Happiness returns

My Philosophy of Happiness course only comes around every other year. (Here's how we kicked off, time before last: Happy go lucky, 8.29.13) Who could have predicted, when last we met in 2015, the current state of things? Who could have imagined this eclipse-defying, race-baiting, ally-smacking, self-infatuated POTUS? It's been surreal, mostly not in a happy way. Some of us may be tempted to surrender to this moment, to suspend talk of happiness as self-indulgence of another sort, and to brace ourselves for conflict domestic and foreign as we soldier through a time of troubles.

But not me. Happiness and its pursuit are too important, too central to the meaning and point of being human, to abandon for anything as fleeting as the particular political absurdities of this passing show.

Weren't you happy to experience and share that cosmic diversion last Monday? But that gets it backwards. Politics, impactful though it is on lives and prospects, is the diversion. We need to remember that we're standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving, etc. We need to retain a cosmic perspective. Then, we'll not be so inclined to discount the importance of our happiness.

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

Thus spake my philosophical spirit-guide James, a little over a century ago. But if that's too current, you can go back to Aristotle. "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."

But the issue of our existence is never settled by the citing of authorities, no matter how lustrous. We have to work it out for ourselves, find a way to flourish in personal terms while also remaining responsibly committed to the welfare of our peers and the survival of our species. No simple task, but there's none more urgent.

That sounds almost grim, in an existentialist sort of way. "You will never be happy," said Camus, "if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

Well, I disagree. That's too pessimistic, too Schopenhaurian.

“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”

If that's the course you signed on for, this one will disappoint. The world does have a great deal to offer. It has a world. We get to live here. We're the lucky ones who got to live at all, who'll get to be happy if we apply ourselves just a bit to the question of how to do it.

 That, anyhow, is our working hypothesis. It makes me happy to begin working it out again. We'll see if we can verify the SoL's 60-second secrets, and its preference for eudaimonia.

There's nothing more fun, and often funny, that the pursuit of happiness.

It's the birthday of the man who said, "Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness... That's 19th-century poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1809)... the father of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

In The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) he wrote, "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible."

And it's the birthday of the man who said, "The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts": British philosopher John Locke, born in Wrington, Somerset, England (1632). He believed all of our knowledge is derived from the senses. He also believed that we can know about morality with the same precision we know about math, because we create our ideas. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1688) was an instant success and sparked debate all across Europe.

Locke said, "Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."