Jim Holt

Reasons to be Cheerful

The Pursuit of Happiness

By

Constable 200pp £12.95 order from our bookshop

Taken collectively, the ‘pronouncements of the wise and near-wise on happiness make for rather a welter. Locke held that all men seek happiness, but Nietzsche insisted that only the English do. The Stoics taught that the happy life was characterised by the exercise of moral virtue, whereas Pater felt it was a matter of bunging in as many ‘pulsations’ as possible. ‘L’inquiétude est essentielle à la félicité des créatures’, declared Leibniz; Captain Grimes, however, was quite unable to see how anyone who got exactly what he wanted when he wanted it could help being happy. For Aristotle, happiness was an activity; Or Johnson, by contrast, seemed to think of it as a state, one that more or less coincided with drunkenness (no wonder he believed that ‘it is the business of the wise man to be happy’).

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Pollan has no doubt that the use of psychedelics could have a powerfully beneficial effect on a range of condition… ,
    • A memoir about an Untouchable family and the 'formation of modern India': 'Ants among Elephants' by @gidla_sujatha… ,
    • RT : First founded in Edinburgh in 1979, is considered a trusted independent source for reviews of new book… ,
    • 'In different ways Hatherley makes gritty Lódź and poor old which-country-are-we-in-this-week Lviv sound entrancing… ,
    • In this issue Lucy Popescu discusses the miscarriages of justice occurring in the investigation over Maltese journa… ,
    • 'Rodin’s fascination with ancient Greek sculpture is part of a long and distinguished French tradition.' A review o… ,
    • The New Testament, in a new translation by David Bentley Hart, reviewed by Salley Vickers ,
    Follow Us