The following is an essay that I wrote for my 4000 level Topics in Philosophy class: "Happiness and Suffering." I have split it up into several pieces and will be publishing it here on Cranial Collision over the next week or two.

The Pursuit of Imperfect Happiness

Throughout the course of his book titled The Pursuit of Unhappiness, Daniel M. Haybron makes numerous distinctions and delineations between different aspects of happiness, and he attempts to define the relationships between these aspects in clear, distinct ways. On the whole, Haybron does an excellent job of explaining and supporting the arguments in his book, especially in relation to his emotional state theory of happiness and psychic affirmation.


However, I think that Haybron runs into trouble in regards to self-fulfillment as his primary means of happiness in relation to well-being. Specifically, Haybron's self-fulfillment concept is incomplete because it addresses only incomplete happiness--temporary happiness.

I will draw on Thomas Aquinas to make a case for the importance of lasting happiness, also referred to as perfect happiness, complete happiness, and long-term happiness. I will accept most of Haybron's changes from Aristotle's eudaemonism, but will color those changes in light of a more permanent happiness. While giving weight to Aquinas's distinction between short-term and long-term happiness and Haybron's self-fulfillment, the best solution seems to be self-fulfillment on an individual internalist level, yet in relation to an infinite God. I will conclude that lasting well-being can be best understood as discovering one's spiritual gifts and using them to serve an infinite God.

The most important distinction between Aquinas and Haybron, and Haybron’s main downfall, is that Haybron is preoccupied with a type of happiness that is truly impermanent. As Aquinas points out, “to have all one’s desires perfectly satisfied” would be a good definition for happiness if indeed happiness “would satisfy desires completely” (McGill 76). Aquinas argues that happiness cannot satisfy desires completely, that only knowledge of an infinite God can do that (82). In arguing this, he says that, “the thing which is desired as an end is that which constitutes happiness, and makes man happy; but the attainment of this thing is called happiness” (qtd. in McGill 80). It is also important to Aquinas’s cause to verify that there is just one last end, namely God. He utilizes a three-step argument to make his point:

"First, 'it is necessary for the last end so to fill man’s appetite that nothing is left beside it for men to desire.” Second, the last end can only be one since it is naturally desired, and “nature tends to one thing only.” Finally, since “all that can be desired by the will, belong, as such, to one genus, the last end must be one. And all the more because in every genus there is one first principle.'" (Mcgill 78)

McGill goes on to add that while this is the way that Aquinas chose to make his point, that there are many other ways he could have chosen to do it (78). In support of Aquinas’s argument, I would add that most human desires are nigh unquenchable. We as humans have an immense penchant for desiring more and better of whatever it may be. We desire to have more money, more fame, more sex, more food, more fun, more knowledge, more understanding, more humility, more simplicity, and the list goes on. We can never simply be satisfied and remain happy. At some point comes the desire, the thirst, for more, and the unhappiness, the dissatisfaction, ensues. It seems logical that the only thing that would truly satisfy is something of infinite worth and infinite goodness, namely God himself. 


Click here to read Part 2.

Works Cited
Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994. Print.
Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Holy Bible: New Living Translation. 2nd ed. Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2009. Print.
McGill, V.J. The Idea of Happiness. Ed. Mortimer J. Adler. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1967. Print.
Reginster, Bernard. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Print.