Culture, Its Delights and Distractions: Culture and the Search for Happiness

Nearly ten years ago I published a book entitled, Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction (Rowman & Littlefield),  the product of ten years research into the history of happiness as an idea.  The issue I explored was straightforward: Why had the notion of happiness changed over the course of Western history, from a moral concept as it was from ancient times to the Renaissance, to a psychological one. 

WASHINGTON,DC (Catholic Online) - Nearly ten years ago I published a book entitled, Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction (Rowman & Littlefield),  the product of ten years research into the history of happiness as an idea.  The issue I explored was straightforward: Why had the notion of happiness changed over the course of Western history, from a moral concept as it was from ancient times to the Renaissance, to a psychological one. 

Anyone who has read Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, or Aquinas on happiness will have noticed how little attention is paid to how persons "feel," their "contentment," or their "peace of mind."  For roughly two thousand years, the notion of happiness, of the best life we can live, the life towards which we all aspire, was understood as primarily a morally good life.  In the past decade, most philosophers have caught on to this problem and have adopted the phrase "human-flourishing" in place of where they would have once used the term happiness. 

To talk about human flourishing only begs the question about what the happy life really is, whether it is to be identified with a psychological state, an emotional state, practical success, an attainment of character, good luck, or some combination of these.  But the image of flourishing does capture the Aristotelian maxim that the happy life is the full actualization of human potential, a potential that Aristotle considered the development of virtue in the face of good and bad fortune. 

The legacy of the Greek philosophers, as refracted through the Christian faith of the Patristic and Medieval writers, was challenged during the Renaissance by the growing preoccupation with earthly life's pleasures  made possible by the economic creation of a middle class. The perfect happiness of heaven, as depicted by Aquinas and the other Medievals, started to take a back seat to what could be obtained here and now. Our earthly life, once tightly bound to a hope for a place in heaven, became more and more an end to be pursued for its own sake, for its pleasures, possessions, powers, satisfactions, and delights. 

The culmination of this development can be seen in Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), which was originally entitled, Culture and Unhappiness. Freud's vision of civilization is based upon the assumption that persons are driven forward by the desire for pleasure and the constraints of society and its institutions. Happiness, identified with the attainment of pleasure, the ultimate being sexual, is thwarted by marriage, law, custom, and social stability.  The solution is the process of sublimation, the transformation of erotic desire into socially valuable actions and products - the arts, commerce, science, lawmaking, education, politics, etc.

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The most significant aspect of Freud's view of happiness is not that it's identified with pleasure - the British and French Utilitarians had already established that - but his argument that the quest for happiness is at odds with a civilized and ordered life. The concept that once stood for the summit of human aspiration and action now represents an irrepressible inner urge toward complete pleasure and, according to Freud, thanatos or death. The death wish is implicit in human eros because the only way to satisfy it is to put it to an end, in other words, death. 

Freud's view anticipates the modern debate about whether or not an individual's self-interest can be pursued without subtracting from the good of others, the common good. Freud considered the two totally incompatible: For Freud, culture is the product of this massive sublimation of human eros, a sort of bird cage into which men and women insert themselves to avoid the violence and death of unbridled eros.In total contrast to Aristotle, culture then assists the human project by creating obstacles to the destructive actualization of our potencies.

It should be observed that among the more puritanical sects of today's Christians, the roles between culture and individuals are reversed. The Puritan impulse, which is part of the root structure of our nation, is to defend oneself and one's family against the danger of culture's carnal mindedness. The Puritan sect seeks to wall out the larger future in order to create an insulated communal culture completely infused with their understanding of the Word of God.  For the Puritan, the danger comes from the culture; for Freud, the danger arises from human eroticism.  But they are similar in another way - each views human desire as the danger, as the flammable fact of human existence that must never ignite, or if ignited quickly stamped out. 

Aristotle and his Christian commentators would not have understood the reduction of human desire - eros - to posing only this danger.  Both the Ancients and the Medievals saw our natural eros as entirely based in the desire for the Good, or for God, an eros corruptible but not corrupted by nature. For them, culture is not a bulwark against eros, or the corruptor of eros, but that which assists reason and faith in leading desire, eros, towards its natural end.

Summary

1. Happiness to the Ancients and Medievals was a moral term, applied only to men and women of virtue.

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2. Starting with the Renaissance the concept of happiness started to become identify with various forms of earthly fulfullment, such as pleasure, emotional satisfaction and peace of mind, power, and success.

3. Sigmund Freud's Civilization and It's Discontents (1930) viewed the search for happiness as detrimental to civilization and society, because for Freud the experience happiness itself was the most intense state of pleasure possible.

© Deal W. Hudson, Ph.D

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Deal W. Hudson is president of the Morley Institute of Church and Culture, Senior Editor at Catholic Online, and former publisher and editor of Crisis Magazine.This column and subsequent contributions are an excerpt from a forthcoming book. Dr. Hudson's new radio show, Church and Culture, will begin broadcasting in February on the Ave Maria Radio Network.

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