What is happiness? It sounds like a simple question. You probably have an intuitive answer — something like feeling good, or getting what you want, or being loved. But philosophers have been arguing about this question for over two thousand years, and their answers are surprisingly different from each other, and often surprisingly different from what we assume. In this deck, we are going to look at four major philosophical accounts of happiness. First, Aristotle's idea of eudaimonia — often translated as flourishing or the good life. Second, the Stoic ideal of apatheia — a kind of deep, unshakeable tranquility. Third, the Epicurean concept of ataraxia — freedom from disturbance. And fourth, the Utilitarian view that happiness is essentially pleasure, and that the goal of life and society is to maximise it. By the end, you will have a richer, more critical understanding of what happiness might actually mean — and what kind of life it might require.

Let us start with Aristotle, who wrote about happiness in his Nicomachean Ethics — a work he apparently dedicated to his son Nicomachus. Aristotle was a student of Plato, and Plato was a student of Socrates, so when Aristotle writes about the good life, he is writing in a tradition that goes back to the very birth of Western philosophy. Aristotle begins with a deceptively simple observation: everything we do, we do for a reason. We eat to satisfy hunger. We work to earn money. We earn money to buy things. We buy things to feel secure or comfortable or happy. But this chain of reasons has to end somewhere. There must be something we want for its own sake — not as a means to something else, but as an end in itself. Aristotle called this the highest good, and he argued that virtually everyone agrees on what it is. They call it happiness. But then the disagreement begins. Because what is happiness, exactly?

Aristotle had a very specific answer, and it is quite different from what most people today mean when they say they want to be happy. He called the highest good eudaimonia — a Greek word that is usually translated as happiness, but which more literally means something like flourishing, or living well and doing well. For Aristotle, eudaimonia was not a feeling. It was not a pleasant inner state or a mood. It was an activity. Specifically, it was the activity of living in accordance with your highest nature — exercising your distinctly human capacities of reason and virtue, fully and excellently, over the course of a complete life. Think of it like this: a knife is doing well when it cuts cleanly. A musician is doing well when they play beautifully. A human being is doing well — is flourishing — when they are exercising their characteristic human capacities excellently. And for Aristotle, those capacities are above all rational thought and moral virtue.

So what does eudaimonia actually look like in practice? For Aristotle, it means developing and exercising the virtues — courage, justice, generosity, honesty, practical wisdom, and the rest. It means engaging in meaningful activities: friendship, philosophy, civic life, creative work. It means living as a full participant in your community, not as a hermit or a passive spectator. And crucially, it means doing all of this not occasionally, but as a sustained way of life. Aristotle famously said that one swallow does not make a spring. A single happy day does not make a happy life. Eudaimonia is not a moment — it is a whole life, lived well. This is why Aristotle thought you could not really judge whether a person had lived a good life until it was over. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells a story of the wise lawgiver Solon, who refused to call any man happy while he still lived — because fortune could always turn. Aristotle was making a similar point: happiness is the shape of an entire life.

There is something both inspiring and demanding about Aristotle's account. It is inspiring because it tells us that happiness is not luck, not wealth, not pleasure — it is something we can actively cultivate through how we live. But it is also demanding because it means that a life of idle comfort, or passive pleasure, or moral cowardice, is not a happy life — no matter how good it feels. Aristotle was quite explicit about this. He thought that people who equated happiness with pleasure were confusing a good life with the life of cattle. He also thought that people who equated happiness with wealth were confused about means and ends — money is useful for getting things, but it is not itself the thing worth having. And he thought that people who equated happiness with honour or fame were making their happiness dependent on other people's opinions, which is fragile and unreliable. True eudaimonia, for Aristotle, comes from within — from the quality of your character and the excellence of your activities.