James to Adams, 1910

Just before dying.

"Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium — in other words a state in which a... maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do . But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. Letters

I'm likeliest to be in that mood myself during and just after my morning walk, when all is positive possibility...

Up@dawn 2.0, "Happy to see the light of day"

The earth of things

I don't think happiness really comes to rocks and rainfall and wineglasses, but the poet is entitled to her license. I think her point is that it's here amidst the stuff of life, or for us it's nowhere.

Happiness

BY JANE KENYON

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away... (continues)

Likewise, her husband the Sox fan. She's gone, and his attention has turned to his things.



William James, a poet among philosophers and an excellent philosopher of happiness, would have approved.

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The center of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. Pragmatism

Happiness on earth must be found on earth. Even those who invest themselves in dreams of heaven still do their dreaming here.

Such a simple point, but so elusive for so many.

Tracking happiness

The wandering mind is the unhappy mind? Well maybe, unless your head's in the clouds. Wandering and movement have their value too.

But yes, the ability to focus your attention on the task at hand is crucial. It's an indispensable happiness tool. You just have to know when it's the right tool, and the right task.

So, people want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness. Aristotle called happiness "the chief good," the end towards which all other things aim. According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable. It's that we expect them to bring us happiness... Matt Killingsworth [& more happiness at TED]

Tracking happiness moment-to-moment, leading to a scientific understanding of eudaimonia? Well ok, but our greatest joy is still going to be spontaneous and absorbed. I've tried my own version of "tracking," with a scorecard. It's fun and useful, but just until it isn't.

Conservatives happier?

Only if, in my experience, by "happier" you mean angrier. But,

newly published research from Canada finds a “significant association” between authoritarian attitudes and a subjective sense of well-being. These findings are “in line with evidence that conservative ideology … may promote positive psychological outcomes...

First thing to say is that happiness is something other and larger than "a subjective sense of well-being."

Second thing to say: what J.S. Mill said.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

Study: Extreme conservatives make happier people - Salon.com
Thanks to DH for the link.

What happiness means

The next rendition of our Philosophy of Happiness course, HAP 101 as I call it (PHIL 3160 in the MTSU course catalogue), is devoted to the question of meaning. Should we settle for the lowest common denominator of our happiness, the path of least resistance, the quantifiably greatest hedonic calculation?

Anti-elitist democratism might argue that we should.  Pluralistic toleration and humane simplicity, not to mention simple opportunity, support Benthamism. Life is short, pleasure can be sporadic: get it while you can. "There is no why," Kurt Vonnegut once said, we're just all here "trapped in the amber of the moment." We should just do our best to enjoy our captivity, and (he often added, to his great credit) be kind.

Yes, but... Kurt also spent a lifetime trying to work out the personal trauma of the insanity of war, the firebombing of Dresden, the repeated failure of human beings to learn from their errors and treat one another kindly. He spent a lifetime searching for, and to a greater extent than he probably realized, creating meaning for his happy readers.

And Kurt also said, meaningfully, “being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” No reason why decency can't be squared with happiness, is there?

Well, that's some of what our course will be about. I considered adopting Lisa Bortolotti's anthology Philosophy and Happiness (Palgrave '09) as one of our texts, since Part I is all about "Happiness and the Meaningful Life."

But they want $105 for it! One more sign, in the age of digital information, that expensive textbooks are doomed. Fortunately a proof version of Thaddeus Metz's opening essay is here. I don't like his conclusion that happiness and meaning "are distinct not only conceptually but also substantially," but at Internet prices I'll invite our class to discuss it. (Isn't it just like a  certain sort of philosopher, though, to devote great energies to defending a counter-intuitive conclusion whose truth would leave us more confused and less satisfied with our lives than we began?)...

Up@dawn 2.0: http://jposopher.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-meaning-of-happiness.html

Against Happiness

Kevin Powers recommends a book by Eric Wilson we didn't find very helpful in Happiness 101, a couple of classes back.

NYT: "Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend? 

It probably depends on how broad your definition of self-help is. I read a book called “Against Happiness” a few years ago that interrogated our culture’s desire to treat or medicate any negative emotional state out of existence, while at the same time acknowledging the incredible contributions melancholic people have made throughout history."

Fair enough. But the biggest contribution melancholics make is to show us how grateful we should be if we're not ourselves saddled by nature with melancholia. Admittedly, we should also be grateful for the work of sporadically-sad artists like Coleridge and Springsteen and others. Peter Kramer also named names in his Against Depression: Van Gogh, Kierkegaard, Dinesen, Bellow, Updike... But he also deplored the presumption of praising or justifying anyone else's sadness.

I don't imagine Wilson is too happy about that old jacket blurb from Colin McGinn, btw.

Kevin Powers - By the Book - NYTimes.com

The contagion of happiness

A pleasant but foreboding exchange between characters in Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, one of whom is torn between his love for the woman he's talking with and his previously-chaste devotion to God. I know which I'd choose.

"Doctor, help me," he says. "Tell me something magnificent."

  ..."Well, I woke up this morning and diagnosed a very early case of happiness."

"Never heard of it," he says. 

   "It's a rare disease..."

"Is it contagious?" 

   "Don't you have it yet?"

It is contagious, for most of us. For this particular character, other maladies impend. Great book. The fragility of happiness, as of life, is one of its great themes.

High on life

Paul took his Bonnaroo show to Boston. Another hit.

"Night-glow rises, city-glow: Fenway Park brims with happiness. "Let's get high on life!" he exhorts before "Hi, Hi, Hi", and it does seem almost possible. "Live And Let Die" includes fireworks. You can't miss with fireworks. "He's seventy-one dude!" insisted a voice in the bag-check line, hours ago. "This is his last tour for sure!" No way, no way. He'll bury us all."

Happiness Is a Paul McCartney Concert in Summertime - James Parker - The Atlantic

Nostalgia and happiness

Boy the way Glenn Miller played, Archie. Or Steve, for members of my own cohort with less refined musical taste. 

...experimenters induced nostalgia by playing hit songs from the past for some people and letting them read lyrics to their favorite songs. Afterward, these people were more likely than a control group to say that they felt “loved” and that “life is worth living.

Then the researchers tested the effect in the other direction by trying to induce existential angst. They subjected some people to an essay by a supposed Oxford philosopher who wrote that life is meaningless because any single person’s contribution to the world is “paltry, pathetic and pointless.” Readers of the essay became more likely to nostalgize, presumably to ward off Sartrean despair.

Moreover, when some people were induced to nostalgia before reading the bleak essay, they were less likely to be convinced by it. The brief stroll down memory lane apparently made life seem worthwhile, at least to the English students in that experiment. (Whether it would work with gloomy French intellectuals remains to be determined.)

“Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function,” Dr. Routledge says. “It brings to mind cherished experiences that assure us we are valued people who have meaningful lives. Some of our research shows that people who regularly engage in nostalgia are better at coping with concerns about death. 

But isn't that just happiness, at least in an Epicurean sense? One interesting reader comment says no: " There's too much of an awareness of how fleeting these moments will be. A longing to hold onto them -- to can them for winter, if only it were possible. It's more like sorrow than happiness. I call it the Good Sadness."

Good sadness will be good enough for some. I think we can do better.

What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows - NYTimes.com

The happy stupid

Maureen Dowd says the French are stuck in yet another existential malaise.

“The French people, maybe they think too much. The happy stupid don’t see the problem.” People with joie de vivre, after all, are simply not paying attention...

It is a measure of their desperation that the French have become fixated on American-style happiness studies. Claudia Senik, a professor at the Paris School of Economics and the Sorbonne, has become a media darling discussing her research on French malaise. Living in France, with its unyielding judgments about talent and its locked labor market, reduces the probability of being happy by 20 percent, she says.

Though everyone else flocks here to be dazzled, the French are less satisfied than the average European. She calls it “a cultural trait” linked not only to circumstance but to values, beliefs and behaviors passed from generation to generation, and exacerbated by madly competitive schools that are hard on self-esteem. In others words, unhappiness has been bred into the French bone. When French citizens emigrate, she said, they take their tristesse with them.

“Our happiness function is a little deficient,” she said over espresso at Le Rostand across from the Jardin du Luxembourg. “It’s really in the French genome.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/dowd-goodbye-old-world-bonjour-tristesse.html?src=rechp&pagewanted=all

Happiness & meaning & all that jazz

"The Meaning of Life"

I once taught a course called "The Meaning of Life" -- lots of fun, if ultimately inconclusive. But on the last day of class we looked at a clip from my all-time-favorite TV show "Northern Exposure" which implied that the M.o.L. is "that old-time rock-&-roll" (music and lyrics by Bob Seger). The point was less literal, of course: we all need to find the particular music of our lives and "dance" to it. Anyway, Terry Eagleton has a new book on the subject. Here's a review excerpt.

Eagleton finally plumps for happiness, currently enjoying a revival among economists, philosophers and even politicians. But he points out with Aristotle that happiness comes in many and devious forms. . . Happiness disengaged from selfishness and allied to the Greek love for humanity (agape) passes muster, at times almost lyrically so.
The meaning of life is thus not "what you make of it". It is not a passing pleasure, which humans share with animals. Indeed it is not even an answer to a question, but rather "a matter of living life in a certain way". It is an ethical construct and involves treating others as you want them to treat you, caring for those close to you, helping strangers, thinking long term.
The meaning of life to Eagleton is like a jazz band, individuals engaged on a collective endeavour in pursuit of happiness through the mutuality of love.
--Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian --http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,2030253,00.htm

DS 3.13.07

Medium chill

In 1906 William James wrote to H.G.Wells of

“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That, with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.”

He was a century ahead of David Roberts, who says the way to subdue the bitch-goddess is with an attitude and behavior he calls "medium chill":

"Medium chill" has become something of a slogan for my wife and me....We now have a smallish house in a nondescript working class Seattle neighborhood with no sidewalks. We have one car, a battered old minivan with a large dent on one side where you have to bang it with your hip to make the door shut. Our boys go to public schools. Our jobs pay enough to support our lifestyle, mostly anyway. If we wanted, we could both do the "next thing" on our respective career paths. She could move to a bigger company. I could freelance more, angle to write for a bigger publications, write a book, hire a publicist, whatever. We could try to make more money. Then we could fix the water pressure in our shower, redo the back patio, get a second car, or hell, buy a bigger house closer in to town. Maybe get the kids in private schools. All that stuff people with more money than us do. But ... meh..."

What Careerist Americans Can Learn From Ike, Dorothy Day and Jimmy Buffett - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic

And here's one of the ways I achieve medium chill:

#Happiness is a hammock, a mild June Sunday, & a good friend alongside. pic.twitter.com/Y1aYRWvf4h