Date Presented

Spring 4-28-2026

Document Type

Thesis

First Advisor

Dr. Stephen Dawson

Second Advisor

Dr. Elizabeth Sharrett

Third Advisor

Dr. Lorna Dawson

Abstract

Happiness is a concept that many people claim to identify, but is perhaps only known in theory by few. Often, happiness is described as an emotion, dependent on many factors in a person's life rather than a continuous state of their being. The majority of people who are asked, “What is happiness?”, respond with examples that are subjective, meaning they are based on feeling in a given moment. Examples of this include, financial stability, a spike in emotion at a pleasant birthday party, or the feeling of being well liked by one's peers. Ancient philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, would beg to differ with the notion. Their theories are substantially different from this modern idea because they argue against the subjectivity of happiness as a feeling. Instead, they assert that happiness is a state, completely controlled by the inner workings of the person, ie their soul. In the previous examples, such as those involving money or peers, happiness is subject to circumstantial outcomes, meaning there is no guarantee that the situations will result in happiness each time. It is reasonable to believe that a person who is financially stable one year could lose their job the next, or the birthday party that seems to fill a person with positive emotions can be canceled due to weather. The contingency of these occurrences on a multitude of factors outside of a person’s control is the point that both Plato and Aristotle make in their argument. The subjectivity shows the comparison of that artificial happiness to the true happiness they have derived. They further this point by showing how examples like the ones above do not regard happiness with an intrinsic understanding; instead they show how happiness has more to do with how people define themselves. It shows that many people choose to define themselves in material things that will bring them short-term satisfaction and pleasure, rather than following their theories and reflecting into their own self in order to combine the role of materials with a transformation within their soul. The Gallup World Happiness serves as a statistical example of this disconnect as it is a modern diagnostic of the percentage of happiness across the globe. This poll uses “...fresh annual samples of 1,000 respondents, aged 15 or over in each of more than 150 countries, to evaluate the quality of their lives on an 11-point ladder scale running from 0 to 10” (Helliwell & Wang 1). This data set provides a useful comparison because of the level of respect it holds among politicians and world leaders. Therefore, this poll serves as an useful example of how people in the twenty-first century define and measure happiness. The existence and amount of research conducted and published by Gallup on this subject allows for comparison to be made between it and the theories of Plato and Aristotle, considering they do not place measurements on happiness. However it must be stated that while they define happiness, their theories do not include measurements of happiness. The data ultimately suggests that modern society is more likely to associate happiness with material access, causing it to lack recognition of intrinsic meaning. This causes the modern conception of happiness to rely heavily on an emotional definition, rather than a state of a person’s being. The emphasis on these qualities is what makes these findings inconsistent with the philosophical theories of Plato and Aristotle that include an emphasis on both external and internal factors.

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