Considering this, I have read many biographies and find it almost universally true that very few people are happy - though they do have interludes of happiness on occasion.
I have wondered if it really is the case that you can only know if you are happy in retrospect. It may be true, but a sensible person could remember a past period of happiness, see the same, or similar, circumstances and, along with the feeling of good will, decide that he is happy now.
It is seen, probably correctly, as smug and insufferable to protest your happiness whilst we travel through this vale of tears. However it is right, I think, to be honest and, if it is true that you are lucky in some particular way, honest to mention it. Just as it is honest to confess your misery if that is how you feel.
I have looked for happy people in many places. I thought I met a happy man in David Raven, the professor of classics in Pietermaritzburg. Later,when he killed himself, I realised that he was not the happy man I thought he was. I mourned, and still mourn, his passing as he was a man of exquisite aesthetic taste, a keen (sometimes too keen) sense of humour and father to a lovely daughter. His homosexuality was, I fear, the seat of his ultimate misery.
I have, of course, been unhappy as a result of the usual things, grief, anxiety, failure in love, physical discomfort and so forth. Without that it would be impossible to claim to be happy - it is, after all, the antithesis of unhappiness, knowing one enables one to know the other. A life lived on an even keel with no misfortune could not be a happy one
for that reason.
I wonder how genuine my belief that I am the happiest person I have ever known really is. My brother (a jovial, delightful and interesting man and a man I loved more than anybody I have known) was not happy. He was irritated, understandably, by what he saw as my complaisant happiness. He felt that I was only under the delusion of being happy because of my capacity to forget unpleasantness and live only for the day.
He may well have been right. After all, if I am truly happy then why should I wish ( or risk ) discussion about it? I know that I do actively forget unpleasantness.
However, if I am so deluded and it doesn't impinge on my effectiveness in life, then why should I seek to open my eyes and remove my delusion to join the ranks of the unhappy? Is there a better delusion, if that is
what it is, than the delusion that you are happy?
I have been interested to join discussions on the Epicurean mail list, I hoped to learn of how to reach increased hights of delight through attachment to an even simpler life. I have been a little saddened to
find that it is a group more of people seeking than of people who have found - but I should have expected that, shouldn't I!
Can anybody point me to happy people, dead or alive, whose lives I can read and learn from?
Is happiness, as I believe, not a goal or a destination, but a way of seeing the journey?
How, by the way, does hubris come into it? Was it just an old Greek way of of cutting down tall poppies or is it a recognition of a real aspect of human nature (environment/culture/upbringing/imprinting/wtf)?
Is this, I wonder, a difficult or threatening subject? Is there a feeling that a person has somehow failed if he is not happy?
Is it, as I believe, not possible to seek happiness, but only to find it, en passant?
We are all of us failures - at least, the best of us are. - J.M. Barrie
You seem to want to treat happiness as a thing, and seek some objective standard for saying whether you are happy or not. Forget it. If you can say you are happy, and it is true for you, then you are. If you can't, you probably ain't. But I think the quest for objective standards is a serious obstacle to realizing happiness. Happiness is subjective, in fact a celebration of our subjectivity.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point about happiness.
ReplyDeleteYou can, when discussing it as a philosophical matter, treat it as an objective thing to see if it has some common features.
As with many things, there's a difference between the quale of happiness and the objective internal or external conditions to lead to its experience. You can discuss the latter productively.
If you're saying that philosophers can't be happy, that'd be another point!