philosophical topics

vol. 41, no. 1, spring

2013

Eudaimonia, Happiness, and the Redemption

of Unhappiness

Timothy Chappell
The Open University

ABSTRACT. In this paper I argue for five theses. The first thesis is that
ethicists should think about happiness and unhappiness together, with
as much detail and particularity as possible. Thinking about unhappiness
will help us get clear about happiness, and distinguish the different things
that come under that name. The second is that happiness and unhappiness can both be important positively valuable features of a worthwhile
life. The third thesis is that Modern Eudaimonism (ME), the claim that
every reason to act is a reason either to promote or facilitate happiness,
or to decrease or prevent unhappiness, is false. The fourth thesis is that
Aristotle is not a Modern Eudaimonist. Aristotelian Eudaimonism (AE)
says that every reason to act is a reason that derives from what Aristotle
calls eudaimonia. But derives from is a different connective from
either to promote or facilitate X, or to decrease or prevent not-X; and
eudaimonia is not happiness. So AE ME. Finally, the fifth thesis is that
AE is false too.
I gave you everything you ever wanted; it wasnt what you wanted.

U2, Youre so Cruel
Mankind does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight

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Where there is sorrow there is holy ground I have a right to

share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world
and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both,
is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to
Gods secret as anyone can get.

Oscar Wilde, de Profundis

I. Some Stories about Unhappiness

Aaron has been jilted by Belinda, with whom he was pretty smitten. Now Aaron is
unhappyinconsolably, wretchedly unhappyand will continue in that state for
some time. His friends tell Aaron that he made a big mistake in pursuing Belindas
affections in the first place. It was always bound to end like this, they say: you
never had a chance with Belindayou shouldnt have bothered. Some of them go
further, and urge Aaron to snap out of it: Come on, they say, you barely know
her, really; it cant be worth this kind of reaction. Aaron repudiates both sorts of
comments. Against the second kind of friends, he doesnt think his unhappiness is
misplaced or an overreaction. Nor does he agree with the first sort of friends that
the prospect then of his misery now constituted a reason why he was wrong even
to try to win Belindas heart.
Clares job contract has finished. It was a three-year research post in philosophy of mind, the area in which she dreams of an academic career, and despite
the sometimes bitchy colleagues and the always lousy pay, she loved it and put
everything she had into it. But now she has no successor-job to move to, and it
looks very likely that for at least the next three years, there will no posts at all that
she could apply for in any sort of philosophy, let alone philosophy of mind. She is
three months behind with her rent, lives off baked beans and toast, is filled with
doubts about her own ability, and has just had her first journal submission scathingly rejected on the say-so of a single referee who, despite sitting on her paper for
over a year, misstates her argument and misspells her name. Clare is unhappy
worn out, despairing, and demoralisedand her unhappiness is not at all abated
by one so-called friend who just shrugs and says, Well, I told you you should have
gone into accountancy; nor by another who tells her, Itll all be the same in a
hundred years.
Donald was in a loving marriage to Eleanor for forty-nine years, but Donald
has just been rather suddenly bereaved. To say that Donald is unhappy is to understate the case. He is crushed. He can barely get out of bed. Losing Eleanor feels, to
him, like half of his own self has been amputated. Fortunately, no one is foolish
enough to criticise Donald for doing somethingnamely, marrying and staying
with Eleanorthat has brought him to this depth of suffering. Nor does anyone
make the crass, Claudius-like suggestion to Donald that he get over it.

Frances is nine years old, and she is bullied at her boarding school. Of her, too,

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to say that she is unhappy is true, if rather inadequate. During school termsbut
not only thenFrancess life is a walking nightmare.
George is a depressive. Depression can mean all sorts of different things; what
it means for George is that he lives his life in a constant state of acute emotional
pain. Accompanying everything he does there is a ground-bass of aching, inarticulate sadness, unrelated to any particular cause or reason that he can identify, but
which colours how he sees his whole world. Most certainly George is unhappy.
Helen is a brilliant mathematician, working on cutting-edge problems in
number theory. She is an obsessive, a workaholic. She finds each problem intensely
frustrating, upsetting, infuriating even, until she has solved it. And as soon as it is
solved, theres another. Helen is breathtakingly good at what she does, and does
exactly what she wants with her time. Indeed she would be unable to imagine
doing anything elseif she ever tried. And her university is ruefully aware that it
pays her very well to do what she would undoubtedly do anyway for no payment
at all if she had to. (Helen would do maths under an aluminium blanket on a park
bench if she had to.) Despite her freedom of choice, her financial security, and
the fact that Helen spends her life developing and expressing her chief gift to its
utmost, it might not seem unreasonable to say that Helen is unhappy.
Iona, finally, is bored. She is restless, aimless, dissatisfied with everything in
her life, but clueless about how to improve anything in her life. As most of us use
the word, she counts as unhappy too.

II. Some Distinctions that the Stories Suggest

If we want to think well about happiness, it is a good idea to think, simultaneously, about unhappiness. To think well about either happiness or unhappiness,
it is a good idea to have as many examples in hand as possible. Hence section
1s seven mini-stories about unhappiness. I could have picked literary examples;
for instance, instead of Aaron being rejected I could have mentioned Levin being
rejected in Anna Karenina. (Or indeed Anna Karenina being rejected in Anna
Karenina, though her case is more complex.) But literary examples would have
involved distractions and been useless if unfamiliar to the reader. Whereas my
seven stories will probably be recognisable to almost anyone as familiar parts of
real life. For many of us, no doubt, these stories will be all too familiar.1
My seven stories do not capture every way in which we use the word unhappy;
just some ways. It is childs play to come up with uses of unhappy not captured by
these stories. (Here is one: Im unhappy with the way youve copyedited my book.)
Nor are there supposed to be seven ways of using the word, one way per story. I had
seven different kinds of cases in mind, but I neednt insist that each case shows just
one different kind of unhappiness. Maybe some of them show several kinds, with
overlaps. Maybe, on reflection, some of them show no kind of (real) unhappiness.

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Nor, beyond the scant information that they explicitly contain, is the detail of
the stories fixed, or meant to be fixed. Not that the detail of the stories is unimportant; it can and often will make all the difference to how we read them. But I
want to close off as few alternatives as possible, and invite the reader to play with
these scenarios imaginatively: to add variations to fill out each story all sorts of
ways, and see how these different fillings-out modulate the stories ethical feel and
significance. This exercise in variation may well also reveal further kinds of unhappiness, and indeed of happiness.2
Though in fact quite a few of the distinctions that we might want to make
about unhappiness are already visible in the stories. Here are five to start with.
(1). Feeling vs. response. First, there is unhappiness as a feeling vs. unhappiness as
a response to something. Someone can be unhappy in the sense that George
is: unhappiness can just be his temperament, the way he feels, the emotional
tone of his lived experience, and his unhappiness have no particular object.
This sort of unhappiness can be more or less permanent, as it is with George
(because hes a depressive); or it can be a mood that comes and goes, as perhaps with most people.
Alternatively, unhappiness can be a response (temporary or permanent)
to some bad thing that happens or is the case. Here too there are at least
two distinct possibilities, causal and referential. Causal: as a blow can cause a
bruise, so a disaster can cause sorrow or anxiety or depression. Referential: the
unhappiness can be about the bad event, can be an attitude directed at that
event as at a proposition, or with that event as its object. Unhappiness can also
be both caused by and about a bad event. I didnt specify which was the case
with Aaron, Clare, Donald, or Frances, but I suspect that in all four of these
stories there is likely to be both a referential and a causal relation to the object
of the unhappiness.
(2) Unhappiness and wants. Unhappiness is often related to what we want. Very
commonly people are unhappy because they are in something like Aarons or
Clares situation: there is something they want, and they arent getting it (or
arent getting it fast enough, as with Helen). In such cases the intensity of the
unhappiness is typically proportional to the strength of the want.
Again, people are often unhappy because they dont know what they
want. This can either be in the loose sense that they want two or more conflicting things and cant decide which they want more. Or it can be in the
tighter sense that applies to Iona: they literally dont know, of anything, that
that thing is something that they want. This either causes unhappiness, or
becomes a reason for unhappiness, or both.
A third possibility is mentioned in my first epigraph. There are senses of
I have got everything that I want in which getting that is not only quite consistent with unhappiness (as seems true of Helen), but can actually cause and/
or be a reason for unhappiness. Think of the person who dreams all his life

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of winning the lottery, then wins it, and finds within three months of his win
that his life has become empty: there is nothing left for him to chase or strive
for, because he can get it all instantly. (A hackneyed example, but life can be
hackneyed too: this happens.) This kind of unhappiness is what the myth of
Midas is all about.
(3) Unhappiness and our sense of justice. One important sense of unhappiness,
which not being an expressivist I would like to keep separate from the sense to
do with frustrated wants, is the sense in which a perception that I or someone
else has been wronged can make me unhappy. This is part of Clares unhappiness. It is not just that she sees that she isnt getting the job in philosophy
of mind that she wants. It is also, and quite distinct from that, that she sees
that she is not getting the treatment in the philosophy jobs process that she
deserves. Obviously she can think this without thinking the further thought
that she deserves a jobwhich might be a reasonable further thought or not,
depending on her abilities and on the competition. However, sufficient ill-use
may make Clare doubt whether she even deserves reasonable treatment in
the jobs process; just as, if Frances is sufficiently badly bullied, Frances may
lose her grip on the idea that she is being wronged at all, and can even come
to think that its her own fault. This is what Marxists mean by internalised
oppression.
(4) Unhappiness as dissatisfaction, or any other negative affective state. Utterances
like the one I mentioned above, Im unhappy with the way youve copyedited my book, can express real, deep, plangent unhappiness. (No, really.
You should see some of the copyediting that goes on.) Or they can express
or betray a dispositional irritability, an inability to be happy or satisfied,
which is exemplified by Helen and perhaps Iona above. They can also, in a
very common use that we might call line-managerial unhappiness, express
nothing more than businesslike, all-in-a-days-work disapprobation or dissatisfaction that doesnt necessarily have any particular emotional content at all.
Broadening this out, we may note how unhappiness can be a general term for
any kind of negative affective state or experienced difficulty or resistance. (I
own a climbing guide that includes the sentence VS leaders can expect a few
moments of unhappiness on this traverse.)
(5) Justified vs. unjustified unhappiness. About all forms of unhappiness where the
unhappiness is unhappiness for a reason, the questions can arise (a) whether the
unhappiness is proportionate to that reason, or unjustified; and (b) whether it
was foreseeable and avoidable that there would be this reason for unhappiness
if a given course of action was taken. This is, probably, what is going on when
Aarons friends tell him not to waste his tears on Belinda, or Clares tell her she
should have gone in for accountancy.
Unhappiness can be unreasonable and unjustified because it is excessive,
or because it is inadequate. When people are bereaved, they can incur criticism for not being unhappy enough at their partners death. As I noted in

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Donalds case, that is probably commoner, in our perhaps rather maudlin

society, than is criticising them for being too unhappy, as a Stoic might.
Where unhappiness is caused rather than being unhappiness for a reason, this too can be either an excessive or an inadequate response to the cause,
just as someone can either overreact or underreact to stubbing his toe; and
here too the question can arise whether the unhappiness was foreseeable and
avoidable, and if so, whether the unhappy person did enough to avoid it.
Where unhappiness is neither caused nor responsive to some reason,
it is correspondingly hard to see it as a proportionate response to anything.
Georges unhappiness is depression, and his depression (lets say) is just an illness caused by hormone imbalance: it needs treatment, not critique. Perhaps
the same is true of Iona. Though as things are in our society, Iona is likely,
unfortunately for her, to fall down the gap between pharmaceutical and interpersonal attitudes, and get no adequate form of either treatment or critical
response.

III. Two More Distinctions

I said above that happiness and unhappiness are best considered together. Certainly
it is striking how neatly section 2s five distinctions about unhappiness, which I
have drawn mostly out of thinking about section 1s seven mini-stories about happiness, can be matched up with five corresponding distinctions about happiness.
Happiness too can be (1) a matter of temperament, or a response to some event
or state of affairs. Happiness too correlates (2) with getting what we want, and
(3) with seeing justice done. Happiness too can just mean (4) satisfaction with a
job well done, or more broadly, any positive affective state. And happiness too can
(5) be either justified or unjustified, proportionate or disproportionate. This close
correspondence between our notions of happiness and unhappiness is an important point about those notions.
At the risk of trying my readers patience, I want to add two more distinctions to the list. These two are not so obvious from my clutch of stories about
unhappiness. Both distinctions, when they are noticed at all, are usually noticed
in the course of thinking about happiness. But for both distinctions, we evidently
still have the correspondence just noted: both apply equally to happiness and to
unhappiness.
(6) Phenomenal vs. adverbial. Gilbert Ryle (1954) famously contrasts phenomenal and adverbial accounts of pleasure. He takes e.g. I enjoyed my round of
golf to be a statement of adverbial pleasure: it says that I played the round
in a way that was enjoyable, not that I had any particular phenomenal sensations as I played it. I think it is natural to suggest that the phenomenal/

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adverbial distinction can be made for happiness as well as for pleasure: there
are activities in which happiness consists, but not because of any particular
phenomenal quality that they may have. I further suggest that the same is true
of unhappiness.

(NB I am not saying that the adverbial account is the truth about every
case of happiness or unhappiness; just some cases. Ryle apparently did think
his adverbial account could cover every case of pleasure. Some of the evidence
that that is wrong has already come out; it is clear enough from thinking
about happiness and unhappiness that they typically have a phenomenology
that not all is darkness within. Perhaps only the grip of a theory, logical
behaviourism for example, could motivate us to deny or ignore this.)
(7) Verdictive vs. descriptive. I can call you happy or unhappy and mean to describe
your sensations, or mood, or emotions, or the like internal phenomena. I can
alsojust aboutcall you happy or unhappy because of something external that has happened to you. Rons wife has left him. O unhappy Ron!
(Or possibly, depending on the story, O happy Ron!) This use of happy/
unhappy does not describe Rons emotionit is not about his emotions at all,
but his situation, which it evaluates, and issues a verdict on. At the limit, the
verdict can be a verdict on Rons entire life.
I say we can just about do this with the words happy and unhappy.
What I mean is that this is a very old-fashioned usage. In ordinary English,
outside parodic contexts, it is nearly completely obsolete. What we say now
is Poor Ron! for the bad cases, and Lucky Ron! for the good cases. These
phrases too are verdictive, not descriptive; it is, for example, a misunderstanding, or a small joke, to respond to Lucky Ron! with Luck had nothing to do
with it. But the corresponding old-fashioned sense of (un)happy, despite its
obsolescence in ordinary English, remains philosophically important; more
important, perhaps, than it deserves to be.
So now we have seven distinctions about happiness and unhappiness, five
of them drawn, and two not, from my opening seven stories about unhappiness.
Does that seem a lot? Given that the complexity of happiness and unhappiness
probably goes well beyond these distinctions, I am more inclined to suspect that it
is not enough. But anyway, there is a payoff for this plethora. We may now apply
the materials Ive just assembled to address some familiar philosophical problems.
These seven distinctions between varieties of (un)happiness shed useful light
on the senses in which it might or might not be true or plausible to say, for
instance, that we should call no man happy until he is dead (Solon), or that
happiness is injustice and intemperance, combined with power (Callicles),
or that no unjust person can be happy (Plato). The verdictive sense of happiness brings out Solons dictum as true. If Solons point is that there is no
definitively saying whether O happy Ariston! is an apt utterance until we can
assess the whole of Aristons life, then Solon is just correct (as Aristotle agrees

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in the one-swallow-doesnt-make-a-summer passage, NE 1098a1820). And what

Callicles says is also true, provided we read it as talking about what Callicles means
by happiness, which is positive affective states: if someone was capable of living as
Callicles describes, as a tyrant unchallenged in power, serenely self-interested, and
untroubled by pity or fellow-feeling for his many victims, then no doubt, in that
sense of happiness, he would be happy. (It is a further question whether anyone
is capable of living like this, and whether he would be human if he was.) What
Plato says about the impossibility of happiness for an unjust person is true as well,
provided here too we take care to use happiness in what is Platos sense most of
the timewhich is apparently adverbial. (At times Plato clearly wants to bring
happiness as pleasure into the picture as well, for example in his famous proof
of the pleasures of justice in Republic Book 9. Here what Plato says cant be kept
consistent with what Callicles says just by suggesting that they are talking about
different things.)

However, I wont pursue any of these themes any further in this essaybeyond
remarking that these are all cases of what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia,
and that reading Herodotus, Plato, or Aristotle might lead us to a reasonable doubt
whether this is quite the same thing as the English notion of happiness that I
have been analysing. This last doubt I will take up. My discussion of it begins with
Aristotles famous discussion of eudaimonia in Nicomachean Ethics Book 1.

IV. Happiness; and Aristotle on Eudaimonia

It is a familiar proem to teaching the Nicomachean Ethics to warn our students
that Aristotles word eudaimonia is not altogether well translated by happiness. The main trouble with this commonplace caveat is that it goes nowhere
near far enough. Its not just a matter of a poor fit between Aristotles concept of
eudaimonia and our concept of happiness. The two concepts barely even overlap.3
A first indication of this disconnect comes when we ask ourselves this simple
question: If eudaimonia is Aristotles word for happiness, then what is his word
for unhappiness? Caught cold by the question, I suspect most of us would hazard a guess at dysdaimonia. This was my own first response when the question
occurred to me. But that word does not even occur in the Nicomachean Ethics
nor, so far as I can tell from scanning the texts and from Bonitzs Index Aristotelicus,
anywhere else in Aristotle.4 Nor do any of its cognates, such as dysdaimn. In fact
the NE never uses any abstract noun to indicate an opposite state to eudaimonia.
Words for this were certainly available in the Greek of Aristotles time, including
dysdaimonia; and Aristotle himself was notoriously swift to neologise wherever
he felt a need to, e.g. by putting the relevant adjective into the neuter singular. But
Aristotle never uses to dysdaimon, or dysdaimonia, or any locution like that.
The nearest Aristotle comes is his use of the adjective athlios and the adverb
athlis. In NE 1, at least most of the time, these do signify what he takes to be

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the opposite of eudaimn and its adverb (which in NE is always eu, never
eudaimons).5 So for example Aristotles word for Priam at the end of his life is
athlios (1100b7), and at 1102b7 he quotes the Greek saying that for half of their
lives (the sleeping half), the eudaimones and the athlioi do not differ at all.

However, in the entire Nicomachean Ethics athlios and the adverb athlis occur
just eight times in total (athlios seven times, 1100a29, 1100b5, 1100b34, 1101a6,
1102b7, 1150b5, 1166b27; athlis once, 1100a9). By contrast, in Bywaters index
to the Greek text of NE, eudaimonia and its cognates have at least forty principal
citations alone; and eudaimonia is the main analysand of NE 1 as a whole. It does
not look like Aristotle is all that interested in athlios/athlis. It certainly does not
look like he is interested in it in the way thatI suggested in section 2anyone
philosophically interested in happiness is naturally also interested in unhappiness.
In any case athlios does not mean unhappy. Etymologically, the word is
(according to LSJ) simply the adjectival derivative of athlon (older aethlon), a
contest. The idea of the word is that someone who is athlios is struggling for a
prizeand not succeeding. An athlios is a striver, an also-ran, a failure; we might
even say, a loser. Being athlios has everything to do with being unsuccessful,
and thence, by natural semantic spread and drift, with being pitiful or pathetic
(probably in both the straight and the sarcastic/contemptuous senses of those
two words). Hence athlios even has something to do with the original sense
of miserable, as fit to be pitied. But to athlion (if I may presume to use this
neuter-singular abstraction when Aristotle so markedly doesnt) has little to do,
directly, with being unhappy.

So eudaimn/athlios does not point us to a neat pairing of concepts in anything like the way that happiness/unhappiness does. Moreover eudaimn does not
mean happy, and athlios does not mean unhappy. That is our impression so far.
The impression is quickly confirmed when we try to map eudaimonia onto section 3s seven distinctions about happiness and unhappiness.

Happiness in one sense can be (1) a matter of temperament, or a(n emotional/
affective) response to some event or state of affairs; eudaimonia cannot possibly
be either. Eudaimonia does correlate (2) with getting what we want and (3) with
seeing justice done; but not in the way that happiness does, and only on condition
that we want the right things and are on the right side of the doing of justice.
(4) Eudaimonia simply cannot mean, as happiness can, either satisfaction with a
job well done, or more broadly, any positive affective state. (5) Unlike happiness,
eudaimonia cannot be either justified or unjustifiedif it is present at all, it is
automatically justified; nor can eudaimonia be proportionate or disproportionate. (To what?) In fact, it is only with my distinctions (6) and (7) that happiness
and eudaimonia even come into contact, as a closer look at Aristotles discussion
brings out.
Aristotles argument in NE 1 is essentially a conceptual analysis. There are
asides, but its main movement of thought is from an unclear familiar concept, his
cultures traditional concept of eudaimonia, to a clearer but less familiar concept,
Aristotelian eudaimonia, the content of which it is his project to argue for.
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This movement isI want to suggestalso one that we can understand as a
movement from a verdictive to a descriptive sense of eudaimonia. Aristotle makes
it quite clear that his initial question, What is eudaimonia?, is very close in sense
to the question What is the human good? (see e.g. 1098a17); he also says that
saying that the best is eudaimonia seems something of a platitude (homologoumenon ti phainetai, 1097b22). At this point in his argument, eudaimonia is his
name for the good human life, whatever that turns out to be. It is as if he starts
with a sentence-frame that runs
Eudaimonia is
and is looking for something to fill in the dots. In this sense, he can
equally well start with a sentence-frame that runs
The human good is
or
The best (sc. for humans) is

and look to fill that in; indeed, as already remarked, at times this is what he does.
In this verdictive sense, eudaimonia is, as we might say, an indefinite descriptiona maximally indefinite description. The eudaimn life is the one that, if
someone (say Ariston) lives it, most reasonably and rightly prompts the verdict O
happy Ariston!: this is why the Greek verb eudaimonizein (NE 1096a2, 1100a10)
means to congratulate as well as to call happy. (Cp. a familiar use of felix in
Latin, e.g. in Vergils tribute to Lucretius, felix qui potuit rerum cognoscrere causas
(Georgics 2.490); cp. too the English verb felicitate.) Exactly what the eudaimn
life is, just what the life is like that prompts this positive verdict, that gets what
Hursthouse 1999 might call the tick of approval: this is Aristotles main question
in NE 1. His way of answering it can look confusing, but, I suggest, is at least partly
clarified by my seventh distinction above. For he answers it by sticking with the
word eudaimonia, but shifting from a verdictive to a descriptive sense of this word.

What then is Aristotles descriptive sense of eudaimonia? This is how he has
come to put it by the end of his conceptual analysis: estin h eudaimonia psychs
energeia tis kataretn teleian (NE 1102a56). I translate: Eudaimonia is a particular activity of the soul in accordance with complete virtue; I might also translate:
Eudaimonia is a particular realisation of our nature as intelligent living beings,
according to fulfilled excellence.6 This is no platitude. What it says, when Aristotle
spells it out, is that eudaimonia means a life of being good at the things that matter.
Being athlios means being a loser, a failure, in those things, just as being eudaimn
means being a winner, a success, in them.

Then obviously everything depends on what things matter. Broadly speaking,
Aristotle thinks that there are two kinds of life in particular that most obviously
engage with the things that matter. One is the life of the gifted leading citizen

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of a thriving and well-ordered polis who does a bit of philosophy among other
things; the other is the life of the exclusively specialising philosopher. Aristotle is
notoriously unsure which way to choose between these two possibilities (and does
not, to my mind, give due attention to the question Why choose at all?). But perhaps we may bypass his uncertainties, and simply say that, on the whole, he seems
inclined to give either of these more-fully described lives the tick of approval of
the verdictive sense of eudaimn.
Either way, notice this: in the descriptive sense, Aristotelian eudaimonia is
entirely a matter of performance. As he himself says, lifes prizes go to those who
actually win them, not to those who just look like they might: NE 1099a5. And
now we seem close to a decisive argument for refusing to translate eudaimn as
happy at all, except in the verdictive sense. For it may be that Aristotles ideal
citizen (Ill call him Ariston), who is eudaimn by definition, lives in such a way
as to make it reasonable and right to apply to him the verdictive exclamation, O
happy Ariston! But it by no means follows from that that the eudaimn Ariston
is happy, if by that we mean the kinds of things picked out under my first five distinctions about happiness. For all that has been shown, O happy Ariston! could
be apt, and yet the eudaimn Ariston be (1) depressed, (2) frustrated, (3) grieved
at injustice, (4) mostly negatively affected by emotions, and (5) suffer, one way
or another, from disproportionate affective responses. Or again, Ariston could be
successful in everything he turns his hand to, yet spend his whole time in a boiling
rage of frustration and impatience about whatever challenge currently confronts
him. In that case he will be rather like Helen in the sixth of my seven mini-stories
(which, as the reader can now see, I designed with precisely this point in mind).

The reason why this problem comes up brings us to the one distinction of my
seven that we have not so far brought to bear on Aristotles discussion of eudai
monia: the adverbial/phenomenal distinction. If we put to one side the verdictive
sense of happy (happy as in O happy Ariston!), then so far as I can see, the only
way we have even a chance of reading Aristotles treatise on eudaimonia as a treatise on happiness is to assume that what he has in mind is adverbial happiness in a
sense parallel to Ryles notion of adverbial pleasure. I enjoyed my round of golf
means that I played my golf in the enjoying way, not that I played it with this or
that particular phenomenal experience as an accompaniment. Similarly, we might
suggest, Ariston is happy running the polis means that Ariston runs it in the way
distinctive of the happy man, not that Ariston has this or that particular emotion
as a standing accompaniment to his running of the polis. (There seems to be a circularity herewhat is the way distinctive of the happy man, if it has nothing to
do with positive emotions?but that is not my fault; its the adverbial accounts.)

Quite likely Aristotle in NE 1 has in mind something like an adverbial view
of happiness. But we have already seen the obvious objection to it. Success means
efficient and proficient functioning in life, skilful mastery of the roles good performance in which fulfils my nature. But all this seems perfectly compatible with
unhappiness. (Consider, again, Helen in section 1.) What is to ensure that enacting

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the human function will coincide with positive emotions? The point is not merely
that you can be happy in the adverbial sense while unhappy in other senses, such
as the affective and emotional sense. The point is also that if things get sufficiently
bad in these other senses, then it will begin to look untenable to say that someone
has adverbial happiness either. Just likewise, Ryles golfer can perhaps take adverbial pleasure in a round of golf when, sensations-wise, the main things he feels
are soaking wet and chilled to the bone; but if we add that he also has a searing
toothache and raging back and knee pain and , then it gets increasingly hard to
see how his pleasure in golfing can even be adverbial.
Aristotle is aware of this objection, andrightlyworried by it. Given our
preoccupation here with how to translate eudaimonia, it is striking that his
main response, his main attempt to provide a philosophical guarantee that good
functioning will be accompanied by positive emotions, says something about
hdonthe word we normally (and in my view correctly) translate as pleasure.
That fact supports a suspicion that I think we should feel anyway: that most of the
emotional and affective phenomena that we collect under the word happiness
would for Aristotle belong under the heading of hdon. It is also striking that this
response comes immediately after Aristotle has just affirmed that what he means
by eudaimonia is entirely a matter of performance:
The life of eudaimones is also pleasant (or sweet: hdus) in itself. For
having pleasure is one of our conscious experiences (tn psykhikn),
and what is pleasant (or sweet) to each man is whatever he cares about
so what is just is pleasant to the man who cares about justice, and in
general, what accords with excellence/virtue is pleasant to the man who
cares about excellence/virtue So the life of eudaimones does not
stand in need of pleasure as a sort of bolt-on extra (periaptou tinos);
it contains its pleasure in itself. After all, besides all this, someone who
does not enjoy (khairn) doing noble deeds is not a good man. (NE
1099a89, 1112, 1517)

This reads to me like a sharp response to the very objection just made: But nothing you have said, Aristotle, does anything to guarantee that being eudaimn will
be enjoyable. Oh yes it does (Aristotle in effect retorts) and moreover the
enjoyment is intrinsic to being eudaimnit isnt just something that may or
may not come along with being eudaimn. It is intrinsic to eudaimonia, Aristotle
argues, because the person who lives the eudaimn life gets pleasure (and presumably this does not mean just adverbial pleasure) from the justice and other kinds
of excellence that that life involves.

Now we might reasonably doubt that this argument will do the trick. Some
virtuous actions are necessarily unselfconscious, so it cant be true of every virtuous action that it gives pleasure to its doer (or not, at least, that it gives him pleasure under the description: my own virtuous action). But even those virtuous
actions that do, as such, give pleasure to the agent may still not give him enough
pleasure to make his life pleasant on the whole. Recall my depressed character

38

George in section 1. George might enjoy his own good deeds as much as they reasonably can be enjoyed, and still be, on balance, very far from overall happiness (or
pleasure, or enjoyment).
But even if Aristotles argument does guarantee that the eudaimns life will
be pleasant or enjoyable, there is still this to note about it: in modern terms, the
argument can reasonably be read as an argument that the eudaimn life is happy.
Its point is that if you live the eudaimn way, then you will experience the kind of
positive emotions and affective states mentioned under section 2s first distinction
about happiness and unhappiness. Now Aristotle would not need to argue this, if
eudaimonia just meant happiness in the affective sense. The fact that Aristotle feels
a need to produce this argument is one last piece of evidence for my main thesis
here: Aristotles term eudaimonia covers hardly any of the things that we mean by
happiness, many of which Aristotle would naturally describe as cases of hdon.

V. Aristotelian and Modern Eudaimonism

Getting straight about the complexities of our notion of happiness, the complexities of Aristotles notion of eudaimonia, and the almost complete nonconvergence
of those two notions, is useful in its own right. It may also help us with some further puzzles that are often raised in Aristotles ethics, and in modern discussions
influenced by Aristotle.
It is often said, for instance, that Aristotle was a eudaimonist. Well, it is true
that Aristotle had an ism, a thesis, about what he called eudaimonia. But modern
eudaimonism, a view most prominently defended by John Stuart Mill, is roughly
this thesis (there are different versions):
(ME) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
happiness.

In the opening lines of Utilitarianism, Mill appeals to Aristotle as another proponent of (ME). However, Aristotles eudaimonism is not (ME) but this view:
(AE) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
eudaimonia. (NE 1097a36b7)

Now eudaimonia is carefully and explicitly defined by Aristotle as a particular

actualisation of the soul in accordance with virtue. And as we have seen, that is
not the way to define happiness. So (ME) is not the same thesis as (AE). Therefore,
pace Mill, Aristotle is not a modern or Millian eudaimonist.
A more direct question about (AE) and (ME): Is either of these theses true?
My answer, in a word, would be no. They are false, not because there is something
else that both (AE) and (ME) miss that is the only thing that people can rationally
take as their ultimate aim, but because there is nothing that is the only thing that

39

people can rationally take as their ultimate aim. Lots and lots of things are worthwhile in their own right, and without the slightest reference back to any further
end or aim that pursuing them subserves; in other words, lots and lots of things
are capable of being ultimate aims. (Other people, for a start. Perhaps that is Kants
point, or one of Kants points, in calling people ends in themselves.) This is the
opposite of the conclusion that Aristotle was actually arguing for in the opening
chapters of the Nicomachean Ethics. But it does seem, to me at any rate, to be the
conclusion that those chapters almost irresistibly suggest.

(Well, maybe other people are ultimate aims at the level that Aristotle labels
with the word telos. It doesnt follow that they are ultimate aims at the level he
labels teleiotation telos (1097a2534).7 Maybe not; but there again, it is not
entirely easy to see what Aristotle means by this distinction. I suspect his point was
that each of us, qua practitioner of various technai or occupant of various roles,
has ends which are final relative to those roles or those technai; but those roles and
technai are themselves instrumental, or otherwise contributory, to some further
end. If this is what Aristotle has in mind, then to apply it to relationships with
other people would mean this: another person is a final end for me qua his philos,
but my relationship with him is itself a means or a contribution to whatever is my
most final end. This last bit still sounds completely wrong to my ear, as it perhaps
will to the ear of anyone with at least mildly Kantian inclinations.)
A little more detail on why (ME) is false comes when we remember what all
the different things are that we mean by happiness. When we read (ME) in the
light of the first five distinctions I offered above, at least the following possibilities
come into view:
(ME1) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
feelings or emotions of happiness.
(ME2) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
the happiness that comes from getting what they want.
(ME3) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
the happiness that comes from seeing justice done.
(ME4) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim
is the happiness that comes from satisfaction with a job well done, or
more broadly, any positive affective state.
(ME5) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
justified and proportionate happiness.

To my eye, not one of these theses is even tempting. The people whom we naturally call rational do not aimnot even ultimatelyat nothing but their own
feelings, or at nothing but getting what they want, or at nothing but any kind of
happiness, including the justified and proportionate kind. And while justice and a
job well done may be important to them, so are plenty of other things. The people
whom we naturally call rational have some interest in all five of these objectives;

40

but they have an exclusive interest in none of them. I doubt we would call them
rational if they had.

Two other versions of (ME) can be derived from my sixth and seventh distinctions in section 2:
(ME6) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
happiness in the adverbial sense.
(ME7) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
happiness in the verdictive sense.

These theses look false too. (ME6) seems incoherent. The point of the adverbial
conception of happiness is that you take all sorts of other things (e.g., playing
golf) as your objective, and pursue those objectives in the happy mans way. It follows from this conception that pursuing those objectives in that way cannot itself
be your (ultimate) objective. This second-order aspiration might be one of your
various objectives in what you do; it could not be the objective of everything that
you do. As for (ME7), this is not obviously false read de re: no doubt a good life is
one that gives others reason to utter this exclamation. But this thought cannot be
anyones aim in what they do, because (ME7) is obviously false read de dicto. It is
simply bizarre (and not just because of the old-fashionedness of the locution) to
suppose that any rational person X will aim, explicitly and exclusively, to live a life
that gives others reason to exclaim, O happy X!
So when we give (ME) more precision by feeding into it any of the seven
senses of happiness suggested by section 2s survey of distinctions, (ME) turns
out fairly obviously false. But that is not because that survey was faulty, or missed
obvious possibilities. It has more to do with (ME)s presupposition that for a rational life there is bound to be some one ultimate aim, and all we have to do is work
out what it is.
In one wayas I have pointed outthis looks wrong because of the sheer
variety of our practical rationality and its objects. In another way, I will now add, it
looks wrong because it underestimates the place of external contingency in human
life. Events can and do present me with reasons for action that simply have nothing
to do with my pursuit of happiness in any sense. Singers (1972) toddler drowning
in a fountain is an example of this kind of reasona confronting reason, as we
may call it. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, it turns out that I have reason to do
something, where my reason to act is not related to my own happiness in any sense
whatever; what it is related to is simply the toddlers need to be rescued. Or again,
consider figures who find themselves in positions like Hans and Sophie Scholls.
They too have reasons that come from their pursuit of their own happinessto
get a degree, to find a spouse and a career, the kinds of thing that naturally matter to gifted young undergraduates. But once Hitler appears on the scene as their
countrys leader, they suddenly have some more reasonsreasons to protest and
subvertthat not only have nothing to do with their own happiness, but seem to
threaten every chance of happiness they have.

41

 Confronting reasons in this sense are everywhere in life, and they do not arise
only from moral emergencies like the Scholls, or like Singers drowning-toddler
case. Confronting reasons can come out of something bad, like a bereavement or
illness, or the outbreak of a war; they can equally come out of something good, like
falling in love, finding a long-lost brother, or unexpectedly inheriting a Hebridean
island. In the world we live in, the threats and the opportunities provided by the
disruptiveness of confronting reasons are a constant presence.8
Whatever our plan(s) of life, and whatever our ultimate aim(s), we are
alwaysboth for good and for illat the mercy of sheer contingency. The reasons
we find we have can always change; they can never be neatly or definitively coordinated around, or subordinated to, any single ultimate aim or plan of life. This is
not just a fact about what we do, it is also a fact about what we have reason to do;
and it is not merely accidental. The contingency of human life is, after all, one of
the deepest facts about it.
These thoughts about contingencytogether with related thoughts about
vulnerability and fallibilitymatter too in the assessment of (AE), Aristotles
eudaimonism. Eudaimonia, recall, is on Aristotles analysis an activity of the soul
according to complete virtue; or it is a particular realisation of our nature as
intelligent living beings, according to fulfilled excellence; or it is a life of being
good at the things that matter. (To retain at least something of the richness and
depth of NE 1s account of eudaimonia, I will not attempt to boil these three formulae down any further.) So when we slot this detail into the place where the word
eudaimonia sits in (AE), we get this thesis:
(AE) The only thing that people can rationally take as their ultimate aim is
an activity of the soul according to complete virtue; or it is a particular
realisation of our nature as intelligent living beings, according to fulfilled excellence; or it is a life of being good at the things that matter.

I have already remarked on the curious monomania involved in (ME)s presupposition that rationality necessarily has any one aim. (AE) shares this presupposition, so one tempting retort to (AE) is The only thing that people can rationally
take as their ultimate aim is ensuring that they have more than one ultimate aim.
Aristotle himself would perhaps take the point; he, after all, is often read as the
philosopher who struggles to choose between a practical and a theoretical ultimate
aim.
A further and I think deeper defect in (AE) is its emphasis on success. We
naturally want our account of the aim of human life to say that that aim is accessible to at least most and preferably all humans. Not unrelatedly, Aristotle says
at NE 1166a20 that a good that I can only achieve at the price of ceasing to be
myself is not a good for me. But there is a certain irony to this remark, given how
few humans could achieve Aristotles own ideal of eudaimonia without becoming
someone quite other than they actually are.
My point here is not, or not mainly, to do with the notorious fact of Aristotles
own long and egregious list of those excluded from eudaimonia by birthwomen,

42

barbarians, slaves, the working classes, hoi polloi in general (see e.g. NE 1099b3
6, 1177b4, Politics 1255a12, Rhetoric 1360b1424). We can if we like clean up
Aristotles ethics to get rid, or minimise the importance, of these exclusions, as
Aristotle himself attempts to when he says e.g. that excellence is open to everyone
who is not maimed and takes the trouble to pursue it (NE 1099b18). Even then,
we will still face the problem that I am thinking of. The problem, as I say, is not
Aristotles elitism; it is his focus on success.

The real-life condition of us human beings is that all of us are failures (athlioi) in some respect or other, and some of us are failures in every respect. So a
conception of eudaimonia that is going to make sense for us is going to have to be
a conception that starts, so to speak, from where we arewhich for most of us,
is (at least in some ways) in the condition of successs opposite, failure. It can still
be, ultimately, a conception of eudaimonia as success. But it will need to begin
with our failures, and work upwards from there: not towards success simpliciter,
but rather towards whatever level of success is still open to us, given our failures.
Otherwise, to have any use for Aristotles ideal of eudaimonia, I would have to
be or become the person, mythical or otherwise, who starts the game of life with
an unblemished scorecard, and keeps it that way. But then to most of us, whose
scorecards are far from unblemished, all that the ideal of eudaimonia can offer will
be a good that is inaccessible to us except on pain of becoming someone else. As
already pointed out, a good like that is no good for us.

We cannot accept any version of the ideal of eudaimonia-as-success that says
to us, in effect, If thats where you want to get to, you cant start from here. The
trouble with Aristotles version is that, at least sometimes, this is precisely what it
saysand not just to women, slaves, and barbarians, but to anyone who does not
get things right, right from the start:
It makes no small difference whether one has been habituated one way
or the other [sc. into good or bad emotional responses] from the very
beginning of childhood; rather it makes all the difference, indeed every
kind of difference there is. (NE 1103b23)
We need to be born (phynai) with (so to speak) an eye by which to
judge well and choose the true good. (NE 1114b9; my emphasis on
phynai)

Aristotles ideal of eudaimonia as success has little to say to failures except that
they shouldnt be. But that is not helpful advice, and it is likely to be something
that they already know. Any widely applicable ideal of eudaimonia has to have
something to say about how exactly (if at all) a failure is to get out of his condition
of failuresomething that addresses the particularities of his condition, and that
does not presuppose that the starting point for him is a track record of success, or
at least of no failures. But Aristotle not only has nothing to say about this question. In passages like the ones I have cited above, he also actually repudiates the
question.

43

 My objection here is structurally parallel to what Bernard Williams neatly

calls the moral weightlifting objection to one familiar modern way of formulating an Aristotelian ethical theory:
[According to many current versions of Aristotelian normative ethics,
e.g. McDowells,] what A has reason to do in certain circumstances is
what the phronimos would have reason to do in those circumstances.
But, in considering what he has reason to do, one thing that A should
take into account, if he is grown up and has some sense, are the ways
in which he relevantly fails to be a phronimos. Aristotles phronimos
(to stay with that model) was, for instance, supposed to display temperance, a moderate equilibrium of the passions which did not require
even the emergency semi-virtue of self-control [egkrateia]. But, if I
know that I fall short of temperance and am unreliable with respect
even to some kinds of self-control, I shall have good reason not to do
some things that a temperate person could properly and safely do. The
homiletic tradition, not only within Christianity, is full of sensible
warnings against moral weightlifting. (Williams 1995, 190)

As we might put it: Aristotelian virtue-ethical theories tend to give the wrong
advice when addressed to anyone who does not already approximate the characteristics of Aristotles man of virtue; but addressed to anyone who does, they just
seem pointless. Likewise, an ideal of success that has nothing to say to those who
at least start in the midst of failures, has nothing to say to most of us. For that is,
as a matter of fact, where most of us are; and those of us who are not there, do not
need it.

There may be ways of blunting this perhaps suspiciously sharp dilemma. But
even if there are, something like this objection would still be a serious problem for
Aristotles ethical ideal of eudaimonia as success even if that ideal faced no other
objectionsas we have already seen it does.

VI. Unhappiness and Happiness: How to

Get from One to the Other
The basic form of the moral weightlifting objection is that what it is right or good
for a virtuous person to do may not connect very much at all with what is right
or good if you are not very virtuous.9 The analogue of this point for eudaimoniaas-success is that the ways of pursuing (continued) eudaimonia that make sense
for an already successful person may be quite different from the ways of pursuing eudaimonia-as-success that make sense for someone who starts from a background of failure.
An ethical ideal of happiness too can face a weightlifting objection. An
account of happiness that is designed for those for whom happiness is easy, that
takes no account of the fact that for most of us some of the time, and some of us
all of the time, our natural condition is not happiness but unhappinesssuch an

44

account is objectionable in just the way in which Aristotelian accounts of virtue

and eudaimonia all too often are.

Spelling out exactly what is objectionable about it brings us back to my citation, in section 5, of Aristotles remark that if the price of some kind of good is
that we cannot have it without ceasing to be ourselves, then the price is, inevitably,
too high. The trouble with eudaimonia-as-success, for someone whose (current)
condition is failure, is that it is not and cannot be his success. There might be a
path that leads him out of his failure into success of a kind, but that is not the
path that Aristotles discussion of his ideal is talking about. Similarly, the kind of
virtue that is worth achieving for me has to be my virtue, not the virtue of some
ideal-postulate imaginary person called the phronimos: it has to be the virtue that
can emerge in my life, from whatever background of moral inadequacy, or outright vice, may happen to be true of me. And so with happiness. If I startas so
many people in fact dofrom a condition of unhappiness, then happiness for me
is going to have to be a kind of happiness that makes sense of my past unhappiness. Not every kind of happiness can do that. But those that cant do it are not
kinds of happiness that I can have without ceasing to be me. And as before, this
price is inevitably too high to be worth my paying to obtain those kinds of happiness, even if the complete and perfect happiness of the ideal phronimos is among
them.

The thesis is that happiness, to be worth wanting for an unhappy person, must
be something that not only replaces, but also makes sense of, her unhappiness. We
can give this thesis more concreteness by seeing how it applies to the seven characters from section 1. Consider again the varieties of unhappiness exemplified by
Aaron, Clare, Donald, Frances, George, Helen, and Iona. How are they to get from
those kinds of unhappiness to happiness?

To repeat, the question that interests me here is not merely what changes in
the natures of these seven unhappy people might make them into happy people.
If that was all we needed, then at least in imagination, we could get there just
by erasing their current natures and personalities, and replacing all that unhappy
mess with something more obviously amenable to happiness. But what we need to
know is not how these seven troubled people might have happiness thrust upon
them; it is how they might achieve happiness, by their own agency and choice, and
without losing touch with the persons they have been up till now.

Having said that, I admit at once that we are closer to erasure and replacement
in some of these cases than we are in others. Most obviously so with Frances. If and
when her parents realise how badly shes being bullied, they should at once move
her to another school; if Frances protests at the move, they should ignore her protests. (Plenty of children have refused an obvious solution to utterly dire problems
because they dont want to make a fuss; come to that, its not just children who
do this.) At this particular point in her life, and relative to this particular kind of
unhappiness that she is suffering, the kind of happiness that Frances needs instead
is (on the face of it) not an achievement of hers, but something that she just gets

45

by (literal) replacement. Rather similarly, perhaps, with George. Assuming his

depression is purely chemicala safe assumption: I stipulated itthe right thing
to do for George, if we can, is simply give him chemicals to counteract his depression. This too (on the face of it) is not a happiness that comes about by Georges
achievement, but by another literal replacement: of one lot of chemicals with
another.
My starting point in this essay was that happiness (and unhappiness) are
names for all sorts of different things; so I would be unperturbed if examples like
Frances and George showed that sometimes the happiness that an unhappy person needs is simply to be got by replacement, not by achievement. But in fact not
even these examples show that; hence my qualification on the face of it. Francess
young age, and consequent lack of autonomy, is a large part of the explanation
why her parents are quite justified in removing her from the school that is making
her life hell, even if Frances herself resists this change. What it means for Frances
to lack autonomy is, as we might put it, that she is not yet the main person who
is telling the story of her own life. Because she is only nine, her parents are telling it
too; in many respects, such as this one, they are still more the tellers of it than she is
herself. But if they are good parents, they will want to talk a lot with Frances after
the event about her time at the bad school, and about their decision to remove her
from it, even if they did not let her protests change their decision at the time. They
will want to talk it through with Frances, because they will want to be sure that she
is able to make sense of it all. For Frances to get over the trauma of being bullied,
she needs to come to understand it in a way that makes it a part of her own past
that she can, at least, live with and accept. This understanding is an achievement.
Of course her parents can and will help her to get to it; at least, they will if they are
any use as parents. Nonetheless this understanding of her own past unhappiness is
an achievement that Frances, in the long term, is going to have to make her own.

Similarly, unless Georges sanity is in question, he will normally need to consent before he is treated for depression. And after the event, he will need to find a
way of making sense of his experience of depression; even if the sense he makes
of it is just that it was an episode in his life that, like quite a lot of experiences of
being a medical patient, didnt make that much sense. These too, in their modest
way, are appropriations by George of the form of unhappiness that has afflicted
him. Part of what would be wrong about treating (a sane) George for depression
without giving him the chance to assent would be precisely that it denies him the
chance to make his predicament his own and deal with it as his own.

So not even the stories of Frances and George really support the idea that any
kind of happiness can be just transplanted into a sane and autonomous human
person; that happiness can be got out of unhappiness by replacement, not by
achievement. But those are the two of my seven mini-stories that come closest to
supporting that idea. For at least it is true, in these two stories, that some kind of
forceful outside intervention seems called for. Not even that much is true in the
other five.

46


What we should certainly do for all five of Aaron, Clare, Donald, Helen, and
Iona is, as people say, be there for them: support them, listen to them, offer
them tea and sympathy. And with Helen in particular, there also seems to be a
strong case for suasive reasoning with her (if we can get her to listen). Arguably
Helen needs to be told that there is something decidedly dysfunctional about her
whole way of life: that she makes herself unnecessarily unhappy, that her absorption in her mathematical puzzles makes her rude, abrupt, inattentive, sloppy, and
thoughtless in her dealings with other people, that her fanaticism about maths and
her obliviousness to almost everything else may even suggest that there is something big, deep, and dark in her subconscious that she is trying to avoid thinking
about, and the rest of it. For sure, she needs to be told all this in the nicest possible
way, by someone who has the right to say it to her, and is trying to help her to
become a happier person (such as a friend, if she has any friends). And ideally,
telling her will not psychologically damage her, or impair her fantastic mathematical ability and drive. (Her employers might be particularly concerned on this
last score.) But it is not just that Helen needs to be told all this; it is also that she
needs to hear it, if it is to do any good. That is, she needs to accept and appropriate
the fact that her way of living is, by a long way, not as happy as it might be, and
do something about it for herself. In short, her way out of her unhappiness, and
towards her own kind of happiness, needs to be her own achievement; it cant just
be something that someone else imposes on her.
Perhaps there is something that suasive reasoning can do for Iona too
though here it depends very much how we further fill out her story. People who
suffer from Ionas kind of accidie are often rather psychologically opaque. Often
their surface aimlessness hides some deeper problem, some deeper and actually quite different form of unhappinessfor instance, chemical depression like
Georgeswhich is not to be got at by merely telling Iona some home truths about
herself and hoping she appropriates them.

The striking thing about the three remaining cases of unhappinessAaron,
Clare, Donaldis that with these, it does not even seem right to engage in such
mild forms of intervention as suasive reasoning. In these cases it is not obvious
that we observers of their unhappiness (their friends, relations, counsellors, or
whoever) ought to try to do anything at all, directly, to remove it.
This is most obvious of all with bereaved Donald. When he has just lost
his wife after 49 years of happy marriage, to try and reason Donald out of his
unhappiness would be mind-bogglingly stupid and impertinent. Not that that has
stopped philosophers:
No evil can come to a good man, whether he lives or dies. (Socrates in
Plato, Apology 41d1)
So and sos son is dead. What do you think of that? It lies outside
the sphere of choice; it is not an evil. So-and-so has been disinherited
by his father. What do you think of that? It lies outside the sphere of
choice; it is not an evil. Caesar has condemned him. This lies outside

47

the sphere of choice; it is not an evil. He has been distressed by all this.
This is within the sphere of choice; it is an evil [i.e.: he was wrong to be
distressed]. He has borne it nobly. This is within the sphere of choice;
it is a good [i.e.: he did well not to be distressed]. (Epictetus, Discourses
III.8.23, tr. Daniel Russell at Russell 2012, 150; my glosses)

Pace too many philosophers, Donald is entitled to his unhappiness. He has good
reason to be unhappy, and he does not do wrong in being unhappy. (Given his
bereavement, he would do wrong in not being unhappy.) Likewise, mutatis
mutandis, with Aaron and Clare. Given what they have just been through, they too
are entitled to be unhappy , and no well-meaning friend, relation, or counsellor
can possibly be on the right track if s/he denies this (as we saw both Aarons and
Clares friends doing in section 1).
Their friends should not be trying to reason Aaron or Clare or Donald out
of their unhappiness, or to otherwise intervene to change the situation. But not
intervening is different from not hoping that the situation will change. Of course
their friends should be hoping that. And in two of the cases, Aarons and Clares, it
is easy to see what they might be hoping for.
Aarons and Clares situations are, respectively, jiltedness and academic unemployment. Even under the bleakest outlook, these are both situations that can easily change very quickly. It is not the part of a friend to engineer the solutions to
Aarons and Clares woes that get them what they want. A job given to Clare that
she knows she got because of someone elses pity for her, or a girlfriend for Aaron
who like a character in The Truman Show is just acting her love for him, is no real
solution at all. (Though no doubt, if Aaron and Clare were desperate enough, they
might well settle for these fixes rather than nothing.) What a friend will do for
Aaron or Clare is stand by them, and hope they get want they want, for the reasons
that they want to get itbecause of her own philosophical talent in Clares case,
and because of the shape of his own character in Aarons. These are the obvious
ways for Aaron and Clare to move from the unhappiness where they presently find
themselves, towards a happiness that they achieve for themselves, and that makes
sense to them; a friend will support them in trying to make that move.
If they succeed, then their present unhappiness will come to be an intrinsic
part of a larger-scale and longer-term happiness. The way they tell their stories, if
they tell them fully and truthfully, will include that unhappiness. But their stories
will be happy stories, not unhappy ones, and with any luck Aaron and Clare will
themselves be happy.

What about Donald? As I told his story, Donalds unhappiness is an unhappiness of old age; I said hed been married for 49 years, and in Britain that means hes
at least 65, more likely a decade or so older. Whereas, as I told their stories, Aarons
and Clares are young peoples unhappinesses. I never mentioned their ages, and
indeed there are very different (and probably worse) kinds of unhappiness that
arise from being jilted, or losing a prized but low-status job, in your seventies. But
the natural way of hearing Aarons and Clares stories takes both of them to be at

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the beginning of their adult lives. This makes theirs less unhappy stories; perhaps
simply because it means there is more time ahead for them to get the partner, and
the academic career, that they respectively want.
Whereas Donald, in losing his wife of nearly half a century, is losing something that in the nature of things he cannot have again and cannot get back. Does
that mean that Donalds cannot be, overall, a happy story? I do not want to be
caught in crass sweeping pronouncements about a kind of loss that I havent experienced; but I will risk saying that my own acquaintance with those who have been
bereaved in ways like Donalds tends to suggest not. Some widowers remarry. Even
for those who dont it is possible, in time, for them to come to a place where they
suffer less acutely from their loss than does Donald as I described him, and to a
state of mind where what they feel about the partner they lost is, mainly, just a
kind of cosmic gratitude at all the good things that they had together for so long.
And then for him too, perhaps, the unhappiness that he feels at his bereavement
will become a part of wider and deeper emotion which is reasonably describable
not as unhappiness, but as happiness. (As Daniel Russell has recently reminded us,
there is much to be learned about bereavement from C. S. Lewiss classic memoir
A Grief Observed.)

This kind of possibility I would like to call the redemption of unhappiness;
a possibility that, I think, any serious account of happiness has to give a key place
to. My remarks about the redemption of unhappiness are, no doubt, schematic
and superficial enough. But I hope I have at least given enough detail to bring
imaginatively alive, for the reader, the possibility that happiness might not merely
cancel out unhappiness, but actually incorporate it: that an unhappiness might
not merely be erased and replaced by a superseding happiness, but might survive
to become an element within a larger narrative whole of happiness.
It is because Aarons and Clares friends have to leave space for this possibility
that they are so clearly mandated to listen to and support Aaron and Clare in their
crises, but not to intervene more directly or forcibly than that. Something like
the same must be true, I think, in Donalds much sadder case. The notion of the
redemption of unhappiness has explanatory value here. And this is not the only
thing that the redemption of unhappiness may explain. I cannot enlarge on these
prospects here. But let me just mention, in closing, five further things that can,
perhaps, be explained this way.

VII. Some Implications of the Argument

First, I suggest it helps explain an inclination that many of us may feelI certainly
feel itto argue against eudaimonism by simply denying that unhappiness is necessarily a bad thing at all (or indeed that happiness is necessarily a good thing).
There are a number of ways of arguing for this denial; it is obviously possible, for

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instance, to suggest, as Socrates does, that if someone is a Calliclean tyrant, then

the unhappier he is, the better. In the present context two other ways of arguing
it are relevant. One is that unhappy experiences can be an essential part both of
larger patterns of happiness; the other is that at least some unhappy experiences
can be part of our moral and sentimental education, part of what it takes to make
us practically wise. We might make points like these to someone in, for instance,
Aarons position. We might tell him that one day he will look back on being jilted
by Belinda as just a step on the road that led him to marrying Zoe. And we might
say that, yes, being jilted is hard, but its alsoto be bluntpart of growing up. No
doubt it is easy to be patronising and platitudinous when making such remarks.
That doesnt mean they arent true. If Aaron is a sensible person, he probably
knows for himself that theyre true.
Secondly, I think the idea of the redemption of unhappiness can help us
to understand part of the reasons why hope is a virtue. In the predicaments I
have described, Aarons, Clares, and Donalds friends cant intervene or interfere
too heavily; they can only stand back and let some difficult emotional processes
unfold, trusting that its not impossible that good things of some interesting and
important sorts might emerge out of those processes, and trying to help Aaron,
Clare, and Donald to begin to feel their way towards those emergent goods. For
their friends to do this is, I suggest, for them to put themselves in the posture of
hope.

Thirdly, and with obvious connections, the idea of the redemption of unhappiness explains a possibility for theodicy. (It is no accident that, in its origins,
the idea of redeeming unhappiness is predominantly, though not exclusively, a
Christian idea.) The idea gives us a possible way of explaining how, despite all
evil and all suffering, there might still be a good divine purpose in what happens. If unhappiness can be redeemedand if other kinds of negative value can
be redeemed in analogous waysthen perhaps in the end it can make sense to say,
with the mediaeval carol-writer, felix peccatum Adae.
Fourthly, and also connectedly, I suggest, it explains why risky living is justified more often than it has seemed to Stoics, to Socratics, to many Buddhists,
and to too many Christians. (Too many Christians, becauseone might have
thoughtthe whole idea of Christianity is that God takes risks.10) These thinkers
are right that, in a world as full as ours is of contingency and vulnerability, commitments to others typically bring with them the ineliminable risk of real and
damaging loss. But that is no decisive reason to avoid commitment; for very often,
losses can be redeemed. (Not that it would be a very good reason to avoid commitment even if losses could not be redeemed.)

Fifthly, I think the possibility of the redemption of unhappiness explains why
so many philosophical accounts of happiness strike us as superficial and hollow,
in the way that Nietzsche, in my second epigraph, is attacking superficiality and
hollowness in the eudaimonism of the Anglophone utilitarians. A good philosophical account of happiness will be able to give at least some explanation of

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how someone who starts in a condition of unhappiness can move from that to a
condition of happiness whichwhile it may not be in any sense an ideal happinessis both genuinely his achievement, and also, as his achievement, redeems
the unhappiness by taking it up into his happiness.
The Greek tragedians before Aristotle, and the Christian theologians after
him, in their different ways had an understanding of how this might be done that
was often profound, and at times even clear. Perhaps every ordinary thoughtful
person has always had at least some inkling of how it might be done. In fact, one of
the great recurring commonplaces of human history is that we can learn wisdom
from both happiness and unhappinessbut especially from unhappiness. Pathei
mathos, we learn by suffering, was already a proverb when Aeschylus wove it into
the first Chorus of the Agamemnon. When John Milton paired his youthful works
LAllegro and Il Penseroso, by doing so he pointed to a conception that was already
completely familiarthe conception of happiness and unhappiness as themselves
being paired, each of them neither particularly a good thing nor a bad thing in
itself, any more than darkness or light is; and everything depending on what use is
made of them.

The striking thing about philosophy in both the ancient world and the modern is how little sense it has made of any such conception. There is no reason at
all why such possibilities should not be taken seriously in philosophy; yet how
quick philosophers have nearly always been to erect notions of happiness as a
simple, shadowless, un-nuanced quantum, of its nature entirely uninvolved with
unhappiness.
If my argument here is correct, then any such notion of happiness, however
valuable it may be in its own right, cannot be one of much interest to beings like
us. For the truth about human beings, as I said before, is that all of us are unhappy
in some respect, and many of us are unhappy in pretty well every respect. Thats
where we start. If we, starting from there, are to get to achieve, for ourselves, anything worth calling happiness at all, then it will have to be a happiness that is
capable not just of replacing our unhappiness, but of redeeming it.

Notes
1. Certainly there are individual stories of all these seven kinds that are familiar to me, either
autobiographically, or from the experience of friends. I am aware that this does not give me an
unabridged right to pontificate about any and every such story. Presumptuous overgeneralisation
is a standard failing among philosophers. If anything I say in this essay seems to exemplify that
failing, I apologise in advance.
2. For more about the use of examples in philosophy, see Chappell 2014, ch. 2.
3. On this negative point at least, I evidently agree with Haybron 2005, 289. However, Haybrons
positive views and mine are miles apart.
4. My thanks to Sarah Broadie and Nicholas Denyer for help with my lexicographical searches.
5.
Eudaimons occurs at least once in the Politics, at 1281a2, this occurrence is cited in LSJ, but not
in Bonitz. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae lists seven occurrences elsewhere in Aristotle.

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 6. All translations are my own, by the way.

7. My thanks to Nicholas Denyer for prompting me to say more about this objection.
8. More about confronting reasons and the contingency of our pursuit(s) of the good(s) in
Chappell (forthcoming).
9. Maybe the first hint of something like the weightlifting objection in the canon is in Republic Book
1 (and is indeed about something like weightlifting): at 338c Socrates instances Polydamas the
all-in wrestler as someone for whom a different diet is advisable from the rest of us, because he is
stronger than the rest of us. Cp. Milo the wrestler at NE 1106b3.
10. On the theme of risk in Christian theology, see e.g. Rahner 1975.

References
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Chappell, T. forthcoming. Encounters with Values. In The Limits of Obligation, ed. Marcel van
Ackeren and Michael Kuehler. London: Routledge.
Haybron, D. 2005. On Being Happy or Unhappy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71:
287317.
Hursthouse, R. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, C. S. 1961. A Grief Observed. London: Faber.
Rahner, K. 1975. On the Theology of Hope. In A Rahner Reader, ed. G. McCool. London: Darton,
Longman and Todd.
Russell, D. C. 2012. Happiness for Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ryle, G. 1954. Pleasure. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 28: 13954.
Singer, P. 1972. Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1: 22943.
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