Hello! My name is Luciano Sewaybricker, and this is The underside of Happiness Podcast.
This is another episode sharing my research on Happiness. In this case, an article I wrote also with my good friend Gustavo Massola in 2022 called “Against Well-Being: a critical analysis of the approximation between happiness and well-being promoted by Positive Psychology”. Yes! Once again a very long title.
This paper is a kind of historical dive that we took after finding some inconsistencies in Ed Diener’s article called Subjective Well-Being. It is both a historical and linguistic investigation of the shift from studying happiness to well-being, arguing that this transition lacks the intended rigor of the Science of Well-Being.
For the sake of time, and not to kill you with boredom, I’ll start with two assumptions:
First, Ed Diener’s article, Subjective Well-Being, crucially influenced this shift. Before his work, there wasn’t a systematized defense for the use of Well-Being instead of Happiness.
Second, there’s a near consensus in the field that well-being is more scientifically robust than the broadly used concept of happiness. Happiness is considered a word that attracts attention but is not scientific. It is too vague, too fuzzy, used constantly to refer to superficial feelings… It is kind of a word of lay people.
So, the paper revolved around the history of the word ‘happiness’. It’s meaning and why there was a shift in the way it is used.
An important question that guided our research was about the curious fact that, despite the diversity of proposals of what happiness is, we still recognize all those ideas as being about happiness. So, how can we discuss the history of happiness with confidence when authors presented different ideas and, also, used many different words? Are they talking about the same object? What unites all those ideas?
Part 3: The Historical and Linguistic Roots of Happiness
Let’s jump to the Historical and Linguistic Roots of Happiness.
Ancient Greece: Eudaimon and makar
In Ancient Greece, many philosophers debated about the best life and referred to that using a couple of words, especially Eudaimonia and Makarios.
- While Makarios had a divine connotation, Eudaimonia was used as a broader expression. This is probably one of the reasons that Aristotle chose it to represent his idea of the best way to live life in his book “Nichomachean Ethics”. Literally, “Eudaimonia” meant having a “good demon”, which was reserved for a few lucky recipients of this good entity. Also, for Aristotle, Eudaimonia highlighted civic participation and virtues. The ideal life was kind of the life of an ideal citizen.
Sounds great! However, as Greek civilization declined amid social chaos, the idea of the best life associated with civic participation lost support, giving space for the word Makarios, which was central to the transition to Latin Roman.
Ancient Rome: Felicitas and beatitudo
So, one of the difficulties in the history of happiness is knowing how words move between languages. In this case, how “eudaimonia” and “makarios” “moved” to Latin. Two key words for us here: “beatitudo” and “felicitas”. So stick with me here.
Originally, “felicitas” in Roman culture denoted fertility and luck, a blessing from the god Felicity. In an agricultural economy was crucial for the soil and people to be “fertile” (to have a lot of sons and daughters so that some could survive early childhood and work in the fields). However, Important Roman Stoic philosophers like Cicero and Seneca saw “felicitas” as too pleasure-oriented, and preferred another word, “beatitudo”, to address the best life. Beatitudo originally meant completeness and indicated a morally fulfilled life, later associated with religiosity.
So, but what felicitas and beatitudo have to do with the Greek words Eudaimonia and Makarios? For this, the New Testament is an important reference.
The New Testament had an old version in Greek (a language called koiné), using “makarios” to refer to the best life in the eyes of God. And in later Latin translations, “makarios” was translated as “beatitudo”. So, was makarios that first “moved” to Latin Rome through beatitudo, not eudaimonia. Also, the idea of having a good demon wouldn’t work in a religion that portrays demons as purely evil.
With time, Beatitudo matured as a spiritual completeness aligned with the Christian God, attainable only in the afterlife, with Him. It contrasted directly with the physical pleasures suggested by “felicitas”. Felicitas was an idea or something to be strived by the common people, the lay people. And with Beatitudo, the Catholic Church controlled the discussion around the best way to live.
The return of felicitas in the Early Middle Ages
It was only in the early second millennium that Aristotle’s Eudaimonia resurged in Europe. This revival was partly due to the influence of Islamic philosophers, followed by European scholars who challenged the religious constraints of knowledge.
Notably, in the 13th century, the first Latin translations of Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ rendered ‘eudaimonia’ as ‘felicitas’ rather than ‘beatitudo.’ This choice of wording indicated the Renaissance’s spirit diverging from the religious ‘beatitudo’ while valuing mundane experiences. It mirrored a broader social trend towards a grounded understanding of the best life. From this moment on, ‘Beatitudo’ and its later translations (like blessed) were relegated to religious discourse.
The emergence of modern languages
Now, on the transition to modern languages, we must consider two key points:
- First, “Felicitas” became prevalent in scholarly and everyday discourse about the best life in Europe.
- Second, luck was rooted in the semantic field of happiness; from being fortunate to have a good demon to having a fertile life.
It was against this backdrop that modern European languages developed between the 13th and 16th centuries.
In English, the word “Happiness” was also derived from a word used to refer to luck or chance, “hap”. And it was Happiness the chosen word to translate the first English versions of Aristotle’s eudaimonia and the work of other thinkers who wrote in French, Italian, German, etc. Bonheur, felicità, gluck, felicidade, all these words used to translate happiness, have the same root in luck.
By the 16th century, Happiness, and its correlates in other modern languages, were already widely used by thinkers like John Locke, Thomas More, and Pico della Mirandola.
Super important: the English word Happiness encapsulated the historical debate around the best way to live life, connecting Eudaimonia, Felicitas, and modern languages; connecting Ancient Greek life, Latin Roman, and the spirit of the Renaissance. It was a word full of layers and open to new ones.
Suring the following centuries, however, in the Enlightenment, significantly shifted how happiness was understood.
In line with the growing importance of science and its positivistic paradigm, happiness slowly became understood less contextually (moral, virtues, civic qualities) and more from an individual’s perspective, a personal experience (like feeling happy). “Chance” or luck was also losing space for the scientific capacity to solve mysteries: happiness should have something to do with empirical experience. And this shift in the understanding and use of happiness makes sense, as the idea of the best way to live life was changing drastically. The idea of what meant to be human and what we can aspire to in life changed.
The fact that the U.S. Declaration of Independence enshrined the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental “individual” right represents that moment. The utilitarian perspective of Jeremy Bentham was also attuned to the moment by aiming to solve once and for all what happiness is, how to measure it, and how to produce it, as if all humans were, in essence, comparable entities.
This shift can also be observed in the evolution of happiness in the Webster’s Dictionary since 1850. The focus shifted from a blend of sensations, luck, and virtues to predominantly sensory experiences and well-being from the 1960s onward.
In the 20th century, with advertisements starting to explore happiness as a key term, happiness became even more common in its adjective form, “happy” and less as the noun “happiness”. It was being less used as an idea and more as a classification.
Curiously, for the first time, after 1930’s, translators of Aristotle’s work started questioning happiness as a good substitute for eudaimonia, preferring terms like flourishing, well-being, and prosperity.
And this brings us to the present vibe around the word happiness.
And here we are, talking about this scientific trend of using well-being instead of happiness, a word considered too superficial, too loose.
So, let me try to wrap up the conclusion of the article.
All changes in how the best life or happiness is perceived are part of a specific moment in time and space; being both a product of and producing ideas of what means to be human, what is the world around me, and how to best live life…
For example, in Aristotle’s Greece, it made sense to think about a virtuous and civic life. For the catholic Roman Empire, a God-oriented best life was more suited.
So, the common use of happiness (like “I’m happy with my coffee”) that focuses on the individual fleeting feeling, aligns pretty well with our modern-contemporary thought. It is a good representation of a capitalist “best way to live”: a life that can be fulfilled by disconnected consumption experiences. It is about “feeling great”. Although it is, as we well know, a dysfunctional idea about the best life (as, from conception, it should never be satisfied); it is dysfunctional but structurally strong.
And very much in line with that, the recent scientific movement, defending the substitution of Happiness for Well-Being, is in synchrony with our modern-scientific thought. Let me delve a bit into that.
As presented by Diener in his 1984 article, Well-Being was an expression that could retain the widespread interest in happiness and avoid all the looseness of the latter. “If you treasure it, measure it”. It was kind of a blank slate, at least for Diener, who had the opportunity to put forward a history of the expression “well-being” – that became generally adopted.
In Diener’s history of Well-Being, there is no space for theoretical divergence: it is a history of linear progression, getting closer and closer to a universal understanding of well-being; through physiological measurements, big data analysis…. The goal is to compare people’s Well-Being, and generalize findings.
This is not problematic by itself. It can be seen as another and interesting way to delve into the complexities of the best way to live. A way attuned to contemporary thought based on a positivistic approach.
However, there are two problems that we need to be aware of:
- By giving importance to linear and tangible aspects of the history of happiness (now presented as the history of well-being), Diener ended up deeming unimportant what is most rich in happiness: its potential to represent tensions, disputes, and changes in ways of seeing the world and life;
- as it negates variation, the newly invented history of well-being considers itself the only valid proposition about the best life. It assumes a Story with science (researchers) as its guide, leaving divergent perspectives out of the scientific field.
But this enterprise is fragile. First, the appeal of ‘happiness’ hasn’t been well transposed to well-being, as the first continues to be preferred to captivate public interest. Second, by avoiding the complexities of happiness and aiming for a measurable object, the Science of Well-Being shifted the discussion from the ‘best life’ to the ‘good life’. The first is intrinsically open to disputes, the second more tangible.
While the idea of ‘good’ requires an unidimensional assessment of something by certain criteria of separation between good and bad; the idea of the ‘best’ depends on hierarchy: not all “goods” are part of the best, not in any quantity, combination, frequency… things considered “bad” might even be part of the best. So, it depends not only on the comparison between things and a criteria of good-bad, but also on the combination of things.
With a problematic theoretical basis, it is not by chance that the field proliferates “well-being constructs” like psychological, subjective, objective, eudaimonic, hedonic, relational, ecological, sustainable, existential … and so on…
My final point is that investigating what is considered good, as part of what the Science of Well-Being does, has its own importance and history, like the welfare debate, but it shouldn’t be mixed up with investigating what is best. To talk about the “best life”, we need more theoretical discussion. We need a richer history that is being left ignored.
The word “happiness” has this splendid and complex connection with eudaimonia, felicitas, and many modern languages, it connects us with Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, with the US founding fathers and the French constitution… It has a root in the idea of Luck or Chance that is not any kind of luck or chance (like “whatever happens”), but an understanding of both entangled with the world that is being lived in: the struggles of surviving, characteristics that you are born with, things that go beyond our control…
Therefore, I advocate for distinguishing ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ in scientific research: which I know is asking a lot… but, well, who knows…
If you look into the Historical and Linguistic Roots of well-being, you will find that ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ refer to different traditions, have different natures, and ask for different methodologies as objects of inquiry.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to think how much and in what way the Science of Well-being represents our present aspirations about the best way to live life.
That is it for today.
I hope you liked. Let me know what you think.
References
Sewaybricker, L. E., & Massola, G. M. (2023). Against well-being: A critique of positive psychology. History of the Human Sciences, 36(1), 131-148. https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951221114733
The Underside of Happiness 