Do you enjoy happiness or are u happy to enjoy?

The lack of a non-problematic life-world, one in which exists a structured series of beliefs, assumptions, feelings, values and cultural practices that constitute meaning in everyday life, removes the comforting sense that it is possible to live against a contextual background that speaks implicitly of firmly cemented meanings which there is no need constantly to re-justify. As a consequence, there may arise a preoccupation with ultimate questions: is it a good thing to have been born; what is the meaning of death; can individuals survive death; given the inevitability of death, how should life be lived; how may happiness be achieved; is death an evil or a good?

This condition of mind is recognisably modern, although it would be inaccurate to regard it as exclusively the product of our own century. Indeed, in going back much further, we discover that one of the central themes of Aristotle's Ethics reflects this preoccupation with the purpose of life and his intuition, that the special rational faculty of human beings is the key to our sense of purpose and fulfilment, is one that has come down to us through the centuries.

What Aristotle meant when he defined happiness in this way has to do with his belief that human beings have a function to fulfil in their lives which has to do with their proper use of the rational principle, a quality unique to mankind and not possessed by either plants or animals. He goes on to argue that when human beings function in such a way as to do excellently whatever tasks fall to them, such as playing the harp, for example, then it may be said that they are demonstrating an activity of soul in accordance with the rational principle and so in accordance also with virtue. As a result, they may be said to be leading good lives from which happiness will grow.

The view that the purpose or meaning of life may or may not have to do with the achievement of happiness and the problem of how such happiness may be defined have been and remain philosophical staples. At one point in his Gorgias, for example, Plato has Socrates and Callicles develop an argument in which the issue is to decide whether or not "a man who itches and wants to scratch and whose opportunities for scratching are unbounded" can be said to lead a happy life spent continually scratching.

Tell me once more; do you declare that pleasure is identical with good, or
are there some pleasures which are not good?

In his Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill returns to this argument. He wishes to define his Principle of Utility, or Greatest Happiness Principle, which he regards as the foundation of morals, and, in the course of this passage he asserts, that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure."

One of the features characteristic of human nature is the felt need to live life seriously in regard to the choices that are made and the positions that are adopted, even though it may be perfectly apparent that other points of view and other choices might, logically, be equally acceptable. This quality of mind and general predisposition are not evident in other creatures. As Thomas Nagel makes clear in his essay "The Absurd" [Journal of Philosophy, 68 (20), 1971: Hanfling: P. 48-59], this inability to live with a diminished sense of the seriousness of life may be the fundamental reason for the sense that both Nagel and many others have that life is, in fact, absurd. He argues that the life of a mouse, for example, is not absurd because "he lacks the ... self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse." This is very far removed from the more usual position that the lives of animals serve only as examples of meaningless existence. In the course of his argument, Nagel develops the view that the human quest for meaning and a sense of purpose in life is derived from the fact that we are preoccupied with such issues as the brevity of the human life-span, our minuteness within the universe as a whole, the inevitability of the eventual disappearance of all of mankind, our sense that life is, if possible, something to be escaped. Rather than attempt heroically to deny the truth of these perceptions and fight against the sense of our own absurdity with which they fill us, Nagel asserts, we would do well to accept what cannot be escaped and, in so doing, demonstrate our ability not only to understand our human limitations, but also to appreciate their unimportance in our situation:

If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

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