History of Happiness part 1: Hedonia
Over two posts I give a quick account of two main threads in the philosophy of happiness. In this post: Hedonia
Currently my PhD research focuses on the theories and experimental approaches that HCI (Human Computer Interaction) researchers use when measuring the effect of technologies on happiness and well-being. This seems to me to be a pretty important question at the moment — since much high-profile software design seems focuses on a fairly exploitative, and autonomy-undermining approach to human pleasure.
The current approaches in HCI have their foundations in two broad schools of psychology, themselves founded on two broad schools of philosophy: Hedonic and Eudaimonic approaches. In this post I’m going to tackle Hedonic philosophy and psychology — the oldest documented philosophy of human happiness, and, arguably the most influential on current approaches, (based broadly on maximising pleasure and minimising pain). In the next post I’ll outline Eudaimonic philosophy, which takes a fuller, more life-situated view of human happiness.
Hedonia
The ancient Greeks had many words for happiness, far more than modern English. These ranged from complex, precise notions like “epicharma” (“malignant joy”) to “hedonia” — a simple, and universal concept, familiar to modern English speakers via its derivative term “hedonistic”, describing a person or activity focused on the pursuit of pleasure.
“Hedonia” describes the state of a person who is experiencing positive feelings. To unpack this further it consists in “the presence of positive affect and the absence of negative affect”, or more crudely, “the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain”.
The first thing to note about this description is that it is an entirely subjective category, based exclusively on peoples’ feelings, and on nothing outside of them. Also intuitively, we can expect people to be pretty good at understanding and reporting on whether they are in this state. If I want to know if you are experiencing hedonia, then I will to ask you. If you say, convincingly, that you are in a hedonic mood, then I have access to nothing that could be used to refute you.
In the Moment, Asleep
This is in keeping with our modern ideas about hedonism and hedonistic pursuits. Also in keeping with those ideas; hedonia is a momentary state. At a particular time, we either are, or are not, experiencing hedonia, and this can change quickly. You may be enjoying a rollercoaster ride one moment, then suddenly feel ill and then begin to hate the experience. Equally you may be enjoy a meal with friends until someone behaves insultingly towards you, and then stop enjoying yourself.
Perhaps more surprisingly to modern readers, since we are used to thinking of the hedonistic life as an active one, hedonia is actually a fairly passive conception of happiness. By this I mean that although many activities result in hedonic happiness, it is not essential to hedonic experience itself that we are in any way active. To clarify this distinction we can use any number of science fiction stories as thought experiments: stories where people are plugged into machines which simulate, and stimulate experiences of pleasure. This is in keeping with our intuitions about positive affect and pleasure: it is not in any way essential to the experience that we act — we can passively receive pleasure. To pick a more down to earth example: we all, from time to time, have pleasant dreams.
History of Hedonism
Hedonia is the arguably the oldest story about happiness and well being. It can be found as early as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where The character Siduri gives the advice “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night […] These things alone are the concern of men”. Later, among the ancient Greeks, Democritus, Aristuppus and Epicurus all espoused sensory pleasure, joy and cheerfulness as the highest ends of life.
Modern hedonic philosophy, and to a large extent psychology, descends from the 18th Century “Utilitarian” philosophies of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. These accounts draw ethical and political conclusions from the principle of maximising pleasure and minimising pain. On Bentham’s account this is framed as a problem of accounting. To judge the goodness of an action we must quantitatively assess the pleasure and pain to which it gives rise, subtracting the latter from the former. Later accounts complicate this picture, often introducing a hierarchy of pleasures, with some pleasures judged better in kind than others. John Stuart Mill, for example, argued that intellectual pleasures are higher than sensory ones.
Empirically Happy
We can see from the description above that Hedonia is quite a simple account of happiness, it has very little content, and it lends itself to quantification and measurement. So while I noted above that Hedonia identifies happiness with the presence of positive affect and with the absence of negative affect, it is important that hedonic accounts tend not to give an opinion on what kinds of things do (or should) create these positive, or negative affects.
These qualities account, in part, for the influence of hedonia on modern psychology — the simplicity and non-opinionated nature of hedonic accounts of happiness has proven itself a good conceptual base on which to build more detailed accounts. Even beyond this though there are several structural factors which make hedonia highly suited to empirical study.
We noted above that hedonia can be isolated from action, and located fairly precisely in time — these factors make it easy to design experiments and thereby put our understanding of hedonic happiness on an empirical basis. Another factor which supports experiment is that the people tend to be quite good at understanding, and reporting on, their level of positive feeling at a particular moment, in respect to a particular activity. This grounds all kinds of experimental possibilities. If we want to get sophisticated, all this makes it possible for us to compare reported experience to brain scans, and thereby build up a picture of what a human brain looks like when it is experiencing hedonia. All in all, hedonia lends itself to a straightforward physical-science model of input-output experiments, which has made it popular among behavioural psychologists (think Pavlov’s dog).
Hedonic Psychology
So, the basic principle of hedonic happiness, as maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain, has been influential in psychology, particularly in the growing Positive Psychology movement. Psychologists such as Ed Diener have developed and refined this principle into more sophisticated accounts, such as Diener’s own Subjective Well-Being (SWB). Moving beyond purely hedonic happiness, SWB accounts for peoples’ well-being by asking them to report not only on their feelings — levels of positive and negative affect, but also on their level of satisfaction with their life.
Such accounts increasingly come under the umbrella of “Hedonic Psychology” a discipline inaugurated in 1999 by the publication of Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by Diener, alongside Norbert Schwarz and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. This is a substantial area of study, too large to be tackled in this brief summary, and one that I will try to unpack in more detail in future posts.
For the moment though it is worth noting the appeal of this approach for Human Computer Interaction. One quality of Hedonic Psychology accounts like SWB (which they inherit from Benthamite Utilitarian accounts discussed above) is that they do not make assumptions about what is likely to make people happy. Hedonic accounts are highly focused on outcomes making them highly attractive to disciplines like HCI which seek simple, easily repeatable methods to experimentally verify user experience. Probably for this reason, most measurement of user happiness and well being in HCI is basically hedonic in character.
Eudaimonia
In the next post I will discuss another major strand in the history of thought on happiness: “eudaimonia”. This account derives from the criticism of hedonic philosophy by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and attempts to give a fuller account of value in human life than is provided by hedonism’s narrow focus on pleasure and pain. In giving this fuller account, however, eudaimonic accounts necessarily move away from the simplicity and easy empirical framing of hedonia. As such they pose more of a challenge to disciplines such as HCI.
Originally published at danbennettdev.github.io.
