Exploring happiness, the threshold of human greatness

By Michael Timm

There's something about ascending particular stairwells that lingers vividly in my memory.

The stairs I climbed the very first time in Puno, Peru, heart racing from the altitude. Never before had I been winded simply walking up the stairs—but life at 3,000 meters will do that to someone whose lungs have developed along the shores of Lake Michigan. Those stairs were nothing special, simply poured concrete with one landing, but they occupy a unique place in the architecture of my memory.

I remember too the crooked stairs I climbed the first time in Oxford, England, sweating, lugging my luggage up the steep and narrow wooden switchbacks to my dorm, exhausted after spanning the Atlantic, but with much more oxygen than Peru. With each step, I was primed with the expectation of newness, prepared for a greatness not entirely my own, borrowed from those who had gone before me in this same space and shared with those I would soon meet from many other places.

My mind also still reserves space for those spiral stairs with the wrought-iron railing in Ripon, Wis. I don't remember the very first ascent, but indelible is the imprint of the many times going up and around that curve in the Harwood Memorial Union to the College Days newspaper office—assuming command, taking care of business, bearing the editorial board pizza or a bundle of papers warm from the press.

These stairwells remind me of the happiness of accomplishment. They mark out phase transitions in my life. Other stairwells have left important impressions as well, and I think it's partly because stairwells are not designed to be spaces where we stop and reflect or where we do deeply purposeful action. They are conduits between here and there, spaces we move through necessarily but without conscious appreciation, without the demands of an office or the comforts of home. We are becoming in stairwells, existing in states of transition. We are open.

I offer you, reader, four new stairwells to climb. Whether they lead to happiness, or turn you upside down as in an M.C. Escher print, is in large part up to you. But it's my hope that the ideas, connections, and experiences shared here will linger in those silent, pregnant spaces of your mind like a refreshing memory linked to your own process of becoming—whatever it is you choose to become.

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What is happiness and how do we get it?

Bishop Richard Sklba discusses the topic of happiness by referencing the work of Thomas Aquinas, for whom happiness was central to organizing his philosophy, and then by unpacking three Semitic terms that eventually have been translated to English as blessed, peace, and justice. The roots of these terms transcend the individual, Sklba writes, emphasizing the need for the establishment of a proper, balanced relationship between individuals and the social whole where individuals work for the common good. Sklba argues these three elements are central to a Christian understanding of happiness, which is a thing that must be practiced to be real.

When a drunk driver crashed into Jason Haas, the impact sent shattered glass into his eye, his brain into shock, and his life into pieces. Almost a decade later, he's picked up those pieces and considers himself lucky to be alive—but he reminds us of the ancient wisdom of the Greek Solon that perhaps one's happiness should not be measured at all, if at all, until after one is dead and one's legacy clear. When Haas woke up from a coma after six weeks lying in a hospital bed, he believed part of him had died. But the part that elected to seize life again has since earned a degree, participated in his community, and started a new home. Is he a happy man?

Kevin Woodcock wrangles with the question of happiness by considering some of the greatest thinkers who have produced literature and philosophy. While respecting their intellectual rigor, Woodcock rejects those whose grand themes terminate in an abyss of meaninglessness. Instead, he considers the varied interests of German Renaissance man Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In Goethe's botanical writing, and infused into his fiction, Woodcock finds an appreciation for organicism—a way of looking at living entities not as closed things but as open processes where a plant, or a character, evolves according to its own innate pattern but is necessarily shaped by and made up of all the elements in its environment. The lesson Woodcock derives is that ultimately we're still in the driver's seat when it comes to finding or making happiness. He perceives a precious inner state of consciousness—an inner Buddha—that, if nurtured and respected, will grow in the world and not be stamped out by it.

Finally, Charles Oberweiser considers the pragmatism of happiness. As a volunteer coordinator, his job is to encourage and measure happiness among volunteer workers because happiness is a valuable recruitment and retention tool (his premise: unhappy volunteers won't return to do more work). Oberweiser has observed, however, that the process of volunteering often makes volunteers happy. At the same time, he suggests that we may fool ourselves into remembering we were happy during times when we wouldn't have reported that we were happy—suggesting that happiness, if it can be measured at all, demonstrates a fair amount of plasticity.

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In the year of my birth, 1982, Arthur C. Clarke published 2010: Odyssey Two, including the somewhat prophetic, somewhat ironic, statement, "A fin-de-siècle philosopher had once remarked—and been roundly denounced for his pains—that Walter Elias Disney had contributed more to genuine human happiness than all the religious teachers in history."

Just prior to the actual year 2010, I traveled with my family to Walt Disney World. Many of the throngs of people I observed there were frustrated, angry, tense, on edge—sometimes even manic. They had to get to the next attraction. They had to wait in line. They had to walk around in the rain in absurd plastic garbage bags. It wasn't how I would describe the happiest place on Earth.

At the same time, I observed the earnest desire of parents to provide happiness for their young children, and share in that happiness—or perhaps it was a desire to attain some happiness themselves, reliving some happiness remembered from their childhood. Nowhere was this as clear to me, nor the desire for happiness apparently as easily satisfied, as at Dumbo: the ride. I watched the Dumbo exit line for multiple cycles. Adults coming off tended to relax, their faces softened, their eyes brightened, holding the hands of mostly exuberant children—even the older kids demonstrated a positive emotional response. I think some of the adults were happy because they felt they'd succeeded—junior enjoyed the ride! This was a stairwell they could easily climb.

It's worth noting that all they did was go up in a fake baby elephant and spin around. Objectively, not much changed. You could have a comparable physical experience without too much trouble. But because they shared an expectation and an experience—they wanted to be happy and the details of the ride were simple enough so as not to interfere with the accomplishment of that dream—they created for themselves a kind of magic bubble. Their special status was reinforced by all those people on the ground waving up at them as they circled, the very center of attention but without either power or control.

In its simplicity and effectiveness, the circle of Dumbo reminds me of another circle—a delicate interweaving design tattooed on the inside of a waitress's forearm. I asked her what the tattoo signified. She said it was the beginning of a Buddhist prayer—the idea was that just by people looking at it, they could start to become better people.

What is happiness? How do we get it? Find a stairwell and climb it.

Michael Timm

23 January 2010

Milwaukee, Wis.

Milwaukee Anthropologist will next turn to the topic of democracy in the spring 2010 issue. If you have ideas on the nature of democracy—what it is, what it isn't, where's it's been, where it's going, if it's really a good idea, and if not what might replace or succeed it—query me by March 20 at platypus [dot] found [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Happiness: Ancient wisdom and modern hope

By Richard J. Sklba

As long as the human heart has experienced a glimmer of desire for something more than whatever might be at hand in the present reality, we have known the hope for happiness.

Happiness suggests something deeply desired and already possessed, at least to the degree that it can satisfy our basic needs and hopes. For some people that sum total is minimal and modest, but for others it may be vast and enormously extended. Some individuals are content with little material comfort or possessions, while the desire, or even greed, of others seems limitless! Western Amero-Europeans are often amazed at the happiness of people in Africa or South America who have so little by way of material possessions, yet live in such deep contentment and peace.

There is, therefore and inevitably, a deeply subjective dimension to such “happiness” and for that reason the state one calls “happy” is relative. This entails a cautionary warning, namely that happiness could even become pathological if the hunger is insatiable and unethically disrespectful of others.

Aquinas’ Investigation of Happiness

When renowned medieval scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1224-74) was organizing his take on the great questions of human thought and existence, he chose “Happiness / Beatitudo” as one of his organizing principles.[1] He took all the religious thinking from the first millennium of Christian writers, namely the biblical perspectives which had quickly become deeply permeated with Platonism—since after all, philosophy was invariably viewed by the ancient world as a way of life that included moral values—and mixed into the stew a healthy dose of Aristotelian philosophy. The result was a new philosophical realism within the big picture of human existence.

After exploring final human destiny (quaestio 1) in the dialectic method of a scholastic disputation, Aquinas moved to a consideration of the various things in which human happiness might consist (quaestio 2), the nature of such human happiness (quaestio 3), the things required for human happiness (quaestio 4), and finally the method of attaining happiness (quaestio 5). In his vast vision, Aquinas acknowledged a type of immediate personal happiness that could be found in a variety of created realities, such as the satisfaction of senses or the possession of material objects which provide comfort, security, and enjoyment. He insisted, however, that full and final human happiness can only be found in the possession of the knowledge of an ultimate being who is all good, and in total friendship with such a God. As a result, every portion of the cosmos was somehow subsumed into his understanding of fundamental happiness, which he viewed as somehow related to God. Such happiness is a gift freely given by God, he wrote, and beyond any human ability to achieve on one’s own.

Obviously, this Thomistic consideration is intimately related to religious faith and cannot be understood or achieved without that context. Not everyone possesses that viewpoint, however, and yet we see that people can be relatively happy if they possess what they need and want, whatever that may be.

Antidote to Rampant Individualism

More ancient than the philosophical synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, one might explore the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures to see if they can illumine a consideration of happiness. It was those same writings that formed the background for Aquinas’ reflections. These Scriptures bear ancient witness to the values of a Semitic culture, which was concrete rather than abstract. These Semitic and biblical values were brought into close connection with the happiness described by Aquinas. He presumed them and brought his philosophical categories to that task of logically organizing the ideas.

The writings we label “the Bible” are in fact an entire library of different writings: poems and songs, tales and parables, ancient myths and family legends together with literature of every sort. Woven throughout the entire body of the biblical writings, partially because of their Semitic origins, are some concepts and viewpoints very different from our own. Those of us who inhabit the “Western world” live within a culture of radical individualism. The French writer who visited the nascent United States of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, warned of this trait which he saw among the early pioneers and entrepreneurs. He foresaw that it could become a lethal disease if not watched carefully. This quality, though needed for creativity and progress, can also become the source of much unhappiness and social harm if unchecked or unlimited. Any happiness which this American civil virtue might provide could become (and at times has been) severely harmful to the social fabric.

There are antidotes to such rampant individualism, and some of them are in fact found in the biblical writings. They surface because the ancient world was primarily social in its thinking. Persons were first and foremost identified by their respective family or tribal character, and only secondarily viewed as individuals.

As I think about it, there are three concepts from the vast witness of the Judeao-Christian Scriptures that can provide an antidote to the excessive individuality of our culture. These three concepts are ways of describing the common good, and might offer some insight into the question of genuine human happiness.

Translating the Roots of Happiness

The first concept a Christian student of the Scriptures might bring forward as a contribution to the study of human happiness is the word that introduces the familiar Beatitudes from Christ’s Sermon of the Mount in Mathew’s Gospel, as in “Blessed are the poor in spirit…the merciful, etc.”[2] The English word blessed translates the Greek word makarios, which in turn attempts to capture the earlier original Hebrew expression עשר / ‘asher. The fundamental concept captured by those three words throughout their linguistic migrations—from in the Hebrew just mentioned and into its subsequent Greek translation—is twofold. The concept attempts to convey, on the one hand, a blessing or gift from outside the human person[3] and initially beyond human control and, on the other hand, the subsequent emotional delight of that same person as a result of the fact that the gift has been bestowed, received, and gratefully welcomed.

Some of the traditional English translations seem very inadequate to the richness of the idea itself if they only stress one aspect or the other. For example, if one should choose to render ‘asher / makarios  as “happy,” one captures the delighted and positive emotion from the gift, but not that the source of the happiness is from outside and beyond the person herself. Conversely, if someone prefers to invoke the traditional English version “blessed,” that choice would seem to accent the opposite, namely that the source of the gift is from without, while virtually ignoring the ensuing emotional state of the human recipient. The best choice seems (at least to me) “fortunate,” because the latter catches both the giftedness of the state and the positive enjoyment experienced by the happy person.

(People are proclaimed “fortunate,” or happy, if they understand that all is gift; if they learn how to live with their personal sorrows without anger, bitterness, or resentment; and are able to avoid being “full of themselves” when reaching out to others. The familiar Beatitudes offer an insight into the factors that could enable a person to be truly “blessed” or “happy.” Thomas Aquinas would readily understand that the Scriptures offer illumination and insight into true human happiness. A truly happy person, therefore, is one who accepts the gift of insight and wisdom with joy.)

A second useful concept from the biblical literature of ancient Israel would be that of שלום / shalom, which is usually translated simply as “peace.” The inner notion for this word, however, is profound and much more nuanced than our familiar American usage might suggest. For us Americans and Western Europeans, the word peace is usually presumed to be the equivalent of tranquility and the absence of noise or distracting cacophony, as in “Thank goodness! The kids are in bed and we finally have some peace and quiet around here!” In the Semitic culture, however, the true sense of “peace” is one of reconciling separated elements, or regrouping disparate parts of an entity which had been splintered or scattered. Like a jigsaw puzzle where all the individual pieces finally fit together again, one experiences happiness when one’s individual gifts are placed in a context which best fits the needs and talents of each person, and thus the entire common good. The same Hebrew concept shalom can mean prosperity, wealth, or health, especially when each category of thought or experience describes a situation in which various parts and facts are reintegrated into a healthy functioning reality.

(Internationally, peace occurs when warring groups are restored to their proper mutual relationship. The attendant noise level is quite irrelevant. Whenever all things are back in their proper place, therefore, and in their proper relationship with everything else, there is true peace. This is another manner of approaching the human notion of happiness.)

The third and final concept I would raise from Israel’s biblical witness because, at least in my judgment, it can contribute greatly to true happiness is that of justice. Often in our pragmatic world we imagine that justice is achieved when an individual has paid all one’s debts. Biblical justice, however, is once again a much larger and more comprehensive notion. Fundamentally, biblical justice, namely צדקה / tzedeqah, means being in right relationship with everything else. A recent article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel[4] highlighted the feast of Hanukkah, which had begun the night before, and reported the delightful efforts of local Milwaukee Jewish children to collect money for the needy. The reporter quoted a local Jewish leader as suggesting that the word could be translated as “charity.” In my judgment, however, that version seems woefully inadequate because charity would suggest an emotional affect for the needy. To the contrary, there is a universal aspect inherent in the original Semitic concept of tzedeqah / justice which includes every bit of reality—animal and mineral as well as social and human—and asserts the quality of being in right relationship with everything! I would suggest that one is truly happy if one is in that sort of right relationship with everything and everyone.

There are undoubtedly other notions within the ancient traditions of Scripture that highlight some aspect of human happiness. These three Semitic words and their inherent frames of reference might seem to singularly contribute to an authentic human happiness. Each presumes, as you can see, a basic social structure or network of relationships. The larger reality of multiple relationships and individual reintegration is a nonnegotiable for the type of happiness described in the Scriptures. Recognition of the common good and a sense of shared responsibility for that common good is assumed to be a portion of human happiness.

Only when a person transcends his or her own individual tastes and preoccupations can he or she begin to find true happiness. The various proverbs collected over the centuries by the sages of Israel also describe happiness within the Semitic frame of reference.[5] They are always worthy of review, but the three concepts explained above seem more precisely targeted toward authentic human happiness.

May those who seek such happiness find it as a gift from God which they welcome warmly in order to place that gift in turn at the service of family, friends, and neighbors! Only in the context of a social context can human happiness be experienced and achieved.

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Richard J. Sklba is Auxiliary Bishop of Milwaukee, former professor of Scripture at St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee, and past chair of the Catholic Bishops’ National Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

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[1]   Summa Theologica, pars Prima Secundae, questiones 1-5. The Pars Prima of the work begins with establishing the truly scientific character of theology, then moves to a treatise on creation and the ongoing divine governance of the world. Thus having laid the necessary logical foundation, Thomas Aquinas raises the question of human happiness.

[2]   Matthew 5:1-12. There is a similar and possibly more original form of the Beatitudes found in Luke 6:21-26. Both versions use the same introductory term “Blessed.”

[3]   This external aspect of the word is evident in the fact that the same root cognate means material riches and wealth.

[4]  Local section, 11 December 2009, B1.

[5]   See the Book of Proverbs 10ff.

Happiness—only known after trauma, or death?

By Jason Haas

An inquiry of this sort must first pay a visit to the text of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. In his history of the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century B.C.E., Herodotus devoted a fair bit of writing to King Croesus of Lydia. The story bears repeating for those not familiar with it. By Herodotus' account, Croesus was one of the wealthiest individuals in the ancient Western world, and the king believed this wealth gave him a commensurate happiness. This view was challenged when Croesus received Solon the wise Athenian as a guest in his palace. After Solon was shown the king's vast treasuries over the period of four days, an audience with the king awaited. There, King Croesus asked Solon for his opinion on who was the happiest man in the world.

Solon answered, "Tellus of Athens, sire." Flabbergasted that he had not been declared the happiest, Croesus demanded Solon's justification. Solon answered that Tellus was happiest for having lived in a flourishing land and seeing both of his sons grow to adulthood. (Whether Tellus had daughters was not reported, or relevant, to Herodotus). Tellus then surpassed most by dying, not of old age, but in battle against a neighboring state. He was given a public funeral, one of the highest honors in ancient Athens. Content in his life and vaunted after his death, Tellus bore the legacy of a great and truly happy man.

Croesus demanded to know who Solon thought was the second happiest man in the world, overly confident that Solon would name him after seeing his immense treasury. Instead, Solon pronounced the names Cleobis and Bito. Each of these brothers had been a victor at the Olympic games, and had personally pulled a cart bearing their mother to a festival of the goddess Hera! This act was seen in such a good light that their mother asked the goddess to "bestow on Cleobis and Bito, the sons who had so mightily honoured her, the highest blessing to which mortals can attain." After prayers, animal sacrifice, and a holy banquet, the young men fell asleep there in the temple. From this sleep, they never awoke, for they had been spirited away by the goddess as a reward for their selfless task.

Still amazed to find himself yet excluded from the Solon’s list of the happiest of men, Croesus pressed Solon for his reasoning. Solon explained, "He who unites the greatest number of advantages, and retaining them to the day of his death, then dies peaceably, that man alone, sire, is, in my judgment, entitled to bear the name of 'happy.' But in every matter it behooves us to mark well the end: for oftentimes the gods give men a gleam of happiness, and then plunge them into ruin."

By Solon's standard, Croesus was a man of great fortune, which was different from having great happiness. In essence, Solon said, Do not judge a person as being happy until they are dead. For only then can such judgment be pronounced.

In that light, I find it curious that the question on the nature of happiness should come to me. Once, in all but the literal biological sense, I think that I have died. Or at very least, I came closer to death than any living being should ever want to.

Dead, Almost, and After

On the evening of March 10, 2000, I was sitting at a red light in Savannah, Ga., when a drunk driver rammed a huge SUV into my very small, older car.

He hit me. My chest smashed the steering wheel. My head bashed through the windshield. My face was torn and lacerated, my nose smashed, and my left eye was shredded. That the sheer force of the impact damaged my internal organs almost seems like an afterthought.

Despite this, I did not die.

The next time that I remember waking up and being aware of the world was at least a month later. I didn't know where I was, or for that matter, who I was—though that came back soon enough. Still, six weeks of my life are gone thanks to the stupidity of the young man who drove his daddy’s huge car after a hard night’s drinking.

How, then, does surviving this horror make me a happy man—no, a content man—today?

While I have been receiving monetary compensation for the crash from the fool who hit me, I got no great joy from depositing the checks. It hardly needs to be said that no money could replace my eye, or make up for the painful eternity that the aftermath of the crash must have been for my wife and family. While I got a trifling check to cover the estimated value of a 1989 Honda Civic DX hatchback, it is impossible to place a monetary value on the marriage that the crash had also destroyed. My now ex-wife Cassandra was true to her vows in caring for me in the long months afterward. Sadly, an overwhelming majority of couples who experience the great traumas that come through debilitating car crashes end in divorce, as did ours. Thus, money has not made for happiness after surviving my personal apocalypse.

Some time after the crash, I concluded that some part of me had died that night. While I was never clinically dead, the hospital that I was taken to kept me under deep sedation for somewhere between one to two weeks. Even if I had been awake, my brain was so bollixed by the crash that it was incapable of storing memories of that time. And my body was so wrecked that it would have been a waking hell to dwell in it. I was kept in a drug-induced coma while my body pulled itself back from the brink, and kept my swollen brain from being moved and further injured.

In short, I survived. No funeral was held, no memorial placard or flowers placed at the intersection where that cretin tried to drive through me. But in my mind's eye, I had died. For about a month, I have absolutely no memory of being in the world. While life certainly went on around me, with family members visiting and taking pictures I don’t remember being taken. According to the hospital, I was never dead, as I later walked out alive. (Or at least rolled out in a wheelchair that they insisted on putting me in en route to my wife’s car.) Though she later would disagree with my assertion, my then-wife held a "re-birthday party" for me on March 10, 2001. My friends were very glad to see me alive and generally well, as was I.

As you may well imagine, this sort of event will cause you to take stock of your life and look very carefully at where and how you will try to head next. I thought that meant coming back to Madison, Wis., the city I had left in 1998 due to frustration with living there without having a college degree, which meant I could not get a good job. Now, nine years after that fateful crash, and five years after moving to Milwaukee, I have earned my undergraduate degree in history from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For I had learned that one of the best things I could do to keep my brain in shape in the long run was to complete a college education. Academically speaking, I flourished. I argued in my senior thesis that Germany’s fate in the First World War was a result of an inadequate food supply, which led to significant unrest on the home front. It was a genuine pleasure to receive top grades on that paper, having been unable to think about anything but the great pain in my body just a few years earlier. And thanks to a professor who whipped her students’ brains into shape with critical thinking exercises, as well as the whole academic process, my brain feels in better shape than ever before.

I still see the result of the crash every day as I look upon the world. My left eye can still see, though it cannot focus on anything—the eye surgeon had to remove the lens in order to remove all of the windshield glass. I’ve had a touch shorter temper since then as well; such is the result of being hit from behind by a 6,000-pound blunt instrument. Despite that, I have largely flourished. It’s not often that you have your face pressed up against (or through) the glass of life and live to tell about it.

The fool who hit me went on to become a Princeton graduate and Wall Street economist. And he is the lucky recipient of 30 days a summer in the Chatham County, Georgia jail. I believe he will be completing his sentence in the summer of 2010. This knowledge gives me a satisfaction that justice has been performed, but just as Solon advised King Croesus that he would find no true happiness from his wealth, I gain no particular happiness from the monetary compensation I have gained from the crash.

Instead, my deep contentment comes from my friends and family, and from knowing that I live in a place that, while ridden with deep problems, enables me to explore matters such as this, while not fearing the repressive hand of the government or the blow of a terrorist’s bomb. For that matter, I do not often fear a repeat of the personal tragedy of March 10, 2000. It may happen, it always could happen. But there is no reason to live in active fear of that. Perhaps that is it: Having seen some of the worst a person can do, yet having survived and dramatically recovered, I fear not what other bad things could happen. Instead, I have the liberation of knowing how limited our presence here can be, and seek to make the best of it for myself, my family, and those around us in the city of Milwaukee. As Solon described the life of Tellus of Athens, whom he thought was the happiest man in the world, I seek to help Milwaukee flourish again, and to see my children grow to adulthood.

That said, judge me not yet a happy man. For I am still alive—and very happy about it!

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Jason Haas is a resident of Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood. After studying history, he often relishes not knowing what comes next.

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Herodotus quotations from The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, translated by Andrea L. Purvis and edited by Robert B. Strassler.

Search for growth, not necessarily truth

By Kevin Woodcock

Generally speaking, we in the modern and postmodern eras have a problem with happiness. Our philosophers, poets, and novelists tend to keep any sense of fulfillment at arm's length, suspicious that giving in to happiness or settling into a sense of fulfillment—or even meaning—is only falling for one of the bits of the world that remains to be disabused.

For instance, in his On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of society is completely void of hope and happiness. In this same line, Gustave Flaubert famously claimed that in order to be happy you have to be stupid. Charles Taylor cites the ubiquitous malaise that runs through the veins of our society. And Max Weber went so far as to say that we can never expect to find any sort of meaning in our lives as everything we do is only an endless progression of expiration, of discovering the problems with our previously held beliefs, pushing them off to the side and then moving on.

One might ask—How in God’s name did these thinkers persevere with such morose perspectives on life? Indeed, how do we get out of bed in the morning knowing that we can never find meaning in our lives?

I will admit, at times I find myself sympathizing with these modes of thought. As a citizen of late capitalism, I bear witness to the fabrication of happiness for marketing purposes which has become inextricably tied to commodity culture. I would also have to agree with the likes of Descartes and Weber that we will forever be searching for truths, but this is where I feel I must part with these individuals. While these things maybe true, I do not necessarily concede that they preclude happiness. On the contrary, I believe happiness is possible even in a society as inauthentic and misguided as our own.

I'd like to touch on two thinkers whose ideas allow us a way out of the postmodern rationalist trap. The first is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German naturalist, poet, playwright, novelist—truly one of the last actual Renaissance men. The second is still with us, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.

Goethe & Organicism

Goethe's botanical writings are actually of primary interest in the discussion of happiness. Remarkably, Goethe produced over 8,000 drawings detailing the growth of plants with a focus on capturing the way their development assimilated their surroundings, embodying the very world in which they lived. Essentially, his theories coincided with organicism, which stresses the subject’s process of organization as opposed to, say, only focusing on its composition. For instance, a plant is the seed, water, soil, light, air, and so on, but it's also the continual organizing of external things. It is the light that just barely ekes through the window that makes the plant bend toward it, and it is the cold winter that makes it drop its leaves. All of these aspects are assimilated by the plant. One could say the plant is in a constant state of “becoming,” always subsuming what it engages with.

In his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Goethe applied this theory to human life. The protagonist, Wilhelm Meister, begins the novel as a fiery youth convinced that his drive and love of theater will propel him to become a master playwright. As the story unfolds, Wilhelm stumbles over and over again until he begins to assimilate the lessons of life. In doing so, he “grows,” so to speak. By the end of the novel, Wilhelm looks back on his forays into failed endeavors (he eventually quits the theater), and the lesson is that those experiences were anything but meaningless. Those experiences made him into the strong and able individual who we finally see at the end of the novel.

Without a doubt, Wilhelm was allowed to be happy. He was not happy all the time, but this organic development granted him genuinely happy moments. His journey was not defined by an ambition to expose the world, but by growth and experiences brought about by his own volition. It is true that he received guidance, but for the most part his passions and inclinations dictated his actions while the world continually fine-tuned those passions. For Wilhelm at least, Max Weber was wrong: all the character's experiences and previous false suppositions about the world were anything but meaningless. In fact, it was those very missteps that led him to where he was by the end of the novel. Therefore—at least in the world according to Goethe—everything has meaning; happiness can be genuine and legitimate until it's proven incorrect, and even when that happens, the happiness was still real in its time.

For Goethe, engagement with the world should start on the inside and then move to the external. What does this actually mean? I sum it up in this way: Follow your own inclinations and, following them, then allow yourself to be molded by the world. Like Goethe’s plants that start with a seed and then grow and begin to bend toward sources of light, people too should allow themselves to follow their own will, and then remain receptive to the world’s vicissitudes and adjust accordingly. In living this way, meaning and beliefs can be preserved while room is also made for happiness. There's no need to buckle under the crippling skepticism of the philosophers mentioned earlier. There need be no presupposition that happiness or meaning is out of reach. On the contrary, the goal isn't uncovering truth, just growth.

The Dalai Lama & Mindset

Who or what is doing the growing and how might we encourage such growth? In a highly popular text, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, psychiatrist Howard Cutler converses with the Dalai Lama on aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that can be applied to Western ideals pertaining to happiness.

In one notable passage, Cutler and the Dalai Lama expound on how one’s mindset is paramount to happiness. In one example, they discuss the lives of two individuals. One wins the lottery, becomes rich and is initially elated, but then the happiness subsides, and the person returns to her normal state. Another individual is diagnosed with HIV, but the long-term effect is one largely of positive change as things in life take on greater meaning. The lesson in all of this, the two authors argue, is that happiness is profoundly determined by one’s mindset rather than external factors. The Dalai Lama goes on to say that wealth and health are crucial to an extent, but they will only make us happy if our mind is in the right state to receive them. In a way, this is quite similar to Goethe’s organicism. For both, the mindset, the inner state, remains the primary driver of things, rather than the external conditions of the world, as is the case for, say, Nietzsche or Flaubert.

The primary objective in Buddhism is to reveal the inner Buddha who resides in every living being. In order to do so, one must gradually become enlightened, which leads to greater happiness, compassion, and presence of mind. Again, this seems strikingly similar to Goethe’s organicism. Unlike in most Western traditions, the self is what grows in the world as opposed to what must completely conform to the state of the world.

To think about this in terms of meaning, if we allow ourselves to grow according to what we think is right, enlightened, or holy, it is quite easy to find meaning in things. If, on the other hand, we see that knowledge is ever changing and assume that because of this we can never allow ourselves to see meaning in things, we preclude ourselves from ever having profound meaning or, consequently, happiness.

A Subtle Subjective Shift

In presenting the ideas of Goethe and the Dalai Lama, I’m aware of many counterarguments that I do not have room to acknowledge in this essay. My aim was simply to show what happens if we shift the way we engage with the world from a perspective that largely focuses on our distrust of things to one that is focused on the continual growth of ourselves. The subtle shift from focusing on the external nature of the world to examining the way our inner nature engages with the world creates more meaning and is surely an option to keep in mind as we search for happiness.

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Kevin Woodcock is completing his MA in Liberal Studies at Duke University. His interests are postmodern literature, economics, philosophy, and classical music.

Volunteering leads to happiness

By Charles Oberweiser

You might say happiness is my profession. I work in the community service office of a medium-sized liberal arts college where it's my job to convince college students that some of the best ways to experience happiness come through the community service projects I organize. I've found the potential of being happy is such a powerful incentive that it makes 19-year-olds do things that defy rational explanation. I've woken them up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning, taken them away from studies the day before a final exam, and made them so busy they give up other satisfying activities. Surprisingly, not only do students accept these inconveniences, they bring their roommates, their teammates, even their love interests, buoyed by the idea that planting garlic at the community garden or sharing the work of Dr. Seuss with a first grader will somehow make it all worthwhile. More surprisingly still, it almost always does.

While work for the public good has long been a part of the American landscape, it's hard to escape how quickly the nonprofit sector has grown in the last 20 years. There are twice as many nonprofit agencies now as in 1998,  with the IRS reporting that some 200 new agencies are recognized daily.  And volunteering for these agencies has become the most accepted method of demonstrating that we are responsible citizens, overpowering old standards like voting, civic knowledge, and military service. Something like 75 percent of high school students now complete community work, often because it’s required in order to graduate.  This participation remains well into the undergraduate years, with upwards of 30 percent of students participating annually in community service.

The predominant reason for this growth in community service is the multiplicity of levels on which service can lead to happiness. It's easiest to appreciate this argument by considering the categories developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow in his hierarchy of needs. From very basic safety needs to the highest-level experiences of development and actualization, you can have an experience in any of these areas on any given day by doing community service.

Let's say the very basic levels of happiness stem from feelings of security and friendship. A typical community service experience offers a number of ways to provide this kind of happiness. Volunteering allows us to meet new people and make new friendships. The possibilities for friendships are magnified by the fact that most nonprofits are human-service providers, so there is constant interaction with people. Volunteering with these types of human-service agencies also provides the opportunity for a volunteer to improve his or her own feelings of safety and security by making downward comparisons with the agency’s clients. If a volunteer comes to work at the soup kitchen worried about potentially losing her job, it’s easy to be reassured by the idea that people she meets while volunteering are doing far worse than she is. This distinction between service providers and service recipients is something we work hard to try to prevent, especially at the college level. Yet, we know volunteers continue to make these distinctions and they do so because making them sometimes feels good.

On a more advanced level, doing community service contributes to our sense of self-efficacy, the happiness that comes from believing we can accomplish tasks. Community work is about, to use the motto of the national AmeriCorps service program, “getting things done.” Far more than our work at our jobs or in our relationships, volunteer work brings tangible results. This happens because the tasks assigned to volunteers are not simply a cross-section of what needs to be done at a given organization; rather, they are specially selected activities likely to bring immediate, demonstrable success. Agencies do this because success leads to feelings of happiness and happy volunteers are more likely to return to do more work for the organization. Meanwhile, the agency's paid staff takes on the mundane and abstract work that keeps the agency operating. While volunteers spend the day reading to children or playing with puppies, staffers spend the day completing grant reports or haggling with the computer system.

These feelings of efficacy flow easily into feelings of esteem, the sort of happiness that comes from feeling respected and valued by others. The reason volunteers are thanked so often during their work goes beyond the goodness of what they do. Earning the respect of others and feeling valuable to them makes a volunteer feel happy, and again, happy volunteers are more likely to return. Nonprofit agencies, especially larger ones, often use a fairly ritualized process to convey their thanks to volunteers. A letter of thanks for the service work, annual volunteer banquets, comfortable volunteer lounges, free food during work, cards, candy, newsletters, and prizes can all be part of the strategy an agency uses to keep volunteers coming back. In the trade lingo we call thanking people “volunteer recognition” and there's a cottage industry of conference speakers who train us to “recognize volunteers the way they want to be recognized,” “thank volunteers on their terms,” and “make a place for volunteers in your agency” (all titles of workshops I've attended). In addition to this praise from agency staff members, the more important feelings of happiness for volunteers often come when they earn admiration from their families, friends, and coworkers.

Community work can also make a volunteer feel happy on the very highest levels Maslow identified. First, there is a sort of moral happiness that comes from knowing we did something we were supposed to do. Most religious or humanist belief systems tell us that we ought to help others, and community work almost always fulfills this goal. Second, there is a sort of happiness that comes from growing to see things as they actually are, of developing a real understanding of the world. Community work often puts us in touch with new situations and people from a diversity of economic levels, races, backgrounds, and orientations. Finally, there is a type of happiness that comes from being called upon to create something new. Many long-term volunteers, such as the students and full-time volunteers I’ve overseen, are asked to use their knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm to create new approaches and new programs for the agency.

Despite these opportunities to experience happiness on so many levels, perhaps the most potent reason people believe community work will make them happy comes from a quirk in our memories: We humans are terrible at making accurate recollections of our feelings, so we substitute how we think we should have felt for how we actually did feel. While there has been much interesting psychology done about our inability to recall feelings accurately, the quintessential study in my opinion remains one done during the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida (Wilson, Meyers, & Gilbert, 2001). Scientists asked Bush and Gore supporters to predict how much an eventual Bush victory would affect their happiness, asked them as Bush was declared the winner how happy they were, and then asked months later how happy they remembered being as the race was decided. Respondents predicted the outcome would have a large impact on their happiness, but experienced a much smaller change in happiness as the race was decided. Yet, interestingly, their later recollection was that the decision had made a large impact on their happiness, just as they had originally forecast it would. My experience with volunteers suggests a similar pattern might come into play when volunteers remember their community work. I've talked with students who say they thought they'd enjoy a volunteer experience quite a lot, but that it hadn't lived up to their expectations. However, by the end of the semester the students remember it being enjoyable and are surprised to see notes from earlier conversations where they claimed it wasn't a happy experience. In light of these experiences, it's worth wondering just how much of our happiness from community work might come from the fact we think it should be a happy experience and therefore remember it that way.

Then again, I leave it to psychologists to decide why you feel happy doing community service or what sort of happiness you feel. I'm delighted that the experience has been a predominantly happy one for most of the volunteers I work with. Yet, with the soup kitchen short of volunteers over the winter and our transitional housing agency in desperate need of help for their after-school program, I selfishly hope that a happy volunteer experience means a volunteer experience you're likely to repeat again next week.

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Charles Oberweiser works in the community service office at Allegheny College with college students and full-time volunteers in an AmeriCorps*VISTA program.