Throughout the ages, the question has often been asked, "Is happiness the meaning of Life?" There have been widely divergent attempts at an answer, and today we are no closer to consensus than the ancients were. In this article, I will defend the proposition that happiness could be the meaning of life, but it depends.
Depends on what? Well, for starters, it depends what you mean by "happiness," as well as what you mean by "meaning." Also, the question would implicate your beliefs about the universe (cosmology), God (theology), moral philosophy, etc. It really is a loaded question, but also an interesting one, so let's consider it.
As such, "happiness" seems to involve both the absence of negatives and the presence of positives. The negatives would include physical pain and psychological distress, as well as the things that would cause one to experience those ills, and the positives would include physical pleasure and emotional contentment and delight, as well as the things that cause one to have those positive experiences.
Of course, in this world, one cannot expect to experience only positive things. But happiness would seem to require, in total, more positives than negatives. While the "wise man on the rack" may lead to interesting philosophical speculation, it is hard to imagine that anyone could be genuinely happy while simultaneously experiencing physical torture and abandonment by friends and family, and without the benefit of any real hope for some future benefit to accrue to anyone from his or her present agony. Some critical mass of positive experiences seems to be necessary for happiness to be realized.
Sometimes the connection is more abstract, but even then, it remains essentially personal. For example, a cross is meaningful to a Christian because it reminds her of her belief in Jesus and her commitment to obey his teachings. This belief and commitment are essentially personal: no one else can have those beliefs for her or make that commitment on her behalf; she must do it herself. She may say, "Well, Jesus is the Savior of all the world, not just me," but her belief about Jesus is her belief, regardless of whether it is true. She believes that the cross is meaningful because of her personal experiences and decisions. If no one had ever told her about Jesus and if she had no experience of the Christian religion or its teachings, then she would not see any religious meaning in a cross; she may just think it's an "X" and be reminded of playing tic-tac-toe.
So "meaning" seems to describe some significant personal connection to a thing, person, idea, experience, etc.
Also, the meaning of a thing may be positive or negative. If you are behind on your mortgage, the name of the lender may mean something negative to you. You may experience intense negative emotion if you see the creditor's logo on a billboard or on an unopened envelope.
However, when people speak of the "meaning of Life," they almost always mean something positive. When they seek a "meaning" to their lives, they are looking for something that will indicate the ultimate good that comes from their lives or the sum total of good things that they experience in life.
It is possible that for some people, Life, and all that it entails, means something negative: chronic pain, widespread suffering, etc. Someone who commits suicide, for example, seems to find the thought of continued life unbearable.
Nevertheless, even though Life may mean something negative to some people, we will consider "meaning" only in the positive sense. This makes sense, since "happiness" is a positive state, so if the meaning of Life is happiness, then Life would have a positive meaning. In this sense, when people ask about the meaning of Life, they are asking, "What would make my life worth living? What, in the grand scheme of things, would make my life a success?"
I think that when people ask the question of whether Happiness is the Meaning of Life, they mean something like the following: "When considering my life as a whole, is it best for me to pursue, as my ultimate objective, a state of overall satisfaction and delight with who I am and with the circumstances of my life?"
Some people, like Immanuel Kant, may object that we do perform some actions merely because we believe it is the right thing to do, without regard for our own personal welfare or happiness. I have subscribed to this belief in the past. But when I consider the experience of holding to this moral belief or acting upon it, I have to acknowledge that I did experience a sense of pleasure and self-satisfaction from maintaining a "higher" or more "noble" moral code. Perhaps it seemed higher in relation to others, or maybe it was only in relation to myself and what I would have been if I had not adopted a particular moral position. Regardless, feeling like I was maintaining a higher or better moral code gave me a very real sense of pleasure, and I suspect it was this pleasure (i.e., one of the ingredients of happiness) that motivated my moral conviction.
People are complex creatures, so our motives and our experiences are also complex. Sometimes, we experience conflicting desires and thought processes. (Some of the Great Courses lectures really spell this out in great detail, such as Outsmart Yourself: Brain Based-Strategies for a Better You by Peter Vishton.) In that case, we may knowingly decide on a course of action that produces some unpleasant effects, even some intense pain or suffering, but our belief that some greater good will come from our action does give us some real experience of happiness in the present, even in the midst of the pain and suffering. There may also be fears of worse pains in the future, such as when one undergoes surgery to avoid worse health problems in the future, or when a Christian martyr refuses to deny Jesus because of fears of eternal agony in hell or because of the hope of everlasting happiness in heaven. We may say we are doing something ultimately for God or for humanity, but it seems we are also doing what we believe will bring us the most happiness.
I recall an objection to this idea in a philosophy class -- I regret that I do not remember the source of this thought experiment, so if anyone can help me identify the proper source, I would appreciate it. The objection goes like this. Imagine someone gave you two options, and that after you made your choice, you would not remember the act of making the choice, kind of like the red and the blue pill offered to Neo in the Matrix. The first option was to have your next-of-kin cared for after you are deceased, but you would honestly believe that they were not cared for. You would experience all the distress of believing that they would suffer after your death, when in fact, they would end up doing quite well. The second option was that you would think that your next-of-kin would be well cared for after your death, but in fact, they would be left destitute and in desperate circumstances. Although you would have all the pleasure and happiness of feeling like you had made good arrangements for your loved ones, the reality would be that all those arrangements would fall through or completely backfire.
So given those two choices, which would you choose? The first scenario appears to involve less happiness for you, personally, while the second scenario appears to mean that you would experience more happiness for yourself. Yet everyone, or nearly everyone, who considers this thought experiment says that they would choose the first option: to have their loved ones well cared for, even though they would experience all the unhappiness and distress of believing that their loved ones would not be well cared for.
This thought experiment seems to cut against the idea that happiness is the meaning of life for people. Given the right conditions, most people would apparently sacrifice their own personal happiness for the well-being of those whom they love.
However, I am a little skeptical of the conclusion that we are supposed to draw from this thought experiment. Although the person answering the hypothetical question is apparently considering both their immediate happiness and their long-term suffering, recent studies seem to indicate that when we think of our future selves, we use the part of our brain that is active when we think of other people; the anticipated future pain or pleasure is less real, less tangible, less concrete, less vivid, than the present pain or pleasure we are actually experiencing now. (These studies are cited by Peter Vishton in his Great Courses series Outsmart Yourself: Brain-Based Strategies for a Better You.)
Of course, this is not a new idea: Socrates expounded a similar theory when attempting to explain why people so often sacrifice a greater, longer-lasting future good for a smaller, more short-term immediate one. A small object that is very near to our eyes appears to be larger than a very large object that is a long ways away. Similarly, a present pleasure appears far greater than a future one, even though the future pleasure may be much richer and more rewarding. We are very poor at evaluating future benefits in comparison to more immediate ones.
The above theory is obvious to anyone who has ever tried to kick a bad habit, break an addiction or compulsive behavior, etc. You want to lose weight for a variety of good reasons, but all those reasons involve some future payoff; that brownie or cheeseburger looks delicious today.
Take cigarettes, which I quit cold-turkey back in 2004. For the first few days, the temptation to smoke would be incredibly intense at times. The reduced risk of lung cancer many years in the future seemed a poor reward for enduring the all-consuming craving for nicotine that I was experiencing in the moment. Obviously, lung cancer would be much more painful than a momentary craving, no matter how intense, but in the moment, the craving was more real. That's why, as Mark Twain put it, "quitting smoking is easy; I've done it hundreds of times." I tried, and failed, many times before I finally succeeded. And what did the trick for me was a respiratory infection that kept me up one night because I could barely breathe. I thought, "So this is what emphysema would be like, only all the time?" Whenever I had the craving, the only thing that worked to fight it was recalling to my mind, as vividly as possible, my (at the time) recent experience of barely being able to breathe in the middle of the night. That was enough to tip the scales in favor of not smoking (that in addition to a couple of dozen other techniques to psych myself out of smoking, but recalling my experience of gasping for breath was the biggest catalyst for me for quitting smoking). My tactic makes sense: I had to make the pain of smoking real in a present, tangible way, in order for me to use it as a counterweight to my monkey-mind's craving for relief of my intense nicotine fit.
In situations, like the thought experiment described earlier, where we appear to be sacrificing our own happiness for the good of others, I believe that if we are self-aware enough, we will find that we really believe (perhaps subconsciously) that we will be happier if we make the sacrifice than if we don't. In the thought experiment, you are making a decision about the future welfare of your loved ones, but you will not remember making it in the future. Nevertheless, while you are making the decision, you would be very much aware of your feelings of kinship and loyalty, as well as your desire to feel good about yourself as being a good person who does what is right. On the other hand, you would be very acutely aware, while you were making the decision, of the distress of feeling like you had betrayed those to whom you were closest, and feeling like you had been a bad person who had behaved shamefully and treacherously. I believe that those immediate feelings would factor into your decision (especially when considering the thought experiment as some abstract, hypothetical question), so even if you decided on an apparently honorable and altruistic course of action, you would very likely be impelled towards that course of action by your desire to gain happiness or pleasure and to avoid pain and emotional distress.
Based on my own experience, I believe Aristotle was right when he identified happiness as the ultimate motivation for all our actions and decisions. It may seem to cheapen moral ideals to say that we pursue them because of our own desire for happiness and pleasure, in conjunction with our (possibly greater) desire to avoid pain and suffering. But if something is good, why should we not take pleasure and delight in it? If anything, this seems to enhance the value of our emotional experiences, rather than degrade them. Of course, it may be that we are designed to take pleasure in doing what is morally good, or it may be that as social creatures, we evolved the faculty of taking pleasure in acting for the good of others, rather than ourselves. In either case, the pleasure or happiness we experience may point to some further good, as defined by God or in terms of what will benefit our species as a whole. But if so, that would not be a good which we experience directly. What we do experience, what actually does motivate us to act or not act, is the desire for happiness and pleasure, operating in conjunction with the desire to avoid pain and suffering.
So is Happiness the Meaning of Life? What we are really asking seems to be, "When considering my life as a whole, is it best for me to pursue, as my ultimate objective, a state of overall emotional joy and contentment combined with physical pleasure?" We may consciously say that we have higher and more noble motives than to make happiness our ultimate aim, but nonetheless, happiness does appear to be what we do, in fact, aim at.
If you've read Viktor Frankl's incredible book Man's Search for Meaning, then my conclusion probably seems tawdry and ignoble. After all, Mr. Frankl showed that even in the midst of incredible suffering and deprivation, people could nevertheless find meaning in their lives. However, I don't think that my conclusion disagrees with Frankl's report. The inmates at Auschwitz desperately needed some source of happiness that would counter the terrible cruelties inflicted upon them by the Nazis. The meaning that they were able to find in their lives, even in Auschwitz, gave them some very real happiness.
So if finding meaning is what gave them happiness, then how could that meaning be happiness? That seems an irresolvable dilemma. Yet, there are, perhaps, different degrees or levels of meaning that we can experience. Why did they seek meaning? For the good of another? Perhaps, but as Frankl readily admitted, most of them knew that their friends and family were likely to perish and that possibly nothing of their former lives would survive. If a husband knows that his wife or daughter is likely already dead, or at any rate, that she is unlikely to be benefited by the significance and meaning that he attaches to their relationship, then is it really ultimately for the good of that person that one is acting? Even if one is motivated by a desire to help others or to suffer "well," it seems that the source of that motivation is the happiness or joy that one experiences from acting in accordance with one's convictions or of proving to oneself that one can still find goodness in the world, even if only in some small and seemingly inconsequential act of kindness. In all of that, the deeper or more powerful sense of attachment seems to be to the desire for happiness.
Of course, what I've said above may be completely wrong. No doubt, if Viktor Frankl were alive today and read this, he would likely offer some powerful rebuttal, made all the more persuasive by his having lived through it, first hand.
Christians may point to Jesus' passion and crucifixion as an example of God demonstrating that love is a greater good than happiness, but doesn't the Bible say that it was because of the joy set before him that he endured the cross? (Hebrews 12:2, KJV.) It may be that God created us for relationship with him through Christ, yet such a beatific vision seems to entail our own happiness, as well as the possibility of bringing happiness to God. If Christ is our example, then according to the Bible, God the Father chose to validate Jesus by saying, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." So for the Christian, maybe the meaning of Life is happiness, in the sense that we share in and enhance God's happiness.
Alternatively, maybe there is a Deist God who created humans for some purpose of which we are unaware, and that all of our pleasures and pains are aimed at something else entirely. Or perhaps the evolutionary biologists are right, and that the capacity for happiness is merely a trait which we evolved because it was useful for survival as a species, basically a tool for getting us to do the things that make our species more likely to flourish. But in either event, we seem to be more attached to happiness than to anything else, so to us, subjectively, happiness still seems to be the meaning of Life.
But if I take a step back and look at what I have written, it also seems so absurd that I should consider or write about something so grand as the meaning of Life. I can't even figure out how to program a DVD player to record something on TV. (I suppose I could, but it doesn't mean that much to me: I don't believe learning that skill would really increase my happiness.) I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast today, yet somehow I can write about the meaning of Life?
Is happiness the meaning of Life? Instead of making any claim about the meaning of Life for anyone and everyone, let me just say for myself what I take to be the greatest good: to live with peace and contentment, fostering rich and rewarding relationships with others, doing work that I enjoy and which expresses what I believe to be my deepest nature, and feeling satisfied at the end of my life that I left the world a better place than it was when I found it; and I believe that these things are good because they would make me happy. So ultimately, for me, I think the meaning of life is happiness.
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| Is Happiness the Meaning of Life? |
Depends on what? Well, for starters, it depends what you mean by "happiness," as well as what you mean by "meaning." Also, the question would implicate your beliefs about the universe (cosmology), God (theology), moral philosophy, etc. It really is a loaded question, but also an interesting one, so let's consider it.
What do we mean by "Happiness?"
Before deciding whether happiness is the meaning of Life, we have to determine what we mean by "happiness." When people talk of "happiness" and being happy, what they seem to mean is something approximating the following definition: "happiness" is the experience of being satisfied with one's self (who one is) and the circumstances of one's Life, including one's relationships, livelihood, living arrangements, and prospects for the future.As such, "happiness" seems to involve both the absence of negatives and the presence of positives. The negatives would include physical pain and psychological distress, as well as the things that would cause one to experience those ills, and the positives would include physical pleasure and emotional contentment and delight, as well as the things that cause one to have those positive experiences.
Of course, in this world, one cannot expect to experience only positive things. But happiness would seem to require, in total, more positives than negatives. While the "wise man on the rack" may lead to interesting philosophical speculation, it is hard to imagine that anyone could be genuinely happy while simultaneously experiencing physical torture and abandonment by friends and family, and without the benefit of any real hope for some future benefit to accrue to anyone from his or her present agony. Some critical mass of positive experiences seems to be necessary for happiness to be realized.
[Take a break from reading and watch this video about Happiness...]
[Video about happiness, embedded from the TED channel on YouTube: "What Makes a Good Life" by Robert Waldinger]
What do we mean by "Meaning?"
When people speak of something having "meaning" or being "meaningful," they seem to be describing something inherently personal. The thing or experience is meaningful to them. If you press them on what makes something meaningful, it typically involves some essentially personal connection, for example, an old watch has sentimental value because it once belonged to a deceased relative.Sometimes the connection is more abstract, but even then, it remains essentially personal. For example, a cross is meaningful to a Christian because it reminds her of her belief in Jesus and her commitment to obey his teachings. This belief and commitment are essentially personal: no one else can have those beliefs for her or make that commitment on her behalf; she must do it herself. She may say, "Well, Jesus is the Savior of all the world, not just me," but her belief about Jesus is her belief, regardless of whether it is true. She believes that the cross is meaningful because of her personal experiences and decisions. If no one had ever told her about Jesus and if she had no experience of the Christian religion or its teachings, then she would not see any religious meaning in a cross; she may just think it's an "X" and be reminded of playing tic-tac-toe.
So "meaning" seems to describe some significant personal connection to a thing, person, idea, experience, etc.
Also, the meaning of a thing may be positive or negative. If you are behind on your mortgage, the name of the lender may mean something negative to you. You may experience intense negative emotion if you see the creditor's logo on a billboard or on an unopened envelope.
However, when people speak of the "meaning of Life," they almost always mean something positive. When they seek a "meaning" to their lives, they are looking for something that will indicate the ultimate good that comes from their lives or the sum total of good things that they experience in life.
It is possible that for some people, Life, and all that it entails, means something negative: chronic pain, widespread suffering, etc. Someone who commits suicide, for example, seems to find the thought of continued life unbearable.
Nevertheless, even though Life may mean something negative to some people, we will consider "meaning" only in the positive sense. This makes sense, since "happiness" is a positive state, so if the meaning of Life is happiness, then Life would have a positive meaning. In this sense, when people ask about the meaning of Life, they are asking, "What would make my life worth living? What, in the grand scheme of things, would make my life a success?"
I think that when people ask the question of whether Happiness is the Meaning of Life, they mean something like the following: "When considering my life as a whole, is it best for me to pursue, as my ultimate objective, a state of overall satisfaction and delight with who I am and with the circumstances of my life?"
So is Happiness the Meaning of Life?
For any individual person out there, happiness could reasonably be seen as the meaning of life. As Aristotle pointed out thousands of years ago in the Nichomachean Ethics, happiness is the one thing that we do for its own sake, without reference to any further ends. For anything that we want, we want it either because the thing itself makes us happier, or because it enables us to obtain some further good that will make us happier.Some people, like Immanuel Kant, may object that we do perform some actions merely because we believe it is the right thing to do, without regard for our own personal welfare or happiness. I have subscribed to this belief in the past. But when I consider the experience of holding to this moral belief or acting upon it, I have to acknowledge that I did experience a sense of pleasure and self-satisfaction from maintaining a "higher" or more "noble" moral code. Perhaps it seemed higher in relation to others, or maybe it was only in relation to myself and what I would have been if I had not adopted a particular moral position. Regardless, feeling like I was maintaining a higher or better moral code gave me a very real sense of pleasure, and I suspect it was this pleasure (i.e., one of the ingredients of happiness) that motivated my moral conviction.
People are complex creatures, so our motives and our experiences are also complex. Sometimes, we experience conflicting desires and thought processes. (Some of the Great Courses lectures really spell this out in great detail, such as Outsmart Yourself: Brain Based-Strategies for a Better You by Peter Vishton.) In that case, we may knowingly decide on a course of action that produces some unpleasant effects, even some intense pain or suffering, but our belief that some greater good will come from our action does give us some real experience of happiness in the present, even in the midst of the pain and suffering. There may also be fears of worse pains in the future, such as when one undergoes surgery to avoid worse health problems in the future, or when a Christian martyr refuses to deny Jesus because of fears of eternal agony in hell or because of the hope of everlasting happiness in heaven. We may say we are doing something ultimately for God or for humanity, but it seems we are also doing what we believe will bring us the most happiness.
I recall an objection to this idea in a philosophy class -- I regret that I do not remember the source of this thought experiment, so if anyone can help me identify the proper source, I would appreciate it. The objection goes like this. Imagine someone gave you two options, and that after you made your choice, you would not remember the act of making the choice, kind of like the red and the blue pill offered to Neo in the Matrix. The first option was to have your next-of-kin cared for after you are deceased, but you would honestly believe that they were not cared for. You would experience all the distress of believing that they would suffer after your death, when in fact, they would end up doing quite well. The second option was that you would think that your next-of-kin would be well cared for after your death, but in fact, they would be left destitute and in desperate circumstances. Although you would have all the pleasure and happiness of feeling like you had made good arrangements for your loved ones, the reality would be that all those arrangements would fall through or completely backfire.
So given those two choices, which would you choose? The first scenario appears to involve less happiness for you, personally, while the second scenario appears to mean that you would experience more happiness for yourself. Yet everyone, or nearly everyone, who considers this thought experiment says that they would choose the first option: to have their loved ones well cared for, even though they would experience all the unhappiness and distress of believing that their loved ones would not be well cared for.
This thought experiment seems to cut against the idea that happiness is the meaning of life for people. Given the right conditions, most people would apparently sacrifice their own personal happiness for the well-being of those whom they love.
However, I am a little skeptical of the conclusion that we are supposed to draw from this thought experiment. Although the person answering the hypothetical question is apparently considering both their immediate happiness and their long-term suffering, recent studies seem to indicate that when we think of our future selves, we use the part of our brain that is active when we think of other people; the anticipated future pain or pleasure is less real, less tangible, less concrete, less vivid, than the present pain or pleasure we are actually experiencing now. (These studies are cited by Peter Vishton in his Great Courses series Outsmart Yourself: Brain-Based Strategies for a Better You.)
Of course, this is not a new idea: Socrates expounded a similar theory when attempting to explain why people so often sacrifice a greater, longer-lasting future good for a smaller, more short-term immediate one. A small object that is very near to our eyes appears to be larger than a very large object that is a long ways away. Similarly, a present pleasure appears far greater than a future one, even though the future pleasure may be much richer and more rewarding. We are very poor at evaluating future benefits in comparison to more immediate ones.
The above theory is obvious to anyone who has ever tried to kick a bad habit, break an addiction or compulsive behavior, etc. You want to lose weight for a variety of good reasons, but all those reasons involve some future payoff; that brownie or cheeseburger looks delicious today.
Take cigarettes, which I quit cold-turkey back in 2004. For the first few days, the temptation to smoke would be incredibly intense at times. The reduced risk of lung cancer many years in the future seemed a poor reward for enduring the all-consuming craving for nicotine that I was experiencing in the moment. Obviously, lung cancer would be much more painful than a momentary craving, no matter how intense, but in the moment, the craving was more real. That's why, as Mark Twain put it, "quitting smoking is easy; I've done it hundreds of times." I tried, and failed, many times before I finally succeeded. And what did the trick for me was a respiratory infection that kept me up one night because I could barely breathe. I thought, "So this is what emphysema would be like, only all the time?" Whenever I had the craving, the only thing that worked to fight it was recalling to my mind, as vividly as possible, my (at the time) recent experience of barely being able to breathe in the middle of the night. That was enough to tip the scales in favor of not smoking (that in addition to a couple of dozen other techniques to psych myself out of smoking, but recalling my experience of gasping for breath was the biggest catalyst for me for quitting smoking). My tactic makes sense: I had to make the pain of smoking real in a present, tangible way, in order for me to use it as a counterweight to my monkey-mind's craving for relief of my intense nicotine fit.
In situations, like the thought experiment described earlier, where we appear to be sacrificing our own happiness for the good of others, I believe that if we are self-aware enough, we will find that we really believe (perhaps subconsciously) that we will be happier if we make the sacrifice than if we don't. In the thought experiment, you are making a decision about the future welfare of your loved ones, but you will not remember making it in the future. Nevertheless, while you are making the decision, you would be very much aware of your feelings of kinship and loyalty, as well as your desire to feel good about yourself as being a good person who does what is right. On the other hand, you would be very acutely aware, while you were making the decision, of the distress of feeling like you had betrayed those to whom you were closest, and feeling like you had been a bad person who had behaved shamefully and treacherously. I believe that those immediate feelings would factor into your decision (especially when considering the thought experiment as some abstract, hypothetical question), so even if you decided on an apparently honorable and altruistic course of action, you would very likely be impelled towards that course of action by your desire to gain happiness or pleasure and to avoid pain and emotional distress.
Based on my own experience, I believe Aristotle was right when he identified happiness as the ultimate motivation for all our actions and decisions. It may seem to cheapen moral ideals to say that we pursue them because of our own desire for happiness and pleasure, in conjunction with our (possibly greater) desire to avoid pain and suffering. But if something is good, why should we not take pleasure and delight in it? If anything, this seems to enhance the value of our emotional experiences, rather than degrade them. Of course, it may be that we are designed to take pleasure in doing what is morally good, or it may be that as social creatures, we evolved the faculty of taking pleasure in acting for the good of others, rather than ourselves. In either case, the pleasure or happiness we experience may point to some further good, as defined by God or in terms of what will benefit our species as a whole. But if so, that would not be a good which we experience directly. What we do experience, what actually does motivate us to act or not act, is the desire for happiness and pleasure, operating in conjunction with the desire to avoid pain and suffering.
Happiness is probably what we're after when we look for Meaning in Life...
So is Happiness the Meaning of Life? What we are really asking seems to be, "When considering my life as a whole, is it best for me to pursue, as my ultimate objective, a state of overall emotional joy and contentment combined with physical pleasure?" We may consciously say that we have higher and more noble motives than to make happiness our ultimate aim, but nonetheless, happiness does appear to be what we do, in fact, aim at.
If you've read Viktor Frankl's incredible book Man's Search for Meaning, then my conclusion probably seems tawdry and ignoble. After all, Mr. Frankl showed that even in the midst of incredible suffering and deprivation, people could nevertheless find meaning in their lives. However, I don't think that my conclusion disagrees with Frankl's report. The inmates at Auschwitz desperately needed some source of happiness that would counter the terrible cruelties inflicted upon them by the Nazis. The meaning that they were able to find in their lives, even in Auschwitz, gave them some very real happiness.
So if finding meaning is what gave them happiness, then how could that meaning be happiness? That seems an irresolvable dilemma. Yet, there are, perhaps, different degrees or levels of meaning that we can experience. Why did they seek meaning? For the good of another? Perhaps, but as Frankl readily admitted, most of them knew that their friends and family were likely to perish and that possibly nothing of their former lives would survive. If a husband knows that his wife or daughter is likely already dead, or at any rate, that she is unlikely to be benefited by the significance and meaning that he attaches to their relationship, then is it really ultimately for the good of that person that one is acting? Even if one is motivated by a desire to help others or to suffer "well," it seems that the source of that motivation is the happiness or joy that one experiences from acting in accordance with one's convictions or of proving to oneself that one can still find goodness in the world, even if only in some small and seemingly inconsequential act of kindness. In all of that, the deeper or more powerful sense of attachment seems to be to the desire for happiness.
Of course, what I've said above may be completely wrong. No doubt, if Viktor Frankl were alive today and read this, he would likely offer some powerful rebuttal, made all the more persuasive by his having lived through it, first hand.
Christians may point to Jesus' passion and crucifixion as an example of God demonstrating that love is a greater good than happiness, but doesn't the Bible say that it was because of the joy set before him that he endured the cross? (Hebrews 12:2, KJV.) It may be that God created us for relationship with him through Christ, yet such a beatific vision seems to entail our own happiness, as well as the possibility of bringing happiness to God. If Christ is our example, then according to the Bible, God the Father chose to validate Jesus by saying, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." So for the Christian, maybe the meaning of Life is happiness, in the sense that we share in and enhance God's happiness.
Alternatively, maybe there is a Deist God who created humans for some purpose of which we are unaware, and that all of our pleasures and pains are aimed at something else entirely. Or perhaps the evolutionary biologists are right, and that the capacity for happiness is merely a trait which we evolved because it was useful for survival as a species, basically a tool for getting us to do the things that make our species more likely to flourish. But in either event, we seem to be more attached to happiness than to anything else, so to us, subjectively, happiness still seems to be the meaning of Life.
But if I take a step back and look at what I have written, it also seems so absurd that I should consider or write about something so grand as the meaning of Life. I can't even figure out how to program a DVD player to record something on TV. (I suppose I could, but it doesn't mean that much to me: I don't believe learning that skill would really increase my happiness.) I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast today, yet somehow I can write about the meaning of Life?
Is happiness the meaning of Life? Instead of making any claim about the meaning of Life for anyone and everyone, let me just say for myself what I take to be the greatest good: to live with peace and contentment, fostering rich and rewarding relationships with others, doing work that I enjoy and which expresses what I believe to be my deepest nature, and feeling satisfied at the end of my life that I left the world a better place than it was when I found it; and I believe that these things are good because they would make me happy. So ultimately, for me, I think the meaning of life is happiness.
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