Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science, by Sissela Bok   

Ever so relevant to our lives today, the cover of Sissela Bok’s Exploring Happiness is a painting by J.M.W. Turner called "Sunrise and Sea Monsters" (1845), a hazy yellow sunrise over a turbulent gray sea. To Bok, that was very important. “Yes, there is sunrise in everybody's life,” Bok says, “but there are, indeed, also monsters of various kinds. And so it's the combination of happy experiences and experiences, sometimes, of great suffering that teaches us much more about how to lead our lives, I think -- if we really learn to look at that carefully.”  And carefully and deeply is what Bok invited our two books groups to do, not to “find” happiness in steps prescribed by other authors and traditions, but to truly “explore” what we can learn about the nature of happiness and its role in our lives. 

To help us in this exploration, her aims in her book are twofold.  First, Bok masterfully brings the wide-ranging, striking new findings of the modern natural and social sciences into conversation with the philosophers, poets, historians, and thinkers of the past. Through these chapters we are given space for reflection and a deeper understanding of the meaning and scope of happiness.  What, for example, does happiness mean to you?  Can we choose to be happy?  What are your most abiding sources of happiness?  

Second, Bok explores the connection between the search for personal happiness as an end in itself and the limits to that quest posed by the wider moral and ethical issues involved in how happiness has been and is pursued, the impact of the choices and trade-offs that we make, and how we should treat one other, concerns that are relevant today.  According to Bok, “the things that seem to produce the greatest and most lasting happiness are really things that are not only good for the individual involved, not just selfish pleasures, they’re really things that are quite good for society as well,” including close social relationships, our families, friends, and colleagues, helping other people, getting involved in civic and community affairs, and even finding awe in walking in nature, all of which our readers found to be true.

In the end, Bok believes, science, philosophy, art, history, personal experience, and our values all have worthwhile things to tell us about happiness. We thus had a great deal of wisdom to draw on and that is what she provided for us in this engaging and challenging book.

--reviewed by Jessie von Hippel