by Scott Samuelson
During our disturbingly subdued celebration of the Declaration of Independence’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, one of the many things I’ve been thinking about is our natural right to “the pursuit of happiness.” As I’ve reconsidered the philosophical tradition that the Committee of Five was drawing on when they lit on that memorable phrase, seven great puzzles of happiness have stood out to me, which also emerge time and again in any halfway-thoughtful person’s life.
PUZZLE #1: WHAT’S IN OUR CONTROL?
In many languages, the word for happiness can also mean luck. Even in English, “happiness” derives from “hap,” which gives us words like “happenstance.” So, maybe happiness isn’t in our control at all. That’s one answer to the puzzle. Happiness is happenstance, sheer luck. Let’s just hope and pray for the best.
In many ways, the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy emerged to give an alternative answer. We can make an art of being human. We can shape our lives to be open to happiness. Fundamentally, the good life isn’t a matter of luck. It involves habits and virtues that we cultivate in ourselves. It’s more about what we do than what’s done to us.
Some philosophers—arguably Socrates himself, but certainly the Stoic philosophers he influenced—went so far as to say that happiness is totally in our control. If we cultivate the right mindset and practice the right virtues, we can be happy under all circumstances. Even when we’re wrongly imprisoned and face an unjust execution (to take the tragic example of Socrates—excuse me, I should say comic example, since all endings are happy endings for a virtuous person), we can be completely happy if we’re just at peace with our conscience. So, there’s another answer to our first puzzle. With the right moral character, we can be happy no matter what our fate holds.
Yet other philosophers, most famously Aristotle, argued that while our choices and virtues are the lion’s share of happiness, there’s still a little luck that we need. At minimum, a happy life involves dodging the worst of fates, a fate like that of Priam, who had to endure the rape and murder of his family, the destruction of his homeland, and the genocide of his people—a fate still being suffered in our current world. So, there’s another answer. Happiness is mostly in our control, but we need a little luck—or at least we need to be spared horrible luck.
Maybe we also need the basic equipment for being happy—for instance, a home and food. If so, that raises interesting political questions for anybody committed to a natural right to the pursuit of happiness. Read more »
Ryan Ruby is a novelist, translator, critic, and poet who lives, as I do, in Berlin. Back in the summer of 2018, I attended an event at TOP, an art space in Neukölln, where along with journalist Ben Mauk and translator Anne Posten, his colleagues at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, he was reading from work in progress. Ryan read from a project he called Context Collapse, which, if I remember correctly, he described as a “poem containing the history of poetry.” But to my ears, it sounded more like an academic paper than a poem, with jargon imported from disciplines such as media theory, economics, and literary criticism. It even contained statistics, citations from previous scholarship, and explanatory footnotes, written in blank verse, which were printed out, shuffled up, and distributed to the audience. Throughout the reading, Ryan would hold up a number on a sheet of paper corresponding to the footnote in the text, and a voice from the audience would read it aloud, creating a spatialized, polyvocal sonic environment as well as, to be perfectly honest, a feeling of information overload. Later, I asked him to send me the excerpt, so I could delve deeper into what he had written at a slower pace than readings typically afford—and I’ve been looking forward to seeing the finished project ever since. And now that it is, I am publishing the first suite of excerpts from Context Collapse at Statorec, where I am editor-in-chief.