In other words, the imagination of happiness resonates inalienably with the one of redemption’ (1991a, p. 693). Happiness is here not in the (past) event, but in its possibility, to which a ‘weak messianic power’ is given; it is recognizable only in its being missed historically (1991a, p. 694). ‘The order of the profane has to erect itself with the support of the idea of happiness’ (1991b, p. 203)—and in the Angelus No us, Benjamin finds the image for history in which the past, that which is complete (misfortune and misery), and the future, that which has remained incomplete (happiness), get reverted and in which misfortune and misery turn into something incomplete hoping for redemption (1991c, pp. 588–9). Ernst Bloch, too, reinstates the old connection between the individual, passion and society; happiness becomes again an inalienable part of human being. ‘Because hope’s grounding in the human drive for happiness is too difficult to be destroyed; and too evidently has it always been the engine of history’ (1978, I, p. 515).

Happiness, thus, even though pushed into the private realm since Kant, persistently returns into the political realm—as ‘redemption,’ ‘the principle of hope,’ as ‘emancipation,’ ‘undamaged life’ and, in the version of existentialist philosophy, as ‘authenticity.’

During the past few years, happiness has not only become the object of dubious empirical-quantitative research on levels of satisfaction, but also again a theme of social philosophy, partly by referring to classical liberalism, partly also by returning to ancient traditions. Under terms such as justice, the good life, and self-realization, the question about the societal conditions under which happiness can unfold is again raised. The attempt is, thus, renewed to locate happiness not only in an ‘accomplished’ relation of the individual to heror himself, but also in relation to others and to a just societal order.

Hannah Arendt already held a view of political happiness, of ‘public happiness,’ that could not be equated with the obligation of the state to care for the welfare of its citizens (such a view of bonheur, in contrast, is, in her view, coresponsible for the loss of freedom in the course of the French Revolution). In the American Revolution, however, the connection between ‘public happiness and political freedom,’ which is an ‘inalienable part of the structure of a republican community,’ could be maintained at least for some period (Arendt 1994, p. 178). The new connection between happiness and freedom made here occurs in the sign of plurality and a public sphere as guardians against both dangers; that namely substantive conceptions of happiness could suffocate freedom or that abstract and atomized freedom empties out any conception of happiness at all.

Drawing on the classical contract theories by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and situating himself—often in a rather decontextualized way—in relation to Immanuel Kant, John Rawls develops a ‘theory of justice’ (1971) for modern, pluralistic and democratically constituted societies. For Rawls’s theory, the ‘right’ enjoys primacy over the ‘good,’ since value-pluralistic societies will be able to agree only over a minimum set of foundations for what is right, but not over what is good. Rawls, thus, renounces any attempt to formulate a substantive theory of the good life. The starting point of his considerations is the hypothetical construction (the ‘intuitive thought’) of a society as a fair system of cooperation between free and equal persons. Since these considerations provide the general political framework for the ‘good life as justice and fairness,’ a human being can for Rawls be called ‘happy … during those periods when he is successfully carrying through a rational plan and he is with reason confident that his efforts will come to fruition’ (Rawls 1971, p. 550). Rawls ties his theory of justice to a critique of utilitarianism. For him the well-being of people does not depend on the degree to which individual preferences are realized. It is important only that people are provided with the basic means to the same amount. As Martha Nussbaum, however, points out, Rawls did not consider what people do with these goods, to what they are enabled, and whether the space of enablements that thus opens up is not marked by striking inequalities.

Nussbaum (1990, 1993) herself resorts to Aristotle to sketch those political foundations that are to enable all people to lead a good life. She does not advocate any liberal relativism, but rather a universalism, based on an anthropological conception, that refers to needs and capacities which all people across all divides of culture, class, and sex have in common. Such basic needs constitute moral demands; they are an inalienable part of ethics and moral philosophy. At the same time, Nussbaum’s perspective aims at pushing back the primacy of reason in moral philosophy, since moral principles had hitherto mostly been anchored in human reason. Her ethics of virtue attempts to counteract the insufficient regard for the particularity of situations in moral theories that are based on general principles. In addition, it aims at integrating emotional dimensions into ethics. To define the concept of virtue more precisely, and not merely to understand it by recourse to rules, a ‘superior instance’ needs to be found; for Nussbaum this is a theory of the good. Starting out from the ‘basic structure of the human form of life’ (mortality, corporeality, cognitive abilities, practical reason, sociality, etc.), she develops an ‘open list’ of the basic capacities of human beings and of the good. She herself characterizes the list as ‘vague,’ which means that it is open for concretization in each specific cultural context, and then puts specific demands towards politics. The objective of measures taken by the state is that they enable the citizens to choose a good form of leading their lives, to develop their capacities and to live in accordance with practical reason and with their social ties.

In his attempt at clarifying the relations between a moral life and a good life, Seel (1995) similarly defends a ‘universalism of the good,’ which is not linked to particular forms of society. This universalism, however, is no essentialism that claims the existence of values independent of human volition or raises anthropological facts to the status of values or norms. Seel develops a position that he calls ‘reflexive eudaimonism’ and asks what it entails, from the viewpoint of different people, ‘to sensibly lead a succeeding life’ (p. 10), defining a ‘good life’ formally on the basis of moral respect, social recognition and political legitimacy. The incarnation of good human life is a ‘life, open to the world and self-determined, the moral and legal protection of which includes a respect for all individuals who are able to have a (however determined) good life’ (p. 11).

 ‘Happiness’ and ‘the good life’ are, thus, always also tied to sociocultural circumstances. It remains the task of philosophy as well as of the social sciences to think the—political—conditions under which a good life and happiness stay open as a possibility. Happiness as the relation to oneself, to others, and to the community belongs then to reflection, to experience, and to the dream (Mauzi 1969).

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