How do we travel from the celebration of holidays to Happiness?
We all aim at happiness. It’s our goal in life, what every person desires and what determines all our choices—or so says Aristotle.
The goal of happiness becomes especially intense over the holidays. What will make the perfect gift? The perfect meal? The perfect outing? What will our kids remember? What will fill our own hearts with joy? Above all else, what we want from the holidays is Happiness—perhaps the one goal that no gift bought in a store, no meal (however lovingly prepared), no adventure destination will ever fulfill.
In Rhetoric, Aristotle divides happiness into the internal and external. The latter is easy to define. Aristotle says that crucial components of external happiness include family, children, friends, prosperity, independence, health. The internal happiness is harder to define; Aristotle talks about goods of the soul and body.
Interestingly enough, Nietzsche evokes a somewhat related idea 2,000 years later in The Birth of Tragedy. He describes two ways of being, two ways that offer a choice between finding a happiness that fulfills the goods of the soul and the body. These are the Apollonian and Dionysian drives, which for the most part are in open conflict with each other: the Apollonian embodying both a rational and visionary principle, and the Dionysian, the wild, anarchic, exuberant dance of pure energy.
The Apollonian represents, in part, “the higher truth,” the power of the philosophical man, the dreamer, the thinking man who fulfills his individual self through contemplation of beauty and solitary reverie and gives us a vision “through which life is made possible and worth living.”
The Dionysian drive represents an “ecstatic rapture;” the individual is aroused “by the influence of narcotic drink”…or through the power of nature which drives us joyfully to a Dionysian excitement that intensifies “into complete forgetfulness of self.” Men are no longer lost in individual reverie, but united with each other through festivals of dance and Odes to Joy.
Sounds like a holiday! Or does it? Do we reject the Dionysian because of its excess (which is part of its point), and the Apollonian because…well, it doesn’t somehow sound festive?
What will fulfill that internal, ineffable craving of ours for happiness? Most particularly, what will bring you happiness in this season of Diwali, Hanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, and all the other holidays that bring us together with our loved ones?
