Book Review

All desires satisfied but am I happy?

A Brief History of Happiness

The Secrets of Happiness
Richard Schoch
Profile, £15.99
Tablet bookshop price £13.50 Tel 01420 592974

Love, Life, Goethe: how to be happy in an imperfect world
John Armstrong
Allen Lane, £16.99
Tablet bookshop price £15.70 Tel 01420 592974

Did you do the right thing?” one of Elizabeth Bowen’s characters asks in her novel Friends and Relations, “I’m not sure”, is the reply, “but I was happy – I know that at least.” But did she know it? As Nicholas White’s A Brief History of Happiness shows, although happiness is said to be what we all most want – is often, in fact, said to be the only thing we really want – we cannot even agree on what it is. And this disagreement is not just a matter of the obvious fact that people have different ways of being happy. It is a deeper dissension, about form rather than content – not over what sort of things make us happy, but over what is to count as being happy in the first place.

White’s book outlines the different answers that philosophers, from Plato onwards, have given to this question. Is happiness, ask some, an overall accumulation of fortunate circumstances and self-fulfilment, a measurable way of living which can only properly be assessed when life ends? “Call no one happy until he’s dead,” said the Athenian statesman Solon, and Aristotle added that even the fate of a man’s descendants had to be thrown into the calculation. (“[It would] be odd if the fortunes of the descendants did not for some time have some effect on the happiness of their ancestors.”) This overspilling of happiness beyond death seems odd to a modern ear. How could your grandchildren’s actual well-being after your death, rather than its likelihood in advance of the fact, actually count in the assessment of your own happiness? You wouldn’t be around to know about it one way or the other (and Aristotle is not imagining that we lean out into a posthumous future from some afterlife, since he didn’t believe in one). His view seems to miss out something we regard as essential to happiness, the palpable enjoyment of it. And this definition, while still including the sense of continuity over time, shifts towards the notion of happiness as an experiential item, a state, like a sensation, often brought about by the satisfaction of desires.

But if happiness (as strict Utilitarianism says) is just a matter of the amount of pleasure we have and the satisfaction of our desires, then it is immaterial what the pleasures or desires themselves are, however trivial or shameful they might seem. And surely some pleasures are better, or worse, than others. Surely we would rather be, as John Stuart Mill, a more sophisticated Utilitarian, put it, Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. There are some things that we desire to desire – that are desirable – and some that are undesirable in that we do desire them but would much rather not. Or are happiness and morality two necessary aims, necessarily separate, as Kant thought? White describes him as going in for “a system of double bookkeeping” in which the scores of happiness and goodness don’t marry up, but are forever divorced.

Between ancient times and Kant, White says, the most interesting treatments of happiness devolved around two quite different ways of thinking – one rooted in the empirical investigation of human psychology, the other deriving the notion of happiness from metaphysics and/or theology. He goes on to develop this fascinating analysis, and the book is full of brilliant themes and insights, but I wish it were more of a “history of happiness”, however brief, as the title promises. Inevitably, there has to be constant criss-crossing over time, from Plato to Bentham and back again, but, in addition to the thematic treatment, I wanted more chronology and more system.

The Secrets of Happiness is more systematic, at any rate, than White’s book, but also thinner. “Three thousand years of searching for the good life” is the subtitle, and the book is neatly divided into four sections, “Living for Pleasure”, “Conquering Desire”, “Transcending Reason”, and “Enduring Suffering”, each of which is further subdivided into two sections, each on a particular religion or philosophical movement. Richard Schoch is clear in his exposition, often correcting careless assumptions his readers might have made, about the orgiastic epicureanism of Epicurus, for instance, who in reality advocated restraint in the interests of a fulfilling life. The book is written for a different, less philosophical readership than White’s, but The Secrets of Happiness exemplifies, in fact, White’s comment that the advice of philosophers on how to become happy “isn’t any better (in fact it’s probably worse) than that of the average person”.

Love, Life, Goethe is subtitled “how to be happy in an imperfect world”, suggesting that its author, John Armstrong, has written a self-help philosophy book, possibly along the lines of Alain de Botton, to whom he is compared in a review-excerpt on the cover. Luckily, along with the meretricious nude beside this excerpt, the subtitle is misleading marketing: this is actually an excellent intellectual biography of Goethe, which is wonderfully executed and would need no disguise in a less dumbed-down world – or in a country where Goethe is so remarkably little known.

During his lifetime (1749-1832) and well into the twentieth century, Goethe was held in universal esteem, but what is a twenty-first century Briton to make of The Sorrows of Young Werther, the novel which, in 1774, first earned Goethe fame? It is hard to know whether it applauds its hero’s emotionality or mocks it, because we are unfamiliar with the fashions of Romanticism and Goethe’s reaction to them. This is where Armstrong is so illuminating. The thesis of his biography is that Goethe “invites us to connect things that are dislocated in our society as well as in ourselves – creative freedom and emotional stability; profundity and practicality; refined taste and power”. Goethe in fact, although living in the era of Sturm und Drang, practises the sort of harmonising of reason with appetite that Plato himself might recommend. Even at the time, a lot of readers misunderstood the point of Werther, which only served to encourage what Armstrong calls “a kind of ideology of misery”. He makes a plausible case for the argument that Goethe, although sharing the Romantics’ fascination with despair, passion and wildness, and although writing a novel that broke the rules about a hero who broke them, was questioning the value of unconventionality for its own sake, and conveying the importance of coordinating passion and sensibility with coherence and discipline.

Strangely, it may be precisely because contemporary readers have dimly sensed what Armstrong so skilfully analyses that they have not warmed to Goethe. Despite postmodern irony, and post-Holocaust cynicism, we still require Romantic sensibility in our artists, and Goethe’s sane, relatively easy life, although interesting, does not enchant us. Life, Love, Goethe may rectify that.

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