Enacting Happiness from Emotions and Moods

*Éric Laurent, Kévin Bague, Colin Vegas and Jonathan Dartevelle*

*"Felicity is a lasting state of pleasure".*

*Leibniz (c. 1690)*

## **Abstract**

The pursuit of happiness has been an important component of philosophical thought for a long time. Traditionally, happiness could be viewed as the result of rational thinking and personal project management. We review the literature in cognitive biology and psychology revealing why happiness could complementarily be conceived as an emerging feeling, anchored in daily emotions and moods. Finally, we propose a framework in which happiness builds on distributed and dynamic bodily processes with which abstract thought interacts. Data coming from complexity science, neuroscience, psychopathology, and cognitive behavioral therapies are gathered in this chapter in order to account for the coordination between "bottom-up" and "top-down" happiness geneses.

**Keywords:** affective science, cognitive science, complexity, coordination, emergence

### **1. Introduction**

Happiness has a very special place in intellectual life. Happiness has been the ultimate goal of occidental philosophy for centuries. In Aristotle's philosophy, a critical distinction was proposed between pleasure and happiness. In the *Nicomachean Ethics*, Aristotle distinguished between the ultimate means (*"eudaimonia,"* or happiness) and multiple intermediate goals (*e.g.*, pleasure, money). This distinction is critical for two reasons. First, different temporal scales are respectively associated with happiness and with other affective events. While pleasure tends to refer to short-term experience, happiness is related to a judgment that would encompass the entire life. Second, it generates hierarchical relationships between happiness and any other affective experiences. While pleasure can be an end, it is also a means (to reach happiness). In contrast, happiness is the end of many means, but the means of nothing else [1]. Then, philosophical wisdom and virtue would consist in searching for happiness through truth.

While Western philosophy generally acknowledges a potential filiation between accumulated affective experiences and happiness, it mainly emphasizes the central role of knowledge and reasoning in reaching *eudaimonia.* For instance, in the *Banquet*, Plato reported that generally what is desired is what we do not have, while what we have got could be what we once desired (*i.e.*, in the past, not in the present). Schopenhauer stated that all our life oscillates between suffering (when we do not have what we desire) and boredom (when we have what we desire). See [1] for an analysis of these philosophical trends and their comparison with the Chinese tradition, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Therefore, there should be a "mindset" favoring happiness. For instance, Spinoza points out that enjoying what we get is a condition of happiness. The responsibility of rational thought in affective experience has been specially underlined by Stoicists according to whom our thoughts are like a filter of external events, which gives rise to meaning and passion regulation. More generally, the dissociation between body and soul largely shared in Western philosophy has placed strong responsibility on thoughts in happiness development. This is what we would name today a "top-down view" on happiness development.

However, how emotions, moods, and other affective experiences are coordinated with "happiness" (viewed as higher-order affective experience) is still unclear. Is happiness regulated by rational thought and other "high-level" cognitive processes, or is happiness more "embodied" and related to everyday life affective events? Those questions are far ancient, but the frameworks offered by cognitive science related to how information circulates in the brain and the body and interacts with other information in the environment, could contribute to refine our understanding of happiness. We will first provide some landmarks about top-down and bottom-up processing in humans, and then successively discuss evidence coming from psychology and neuroscience for bottom-up and top-down influences on happiness. Finally, we will share a perspective combining those influences in order to contribute to a cognitive approach to happiness.
