Human flourishing, pleasure and the good life.
Nick Gellatly
A different question
Week 1 asked whose happiness counts. Week 2 asked something more uncomfortable: can you be wrong about your own happiness?
“Happiness is a state of mind, specifically a feeling of contentment” (Epicurus)
“Happiness is an activity, specifically a way of living your life” (Aristotle)
Today’s objective is for you to decide which answer you think is best.
Dr Tristan Moyle set two ancient Greek answers against each other, and then the seminar dropped a thought experiment on us that has been rattling around my head ever since. I came away with a clearer idea of what my café is for, and a date in the diary.
Two Greeks, two answers
Epicurus. Happiness is a state of mind: the absence of physical pain and a mind free of disturbance. Not the sex, drugs and rock and roll version, which the lecture pointed out produces hangovers, regret and worry, all of which are pain. His four-part cure says what is good is easy to get, and the natural and necessary list is short: food and water, shelter, warmth, clothing, some friends and trusted companions, a bit of nature. Unhappiness comes from wanting things that are luxurious, unnecessary and hard to obtain.
That is a materially modest and socially rich account of the good life, and it is more or less my café’s shopping list.
Aristotle. Happiness is not a feeling but an activity, a life lived well over time. Eudaimonia gets translated as flourishing, and the lecture offered a useful test: it is closer to applause than to a mood. We are rational, social animals, so flourishing means exercising good character among other people, sustained over years rather than managed once or twice. It needs friends, freedom, and enough leisure to pursue something meaningful. You cannot flourish, Aristotle thought, as a wage slave.
The real argument is not pleasure against meaning. It is subjective against objective. Hedonism says if I feel happy then I am happy, and nobody else gets a vote. Aristotle says a life can be going badly while it feels fine, and that how it feels from the inside does not settle the matter.
Felicity
The sharpest thing in the lecture was a philosopher’s example I had not met before. Thomas Hill’s deferential wife. Felicity is devoted to her husband, moves cities for his job, treats her own friendships and preferences as unimportant, and develops few interests of her own. She is entirely contented.
Is her life going well? Hill says something is missing, and names it: self-respect. Excessive deference is not a virtue but the vice of servility. The point is that the kind of person you are matters to how well your life is going, not only how you feel about it.
I wrote a few weeks ago that I had lived a life of compliance. I meant it as a complaint against myself. Felicity gives me better vocabulary for what I was actually describing, and rather less self-pity. She is not a failure. She is a person whose preferences were quietly organised around somebody else’s, in a way that felt, from the inside, like contentment.
Which is exactly the trouble with the subjective account. If happiness is only how it feels, Felicity has nothing to complain about, and neither did I.
The machine
The seminar ran Robert Nozick’s thought experiment from 1974. A machine will give you any experience you choose, for the rest of your life, while you float in a tank. You will not know you are in it. Would you plug in?
Most people say no. If pleasure were all that mattered, that refusal would make no sense. So something else matters, and Nozick names three things: we want to do things rather than have the experience of doing them, we want to be a certain sort of person, and we want contact with a reality we did not construct. Someone long in the tank, he says, is an indeterminate blob. There is no fact about whether he is kind or brave.
My answer was no, and the reasons are occupational. I spent a career in PR, which is the applied version of the machine. The job is to produce an experience of an organisation that is rather better than the organisation. Somebody who has built small experience machines for a living does not queue up for a large one.
There is a queer reading of it too, and it is the one I would offer the group. Anyone who has spent years presenting an acceptable version of themselves already knows what a fabricated life costs. The machine offers a welcome that nobody is actually giving you. That is the closet with better lighting.
The seminar’s best question came last: if you discovered you were already inside one, would you unplug? Most people say no to plugging in and no to unplugging, which do not obviously agree. Nozick’s critics call it status quo bias, and suspect the intuition tracks attachment to the familiar rather than a principle about reality. My answer stays consistent, I think, because the argument is about what a person is rather than what is true. Leaving late still leaves you something to become.
What this does to the café
Queerly Beloved Café is, technically speaking, a small experience machine. A designed room, a curated atmosphere, a staged feeling of belonging. That should worry me, and this week it has turned into the most useful thing I have.
Nozick gives me a test the project has to pass. If the room delivers the experience of belonging to people who remain unconnected to anyone, it fails on its own terms and I have built a tank with scones. If it produces real contact between real people, and the design simply makes that easier, it is the opposite of the machine. That is now the design brief rather than a nagging doubt.
Three consequences follow.
- The room has to do something, not just feel like something. Aristotle’s flourishing is activity. So the evening needs an occupation, however modest: making, reading, cooking, talking to a stranger with a prompt in your hand. A pleasant atmosphere with nothing to do in it is the warm bath conception, and Epicurus is welcome to it.
- The documentation is not the artefact. Stills and film are experience and can only ever be that. The evening is the work, and the footage is a report from it. For a media student that is an awkward inversion, and it belongs in the reflection.
- The grief corner stays. A machine would edit out loss. A real room cannot, and the seminar has made that a point in its favour rather than a caveat.
Epicurus supplies the shopping list: warmth, shelter, something to eat, trusted companions. Aristotle supplies the reason it is not a gesture: flourishing needs company and practice, so belonging is a condition of a good life rather than a pleasant extra.
And the rest of the semester
The machine turns out to be a useful test to hold against everything else I am making this term.
Motion Graphics. My title sequence for My Beautiful Laundrette is pure experience, two minutes of manufactured feeling, and there is no shame in that as long as I know it. Titles promise a world. Nozick’s question is whether anyone can live in it. The interesting design problem is whether a sequence can point at something real rather than simply produce a mood.
Immersive Storytelling. Complemental, the binaural piece for the Sedgwick, is the closest thing to a literal experience machine I will build. Headphones, a fabricated acoustic space, a listener who forgets where they are. The distinction that matters is the one Nozick draws: the piece should send someone back into the gallery looking harder at the actual rocks, not replace the gallery with a better one.
Welcome Buddy. Nothing simulated about it. A new student either is welcomed or is not, and no amount of well-made video substitutes for someone saying hello. It remains the least assessed and most real thing on my timetable.
Taken together, three of the four are in the business of making experiences, and the fourth is the one that reminds me what they are for.
A date
Queerly Beloved Café will run in the first week of Advent. Advent Sunday falls on 29 November this year, so the café sits somewhere between then and 5 December, with the artefact due on the 11th.
The week is not an accident, though I intend to keep the reasoning quiet in the room itself.
Advent is the season of waiting in the dark for something that has not arrived yet. It is the one stretch of the church year that does not ask anyone to be cheerful, which makes it the right week for a café built on joy that has room for loss. It is also the season of preparing a place, and of a couple who famously could not find one.
More practically, it is the week when university term is grinding to its end, everyone is tired, the evenings are black by four, and Christmas is arriving whether people have somewhere warm to go or not. If a room with a lamp and a pot of tea is ever going to earn its keep, it is then.
No scripture on the walls. One candle, which reads as warmth to everyone and as something else to those who recognise it. That is as loud as the theology gets.
So finally answering the first question posed in this session:
Today’s objective is for you to decide which answer you think is best.
- “Happiness is a state of mind, specifically a feeling of contentment” (Epicurus) or;
- “Happiness is an activity, specifically a way of living your life” (Aristotle)
So, which one?
I think Aristotle gives the better account of what happiness is. Epicurus gives the better advice on how to get it.
The test is whether a person can be wrong about their own life. Hedonism says no: if you feel contented, you are happy, and there is nothing further to discuss. Two cases make that hard to accept. Thomas Hill’s deferential wife is entirely contented, and her contentment was produced by an arrangement that cost her a self. Nozick’s tank offers maximum pleasant experience with no doing, no company and no character, and most people decline it. If contentment were the whole of the good, both would be triumphs. Aristotle’s answer explains why they are not: happiness is activity, exercised over time, among other people, and how it feels from the inside does not settle whether it is going well.
Epicurus is still right about almost everything on his list. What is good is easy to get: warmth, shelter, something to eat, a few trusted companions. That is a modest and generous account of what a good life actually needs.
This is why my artefact takes both. Queerly Beloved Café is Epicurean in its materials and Aristotelian in its claim. A lamp, a teapot, mismatched chairs, and something for people to do together, because belonging is a condition of flourishing rather than a pleasant extra.
It also answers Week 1. If flourishing requires company, freedom and a little leisure, the response to unequal flourishing is to build those conditions, not to ask people to feel better about going without them.
Images for this post
The illustrations for this series are made in Canva, in a flat vector style borrowed from broadsheet long-read journalism. The palette stays fixed: cream, deep navy, a muted grey and one warm amber accent. There are no people in any of them, and no faces, which is deliberate. A module about who gets pictured as happy is not well served by stock photographs of contented strangers, and the argument of my artefact is that belonging is built out of rooms, objects and arrangements rather than staged smiles. So the images show the furniture and leave the people to turn up.
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