What If We've Got Happiness Wrong?

Why Eudaimonia Is Better Than Happiness

A concert pianist performs rapturously — It’s about what we do, not what we feel.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We all say we want to be happy, yet the pursuit of happiness often seems like a wild goose chase.

Perhaps the problem is not so much with us, or the world we live in, but with the very concept of happiness.

The ancient Greeks had a better idea. They called it eudaimonia, literally, ‘good soul’, ‘good spirit’, or ‘good god’. Although Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle each understood eudaimonia in somewhat different ways, they all regarded it as the highest good, often even as the very aim and purpose of philosophy.

What Is Eudaimonia?

Eudaimonia is often translated simply as ‘happiness’—but that can be misleading.

The word happy, which is related to happen and perhaps, derives from the Norse happ for ‘chance’, ‘fortune’, or ‘luck’. From Irish to Greek, most European words for ‘happy’ originally meant something like ‘lucky’—one exception being Welsh, in which it originally meant ‘wise’. Another Old English word for ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ was gesælig, which, over the centuries, morphed into our ‘silly’.

Eudaimonia, by contrast, is anything but silly. It has nothing to do with chance or fortune and everything to do with thought and design—with how we choose to live. Compared with happiness, it is a much deeper, fuller, and richer idea, often articulated in terms of flourishing or living a life that is worthwhile, fulfilling, and elevating.

All the major philosophical schools of antiquity, including even the Epicureans, regarded eudaimonia as the highest good. Like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, they differed over how it was to be achieved, but they all agreed that the aim of human life must be something higher or fuller than simple happiness.

Unlike happiness, eudaimonia is not an emotion but a state of being—or, especially for Aristotle, a state of doing. As such, it is more deeply rooted than happiness, and more stable and reliable. Although it leads to pleasure or satisfaction of the highest kind, it does not arise from pleasure, but from higher values and principles that transcend the here and now. The people of Athens put Socrates in prison, they even put him to death, but they did not and could not take away his eudaimonia.

Socrates on Eudaimonia

Socrates, it seems, equated eudaimonia with wisdom and virtue. In the Greater Alcibiades, he says that he who is not wise cannot be happy; in the Gorgias, that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man; and in the Meno, that everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness.

At his trial, Socrates gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honour as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul. ‘Wealth,’ he said, ‘does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.’

Socrates supplied the supreme proof that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man, for when the jurors condemned him to death, they only made him and his ideas as immortal as can be—and rather than appease them, which he could easily have done, he chose instead, very cannily, to abet them.

Plato on Eudaimonia

Plato broadly agreed with his teacher Socrates, and sought to answer an obvious objection: If virtue is the path to a flourishing life, why does injustice so often seem the easy shortcut?

In the Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon argues that most people are venal, but maintain a reputation for virtue and justice to evade the social costs of being or seeming unjust. But if a man could get hold of the fabled Ring of Gyges and make himself invisible, he would behave without restraint:

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

According to Glaucon, we behave justly not because we value justice, but because we are weak and fearful; while the unjust man who is cunning enough to seem just will get the better of everyone and everything.

In his magisterial reply to Glaucon, Plato famously conjures an idealised Republic to help him ‘locate’ (define) justice, first in the state, where it is larger and easier to pin down, and then in the individual. He argues that justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: if health in the body is intrinsically desirable, then so too is justice in the soul. For Plato, an unjust man cannot be happy because he is not in rational and ordered control of himself.

Aristotle on Eudaimonia

It is with Plato’s one-time student Aristotle, and his Nicomachean Ethics, that the concept of eudaimonia is most closely associated.

For Aristotle, a thing is best understood by looking at its end, purpose, or goal (Greek, telos—as in ‘teleology’ and ‘telomere’). The purpose of a knife is to cut, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what a knife is. The goal of medicine is good health, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what medicine is, or should be. If this is true of knives and medicine, might it also be true of us? Might we also have an ergon, or ‘distinctive function’?

Maybe we’ll come back to that.

If one follows Aristotle’s line of thought, it soon becomes apparent that some goals are subordinate to other goals, which are themselves subordinate to yet other goals. A medical student’s goal may be to qualify as a doctor, but this is subordinate to her goal of healing the sick, which is itself subordinate to her goal of making a living by doing something useful. This could go on and on, but unless the medical student has a goal that is an end-in-itself, nothing that she does is actually worth doing.

What, asks Aristotle, is this end-in-itself? This ‘supreme good’, he replies, is eudaimonia, and eudaimonia alone.

Eudaimonia, notice, is not just ‘happiness’, it’s salvation—the thing that prevents life from being an infinite regress of ends, as it so often seems. Only in eudaimonia does life become worth living in and of itself.

So, given its importance, what exactly did Aristotle understand by eudaimonia?

Whereas human beings need nourishment like plants, and have sentience like animals, our ergon—the thing that most makes us not something else, like an oak, a dolphin, or a baboon—says Aristotle, is our unique and god-like capacity to reason. Aristippus of Cyrene made much the same point when he chided a champion swimmer: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of boasting about what a fish or dolphin could better do?’ Thus, our supreme good is to lead a life that enables us to use and develop our reason, and that is in accordance with rational principles.

By living our life to the full according to our essential nature as rational beings, we are bound to flourish, that is, to develop and express our full human potential, regardless of the ebb and flow of our good or bad fortune.

To put this in modern terms, if we develop our thinking and imagining skills, if we guard against lies and self-deception, if we refine and master our emotions, we will, over the years, make better and better choices, do more and more meaningful things, and derive ever-increasing satisfaction from all that we have become and all that we have achieved, and are yet able to achieve.