Jim Holt

Reasons to be Cheerful

The Pursuit of Happiness

By

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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’).

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