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What exactly is happiness? Ancient philosophers like Aristotle and medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas have wrestled with this perennial question. A leading figure of contemporary positive psychology, Martin Seligman (2011), proposes that happiness, which he also calls flourishing and well-being, involves five different elements: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement (PERMA). I consider in this paper how PERMA does and does not accord with the notion of happiness given by Aristotle (1984) and Aquinas (1975, 2012).
What exactly is happiness? Ancient philosophers like Aristotle, medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas, and contemporary psychologists like Martin Seligman have wrestled with this perennial question. In seeking happiness myself, I've learned a great deal from all three. I found instructive the ways they accord as well as ways that they differ.
It might seem at first silly to try to define happiness. "I know it when I feel it," you might say with some justification. In a similar way, we know about our bones, but the systematic study of our bones can nevertheless be useful, especially if something is going wrong with our bones.
A Positive Psychology Framework for Happiness
In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well Being (2011), Martin Seligman that happiness, which he also calls flourishing and well-being, involves five different elements: Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement (PERMA) (Seligman 2011). Each of these five elements contributes to human flourishing, and each is chosen by people as an end desired in itself, rather than simply as a means to some further end.
The first element of flourishing is positive emotions such as joy, delight, warmth, euphoria, and gladness. One element of positive emotion, subjective well being, is how people respond to questions such as, "How happy are you right now?" or "How satisfied are you with your life?" (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2008, p. 4). We can distinguish feelings, our own subjective and conscious awareness of emotions, from the emotions themselves. We can be having an emotion manifesting itself in our bodies and yet not really feel or consciously realize we have the emotion, as when people say, "I didn't realize how happy I was until he walked into the room." Likewise, our bodily reactions may be expressive of positive emotion,...