PHILOSOPHICAL AND SPIRITUAL VIEWS ON HAPPINESS

Welcome back! I hope you have gotten a sense of what the course is going to be. What we'regoing to get into before we dive into before we get to the science of happiness is how have the greatthinkers thought about happiness and the meaningful life over history. This is really one of theoldest questions that humans have been grappling with, which is how do I lead a meaningfullife? What is happiness? How do I cultivate the happiness of people around me? Scientistshave gotten into this game relatively late and there have been great thinkers for quitesome time who have really grappled with this fundamental question: what is happiness?I'm going to give you a quick survey of some of the great thinkers. I'm sure youhave sort of encountered other people you should be thinking about as you move throughthis class. Let's take a quick spin through the great thinking of happiness.The first stop is the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius, who was a part of an explosionof writing about 2500 years ago where great thinkers were thinking about what does itmean to be happy? To lead a virtuous life? Or to be content? And Confucius from his analectsfrom 2500 years ago, writes about this concept of jen. J-E-N. Or sometimes spelled in differenttranslations, R-E-N. And jen is really about dignity. It's about conveying your senseof reverence or humanity towards others. Let me give you an illustrative quote that reallygets to the heart of the philosophy of Confucius and jen: A person of jen or humanity who findshappiness and brings it to others, brings good of others to completion and does notbring the bad in others to completion. What's that really is telling us, and which we willsee throughout this class, is that happiness is some sense has an outward orientation inenhancing the welfare of others. A very deep and lasting theme.Let's turn to another great tradition in Eastern thought that influenced a lot of substanceand science of this class, which comes out of Buddhism. Again, a kind of a line of thinkingthat traces back 2500 years. I really love this quote, one of the leaders of TibetanBuddhism, His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, where he writes: "If you want others to be happy,practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion". Again, it's interestinghow this is emphasizing orienting your attention to other people and that compassion, as welllearn in Week 3, is one of these very powerful pathways to happiness. And this thinking ofthe Dalai Lama is part of a broader tradition in Buddhism that many of you have probablyheard about where they talk about the state of peacefulness and contentedness and happiness,sometimes called nirvana. The pathway to the state of happiness or nirvana really startsfrom the recognition, the first noble truth, that there are a lot of difficulties in life,there is a lot of suffering. The second noble truth is that we suffer because of illusions,because of grasping for things that might not bring us happiness because of certaintypes of ignorance, that we find nirvana and happiness and peacefulness when we detachfrom these clinging tendencies and grasping. And then there are all these practical recommendationsin Buddhist philosophy that get us to this state of detachment or nirvana. Things likepracticing equanimity and calmness or things like kind speech, which we'll talk about.An emphasis is placed once again on compassion or karuna of being really concerned withthe welfare of others and being kind. Again we see this outward orientation that we'llreturn to in the class.Yet another great tradition in Eastern thought emerging 2500 years ago, a little less recognizedtoday, is Taoism. This really comes out of first Lao Tzu, the great Chinese philosopher,and his influential book, Tao Te Ching. I think the Taoist tradition turns us to acouple really important themes, challenging themes if you will. One is that happinessis often paradoxical. The meaning of life may not be necessarily grasped by your rationalmind, you have to experience it, let it unfold. I love this quote from the Tao Te Chingof Lao Tzu that brings into focus the paradoxical nature of happiness and meaning and some counterintuitivenotions. In this quote Lao Tzu writes "When man is born he is tender and weak. At deathhe is stiff and hard. All things, as well as the grass and the trees, tender and subtlewhile alive, when dead, withered and dried. Therefore, the tender and the weak are thecompanions of life and the stiff and the hard are companions of death." It's a littlebit paradoxical: weakness and tenderness may be the pathway to life and the Tao and themysterious force of life. And again, challenging us to put aside preconceptions to find happiness.Let's shift continents if you will and move to yet other thinkings 2500 years ago. There wasa lot of discussion about what happiness and the meaningful life is. In Greek philosophyof Plato and Aristotle and others beginning 2500 years ago. One of my favorite approaches to the meaningful life and happiness is offered by the greatGreek philosopher 2500 years ago, Aristotle. In his book Nicomachean Ethics was kind ofone of his treatments for the ethical life and the Greeks were really interested in howhappiness is really found at the end of life when you're summing up the things that you'vegiven to the world and kind of the balance of virtuous acts that you may have engagedin while alive. Thinking about happiness in this virtuous life, Aristotle arrives at avery useful idea called the Principle of Moderation. There he reasons, which will be useful foryou when you think about all the different passions and emotions and mental tendenciesthat we talked about in this class. What Aristotle would argue is that we really have to acceptthem all and they all have their place and function when cultivated in the right way.So Aristotle writes when articulating his Principle of Moderation, anyone can becomeangry. That's easy. But to be angry at the right person and to the right degree and atthe right time and for the right purpose and the right way thats not within everybody'spower and that's not easy and that is really the appropriate fashion that when our passionsare cultivated in the right context, they bring us happiness and the good life. Andeven passions like anger when, for example, engaged in societal injustice can bring abouta lot of good and happiness. Aristotle is suggesting moderation and acceptance of ourpassions as a pathway to happiness.Let's move forward in time historically and just talk about a couple of other ideason this broad perspective of the wisdom of the ages of how we can think about what happinessis. Coming out of European philosophy, might not surprise you, parts of France and elsewhere,was a hedonistic viewpoint of happiness. Really it's this notion that happiness is foundin pleasure and sensation, that this is a way that we should really define happiness.Happiness is really the sum of all the sensory pleasures and the absences of pain. If I wantedto know if I'm happy or not from this hedonistic perspective, which is sometimes called theEpicurean philosophy, I would sort of take stock of my delicious meals, if I had a wonderfulcup of coffee or burrito, have I enjoyed the beauty of walking in the woods with the sensationof sun on the skin? And that would tell me that I'm happy today. It is really basedin the sensations of the senses I've experienced.Building on that and I think a really powerful idea that in many ways is a founding ideasof the Greater Good Science Center comes out of the enlightenment era philosophers of the18th and 19th century, which is called utilitarianism. This is the notion that is articulated byJohn Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and others and its such a useful idea, which is thathappiness is found in your actions that bring about the greatest happiness for the greatestnumber of people. Again, just think about that. Happiness is found in actions thatlift up the welfare in as many people as possible. What that starts to do as we saw with manyof the Eastern thinkers as well is that happiness may not be about your own personal pleasureor the delights you experience, but rather it's about bringing a lot of good to otherpeople. It's about lifting up communities as a way to define happiness. This philosophywas a really important underpinning that Thomas Jefferson wrote that we really have to guaranteethe rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If you allow societies to pursuethis utilitarian notion of happiness of lifting up the welfare of others, societies will dopretty well.Of course there are other great traditions in thinking about happiness and it's embarrassingto just devote this limited time to these traditions. There are Judeo-Christian waysof thinking about happiness and I'd really recommend reading Darren McMann, a FloridaState philosopher and historian, who has written about happiness from this historical, philosophicalperspective. Some of you may be more aware of some Hinduist approaches emerging of Indiaabout how happiness is really found from the freedom of desire, very Buddhist idea of non-clinging,non-attachment. Some of you may have practiced the ancient traditions of yoga, the breathingposture, the way of cultivating happiness through physical posture. Really at the coreof that philosophy is that peace and happiness are found when we are no longer desiring thewrong things.What this all tells us when we take this look at the wisdom of the ages and we consult thegreat Eastern traditions and the European traditions and the Judeo-Christian thoughtis we really have to honor cultural approaches to happiness, cultural variations. Scientistsare starting to look at that and I just want you to be mindful of this going forward. Forexample, Uchida and colleagues and Oishi and others have started to document that theWestern mindset and things of happiness is all about freedom and achievement, kind ofself-gratification. The Eastern mindset, that you might find in China for example or Japan,is a little oriented more towards happiness as relational as connection, community, orduty. It's important to bear in mind that there are many different perspectives on thisquestion of what happiness is and now our task and what we're going to do next isstart to take these rich ideas and bring them into the laboratory and think about how wewould study happiness from a scientific perspective.THE TERMS OF HAPPINESSThese terms are important to understanding some of the obstacles to happiness identified by researchers. Sonja Lyubomirsky and Emiliana have alluded to many of them in earlier videos. You can also hear Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the best-selling bookStumbling on Happiness, discuss severalof these terms in this video onBig Think.Affective forecasting:The process ofmaking predictions about how you will feel in the future.Accordingto Daniel Gilbert, who coined the term "affective forecasting" with his colleague Timothy Wilson, affective forecasting is simply "the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what theyll like and what they wont like."However, as Emiliana explained in the previous video, we are often poor judges in the present of what will bring us happiness in the future, causing us to look for happiness in the wrong places.Impact bias:The tendency to overestimate how an event or experience in the future will affect our emotional well-being, for better or worse. For instance, we often underestimate our ability to recoverfrom difficult experiences, an ability that Gilbert calls our "psychological immune system." He documented this bias in astudythat found peoplegenerally overestimate how various defeats or rejections--such asa romantic breakup or being turned down for a job--would impact their happiness.Impact bias is a major cause of mistakes in affective forecasting. It can leadus to avoid certain decisions or activities out of an inflated fear that they will harm our happiness or to covet certain outcomes (such aswinning the lottery) that don't actually boost our happiness as much as we think they will.Set point theory:The theory that we each have a relatively stable level ofhappiness that is largely determined by our genes and personality. Though we might experience some fluctuations in happiness due to events big and small, this theory holds that we eventually return to our basic set point of happiness.Hedonic adaptation (aka the "hedonic treadmill"):Our ability to adapt tochanges in our life circumstances or sensory experiences. Research suggestsmanyof us have a remarkable ability to get used to things that might initially bring us pleasure, such asgetting marriedorwinning the lottery,and even to eventuallyreturn to our happiness set pointafter a traumatic accident.Some researchers, such as Ed Diener at the University of Illinois, however, have argued that the truth abouthedonic adaptation and set points is more nuanced: Some people might be more prone than others to adapt to events, and aperson's set point may not be stable over time. Throughout this class, we will explore research--and research-based methods--that suggest how we might counteract our tendency for hedonic adaptation and develop more lasting happiness.