What is happiness? Philosophers give 5 main answers: virtue and wisdom, pleasure, in god, a social matter and no lasting happiness. AskPhilosophy presents 29 arguments, from Laozi to Robert Nozick, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 5 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
Happiness comes from living well: exercising one's qualities, mastering one's judgements.
Aristote, Lao-tseu, Cicéron, Marc Aurèle…
Happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain, wisely chosen.
Érasme, Aristippe de Cyrène, Épicure, Julien Offray de La Mettrie…
True happiness is found only in union with God.
Augustin, Thomas d'Aquin, Pascal, Al-Ghazali…
No one is happy alone: it depends on living and working conditions.
Aristote, Marx, Richard Easterlin, Émile Durkheim
Desire keeps coming back: life swings from suffering to boredom.
Kant, Schopenhauer, Sigmund Freud, John Stuart Mill
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
Virtue and wisdom
Happiness comes from living well: exercising one's qualities, mastering one's judgements.
11 argumentsHappiness and the human function
A thing's good is performing its function well, and the human function is to act according to reason, with excellence.
Water: the weak overcomes the strong
What is supple goes with life, what is rigid with death, and water, the weakest of things, overcomes the hardest.
Happy even under torture?
Happiness needs a good that cannot be lost, and only virtue qualifies, since it depends on nothing but ourselves.
Only your judgement can harm you
What is not up to us makes no one worse; only our own judgment, which is up to us, disturbs us.
Cheerful calm through moderation (euthymia)
Happiness is a calm state of soul that lack and excess disturb: we reach it with few affairs and moderate pleasures.
The happy life follows nature, hence virtue
Human nature is to be rational: living by reason and virtue is enough for happiness, with pleasure as a bonus.
The four noble truths
Suffering comes from craving for what we lack or what passes; it ends when that craving is put out by a right way of living.
Want only what is up to you
What is not up to us can always be taken from us; counting as ours only what is truly ours means nothing can hold us back.
The experience machine: happiness is not only pleasure
Many would refuse to plug into a pleasure machine: they want to do things and be someone, not just feel as if they did.
Living according to nature with almost nothing: happiness lies in trained virtue, not in needs
Conventions make us want the superfluous and make us dependent; nature asks little, and training teaches us to live on little.
The beggar in the sun: wealth does not buy peace
The ambitious son wears himself out for a rest that wealth does not give; for ease of body and peace of mind, all ranks are nearly level.
Pleasure
Happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain, wisely chosen.
5 argumentsA little folly to be happy
Without a little illusion no friendship or marriage lasts: bare truth often spoils the pleasure of living.
The only good is the pleasure of the moment; happiness is merely their sum
From childhood we seek pleasure for itself, wanting nothing more once we have it: so it is the aim of life.
Pleasure is the aim of life, provided we sort our desires
Every living being turns to pleasure by itself: it is the first good, but each desire is judged by its consequences.
Happiness is lasting pleasure, free of remorse
Happiness is a pleasant sensation that lasts, and remorse is only a useless old habit: better to enjoy without suffering from it.
Nothing is good in itself except desirable consciousness
A thing with no consciousness is worth nothing in itself: whatever we call good is good through the happy conscious life it brings.
In God
True happiness is found only in union with God.
5 argumentsThe restless heart
Every good of this life can be lost against our will; only an eternal good cannot, and our desire for happiness is not in vain.
Perfect happiness is seeing God
No created good fully satisfies desire, and the mind only rests when it knows the very essence of God.
Diversion: fleeing our misery, seeking God
Alone with ourselves we see our weak, mortal condition; diversion hides it from us without curing it.
The alchemy of happiness: knowing and loving God
Each faculty has its delight in its own object; the soul's is to know, and its highest object is God, hence its greatest delight.
False goods and true happiness: God
Wealth, honours, power, fame and pleasure each offer only a piece of happiness, never the whole: the perfect good lies elsewhere.
A social matter
No one is happy alone: it depends on living and working conditions.
4 argumentsMan is a political animal: one cannot be happy alone
Happiness is self-sufficient, and for a being made to live with others, that includes family, friends and fellow citizens.
Estranged labour
What makes us human is free, conscious activity; wage labor is forced and belongs to someone else.
The Easterlin paradox: money makes us happy, but growth does not
Rich people are happier than poor ones, but when a whole country gets richer nobody feels higher up: we compare ourselves.
Without a limit set by society, desire has no end: anomie
We are happy only if our desires match our means, and the individual alone has nothing to set that measure.
No lasting happiness
Desire keeps coming back: life swings from suffering to boredom.
4 argumentsHappiness, an ideal of the imagination
Happiness demands an absolute whole, yet its elements come from experience: nobody can say precisely what they want.
The pendulum: from suffering to boredom
We swing between painful desire and boredom once satisfied, and contemplation lasts only a moment.
Happiness is not in the plan of Creation
We enjoy intensely only by contrast, so only in moments, while misery threatens us constantly from three sides.
The paradox of hedonism: to be happy, do not aim at happiness
Constantly asking "am I happy?" is enough to stop being so; happiness comes from aiming at something else.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.