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Happiness as a State of Non-Contradictory Joy (AynRandCon 2016)

749 views · Published 21 August 2017 · 3:49 · Indexed 27 October 2026

Channel: Ayn Rand Institute · 2017 · Nonprofits & Activism

Achieving happiness "requires having values — consistent, rational values," Gregory Salmieri tells students in this excerpt from "Taking Responsibility for Your Happiness: Insights from Ayn Rand's Ethics," available in full here:

https://youtu.be/bVZJMdMpib8

Here's a transcript:

Rand defines happiness as a state of, or she describes it as a state of noncontradictory joy. Sometimes we use happiness to mean just the feeling you might have in a moment, and any kind of positive feeling will count. And yes, you can use the word that way. Pleasure, I think, is a better word for that. But what we often mean by happiness, and what she means by it, is a state of noncontradictory joy. And the “noncontradictory” is important.

There are a lot of things that are pleasant or, well, sort of pleasant, or at least take away some of our anxiety in the moment. But that can't give us any kind of noncontradictory joy because we know that by achieving them, we're frustrating our ability to achieve others — and they don't last, so that any fleeting feeling of joy you have in them is tinged with pain and guilt and fear.

But a noncontradictory joy is an enjoyment you can take in particular things, and in your life as a whole, where the enjoyment is, pervades the whole of life, because you know that each good thing that you're taking pleasure in fits with — it enhances, augments, works together with — all the other things that you want and care about. There are no hangovers, there are no tensions — it’s noncontradictory. It fits together.

But such noncontradictory joy requires having values — consistent, rational values — which means goals that are consistent with one another and consistent with all the relevant facts about human nature, about your specific nature, about your circumstances, about the effects that these goals will have if they’re accomplished down the line, about what kind of means you’d need to enact to obtain them, and that therefore cohere into a life that you yourself can enact.

The happiness that you get by having such a set of values and then acting on them is noncontradictory joy. Rand describes it as that state of consciousness that proceeds from the achievement of one's values. And it requires again that they be your values, that you not take the things you're working towards as what people go after, or you have to go after, as a good American, or good Christian, or good Muslim, or good Midwesterner, or good wherever you're from — or good Objectivist, for that matter, who has to like skyscrapers or something. But it’s rather things that you chose, that you thought about how they fit together and form a self-sustaining, achievable-to-you whole. “Self-sustaining” is important, and we'll talk more about that later. But they form a whole, such that you can act for them, you can expect to achieve them, or at least make some progress towards them which would count as a real achievement, and that that progress wouldn't be self undermining, but is rather something that will feed itself and can continue. That’s what it is to have consistent goals.

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The talk was given on Saturday, November 5, 2016, at Ayn Rand Student Conference 2016, held at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia. Salmieri teaches at Rutgers University, serves as co-secretary of the Ayn Rand Society (a professional group affiliated with the American Philosophical Association), is the co-editor of "A Companion to Ayn Rand" in the Blackwell Companions to Philosophers series, and publishes and lectures of the philosophies of Aristotle and Ayn Rand.

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