From ancient Greece to Frankenstein: how the pursuit of happiness has evolved

Solon of Athens was the first to travel for the simple pleasure of knowing the world, without any utilitarian interest. His goal was the journey. Thus he arrived at the court of the very rich Croesus, king of Lydia, who received him with open arms and showed him all his immense treasures. Faced with his wealth, Croesus asked him if, throughout his travels, he had met anyone happier than himself. Solon told him that he had met someone much happier, Telon of Athens, a simple man who lived in a time of prosperity, had excellent children, saw his grandchildren grow up, and died, a glorious death, defending his homeland. "Man, Croesus –Solon continued– is subject to chance. No two days in his life are completely alike. So to know if a man is happy we must consider his whole life, in conjunction. Before death, no one deserves the title of happy".Croesus did not understand the meaning of these words until much later, when, defeated by the king of Persia, he was condemned to die at the stake. At the top of the pyre, remembering Solon, he began to cry.Here, synthesized, is the Greek reflection on happiness. There are not enough cents in the world to guarantee us a happy life. All of us, poor and rich, are exposed to the fortuitous events of life. Euripides highlights this: “Prosperity can provide us with well-being, but it does not guarantee us happiness” (Medea).

In the first pages of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle summarizes the Greek perspective thus: "Everything we do, we do aspiring to some good and to the highest good of all, we all agree to give it the name of eudaimonia (happiness).” This term, eudaimonia, literally means “to be inhabited by a good daimon”, that is, by a benevolent deity. Happiness, then, would be a gift we receive from heaven. But Aristotle, despite accepting the relevance of this gift, tries to make it accessible, as far as possible, to the intelligent decision of man by seeking what is common in the various forms of happiness. His answer is a theory of stable virtue: activities that conform to virtue contribute to happiness, those that are contrary lead us away from it. By “virtue” he understood excellence in the performance of a function, which, in the case of humans, would be excellence in the performance of a human life. The happiness accessible to man is a human happiness, very far from that enjoyed by the blessed gods. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes this point: Our happiness is a “happiness tailored to us” and we do not even have it guaranteed. Perfect bliss is not accessible to us.Hellenistic ethics seek human excellence in living according to nature, convinced that in our nature lies the key to our happiness. But in trying to live naturally, they all end up imposing a “should be” on nature. The Cynics will attempt a wild life. The Epicureans will seek knowledge of the natural limits of pain and desire, and in this pursuit, they will make the retired life a utopia, which in the case of Diogenes of Oenoanda takes this form: "When no one rules, the life of the gods will transform into human life. Justice and mutual esteem will reign everywhere, and there will be no need for walls or laws. Since everything necessary comes from the earth, we will all plow and cultivate and care for the flock and dedicate ourselves to the study of philosophy.” Stoicism (now a soft self-help philosophy) understands that living according to nature is equivalent to living according to the divine reason that governs the world. Happiness is nothing other than the harmony between our will and reason. Despite their differences, all these schools agree that only virtue can bring us closer to happiness. What's more: if we are virtuous, we have nothing to fear, even if we were subjected to the bull of Phalaris, not a lament would escape our lips. Phalaris was a tyrant who enclosed his enemies inside a bronze bull under which a bonfire was lit. Plotinus also assures us that the highest science, that of the Good, is available to the wise even within that bull. What is happiness?

Let's admit that it is easier to talk about happiness than to know what we are talking about when we talk about it. This is Kant's starting point. In his opinion, what aspirations for happiness have in common is exactly that: they are sentimental aspirations in whose depths there would be some mystification of pleasure elevated to the condition of the ultimate goal of human activity. Now, if happiness is made dependent on the inconstancy of fortune or the volubility of the senses, it will become unattainable for us. We must admit that we do not know how to determine with certainty which actions promote the happiness of a rational being. Therefore, we will not find an imperative that requires us to do what makes us happy. Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of the imagination. We know how to provide ourselves with isolated pleasures and well-being, but not how to guarantee ourselves a permanent state of happiness.To explain to us that there is no way to tame happiness, a first-century Hispano-Roman, Hyginus, writes this fable. "Cura was crossing a river when she found a lot of clay. She picked it up thoughtfully and began to model a figure. While she was reflecting on what she was doing, Jupiter appeared. Cura asked him to give spirit to the clay figure, and he easily succeeded. Seeing the animated clay, Cura wanted to give it her name, but Jupiter asserted that it would bear his. While they were arguing, Tellus, Mother Earth, arose and argued that only she had the right to give her name to the new being, since she had given it its body. As they could not agree, they asked Saturn, god of time, to act as judge. His sentence was this: 'You, Jupiter, since you gave it the spirit, will receive its spirit when it dies; Tellus, since you gave it the body, will receive its body; but since Cura was the one who modeled it, it will be hers as long as she lives. As for its name, it will be called homo because it has been made from humus.'"Heidegger commented on this fable in his classes, seeing it as a summary of his Being and Time. The fact that man is the possession of Cura by a sentence of time fascinated him. We are the synthesis of time and Cura. And there is no possible rest. We are what we do and we make ourselves even when we do nothing. Cura (Sorge) is the fundamental trait of our existence. To exist is to be in charge of what we do to ourselves. In this sense, Heidegger is diametrically opposed to modernity's attempt to turn happiness into a sinecure, into a satisfied life. The aspiration to a carefree life would be a sign of inauthenticity.And here we come across Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.Dr. Frankenstein was a passionate philanthropist who set out to create the new man. But his work turned out to be abominable. "Away from me your filthy sight!" he snapped at it. The consequence of this rejection is the alienation of the creature, which, turned into a monster, shouts at its creator: "Misery made me a villain. Make me happy and I will be virtuous again!"The monstrous creature sees happiness as a condition for the possibility of virtue. It cannot bear the idea that, having been created to live, it might die without having lived, which is what Rousseau will say of himself.Mary Shelley tells us that the monster is a monster because it suffers. Thanks to this conviction, a pitiable figure gains the reader's empathy. It is rebellious because the world has made it so. Its crimes must be attributed to the clash of its noble feelings with a poorly organized society. Thus, the therapeutic happiness of the psychosocialism that surrounds us is inaugurated, which has transformed eudaimonia into "gross national happiness", thus wanting to surpass the limits of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2005, Lord Layard of Highgate, an economist from the aristocratic wing of the Labour party, published Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. In 2011, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the resolution known as Happiness: Towards a holistic definition of development, which gave rise to different mathematical formulas for happiness that wander through ministries of economy like headless chickens, but determined to give Croesus a posthumous victory.

Since we have so cheapened happiness, I think we can summarize the state of affairs as follows: There are those who want to be happy and those who know what they want. The former fail in the therapist's office and the latter in their homes.