Happiness is a political category, even an ethical proposition. The aspirational idea of happiness is articulated in the American Declaration of Independence and has lingered as an imperative for modern times. On the one hand, it's about the opportunity to pursue a happy life, but it has also become the prerogative by which the individual has to present as “sufficiently happy” or else suffer the consequences in a world that requires and rewards happiness.
This idea is also in the work of Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767-1794), the French Revolutionary who declared that happiness was a political category. Happiness was seen as the foundation for individual liberty and living a meaningful and happy life. In this sense, happiness is supposed to be an emancipatory idea, it’s supposed to be about the freedom that you experience as an individual to become your best self, to live your happiest life. This notion that the happiest life is living in accordance with your purpose has intuitive appeal.
A critique of happiness might begin with the critique of the manner in which happiness is sold to us as a commodity within capitalism. This is after all the title of Pharrell's song Happy, with its elliptical and tautological insistence that one must be happy because one is already happy. Happiness in this sense is symptomatic, an imperative echoing within an increasingly unhappy, alienated life.
Happiness, to put it in Freudian terms, is today’s Unbehagen in der Kultur. Growing rates of depression are further exacerbated by expectations about being happy. It is symptomatic of a society living in pain, where the pursuit of happiness becomes a wishful, almost idealized substance that we're all supposed to be chasing, yet few of us ever reach.
Nietzsche framed this as the difference between happiness and joy. For Nietzsche, happiness was part of “slave morality.” To be happy was to be idle, to do nothing, yet to not have the courage or individuality to do something meaningful with your life.
Lou Salomé, Paul Rée, and Friedrich Nietzsche posed for this photo after Salomé rejected offers of marriage from both men in May 1882.
Instead, Nietzsche juxtaposed the idea of happiness with the idea of joy. Joy was something that came as a side effect to struggle. Joy was not peaceable, it was violent. Both passion and quiet contentment, but never happy. This remains to my mind a more truthful conception of happiness: to do something meaningful with your life, to work and create, to embrace struggle and hardship, even sacrifice. In this process of laying it all out, of being willing willing to go all the way, one can find joy and contentment, if not happiness.
Here it's worth returning to Seneca, who argued that one should strive to be happy even on the torture rack in an uncanny prefiguration of Christ on the Cross. And yet Seneca wasn't arguing that you should seek out pain in a masochistic fashion. Instead he was saying that happiness is a self-reflective category, not of one’s circumstances, but of one’s subjective disposition. One should caution however, that this is nowhere close to today’s reactionary insistence on a so-called ‘positive mindset’, but almost exactly the opposite. To be happy on the torture rack isn’t to be optimistic, but to be hopeful. As Terry Eagleton once wrote, optimism is for idiots, hope is for revolutionaries.
This is similar to the happiness that Camus famously ascribed to Sisyphus. It isn't the absence of struggle, it isn't the absence of pain. Rather, it’s the embrace of pain and struggle which allow the fortitude and the resilience to withstand hardship and pain. For Camus, this is what true happiness is, not the absence of struggle but the embrace of it. Now we can see how for Saint-Just happiness is not just a political idea, but a revolutionary one, to give oneself fully to the cause of one’s struggle.
From here, we can return to the critique of happiness as a political category. For Žižek, it is precisely a society in pain that requires happiness as absolution. This is a very individualized idea of happiness, the pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of financial freedom. This can certainly make one happier, after all we shouldn’t romanticize poverty. Rather, we should follow Tolstoy, who argued that the pursuit of happiness was tied to the pursuit of individual liberty, but money could be either that which facilitates freedom, or what enslaves you. As Lacan already said, when dealing with enjoyment one has to be very careful to distinguish between the goal and the aim. The goal of freedom can easily serve the underlying aim of remaining unfree.
Žižek takes this a step further and argues that happiness and the performance thereof is always ideologically suspect. For example, isn’t today’s ‘happiness’ precisely reserved for those who get to apologize profusely about their ‘privilege’. Think of the way in which calamities that strike others often make one feel more grateful for what one has. As Aquinas already queried, are the people in heaven happier because they know others are in hell? Or does this knowledge ruin their happiness? The answer, for Aquinas, is to discredit happiness as an ethical category of the world. Those who are in heaven are content, not happy, because they know justice has been served, the chaff has been separated from the wheat. It is in this exact sense that happiness is ideologically suspect, as it is always tied to a certain meta-narrative about worth, value, and the abstract categories of justice, crime, and punishment.
And yet particularly in the holiday season, I think it would be a mistake to resign ourselves to life as pain and suffering. Instead, life is beautiful and we can find contentment and joy as Nietzsche put it, in our solidarity with others. The crucial insight here is that happiness doesn't lie within the pursuit of individual pleasure, which is fleeting and momentary. Instead, happiness comes when we give to others, when we make ourselves subject to others.
This is one of the paradoxes of human existence, that you feel most alive at the exact moment that you eliminate your sense of self, you no longer hold on so deeply to the identification that you have with your own ego. This is part of what Freud called the Death Drive. The Death Drive isn't just a movement towards death, it's the paradox by which you feel most in life at the exact moment that you do something which is de-sublimating.
This can be like a runner’s high, just putting one foot in front of the other goes from a struggle over time to an act which transcends the limits of your own physical body. The French have a euphamism for orgasm, little death, a death which is life-affirming. Here we should be critical of the insistence on ‘being more present’. After all, what one might call ‘living in the moment’ is precisely to cease momentarily that exhausting flow of being-in-life, what Heidegger called Verworfenheit.
Likewise for Plato, philosophy was about staging or enacting a kind of death within your life, a living death. The philosopher, by nature of his vocation, had to be both within and outside of ordinary life. It is wroth mentioning that the invention of the ‘Gymnasium’ was precisely to create a physical location where this living death was possible, something which continues to prove its political nature when one considers the continued accusations about the lack of ‘real-world’ application universities supposedly provide.
The paradox, which Plato was already aware of, was that happiness could only be found when the subject puts himself aside. As Chesterton wrote, humility is to think less of oneself, but to think of oneself less. Living death can be an act of charity, the more you give, the more happiness you receive.
As Goethe wrote, happiness has a tendency to nip at our feet when we least expect it to. We should dare to be happy, which means to dare imagining a world in which happiness could be more than the semblance of heroic happiness staged in a pop-song. Or, as Brecht warns us: Unhappy the land that needs a hero.
We should consider happiness as a political category. In order to be happy, we need to reimagine the manner in which we conceive of happiness, the manner in which we live with others, and the manner in which we imagine ourselves living well.
