What We Can Learn From the Ancients About Happiness

“The School of Athens” fresco by Renaissance artist Raphael depicting the Platonic Academy, a famous school in ancient Athens founded by the philosopher Plato in the early 4th century B.C. In the center are Plato and Aristotle, in discussion. Public Domain

Commentary

In the past several decades, it seems everyone has discovered a recipe for happiness, from various celebrities and new age gurus to the cannabis retailers one now sees on every street corner; from the moral relativists, to the New Atheists, to the Darwinian dogmatists for whom the world is the product of blind chance; from the self-righteous social-justice torchers of cities to the anatomical male rapists who “self-identify” as females in order to get sent to women’s prisons.

Oh the joys of the examined life! But it doesn’t take much thought to recognize that it is only ideological snake oil that they are trying to sell. Given the popularity and influence of such people and movements, however, it is almost impossible to persuade students whose institutions of “higher learning” have become re-education camps in postmodernist “theory,” that the ancient Greeks and Romans—the deadest of the dead white males—had something rather valuable to say on the question of how to live fully realized and meaningful lives.

That, of course, is assuming that today’s students have ever heard of “the ancients.” An email I received from a prospective student in an undergraduate course I used to teach speaks volumes—that is to say, the volumes of the Western canon that she has never read. The course was called “The Western Tradition,” and on its syllabus I included as many as possible of the ancient philosophers, poets, and theologians as I could smuggle in without detection by the university’s postmodernist thought police. The student in question wanted to know (in earnest, I assure you) if, in tracing the Western tradition, we were going to study the later westerns, such as those that exposed the “genocidal extermination of native Americans by white supremacist colonialists,” or just the classic John Ford films—in which case, needless to say, she wasn’t interested.

In another course, at the end of a lecture on the West’s longest-running and still unbroken literary narrative theme called in the Middle Ages “the matter of Troy,” a student raised his hand to ask (equally in earnest), “Who is this Troy fellow and what is the matter with him?” In the same survey course, at the end of a lecture on the House of Pride in Book I of Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” another student came up to my desk and scoffed, incredulously, “Do you really mean to say that pride isn’t a good thing?” As a graduate of Self-Esteem High, she might have been forgiven, I suppose, for not knowing that from pagan antiquity through the Christian millennia down to circa 1960, pride was still counted as a vice, if not the root of the Seven Deadly Sins. In any case, Allan Bloom’s 1987 classic “The Closing of the American Mind” seems to have called long ago for a sequel entitled something like “The Emptying of the American Mind.”

Vacuums, as the cliché goes, are abhorrent to nature, and what has flooded into the intellectual abyss is the postmodernist orthodoxy according to which the patrimony of the West is a miasmal swamp of racism, sexism, Christian bigotry, homophobia, oppression, and victimhood of every sort, all in conjunction with the historical myth according to which man is inexorably wiser, more virtuous, and his social and political arrangements more equitable and just, than at any time in our benighted past.

On the model of science and technology, it is all too easy to subscribe to the modern fantasy of infinite and inexorable progress. But although tomorrow’s computers will be ineluctably more powerful and efficient than today’s, art, literature, and morality do not necessarily follow such a steady and optimistic trajectory. Our own ideas about beauty, justice, wisdom, and truth are certainly more sophisticated (and often sophistical), but not necessarily more intelligent or convincing than those of the ancients.

Indeed, the fact that so many today take it for granted that the latest generation is the wisest and best argues all the more for the need to study the Greeks and Romans, if only as a means of holding the presuppositions of our own age up to critical scrutiny. What should be clear at least is that the problem of happiness is hardly a new one, and only a rank species of chronological jingoism could persuade us that the philosophers and poets of classical antiquity need not be consulted, since our solutions are self-evidently superior to theirs.

But for a teacher of pre-modern literature and thought, the conjunction of historical amnesia with ideological certitude is well nigh invincible. In any case, there is an even more fundamental problem that he faces in his attempt to impart to his students some inkling of how the ancients understood what they called “the examined life.”

“Happiness,” as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “is as grave and practical as sorrow, if not more so. We might as well imagine that a man could carve a cardboard chicken or live on imitation loaves of bread, as suppose that any man could get happiness out of things that are merely light or laughable.”

Though Chesterton wrote in the early 20th century, his solemn attitude was apparently already a rather retrograde one. Today, we are more or less all enrolled in the Playboy School of Philosophy, and when happiness isn’t being reduced by the beau monde to something as puerile and frivolous as mere personal pleasure, material success, or the number of one’s followers on social media, it is being merchandised by the self-help set as “making time for ourselves,” or by the gurus of pop psychology as “following our bliss,” usually in conformist defiance of traditional norms or conventions.

In a post-religious age in which the only realities are those that can be perceived by the physical senses, it is no surprise that happiness is defined in purely sensual and worldly terms. Having little acquaintance with the history of either religion or philosophy, most moderns are blissfully (pun intended) unaware that the regnant attitude of Western civilization, both pagan and Christian, was almost always one of contemptus mundi, founded on the entirely logical principle that no true happiness could depend upon the possession of what is mutable and transitory. The goddess Fortuna confers her gifts only to take them away again (one of the longest-running topoi in Western literature), and the knowledge that they are fleeting is in itself subversive of the “happiness” they confer even in the state of possessing and enjoying them.

Recognizing the inevitable mutability and impermanence of the goods and pleasures of this world, the most influential of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and moral essayists (from Socrates and Plato through Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, and Epictetus, to name a few) enjoined that the reasonable man inculcate an attitude of detachment or indifference, neither excessively rejoicing in their acquisition nor sorrowing at their loss, both of which were in any case, as the Stoics insisted, beyond his control.

To the ancient sages, by contrast, happiness depended upon virtue, wisdom, and an interior life in communion with and contemplation of the divine, moral, and spiritual states which, once achieved, the happy man possessed inalienably. Residing impregnably in the rational intelligence—the highest faculty in man that assimilated him to God—they made his happiness autonomous of, indeed proof against, all the sorrows, injustices, and misfortunes that come with life in a fallen and mutable world. They made the wise man utterly self-reliant, invulnerable, indeed (as Plato described him), a God among men.

A version of this article first appeared in The Wanderer newspaper and is re-printed here with permission.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.