In college I had the philosophy course and I hated it from the first minute. Now I realize that I hated it because I couldn’t understand it. Maybe I lacked maturity.
I regret it, especially because now that I have delved deeper into it (the purpose led me to philosophy), I have no doubt that if Aristotle were alive, he would be the influencer with the most followers on Instagram. I say this, because it wasn’t until I came across a phrase of his that I read so many times — but that only a few years ago made real sense — that I managed to understand the real purpose of life and that:
All human beings share the same purpose: to be happy, or to achieve eudemonia, as he called it.
After thinking about it for a few days, it seemed quite logical to me and I came across several other philosophers, psychologists or spiritual references, such as the Dalai Lama, who affirmed the same thing.
For those of us who are parents, this should come as no surprise. It is not surprising that in moments of deep conversation we tell our children that the most important thing for us is for them to be happy. Our parents told us the same thing. After all, who doesn’t want to be happy?
Who doesn’t want to be happy?
We all want to be happy, there is no doubt about that, and that is why I am convinced that this is the purpose of life. The problem is that, for some reason, we have stopped taking the word “happiness” seriously. In spite of how important it is for our lives, many times we refer to our happiness almost mechanically, like someone who asks someone else when greeting “how are you?”, just out of habit, but without really asking to know the answer. We talk about happiness, but we do not take the time to think about what it really is, its importance for our well-being and how we can achieve it. This leads us to ask ourselves a key question:
What is happiness?
There are hundreds of thousands of books and authors who talk about happiness. There are more than fifteen thousand texts available on Amazon that allude to it as a main topic. The interesting thing is that, to a greater or lesser extent, most of them go back to the origin of the concept, going back to Ancient Greece, a time when there were two types of happiness: hedonism and eudemonia.
Hedonism is characterized by placing pleasure as the supreme good of human life. Since these goods are ephemeral and mostly of a material nature, their effects are not prolonged in time. Each need that we manage to satisfy will generate happiness for exactly the same amount of time that the activity lasts.
This lifestyle often seems attractive to many, at least at first glance. But as Aristotle says, rather than a happy life, it is an easy, primitive and vulgar life. Moreover, while it may be an end in itself (seeking pleasure because we like to feel pleasure), it is not stable over time, nor is it something proper to man (any animal can feel pleasure) and often does not depend on one — characteristics that for him are fundamental to human purpose.
This philosophy of life has taken its most extreme form in recent times, moving away from philosophical hedonism. In the consumer society in which we live, there is a majority whose priority is to satisfy their personal needs and desires with the minimum of effort, and without the well-being of others being relevant to their purpose.
The big problem with this lifestyle is its conceptual extremism, as it wrongly relates the notions of pleasure and pain: it assimilates effort with pain, and leisure with pleasure, as if it were impossible to find satisfaction in effort or boredom in leisure.
This makes the consumerist (a kind of modern hedonist) a slave to the world with an ideal of happiness that is ultimately truncated, for this kind of life does not lead to true happiness. It also represents a problem, or at least a challenge for today’s society, for such a way of life does not lead to greater individual well-being, nor does it contribute to building a better society.
Eudemonia, on the other hand, refers to happiness, which includes both sensory pleasure and fulfillment, understood as happiness of a more spiritual nature.
It supposes a spiritual life — not necessarily linked to religion — but by which we know, or suppose, that we are part of something greater than ourselves. And that need for spiritual development leads us to seek our own perfection, that is, to be the best version of ourselves. This means that humanity can progressively, and through the use of reason and virtue, move towards its own perfection.
It consists of a life well lived, both for oneself and for those around us. It is a happiness that gives meaning to our lives, in which it is not enough to seek not only my own well-being, but also that of others.
Eudemonia takes place in doing, in the human experience in relation to ourselves and others. It lies in our virtuous actions: we are happy when we are just, supportive, generous, tolerant, promote equality, beauty and, above all, love and kindness.
Aristotle thinks that a virtuous life is not something reserved only for those important people who hold positions of influence or who have achieved great deeds. In his concept, any form of service to others has the potential to be an activity in keeping with virtue.
For the Greek philosopher, eudemonia is an end in itself: it is the supreme good of life. It is that which people choose before anything else, unlike, for example, wealth, professional success or power, which are desired as means to that end, but not as ends in themselves.
This type of happiness, when present, makes us feel complete, that is, that to some extent we are living the way we are meant to live. As if we feel a deep certainty that we are doing the right thing and are walking the path that is properly human.
Perhaps what most distinguishes eudemonia from other ways of conceiving happiness is that it transcends the individual. It presupposes the need to love or to give oneself beyond oneself, beyond the physical or what can be understood through reason. For this very reason, Aristotle considered eudemonia to be the true form of happiness, the noblest and most honorable of all.
His philosophy has been used to lay the foundations of humanistic psychology, positive psychology and has also been reaffirmed by neuroscience.
Now that we know what our purpose is, we must set those goals that will allow us to achieve it, something I like to call the “path of purpose”. So I invite you to read the next article to learn how to design and live a purposeful life.
If you want to know more about about purpose visit my website www.sharonirosenberg.com and read my book WTF is purpose.
