We live at a time when the search for happiness has taken center stage as never before. Books, TV shows, and websites are constantly offering pointers about how to finally achieve and sustain this elusive and sought-after state of being. If only we were happy, everything would be okay. Imagine a drug that would make you perfectly happy, but remove any interest you might have in doing anything more than simple survival. You would lead a thoroughly boring treadmill of a life, from the outside—but inside you would be blissfully happy, romping through imaginary adventures and always-successful romantic escapades. Would you take the drug? Think of Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Or Michelangelo, Beethoven, Virginia Woolf. Is “happy” the first word that comes to mind when you set out to describe them? They may have been—and surely were, from time to time—but it’s not their defining characteristic. The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life.”
― The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
What is it, how can we best pursue it, why should we? Supporting the study of these and related questions at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond. PHIL 3160 – Philosophy of Happiness - "Examining the concept of human happiness and its application in everyday living as discussed since antiquity by philosophers, psychologists, writers, spiritual leaders, and contributors to pop culture."
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Russell on merging happily in "the universal life"
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) March 9, 2019
Bertrand Russell on how to grow old https://t.co/jK1MOgACCH
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
Happy dissolution
“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)