Life, Liberty and the Pursuit…

The second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence begins: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Though this 18th-century English appears straightforward, the words are at least somewhat ambiguous – especially the last word, Happiness.  If I were to ask you to complete the sentence, “Happiness is…,” there would likely be almost as many different responses as there are readers of this column.

However, given the revolutionary context of our Declaration of Independence, many historians would argue that our founding fathers understood “happiness” to mean economic freedom from the oppressive laws of Great Britain’s King George III.  Indeed, the majority of the Declaration signed on July 4, 1776, is a bill of particulars against the tyrannical actions of the British Monarch’s “Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations” designed to force the American colonists to endure a state of “absolute Despotism.”  To put it succinctly, the Pursuit of Happiness could be rephrased as “the pursuit of property” – the pursuit of private property unencumbered by the restrictive laws and regulations of the British government located thousands of miles away across the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Going back about 2,400 years, the renowned Greek thinker Aristotle (384-322 BCE), a founding father of Western philosophy, defined happiness as “an activity of the soul in conformity with virtue.”  It is admittedly a challenge to translate ancient Greek into contemporary English; nevertheless, one can see that Aristotle’s understanding of happiness is far broader than that of the author(s) of our Declaration of Independence.  Aristotle seeks to grasp what happiness means to all people, in all places, in all historical situations.

Aristotle is offering us a perspective on happiness that is both a mile wide and a mile deep.  Perhaps, most importantly, Aristotle makes it clear that happiness is not pleasure.  Pleasure is fleeting, while happiness is gradually achieved during the journey of a lifetime. Pleasure is often morally neutral; we enjoy the fleeting pleasure of a well-prepared meal or a dip into the summer surf or the sound of a Beethoven symphony or the fond embrace of an old friend; but our enjoyment is not of moral consequence, neither good nor bad.   By way of contrast, Aristotle views happiness as the lifelong project of pursing virtue, of acting for the benefit of others in every season of our lives.

Indeed, I believe that I am not too far off the mark if I state that Aristotle’s view of happiness is to live the life of what we Jews call a “Mensch” – or, to coin a term that pays tribute to both genders, a “Wo-mensch.”  That is to say, what brings us lasting happiness is a life spent in service to others as well as to ourselves. To act like a Mensch is to bring comfort to others without neglecting the obligation, the need to take care of oneself.  Though Aristotle never heard the Yiddish word “Mensch” spoken, I believe the ancient Greek would agree that the actions of a Mensch are the actions of a happy person.

This past Aug. 11, Jessica Grose devoted several columns in the Sunday Opinion section of “The New York Times” to her piece paradoxically called “The Joyless Quest For Peak Happiness.”  What are the words “joyless” and “happiness” doing in the same title?  Indeed, her article reads like a script from the theater of the absurd.

The author informs us that she had committed herself to taking a hundred brief surveys: three times a day for about a month.  As she notes, “The survey, from TrackYourHappiness.com., asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how focused I was on my task, how productive I was being and how happy I felt about it all.  I measure my emotional levels with a little toggle that slides from ‘bad’ to ‘good.’ ”

That is to say, TrackYour Happiness.com is trying to measure its survey-takers’ feelings of happiness or, I suppose, their feelings of unhappiness. The irony of trying to measure happiness on a quantitative scale is that it can, in some cases, lead to unhappiness, even depression. As Prof. Martin Seligman, a pioneer in the academic study of happiness, puts it, “I think it’s a pretty serious mistake to think that what life is about is your moment-to-moment mood…I think that’s a recipe for depression and anxiety.”

Happiness, then, is not ultimately about what you feel but about what you do, not about your emotions but about your actions.  At this time of grave political and social upheaval here in America, we citizens must learn to view our individual pursuit of happiness as part of our collective pursuit.  We need to deepen our understanding of happiness as that which bring joy to us all – a pursuit which once again binds us together as a truly United States of America

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in  Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org