Like chess, love, and music, philosophical inquiry has the power to make its acolytes happy. There are higher and lower pleasures and the pleasures of the philosophical quest are among the highest, noblest, and longest-lasting. Aristotle thought so and taught so. Philosophy activates the mind in the direction of the outermost reaches of intelligibility. In this respect it goes beyond any other discipline. Activity makes us happy. Happiness or well-being does of course include an ingredient of contentment, acceptance, and contemplative repose. But the Peripatetic insight must also be accommodated. Happiness, eudaimonia, is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, moral and intellectual, intellectual virtue especially. Thus taught Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics.
We like puzzles, problems, and riddles, and the deeper the better. We like to understand things including the process of understanding and its limits. We like the challenge of problem-solving whether or not solutions are achieved. I conjecture that the highest and deepest problems, those of philosophy, are in the end beyond our power to solve, and that they point us beyond philosophy to superior sources of insight. But we do not know that the problems are insoluble. Not knowing, we keep searching, relishing the quest but ever ready to push beyond using such problems as prove insoluble as springboards to extra-philosophical sources of insight. And what might they be? Revelation is one, mystical insight is another. But to be ready for them and to be in a position properly to assess their deliverances, and to preserve ourselves from fanaticism and superstition, we must first exhaust the resources of the discursive. Whether or not we manage to ascend to the Unseen, philosophy is intensely pleasurable mind-activation and a sovereign cure for the hebetude of the flesh. It is one of the few things that make life worth living.
But philosophy can flourish only if philosophers do, and their flourishing requires favorable political and social conditions. In these dark times, when the threats to free speech and open inquiry are growing, the philosopher must engage the enemies of civilization, taking care to not become like the evildoers he must oppose.