A Brief History of Happiness

205 Pages·2006·5.367 MB·English

by  Nicholas White

A Brief History of Happiness
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To C. C.
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a brief history of happiness
Nicholas White
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© 2006 by Nicholas White
blackwell publishing
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except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2006
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, Nicholas P., 1942–
A brief history of happiness / Nicholas White.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1519-3 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1519-X (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1520-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1520-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Happiness—History.
I. Title.
BJ1481.W65 2006
170—dc22
2005024028
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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Contents
Preface vii
1 Introducing the Concept 1
2 Conflicts, Perspectives, and the Identification of
Happiness 6
3 Pleasure, Hedonism, and the Measurement of Happiness 41
4 Happiness as Structure and Harmony 75
5 Morality, Happiness, and Conflict 116
6 Happiness, Fact, and Value 142
7 Doing without the Concept 162
Glossary and List of Historical Figures 175
Bibliography 181
Index 187
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H
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Preface
Now anticipation is an odd thing, as we all know – imaginative,
credulous, and sure of its facts before the event; difficult to please and
overcritical when the time comes. Reality never seems enough to it,
because it has no real idea what it wants...
(Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed)
The history of happiness is no ordinary history, and the subject is
by no means ordinary either. The idea of happiness points us to an
all-inclusive assessment of a person’s condition. It makes a claim, at
least, to take into account all considerations about what’s desirable
and worthwhile. The history of happiness might thus claim to be
relevant to everything concerning human, or even other, beings. On
both sides, the concept and the history, there seem to be no bound-
aries within which to work. On various grounds, some contours and
limits are called for.
The contours should come from the problem that the concept
raises. It attempts and purports to include, as I’ve just said, every-
thing that’s desirable and worthwhile for humans. As the history of
happiness shows, however, this totality isn’t easy to grasp.
The various aims – and enjoyments, desires, judgments about
what’s worthwhile, etc. – all of which the notion of happiness istaken
to include, seem often to conflict with each other. They seem to con-
flict with each other in such a way that they can’t all be surveyed and
evaluated together. Accordingly there might be no non-arbitrary way
of constructing a coherent concept out of them. The concept of
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happiness may simply be the expression of a firm but unrealizable
hope for some kind of coherence of aims (see Chapter7).
A history of happiness as it appears in western philosophy, which
is what this book will cover, should contain descriptions ofimportant
attempts to fulfill this hope, by somehow harmonizing these ele-
ments or systematizing them. Many of these attempts are attached
to the word “happiness,” and to fairly near equivalents in English
and other languages, such as “well-being” and the Greek eudaimonia.
Trying to include all of the topics that have been thought relevant
to happiness, or all of the people who have said significant things
about it, would make impossible the task of a history of happiness,
especially a brief one. A great deal has to be left out. I’ve selected
the material to include by its relevance to the philosophical issues
surrounding happiness that seem to me most important and inter-
esting. Still, enough is excluded to occupy a much larger book than
this one.
The best kind of history of such a philosophical concept is one
that concentrates on and confronts interesting and important philo-
sophical problems in which the idea figures. (There’s no algorithm
for determining which problems are interesting and important; one
just has to consider them and see what one thinks and what others
think.) There would be no sense in a mere chronological march
through the historical periods in which the concept of happiness has
been employed. That would only give a hint of the issues connected
with the concept that are still worth thinking about. No one ever
learns anything about philosophy from the vulgar historicism which
says that the understanding of a concept is generated simply by
studying its history or its contexts. One has to understand the con-
cept without that, to some extent, before one can begin to know
what its history or contexts might tell one about it.
Moreover the connections between the philosophical issues that
the concept of happiness raises and the various political, economic,
and even cultural events of the periods in which the concept appears
aren’t even particularly interesting as history. Most of the standard
connections are obvious anyway – such as the fact that treatment of
viii Preface
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the concept in the Middle Ages was associated with Christianity, that
this connection was partly loosened in the Renaissance, and so on.
Philosophers can, and often do, think of things to discuss that aren’t
closely tied to their own times; that isn’t, really, very difficult for
a reasonably intelligent person. So almost every historical context
witnesses concepts, and rivalries between concepts and disputes
over them, that don’t bear any interesting historical relation to other
things that went on at the time.
In any case, the connections of this kind that I’ll discuss are ones
that are integrally connected to deep-seated live problems in the
concept as it has been for a very long time under a wide variety of
circumstances. By “deep-seated” I don’t mean “essential” or “meta-
physical” or “timeless” or “eternal.” It can just be the case that we
have certain concepts and can’t put them aside, and that can make
certain thoughts obviously wrong. For that to be so, essentiality, and
metaphysicalness aren’t necessary. Nor is timelessness or eternality.
Here we have to do with twenty-five hundred years. That’s more
than long enough.
Having certain concepts can make certain problems un-get-
over-able. (We can forget about this silly false contrast: the idea that
if there’s no metaphysical basis for settling an issue, then there’s
nothing to do but have a “conversation” about it.) That becomes
clear when one looks at the things that have been said about happi-
ness over the period during which it’s been discussed.
Thinking of the history of philosophy as valuable primarily for
the sake of thinking about philosophy leads, of course, to a focus
on certain philosophical ideas and issues rather than others. That’sas
it should be. It’s as it should be even though it means, when organ-
izing a book, leaving certain interesting things out, among them
interesting historical matters. The resources of the history of philo-
sophy are too valuable for philosophy to be allowed to be hostage to
encyclopedism, antiquarianism, or historicism.
Most of the important ideas about happiness, and the difficulties
that arise from them, were already present in the thinking of the
ancient Greeks. Most philosophical questions about happiness that
Preface ix
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