What did Greek philosophers think about happiness?

What is happiness? To answer this question, our resident history buffs turn back the clock and take a closer look at ancient Greek philosophy, from Herodotus to Epicurus. Learn more in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, we welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Knadas Keener, joined by fellow editor Kaden Lambert.
Good morning, candles, Good morning. I'm trying to speak with
a little something extra in my voice, a note of

(00:23):
enthusiasm and excitement, because the topic of today is happiness,
and you know it really started brings you down if
you hear it to your hosts talking about happiness and
the sling thing would rather slip their risk and be
talking into a microphone. I'll do what's past everyone, um
exclamation points. Everywhere. Since the recession, I've noticed that all

(00:45):
manner of publications and advertisements have been pushing a different
type of fulfillment. You know, before with things if you
have this bracelet, if you have this car, if you
have this television, you know it'll make you happier because
it adds a new type of Richmond to your daily life.
But now I read and I see things about experiences

(01:05):
as a way to fulfillment, and it seems like no
matter if you're pushing a thing, a tangible thing or
an experience, there's still marketing happiness. Can you really do
that and what really is happiness. It seems like it
might be appropriate to turn back to some of the
oldest conceptions of what happiness really is. So we shall

(01:28):
travel back to ancient Greece, and we're gonna hang out
with Herodotus Um, who of course wrote the history, which
is one of the classics of classics, if I can
say that, and he tells the story of Crisus and Solon.
Crisus was the richest man pretty much on earth. He
was the king of Lydia. He was there Donald Trump,

(01:49):
and Solon was an adene lawgiver and general wise man.
And Crisis said to Solon very confidently that he thought
he was the happiest man in the world, and so
On basically called him an idiot and said the happiest
man in the world was a guy named tell Us,
who had been killed in battle at the prime of life.
And the second happiest people were two brothers, Cleobus and Biden,

(02:12):
who had carried their mother to a festival, yoked up
to this cart like Oxen, and then died. So basically,
the three happiest people in the world were all dead,
which isn't really what you think of when you think
of happiness so much um. But his point was that
you can only figure out if you're happy when you're dead,
because the possibility of chance and luck and fortune that's

(02:36):
ended at that point, and otherwise you never know what's
going to happen. The Greek idea of happiness was very dependent,
I think, on the idea of chance, and we should mention,
while neither of us has a degree in philosophy, if
it has done a marked amount of research, that the
closest word for happiness in Greek seems to be youd ammonia,

(02:57):
which etymologically speaking at lay means living in a way
that's favored by the gods, you meaning well and de
moon meaning a spirit. So living well would be living happily,
or living in a way that's pleasing to the gods.
But happiness in a way that we can see that it,
which could be ice cream cones and sunny days or

(03:20):
you know, a rainy day in a book and an
ice lamp, depending on what type of personality you have,
wasn't It wasn't the way the Greeks thought about it.
It was more or less a series of experiences, and
of course that would vary depending on the philosopher you're
looking at, and Katie's mentioned Herodotus, and I think that's
an excellent place to start. And at the risk of

(03:42):
sounding like we're we're taking off a list of different
Greek philosophers, we are because we wanted to give you
all a broader take of the Greek definition of happiness.
And someone I find particularly interesting is Socrates. And Socrates
was all about the soul and virtue. The Greek word
for virtue is actually are at, which means something more

(04:04):
along the lines of excellence. And socrates Is question was
what makes an excellent person or what makes an excellent life?
And it wasn't sensual pleasure, it wasn't money, it wasn't family,
so sorry family, um. But he did have the idea
that you can't achieve happiness, which was pretty revolutionary. This
is something that you can get you personally, and to

(04:27):
get to that, what you have to do is put
your soul to rights. He basically believed that your soul
could rot and die or it could flourish and you
could live this good, flourishing life and the worst thing
that could happen to you was to be a wicked person.
So wicked people can't be happy. So just playing devil's
advocate here, what if you're born with a wicked heart?

(04:48):
I mean, I guess some people would argue that some
people are born with kinder dispositions and some people have
more inherent nasty spirits. And I think Aristotle had something
to say about what you're born with and making the
most of it. In terms of happiness, Aristotle had a
bit of a grimmer view of happiness. Um, he thought
it was really important to be of good birth and

(05:09):
to have lots of friends and good friends, and money
and children and a healthy old age and on and on.
I presume he had all of these things himself. Well,
the problem is that if you don't have these things,
you can't be happy. But you can't exactly choose what
you're born into. So that doesn't leave a lot of
room for some of us. And in fact, he didn't

(05:29):
believe that women had reason, and reason, of course, was
the way to get to happiness. So chindas you and
I are excluded from this whole happy thing. Apparently so.
But I tend to be a pretty active person. I
like to do things exclamation point. And that's a philosophy
that Aristotle favored. He didn't think that attaining happiness happened

(05:50):
by living passively. You had to be active. You had
to actively be conceiving of ways to reach well being.
The thing about Aristotle was that he believed that happiness
was man's highest purpose, that we actually have an end
point the teleological argument, and that separates us from animals
and plants well, because we can think with reason, and

(06:10):
he thought reason was the one thing that separated us.
So if you acted with reason, you could find your
way to the highest good, which was yourn ammonia happiness.
But you know, of course, as women couldn't get there.
And the thing that really gets a little bit depressing,
Sorry Happiness podcast, was that he thought the best kind
of happiness was a godlike happiness, which he also says

(06:32):
is pretty much impossible unless you're born into that state, right,
not even just you have to have all of those prerequisites,
the good birth, the good family, and all the friends
and the money and everything. And then out of those
select few, because that narrows it down a lot, a
couple of you, you know, might attain that whole godlike
happiness thing, but the rest of us are kind of screwed.

(06:53):
But I suppose if you're on the screwed end of
the spectrum and you don't have a good family, and
you're not attractive and you're childless, which are all things
he pointed out, is being key to that state of contentment.
You could say that instead of being bitter and cursing
the state you're in, you could always strive toward happiness.
You could you could take the point of view, well,

(07:14):
maybe I don't have all these facets that are necessary,
but I could still actively pursue some sort of contentment
and well being well, and that might bring us to
some of the later philosophies. I know you've been talking
earlier about Epicureanism exactly, And if I had to pick
a Greek philosophy of happiness, I think I'd go with

(07:35):
Epicurean is um sort of the least of all evils,
because I have to say that if one expects to
live by some sort of Greek philosophy in the modern age,
you're hopelessly anachronistic. And I don't think it's possible. And
if you do, please email me immediately because I want
to know how you're doing it. Um. Epicurus advocated detaching
oneself from philosophy, essentially being a type of hermit. He

(07:56):
did say, however, you can surround yourself with like minded
folks and a commune, which is where he lived. And
his big philosophy was attaining pleasure by avoiding pain. So
you know, it takes two objects to cause friction. Two
different services running against each other is going to cause

(08:17):
a spark, cause some sort of disturbance, and he said,
just avoid it, no friction. That's okay. You'll be happier
if you just avoid that all together. And he was
a hedonist, and today we may think of a hedonist
to someone who drinks too much and parties too much
and eats too much. But his definition or the definition
that he abided by, was a little bit different. Um,

(08:38):
Miriam Woobster just defines it as the doctrine that pleasure
or happiness is the soul or chief good in life.
And we're not talking a Dionysian sort of hedonism. He
was epicurious, advocated a sort of ascetic lifestyle like Candice
was saying, you know, living in a living kind of
as a hermit. And even though he wasn't a set,

(09:00):
he didn't believe in deprivation. Necessarily, he believed in moderation
and simplicity, And just for argument's sake, I think that
there's a whole industry today built on the idea of simplicity.
You could confine yourself to a diet of bread and
peanut butter, but if you go to a gourmet grosser
and buy a fourteen dollar jar of almond butter and
a ten dollar loaf of fancy bread, you're not exactly

(09:24):
being an epicurean well, And I think the bottom line
Frebertarianism was that if you don't want a lot of things,
you can satisfy those few things that you have. Like,
the worst thing that could happen is to have a
bunch of unfulfilled longings. And if you get rid of
those desires by saying you only want, say, three things,
instead of three hundred things, you up your chances of

(09:45):
actually being able to accomplish that. And he also put
mind over body in terms of happiness, the idea of
an intellectual pleasure versus some sort of carnal or corporeal pleasure.
And this is something that John Stewart Mill picked up
on later when he talked about the kernel pleasures of
food and drinking sex, and Epicurius actually advocated abstaining from

(10:07):
sex as well as substaining from marriage. So well, there
you go. But the exact opposite of hedonism as we
would think of it today, really, but he would have
argued that no matter what circumstance you're and no matter
how painful it is, as long as you can put
your mind over that situation, you can find pleasure mind
every body. Aren't there all sorts of magicians today who

(10:30):
talk about putting mind everyone's body? Are you saying, Epicaris,
It's like David Copperfield, I don't know about that. It's
an interesting proposition. I think one of the most striking
things about Epicureanism was that Epicarius believed that there are
gods who exist, but they're not even concerned with us.
They don't care about you, They really don't. They like

(10:51):
to do exactly god like things. And he was implying
basically that you can make your own destiny because the
gods don't care you're here, you're in motion, not do it,
you will well. And if there is no divine order,
the only things you have to depend on to figure
out what's good and what's bad are your senses. And
obviously pleasure is good. When you things are pleasurable, you

(11:14):
feel good, and when you're in pain or you're anxious,
you feel terrible. And stoicism is actually supposed to be
the opposite of Epicureanism. They believed. Stoics believed that the
universe was rational, harmonious whole, and since human beings are
also rational, we should be able to find our place
by living in a virtuous way, by living an excellent life.

(11:37):
And it's funny because stoicism is supposed to be the
total opposite of Epicureanism, but they do have a lot
of things in common. They believe that you should be
happy regardless of the external factors of what was going on.
So you can't control the things that happened to you,
unlike Aristotle. You know, you can't control how you're born
and what you're born into, and you can't control disease
and famine war, but you should be able to find

(12:00):
your happiness regardless of what's going on. You should be
stoic in the way that we use it today. And
for the sake of argument and presenting another side of
the happiness story, we're going to travel much further into
the future, not the present day, but back during the
Romantic period. And this has a little to nothing to

(12:21):
do with the Greek philosophers, but it presents a very
interesting contrast to their ideas of attaining happiness. And there's
a book that came out not too long ago by
Eric Wilson called Against Happiness and Praise of Melancholy. And
Wilson is a noted professor of Romanticism at wake Forest University,

(12:41):
and he abides by the philosophy of melancholia, and essentially
what he explained in his word is that melancholy is
an essential part of being a human being, and he
defines it as a very active state. When we're melancholy,
we feel uneasy in relation to the way things are,

(13:03):
the status quo, the conventions of our society. We yearn
for a deeper, richer relationship to the world. And he
goes on, but I'm going to trail off there. And
what struck me about this definition of melancholy and how
it's a necessary contrast to living happily and obliviously some
might say, is that it's so different from this idea

(13:26):
of epicurean detachment it's sort of like being immersed in
a world that you don't understand. You may be unlucky
in it, you may not have a strong foothold in it.
But that's a good thing. That's an excellent thing because
it makes you almost hyper aware of your surroundings and
your place in the world. And unlike the Stoics who
would say take your lot and live with it, he's

(13:49):
essentially saying, yeah, take your lot, but look how much
you can do with it. Because out of this state
of awareness and dissatisfaction comes great art, great poetry, which
of course the Greeks had in spades when you look
back at all sorts of Greek art and architecture and literature.

(14:10):
What they also had and what we enjoy so much today,
is the idea of democracy. And I was reading a
really good book called Happiness, a History by Darren McMahon,
and he was positing that perhaps the idea of democracy
led to all these questionings of what happiness is and
how you achieve it because people had a choice. They

(14:32):
had a choice to elect who they wanted, a choice
to participate at least in the process. And maybe you
can also participate in the process of achieving your own happiness.
And at the risk of sounding like a kindergarten teacher,
we have that choice to every day when you wake up,
you choose whether or not you're going to have them
quote unquote right attitude. But happiness is, you know, it's

(14:53):
more than just the smile you put on for the
rest of the world. It is really no matter what
philosophy you live your life by. It it's how you
find enjoyment and fulfillment. And if you look at happiness
like a line graph, it's different for everyone. For some
people who live contentedly and happily, it's probably just a
straight line. For other people who depend on experiences or

(15:15):
themes to make their day, you probably see a line
that goes up very sharply with a peak of happiness
and then plummets with the trough of unhappiness and then
up and down and up and down. And whether you
prefer that type of line graph for your happiness cycle
or a straight line again your choice. I feel like
I should start singing more than a feeling. Oh that's

(15:36):
a great song, um, and Katie actually is about too,
but working to spare all of your ears. So we'll
go ahead and let all of you go, But if
you have any ideas, and for heaven's sake, if you
are a real philosopher and you want to weigh in
on any of this, email us at History podcast at
how stuff works dot com or common on the blog.
And for more about the ancient Greeks and ancient civilization,

(15:57):
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