Post by Emperor AAdmin on Dec 29, 2007 16:11:02 GMT -5
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AAdmin
(2/12/06 6:12 am)
New Post: The history of the idea of happiness and its ideas!!
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'Happiness: A History,' by Darrin M. McMahon
Oh, Joy
Review by JIM HOLT
Published: February 12, 2006
The history of the idea of happiness can be neatly summarized in a series of bumper sticker equations:
1.Happiness= Luck (Homeric),
2.Happiness=Virtue (classical),
3.Happiness=Heaven (medieval),
4.Happiness=Pleasure (Enlightenment) and
5.Happiness=A Warm Puppy (contemporary).
Does that look like progress? Darrin McMahon doesn't think so.
Ray Bartkus
HAPPINESS
A History.
By Darrin M. McMahon.
Illustrated. 544 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $27.50.
Forum: Book News and Reviews
In olden times, McMahon observes in his engaging book, happiness was deemed a transcendent, almost godlike state, attainable only by the few. Today, however, the concept has become democratized, not to say vulgarized (think of that damned ubiquitous smiley face): it is more about feeling good than being good. With happiness supposedly in the reach of everyone — especially in the United States — it is pursued with a frenzy that, perversely, gives rise to its opposite: unease, discontent, even guilt. We might be better off returning to the classical Greek ideal of happiness as a life lived according to reason and virtue — so, at least, McMahon (a professor of history at Florida State University) sometimes seems to suggest. At other times he appears keener to follow Nietzsche and ditch happiness altogether.
But "Happiness" is not really a polemic. It is a history, one that takes us on a leisurely Great Books-style tour of Western thought, ranging from Herodotus and Aristotle through Locke and Rousseau down to Darwin, Marx and Freud. The musings on happiness of these and dozens of lesser thinkers are lucidly presented in fine, sturdy prose that is, on the whole, a delight to read. Only occasionally is one's ear clouted by a PBS-style cliché ("Rome. The very name suggests power and prosperity, glory and grandeur, earthly majesty and might. . . ."), a patch of run-amok alliteration ("fabled fiddling . . . proud Pompeian penis . . . felicity and fecundity") or a solecism ("soaring into the netherworld of meaningless abstractions" — soaring is best done upward). There are more references to flatulence than one would expect in an intellectual history, but every writer must be allowed his harmless quirks.
The topic of happiness turns us all into philosophers. Everyone wants to be happy, but no one can say with much precision or assurance what happiness is. In the history of the idea, the main tension is between thinkers who hold that a life must meet some objective standard to be considered happy, and those who hold that happiness is merely the subjective state of being pleased with one's life. The most prominent of the objectivists was Aristotle, who argued that happiness was "activity of the soul expressing virtue." (Aristotle's virtues, by the way, are rather self-centered and not at all Christian — more pride than charity.) And the most perfect happiness, he reasoned, involved the divine "intellectual" virtues rather than the lower "practical" ones. In other words, the happiest life consisted of the pure contemplation of truth — just like Aristotle's! Other classical thinkers may have taken a less intellectualist view, but they were united with Aristotle in equating happiness and virtue. The most extreme among them, like Cicero, maintained that a virtuous man could truly be called happy even while being tortured on the rack.
Ironically, McMahon observes, it was Christianity that restored the sensual element to the idea of happiness. Suffer for virtue's sake, medieval Christians were told, and you will be rewarded with an eternity of heavenly bliss. But why couldn't some of that bliss be enjoyed here on earth? It was in the late 17th century that a frankly subjectivist, hedonistic understanding of happiness started to take hold — a development that McMahon associates with the intellectual ferment surrounding the English civil war. "Happiness . . . in its full extent is the utmost Pleaure we are capable of," John Locke declared, raising the dangerous possibility that there were as many forms of happiness as there were types of desire.
Once pleasure came to be accepted as the final good, Enlightenment thinkers set about disputing the best means to it. Virtue? That was the hope of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson: if happiness was not identical to virtue, it should at least be virtue's reward. But those of a more radical kidney, like the Frenchman Julien Offray de la Mettrie, denied even an instrumental connection between virtue and happiness — a shocking view that Casanova and Sade pushed to its logical conclusion. It seemed terrible that the question "Why should I be moral?" could no longer be smugly answered, "Because that is the only way to be happy." Ever since, philosophers have been trying to prove that happiness and goodness are indissolubly linked, a task that has been likened to squaring the circle. Some wicked people do seem to enjoy themselves.
The 18th century — deemed the "century of happiness" by Helvétius — saw a dramatic improvement in the material conditions of Europeans, as famine and plague gave way to longer life spans and a near-doubling of the population. Happiness began to be thought of not just as the right of the individual, but as a proper aim of the state. Inevitably, there was a backlash. Rousseau gloomily insisted that civilization only multiplied desires, making us their unhappy slaves. Odes to melancholy became fashionable. Perhaps the greatest pessimist was Schopenhauer, who thought happiness would always be defeated by painful craving and who counseled the ascetic renunciation of pleasure — a policy that bore no resemblance to his own comfortably bourgeois life.
Confronted with this welter of clashing opinions, one sometimes wishes that McMahon had done more critical shaping of his material. Is happiness really our ultimate goal? Are truth, beauty, goodness and freedom only valuable insofar as they lead to it? Is it possible to have everything you want, and still not be happy? Would that mean there must be something else you want, but you don't know what it is? These are a few of the questions that bob up only to disappear in the exhilarating foam of ideas.
McMahon is quite concerned, however, with what is sometimes called the paradox of happiness: the harder you endeavor to catch it, the more elusive it proves. In the past couple of decades, scientific studies have shed new light on this paradox. One thing that has been learned is that happiness is surprisingly stable over time. Each of us seems to have a "set point" to which we snap back a few months after good or bad events. Getting tenure ought to boost your happiness if you're a professor; getting cancer ought to diminish it. Yet, in the long run, neither makes much difference. This set point, moreover, seems to be largely determined by our genes. As one researcher put it, "Trying to be happier is like trying to be taller." That is the bad news. The good news is that, for most of us, our set point is pretty high. In Western nations, reported happiness beats unhappiness by a three-to-one ratio. Being happy is the norm, much like being healthy. Darwin was right: we've evolved to fit our psychological niche, just as we've evolved to fit our physical niche. And Freud, who hoped at most to transform his patients' "hysterical misery into common unhappiness," may have been aiming too low.
McMahon sniffs at the science of happiness, suggesting that it doesn't reveal much that can't be found in the Great Books. (Research has suggested that men, contrary to our expectations, are slightly happier married, women unmarried — did Socrates know that?) He also rebukes contemporary philosophers for supposedly ignoring the question, "What constitutes the good life?" In fact, the late John Rawls produced an answer to precisely that question, one that blends Aristotle with modern liberalism, and it might have been mentioned in this book.
Considering the handsome job McMahon has done in canvassing the best that has been said and thought about happiness through the ages, it would be churlish to complain about other omissions. And yet . . . well, I can't resist this gem from the French philosopher Alain (1868-1951), which has brought me so much consolation: "A man is occupied by that from which he expects to gain happiness, but his greatest happiness is the fact that he is occupied." Somehow it sounds even better in the original. You know what they say: an epigram is a platitude expressed in French.
Jim Holt writes frequently about philosophy and science for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and other publications.
-----
AAdmin
(2/12/06 6:12 am)
New Post: The history of the idea of happiness and its ideas!!
----------
'Happiness: A History,' by Darrin M. McMahon
Oh, Joy
Review by JIM HOLT
Published: February 12, 2006
The history of the idea of happiness can be neatly summarized in a series of bumper sticker equations:
1.Happiness= Luck (Homeric),
2.Happiness=Virtue (classical),
3.Happiness=Heaven (medieval),
4.Happiness=Pleasure (Enlightenment) and
5.Happiness=A Warm Puppy (contemporary).
Does that look like progress? Darrin McMahon doesn't think so.
Ray Bartkus
HAPPINESS
A History.
By Darrin M. McMahon.
Illustrated. 544 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $27.50.
Forum: Book News and Reviews
In olden times, McMahon observes in his engaging book, happiness was deemed a transcendent, almost godlike state, attainable only by the few. Today, however, the concept has become democratized, not to say vulgarized (think of that damned ubiquitous smiley face): it is more about feeling good than being good. With happiness supposedly in the reach of everyone — especially in the United States — it is pursued with a frenzy that, perversely, gives rise to its opposite: unease, discontent, even guilt. We might be better off returning to the classical Greek ideal of happiness as a life lived according to reason and virtue — so, at least, McMahon (a professor of history at Florida State University) sometimes seems to suggest. At other times he appears keener to follow Nietzsche and ditch happiness altogether.
But "Happiness" is not really a polemic. It is a history, one that takes us on a leisurely Great Books-style tour of Western thought, ranging from Herodotus and Aristotle through Locke and Rousseau down to Darwin, Marx and Freud. The musings on happiness of these and dozens of lesser thinkers are lucidly presented in fine, sturdy prose that is, on the whole, a delight to read. Only occasionally is one's ear clouted by a PBS-style cliché ("Rome. The very name suggests power and prosperity, glory and grandeur, earthly majesty and might. . . ."), a patch of run-amok alliteration ("fabled fiddling . . . proud Pompeian penis . . . felicity and fecundity") or a solecism ("soaring into the netherworld of meaningless abstractions" — soaring is best done upward). There are more references to flatulence than one would expect in an intellectual history, but every writer must be allowed his harmless quirks.
The topic of happiness turns us all into philosophers. Everyone wants to be happy, but no one can say with much precision or assurance what happiness is. In the history of the idea, the main tension is between thinkers who hold that a life must meet some objective standard to be considered happy, and those who hold that happiness is merely the subjective state of being pleased with one's life. The most prominent of the objectivists was Aristotle, who argued that happiness was "activity of the soul expressing virtue." (Aristotle's virtues, by the way, are rather self-centered and not at all Christian — more pride than charity.) And the most perfect happiness, he reasoned, involved the divine "intellectual" virtues rather than the lower "practical" ones. In other words, the happiest life consisted of the pure contemplation of truth — just like Aristotle's! Other classical thinkers may have taken a less intellectualist view, but they were united with Aristotle in equating happiness and virtue. The most extreme among them, like Cicero, maintained that a virtuous man could truly be called happy even while being tortured on the rack.
Ironically, McMahon observes, it was Christianity that restored the sensual element to the idea of happiness. Suffer for virtue's sake, medieval Christians were told, and you will be rewarded with an eternity of heavenly bliss. But why couldn't some of that bliss be enjoyed here on earth? It was in the late 17th century that a frankly subjectivist, hedonistic understanding of happiness started to take hold — a development that McMahon associates with the intellectual ferment surrounding the English civil war. "Happiness . . . in its full extent is the utmost Pleaure we are capable of," John Locke declared, raising the dangerous possibility that there were as many forms of happiness as there were types of desire.
Once pleasure came to be accepted as the final good, Enlightenment thinkers set about disputing the best means to it. Virtue? That was the hope of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson: if happiness was not identical to virtue, it should at least be virtue's reward. But those of a more radical kidney, like the Frenchman Julien Offray de la Mettrie, denied even an instrumental connection between virtue and happiness — a shocking view that Casanova and Sade pushed to its logical conclusion. It seemed terrible that the question "Why should I be moral?" could no longer be smugly answered, "Because that is the only way to be happy." Ever since, philosophers have been trying to prove that happiness and goodness are indissolubly linked, a task that has been likened to squaring the circle. Some wicked people do seem to enjoy themselves.
The 18th century — deemed the "century of happiness" by Helvétius — saw a dramatic improvement in the material conditions of Europeans, as famine and plague gave way to longer life spans and a near-doubling of the population. Happiness began to be thought of not just as the right of the individual, but as a proper aim of the state. Inevitably, there was a backlash. Rousseau gloomily insisted that civilization only multiplied desires, making us their unhappy slaves. Odes to melancholy became fashionable. Perhaps the greatest pessimist was Schopenhauer, who thought happiness would always be defeated by painful craving and who counseled the ascetic renunciation of pleasure — a policy that bore no resemblance to his own comfortably bourgeois life.
Confronted with this welter of clashing opinions, one sometimes wishes that McMahon had done more critical shaping of his material. Is happiness really our ultimate goal? Are truth, beauty, goodness and freedom only valuable insofar as they lead to it? Is it possible to have everything you want, and still not be happy? Would that mean there must be something else you want, but you don't know what it is? These are a few of the questions that bob up only to disappear in the exhilarating foam of ideas.
McMahon is quite concerned, however, with what is sometimes called the paradox of happiness: the harder you endeavor to catch it, the more elusive it proves. In the past couple of decades, scientific studies have shed new light on this paradox. One thing that has been learned is that happiness is surprisingly stable over time. Each of us seems to have a "set point" to which we snap back a few months after good or bad events. Getting tenure ought to boost your happiness if you're a professor; getting cancer ought to diminish it. Yet, in the long run, neither makes much difference. This set point, moreover, seems to be largely determined by our genes. As one researcher put it, "Trying to be happier is like trying to be taller." That is the bad news. The good news is that, for most of us, our set point is pretty high. In Western nations, reported happiness beats unhappiness by a three-to-one ratio. Being happy is the norm, much like being healthy. Darwin was right: we've evolved to fit our psychological niche, just as we've evolved to fit our physical niche. And Freud, who hoped at most to transform his patients' "hysterical misery into common unhappiness," may have been aiming too low.
McMahon sniffs at the science of happiness, suggesting that it doesn't reveal much that can't be found in the Great Books. (Research has suggested that men, contrary to our expectations, are slightly happier married, women unmarried — did Socrates know that?) He also rebukes contemporary philosophers for supposedly ignoring the question, "What constitutes the good life?" In fact, the late John Rawls produced an answer to precisely that question, one that blends Aristotle with modern liberalism, and it might have been mentioned in this book.
Considering the handsome job McMahon has done in canvassing the best that has been said and thought about happiness through the ages, it would be churlish to complain about other omissions. And yet . . . well, I can't resist this gem from the French philosopher Alain (1868-1951), which has brought me so much consolation: "A man is occupied by that from which he expects to gain happiness, but his greatest happiness is the fact that he is occupied." Somehow it sounds even better in the original. You know what they say: an epigram is a platitude expressed in French.
Jim Holt writes frequently about philosophy and science for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and other publications.