The Pursuit of Happiness

We intuitively understand that happiness is our aim and the very point of our existence. I outline the various theories on happiness, and use Hannah Arendt’s vita activa and Georges Bataille’s concept of sovereignty to explore how we can be happy in a world that seems to, on the contrary, propel us away from our happiness.

1: Preamble

There was once a Persian king who wanted to find a piece of knowledge that is always true. What is always or universally true is what is true in all circumstances, across all epochs – a truth that will withstand the test of time. He called together the wise men of his kingdom and set them to the task of finding this truth, which should be one that made us happy when we are sad and sad when we are happy.

His wise men laboured for what seemed an extraordinarily long time, given that a powerful king who has the power of life and death over them had commanded them to find it. What seemed simple was clearly not so, given that even the wisest had to devote so much time to find it. Finally, they presented him a ring with the inscription: “This Too Shall Pass.” Just a simple set of four words.

The very wisest of men, embodied since time immemorial in a group known as philosophers have long sought universal truths. We have always lived in a world of change, where what is true today is invalidated tomorrow. Even our best theories, from geocentrism to heliocentrism, have failed us. We are not the centre of the universe. Even when we came to recognise that the earth was not at the centre, we thought that the sun which nourished our planet must be at the centre. Today, we know that not only are we not at the centre, neither is our sun. We are instead just one small planet, within an insignificant solar system, in a remote galaxy, in what may be an infinite universe. There is no centre and even if there is one, we are not there.

If we try to speak some universal truth, then while that truth might be applicable in all situations, be we happy or sad, alive or dead, brave or afraid, it is not quite instructive. It does not tell us how to lead our lives. It does not tell us what is best and what to choose when confronted with the multitude of decisions we have to make. We are faced instead with uncertainty due to ambiguity, a lack of knowledge, and a pressing dearth of eternal principles that can clarify our moral position. The more universal a truth-proposition is, the less concrete it is for us to put it to use. This is the price we have to pay for universality.

This Too Shall Pass is a consolation, that even our toughest struggle will come to an end, be it through us managing to overcome it, or, failing to overcome it, be overcome by it. It indeed shall pass – we, as individual living beings, will die. Our suffering will cease. Our greatest triumphs and joys will come to pass in the same way. Whatever happiness we enjoy will fade and as much as we want to cling to it, eventually our bodies will perish along with our feelings of elation. That is not to say that universal truths are worthless. They are worth a great deal but they give us no direction on how we should live our lives, how to choose between the countless decisions we have to make each day, from the time we should wake up to the food we should eat.

Instead, we need to use our faculty of reason to weigh our options. Not every decision requires deep pondering; whether we have fried noodles or waffles for breakfast hardly matters. We have personal preferences, some of which are driven by our cultural background and geographic location. For instance, if we live in Asia, choosing to eat noodles or rice for a meal is much more likely than choosing to eat potatoes. Some of these preferences are driven by our ‘whims,’ which would take some psychologising to unearth their roots. We might feel this morning like something sweet or something savoury. So far my examples are banal, but decisions come in many varieties, some whimsical and some deeply consequential. From the unimportant to the life-changing, we nevertheless have to make each of these decisions.

For the tougher decisions, we use our reason but this is not to say that it is simply a logical calculation. Our faculty of reason is conditioned by our value system. If for instance, we value the intellect more than physical strength, we may choose to emphasise developing our intellect through study rather than our bodily strength through sports. It is not a logical calculation only since top sportsman can earn much more money than top professors, if money is our yardstick. Why we value the intellect more is because of our value system, where for instance as a child, our parents instil in us the notion that having ‘brains’ is better than having brawn. Why is it better? It might not be as lucrative or as pleasurable since one can make a lot of money and enjoy a lot of satisfaction playing sports. So why this emphasis on learning and the development of the intellect? Where did this hierarchy of values come from, which pride intellect over brawn? Our parents did not live in isolation and obtained their values solely from the force of their reason. Our value systems are shaped by our elders and leaders who in turn have their value system shaped by the prevailing norms, expectations and values of our society.

If warriors are who our society valued, we would have been training to become fighters. Where the problem arises is when our predispositions are out of alignment with the value system of our society. If we are talented at fighting but mediocre in our studies, and yet fighting as a skill is lowly valued by our society, then we seem less capable compared to if we were living in a warring city like Sparta in 500 BC. Warren Buffett’s skill as an investor is richly rewarded today since it is a skill valued by his society but you would not want to be marooned with him on a desert island. You instead will want to be buddies with the Robinson Crusoe type who knows how to make a fire and build a shelter from trees, a valuable skill in the right environment but not in modern day New York City. Context is important.

The point is, there is no brief aphorism that is going to be our guiding star out of the complexity of our lives. Whatever answers we shall find, do not expect it to be simple and straightforward, universally applicable to everyone and in all situations. It will require nuance and, in some situations, may seem contradictory to what might appear to be best. If we want it to be practically useful, we must expect it to lose some universality. We too like the wise men of Persia have to embark on a journey of contemplation and discovery, under pressure from the demands of our lives, but at the end, we should not expect a one-liner or a four-word phrase. Simple answers will simply not fit the complexity of our human condition.

In this essay, I want to enquire into how we should live our lives. It is a massive endeavour but I will narrow its scope so that it will more closely address what I want to know for myself. The endeavour after truth is fraught with difficulties which I have hinted at. How can we even begin? We must begin from our intuitions, which might not tell us what is universally true if held to strict standards but is something that others are able to understand since they too experience the same intuitions.

What do we want from our lives? My intuition suggests that it is happiness that we want. We want to be happy, to lead meaningful lives, to have a good life. I am not the first to think this obviously. Aristotle wrote The Nicomachean Ethics for his son, Nicomachus, and in its first book[1], he considers what is our ultimate aim for each of our actions. He writes: “If there is an end for all that we do, this will be the good achievable by action.” This is his basis for which he can provide no proof since there is no proof to be had. From this intuition, he reasons that sometimes, we do things not for its own sake but for the sake of something else. But we want that something else for some final reason and if we follow that chain of reasoning to its end, we would arrive at a final and self-sufficient reason for our actions. That final and self-sufficient reason is happiness. We want happiness for its own sake; it is our ultimate aim.

Aristotle’s theory of virtue ethics explains how we can achieve this happiness, which he thinks of as a life well-lived, where one pursues a life of moral virtue and excellence, through an “exercise of our capacities through worthwhile activities well done.”[2] Well-being is not merely a state to achieve. It is a way of leading our lives, it is an activity. This sums it up well but I am getting ahead of myself. I do not want to just take Aristotle’s word for it but to really understand, I need to embark on a quest, which is why I am writing this.

However, don’t you wish there is a book you can read that addresses what you specifically want to know? Many books have been written on the topic of happiness. At least from the massive bibliography of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on happiness,[3] we know that there are hundreds of articles and books discussing happiness in a serious, rigorous way but even if there are such books that can completely address my needs, it can never be adequate. To find out how to be happy is not something that one can passively imbibe from without. I need to write my own account to work it out for myself. Sometimes, we need to work things out for ourselves though we can be helped on our journey through learning from other people’s account.

An example of an important matter that people need to work out for themselves is religious belief. One can passively accept the religious beliefs of others such as one’s parents or elders like one’s religious teachers, and accept its imposition but I believe that one needs to take the journey herself to try to understand what the religion means relative to other religions, to, on one’s own, challenge the prescriptions and accounts, so as to finally come to one’s own conclusion and in that way build a strong belief. Otherwise, one would hardly even know what one believes, which makes for a weak belief.

Channelling Descartes, I invite you to take this journey with me, to “meditate seriously with me”[4] to try to understand what it means for us to be happy in this life and to consider if my reflections make sense for you also. I aim through this essay to think about how to be happy in this life. There is an underlying assumption that I am making, which is that we have only one life which means that once we die, that is the end; there is no afterlife. For those who do believe in God and an afterlife, I leave it to you to see how this essay applies. Not all of it will but I do think that any religion also wants its adherents to live happily and meaningfully, with perhaps the sources of happiness differing from that of a non-believer.

Those, like myself, without a hope for an afterlife might have a nagging sense of futility. Whatever it is that we do will in the long term come to naught. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s tale of Ozymandias, a traveller encounters the remains of a massive statue in a desert of an “antique land.” How splendid that statue must have been in its heyday but now, its ruins lie crumbled on the sand. He reads the inscription: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”[5] Ozymandias must have imagined that his glory, manifested in his constructions such as the statue of himself, will last forever. He expected that people will view them millennia later and still marvel at them. The mighty and the powerful will despair upon seeing the magnificence of Ozymandias’s works, as they will realise that they can never match it. Yet even for one as great as Ozymandias, hardly anything remains as the tides of time erode what he had left behind.

On the scale of the universe, we are merely specks of specks of dust. On the scale of time, our existence even for the greatest among humankind will hardly register as the briefest blip. Is there any point then? Why bother pursuing happiness, or try to do anything at all? However, is it not precisely because our life is limited, that at least to us, it has value while we are alive? All of us have a limited time to live. Even the oldest among us will have little over a century to walk the earth. Because our time is limited, we surely do not want to squander even what little time we have. We want to live it as best as we can, which involves pursuing our own happiness.

We have no automatic right to it; no one owes it to us to ensure our happiness. What we do have a right to, as recorded in the American Declaration of Independence, is the right to a “pursuit of happiness”. We have a right to pursue happiness, and with this right to pursue it, which implies choice, it also means that we are responsible for our own happiness. We can choose to be miserable; on the other hand, we can try to do what makes us happy. We can accept our circumstances or we can try to change it in our favour. We may not be able to get everything we want but we can certainly try.

While sometimes good things may come our way by strokes of luck, sometimes we have to make our own luck and create the conditions that increase the chances of us getting what we want. However, not everything is in our control; try as we might, we might fail. Or we might succeed but then realise that what we thought we had wanted is not what we need. Even to discover what makes us happy is a learning process. There is no one formula that works in all conditions for everyone, though we might find consolation when we fail, in thinking that This Too Shall Pass, or be stirred to action in that same aphorism, to recognise that in our limited time alive, that it too shall pass and we must try to improve our lives, to try to live as good as we can and to try to be happy.

Since we speak about life and its limited span, we must then speak of death. On death, there is much to be said but as it is not the subject of this essay, let us simply take our cue from Epicurus (BC 341-271) and leave it at that: “Death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.”[6] This thought came from Epicurus’s letter to his friend, Menoeceus.

To bring this preamble to a close, given that my aim is to explore the pursuit of happiness philosophically, it is worth considering Epicurus’s opening to the same letter: “Let no one when young delay to study philosophy, nor when he is old grow weary of his study. For no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul. And the man who says that the age for philosophy has either not yet come or has gone by is like the man who says that the age for happiness is not yet come to him, or has passed away. […] We must […] meditate on the things that make our happiness, seeing that when that is with us we have all, but when it is absent we do all to win it.”[7]


2: What is Happiness?

What do we want? Common-sense intuition tells us that we want to be happy, we want to have meaningful lives and lead a good life. But what does it even mean to be happy? Daniel M. Haybron in Happiness: A Very Short Introduction breaks it down into two broad notions, the first a psychological perspective on happiness and the second a value perspective which he distinguishes from happiness by terming it well-being.[8] Three theories arise from the psychological perspective where happiness is a state of mind:

1) Emotional state theory

2) Hedonism

3) Life satisfaction theory

The emotional state theory is about our feelings and mood propensity. We recognise that we are in a happy emotional state when we feel that we are thriving, carefree and not overcome by worries. Our mood propensity is our genetic predisposition to, for instance, be optimistic or dour. Hedonism is the balance of pleasant over unpleasant experiences where we will want to have more of the pleasant and less of the unpleasant, though we do care about other things other than pleasure or for that matter, happiness, which brings us to the life satisfaction theory.

To assess our life satisfaction, we make a global judgement of how satisfied we are with our lives, all things considered. On the whole, are our lives going well by our own standards? The life satisfaction theory can account for how we do care about things other than those that give us pleasure. For example, Su-Ting may wish to be an outstanding chess player even if it involves many hours of tough training which may often not be fun. She has to take part in difficult and frustrating bouts ending in defeat. However, even those who suffer a lot may still be satisfied with their lives and, based on this theory, be considered happy. After all, if they judge themselves satisfied and hence according to this theory, happy, who are we to judge otherwise? However, a problem (and a benefit) of this theory is that life satisfaction is something that we can only gauge when our entire lives have run its course. Athenian statesman Solon says that we should “count no man happy until the end is known.” This means we should keep the big picture in mind, when we pursue actions that may not immediately give us feelings of happiness or pleasure, but may pay off later. The aim is to look back at the end and reflect on whether overall, we have led a good life and in that way a happy life.

We need not decide between these three theories. Each are instructive. We want to feel good (emotional state theory), we want to enjoy pleasures and avoid pain (hedonism) and we want to be able to look back and judge that we have led a happy life (life satisfaction theory). In addition to the psychological perspective of happiness, the value perspective also lends insight. By value, Haybron is referring to what is good for us, what kind of life we want and what is valuable to us. Just to have a happy state of mind is apparently not enough, it should be accompanied by leading a good life. Aristotle’s account once again is worth considering. He talks of eudaimonia, a “complete life of virtuous activity.” Virtue for Aristotle is not just to be morally virtuous but to have human excellence. As Haybron writes: “A good life […] consists in excellent activity: it is more something you do than a state you try to attain.” He outlines four theories of well-being:

1) Hedonism: the balance of pleasure over pain as previously mentioned.

2) Desire theories: where what is good for you is getting what you want. However, this theory has difficulty explaining the mistakes we sometimes make in desiring what is bad for us.

3) List theories: where we make a list of objective goods like knowledge, achievement, friendship, pleasure and whatever else is important to us, and try to obtain them.

4) Eudaimonistic theories: where we live in accordance to who we are, to try to be authentically happy by reflecting our own values.

Pleasure is important for us but so are objectively good things such as knowledge, friendship and achievement which might or might not be pleasurable while we try to attain them. However, since we value them, we have to try, for the sake of our well-beings, to attain them. We also need to try to live in accordance to our nature, by our own lights. Haybron presents three dimensions of happiness:

1) Attunement: where we feel at home in our lives, safe and secure enough to let our defences down, home being a place where we can be relaxed and have peace of mind and tranquillity. When we are in tune with ourselves, we can be confident and we feel relaxed and carefree in contrast to feeling alienated, anxious or stressed.

2) Engagement: We want to be engaged with our choice of activities, where we feel energised, passionate and in the flow while doing them, even when they are not going well.

3) Endorsement: In those moments when we feel happy and joyful, we have the feeling that life is good.

According to Haybron, we have a relaxed posture when we are attuned, we have a spring in our step when we are engaged and we smile when we endorse our happiness, which is all very well but how can we be attuned, engaged and endorsing our happiness? He discusses some sources of happiness though he notes two limitations. The society we live in can and does determine what we want and they may make certain things important for happiness, for instance money. We may also have a genetic predisposition for happiness but since it is something we are unable to do anything about, he does not dwell on it.

Haybron, through the scientific literature, identifies five sources of happiness which happily forms a memorable acronym, SOARS:

1) Security

2) Outlook

3) Autonomy

4) Relationships

5) Skilled and Meaningful Activity

He considers four aspects of security: material security, social security, project security and time security. What is important to our sense of security is our perception of it. For instance, in the case of material security, some may think that when they have enough wealth to take care of their physical needs such as food and shelter, and in addition have some surplus to take care of crises and emergencies, they will then be able to move beyond wealth accumulation to do other things with their lives. Others may think that there can never be enough money since the possibility of crisis is always there and our wants are endless, hence living a life of continuous material insecurity. Too much wealth can also cause material insecurity, since one may fear being robbed if one is seen to be wealthy. It may also create other problems such as having to store it, protect it against theft and prevent its erosion from inflation. On the personal front, one can become arrogant or experience dispute within the family over how to distribute the wealth. Hence, more is not necessarily better.

On arrogance and dispute among one’s loved ones, it is another aspect of security, social security. As a social animal, we crave relationships with others. We care about our social standing and desire mutual respect for one another. We want to be cared for and care for others. Project security concerns the prospects for success in our chosen projects, which affects our self-esteem. Time security is about having enough time to take care of all our various needs and wants. For some people, it seems as if there are never enough hours in a day for all the competing demands in their lives, such as work, parents, children, self-time, rest, entertainment and friends.

Outlook is our general attitude towards our lives. Those with a positive outlook are better able to brook life’s challenges and difficulties with fortitude and even humour. The Stoics, a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece, think that “what matters is not what happens to you, but how you respond to it.” For them, the good and the bad that takes place in our lives are all just “part of the ride.” Haybron shortlists five factors that can help one’s outlook:

A) Positivity: where we savour life’s pleasures, focusing on the positives, being optimistic and grateful, counting our blessings, seeing humour in things and letting ourselves be silly or ridiculous.

B) Acceptance: where we accept things as they are and not demand that they fit our agenda. Keeping our expectations modest can help us accept how things finally turn out. Since we are not harbouring unrealistic hopes, we are hence less likely to be disappointed.

C) Caring for others: Research has shown that caring for others boosts one’s own happiness.

D) Moral integrity: by being honest and keeping promises.

E) Motives that drive your work: by undertaking pursuits that are intrinsically worthwhile, and doing them for their and our own sake instead of a materialistic objective.

Autonomy is the ability to make our own decisions, giving one a sense of self-determination. It is freedom from being coerced to do things against our will, from being meddled with and from being subject to someone else’s will. Some may even consider ‘wage slavery’ a lack of autonomy. There is another freedom which is linked to autonomy and desire theory, which is option freedom. To have options to choose from is a type of freedom but it has two downsides. While it gives us a sense of possibility, it takes energy to figure out what is one’s best option among a plethora of choices. In addition, there is the possibility of making the wrong choice which then gives rise to regret and self-reproach. It can also lead to a weakened commitment and contentedness, such as the option of divorce which may reduce one’s commitment and contentment in one’s marriage. This brings us to relationships.

Relationships are an important source of happiness given our social natures. We want to be treated with respect, as opposed to contempt, and to enjoy the esteem of those whose judgement we care about. Haybron points out that while working in corporations may seem social, it could be that we are spending lots of time with people we do not really trust, care about and whose interest in us is not for who we are but for their own purposes.

We do not like being manipulated and we want to have a sense of agency. We want to actively decide what we do and do it well. Skilled and meaningful activity gives us that agency. Haybron writes: “In general, people are happiest leading active lives – doing, and not just having or passively consuming.” Aristotle’s good life, one of eudamonia, involves a life of virtuous and excellent activity, where we can “exercise […] our capacities through worthwhile activities well done.” I have earlier already cited this but this phrase is worth breaking down and elaborating. It has three parts. We want to exercise our mental and physical capacities, which is why an activity requiring some level of skill is fulfilling while an activity that is too simple may become a bore. We want to do worthwhile activities, activities that are meaningful to us and not just ‘busy work’ or activities we do not care about. Finally, we want to do those activities well.

‘Why do you like Mathematics?’ Peter asks his daughter, Felicia. ‘Because I am good at it; I get good grades in it,’ she replies. Being good at something is a source of fulfilment; it is pleasant to know that one has capabilities. However, it is not enough. Haybron gives an example of playing video games well. It is a skill for sure and exercises our hand-eye coordination among other capacities but unless we are professional gamers, it might not give us much meaning. We want to use our skills in activities that we find meaningful, which allows us to connect with people and things that matter, what Haybron called appreciative engagement. Besides, even if we are no good at something for now, we may also relish a challenge to become good at it. Becoming good makes one able to enjoy the activity more which then allows one to become even better, sparking off a virtuous cycle.

There are apparent alternatives to happiness as a life goal. Some people want peace. Buddhists aim for nirvana, a state of nothingness. Others seek a simple life so as to more easily be contented, while others want an exciting life. I suspect these only appear to be alternatives. They are instead parts or steps towards our happiness. Isn’t nirvana pure bliss? Isn’t peace the opposite of fighting? It is clear that no one wants a life of suffering and misery and given that these are opposite to happiness, we want happiness, using the logic of negation. But I also suspect that there is no need to overly argue why we want happiness. We already know that happiness is what we want even without much proof.


3:Vita Activa

So why do our actions seem to belie what we say we want? Most working adults spend more time with their colleagues than their loved ones. Some of these people will tell you they will die for their families and friends if need be, yet may be too tired at the end of a work day to spend time doing things together with them. We may explain this away by citing how we need money to sustain our lives and our family’s which is the reason why we devote so much time to our jobs.

Here though is a thought experiment: if your (and your family’s) needs are already all met and you are free to do anything, what is that thing? If you reply that it is your job, then you are in your sweet spot. If you, like many, fantasise about winning the lottery so you can throw your resignation letter in the face of your boss, clearly you are not enjoying your job all that much. Do you get an uncanny feeling sometimes, that work cannot possibly be all there is to life? That your lot is a repetitive Sisyphean cycle of work-eat-sleep for 40 years till retirement after which you are too frail and old to do anything worthwhile and all you have left is to wait till you die of sickness or if you are lucky, of old age? If it is, then what could possibly be the point of life? Surely we were not born to simply grow up just to serve corporations reified in the form of bosses be they bureaucrats or heartless capitalists?

Some of you reading this may feel that such talk smacks of privilege: such thoughts are only for those who believe they have a choice or alternative to a life of work-drudgery. Indeed, if the basic necessities of life have not yet been met, there may be no point in trying to fulfil higher-order needs and wants. Abraham Maslow writes:



The urge to write poetry, the desire to acquire an automobile, the interest in American history, the desire for a new pair of shoes are, in the extreme case, forgotten or become of secondary importance. For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry, no other interests exist but food.[9]



He posits a hierarchy of needs where a state of excess is required for one to achieve the next tier in his hierarchy, a pyramid culminating in the need for self-actualisation after the “satisfaction of physiological, safety, love and esteem needs” respectively.[10] However, he is not suggesting that happiness can only begin when one is at the top of the hierarchy. Arendt explains that our labour can also be a source of happiness, indeed the most stable one.

Arendt distinguishes between three types of activities corresponding to the vita activa or the life of action: labour, work and action.[11] Labour is what we do to produce the “vital necessities that must be fed into the life process of the human body.” A paradigmatic example of such a product of labour is food, which serves our bodily requirements so as to preserve our lives. The defining characteristic of the product of labour is that it is consumed soon after production. We labour to produce such “consumer goods”[12] so that we can consume them in order to survive, so as to be able to labour again subsequently. The perishable quality of consumer goods means that they do not endure and cannot be directly saved. This cycle of labour and consumption follows the “circular movement of our bodily functions,” is “endlessly repetitive” and the labouring activity does not stop as long as the subject is alive.

Work, by contrast, has an end goal of creating an object. The activity of work ceases once the production of the object has been completed. An example of work is when one builds a house. Once that house is completed, she can stop her building activities since her aim was just to create her own house and since that is done, the work can cease. The terms labour and work has become synonymous but Arendt draws a clear distinction between the two activities. Building a house as a one-off effort for an individual is work, while building houses the way a professional housebuilder would do it day after day so as to earn his wages, is labour.

Contrary to Marx’s account of alienated labour, labour for Arendt, while Sisyphean, is not sheer misery but possesses its own form of satisfaction. “The blessing of labour is that effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming, so that happiness is a concomitant of the process itself,” giving rise to a lasting happiness which comes from the cycle of “painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration.” It is the kind of satisfaction we feel when quenching our thirst with water after labouring under the hot sun for many hours. Our thirst is sated for now even though it will return again soon after. The satisfaction does not last for long but it comes regularly, making it reliable, something that we can count on so long as we labour. Work on the other hand provides only an “inevitably brief spell of joy that follows the accomplishment and […] achievement” of its aim.

Arendt’s analysis presents two types of happiness. The first comes from our labour, from a job well done after which we can enjoy some rest and respite where we replenish ourselves from the fruits of our labour, though we would soon have to begin again our labouring. Our labour keeps us alive and there is a “sheer bliss” that arises from simply being kept alive through its activities. This happiness, while not ecstatic, forms a baseline for us to keep carrying on living. When lost, we experience a “misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness or an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, or consumption and digestion grind an impotent human body mercilessly to death.” The second comes from work where we create something longer lasting. When we complete our project of building a boat or even assembling a bookshelf, we may be happy in a more ecstatic way, but the feeling quickly fades and after a while, completely vanishes.

These two forms of happiness are not in competition, the same way labour and work are both needed, not in the sense of survival but for a complete life. Just as we need labour to keep our bodies intact and functional, we also need work to create a world of things which may not be entirely necessary but still invaluable. For instance, my earlier example of work was to build a house. We do not necessarily need a house to live in; there are people who have lived for decades on the streets or a tent or in a cave, just like we do not necessarily need shoes to walk in but it certainly makes walking on a hot road easier. She terms these products of work “use items” which examples so far are houses, shoes and bookshelves.

Work and labour however are still only in the domain of material objects. There remains an important missing piece of the puzzle for a complete life, for Arendt the most important component of the vita activa. While we can build a house, it does not make it yet a home. Arendt writes: “The man-made world of things becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and deeds, only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of consumer-goods and the sheer utility of use objects.” Arendt does not define home in her essay, but I understand her intention of using that word not to mean a structure or building to merely live in but a place where one can be safe, comfortable, can grow, develop and flourish in, pretty much the ordinary sense of how people and Haybron understand the term ‘home.’ She writes about a place that is stable and enduring, a safe harbour against the constant changes and movements of our lives. She thinks that for human beings to have such a home, it needs to be more than what usage things can provide, be it to satisfy our necessities (consumer goods) or to serve some function (use objects).

Arendt distinguishes between the ‘human world’ and the ‘world of things.’ Through work, we have built a world of things which endures and thus gives a stability to our lives. However, we also live among others, in the human world, which entails a web of human relationships. To have a human world is to participate in the human world and we do so through our speech and actions. Human beings are able to express their own individuality and can communicate not just how they feel, for instance, by crying out in pain the way some animals are also able to communicate. We can also convey our own uniqueness to other human beings, using both words and deeds which Arendt collectively terms “action.” Speech discloses who we are and informs others that we are the actor of our actions.

Arendt examines the etymology of the word ‘action’ through its Greek and Latin roots, explaining that “to act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin […] or to set something into motion.” I act, that is, I begin doing something, which sets other things in motion, taking an initiative through my words and deeds. However, we live with others, linked in a web of relationships with these others. Each of them also have their own wills and intentions which may conflict with one another’s. Hence, our actions may not achieve their purpose, with the collisions in wills and intentions making it unpredictable how things may turn out. For instance, returning to our father-daughter example, Peter, as a successful lawyer, wanted the best for Felicia. He pressured her into going to law school even though Felicia had no desire to follow in his footsteps. She sought solace in her boyfriend’s arms, became pregnant and went into a hasty marriage that turned out to be a mistake, harming her life and her child’s. Surely when Peter spoke and acted towards Felicia, he did not intend to hurt her but because of their differing wills, things turned out not as they had expected.


4: Sovereignty

Despite this potential collision of wills, we need other people. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel writes about how we need the recognition of others to come fully into our own being. As social animals, we are beings-in-ourselves but also beings-for-others. For better or worse, other people contribute to forming who we are. We understand our identity not only in an atomistic way but also in an intersubjective, dialogical way. According to Hegel, “recognition is the mechanism by which our existence as social beings is generated.”[13] However, in seeking the recognition of others, we may also lose our sense of identity when we allow our unique personalities to dissolve in the expectations and norms of our society, becoming the generic Das Man that Martin Heidegger warns us about.

We do not want to lose our identities and be just part of the masses, and we do not want to be reduced to an object which labours, which seem to have come into this world to be made used of and then discarded. We want to assert our humanity, and be sovereign, where we act not for the sake of some other benefit but for our own sakes. In our society of jobholders, there is certainly a part of our wages that goes towards meeting our bare necessities so that we can stay alive. The question however is, what shall we do with the excess? What can satisfy us so that we can be happy? Georges Bataille, in volume 3 of The Accursed Share writes about sovereignty and the sovereign moment.[14] To be sovereign is to enjoy the surplus, the excess that we generate and possess. What he means by enjoy is to be in the present moment and to do things for their own sake. If you were given a free holiday to your dream beach resort but on condition that you cannot take any photos or tell anyone about it, for instance through social media, would you care to go? If you are unable to simply relish the beauty of your surroundings and enjoy the sound of the waves without having to tell your ‘followers’ about it, then you are not in the moment. Do you go on a holiday to enjoy new surroundings and spend time with your loved ones, or do you do it so you can tell your friends about it? If no one knew, did it even happen? Does it ‘count’?

Often, we do things for the sake of a future moment. For instance, we carry out our jobs for the sake of the salary that comes at the end of the month. Instead, what if we can also enjoy the present moment in our jobs? If that is not possible, does it not tell us that something is wrong with our jobs or the way we go about doing them? We have been indoctrinated with the idea that for the sake of future success, we have to sacrifice the present, with folk wisdom like ‘no pain, no gain.’ In Chinese, there is an aphorism, 先苦后甜 – first we have to endure bitterness in order to reap sweetness later. While it may be prudent indeed to sacrifice our current enjoyment for the sake of a future enjoyment or benefit, which is the very concept of wages and interest for savings as compensation owed for delayed gratification, the balance for some (indeed for many) people seem to have swung too far to the side of deprivation and sacrifice such that whatever excess is simply accumulated, to be enjoyed in some future that never arrives. Bataille critiques such a capitalist economic rationalism where wealth accumulation has become a primary fixation with its resulting inequality leading to conflict.

There are good reasons to accumulate wealth and then there are bad ones. Having some wealth as noted by Haybron can give one a sense of security which enhances happiness, where this wealth can come in handy for unanticipated emergencies and can give one a buffer, hence allowing one to take risks, such as starting a business for which success is not assured. A bad reason is to just accumulate wealth for its own sake, where, regardless of how much there already is, to accumulate some more. That is what Bataille calls the Accursed Share, where such an accumulation is cursed, since instead of bringing security and happiness instead poisons those linked to it. Imagine siblings fighting over a massive inheritance to the point that it tears the family apart. It is a common tale but if you need an example, examine what happened to the Gucci family.

Here is a less common but true story. Imagine a person so wealthy that his grandchildren may be kidnapped. J. Paul Getty was the world’s richest man, having made his fortune in oil. His grandson was kidnapped and Getty refused to pay the $17 million dollar ransom, with the logic that if he did, it would put his other 13 grandchildren at risk also of being kidnapped. The kidnappers cut off his grandson’s ear and sent it to Getty, after which he negotiated the ransom down to $2.2 million which he loaned to his son to be repaid with interest. By the time the grandson was finally released, five months had passed. The trauma left his grandson with a drug and alcohol addiction, which led to a narcotic-induced stroke. He finally died age 54.[15] A film was made depicting this cautionary tale, and was titled All the Money in the World. Indeed, what is the point of all the money in the world if it cannot be enjoyed or protect your loved ones? Imagine if the grandson was born to an ‘ordinary’ family how his life might have been. Does his life not seem accursed, where he was not blessed but cursed by his grandfather’s wealth?

Money is among the most useful of human creations, facilitating our trades with one another (imagine having to bring a goat to exchange for a pair of shoes) and enabling us to save for the future (imagine having to somehow store up perishable vegetables for a future trade to get shoes) but it has also become our bane. If we are unable to use our money to buy us goods and services that satisfy our needs, bring us comfort, give us security for our future, save the lives of our loved ones, then what exactly is the money for? When money becomes the proverbial tail that wags the dog, we know we have lost the plot of our lives. I do not deny the usefulness of money. Money is indeed very useful but we need to let our ultimate aims guide how we use that money. If our ultimate aim is our happiness, then once we have enough money to cover our necessities and some degree of creature comforts and savings for good measure and future security, what else should we do? What moves us, what is good for each of us, that gives us happiness, is different for each of us though we have some things in common such as the desire to care for our loved ones, to love and be loved, and to be in good health. To consider what else makes us happy, let us return to the earlier thought experiment: if you have enough money to take care of your basic needs and secure your life, what else would you like to do? Whatever you have identified, should you not go do them?

It bears explaining what is meant to do something for its own sake. For instance, middle-aged Greg enjoys music and thinks that he can enhance his enjoyment for music by knowing more about it and be able to perform it himself. He has not learnt a musical instrument before since his parents were not able to afford music lessons when he was young. He now has enough money to buy a piano and pay for classes. Should he do so? Clearly he will never be able to reach the standard of a concert pianist, even if he devoted the rest of his life to the study of music. There is little hope he will ever make money from it. Should he just forget about it? If learning to play the piano, as a hobby, will bring him some happiness, then obviously he should do it. Not for profit, not to show off to his friends but for his own sake, for the sake of his happiness. It will not be all fun and games – Greg will struggle to read the notes, to control his fingers to hit the right keys in just the right way, and will need to spend time to improve his chosen craft. He will have to decide for himself whether it is worth it. However, for Greg to say that the time for him to learn has passed will be like what Epicurus had said, as noted in the preamble: “No one can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul.”

One final example. When parents give care and love to their child, do they do it in the expectation that their child will in future be a money-generating machine for them? Perhaps so, since they may expect reciprocation in future when they are old for their child to then take care of them. Let us finetune this thought experiment. Say the child is sickly and the doctors’ prognosis is that he will not live past the age of five. There is now no hope of a future payback from the kid. Will the parents still love and care for their child? If so, why? Their love for their child is not conditioned on future profits to be made from him. They love the child for his own sake and for their own sakes. Because the time now that they have with him is limited, is it not all the more precious?

My examples are clearly oversimplifications. Along the way, Greg and the parents may have their doubts, but I am appealing to the intuition of the reader to demonstrate that we do understand what it is to do something for its own sake and not for the sake of something else such as monetary profits. In Greg’s case, being liberated from the pressure that he has to be ‘successful’ at his piano playing, does it not give him the freedom to pursue it in whichever way he likes, instead of the usual path of classical pieces and graded examinations? In the case of the parents, knowing that their son is not going to live past five, would they spend that time ensuring he learns his multiplication tables well, or would they prefer he learns to love, laugh and play? There is a liberation that comes from ‘failure’ and a joy from doing things for their and our own sakes.

Besides, who knows if Greg might become so proficient as to be able to perform publicly (dare I say it, for money) or that the boy goes on to live a long life? After all, doctors have been wrong before. Hope may spring eternal but setting aside ‘unrealistic expectations’ can liberate us to then pursue our endeavours in our own way. Not being chained by the demands of utility, by the profit motive, is itself a source of freedom. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If no one sees pictures of your holiday at the dream beach resort, did you go there? If no one hears your music, reads your writing, admire your painting or marvel at your dance, did it happen? Yes it did. You heard it. You experienced it. Even if no one but Greg ever hears his music, he has heard it and for his own sake, he wants to play it well. For his own pleasure, he can choose the pieces he wants to play. Instead of Mozart, he may want to play Meatloaf. He can be sovereign in that way, to just be in the moment and to do what he wants for its own and for his own sake.

Does sovereignty mean we have no worldly cares? No. Bataille refers to what is in excess, what is left over after we have satisfied our necessities. But once we have satisfied our necessities, would it not be a mistake to then go after more and more necessities when it has already been satisfied? If you have sated your thirst, would you want to drink another gallon of water? That would be a form of torture. Would we choose to remain in our prison cells if the cell-doors were thrown open?

For the jobholders, the workers, reading this, you may feel that having to work is unavoidable as you need to earn a wage that keeps you alive and provide you also some creature comforts and savings to secure your future. Indeed all that is important but given that we devote so many hours of our existence to it, perhaps even to the neglect of other important things in our lives, we should demand that our jobs require some of our skills and be meaningful at least in parts, to be a source of happiness citing Haybron. As Arendt has articulated, the regularity of labour gives us a baseline satisfaction and the work where we create something more permanent gives a more intense though fleeting joy. Our jobs should also give us opportunity to take action, in the sense of speech to propel the larger endeavour of the corporation which ideally translates to a service to our wider society and also allows us to carry out deeds resulting in achievements which boost our self-esteem.

How can we be in the moment in our jobs? Bataille talks about how we should make work into play, writing: “He is not work that is performed but rather play.” We have to find joy in our jobs, the way we enjoy ourselves when we are playing. The joy of play is not just something we get in a future end result but even as we play, we find it fun and meaningful. This same joy of play is something we need to bring into our activities such as work so that we can be in the moment. Our jobs should also be something worth doing for its own sake. We have to find jobs where we find the work meaningful and not sell our time doing work we find meaningless and perhaps even downright harmful. It need not be a trade-off between decent wages and meaning, we need both.


5: Conclusion

Why does the concept of sovereignty, which is so simple and obvious, seem so radical? Is trying to be sovereign selfish? It can be, if all we are concerned with are ourselves. However, we are also concerned with others, and the happiness of others also contribute to our happiness. Our lives are intertwined with the lives of others, most immediately our family and loved ones, but even seeing the suffering of strangers stirs up in us an empathy that wants to alleviate their suffering. We literally feel pained by their pain. If anything, it is the pursuit of accumulating more and more for ourselves that is selfish but yet that seems to be the way of the world – what is ‘normal’ and accepted to be what we should do. If we care about the state of the world spirit by trying to plumb the depths of our existence, through living authentically and sovereignly, how is that selfish? Is it not the opposite, where one is expanding the horizons of our humanity and in that way, for all of humanity?


Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. “Labor, Work, Action.” In Amor Mundi, edited by S. J. James W. Bernauer, 29–42. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1987. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3565-5_2.

———. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Vol. 2 & 3: The History of Eroticism, Sovereignty. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Epicurus. “Letter to Menoeceus.” translated by Cyril Bailey, 1926.

Haybron, Dan. “Happiness.” Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020, 46.

Haybron, Daniel M. Happiness: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199590605.001.0001.

Maslow, A. H. “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review 50(4) (1943). https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346.

McQueen, Paddy. “Recognition, Social and Political.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d., 38.






[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), para. 7.


[2] Daniel M. Haybron, Happiness: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 6, https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199590605.001.0001.


[3] Dan Haybron, “Happiness,” ed. Edward N. Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020, 46.


[4] Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Preface to the Reader


[5] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias


[6] Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” trans. Cyril Bailey, 1926, para. 3.


[7] Epicurus, para. 1.


[8] Haybron, Happiness: A Very Short Introduction.


[9] A. H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50(4) (1943): 373–74, doi: 10.1037/h0054346.


[10] Maslow, 383.


[11] Hannah Arendt, “Labor, Work, Action,” in Amor Mundi, ed. S. J. James W. Bernauer (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1987), 29–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3565-5_2. See also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).


[12] The reader should note that by consumer goods, Arendt is referring to goods that are literally consumed such as food and not goods bought by consumers such as handbags or houses which she would consider as a separate class of goods she calls use-objects.


[13] Paddy McQueen, “Recognition, Social and Political,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d., 38.


[14] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share. Vol. 2 & 3: The History of Eroticism, Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991).


[15] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020706089.html

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a9173861/john-paul-getty-kidnapping/