Everyone wants to be happy. No one has agreed on what that means. Aristotle says: happiness is activity in accordance with virtue. Epicurus: pleasure without pain. Schopenhauer: there is no happiness, only the ending of suffering. Nietzsche: happiness is what happens when you live so fully that you have no need to look for it. Tolstoy wrecked his life searching for it. Fromm understood that happiness is not found — it is produced. Six answers — each of them honest, each of them incomplete.
Aristotle was the first to put the question strictly: what is eudaimonia — the flourishing of a human being? Not pleasure and not calm. Happiness is activity: living at the full stretch of your capacities, in accordance with virtue, among other people. Without friendship, without a share in the life of the polis, without growth, there is no happiness by definition. A hermit cannot be happy — a human being is social.
Epicurus is the most slandered philosopher in history. He is called an apologist for debauchery — he lived in a small garden, ate bread and drank water. His happiness: ataraxia, the imperturbability of the spirit, and aponia, the absence of bodily pain. Pleasure is not an orgy but a quiet gladness. Friends, simple joys, no fear of death. It is a modest programme — and a surprisingly workable one.
Schopenhauer is the most honest pessimist in the history of philosophy. There is no happiness: there is only a brief cessation of suffering, which is immediately replaced by boredom or by a new desire. The will to live is blind and meaningless. We are its victims. His prescription: asceticism and art — the only pauses in that wheel. It is not a consolation. But it is honest.
“Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does.” Nietzsche rejected the question itself. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is a by-product of living at full strength. The Dionysian experience: living so intensely that the question “am I happy?” simply never arises. Amor fati — love your fate, even its terrible parts.
At fifty Tolstoy wrote “A Confession”: I am rich, famous, healthy, loved — and I do not understand what to live for. He hid the ropes so as not to hang himself. His way out of that state ran through the simple life, manual labour, the faith of ordinary people. He found the way out — and destroyed everything he had. He left home three weeks before he died. The happiness he found cost him his family, his peace and his life.
Fromm — psychoanalyst and philosopher — gave the most practical answer to the question of happiness. “To Have or to Be”: two modes of existence. Having means accumulating, consuming, controlling. Being means loving, creating, giving. Happiness is not in what you own — it is in who you are at every moment. This is not Buddhism and not Christianity — it is a psychological fact that Fromm demonstrated clinically.
Tolstoy, at the height of everything — rich, famous, healthy — discovered that he did not know what to live for. What does that tell us about the nature of happiness?