Helen Keller’s Five Keys to Being Happy

From Craig Biddle on Objective Standard.org (June 30, 2020):

In 1882, when Helen Keller was nineteen months old, an illness left her blind, deaf, and consequently dumb. For the next five years, she lived essentially as a wild animal in the home of her loving but desperate parents, who had no idea how to deal with her condition. She was unable to form concepts (e.g., “fork” or “water”), unable to communicate thoughts (beyond wordless expressions of desire, anger, pleasure, or pain), unable to understand the world or her needs, unable to become a functional human being. Her future looked bleak. But she would go on to live a life of success and happiness.

How?

When Helen was six, her parents hired a remarkable educator, Anne Sullivan, who taught her language. Under Anne’s tutelage, Helen learned to “hear” (via the manual alphabet), speak, read (braille), and write—and she went on to graduate from Harvard University and to enjoy a happy, fulfilling career as a writer and activist. She argued for, among other things, equal rights for women and blacks, the legalization of birth control and abortion, and (unfortunately) socialism (about which she knew far less than we know today). On the whole, Helen lived a purposeful, fulfilling, happy life. And she did so against all odds.

The story of how Anne Sullivan engaged with Helen Keller and taught her to communicate is portrayed beautifully in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, which I highly recommend. The philosophic significance of Sullivan’s teaching methods is examined in Ayn Rand’s essay “Kant Versus Sullivan” (in Philosophy: Who Needs It), which I emphatically recommend as well.

My focus here is on Keller’s prescriptions for loving life. She is, to my knowledge, among the few people in history to explicitly and succinctly identify the fundamental actions that an individual must take in order to flourish.

In a 1933 article titled “The Simplest Way to Be Happy,” Keller reflected on what happiness is and how to achieve it. Although I don’t recommend the entire article (its flaws include paeans to selflessness), Keller makes several incisive points:

[H]appiness is not the work of magic. Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life. . . .

I know no study that will take you nearer the way to happiness than the study of nature—and I include in the study of nature not only things and their forces, but also mankind and their ways, and the molding of the affections and the will into an earnest desire not only to be happy, but to create happiness.

A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships. Happiness is not for wild animals who can only oscillate between hunger and repletion. To be happy we must exercise our reasoning faculty and be conscious of our will and powers. In other words, we must have learned the secret of self-discipline. To be happy we must do those things which produce happiness. . . .

The surest proof that this is the law of cause and effect is, we may try every other conceivable way of being happy, and they will all fail.

These truths are rich. They’re also broad and highly abstract. And Keller packed them all into a few short paragraphs. So let’s unpack and concretize the main points, which boil down to five prescriptions. Along the way, I’ll suggest some books, movies, and TV shows that demonstrate or elaborate the core ideas and can help us to further integrate and apply them in our lives. [read more]

Her 5 keys to happiness are:

• Study Nature, Including Human Nature
• Exercise Your Reasoning Faculty and Your Free Will
• Learn Self-Discipline
• Learn to Master Hardships
• Recognize the Law of Cause and Effect, and Produce Happiness