FORMACIÓN DE RECURSOS HUMANOS

By way of fleshing out this view just a bit further, I propose three theses on happiness. The first is that tranquillity is con- nected with the long-range sense of happiness discussed above, and so with the notion of a proper ordering of soul. Happiness is best understood, at the start, in terms of tranquillity. One gen- eral feature of happiness so understood is that it captures the connection between happiness and being at rest. It is at rest in the sense of lacking significant discord; it is peaceful, at a deep level. Further, it is at rest in the sense of being something like coming to a stop rather than like a process of moving towards a goal. It is more like an end state, a completion or fulfillment, than a condition of lacking and overcoming of lack. “Tranquillity” is the term usually used to translate the Greek term “ataraxia,” a term that is the natural competitor to “eudai- monia,” which is the one that Plato and Aristotle use. The latter is normally translated as “happiness,” and less often as “blessed- ness”; ataraxia is also difficult to translate, and “tranquillity” is something of an approximation. Understanding happiness as tranquillity helps us to see that the enemy of happiness is anxi- ety. I have in mind not so much anxiety about this or that event—the sort of anxiety you have about getting back to the Nebuchadnezzar before the Agents catch you—but rather a general anxiety about things being out of kilter, not stable, not holding, potentially dissolving—the kind of “splinter in your mind” that keeps you awake at night.

This brings me to my second thesis about happiness, which is that one fundamental view associates happiness with ataraxia (tranquillity), and the other follows Aristotle in associating hap- piness with activity (energeia). The debate between Stoics and Aristotelians, in other words, articulates basic alternatives. Aristotelians define happiness as activity of the soul in accor-

dance with excellence (arete). Happiness is the summum bonum, and the highest good for a person consists in excel- lence in his proper function (ergon), that is, in the proper activ- ity or work of the psyche. There is a place, if a problematic one, for “external goods” (like decent food and a safe environment) in this picture; happiness is not just the exercise of virtue. This is what one might call an objectivist definition of happiness, and it has several obvious advantages. It provides us with a means of assessing claims to happiness and of explaining how people can be mistaken in thinking they are happy when in fact they are (as The Matrix portrays) nothing more than human batter- ies. As already noted, this is useful with respect to the “happy slave” or “happy tyrant” problem. It links up happiness with ethics and with how one leads one’s life as a whole. It provides a basis for distinguishing between happiness and contentment.

Putting aside problems of making sense of the notions of soul, natural function, and excellence, and the famous diffi- culty of reconciling practical and theoretical virtue, however, this definition does not link up clearly with the experience of happiness. Aristotle says that excellence (arete) is not a pathos (Nicomachean Ethics II.v.3), and never says that happiness is a feeling (a pathos). Since happiness is energeia, its activity would seem at odds with the passivity connoted by the term “pathos.” And as an activity in accordance with virtues that by definition are not feelings, it would be strange if happiness were understood by him as a feeling or emotion. Happiness is rather more like Neo’s active decision making and discovery of truth about self and world, than like a lazy virtual tryst with the woman in red.

Finally, a third thesis about happiness: that neither of the two basic alternative views of happiness is alone adequate. I have mentioned some reasons why I think this true of happi- ness as Aristotelian activity. In spite of my endorsement of the association of happiness with tranquillity, however, one cannot accept that association without emendation. The tranquillity view of happiness tends to be associated with apatheia, with passionlessness, with a leveling out of the emotions, with detachment or indifference. This is precisely because of the close association of tranquillity with rest, peacefulness, and the other qualities already spoken of; and the contrary association of the passions, emotions, and attachment with perturbance,

discord, motion. Yet to live a life of tranquillity so understood rightly strikes us as barren, dry, uninspired, as forsaking pre- cisely much that is of value in human life.

Happiness as tranquillity in this long lasting, structural sense is compatible with anxiety and lack of contentment in the every- day sense. It is not so much equanimity as it is equipoise, bal- ance, coherence and settledness in one’s basic stance. At the level of lived experience, on this account, one can and indeed must have all sorts of passions, attachments, commitments. These may well be turbulent at times; they certainly put one’s happiness, in the sense of mood, at risk, and in that sense they put one’s happiness in the hands of others.

The Matrix

as Mirro r

Happiness as tranquillity requires evaluative assessment of my life; otherwise it would be difficult to distinguish between con- tentment and tranquillity. This assessment is, in the broadest, a philosophical one. From Socrates on down through the tradi- tion, the questions “Who am I?” and “What sort of person ought I to be?” are fundamental to the philosophical enterprise. Philosophical recognition may often (to recall a point offered at the start of this essay) require personal experience, not just abstract argumentation. And art—including movies such as The Matrix—can both portray a problem, and, by holding up a mir- ror to the spectator, instigate reflection about its relevance and solution. This chapter is but a sketch of that reflection.3

3_{I am grateful to Eduardo Velasquez (Washington and Lee University) for the} invitation to discuss The Matrix with his seminar “Film, Fiction, and the Politics of Popular Culture” on May 28th, 2001, and to the students for their illuminat- ing thoughts. One of them—David Newheiser—kindly provided me with sec- ondary sources relating to the movie. I am also grateful to William Irwin for his helpful suggestions. My discussion of happiness is drawn from the unedited manuscript of my Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1999), Chapter 5. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to draw upon the book.