A Few Thoughts on Happiness: Is Happiness A “Moral Obligation”?

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This reflexivity undermines the notion of the Post-Modern subject free to choose and reshape his identity. The psychoanalytic concept that designates the short-circuit between the repression and what it represses is the superego. As Lacan emphasised again and again, the essential content of the superego’s injunction is ‘Enjoy!’ A father works hard to organise a Sunday excursion, which has to be postponed again and again. When it finally takes place, he is fed up with the whole idea and shouts at his children: ‘Now you’d better enjoy it!’ The superego works in a different way from the symbolic law. The parental figure who is simply ‘repressive’ in the mode of symbolic authority tells a child: ‘You must go to grandma’s birthday party and behave nicely, even if you are bored to death – I don’t care whether you want to, just do it!’ The superego figure, in contrast, says to the child: ‘Although you know how much grandma would like to see you, you should go to her party only if you really want to – if you don’t, you should stay at home.’ The trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, when, as every child knows, he is not being given any choice at all. Worse than that, he is being given an order and told to smile at the same time. Not only: ‘You must visit your grandma, whatever you feel,’ but: ‘You must visit your grandma, and you must be glad to do it!’ The superego orders you to enjoy doing what you have to do. What happens, after all, if the child takes it that he has a genuinely free choice and says ‘no’? The parent will make him feel terrible. ‘How can you say that!’ his mother will say: ‘How can you be so cruel! What did your poor grandma do to make you not want to see her?’
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The superego inverts the Kantian ‘You can, because you must’ in a different way, turning it into ‘You must, because you can.’ This is the meaning of Viagra, which promises to restore the capacity of male erection in a purely biochemical way, bypassing all psychological problems. Now that Viagra can take care of the erection, there is no excuse: you should have sex whenever you can; and if you don’t you should feel guilty. New Ageism, on the other hand, offers a way out of the superego predicament by claiming to recover the spontaneity of our ‘true’ selves. But New Age wisdom, too, relies on the superego imperative: ‘It is your duty to achieve full self-realisation and self-fulfilment, because you can.’ Isn’t this why we often feel that we are being terrorised by the New Age language of liberation?

Although submission within a lesbian sado-masochistic relationship and the submission of an individual to a fundamental religious or ethnic belief are both generated by modern reflexivisation, their libidinal economies are quite different. The lesbian master/slave relationship is a theatrical enactment, based on accepted rules and a contract that has been freely entered into. As such, it has a tremendous liberating potential. In contrast, a fundamentalist devotion to an ethnic or religious cause denies the possibility of any form of consent. It is not that sado-masochists are only playfully submissive, while in the ‘totalitarian’ political community, submission is real. If anything, the opposite is the case: in the sadomasochistic contract, the performance is definitely for real and taken absolutely seriously, while the totalitarian submission, with its mask of fanatical devotion, is ultimately fake, a pretence of its opposite. What reveals it as fake is the link between the figure of the totalitarian Master and the superego’s injunction: ‘Enjoy!’
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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/slavoj-zizek/you-may

Well ya got me musing.

If “joy” is fruit of the Spirit, it is a gift received by the grace of God and can’t be considered a moral obligation. 

The “blessedness” (makarios) that Jesus preaches in the Sermon on the Mount is the product of striving after and being transformed by kingdom values, not a moral imperative to be happy.

When Paul tells us to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice,” the moral obligation is compassion, honoring the emotion experienced by another, rather than a moral imperative to abide in any particular feeling.

Jesus’ warnings against public displays of piety do include “washing the face and anointing oneself,” but this is to avoid getting public praise for the rigors of fasting, not the elimination of the rigors themselves.

I have not seen the video yet, so take these comments for what they are.  The idea of happiness in moral philosophy is typically associated with what the Greeks understood as eudaimonia, or human flourishing or fulfillment.  Traditionally, the Greek word, eudaimonia, is translated as “happiness.”  But it is not a psychological concept as Ms. Hey seems to take it, and possibly Prager as well, not about feelings; but rather a comment about trained emotions and intellect.  Happiness, on the classical view, is fully a matter of character (Plato) or character, along with externalities such as beauty and wealth (Aristotle).  On this view, happiness and goodness are intimately related.  The point to make on this here is that character, and hence, happiness, is a result of training. How does anyone train character?  By choosing to act well, one develops virtuous character traits.  In that sense, it seems correct to me that one becomes happy (good) by acting happy (choosing good acts).  Moreover, it does seem to me that we have an obligation to be happy, understood as being good.  The requirements of goodness, that is, happiness, understood Christianly, for example, the character traits of the Beatitudes, are obligatory for Christians.  The “blessedness” of the Sermon on the Mount is at the same time the guidelines for happiness (human fulfillment).  Prager’s argument seems to conflate a modern, psychological conception of happiness with the classical character-oriented understanding.

Well I would have been happy to agree with Dennis Prager had he defined “happiness” more classically.  But he didn’t.

I recognize that in classical thought “happiness” was not defined in the same way as “happiness” is in late 20th and early 21st century America.

But then, had he chosen to define happiness in a less shallow way—unlike the definition that was implied throughout the video—I probably wouldn’t have chosen to post about the video, since it’s hard to post a simple agreeable nod of the head.  ; > )

A thoughtful post.  Thank you, Sarah.

I would add that, while Aristotle (and Christian eudaemonists like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas) granted that beatitude was correlated with character, they saw it as a byproduct of something else, namely a worthwhile activity.  To set out to pursue happiness in itself led to unhappiness.  However, doing something inherently worthwhile, and doing it well, can lead to happiness.

This is the unexpressed assumption in Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, the intent of which is to sort out one’s vocation.  One begins not by asking “What makes me happy?,” but “What do I love?”

How to be happy? Pursue those things you love doing, and, as Sarah recommends, do good.  Don’t pursue happiness for its own sake.  Be aware that if you’re unhappy, that may be a sign that you need to change something you’re doing.

May be, not must be. Our ancestors were very savvy about the passions (not to be equated with the emotions, full stop), and recognized that some people just had a disposition to melancholy.

I should add that the most significant way in which Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Richard Hooker[!—how could I have forgotten him??!!) differ from Aristotle on happiness is that Aristotle believed neither in a personal God nor in an afterlife.  Like so many of our contemporaries, Aristotle believed that if we were going to be happy, it had to be here and now.

The Augustinian tradition recognizes that God is the Greatest Good (summum bonum), and true happiness can be found only in the beatific vision (seeing God “face to face” and enjoying him forever). This is what we are made for, and it is the fuel that drives all our seeking for happiness.  As Augustine expressed it at the beginning of the Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts our restless until they rest in you.”

This is a tremendous help insofar as it relieves the [implicitly Pelagian] demand of our culture that we MUST be happy, and we must be happy now.  Augustine reminds us:

1) Only God can truly make us happy.  This does not mean that there is no genuine happiness connected with created things or “secular” activities, but it does relative the kind of happiness we expect from them.  We shouldn’t be surprised if our spouses, our jobs, our bodies, or our “stuff” does not make us happy.  They’re not supposed to.

2) It introduces a personal dimension to happiness.  Happiness comes not from things, but from friendship with God, and, to a lesser extent, from friendship with others.  Thomas Aquinas is especially good here.

3) It reminds us that life is a pilgrimage.  We’re moving to happiness, and we can be certain that some day we will have it, but we don’t have to insist on having it NOW.  Meanwhile, we can get on with the task at hand.

4) It helps us to be grateful for the genuine goods that we enjoy, realizing that they are gifts from our Creator.

5) It reminds us that some of the things that our culture tells us with make us happy will not.  Happiness is not equivalent to pleasure.  Pursuing activities that are contrary to our true end—knowing and loving God—will actually make us unhappy.  For Augustine, the first step in ethics is sorting out true from false goods, and learning to pursue those goods that will actually make us happy.

6) A rule of life is important.  Mundane activities like regular private prayer, reading/praying the daily office, Sunday worship, lectio divina (reading Scripture and “spiritual” texts, being with friends, physical exercise, being in nature, playing music, doing “chores,” are the kinds of “habits” that make the conditions possible for the kinds of limited happiness we can expect in this life.

I’m inclined to agree that Prager overstates his case. The projection of “happiness”, as he presents it, is really a matter of good citizenship, rather akin to volunteering at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, supporting UN MDGs, voting responsibly, and helping little old ladies across the street.  But is good citizenship - particularly of this sort - a moral obligation?  To some extent, what he says seems to be along the lines of what we continually hear from our soi disant prophetic TEC leadership: “God demands that you be (our kind of) good citizen”.  But they then essentially finish with “...and that’s all he/she/it/(OK, whatever) wants!”

I don’t see Prager going there, though he seems inclined in that direction.  The point sounds to me to be pretty much the same one Lewis makes in Mere Christianity (page 101-102): you tend to become what you pretend to be.  Training in virtue has always worked thus and Prager is simply applying it to “happiness”.  I don’t see him saying that such activity “necessarily” makes one happy and I think it quite unfair to demand that he take clinical depression into account.  Medical conditions are outside the scope of general exhortations to the development of habits of virtue (it’s worth noting that Lincoln, the source of the “happy as you want to be” quote, apparently suffered from a severe inclination toward melancholy).  Note also that he’s speaking to a relatively comfortable middle class audience.

My difficulty with Prager’s discussion herein is his limitation of his remarks to the level of social well-being, a la Miss Manners (whom I think a significant social commentator).  It is important that, in a dark, superstitious and barbaric age, the shrinking forces of civilization try and encourage decent treatment of others when and where possible.  Nevertheless, given the human devastation that continually pours forth from our society’s continual craven surrender to the passions, it’s a mite difficult not to see Prager as in some way cheapening a vital discipline.  Virtue has more important matters to attend to than the mere projection of “happiness”, whatever Prager means by the term.

Nevertheless, he deserves credit for encouraging even small victories.  Our civilization is in dire shape in no small part because, in the lives of too many, the will, refusing divine instruction, does not govern the heart.  Give Prager credit for at least trying in a small way, to begin righting the ship.

On (changing) definitions of happiness:

So, what did the American founders mean by “pursuit of happiness”?