Beach brain workout

Wellbeing takes a popular philosophical
approach to the search for happiness

by JULIET WATERS

In a couple of weeks, I’m taking a brief vacation. Of course it’s a working vacation because a very important part of my job involves test-reading books for the beach. I used to be a big fan of the Big British Beach Book. You know, those hardcover epics that are so handy to put your drinks on because you’ll never actually read them.

But last year, I got into slim books on heavy subjects. It all started with Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan. I don’t know why I got this urge to spend my vacation catching up on the university subjects I never got around to taking. But I loved this book. And when the world markets crashed and burned a few months later, everything I’d learned came in pretty handy.

This week, I read Wellbeing by Mark Vernon. I chose it because Vernon edits The Art of Living series (of which this book is a part), an ongoing collection of small paperbacks on subjects light and heavy from clothes to death. Vernon is an Oxford educated philosopher and journalist, and while the books in this series are certainly popular philosophy, they are by no means dumbed down.

Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell did something similar about 10 years back with In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living From Plato to Prozac. But Pursuit was one of those meandering books, typical of the ’90s, that argued that happiness was impossible to define, so let’s just give up and say it has something to do with that transient moment of existential joy you don’t want to ever over-analyze. Vernon agrees with Kingwell that the word has been overused so often in our culture that it’s entirely lost any real practical meaning. But that certainly doesn’t mean that we should stop trying to define what it is we’re really looking for when we ponder its mysteries. This is why he prefers the word wellbeing.

Yes, it’s overused; especially in its association with lifestyle and health choices. But it’s still useful as a concept, especially when we think about what we need for lasting wellbeing. If that’s what we’re really looking for.

First Vernon takes us through a brief history of the search for happiness from Aristotle to modernity. When he hits our current age, he frequently quotes Montreal philosopher Charles Taylor. Vernon’s young. He’s probably in his early 30s, from his picture and what I’ve read on his Web site (markvernon.com) and seen on YouTube. He’s a committed agnostic. So I suppose I expected him to draw from someone a little less, well, Catholic. But after some research, I discovered Vernon was once ordained as an Anglican priest. So, for a popular philosopher, he’s surprisingly well read in religion. Although they don’t agree on the existence of God, both Vernon and Taylor agree on one thing. Lasting happiness is not something achievable by pursuing only whatever puts you in a good mood.

“If the good life were that transparent,” Vernon argues “then we would follow the formula and the self-help industry would effectively cease, which it clearly has not.”

But sales are not the only reason why the pleasure principle is at the core of so many books about wellbeing. “Science needs it, like a train needs tracks, because it provides something for experiments to get a grip on. But as happiness is more than mood swings, life is more complex.”

Complex, but not necessarily complicated. The deepest wellbeing we can achieve, Vernon argues, is one that doesn’t ignore what Taylor calls the “lower flourishings:” having good friends, a happy family, fulfilling employment, pleasurable leisure. But how deep can it go if we’re not also taking action towards the “higher flourishings:” political action and a willingness to ponder spiritual and intellectual mysteries? The problem is not so much defining wellbeing. It’s in being well. As Iris Murdoch once wrote, “the good is simple. It’s just very difficult.”

WELLBEING BY MARK VERNON,
ACUMEN, PB, 144 PP., $19.95