The Pursuit of Happiness?
Journal entry July 3, 2024
Happy 4th!
In the declaration of independence we have the well-worn phrase ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’… the unalienable rights, the natural rights endowed upon all by birth. But the nagging question I ask myself is about the pursuit of happiness which might be a natural right but what does that even mean: to pursue happiness? Maybe that isn’t the right thing to pursue. It is an ambiguous moving target. Maybe wholeness would be a better pursuit, or integrity or even adventure. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Adventure. Hum… or maybe peace or love.
Maybe all of those things. Life, Liberty and Happiness are just three examples not the whole list. The list of natural rights that should not be impinged upon is virtually endless. Maybe the better question is what rights do we not have? Probably the main one is that we, individually and collectively, don’t have the right to impinge upon everyone else’s rights if we could figure out what all of those rights are. What else don’t we have a right to do or be?
Life and liberty, yes. But it is interesting to then throw in the idea of pursuing something, striving toward something as a third element, a verb. I suppose it was more of a rhetorical decision to throw in a pointer toward an ambiguous, open-ended striving toward the future. Onward through the fog! It adds more urgency and sense of purposefulness to the declaration.
But coming back to my main thought: the pursuit of happiness. What is it? What makes us happy? How do you maintain happiness or is it just the pursuit we have a right to? Not happiness itself whatever that might mean. Otherwise it would say ‘Life, Liberty and Happiness’.
My basic thought on happiness is that you have to make yourself happy. No thing and no one outside of yourself can make you happy. A sense of happiness must be pursued inwardly, developed inwardly, cultivated inwardly. Once you are internally happy at your core then you can share that happiness with others. People love to share. We like to share everything, but we can only share what we have and if that is happiness then that is a wonderful thing.
But again, what is happiness? How do you pursue it? It is something to ponder.
At the root of happiness would have to be an exploration and discovery of one’s own feeling of rightness, being in harmony with life, the feeling that you are on the right track, that you are pursuing the right path in life and that you are walking that path. The path that is your ‘strait and narrow’. We all have one.
Thank you, Cecil, for such a thoughtful installment before Independence Day, and an effective catalyst for my own rumination.
For me, to make any attempt at discernment, it is always important to try to put things into context. The “Committee of Five” selected by the Continental Congress to come up with a Declaration included Franklin, Adams, Sherman, Livingston, and Jefferson. It has never been settled as to how it fell to the young Virginian to compose the document. Adams, famous at the time for his legal arguments, later claimed he declined and that he insisted it be Jefferson, who did not recall it transpiring that way. At any rate, I think that picking Jefferson would not have happened without the guidance and approval of the old statesman from Philadelphia. Historian David McCullough tells us that Franklin was not the most influential member of the entire Congress, but surely he had attained the most wisdom.
In “First Principles,” Thomas E. Ricks describes how the revolutionary generation was influenced by classical education and the prevalent awareness in the 1700s of Roman and Greek history, law, literature, philosophy, and concepts of “virtue.” The document that shouted to the world our new “Americanism” did indeed declare that all “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” We learn that the 33-year-old author of that familiar expression was deeply influenced by Epicurus, who states in a letter that “Pleasure is the beginning of and end of living happily.” We can choose to interpret that definition as we see fit, but the Greek philosopher continues, “we are not speaking of the pleasures of a debauched man, . . . but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and the soul from confusion.” Thomas Jefferson himself avowed that “Liberty in all essential needs, is not a privilege granted by Government, but an inherent right possess by all,” and also summarized his Epicurean ideals:
Happiness the aim of life.
Virtue the foundation of happiness
Utility the test of virtue . . .
Virtue consists in
1. Prudence, 2. Temperance, 3. Fortitude, 4. Justice
Life and Liberty; they seem obvious, but what of Happiness? Or, rather, its Pursuit? In my opinion, one must appreciate the context of its meaning to a classically aware 18th-century audience. To usurp the prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice bestowed by a Divine Source to each individual is to infringe not on happiness itself, but on the self-evident right to pursue it. Would that not be a violation of basic freedom? To quote from a landmark Supreme Court opinion: “No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person.” This is the principle embedded in the phrase, “Pursuit of Happiness.” The inherent human right to be left alone by Power.
The profound contradictions in the life of the complex gentleman who would pen the Declaration of Independence and become the third president will be debated beyond the lifespan of all who read this, but we would dismiss his revolutionary genius at our peril. That there is something essentially “Jeffersonian” at the heart of our long experiment as a free, personally secure, land-based culture seems undeniable to me, but that would be an analysis for a future comment.