Happy hedonists

British Medical Journal, Dec 23, 2000 by Roy Porter

Recipes for happiness

How do we define happiness? Have humans always sought happiness? Is it worth pursuing? Should happiness perhaps be classified as a psychiatric disorder? We asked a medical historian, a public health professor, a medical humanities generalist, and a journalist to write about happiness. This is what they said.

Attached as I am to University College London, I often bump into Jeremy Bentham--that is, his stuffed body on display in the college that he helped to found just over 170 years ago (embalming, he thought, was cheaper and more effective than sculpture). Bentham was the founder of utilitarianism, the philosophy that proclaimed that the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" (the "felicific calculus") was the only scientific measure of good and bad, right and wrong--the only worthy goal in life.

For that great reformer, seeking utility was the basic fact of human nature. Everyone's psyche was programmed to pursue pleasure in precisely the same way as bodies necessarily gravitated towards each other, obeying a law of nature. The only difference was that people could pretend they were behaving otherwise, could protest that they were motivated not by vulgar, selfish, hedonistic drives but by supposedly higher, more altruistic ideals. For Bentham, however, all that, to use a favourite phrase of his, was but nonsense on stilts. Did not self denying Christian martyrs expect their bliss in heaven? Did not party poopers such as Scrooge get their kicks out of being killjoys? And did not Queen Victoria find being not amused highly amusing indeed?

Bentham, who judged that pushpin (a tavern game; we might say "pool") was as good as poetry if it gave as much pleasure, wanted all such "gainsayers" to come clean. And there lies one of the reasons that, as historian and as human being, I feel so drawn towards the 18th century: the Georgians were remarkably frank and forthright about being pleasure loving. "Happiness is the only thing of real value in existence," proclaimed the essayist Soame Jenyns; "pleasure is now the principal remaining part of your education," Lord Chesterfield told his dim son.

The hedonism debate

The quest for happiness was crucial to enlightened thinkers throughout Europe. I would not want to suggest that British thinkers had any corner on the idea. Nevertheless, it was a notion that found many of its earliest and most ardent champions in Britain. "I will faithfully pursue that happiness I propose to myself," insisted John Locke--physician as well as philosopher --at the end of the 17th century. And English thinkers remained to the fore in championing the right to happiness.

To picture the Georgians as happy hedonists is not to imply that no one was ever happy before, or sought to be. In antiquity, Epicurus and his followers, while not "epicureans" in the crass "eat, drink, and be merry" sense, had urged a hedonism that prized if not the indulgence of appetites, at least the avoidance of pain. Pagans had their bacchanalia; pastoral painting and poetry gloried in golden age idylls; and the old Christian calendar had feasts as well as fasts--not least, the Twelve Days of Christmas. Familiar artistic themes--the revels of Bacchus and Venus, the cornucopia and the flowing bowl--show times and places of holiday, enjoyment, and abandon.

Yet sensualism had always been anathema. Plato had pictured the appetites as a mutinous crew--only Captain Reason would prevent shipwreck--while the Stoics for their part had insisted that the wise must rise above fleeting pleasures. Christianity then expressed contempt for the flesh--true blessedness would come only through abstinence and asceticism. Concupiscence was the consequence of original sin; and omnipresent images of the Expulsion from Paradise, the danse macabre, and the death's head taught the faithful that they dwelt in a vale of tears in which only the mortification of the flesh would release the spirit. Overall, although there were sunny intervals, hedonism as such was wholly condemned by the church. And many such God-fearing Christians remained in the 18th century; Samuel Johnson for his part advocated what might be called an "infelicific calculus": "Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being."

What was new about the Enlightenment was the advocacy of pleasure not as occasional binges, mystical transports, or louche aristocratic privilege, but as the routine entitlement of people at large to satisfy the senses and not just purify the soul, to seek fulfilment in this world and not only in the next.

What shifts of thinking made hedonism eligible to enlightened minds? In part it was a new turn in religion itself. By 1700 rational Anglicans were picturing God not as a Lord of Vengeance but as the benign architect of a well designed universe: God wanted to be honoured as the author of human happiness. And alongside this new Christian optimism ran the hopeful moral philosophy and aesthetics espoused by John Locke's protege, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. His rhapsodies on the pleasures of virtue pointed the way for those who would champion the virtues of pleasure.