“Happiness is a very proud word of our whole cultural heritage,” said humanist philosopher Erich Fromm in a rare 1958 interview. “If you would ask people what their concept of Heaven is, and if they were honest, they would say it’s a kind of big department store with new things every week, and enough money to buy everything new.”

This distorted view perpetuated by our modern culture makes us believe that happiness lies in unlimited consumption. But what is real happiness? One might say there are as many definitions of happiness as there are people in the world, but in the video below prominent American philosopher, scholar, and educator Mortimer J. Adler argues that the great ancient philosopher Aristotle thought otherwise — there is only one true conception of happiness and it is the same for all people. The lecture highlights can be found below the video. Please enjoy.

Happiness is not made by the pleasures we have, nor is happiness marred by the pains we suffer. Aristotle helps us see this by making a rather shocking statement that children can’t be happy. Young people he says, precisely because they are young, are not happy nor for that matter unhappy. Aristotle writes:

A boy is not happy, owing to his age; boys who are called happy are being congratulated by reason of the hopes we have for them. For there is required not only complete virtue but also a complete life, since many changes occur in life, and all manner of chances, and the most prosperous may fall into great misfortunes in old age.

What Aristotle is saying is that what is required for happiness is a complete life which obviously no young person has while still young. A life must be completed before we can truly judge whether or not it has been a happy one. Towards the middle or before all we can say that it is becoming a happy life. Aristotle writes:

Certainly the future is obscure to us, while happiness, we claim, is an end and something in every way final. If so, we shall call happy those among living men in whom these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled.

For Aristotle, a happy life is a good life, and a good life necessarily includes all other goods, such as health, wealth, friendship, knowledge, virtue. All these are constituent parts of happiness, and the happiness is the whole good of which these are constituent parts. Happiness is the only good which we seek for its own sake. Aristotle writes:

Happiness is desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else. But honor, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves, but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself. Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient.

In light of this definition of happiness, we can see why Aristotle claims that the pursuit of happiness takes a lifetime and the happiness is the quality of our whole human life. For more on Mortimer Adler’s deep insight into Aristotle and his timeless wisdom, you can’t go wrong with his book Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy. In this book, he presents the great philosopher’s teachings in a current and lucid way, offering a unique path to insights and understanding of the difference between wants and needs, the proper way to pursue happiness, and the right plan for a good life.

“In every act observe the things which come first, and those which follow it; and so proceed to the act,” writes Epictetus in his famous manual Enchiridion. “If you do not, at first you will approach it with alacrity, without having thought of the things which will follow; but afterward, when certain base (ugly) things have shown themselves, you will be ashamed.”

Speaking of making wise decisions, isn’t it strange that at some point in our lives we come to the most unexpected realization — that everything we’ve done up to this point was unconscious. All that we’ve done, thought or been seems like a series of submissions, either to the false self that we thought belonged to us because we expressed ourselves through it to the outside, or to the weight of circumstances that we supposed was the air we breathed.

In this moment of seeing, we suddenly find ourselves estranged and isolated, exiles where we thought we were citizens. We realize we were all error and deviation, that we never lived, that we existed only in so far as we filled time with constant doing and achieving. So how can we learn to do better? How can we avoid this sarcastic terror of life and wake up to a better way of doing things? This is what ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus takes up in one of the passages of his timeless manual of ethical advice Enchiridion.

Unconscious living, irrational thinking, and impulsive behavior were as much an issue in ancient times as they are now. So it’s not surprising that many philosophers tried to address the matter in their own unique way. Epictetus starts by noting that it’s great if you want to win and come first in a competition. But in every affair consider what precedes and what follows. Epictetus writes:

A man wishes to conquer at the Olympic games. I also wish indeed, for it is a fine thing. But observe both the things which come first and the things that follow; and then begin the act. You must do everything according to rule, eat according to strict orders, abstain from delicacies, exercise yourself as you are bid at appointed times, in heat, in cold, you must not drink cold water, nor wine as you choose; in a word, you must deliver yourself up to the exercise master as you do to the physician, and then proceed to the contest. And sometimes you will strain the hand, put the ankle out of joint, swallow much dust, sometimes be flogged, and after all this be defeated.

Furthermore, Epictetus maintains that we have to be consistent in everything we do. In order to make wise decisions, we need to consider all angles, otherwise, we’ll “behave like children, who at one time play at wrestlers, another time as flute players, again as gladiators, then as trumpeters, then as tragic actors.” Epictetus writes:

So you will be at one time an athlete, at another a gladiator, then a rhetorician, then a philosopher, but with your whole soul you will be nothing at all; but like an ape you imitate everything that you see, and one thing after another pleases you. For you have not undertaken anything with consideration, nor have you surveyed it well; but carelessly and with cold desire. … These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must either cultivate your own ruling faculty, or external things; you must either exercise your skill on internal things or on external; that is you must either maintain the position of a philosopher or that of a common person.

Complement this particular portion of Enchiridion, an ancient treasure trove of Stoic ethical advice, with Aristotle’s teaching on how small things make all the difference in cultivating virtues as habits.

“What is wisdom? What is moderation? What is courage? What is justice? What is the nature of reality itself? Looking at these questions today, we could just shrug our shoulders and discard them as irrelevant. After all, they seem too abstract and distant from real concerns of our everyday life. Or are they? Two and half millennia ago the Greek philosopher Plato considered answers to these questions vital, if not absolutely necessary, for a happy and fulfilling life, a conviction reflected in his timeless treatise The Republic (paperback | audiobook), where he envisioned a life of ideal society. In today’s post, we’re diving into wisdom, one of the four virtues that figure prominently throughout the dialogue. Understanding the nature of wisdom is not an easy task, and this particular excerpt sheds light on how it was perceived by one of the greatest philosophers in the history of Western thought. Please enjoy this audio performance by an immensely talented William Sigalis as Socrates and Ray Childs as Glaucon.

SOCRATES ON WISDOM
from The Republic of Plato

[Glaucon,] let’s say that if the republic [that we created] has been properly ordered, then it is completely good.

That necessarily follows.

Then do you believe that your republic is wise, courageous, moderate, and just?

I do.

Once we find some of these qualities, we can assume that the ones we have not yet discovered remain to be found.

That makes sense.

Hmm. Let’s suppose that we are looking for one thing out of four. If we find it first, that is the end of the search. But if we first find the other three and can eliminate them, then the one that remains is the one we are seeking.

True.

Then that is how we should proceed in the present case.

I agree.

Wisdom is the first one we saw in your republic, but there seems to be something strange about it.

What’s that?

When we say that republic is wise, don’t we mean that it practices good judgment?

Yes. We mean good judgment.

People make good judgments by knowledge, not by ignorance. So can we say that good judgment is a kind of knowledge?

Clearly.

But don’t we find many different kinds of knowledge in the Repuplic?

Of course.

For example, consider the knowledge of the carpenter. Is that the kind of knowledge that leads us to say that a republic is wise and has good judgement?

No. That only means it is skilled in making things out of it wood. …

Then do any of the citizens of your recently founded republic possess a kind of knowledge that advises about the entire republic rather than some particular thing? Does anyone know how to make the best policy concerning both citizens and foreigners?

Certainly.

Then what is this knowledge and who has it?

It is the knowledge of leading possessed by those we call guards in the fullest sense of the term.

Then what should we call a republic that has this kind of knowledge?

We should call it wise in the sense of having good judgment in leading people. …

Of all the groups that are named because they possess a certain kind of knowledge, don’t you think good leaders will be the smallest?

The smallest by far.

Then do we agree that the nature of the smallest group in a republic, those who govern a rule justifies calling the whole republic wise? And can we say that this is the only knowledge properly called wisdom?

Yes, Socrates, we do agree about that.

Glaucon, somehow we have discovered the nature and the place in the republic of one of the four things we are seeking.

I’m quite satisfied with our method.

Complement this particular passage from The Republic of Plato, a treasure trove of timeless wisdom, with another incredibly gratifying audio performance by William Sigalis as Socrates on moderation as a harmony that permeates all aspects of the human soul and then revisit the famous allegory of the cave that questions the nature of perceived reality itself.

What is the source of all unhappiness in our lives, and is there a way to overcome it? To answer this question, two and a half millennia ago, a young man named Siddhattha Gotama left his parents’ palace to become a wandering ascetic. After six years of extreme austerities and meditation, he attained enlightenment and expounded his famous teaching on the Four Noble Truths. Since then, wherever he went, he taught those who wanted to listen that the root cause of our suffering lies in our boundless cravings, and that the key to liberation lies in the Noble Eightfold Path.

While it’s unlikely that any of us will be able to complete the path and become enlightened in this lifetime, we can significantly lessen our pain by lessening our desires. This is what Roman philosopher Seneca and Greek philosopher Epicurus discuss in letters to their friends quoted in an altogether indispensable Letters on Ethics. And even though they lived in different times and belonged to different schools of thought, Seneca was a follower of Stoicism and Epicurus was the founder of Epicureanism, both of them agreed on what role desires play in our lives, and how restricting them can make one happy and fulfilled.

Drawing on his boundless wisdom and knowledge of rival philosophical schools, Seneca writes to his friend Lucilius Junior while quoting Epicurus writing to his friend Idomeneus:

It was to him [Idomeneus] that Epicurus wrote that fine sentence urging him to enrich Pythocles in no common or ambivalent way. He says, “If you want to make Pythocles rich, what you must do is not add to his money but subtract from his desires.”

He continues by noting that “this saying is too clear to need interpretation, and too well phrased to need improvement,” and that his only addition is that it applies not only to wealth but to everything else in life. Seneca writes:

If you want to make Pythocles honorable, what you must do is not add to his accolades but subtract from his desires.
If you wish to make Pythocles experience constant pleasure, what you must do is not add to his pleasure but subtract from his desires.
If you wish to make Pythocles live a long and complete life, what you must do is not add to his years but subtract from his desires.

And just to make sure that his friend Lucilius doesn’t miss his point, Seneca throws in another piece of advice:

For about those superfluous desires that can be put off, rebuked, or suppressed, I remind you only of this: such pleasure is natural but not necessary. You do not owe it anything: anything you do devote to it is voluntary. The belly does not listen to instructions: it merely demands and solicits. Still, it is not a troublesome creditor. You can put it off with very little, if you just give it what you owe rather than what you can. Farewell.

Complement these witty and life-changing passages from Seneca’s Letters on Ethics with Socrates on moderation as a harmony that permeates all aspects of the human soul, Aristotle on virtues as habits, and then revisit Seneca on the middle way of restraining ourselves.