Happiness

HAPPINESS
A HISTORY
DARRIN M. McMAHOK T
$27.50
T oday, human beings tend to think of

happiness as a natural right. But they
haven't always felt this way. For the ancient
Greeks, happiness meant virtue. For the
Romans, it implied prosperity and divine
favor. For Christians, happiness was synony-
mous with God. Throughout history, happiness
has been equated regularly with the highest
human calling, the most perfect human state.
Yet it's only within the past two hundred years

that human beings have begun to think of
happiness as not just an earthly possibility but
also as an earthly entitlement, even an obliga-
tion. In this sweeping new book, historian
Darrin M. McMahon argues that our modern
belief in happiness is the product of a dramatic
revolution in human expectations carried out
since the eighteenth century.
McMahon investigates how that funda-
mental transformation in thinking took place
by surveying two thousand years of politics,
culture, and thought. In ancient Greek tragedy,

happiness was considered a gift of the gods. By
the time of the Romans, its cherished symbol,
the phallus, was synonymous with pleasure
and prosperity. Central to the development of
Christianity, happiness held out the promise
of an end to all suffering in the eternal bliss
of the world to come. When that promise was
extended from heaven to earth in the age of the
Enlightenment, men and women faced the
novel prospect that they could — in fact
should —be happy in this life as a matter of

course. Ultimately, the Enlightenment's faith
in happiness led to its consecration in Thomas
Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and
France's Declaration of the Rights of Man.
But it also lay behind the tragic Utopian
experiments of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries that vowed to eliminate misery and
extend happiness to all. Ranging from
psychology to genetics to the invention of the
(continued on back flap)

HAPPINESS:
A HISTORY
Also by Darrin M. McMahon
Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter- Enlightenment

and the Making of Modernity
Darrin M. McMahon
HAPPINESS:
A HISTORY
Atlantic
A
Monthly Press
New York
Connolly Branch Library

Copyright © 2006 by Damn M. McMahon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

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Every effort was made to secure permissions for photographs and

text. Any omissions brought to the publishers' attention
will be corrected in future printings.
Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States ofAmerica
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McMahon, Darrin M.
Happiness : a history / Darrin M. McMahon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN- 10: 0-871 13-886-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-871 13-886-6
1. Happiness — History. 2. Happiness — Social aspects. I. Title.
BJ1481.M46 2005
170—dc22 2005048009
Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
06 07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For Courtney, partner in pursuit,
who has endured all the moods
that writing a book on happiness entails,
and invented some of her own
Contents
Preface xi
Introduction: The Tragedy of Happiness i
Part One: The Making of a Modern Faith

i The Highest Good 19
2 Perpetual Felicity 66
3 From Heaven to Earth 140
4 Self-Evident Truths 197
A Modern Rite 253
Part Two: Spreading the Word

5 Questioning the Evidence 271
6 Liberalism and Its Discontents 312
7 Building Happy Worlds 363

8 Joyful Science 406
Conclusion: Happy Ending 454

Acknowledgments 481
Notes 485
Index 529
My steps have held fast to your paths; my feet have not slipped.
—Psalm 17:5
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's

heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
—Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
—
Preface
One may observed

contemplate
ness," the
history from the point of view of happi-
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich Hegel, "but history is not the soil in which happiness grows.
The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." 1
There have been times in cultivating this project — in which hours

of drudgery yielded only barren pages and arid drafts —when I was
forced to confront the irony that writing a book on happiness might
make me miserable. Usually I did so with a smile, laughing faintly at
myself. But I was also tempted on occasion to concede Hegel's dic-
tum and be done with it. My history of happiness, it seemed at such

times, would prove an empty book.
For how to write a history of something so elusive, so intangible
of this "thing" that is not a thing, this hope, this yearning, this dream?
As another German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, rightly observed,
"the concept of happiness is such an indeterminate one that even

though everyone wishes to attain happiness, yet he can never say defi-
nitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills." 2 It is
disconcerting for any author to be forced to admit the difficulty

perhaps impossibility —of even defining the subject of his inquiry. And
—
xii Preface
it is more daunting still to know that countless men and women have
spent their entire lives searching for this very "thing," only to have it
elude their grasp. Was happiness like Eurydice of Greek myth, I won-
dered, who slips from our arms when we turn to behold her, disap-
pearing as soon as we catch a glimpse?

That thought has given me pause. So, too, has the peculiar nature
of the subject itself. As Sigmund Freud recognized nearly a century
ago, "happiness ... is something essentially subjective." He went on

to assert that "no matter how much we may shrink with horror from
certain situations — of a galley-slave in antiquity, of a peasant during
the Thirty Years' War, of a victim of the Holy Inquisition, of a Jew

awaiting a pogrom — it is nevertheless impossible for us to feel our way
into such people," to gauge their pleasure and pain. If even such sad
cases could harbor happy thoughts, I wondered, how could anyone
hope to write the history of the term? "It seems to me unprofitable,"
Freud concluded, "to pursue this aspect of the problem any further." 3
And yet, living in the West at the turn of the twenty-first century,
I found it impossible to leave the problem at that. For happiness — its
promise, its expectation, its allure —was everywhere around me. In

New York City, where I made my home in the roaring 1990s, people
splashed themselves, both literally and figuratively, with a cologne
whose very name — Happy—captured the ethos of the time. In Lon-
don, illicit pleasure seekers offered the drug of the decade —ecstasy
stamped with a smiling face. In Vienna, every morning I drank orange
juice whose label proclaimed, "[Have a] happy day," while on the tele-
vision, Bavarian automakers promised that "happiness is the curve."
In Paris, like so many other places, a trip to the local bookstore revealed
a contemporary obsession. Entire walls of popular psychology and new
age religion beckoned in the direction of everlasting content. They
beckon still. "Don't worry, be happy," intones the popular song. When
one contemplates that great modern icon, the smiling yellow happy
face, it becomes possible to think of this suggestion, rather sadly, as a
command.
We can be happy, we will be happy, we should be happy. We have a
right to happiness. Surely this is our modern creed. But have human
Preface xiii
beings always felt this way? Is it correct to assume, with Freud's con-
temporary the American philosopher William James, that "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"? 4 Is happiness eternal — universal — or does it have a history,
a specific record of time and place?
The title of this book alone, of course, reveals my conviction that,
Hegel and Freud notwithstanding, happiness can be treated histori-
cally. But let me draw attention to the indefinite article from the start.
This is a history of happiness, not the history of happiness; it makes no
such grandiose claims. On the contrary, writing this book has made
me painfully aware of how much I have had to leave out. There are
infinite histories of happiness to be written — histories not only of the
struggles and pursuits of the peasants, slaves, and apostates mentioned

by Freud —but of early-modern women and late-modern aristocrats,
nineteenth-century bourgeois and twentieth-century workers, conser-

vatives and radicals, consumers and crusaders, immigrants and natives,
gentiles and Jews. There are fascinating national and regional varia-
tions of this history to consider, a fact that social scientists in recent
years have begun to explore, devoting considerable effort to attempts
to measure the comparative happiness or "subjective well-being" of

peoples. Are Swedes happier than Danes? Americans than Japanese?
Russians than Turks? Are some cultures happier than others? 5
Such questions highlight the fact that, although for reasons of per-
sonal interest and professional expertise I have concentrated my his-
tory on the experience of "the West" (an imperfect term that I use
broadly for lack of a better, without celebration or geographical preci-
sion), it is undoubtedly the case that happiness might be studied fruit-
6
fully from a variety of different cultural and historical perspectives.
As the recent international success of the Dalai Lama's The Art of Hap-
piness: A Handbook for Living makes clear, the search for happiness is
now a global concern, one with roots, however shallow or deep, in many
different cultural and religious traditions. In the end, William James
may well have been right. Perhaps happiness is, was, and ever shall be
the ultimate human end in every time and place.
xiv Preface
Yet it is also perfectly clear that the manner in which men and
women understand happiness — how they propose, and whether they
expect, to achieve it — varies dramatically across cultures and over

time. And as I hope this book will demonstrate, happiness has occu-
pied a particularly prominent place in the Western intellectual tradi-

tion, exerting its influence on many aspects of Western culture and
thought. As the late Harvard historian Howard Mumford Jones once
pointed out in contemplating both the challenge and the hubris of any
such undertaking, a history of happiness would be "not merely a his-
tory of mankind, but also a history of ethical, philosophic, and religious
thought." 7
Although I have no intention of attempting anything so rash as a
"history of mankind," I do believe that a history of happiness, at least
initially, should be an intellectual history, a history of conceptions of
this perennial human end and the strategies devised to attain it, as
these have evolved in different ethical, philosophical, religious, and, I
would add, political contexts. For whatever else it might be (and it is,
assuredly, many things), happiness in the West has functioned above

all as an idea —an idea and aspiration that for particular reasons has
exercised a powerful hold on the Western imagination. Given, as Freud

recognized, the immense difficulty, even impossibility, of ever judg-
ing another's state of happiness with precision (indeed, of judging our
own), I have chosen instead to focus on representations of the term
and concept as these have developed over time. The changes, we shall
see, have been dramatic — so much so that the "happiness" of yester-

day bears only a scarce resemblance to the "happiness" of today. But
by charting the history of this development, and tracing the geneal-
ogy of what is now an overarching aspiration, I hope to show that there
are important connections nonetheless.
Born in the ancient world of classical Greece, shaped profoundly by

the Judeo-Christian tradition, only to emerge as a radical new force
during the Age of Enlightenment, happiness and its pursuit have fas-
cinated ever since, fundamentally influencing our modern expecta-
tions and experience. No contemporary effort to achieve happiness, it
is clear, can properly be understood without consideration of this

Preface xv
past — a past, as we shall see, that has not always been a happy affair.
Replete with struggles and disappointments, disillusion and despair,

the pursuit of happiness has a dark side. It is, observed the nineteenth-
century critic Thomas Carlyle, a "shadow of ourselves." 8
In following the outlines of this shadow in light and dark, I have
drawn on many sources, including art and architecture, poetry and
scripture, music and theology, literature, myth, and the testimony of
ordinary men and women. But by and large, I rely on what were once
called, without irony or inverted commas, the great books of Western
civilization. In teaching these books in Europe and America over the
past several years, it has been my experience that debate regarding
their continued relevance disappears the moment one bothers to read
them. I continue to subscribe to this opinion, and it is clearly reflected
here.
But by defending what is, in effect, a return in this instance to a
quite traditional form of intellectual history, I do not mean to suggest
that the history of happiness (or the history of any subject, for that 7
matter) should be approached only in this way. My own past scholar-

ship is deeply indebted to the work of a wide variety of social and cul-
tural historians, and I have little doubt that future endeavors will draw
heavily (and gratefully) on their labors. Moreover, as I point out in sev-
eral places in my notes, much of the material examined in this book
deserves to be studied in further detail and treated in other ways: In
the rich, contextualized approach developed by the so-called Cam-
bridge School of textual analysis; from the perspective of the growing
subdiscipline known as the History of Emotions; or finally, as several
young scholars are doing right now, from the standpoint of literary
criticism. 9 In the study of happiness, as in the study of most things,
methodological pluralism is only to be encouraged.
Having said this, I do feel strongly that the approach adopted in this
book is a necessary beginning, and also a revelatory one, if for no other

reason than it allows me to take a view of the longue duree, following
changes and continuities that might otherwise be missed. What I hope
will become clear as a result is not only the centrality of the issue of
happiness to the Western tradition, but the centrality of that same
XVI Preface
tradition and legacy to contemporary concerns. Whether we choose to

recognize the fact or not, our present preoccupation with happiness
has been shaped fundamentally by the deep and abiding influence of
the classical and Judeo-Christian experience. We moderns — so ready
to countenance our cultural liberation from the past, so ready in our

technological prowess and global sophistication to view with conde-
scension much that has come before —ignore this experience at a cost.
For though some would bemoan the fact, it remains with us, influenc-
ing our actions and desires, forming who we are.
One last editorial remark. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of
Shaftesbury and an important eighteenth-century moralist, once
asked, "If Philosophy be, as we take it, the Study of Happiness, must
not everyone, in some manner or other, either skillfully or unskillfully
philosophize?" 10 In my experience, the answer to this question is a re-
sounding yes. And so I have tried here to reach out to that perhaps
mythic, certainly endangered, species, "the ordinary reader," writing
without condescension, I hope, but at the same time with a self-
conscious effort to enliven as well as to analyze and explain. I have even

attempted (God forbid) to have fun, recklessly ignoring the warning
of the Oxford don and Anglican archbishop of Dublin, Richard
Whately, who cautioned in the nineteenth century that happiness is
no laughing matter. The humanities are simply too important to be

left to dour scholarly eyes alone. And we humanists need to recall more
often that the rightful owner of our subject — the humanities— is hu-
manity itself, of which we form only a tiny fraction.
Some of these goals are undoubtedly ambitious. But it is my hope
that, as in the pursuit of happiness itself, there may be value in striv-
ing to attain them nevertheless, even when I fall short of my ultimate

end.
New York City

October 2004
—
introduction:
The Tragedy
of happiness
The search for happiness

ture, and in a certain
is as old as history itself, one might ven-
sense that claim would be true. For in
the opening pages of Book One of what is widely regarded as the first
work of history in the West The History of Herodotus —we find the
quest for happiness bound up in this inaugural record of the "great

and wonderful deeds" of human affairs. Croesus, the fabulously
wealthy king of Lydia, has summoned before him the itinerant sage
Solon, lawgiver of Athens and a man who has traveled over much of
the world in search of knowledge. The Lydian king lacks nothing, or
so he believes, and attempts to convince Solon of the fact, dispatch-
ing servants to lead the wise Athenian around his stores of treasures
so that he might marvel at "their greatness and richness." Needing
nothing, Croesus nonetheless reveals that he is in need, for he is over-
come by a "longing" to know who is the happiest man in the world.

Foolishly, he believes that this man is himself. 1
Solon's answer, however, threatens to dispel this illusion. The hap-

piest man, he claims, is not Croesus but Tellus, a father from Athens
who was killed in battle in the prime of life. And the second happiest
—
men two young brothers named Cleobis and Biton are also dead, —
2 Happiness
having passed away in their sleep after pulling their mother to a vil-
lage festival, yoked to her cart like a pair of oxen.
Not surprisingly, Croesus is perplexed by these answers, perplexed

and then enraged, eventually sending Solon away, "thinking him as-
suredly a stupid man."

2
The Lydian's proud refusal to hear the wis-
dom in Solon's words sets in motion a series of events that eventually
bring down Croesus and his kingdom, embroiling the peoples of

Greece and Persia in nearly one hundred years of war. The great clash
of civilizations that would draw to a close only with the Greek victo-
ries at Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea in 480-479 bce might thus
be read as the awful outcome of the search for human happiness.

In truth, it is unlikely that the historical figures Solon and Croesus
ever met, though the real Solon probably did have something to say
on the subject of happiness. 3 Still, the central place of this episode in
Herodotus's History reminds us that this chronicle of human conflict
is also a chronicle of human striving. Painting with a broad brush,

Herodotus vows famously in the work's opening paragraph to capture
all so "that time may not draw the color from what man has brought
into being." The pursuit of human happiness, it would seem, has been
with us from the start.
But what are we to make of Solon's response? Two well-built

brothers, who shut their eyes for a well-earned rest, never to wake
again. A young family man cut down in the prime of his life, leaving
his wife and sons behind. On what terms might such people —such
dead people — possibly be considered "happy"?What could Herodotus
have meant, and how might he have been understood by those who
gathered to hear his tales at the agora, the marketplace of the fifth-
century Mediterranean world? To know this, we must listen with more

care than Croesus to Solon's response. And we must do so while sus-
pending our own beliefs about what happiness is, or what happiness
should be. For nothing could be further from this early Greek ideal
than our modern conceptions of the term.
In the first place, Herodotus employs not any single word to de-
scribe the object of Croesus's desire, but several, drawing on a num-
ber of closely related terms that had come down to him from the great
—
Darrin M. McMahon 3
epic period of Homer and Hesiod in the eight and ninth centuries
bce. 4 Herodotus makes use, for example, of the term olbios, which,
along with its close cousin makarios, may be rendered (imperfectly) as
"blessed." In the Homeric hymns and the Hesiodic poems, these com-
plex terms are used frequently in reference to the heroes, to the gods,
and to those who enjoy their favor, indicating divine sanction, free-
dom from suffering, and general prosperity, both material and moral.
Thus, in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the master of the Cretans ad-
dresses a god disguised as an ordinary man with some confusion:
"Stranger —though you are nothing like mortal men in shape or stat-
ure, but are as the immortal gods — hail and all happiness to you,"
employing here a variant of olbios. But 5
in the Hymn to Hermes, the poet
uses a form of'makarios to describe the cave dwelling of the god Hermes
and his mother, which is full of "nectar and lovely ambrosia," with
"much silver and gold," fine clothing, and other things "such as are
kept in the sacred houses of the blessed." Like the Olympians who
know no hardship and are beautifully clad, richly fed, and secure in
their possessions and persons, those who are olbios or makarios are simi-
larly favored.
6
They are, one might say, "fortunate." And so we find
Herodotus, and through him, Solon, speaking of those who possess
what Croesus claims to enjoy as having eutychia, or "luck." To live in
the favor of the gods, to be blessed, is to live with fortune on one's

side.
Finally, Herodotus uses one other adjective to capture all these

subtleties eudaimon (and the noun, eudaimonia) — indicating a flourish-
ing, favored life. The word was first employed in extant Greek litera-
ture by Hesiod. "Happy and lucky the man" {eudaimon te kai olbios) , he
declares in the Work and Days, who knows and keeps the holy days, who
understands omens, who avoids transgression, and "who does his work
7
without offending the deathless gods." But the word was emerging in
Herodotus's own time as the preferred —and absolutely central —term

to designate the elusive quality for which Croesus yearned. Comprising
the Greek eu (good) and daimon (god, spirit, demon), eudaimonia thus
contains within it a notion of fortune — for to have a good daimon on
your side, a guiding spirit, is to be lucky—and a notion of divinity, for a
4 Happiness
daimon is an emissary of the gods who watches over each of us, acting
invisibly on the Olympians' behalf. As a leading classicist has observed,
"Daimon is occult power, a force that drives men forward where no agent
can be named," and it is this aspect of the term that helps to account
for the unpredictable force that leads Croesus, like all men, impelling
8
him forward in pursuit of he knows not what. For if to have a good
daimon means to be carried in the direction of the divine, to have a bad
daimon, a dysdaimon (or kakadaimon) is to be turned aside, led astray, or
countered by another. The gods, alas, are as capricious as mortals, as that
unhappy wife of Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona, learns to her dis-
may. Her name is simply a variation on the Greek word for unhappy,
dysdaimon, as Shakespeare certainly knew. He was probably also aware
that daimon is the Greek root of the modern word "demon," a fiend or
an who haunts. Something of that vaguely sinister connota-

evil spirit
tion is embedded in mdaimonia itself.
Thus, when Croesus asks Solon after hearing of the blessedness of

Tellus, Cleobis, and Biton, "Is the happiness [eudaimonia] that is mine
so entirely set at naught by you that you do not make me the equal of
even private men?" Solon's response makes clear that in matters of
chance, one can never be too sure:
Croesus, you asked me, you who know that the Divine is
altogether jealous and prone to trouble us, you asked me

about human matters. In the whole length of time there is
much to see that one would rather not see —and much to
suffer likewise. I put the boundary of human life at seventy
years. These seventy years have twenty-five thousand two
hundred days, not counting [leap years] ... so that all the
days of a man's life are twenty-six thousand two hundred and
fifty; of all those days not one brings to him anything exactly
the same as another. So, Croesus, man is entirely what befalls
him. To me it is clear that you are very rich, and it is clear
that you are the king of many men; but the thing that you
asked me I cannot say of you yet, until I hear that you have
brought your life to an end well. 9
Darrin M. McMahon 5
This is the wisdom of a world in which inscrutable forces constantly

threaten to subvert human aims, a world ruled by fate or by the gods,
in which suffering is all pervasive and uncertainty is woven into the
fabric of daily experience. Today it is sometimes tempting to think
of early Greek life in the manner by which it has largely come down
to us — as myth —imagining it, deliciously, as a sunny, sensual affair,
flowing with the unflinching purpose of Attic oarsmen, clean as

classical marble, sweet as ambrosia. But such reveries hide the less
pleasant facts: that thunder or an eclipse could induce terror, that

pestilence and hunger periodically wiped out entire communities, that
horribly disfigured men and women were a presence in every town,
that children were as apt to die before their fifth birthday as to live
longer, that bloody warfare was a constant reminder of the fragility of

existence. In a world such as that, life was less something to be made
than something to be endured. Only those who did so successfully
could be deemed fortunate, blessed, happy.
It is in part for this reason that Solon judges Tellus, Cleobis, and
Biton worthy of the epithet of "happy." All three successfully negoti-
ated life's perils while they lived, and then died with honor at the
moment of their greatest glory. Of Tellus, we are told:
In the first place, [his] city was in a good state when he had
sons —good and beautiful they were —and he saw children in
turn born to all of them, and all surviving. Secondly, when he

himself had come prosperously to a moment of —his life that
is, prosperously as it counts with us —he had, besides, an

ending for it that was most glorious: in a battle between the
Athenians and their neighbors in Eleusis he made a sally,
routed the enemy, and died splendidly, and the Athenians

gave him a public funeral where he fell and so honored him
10
greatly.
Living in a city ravaged neither by plague nor by marauding armies,

the father and grandfather of beautiful children who survived child-
birth unscarred and unmarked, himself healthy and of sufficient
6 Happiness
means, honored in life as in death, Tellus managed to run the gaunt-
let of life without falling and to leave it with honor and grace.
Cleobis and Biton also performed this most perilous of feats. Blessed
with "sufficiency of livelihood and besides, a strength of body," these
two prizewinning athletes from the Argive were late in taking their
mother to a temple for the feast of Hera. Unharnessing the oxen that
pulled their cart, they drew it themselves at a much faster pace for
many miles, and when they arrived, they were seen by all who had
gathered for the feast:
The Argive men came and stood around the young men,
congratulating them on their strength, and the women con-
gratulated the mother on the fine sons she had; and the
mother, in her great joy at what was said and done, stood right
in front of the statue and there prayed for Cleobis and Biton,
her own sons, who had honored her so signally, that the
goddess should give them whatsoever is best for a man to win.
After that prayer the young men sacrificed and banqueted and
laid them down to sleep in the temple where they were; they
never rose more, but that was the end in which they were
held. 11
It is the last line that prevents us from yielding to the temptation to

pull these tales into our own time, to see the "happiness" of Tellus,
Cleobis, and Biton in recognizable terms as a function simply of their
robust health, their relative prosperity, their familial harmony, their
noble achievements, and their public esteem. All these factors, to be
sure, figure in Solon's reckoning, but it is the end —death— that gives
them meaning, ensuring in its finality that one's good fortune, one's
blessedness, can no longer be taken away. It is a good death that the
goddess deems "best for a man to win," so that is the reward she
bestows. Where life is governed by uncertainty, one can count no man
happy until he is dead, for as Solon warns, "to many the god has shown
a glimpse of blessedness only to extirpate them in the end." 12
And this, of course, is precisely the destiny of Croesus, whose down-
Darrin M. McMahon 7
fall is presented as a cautionary tale of the hubris of deeming oneself

happy in a world where it is impossible to control one's fate. Men and
women, Solon says, are what "befall" them, a certainty that applies
equally to rich and poor. Although wealth may help to satisfy our de-
sires and even shield us from certain pains, it can do nothing, ulti-
mately, to withstand ill fortune or the wrath of the gods, for "no single
person is self-sufficient." Shortly after Solon's departure, Croesus
learns the awful truth of those words, receiving "a great visitation of
evil." His son is killed in a freak accident, Croesus himself misinter-

prets an oracle at Delphi and is lured into a disastrous war as a conse-
quence, and his kingdom is destroyed by invading Persian armies. Only
as a captive, facing imminent destruction atop a funeral pyre whose
flames lick at his feet, does Croesus realize the wisdom of Solon's
words and the folly "No one who lives is happy," he
of his own pride.
exclaims, calling out three times the name of the Athenian sage and
recounting his own fate for the benefit of all who "are in their own
eyes blessed." 13 Only when Croesus has fully repented is the god
moved. "Suddenly, out of a clear sky, with no wind in it, there gath-
ered clouds, and a storm burst and a violent rain with it; and the fire
was quenched." Croesus is saved at the final hour, but only after he
has renounced the belief that he was, or ever can be, happy while still
alive.
In the understanding of Herodotus and his contemporaries, then,

happiness is not a feeling, nor any subjective state, a point highlighted
by the irony that Croesus originally thinks that he is happy, only to be
shown otherwise. Happiness, rather, is a characterization of an entire
life that can be reckoned only at death. To believe oneself happy in

the meantime is premature, and probably an illusion, for the world is
cruel and unpredictable, governed by forces beyond our control. A

whim of the gods, the gift of good fortune, the determination of fate:
Happiness at the dawn of Western history was largely a matter of
chance.
We tend to think of this general conception of the world, in which
suffering is endemic and happiness largely beyond our control, as in
a broad sense "tragic." And in the context of the Athenian world

—
8 Happiness
known to Herodotus, that word is not at all misplaced. For it was

precisely there, in precisely that period, the fifth century bce, that
"tragedy" {tragoidia) took the stage as a new word and a new form of
art. Performed annually in honor of the god Dionysus at the spring-
time festival known as the City Dionysia, tragoidia initially referred
only to a general type of theatrical performance. Roughly equivalent

to our modern word "play," it implied neither content nor emotional
tone. But that tragoidia should come to take on associations with
what we now think of as tragedy, more generally speaking, is hardly
surprising. As any reader of the great playwrights of the period

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides — will know, fifth-century bce
Athenian "tragedies" seldom have happy endings. On the contrary,
they return again and again to situations in which seemingly inno-
cent figures are overwhelmed by circumstances they cannot control.
Forced to make impossible choices between irreconcilable alterna-
tives, the likes of Agamemnon and Antigone, Orestes and Oedipus,
Electra and Medea are hunted down by gods and pursued by famil-
ial curses, overwhelmed by fate and defeated by the very nature of
things. And although those figures inevitably contribute to their own
undoing through hubris and folly, the crux of the tragic dilemma is
that there can be no easy resolution of conflict, no decision without
grave costs, no simple, happy ending. Agamemnon, in Aeschylus's

Oresteia, is in this respect an altogether typical figure. He must either
sacrifice his own daughter at the behest of the gods, or relinquish
his honor by abandoning the Greek campaign against Troy. The trag-
edy of his dilemma is that he cannot have it both ways. Torn between
duty and love, justice and self-sacrifice, family and city, and any
number of other irreconcilable ends, the protagonists of the Greek
tragic stage are caught up in circumstances and trapped by them-
selves. Inhabiting a world in which conflict is inevitable and struggle
preordained, they cannot make themselves happy, for among mortals
in this tragic universe, "no man is happy," as the Messenger in
Euripides's Medea darkly proclaims. The Chorus in Sophocles's
Philoctetes is bleaker still, bemoaning the "unhappy race":
Darrin M. McMahon 9
Of mortal man doomed to an endless round

Of sorrow, and immeasurable woe!
In this play, as in so many others of the genre, the only salvation for
the titular hero is through the unlikely intervention of a god. Just as
the heavens opened to shower rain on Croesus atop his pyre, Her-
cules arrives at the final moment of Sophocles's play to extricate
Philoctetes from his plight. Hercules is a deus ex machina {theos ek
mechanes) — literally a "god from the machine" — a reference to the
Greek convention in tragoidia of lowering an actor in the guise of a

deity onto the stage by a crane or some other such contraption as a
way to bring the drama to a close. It may be argued, as Aristotle would

do in the Poetics, that this is a clumsy way to end a play. But the deus
ex machina serves perfectly to dramatize a much more important
point: In the tragic tradition, happiness is almost always a miracle,
requiring the direct intervention of the divine.
Herodotus was a contemporary of Sophocles, who probably knew
him personally and almost certainly knew his work. Not surprisingly,
the tale of Croesus shares many features of the same tragic outlook.
Croesus, too, is caught up in circumstances beyond his control, the

victim, Herodotus tells us, of a family curse visited upon the offspring
of one of Croesus's distant ancestors, who by slaying his master in-
voked the wrath of the gods. And though Croesus surely contributes
to his own demise through his misinterpretation of the oracle, his
misreading of events, and his presumptuous certainty that he is the

happiest of all men, it is clear that the destruction of his kingdom and
the death of his son are an inordinate price to pay for any actual faults
he has committed. In the end, we must conclude, Croesus suffers not
so much for what he has done as for the kind of world he inhabits, a
world in which "fate that is decreed, no-one can escape," a world in
which "no one who lives is happy." 14 Where human agency is frus-
trated, human choice contradictory, and human suffering inevitable,
happiness, if it comes at all, is largely what befails us. That is the tragic
predicament.
—
10 Happiness
This tragic vision was by no means original to Herodotus or even to

the formal classical tragedies performed on the fifth-century Athenian
stage. Without question, each of these new genres historia and
tragoidta — laid out this vision with an unprecedented sharpness and
self-conscious clarity. But the general understanding of happiness on
which they rely is much older. When the poet Semonides of Amorgos,
a small island in the Cyclades archipelago of the Aegean, observed in

the seventh century bce that "We who human have no minds, /
are
but live, from day to day, like beasts and know nothing/ of what God
plans tomake happen to each of us," he was merely articulating the
long-standing wisdom of his ancestors. A surviving fragment of an-
other of Semonides's pearls of wisdom
— "A women thick around the
ankles is no good" — may give us pause in accepting his general au-
15
thority without reservation. But with respect to his account of the
human condition, at least, we can be confident that his judgment
was widely shared. Harking back to a perennial, prehistoric view of
the world in which the rhythms of time were understood through

myth and the universe through the play of the gods, this fatalistic
mind-set animates the epic poetry of Homer, for whom the gods
alone are the "blessed ones," and human beings "of all creatures that
breathe and crawl across the earth" the most dismal, the most ago-
nized. 16 A similar outlook is central to the stories of classical Greek
mythology, of ancient Egypt, and of a great many other traditional
cultures.
This fact helps account for the longevity of the link connecting
happiness to luck and fate.* That link held fast long after the fifth
century bce, and in certain respects it endures today. It is striking that

in virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for hap-
piness is cognate with luck, fortune, or fate. The root of "happiness,"
*Strictly speaking, luck and fate are opposed, in that one implies randomness and
the other preestablished order. When considered from the standpoint of human
happiness, however, the two are closely related, in that each denies the role of
human agency in determining the course of human events. Whether the universe is
predetermined or unfolds chaotically, what happens to us —our happiness— is out of

our hands.
Darrin M. McMahon 11
for example, is the Middle English and Old Norse happ, meaning
chance, fortune, what happens in the world, giving us such words as
"happenstance," "haphazard," "hapless," and "perhaps." The French
bonheur, similarly, derives from bon (good) and the Old French heur
(fortune or luck), an etymology that is perfectly consistent with the
Middle High German Gliick, still the German word for happiness and
luck. In Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, felititajelicidad, and felicidade
all stem from the Latin felix (luck, sometimes fate), and the Greek
eudaimonia brings together good fortune and good god. One could
multiply these examples at much greater length, but the point would
be the same: In the Indo-European language families, happiness has
deep roots in the soil of chance.
That so many of these modern words for happiness emerged only

in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, while the wheel of
lady fortune (Fortuna) continued to turn, is itself testimony to the
strength of this enduring connection. For as we shall see, by this stage
the tragic understanding of happiness had been challenged by a num-

ber of competing conceptions —above all, post-Socratic philosophy
and the Christian religion. For all his indebtedness to both those tra-
ditions, however, Chaucer did not hesitate in the fourteenth century

to have his monk observe in The Canterbury Tales:
And thus does Fortune's wheel turn treacherously

And out of happiness bring men to sorrow
Nor did Shakespeare, several centuries later, allow his Renaissance

humanism to obscure the hap of hap. One might hope for "happy hap"
but could rest assured that "hap what hap may." 17
Down to the present
day, what the historian Jackson Lears has called the "culture of
chance" has played an important role in configuring our fortunes. 18
Yet despite the stubborn persistence of horoscopes in our news-
papers, palm readers on our street corners, and casinos as our places of
recreation, most Westerners tend to resist, like Einstein, the notion that
life or the universe is a dice player's game. Happiness might be thwarted
by a random act of violence, we concede, a terrorist strike, or a freak

a
12 Happiness
accident. And most of us are probably willing to allow, rather more pro-
saically, that "shit happens," in the contemporary phrase, for better or

for worse. But when it comes to the ultimate trajectory of our lives, we
are generally loath to leave happiness to chance. To be happy is a right,
we believe, a natural human entitlement, perhaps even a "moral obliga-

19
tion," to cite a chapter title of a recent best-selling book. Arguably,
there is no greater modern assumption than that it lies within our power
to find happiness. And arguably there is no greater proof of that than

our feeling that we have failed when we are unable to do so.
—
This book tells the story the history of how people in the West —
came to harbor that belief. It is a long story, and in telling it, I hope to
make what is today an unexamined assumption appear strange — less
a certainty of the universe than a species of faith. The product of

Greek and Roman philosophy and centuries of Judeo-Christian reflec-
tion, modern conceptions of happiness, we will see, were born in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in an age we now call the En-

lightenment. It was in that period that considerable numbers of men
and women were first introduced to the novel prospect that they could
be happy — that they should be happy — in this life.
Granted, the idea was not entirely without precedent. Just as some
human beings had long imagined happiness to lie in a remote,
otherworldly place — in the fields of Elysium, say, or the islands of the
blessed, in the Hyperborean regions, in Heaven, Paradise, or a van-
ished Golden Age — others had been prepared to speculate on the pros-
pects of happiness on earth. Yet in both classical philosophy and
Christian practice, happiness of this immanent variety was exceed-
ingly rare — the preserve of a "happy few," whose outstanding virtue
or exceptional favor made them more than mere men. As Aristotle
observed, a life of happiness "would be superior to the human level,"
tantamount to the divine. 20 His happy few were a "godlike" few —
description that applies equally well to the Socratic sage or the Pla-
tonic philosopher, the Stoic ascetic or the Epicurean wise man, the
Catholic saint or Calvin's predestined elect. In all of those incarna-
tions, the happy man —and less frequently, the happy woman was —
thought of as one who approached the gods, who had gone beyond the
merely human, who had achieved a form of transcendence. For much

of Western history, happiness served as a marker of human perfection,
an imagined ideal of a creature complete, without further wants, de-
sires, or needs.
The Enlightenment fundamentally altered this long-standing con-
ception, presenting happiness as something to which all human be-

ings could aspire The
in this
life. basic default position of humanity,
happiness was not a gift from God or a trick of fate, a reward for ex-
ceptional behavior, but a natural human endowment attainable in
theory by every man, woman, and child. Indeed, where human beings
were unhappy, Enlightenment thinkers argued, something must be
wrong: with their beliefs, with their form of government, with their
living conditions, with their customs. Change these things —change
ourselves —and we could become in practice what all were intended
by nature to be. Happiness, in the Enlightenment view, was less an
ideal of godlike perfection than a self-evident truth, to be pursued and
obtained in the here and now.
Such a dramatic shift in the nature of human expectations did not
occur overnight. Initially the preserve of a social and intellectual elite,
the Enlightenment's promise of human happiness on earth spread

gradually outward. By the end of the eighteenth century, with the
outbreak of the American and French revolutions, happiness could
claim widespread recognition as a motivating ideal. Thomas Jefferson
took it for granted that enlightened citizens of the world would agree
with him when he judged in the Declaration of Independence that

the right to the pursuit of happiness was a "self-evident truth." And
the French, in proclaiming their own Declaration of Rights of Man
and the Citizen in 1789, understood that few would find fault with
the lofty goal articulated in the last line of the document's preamble
securing the "happiness of all." A great human pursuit had begun. It
continues still.
The first half of this book examines the ways in which a classical
and Christian concept was transformed into an earthly end. The sec-
ond half investigates the ambiguities of this coming to earth. For what
did it really mean to demand, and to expect, a lifetime of happiness in
14 Happiness
a still-imperfect world? Perpetual pleasure? Endless euphoria? Purely

material gain? And if human beings had a right to happiness, then did
not others have a duty to provide it? To what extent were happiness
and freedom commensurate — or happiness and virtue, happiness and

reason, happiness and truth? Was happiness simply a state of feeling,
the calculus of pleasure and pain? Or did it continue to be a reward, a
precious prize to be earned at the cost of sometimes painful sacrifice?
These are but a few of the many vexing questions raised by this
curious Enlightenment pursuit. Their persistence, long after the

eighteenth century, highlights the fact that try as it might, the En-
lightenment did not wholly succeed in separating happiness from its
religious and metaphysical past. Enchanted still, happiness retained

the allure of transcendence, the intimation of the divine. And it was
in large part for this reason that it continued to command such power.
In the name of happiness, human beings continued to search for the
strength of the gods of old, tempted by the prospect that our domin-
ion over nature and control of fortune might make gods of us all, that
the happy many might replace the happy few.
But even though the close observer could detect traces of the tran-
scendent in the happiness of the post-Enlightened world, the nature of

the pursuit was undoubtedly changing. Slowly, the goal became less to
make more of man — to ask him to rise above — than to feed him the
ambrosia that had been taken from heaven, to deliver him his due. And
over time, this would create a sense of entitlement and expectation that
was fraught with danger. Even in a post-Enlightened world, the attempt
by mortals to walk on hallowed ground — to become gods themselves or
to banish them altogether —was a perilous affair. The Greeks had called
it hubris, excessive pride, the refusal to accept the natural limits that
separated the sacred from the profane. And they raised the specter of
divine retribution for those who dared to cross that line, the suffering
and sadness visited upon the tragic heroes who reached (overreached)
for what was fit only for the gods. "Many are the forms of the daimon-ly,
many things unhoped-for the gods bring to pass" was the stereotyped
conclusion to Euripidean tragedies. 21 There were good daimones and bad
daimones, good demons and bad demons: To be under the spell of either
was to be haunted and possessed.
To think of the search for happiness in this sense as a form of pos-
session —possession by an alien force that moves through us, like the
force that carried Croesus to his doom —may help account in mythic
terms for a phenomenon that commentators long after the Greeks have
described in different ways: the frustrating tendency of the search for
happiness to lead human beings astray. It is this tendency to which
Aeschylus gave voice when he complained of the "deceitful deception"
of the gods, asking, "What mortal man shall avoid it?"
Benign and coaxing at first
It leads us astray into nets which

No mortal is able to slip,
22
Whose doom we can never flee.
Many since have been moved to similar reflections, and together they
raise a disturbing prospect for all who live in a post-Enlightened age.
Might not the search for happiness entail own undoing? Does not
its
our modern commandment to be happy produce its own forms of

discontent?
PART I
The Making of
a Modern Faith
The mere search for higher happiness, not merely its actual
attainment, is a prize beyond all human wealth or honor or
physical pleasure.
—Cicero, fragment from the lost manuscript Hortensius
For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life,
and there are few who find it.
—Matthew 7:14
1
The Highest Good
Happiness is what happens to us, and over that we have no con-

trol. That, in a line, is the received understanding of the
ancient Greeks and of much of the world of antiquity. From the Medi-
terranean basin, extending deep into the lands traveled by Herodotus
and beyond, this venerable wisdom was widely shared, a common
feature of ancient civilizations in Asia Minor, Egypt and the Levant,
Persia and Mesopotamia. The legions who quaked under the pharaoh,
or the multitudes who scratched out a living from the soil of Persian
kings, also experienced the world as a precarious place, served up by
their social betters and delivered from on high. Most were constrained
to accept what came to them, scarcely daring to think that they might
alter their circumstances or significantly influence the many happen-
ings of a lifetime. It was easier and far more prudent to assume the
worst and hope for the best, leaving happiness to the gods.
Such a fatalistic view had held sway from time immemorial, help-
ing untold millions comprehend the mysteries of existence as it still
does in many pockets of the world. Sharpened and refined in the fifth
century bce by Herodotus and the tragic playwrights of Athens, this
view received its consummate expression in their work. Yet ironically,
—
20 Happiness
in that same time and place, a new perspective on happiness was tak-
ing shape. At its most basic level, this view held that human beings
might hope to influence their fate through actions of their own.
Perhaps we should not be surprised by the coincidence. For do we
not see already in the striving of Herodotus's Croesus, or in the heroic
efforts of the protagonists of the tragic stage, evidence of a yearning
to break free of the confines of a fatalistic world, to challenge the
caprice of fortune, to resist the final verdict of the gods? "Fate that
is decreed, no man can escape" is the summary judgment of Herod-
otus. But the crime of Croesus, like that of the heroes of Sophocles,
Aeschylus, and Euripides, is to defy this unchanging law of the uni-

verse. They fail, and we are asked to seek counsel in their failure. But
we are also meant to sympathize with their attempt.
Certainly, those who heard Herodotus or traveled to the City
Dionysia in Athens for the festival oitragoidia had ample reason to be

sympathetic to human agency. Herodotus's History, after all, is a he-
roic account of the Greeks' victory over the armies of the Persian
empire in the early fifth century bce, a feat that was due in no small
measure to their courage, savvy, and will. Herodotus himself took pains
to emphasize the point, extolling the Greeks for their love of freedom.
And if the defeat of an enemy that had threatened to enslave them

did not attest sufficiently to the powers of collective agency, then life
in fifth-century Athens probably did. For it was here, in the Athenian

polls or city-state, that the world witnessed the invention of a new type
of government demokratia, horn demos (people) + kratos (power).
Democracy was only one of the many varieties of authority exercised

in the hundreds of city-states of ancient Greece. They ranged in form
from hereditary kingship to aristocracy to oligarchy to a type of one-
man rule by a strongman or boss, whom the Greeks revealingly de-
scribed with a non-Greek word, tyrannos. With the exception of the
latter, however, rarely were these forms truly distinct. For example,
the Spartan constitution, conceived by the seventh-century lawgiver
Lycurgus, comprised hereditary kingship (monarchy), an aristocratic
council of prominent elders (oligarchy), and a general assembly con-
sisting of male citizens over thirty (democracy) all rolled into one.
Other of the city-states arranged matters differently, in innovative
ways. But almost all made some provision for citizens to participate
directly in the affairs of the polls, whether through approval of the
decisions of military leaders, participation in the law-courts, voting on
measures of public importance, or institutionalized debate. As one
leading historian observes, "politics," in the sense of "direct partici-
pation in the making of rational choices after discussion," was "cen-
tral to all Greek cities."
1
By the beginning of the fifth century, some
measure of self-government was a distinctive feature of Greek politi-
cal life.
It is important to appreciate what a radical departure this was from

previous norms. As another eminent scholar rightly enjoins, "If we are
to understand the Greeks' experience we must recognize that it was
a freakish exception to that of the overwhelming number of human
beings and societies that came before and after." 2
Whereas earlier
civilizations —such as those of Egypt or Mesopotamia, India or China

—were ruled hierarchically, with mighty monarchs holding sway over
extensive empires, administered by large bureaucracies, standing
armies, and powerful priestly castes, the Greeks tended to rule them-
selves. In their small, autonomous polels, where citizens staffed the
army and collected public funds, a premium was placed on self-
reliance and self-control.
This was a shared feature of classical Greek culture. But it was above
all in the polls of Athens that the common process of self-government
and self-rule was furthest advanced. Building on a system of law that
had been laid down first by the chief magistrate Solon at the begin-
ning of the sixth century (the same Solon who figures centrally, if
imaginatively, in Herodotus's History), then broadened considerably
by the reformer Cleisthenes in 508 bce, Athens gradually overcame

the usurpations of tyrants and the resistance of oligarchs to extend
the basis of By the end of the fifth century, this extension
its rule.
was considerable, encompassing some forty thousand adult male

citizens who had the right to participate directly in the voting and
debates of the sovereign general assembly, the ecclesla. An extraor-
dinary body, which for critical votes might require a quorum as large
22 Happiness
as six thousand to get under way, the ecclesia was in many respects the
closest thing to direct democracy the world has ever known. Persons
of rank and fortune inevitably exercised considerable influence there,
as they did in the much smaller Council of Five Hundred (the boule),
which reviewed and referred business to the larger body. But on the
whole, the citizens of Athens governed themselves with remarkable
equality. 3
It is thus with reason that the general Pericles, a democratic re-

former in his own right and the greatest of the Athenian statesmen of
the fifth century, took such pride in his homeland. As he boasted to
his fellow citizens in a famous oration of 431 bce, while Athens was
mired in the long Peloponnesian War with Sparta:
Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states;

we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its
administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why

it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford
equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social
standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for
capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere
with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is
able to serve the state he is not hindered by the obscurity of

his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our govern-
ment extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercis-
ing a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel
called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he
likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot
fail to be offensive. 4
. . .
Having praised Athen's freedom and tolerance, Pericles proceeded to

laud its material and cultural wealth. A mercantile nation with an ex-
tensive network of colonies and trading posts spread throughout the
Mediterranean, Athens was rich, and it put that wealth to good use,
constructing the Parthenon and many of the other architectural trea-
sures that stand to this day. "We provide plenty of means for the mind
to refresh itself from business," Pericles continued. "We celebrate games

and sacrifices all the year round, and the elegance of our private estab-
lishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish spleen,
while the magnitude of our city draws the produce of the world into
our harbor, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as
familiar a luxury as those of his own." 5 Rich, cosmopolitan, pleasure-
loving, Athens could also afford to indulge the life of the mind, produc-
ing not only great works of tragedy and history but also poetry, art, and
philosophy as well. Periclean Athens, truly, was a golden age.
Of course, Pericles's portrait was hardly disinterested. Self-flattering
and selective, it left a good deal unsaid. The general made no men-
tion of the fact that the same Athenian empire that brought such
riches to the metropole could rule over its colonies with an iron fist.
Nor did he dwell on the unsettling truth that his "free" city was built
on the backs of slaves, who numbered as many as a hundred thousand
by the end of the fourth century bce; or that women and resident for-
eigners enjoyed none of the benefits of male citizenship. 6 Nonetheless,
and judging by the standards of the time, Athens's accomplishments

were undeniably great. Even the grudging observer will be inclined to
forgive Pericles his overstatement and grant that he had a point when
he declared at the end of his oration: "In short, I say that as a city we
are the school of Hellas; while I doubt if the world can produce a man,
who where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many
emergencies, and graced by so fortunate a versatility as the Athenian." 7
Which brings us back to happiness. Although it would be reductive
to say that Athenian democracy was the cause of the emergence of hap-
piness as a new and apparently realizable human end, it was neverthe-
less in Athens, democratic Athens, that individuals first put forth that
great, seductive goal, daring to dream that they might pursue —and
capture —happiness for themselves. Surely we may admit some con-
nection between context and concept, between a society in which free
men had grown accustomed, through rational inquiry and open delib-
eration, to decide matters for themselves, and the effort to extend the
sway of self-rule ever further, even to the long-standing domain of the
gods. Freed by Athenian prosperity from the need to direct life solely
24 Happiness
to the pursuit of survival, a fortunate few could afford to turn their
attention to the pursuit of other things.

Many drew on the versatility and self-dependence so lauded by
Pericles. But one man stands out with respect to happiness as an in-
novator and founder. As another great student of happiness, Saint

Augustine, would later attest, it was Socrates who was the first to con-
sider in detail what would draw the "sleepless and laborious efforts"
of all subsequent philosophers: the "question of the necessary condi-

8
tions for happiness." Socrates, admittedly, was not much of a demo-
crat himself; he tended to spurn politics for matters of the soul. But
he shared wholeheartedly in a belief that was central to the democratic
ethos of his times: that human beings, through their own rational con-
duct, can exercise control over their lives. Socrates's achievement was
to apply this same spirit to the pursuit of happiness. In doing so, he
created a longing that would fascinate classical minds for centuries,
and that has haunted human beings ever since.
The Birth of Ultimate Desire
In the history of happiness, as in the history of philosophy, Socrates

is a pivotal figure. But, like the object of his inquiry, he is elusive,
leaving us with neither a coherent body of thought nor any written
testimony of his teachings. He lived, we know, from 470 to 399 bce,
when he was put to death by the democratic rulers of Athens for al-
legedly denying the city's gods and corrupting its youth. A citizen,
he served bravely as a soldier. He had a wife, but he seems to have
preferred the company of younger men, who flocked to him as a
teacher and guide. He was not rich, and was apparently quite ugly,
though charismatic and seductive; and he cultivated the art of asking
questions — difficult questions —with consummate skill.
Beyond these bare details, our knowledge is sketchy, and the little
more that we do know comes secondhand, primarily from Socrates's

most brilliant student, Plato. In a series of some twenty-four dialogues,
Plato used the figure of his master as a character in order to preserve
9
the form and content of his teachings. Plato was a much younger man,
who lived from c. 427 to c. 347 bce. Inevitably, he altered a great deal,
infusing Socrates's observations with his own to such an extent you

can't separate the lessons of the master from those of the student.
But the fluid blend of Socratic-Platonic teaching evident in the dia-
logues nonetheless conveys a sense of Socrates's radical departure

from all previous Greek thought. Whereas earlier philosophers had
focused largely on questions of natural science, logic, and the grounds
of knowledge (epistemology), asking how the world is made and how
we know it, Socrates insisted dramatically on the importance of human
conduct (ethics), asking how we should best live our lives. And while
the epic poets and tragic playwrights had accepted that human hap-
—
piness was beyond human agency controlled by luck, fate, or the
gods —Socrates adopted as his point of departure the proposition that
happiness is within the human grasp. "What being is there who does
not desire happiness?," he asks his companions in Plato's early dia-
logue, the Euthydemus. "Well, then," he answers, "since we all of us
desire happiness, how can we be happy? — that is the next question." 10
Transforming Croesus's quest from an outrageous act of hubris to the
highest form of inquiry, Socrates grounds the search for happiness in
natural human longing. "Nor is there any need to ask why a man desires
happiness," he reiterates elsewhere; "the answer is already final." 11
That desire, says Socrates, is self-evident.
At first reckoning, this assertion —repeated in a number of Plato's

other dialogues —seems perfectly straightforward. It may, in fact, be
12
true. Certainly, the desire for pleasure must be counted a universal
trait, in animals and human beings alike. But by "happiness," Socrates

has something else in mind —something loftier, grander — a higher goal
that lies beyond mere enjoyment or satisfaction of the senses. And

whether human beings instinctively long for that is far less clear. Only
when we realize that Socrates declares happiness a natural human
longing at the very moment that he invents it as a new, and appar-
ently realizable, form of desire do we begin to suspect that the elusive
something for which we naturally yearn may be less inherent to our
nature than originally thought.
26 Happiness
Evidence for this suspicion can be found throughout Plato's work.

But nowhere is it more apparent than in his middle dialogue, the Sym-
posium. Written sometime around the year 385 bce, but set much ear-
lier, less than a decade after the death of Herodotus, in roughly 416,
the work is an imaginative reconstruction of an actual banquet held at
the house of the Athenian poet Agathon, not far from the Theater of
Dionysus. The tragedies of Sophocles were still being performed
there, but the guests have gathered on this occasion to pay homage to
another playwright —Agathon himself—who has been awarded a prize
for tragoidta in the City Dionysia. The guests, who include Socrates,
the comic dramatist Aristophanes, and a small group of Athenian no-
tables, are distinguished, and the mood is festive, befitting a party.
We may wonder initially at this juxtaposition of tragedy and celebra-

tion. And yet in ancient Greek life, the two were frequently linked.
Happiness might be hard to come by, but fleeting pleasures were less
difficult to find. For all their talk of suffering, the Greeks knew how
to enjoy themselves. It is noteworthy that some of the earliest Greek
—the celebrated
sculpture statues of adolescent males
kouroi, large in
the bloom of youth — frequently depict subjects their smiling, as if to
convey that a tragic outlook on life need not spoil a brave or cheerful
face. The wrath of the gods could show itself at any moment. But this
was all the more reason to make the most of their indulgence, to rel-
ish the times of our reprieve.

The City Dionysia is a case in point. Although the springtime fes-
tival culminated in the presentation oitragoidia, it was a festival none-

theless, a raucous celebration devoted to none other than Dionysus,
the god of wine. In the Greek conception, Dionysus was polygethes, the
bringer of many joys, who delivers sleep and respite from earthly cares,
forgetfulness and periods of sweet abandon. 13 The Greeks drank deeply
in his honor at the festival in Athens, as well as at the numerous other
celebrations held regionally in his name. Wine consumption — in vast
quantities —was a central feature of these festivals, and in the words
of one distinguished scholar, an "intoxicated time of license seems
common to all." 14 Drinking, dancing, the sacrifice of goats, often the
parading through town of a giant phallus to raise the mood: All this
The Greek Smile. An Attic kouros

from Anavysos, c. 525 bce. National
Archaeological Museum, Athens.
Photo Credit: Nimatallah/Art
Resource, NY.
induced an atmosphere of gaiety, rejoicing, and "ectasy," the stand-

15
ing (stasy) outside (ec) of one's normal self. Even the unhappiness of
an unhappy ending gave way to mirth. In Athens, the final performance
of the cycle of three plays that constituted a complete tragoidia was
regularly followed by a "satyr play," a lighthearted romp featuring a
chorus of satyrs — those mythological half-men/half-goats, who think
like the one and rut like the other.
Unfortunately, we possess only a single complete satyr play, the

Cyclops of Euripides. But this, together with the fragments of numer-
ous others, is enough to give us a good sense of what they were about:
in a word, fun. Bawdy, humorous, amoral, the plays reflect the same
carefree spirit that animates their central figures, who frolic and gorge
themselves while displaying a relentless devotion to the activity most
pleasing to their master Dionysus: drinking themselves silly. If the
tragoidia proper invariably ended on a sober note, the satyr plays were
lubricated throughout.
"The man who does not enjoy drinking is mad," declares Silenus,
father of the satyrs and a central character in the Cyclops. He adds that
28 Happiness
"in drink one can raise this [his prick] to a stand, catch a handful of
breast and look forward to stroking [a woman's] boscage" — finding, as

16
it were, a little shrubbery in the shrubbery. Such coarseness is by no
means uncommon to these plays. The satyrs themselves were fre-
quently represented onstage with enormous, exaggerated erections,

and such strap-on accoutrements inevitably invited lewd asides. When
a young boy marvels at the size of one such appendage in an extant
fragment from Aeschylus's Net-Fishers, the satyr responds by noting,
17
"What a cocklover the little fellow is." Presumably, the line drew a
laugh. The catharsis of tragedy gives way to comic relief.
The transition was apparently natural enough, reminding us that
the tragic spirit was never solely doom and gloom. "There is vengeance
from the gods," an early poet, Alcman of Sparta, observes, "but blessed
is he who blithely winds out all his days of life without tears." 18 If
happiness, in the tragic understanding, was ultimately out of our

hands, then it made sense to amuse ourselves when we could. The
chorus of the Cyclops is clear on the matter: "Happy the man who
shouts the Bacchic cry, off to the revel, the well-beloved juice of the
vine putting the wind in his sails. His arm is around his trusty friend,
and he has waiting for him the fresh, young body of his voluptuous
mistress upon her bed, and his locks all gleaming with myrrh he says,
19
'Who will open the door for me?'" Friendship, love, a bellyful of
wine —perhaps, as the satyr suggests, "dancing and forgetfulness of
cares" —were ever at hand to take the sting from the pain of existence.
The Greeks made full use of all these palliatives when they could.
The opportunities were abundant. In addition to the City Dionysia,
there were countless religious festivals and processions, like the pil-
grimage from Athens to Eleusis or the fetching of the great fire at
Delos on the island of Lemnos, in which days of fasting and abstinence

were followed by public rejoicing and ritual intercourse, drinking,
dancing, and song. There were the great athletic contests, culminat-
ing in the panhellenic games at Olympia, but held also at Delphi,
Corinth, Nemea, and scores of lesser locations. The spirit of competi-
tion was pursued with deadly seriousness by the participants, but the
spectators could afford to treat themselves and their bodies with more
indulgence. There were public feasts and civic celebrations, replete

with music and munificence. There were comedies, which, like the
satyr plays, tended to end on a high note, usually with a celebration.
There were parties, public feasts or impromptu drinking nights in one
of Athens' many taverns. And for those of greater means, there were
private banquets —symposia—held in the privacy of one's own home.
It is the last of these institutions, of course, that gave Plato the title
of his dialogue. The word remains familiar today, although it is far more
likely to summon images of sober gatherings, plastic name tags, and
daylong retreats than riotous evenings during which drunkenness and
debauchery often played a central role. But riotous is what the sym-
posia could easily be: privileged male dinner parties that began with
feasting and ended with fucking, fueled by binge drinking and some-
times fighting along the way. 20 The comic playwright Eubulus de-
scribes the degeneration of the symposium as the wine flowed in ever
greater draughts, leading in stages from shouting to loud revelry to

black eyes to court summonses to bile and tossing the furniture
about. 21
The latter was apparently a favorite pastime, and it was not
at all rare to conclude festivities by spilling out of the andron, the spe-
cially designed men's room where the symposium itself was held, to
go smash something up or wreak havoc in the town. The Greeks even

possessed a special word for the practice — the komos— a ritualized al-
coholic riot.
Where violence was lacking, other passions might play. The mirth
of a great many symposia was enhanced by the presence of hetaera, a
sort of elegant Greek geisha or call girl whose many services included
(but were not limited to) music making and scintillating conversation.
For those so inclined, the pretty wine pourer or flute boy might be
open to seduction, and if nothing else, he was usually good to look at.
Infinite gradations of cheaper fare — prostitutes both male and fe-
male —could be readily summoned for a price, to ensure that no guest

was deprived if the lubricious desires of Dionysus moved him. 22
To be sure, more refined satisfactions were aiso on hand; excess was
not always the norm. Ever mindful of balance, the Greeks, as one
scholar has recently argued, evinced caution even in their keenest
30 Happiness
pleasures, concerned lest they be consumed by them. 23 Xenophanes

of Colophon leaves us with a comparatively chaste picture in his poem
"The Well-Tempered Symposium." The floor has been cleared of
stray crumbs and shells and bones; the wine is mixed with water; the
rhythms of the lyre animate the music of close friendship. One can
readily imagine noble Greeks reclining on their couches after the meal,
joining in exalted conversation and song:
Now the floor is swept clean, and the hands of all who are
present are washed, and the cups are clean. One puts the
garlands on, another passes the fragrant myrrh on a dish. The
mixing bowl is set up and stands by, full of the spirit of cheer,
and more wine still stands ready and promises no disappoint-

ment; sweet wine, in earthen jars, preserving its bouquet. In
the middle of all, frankincense gives out its holy fragrance,
and we have water there too, cold and crystal and sweet. . . .
24
Merriment and singing fill all the corners of the house.
The copious supplies of wine — habitually blended with water in a bowl
so large that it was referred to as a krater —should give us pause. For

even Xenophanes admits that as long as the men have made their li-
bation to the god, "and prayed to be able to conduct themselves like

gentlemen as occasion demands," it will not be "drunk-and-disorderly
to drink as much as one can and still get home without help." 25 Inde-
pendent locomotion was hardly an exacting standard of sobriety. It is
safe to assume that, at least in many cases, one added set of shoul-
ders was required to complete the journey.
Such ritualized debauchery may well call to mind the image of the
stag night or the fraternity party, replete with call girls and vomit and
the breaking of things. That image tends to clash with a received sense
of the symposium as a refined and rarified occasion. And though part
of the reason for this disjuncture is likely our own failure of imagina-
tion — a tendency to idealize the Greeks, rendering them more lofty
than they actually were — it also probably owes something to the en-
during legacy of the Symposium itself. For Plato's account of the drink-
Winged Eros and a seated
personification of Eudaimonia, Red-

figure squat lekythos, late 5th century
bce, © copyright the Trustees of

the British Museum.
ing party creates a very different impression of this central Greek in-
stitution.
In the first place, Plato tells us, Agathon's guests agree shortly after
the meal to forgo any hard or forced drinking. A number of the com-
pany admit to suffering hangovers from the night before, but the
choice is nonetheless portentous, as much an effort to set the party's
mood in advance as a concession to weak constitutions. Next, the
guests voluntarily dispatch with the flute girl, ensuring that their
glances will not be distracted by fetching limbs. Music, at this gather-
ing, will be made by words alone. Finally, the philosopher Socrates is
an attendance, and according to Plato, he was a man who generally

avoided symposia as a low form of fun. 26
He arrives late (and only after
a second invitation), clad in sandals, which is itself a rare occurrence.
In normal circumstances, the philosopher prided himself on being an
anypodetos, a man who went without shoes.

Plato's symposium, then, is intended from the outset to be a spe-
cial gathering, a party of a rarified sort. Not coincidently, it subscribes
32 Happiness
closely to the model that Plato had already suggested in his early dia-
logue, the Protagoras. There, Socrates disparages common drinking

parties for their slurred speech and sensual distractions, observing that
a proper symposium ideally should be a more sober affair. "Where the

party consists of thorough gentlemen who have had a proper educa-
tion, you will see neither flute-girls nor dancing girls nor harp-girls,
but only the company contenting themselves with their own conver-
sation, and none of these fooleries and frolics —each speaking and lis-
27
tening decently in turn." Proper education necessarily entails for
Socrates the education of desire. So, fittingly, having renounced the

quotidian pleasures of the drinking feast, the guests of the Symposium
vow to consecrate their energy to conversation alone. They choose as
their subject the nature of Eros, the great god of desire.
Each of the guests delivers a speech in honor of Eros, from which it
quickly emerges that this is an immensely powerful god whose force

is intimately bound up with the yearning for human happiness. He is
"the oldest of the gods, the most deserving of our respect, and the
most useful for those men . . . who want to attain virtue and happi-
ness," observes Phaedrus, the first speaker of the evening. 28 Somewhat
later, the doctor Eryximachus adds that the influence of the "great
and awe-inspiring" Eros is "unbounded" and "absolute," capable of
bringing us "complete happiness," while Aristophanes, after recover-
ing from a bout of hiccups, notes that "Eros is the most friendly to-
ward men . . . our helper, [who] cures those evils whose cure brings
the greatest happiness to the human race." 29 Agathon, in a grand rhe-
torical flourish befitting a poet, concludes that though all the gods are
happy, Eros is "the most happy, since he is the most beautiful and the
best." 30
To this much, all the participants save the still-silent Socrates agree.
But beyond Eros's power and proximity to happiness, there is little
else on which the guests can establish common ground. One speaker,
Pausanias, refuses to see Eros as a single entity, claiming that he

must be divided in two as Common Eros and Heavenly Eros — the
one, a seedy creature drawn by sexual appetite and so depraved that
he will even sleep with women; the other, a more transcendent being
Detail of Eudaimonia in the retinue

of Aphrodite, Red-figure squat
lekvthos, 410-400 bce,
© copyright the Trustees of
the British Museum.
attracted by mind as well as beauty, who finds his consummate

expression in the higher love between boys and older men. Eryxi-
machus, on the other hand, views Eros as a pantheistic force found
not only in the hearts of gods and humans but "also in nature — in the
physical life of all animals, in plants that grow in the ground, and in
virtually all living organisms." 31 Finally, Aristophanes maintains in a
celebrated fable that human beings were originally joined two at a time
to form complete wholes. Overly powerful, these four-legged creatures
provoked the suspicion of the gods, who had them sundered to reduce
their strength; now each half walks the earth in search of its other.
The fable explains our sexual orientation, for men originally joined to
men will seek their complement in the same sex, while those origi-
nally joined to women will seek their other half accordingly. It also
explains our sense of longing and loss, as we wander the earth in search
of the one who will make us whole. "[W]here happiness for the human
races lies," Aristophanes concludes, is "in the successful pursuit of love."
Eros is the great benefactor who will "[return] us to our original condi-
tion, healing us, and making us blessed and perfectly happy." 32
A pantheistic force animating the world; a schizophrenic deity both
plebeian and patrician; a guide who leads us only to ourselves: Eros,
34 Happiness
clearly, is no simple god. He is, Socrates contends, no god at all. Draw-

ing together the strands of these various reflections, Socrates main-
tains that Eros is, rather, a "great spirit" who is "midway between what
is divine and what is human," his ambiguous nature owing to the
33
strange circumstances of his conception. Sired at the birthday party
of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, Eros is the child of Pov-
erty, who came to the festivities uninvited as a beggar, and the god
Plenty, a welcome guest who passed out there drunk. How Plenty is
able to perform in such a state, we are not told (presumably, a feat of
the gods), but perform he does, producing a son who is neither "mor-
tal nor immortal." Now fully grown, Eros takes after his mother. Con-
stantly in need, he is "hard, unkempt, barefoot, homeless." But, like
his father, he is "brave, enterprising, and determined." Having inher-

ited "an eye for beauty and the good," Eros continually searches for
these two qualities through love, as befits one conceived in the pres-
ence of Aphrodite. 34
Straddling the human and the divine, Eros is an emissary, con-
ducting "all association and communication, waking or sleeping,"
35
between the gods and men. His twofold nature explains his defin-
ing characteristic —desire itself. For what is desire but the human
acknowledgment that one is in need, that one is lacking? As Socrates
explains, "the man who desires something desires what is not avail-
36
able to him, and what he doesn't already have in his possession." And
what is it that Eros lacks? Precisely those qualities that surrounded
him at the moment of his divine conception, the qualities held by the
self-sufficient gods: goodness and beauty, or, in a word, happiness, for
to be "happy means possessing what is good and beautiful." 37 Part
human, Eros is incomplete —he yearns; part god, he yearns for what is
godlike, happiness.
Unfortunately, like all who know his power, Eros is easily misled,
prone to seek the good in places it cannot be found: in the pursuit of
money, for example; in purely carnal sex,
in fame, in people who do us
harm. Midway between the gods and men, Eros is also "midway be-
tween wisdom and folly," rendering desire a volatile force. Elsewhere,
in his greatest dialogue, the Republic, Plato dwells at length on the
potential hazards of this force, noting in the voice of Socrates that

"there is a dangerous, wild, and lawless form of desire in everyone."
Even those who appear entirely moderate and measured on the sur-
face can catch sight of the dark potential of Eros in their dreams, where
uninhibited desire will shrink from nothing, including murder or "try-
ing to have sex with a mother ... or with anyone else at all, whether
38
man, god, or beast." It is not difficult to see why Sigmund Freud
would later find in the "Eros of the divine Plato" an important prece-
dent for his own work. 39
For Plato, Eros's potential for wickedness and folly demanded that
desire be carefully disciplined. We can never hope to subdue Eros (nor

would we want to), but we can direct his power toward the genuinely
good and the genuinely beautiful, learning to love the right things in
the right way. In the Symposium, Socrates begins to sketch the out-
lines of this education of desire, suggesting that the ascent to hap-
piness will be a long and arduous process. Beginning in youth, the
potential lover of the good is led gradually from the love of the physi-
cal beauty of individuals to the love of physical beauty in general. From

there the apprentice is trained to put a higher value on beauty of the
mind, gradually learning as a lover of wisdom, a philosopher, to look
beyond what he once desired. "Whereas before, in servile and con-
temptible fashion, he was dominated by the individual case, loving the
beauty- of a boy, or a man, or a single human activity, now he directs
his eyes to what is beautiful in general, as he turns to gaze upon the

limitless ocean of beauty." Onward and upward, the lover of wisdom
ascends in search of the pure form of beauty, beauty itself:
Such is the experience of the man who approaches, or is
guided towards, love in the right way, beginning with the

particular examples of beauty, but always returning from them
to the search for that one beauty. He uses them like a ladder,
climbing from the love of one person to love of two; from two
to love of all physical beauty; from physical beauty to beauty
inhuman behavior; thence to beauty in subjects of study;
from them he arrives finally at that branch of knowledge
36 Happiness
which studies nothing but ultimate beauty. Then at last he

40
understands what true beauty is.
This final consummation —likened in the even more eroticized ac-
counts given in the dialogues Phaedrus and the Republic to "intercourse"

between the lover of wisdom and truth —can be described only as a
sort of intellectual orgasm in which desire is sated and happiness flows
forth. "That, if ever," Socrates recounts in the Symposium, "is the

41
moment . . . when . . . life is worth living."
This vision of the rapturous contemplation of beauty would

have tremendous impact on the Western mystical tradition. Here,
however, it is important to appreciate that for Plato, the happiness
induced by the intimate encounter with beauty need not be fleeting.
If the great orgasmic moment itself was necessarily ephemeral, the

discipline of desire, and the proper ordering of the soul required to
induce it, were not. Through self-control, the lover of wisdom could
ensure that the "better elements of the mind" prevailed; that one
passed life here, in this world, "in happiness and harmony." 42
The quest of Croesus — to achieve happiness through one's
own volition —Socrates affirms, is a realizable dream, albeit one car-
ried out on terms vastly different than those imagined by the Lydian
king. Indeed, Socrates's vision entails a thoroughgoing rejection of all
previous conceptions of what it might mean to be happy. Just as he

purges the symposium of wine, women, and song, he sets aside the
sensual pleasures that had long consoled the Greeks in their tragic
world. Happiness is not hedonism. Nor is it ultimately to be found in
those pathways of misdirected desire that have long deceived men and
women in pursuit: good fortune, pleasure, power, riches, fame, even
health or familial love. In place of all these things, Socrates preaches
philosophy with unflinching ardor, insisting that the right ordering of
the soul and the elevation of Eros will alone ensure our most coveted
end. But to attain this pinnacle of desire, all others must be controlled
and even renounced. As Socrates never tires of insisting, the true lover
of wisdom will be as impervious to physical hardship as to the haphaz-
ardness of chance. To follow in his footsteps is to leave behind a world
in which one's happiness is controlled by the chaos of fortune or the

predeterminations of fate. Happiness, Socrates insists, lies within our
power.
Requiring a radical reappraisal of the standards of the world,
Socrates's vision is necessarily disruptive, even revolutionary, a point
that Plato takes pains to remind us toward the end of the Symposium.
For just as Socrates has completed his paean to Eros, the party is in-
terrupted by shouting, music, and a loud hammering on the front door.

A group of drunken revelers stand outside, led by Alcibiades, a young
man of physical beauty, whom Socrates once befriended and may have
loved. Boisterous and impassioned, the revelers have come to con-
gratulate Agathon on his success in the manner of a more traditional
symposium. With a flute girl on his arm, and already terribly drunk,
Alcibiades seeks to crown Agathon with a garland of laurels. But as he

does so, he notices Socrates in the room and flies into the jealous rage
of a lover spurned. Chugging down a large bowl of unmixed wine and

bidding the others to do the same, he explains how he was once "se-
duced" by the "wild passion for philosophy" preached by Socrates. His

words turned all of Alcibiades's former beliefs "upside down," convinc-
ing him that he was living the life of a slave, in thrall to his lowest
passions. Unable to direct Eros in the appropriate manner of a lover of
wisdom, Alcibiades attempted to take Socrates as his (physical) lover
and was rebuked. He now likens Socrates to Silenus and the satyrs,
the only difference being that the seductive philosopher beguiles with
his words rather than his flute. The comparison notwithstanding, it is
clear from Alcibiades's behavior that he is the more satyr-like of the

two. With a soul prone to violent passions and governed by an "insane"
sexual frenzy, the figure of Alcibiades is intended as testimony to the
43
dangers of misplaced desire.
A man of great gifts and charisma who studied with Socrates in his
youth but later left him estranged, Alcibiades is a complicated histori-
cal figure. A wily politician and a brilliant military commander, he was

also a demagogue and a schemer who seduced other men's wives, be-
trayed Athens during the Peloponnesian War, and was eventually
murdered. Plato, like Socrates, was fascinated by him, and used his
38 Happiness
figure in a number of dialogues, including the eponymous Alcibiades,
to represent positions he strongly opposed. In the Symposium, Alcibiades

serves a similar function. An embodiment of lawlessness who is ruled
not by reason but by the lowest passions, he is a fitting representative
of the older sympotic culture that Plato deplored. In crashing Agathon's

party, he quickly brings the rarified discussion of happiness crashing
down to earth. And that is where the party ends —on the floor, with
the guests passed out drunk. Only Socrates is still upright at daybreak,
carrying on about the proper relationship between comedy and trag-
edy. In a sense, the two have come together at his feet. After tucking
in his hosts, he takes his leave, headed for the baths.
The ease with which Alcibiades is able to upset this special celebra-
tion —redirecting desire from higher happiness the lower realms to
of pleasure — altogether
is For the same way
instructive. Plato in that
was inclined to associate the sympotic lifestyle with the vulgar hedo-
nism of democratic Athens, he likewise associated symposia with poli-
tics.
44
Socrates —or at least the Socrates of Plato's dialogues — tended
scrupulously to avoid both. And thus Alcibiades's intervention is dou-
bly symbolic, representing not only the elusiveness and fragility of
Socrates's new form of happiness, but also what Plato regarded as the
fragility and shortcomings of democracy. When Alcibiades appeals to
the "jury" of guests in an attempt to warn them of the dangers of
Socratic philosophy, his action is meant to call to mind the very real
charges brought against Socrates by the rulers of democratic Athens

some seventeen years after this great feast. Accused of failing to honor
the old gods and of leading the city's youth astray, Socrates was con-
demned to death in sad recompense for having offered to the people
of Athens what he described in his own trial defense as the "reality of
happiness." 45 If the figure of Alcibiades is something of a classical
Judas —able to recognize that Socrates is nobler and better than any-
one "in the past or present," but unable to follow his call —he is also
an executioner, a symbol of the turbulent democratic man who appeals
to the basest parts of our soul. 46
Plato's hatred of democracy is notorious. An aristocrat himself, he

never forgave Athens for having condemned the man he considered
the most just who ever lived. It is not surprising that he heaps scorn
on democratic institutions throughout his work. In book eight of the
Republic, Plato infamously describes democratic man as a slave to un-
necessary desires, ruled by "useless and unnecessary pleasures," and

he likens democratic leaders to evil wine-pourers who slate the
47
people's thirst for license and illusory freedom. Turbulent and un-
stable, the soul of democratic man is fickle and changing, led by the
lowest appetites and prone, like an unruly symposium, to devolve into
chaos. Democratic man, Plato concludes, is not free but a slave, only
one step removed from tyranny. The same culture that produced
Socrates, with its manifold pleasures and its penchant for self-rule,
allegedly militates against the possibility of human happiness that

Socrates dared to dream.
We may find this judgment ironic, perverse, or ill conceived. It is
unquestionably bleak. For as the ease with which Alcibiades brings

down Socrates's rarified symposium attests, Plato believed that human
desire was all too quickly diverted. Only in special circumstances can
our unruly appetites be properly disciplined to seek the truth, and only
in special circumstances can we educate our desire so that it will suc-
cessfully seek the good for which it yearns. In the Republic, Plato goes
so far as to suggest that the one way this goal can be widely achieved
is coercively, in a state — a political state —where philosophers rule as
kings and kings rule as philosophers, devoting themselves to inculcat-

ing true justice, true wisdom, and true happiness in the city and its
citizens alike. Prior to that time, Plato believed, only Socrates can be
said to have claimed the elusive prize to which his philosophy pointed
the way. He alone approached the goal of "becoming like a god," of
being truly happy. 48
Whether Socrates was in fact a corrupter of youth will likely remain
a contested question. What is far more certain is that his new view of
happiness entailed a radical rejection of all previous norms. In this
respect, if in no other, his accusers were right to fear him, and their
readiness to do so is instructive, highlighting the Socratic sleight of
hand that drew our attention at the beginning of this section. How,
we must ask again, can our desire for happiness be considered natural
40 Happiness
at the moment of its birth? Clearly, we all feel desires, but as both
Socrates and Plato hasten to emphasize, the vast majority of us follow
Eros, not back to the ethereal realm of goodness and beauty from
whence he purportedly came, but down to the earthly material world
where he is so often lost and confused amid the pleasures of the senses.
There — here — far away from the transcendent forms — happiness
proper can hardly be conceived. How can it be that we naturally de-
49
sire what we have never even known?
Plato himself would seem to admit as much, prescribing a radical
program to reorient our desires — to change our natural human nature.

And yet perhaps we should also grant that he had hit upon something
profound. For who among us has never felt that our own freedoms and
fleeting satisfactions are not enough to give us what we want? Even in
the extraordinary luxury of our modern democracies, so far removed
from Plato's own, something like an instinct is apt to suggest that we
yearn for more than our wealth and precious freedoms can provide.
Do the pleasures we know now suffice to quell our longings, or do they
incite us, embolden us, to long for more?
Human desire is ubiquitous, spilling out from all places and into all
things. By giving it a comprehensive new goal, and insisting that it lies
within our grasp, Socrates and Plato create a longing of tremendous

power. Their happiness is the sum of all desires, the final resting place
of Eros, the highest good. As such, says Socrates, happiness is a "pow-
erful and unpredictable force." 50 Even he would likely be surprised by
the strange directions in which it has led posterity — so far that we can
almost imagine, like him, that our natural desire for happiness is com-
pletely natural, owing nothing to these early imaginings.
The End of Existence
Anyone who has ever walked the gilded halls of the Vatican, or taken
a survey course in European art history, will know Raphael's filial fresco
The School of Athens, in which this devoted son of the Renaissance pays
homage to the movement's philosophical forefathers. A sumptuous
symbol of the endurance of Greek thought and of its central place in
the church — literally embedded in the walls —the work also captures
a received contrast between its two principal figures, Plato and Aristotle.
Framed in an archway that leads to the heavens, surrounded by the
greatest minds of the classical world, the two men dominate the work,
creating harmonious tension at its heart. Whereas the long-bearded
Plato gestures upward beyond the vast space of the enclosure, Aristotle
checks him horizontally, his hand steady in the plane of the earth.
The tome on his arm is exposed, also facing down, while Plato clutches
his great black book tightly to his side, accentuating the vertical
movement of his gesture. And though Plato is precipitously balanced

in midstep, as if straining to leave the earth, Aristotle has both feet
planted firmly on the ground. A study in contrasts, Raphael's master-

piece presents these two giants as philosophical and temperamental
Raphael, The School of Athens, 1510-11, Stanza della Segnatura,

Vatican Palace, Vatican State.
—
42 Happiness
opposites: one striving for wisdom in the world beyond; the other
searching to find it here in the world below.
There is a good deal of truth to this simple opposition, and it is of-
ten repeated. As the nineteenth-century English poet Samuel Taylor

Coleridge summarized famously, Plato and Aristotle placed "two op-
posite systems . . . before the mind of the world." "Every man is born
an Aristotelian, or a Platonist," he continued. "They are the two classes
of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third." 51
On the surface, this characterization applies equally well to the two
men's conceptions of happiness. And Aristotle does approach the
subject from a new, and overwhelmingly immanent, perspective. If
Socrates and Plato are skeptical of the given world, inclined to cast
their gazes on high, Aristotle looks far more indulgently on the things
of this earth, prepared to pay heed to the limits of the empirical and
to work within its bounds.
Yet Aristotle was also an admirer of Socrates — he was said to have
taught with a bust of the martyred philosopher in his classroom

and a longtime student of Plato, in whose Academy at Athens he
Raphael, detail of The School

of Athens, Stanza della Segnatura,
—
spent nearly twenty years, from 367 to 347 bce. After serving as a
tutor in Macedonia to the young Alexander the Great, Aristotle re-
turned to Athens behind his pupil's armies and established his own
school, the Lyceum. Athen's democracy was drawing to a close, and
what was left of the city's fragile independence would soon be com-
pletely destroyed as its dominions were forcibly incorporated into
the Macedonian empire following Alexander's death in 323 bce. But
the dream of happiness born in the previous century was preserved
in Aristotle's school. Despite his different methods and approach,
he shared many of Socrates and Plato's larger aspirations. Serving to
further reinforce one of their central objectives — that of making
happiness the goal of all human activity— his work saddled this ulti-
mate end with contradictions as daunting as those he had been

bequeathed.
Aristotle's reflections on happiness can be found throughout his
writings, but he engages the subject most rigorously in what has come
to be known as the Nichomachean Ethics, named after Aristotle's son,
Nichomachus, who helped collate the text following his father's death.
Like so much of Aristotle's work, the Ethics was never intended as a

finished project. It comprises, rather, a set of notes from which he
probably lectured at the Lyceum. Necessarily fragmentary, they none-
theless provide our most complete picture of Aristotle's conception
of happiness.
"Every craft and every investigation, and likewise every action and
decision," the work famously begins, "seems to aim at some good." 52
The sentence is revealing both of the Ethics' chief intention and of the
overriding assumption of Aristotle's thought: that nature does not act
in vain. In the Aristotelian universe, all things, whether natural or cre-
ated, man-made or divine, are intended to fulfill a purpose. Just as the
acorn is intended to become an oak, a knife is intended to cut, and a

ship captain is intended to pilot ships, man, Aristotle believes (and,
as we shall see, he emphatically means man), is intended for some end,
some purpose, some telos. The goal of his investigation — its good
will be to discern the nature of this final destination.
Aristotle proceeds by way of analogy. We say that the function of a

44 Happiness
flautist is to play the flute, and that the function of a sculptor is to sculpt.
Every way of life, every profession —what the Greeks called a "craft"
(techne) —would seem to have a distinct purpose. Can we say that there
is a distinct purpose to living in general, a craft of life? Aristotle believes
we can, and he tries to identify this purpose by isolating our most dis-
tinctly human activity. Some —

creatures plants —vegetate and grow;
they live. Other creatures —animals—move according to their senses.
Only human beings are capable of reason. Our unique human activity is
thus to live and act in accordance with reason.

But there is obviously a tremendous difference between mere life
and the good life, between a human being who reasons well and one
who doesn't reason at all. In order to account for these differences,
Aristotle pushes his analogy with craftsmanship even further:
Let us return once again to the good we are looking for, and
consider just what it could be, since it is apparently one thing
in one action or craft, and another thing in another; for it is
one thing in medicine, another in generalship, and so on for

the rest.
What, then, is the good in each of these cases? Surely, it is
that for the sake of which the other things are done; and in
medicine this is health, in generalship victory; in house-

building a house, in another case something else, but in every
action and decision it is the end, since it is for the sake of the
end that everyone does the other things.
And so, if there is some end of everything that is pursued in
action, this will be the [highest] good. 53

. . ,
What, then, is the highest good of the craft of life, the good for which
all others are simply means, the end that is complete in and of itself?
In Aristotle's view, this final end is happiness. Just as the good doc-
tor procures health through medicine, and the good general procures
victory through war, the good human being will procure happiness
through life. It is — the end we ought
our natural telos to reach if we
live well —and our highest attainment be won by to cultivating the
—
faculty that sets us apart from all other creatures and acting accord-
ingly. To be a good human being, Aristotle affirms, is to live accord-
ing to our special human virtue, reason. And to be a good human being
is to be a happy human being. Happiness, Aristotle concludes, is an
"activity of the soul expressing virtue." 54
In its apparent coherence and seeming simplicity, Aristotle's for-
mulation is monumental. Adopting what is, in effect, the central and

revolutionary contention of Socrates and Plato before him, Aristotle
takes their assertion that human happiness is a function of virtue and
states it far more directly. His point of departure — that human be-
ings, like all things in the world, are intended to fulfill a purpose
involves a major teleological assumption, one whose truth is far less
apparent in our own time than much of Western his-

it has been for
tory. The ancient Greeks, however, believed that human beings and
the world they inhabit participate in a larger order that gives them
meaning. Like Socrates and Plato, Aristotle assumes this to be the
case. And also like them, he is confident that human reason can give
us insight into our specific human function. Unlike them, he believes
that we should look to the world around us — the world of phenomena

— for guidance in forming our judgments on these matters.
It is therefore of particular interest not only that Aristotle dismisses
Plato's quasi-mystical idea of the form of pure good as vague, unsub-
stantiated, and impractical — for "clearly it is not the sort of good a
human being can pursue in action or possess [which is] just the sort
we are looking for in our present inquiry" —but also that he turns to
popular conceptions of happiness to begin his investigation into what
this end might practically entail. Aristotle readily acknowledges that
most people form some idea of the nature of eudaimonia, even if they
don't believe it lies within their power to attain. And so he thinks that
we should consider what they have to say on the matter. True, he is
often condescending; he dismisses, for example, the view that he at-

tributes to "the many, the most vulgar" — that happiness consists in
pleasure — as "completely slavish," befitting the lives of "grazing ani-

mals" more than human beings. But he considers it all the same, de-
liberating on a number of others as well, a move that draws attention
46 Happiness
to the fact that debate over the proper meaning of happiness was al-
ready taking shape in the classical world. Weighing heavily into that
debate himself, Aristotle is more than prepared to draw on much of
what he hears. As he summarizes these views in another work, the
Rhetoric:
We may define happiness as prosperity combined with virtue;

or as independence of life; or as the secure enjoyment of the
maximum of pleasure; or as a good condition of property and
body, together with the power of guarding one's property and
body and making use of them. That happiness is one or more
of these things pretty well everybody agrees.
From this definition of happiness it follows that its con-
stituent parts are: —good birth, plenty of friends, good
friends, wealth, good children, plenty of children, a happy old
age, also such bodily excellences as health, beauty, strength,
large stature, athletic powers, together with fame, honour,

good luck, and virtue. A man cannot fail to be completely
independent if he possesses these internal and these external
goods; for besides these there are no others to have. (Goods of
the soul and of the body are internal. Good birth, friends,
money, and honour are external.) Further, we think that he

should possess resources and luck, in order to make his life
really secure. 55
This, to Aristotle, is "happiness in general," a compilation of "all
the features," as he says in the Ethics, "that people look for in happi-
ness" when they consider it in everyday terms. 56 In stark contrast to
the views of Socrates and Plato, this general understanding of happi-
ness is in keeping with the reflections dispensed by Solon to Croesus,
entailing health and security, pleasure and prosperity, honor and vir-
tue, good friends and good fortune to the end of one's days. Nor is this
similarity coincidental, for Aristotle believes that any theoretical ac-

count of happiness must "harmonize" with the "facts" — it must be at
least partially consistent, that is, with "common beliefs." By taking
"
into account views that are "traditional, held by many," with others
entertained by a more reflective minority, "a few reputable men,"
Aristotle hopes to guard against theoretical abstruseness. 57 He also
reveals a bias that is rare in the philosopher: a predilection for the sta-
tus quo.
Thus, he is quick to acknowledge that although pleasure is by

no means the sole constituent of happiness, it is certainly a contribut-
ing element. External goods, likewise —money, friends, children, good

birth, and physical beauty — are all frankly accepted as necessary com-
ponents of happiness, for we "cannot, or cannot easily, do fine actions
if we lack the resources," and "we do not altogether have the charac-
we
ter of
childless
—
happiness
58
if look utterly repulsive or are ill-born, solitary or
Similarly, Aristotle concurs with the widely held Greek
belief that happiness must be judged over a lifetime, for even "the
most prosperous person may fall into a terrible disaster in old age."
Granting virtue a central place in the attainment of happiness,
Aristotle nonetheless rejects the view, held by Socrates and Plato, that
virtue on its own is enough to secure our highest end. "Someone might
possess virtue," he counters, but still "suffer the worst evils and mis-
fortunes." To call this person happy would be "to defend a philoso-
59
pher's paradox."
Fortune is forever fickle, a proposition that Aristotle cannot bring

himself to deny. It guarantees that factors over which we have rela-
tively little or no control (birth, beauty, luck) play some role in deter-
mining happiness. Yet at the same time, he is engaged in the task of
showing how happiness is brought about through virtuous activity in

accordance with reason. This is his overall emphasis, and, initially, he
seems quite sanguine about the prospect of its realization, observing
that "anyone who is not deformed [in his capacity] for virtue will be
able to achieve happiness through some sort of learning and attention."
Happiness, apparently, "will be widely shared." 60
But when we many (though not all) of
consider that Aristotle, like
his contemporaries, believed that women and those he deemed "natu-
ral slaves" were inherently deformed in just this way deficient in —

reason, and so deficient in the capacity for virtue —our sense of the
48 Happiness
scope of his intended allotment narrows considerably. Children, too,

are debarred, given that their faculty of deliberative reason is not yet
fully developed; and so are all those without sufficient resources to
assure leisure, education, and independence. Restricted from the out-
set to free men, men of means, the pool of candidates for happiness
only grows smaller as we work through Aristotle's account.
What of those who do satisfy the fundamental criteria; who are, as
it were, potentially fit? Aristotle prescribes a lifelong regime of habitu-
ation to virtue, the most stable and controlling element in governing

happiness. He understands that the study of virtue can never be an
exact science in which unfailing rules of behavior are decreed from
above. He urges, rather, that virtue be cultivated through practice, so
that it gradually becomes second nature, with individuals developing
an inherent sense of the right response with which to approach life's
many vagaries. The principal rule of thumb is Aristotle's famous doc-

trine of the mean, which advises us to calibrate our behavior between
extremes. Through reason, practice, and example, the virtuous man
will come to know the appropriate middle way between cowardice
and rashness, or stinginess and prodigality, or boastfulness and self-
deprecation. He will cultivate the appropriate virtues of character
—courage, liberality, and self-respect —and gauge his behavior accord-
ingly. Discussing in detail a number of such virtues — magnificence,

moderation, gentleness, modesty, friendliness, and righteous indigna-
tion, among others —Aristotle puts forth an ideal of harmony and bal-
ance in which desire is tempered through rational restraint, and life
lived in keeping with our highest human faculty.
The habituation to virtue counseled by Aristotle is thus a practi-

cal education in the craft of life, to be carried out from youth and
conducted, ideally, within the shepherding structure of a virtuous
society. It is an elite education and an education for elites, designed
to produce men not unlike those who ruled in many contemporary
Greek city-states. In fact, the Nkhomachean Ethics is really a prelude
to Aristotle's Politics, which aims to identify the best regimes for pro-
moting the virtuous behavior — the happiness — of its citizens. In
such optimal environments, the greatest number of human beings
would be able to realize their full potential, becoming what they are
intended to be, while adopting, in turn, positions of responsibility and

authority within the polis. In these, what might be called "eudaimono-
61
cracies," the happy would lead.
Even in such ideal circumstances, we are left to wonder about the

attainability of happiness as described in the Ethics. For toward the
end of the work, Aristotle concedes that the virtues of character he
has so assiduously expounded are, at best, capable of conferring only
62
"secondary" happiness. Above them lies the highest expression of
our highest faculty, the pure exercise of reason: what Aristotle terms
"contemplation" or "study." While all other forms of activity are
merely "human," contemplation is divine. Aristotle dwells at length
on how the gods, traditionally assumed to be more "blessed and happy"

than other beings, are also popularly supposed to pass their time in
pure contemplation. "Hence," Aristotle concludes, "the gods' activ-
ity that is superior in blessedness will be an activity of study. And so
the human activity that is most akin to the gods' will, more than any
other, have the character of happiness." In the end, the life of pure
contemplation is the most godlike life. It is "superior to the human
63
level."
What are we to make of this surprising turn? Having advocated a

philosophy designed to realize human happiness on earth, the appar-
ently worldly Aristotle turns his gaze upward in a manner reminiscent

of Plato. Unable to conceive of perfect happiness without reference
to the gods, he unwittingly casts a shadow on the life that the bulk of
his Ethics recommends. As the contemporary philosopher Jonathan

Lear has observed, Aristotle suggests that "those who know most
about human life know that what is best is to organize life so as to
escape its ordinary conditions —even the conditions of excellence

within it. What is best about being human is the opportunity to break
64
out of being human." As a consequence, the prospects for earthly
happiness would seem rather bleak. Not only will most men and
women be denied true happiness from the outset —barred for reasons
of birth and circumstance —but even the relative elite who manage to
live in keeping with the ethical virtues will fall short. Theirs is but a
50 Happiness
"secondary happiness" that pales before the godlike activity of con-

templation. Open to an even smaller number, this summit will be
experienced only in comparatively brief intervals, for not all of life may
be spent in study.
The natural telos of man, we are led to conclude, is unnaturally

difficult to fulfill. In Aristotle's world, there may be such a thing as
the "happy few," but perhaps more telling is the unhappy majority that
this ideal creates. For the majority of humanity, Aristotle's happiness
is not only unattainable; it casts a shadow on the rest of life that must
remain, by definition, imperfect.
Yet for all its intangibility, Aristotle's teaching on happiness

only enhanced the allure of this enigmatic end. Drawing acolytes from
across the ancient world — his fame bolstered by his early association
with Alexander —Aristotle affirmed the central place of eudaimonia in
classical ethics and thought. Henceforth, happiness would serve as the
overriding philosophical concern, the ultimate end of existence. And

as more people came to focus on this elusive end, new teachers would
present themselves to help guide others on their way.
Surgery for the Soul
In the lower left quadrant of Raphael's masterpiece, two figures sit
as if in quiet rebuke of the work's title. A garlanded man, consoled by

the arm of a friend, writes intently in an open book, captured in am-
biguous union with a second sage — solitary, distant, bearded, and
grave —who sits, gazing, behind him. By rights these men should be
closer to the two giants of the center, for their lasting influence was
almost as great. Epicurus, in garlands, founded a school that would
shape a current of thought powerful well into the nineteenth cen-
tury, while the bearded Zeno, the father of Stoicism, did much the
same.
In the context of the ancient world, their importance was respect-
fully acknowledged — so much so that within several decades of Aris-
totle's death, the literate traveler to Athens would not have failed to
—
' !
.
. 1
JBH|
H^H yjj J
mm Tjjf
fpfe
Raphael, detail of The School of Athens, Stanza della Segnatura,

pass "the Garden" of Epicurus, the home where his adherents gath-
ered daily just minutes from the Dipylon Gate. Nor would the trav-
eler have missed the public lectures and discussions of Zeno, held at
the Stoa Poikile, a colonnade closer to the city center from which his
followers derived their name. Alongside Aristotle's own center of learn-
ing, the Lyceum, and that of his teacher, the Academy, these and
numerous other philosophic schools openly competed for adherents,
offering the possibility of earthly happiness in return. By the close of
the fourth century bce, happiness eudaimonia — was the undisputed

65
goal of them all.
This unanimity is testimony to the power of the philosophical tri-
umvirate of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whose work would continue

to define the terms of ethical debate in the West for centuries to come.
Happiness as ultimate desire, happiness as final end — this is their
legacy, as it is of classical Greek philosophy as a whole. Yet the number

of schools offering different means to that end is also testimony to the
52 Happiness
fact that by the close of the fourth century bce, their legacy was dis-
puted or, more precisely, regarded as incomplete. All three raised ex-
pectations they could not entirely fulfill. To many, their goal of earthly
happiness was enticing, but happiness for the godlike few was unaccept-
ably grim. Was there no other way of satisfying this nagging desire?
Zeno and Epicurus address precisely this question, aiming far more
human pain. "Empty is
explicitly than their predecessors to alleviate
that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeu-
tically treated," Epicurus maintains, adding that "just as there is no

use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so
too there is no use in philosophy, if it does not throw out suffering
66
from the soul." Speaking of the tradition of Zeno, the Roman Stoic
Cicero observes similarly, "There is, I assure you, a medical art for the
" 67
soul. It is philosophy If the significant contribution of Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle was the identification of happiness as the ultimate
state of human health, then the task of their successors was to help
diagnose and manage our ills. Both Epicurus and Zeno do this by man-
aging desire itself.
Unfortunately, we know comparatively little about them. Of Zeno,

born in roughly 335 bce, we are told by the third-century historian
Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers that the Stoic
founder "was sour and of a frowning countenance," had thick legs and
was flabby and fond of green 68
figs. Originally of Citium, on the island
of Cyprus, Zeno traveled to Athens in his mid-twenties, apparently
drawn by an interest in the teachings of Socrates. After studying for a
number of years with various teachers, he branched out on his own,
courting students around the Stoa in regular meetings that took on
the character of a religious cult. He wrote profusely, and died around
263 bce, but not a single scrap of his work survives, leaving us heavily
dependent on the accounts of men like Diogenes, and the writings of
later Stoics like the Greek-speaking Epictetus, and the Romans Sen-
eca, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius. Though imperfect, these sources
are all we have.
Knowledge of Epicurus is only slightly less spotty. An Athenian
citizen born on the island of Samos in 341 bce, Epicurus lived an
—
itinerant life as a soldier, student, and schoolteacher before settling

in Athens in 306 bce. He purchased a large house there, "the Garden,"
where he gathered adherents and launched his own philosophical
school. He wrote prolifically until his death in 270 bce, producing
perhaps as many as three hundred papyrus rolls, more than any previ-
ous Greek philosopher. But of this tremendous output, just a few frag-
ments remain. As with Zeno, the accounts of later followers —notably
the Roman Epicurean Lucretius — are central sources for understand-
ing his influence and his thought.

Despite these lacunae, it is possible to speak with some assurance
of the general teachings of Zeno and Epicurus, and of the schools they
founded. Both retain the Platonic and Aristotelian emphasis on human
beings' responsibility for happiness. Unlike the chastened Croesus and
the chastised heroes of the tragic stage, Zeno and Epicurus believe
that fate and fortune are ours to control. "I have anticipated you, For-
tune," Epicurus affirms, "and have barred your means of entry. Nei-
ther to you nor to any other circumstance shall we hand ourselves over
69
as captives." The Stoics, similarly, refuse to cede themselves to the
centurions of fate. Happiness is our own possession, they argue, even
when we have nothing else.
This message resonated in the changing social and political context

of the late fourth and early third centuries bce. The rise of the empire
of Alexander the Great, and its rapid fragmentation following his
death, had shattered the comparative order and cohesion of the Greek
polis. The ensuing Hellenistic period, which dates roughly from
Alexander's death until the consolidation of Rome, witnessed the
decline of the intimate, self-governing city-state and its gradual re-
placement by sprawling, multicultural empires and vast, anonymous
urban centers. In this setting of disruption and dislocation, scholars
have long argued, men and women were apt to experience a height-
ened sense of powerlessness and cultural anomie, which rendered
them particularly receptive to the agency and control preached by
Stoics and Epicureans alike. Each offered their followers the comfort-
ing belief that they could retain power over their lives in increasingly
complex and impersonal worlds. Though democracy was no longer

54 Happiness
banished from the world for the following two thousand years — its
early emphasis on self-sufficiency lived on in the hope that men and

women could make happiness for themselves.
In this respect, Epicureans and Stoics remained true to, and even
accentuated, the Socratic stress on the immunity of happiness to luck.
But both schools also broke sharply with their classical predecessors.
In the case of Epicurus, this is most apparent in his unapologetic in-
sistence that "pleasure is the beginning and goal of a happy life."

70
We
are drawn to pleasure naturally, he believes, just as we naturally flee
pain and disturbance. Rather than fight against nature in the search
for happiness on high, we should accede to its power; nature will lead
us to our destination.
Epicurus's insistence on the centrality of pleasure —an insistence
with roots in other Greek traditions but at odds with the Socratic,
Platonic, and Aristotelian precedents — is based upon his radically
materialist understanding of physics. In Epicurus's view, the universe
is composed entirely of combinations of matter and void, atoms and

emptiness. Although he grants that there are gods, immortal and
blessed, he believes that they never concern themselves with the func-
tioning of the world or of those who live within it. It makes no sense,
consequently, to speak of Providence or Platonic forms, divine inten-
tion or an immaterial soul. Like everything else in the universe, human
beings are merely assemblages of matter, and consciousness is but
complex atomic motion. For Epicurus, it follows directly that sensa-
tions are not only the source of all experience but also the source of all
good and evil. What causes pleasure is good, and what causes pain is
bad. That is nature's way.

Zeno also urges his followers to order their lives "in agreement with
nature," but he conceives differently of this slippery concept. 71 For
him, the universe is not a random chaos of matter in motion but an
orchestrated, harmonious whole, ordained by Providence and perme-
ated by an underlying reason that the Stoics call logos. Appearances to
the contrary notwithstanding, the world is ever as it should be, guided
by a purposeful creator who gives the universe meaning, even when
we cannot discern that meaning directly. Seeing that the universe is
rational, and that human beings are part of this ordered realm, Zeno
enjoins his followers to bring their individual natures into harmony
with nature as a whole.
The way to this end is virtue. By living virtuously, we order our lives
in keeping with the order of the world, and it is from this rational cor-
respondence that happiness is born. Deeply indebted to Socrates in
this respect, Zeno goes well beyond Aristotle to make virtue the sole
constituent of happiness. All "secondary" goods — riches, honor, birth,
beauty — are irrelevant, indifferent to the highest good. In direct con-
trast to the Epicureans, the Stoics reject even the importance of plea-
sure and pain. "The happy man is content with his present lot, no
72
matter what it is," Seneca maintains. Cicero goes so far as to argue
that the man of perfect virtue will be happy even under torture, even
on the rack. 73
The well-being of the happy man is completely imper-
vious to the crudest twists of fate.
On the surface, these two schools could not be more at odds, ap-
parently justifying our current use of the terms "stoic" and "epicurean"
to refer to, respectively, one who is "indifferent to pleasure or pain,"
and one who is "devoted to sensual pleasure." 74 Such contemporary
definitions are misleading, for they hide the essential similarities of
the schools. When we look beyond the surface, we begin to take note
of a crucial convergence.
Most important, both Epicureanism and Stoicism are ascetic doc-
trines, demanding the strict regulation of desire. Despite our modern

definitions, Epicurus never taught hedonism. As he says explicitly in
one of his extant fragments:
When we say that pleasure is the goal, we are not talking
about the pleasure of profligates or that which lies in sensual-

ity, as some ignorant persons think . . . ; rather, it is freedom
from bodily pain and mental anguish. For it is not continuous
drinking and revels, nor the enjoyment of women and young
boys, nor of fish and other viands that a luxurious table holds,
which make for a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, which
examines the motives for every choice and avoidance, and
56 Happiness
which drives away those opinions resulting in the greatest

75
disturbance to the soul.
Pleasure, in other words, is defined negatively as the absence of bodily

pain (what Epicurus called the state of aponia) and the absence of
mental anguish or anxiety (the state oiataraxid). These are the true
goals, and to reach them, he counsels "sober reasoning," or what he refers
to elsewhere as "prudence," the cultivation of knowledge of the world

and knowledge of oneself. We must understand, for example, the physi-
cal laws of the universe so as to rid ourselves of unnecessary fears caused
by false beliefs: the vengeance of the gods, the horrors of the afterlife,
and other spurious notions that exist only in our minds. It is not sur-
prising that thinkers in the eighteenth century would later seize on this
Epicurean theme —stressed to great effect by Lucretius — to help jus-
tify their own view that "superstition" was antithetical to happiness.
From Epicurus's perspective, prudence also involved knowledge of

self or, more properly, the knowledge of desire. Why do we long for
this or that? Will short-term satisfaction be offset by long-term pain?

How is it that we choose to refrain from a certain opportunity but fol-
low another? What draws us forward, and why? If we are honest with
ourselves, Epicurus believes, probing and unsparing in our answers,
we will see that the vast majority of our desires are idle or empty, ir-
relevant to the health of the body or the peace of the mind, the final
goals of a happy life. The singular task of the Epicurean acolyte is to
learn how to winnow and sort, separating the necessary desires from
those that will lead us astray. Self-knowledge, like knowledge of the
world, enables us to free ourselves from the sources of pain.
Although this is a complicated process, the essential point is that
Epicurus believes our necessary desires to be extremely limited: The
requirements for happiness are few. "The voice of the flesh cries,
'Keep me from hunger, thirst, and cold!'" Epicurus writes. "The man
who has these sureties and who expects he always will would rival even
Zeus for happiness." 76 Food and drink—frugal food and drink, for "plain
dishes offer the same pleasure as a luxurious table" — shelter, and a
modicum of security should be enough to satisfy anyone whose desires
are properly in order. By contrast, "He who is not satisfied with a little,
77
is satisfied with nothing." Here and elsewhere, Epicurus sounds sur-
prisingly Stoic, even observing in one instance that "all physical pain is
negligible: that which is intense lasts but a brief time, while chronic
physical discomfort has no great intensity." 78 It is not without reason
that Seneca later concluded the "teachings of Epicurus are upright and
holy and, if you consider them closely, austere." His "pleasure" was, in
79
truth, "sober" and "abstemious," wholly in keeping with virtue.
Seneca was admittedly an indulgent Stoic —he devotes much of his
own essay on happiness, "De Vita Beata," to defending his wealth and
luxurious lifestyle. But his ruminations on Epicurus's austerity and the
suggestion of similarity with the tradition of Zeno are worth consider-
ing, for they cut to the heart of what was originally most innovative
about both schools of belief. Epicurus, no less than his Stoic counter-
part, taught that happiness is a function of the ratio of satisfied de-
sires to desire. By radically restricting the number of our total wants,

we help ensure our ability to satisfy them in full, decreasing as much
as possible our dependence on all that is not within our power. The
same ascetic move is what lies behind the Stoic injunction to restrict
our passions and emotions, conceived by Zeno as "irrational and un-

80
natural movement in the soul," or "impulse in excess." If we are
angry at our inability to achieve fame, frightened by the prospect of
disease, frustrated by the failure to fulfill our sexual appetites, or an-
noyed by the actions of others, it is probably because we have put our
confidence in places it should not be. At this juncture, we can do one
of two things: either expand our means to attain our desires or reduce
our desires to suit our means. "That which is happy," Epictetus af-
firms, "must possess in full all that it wants, must resemble a person
who has achieved his fill —neither hunger nor thirst can come near
it."
81
And as he and Epicurus emphasize, the surest way to protect
oneself from hunger is to stifle all cravings, to give up one's appetite.
It is this effort — the attempt
above all to make happiness com-
pletely independent of external goods — that lends insight into why
these two philosophies were conceived, and subsequently flourished,
in complex social and political environments in which little beyond
58 Happiness
one's own reaction to circumstances could be completely controlled
or counted upon. In this respect, the teachings of Zeno and Epicurus

are a fitting response to the heightened anonymity, uncertainty, and
complexity of the sprawling empires that succeeded the polis in the
Hellenistic age. But just as importantly, they are a response to the
impossible demands raised by the teachings of their predecessors.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle may have taught that happiness was no
longer the preserve of the gods, to be bestowed or withheld at will;
yet in practice, they were remarkably pessimistic about the attainabil-
ity of this end, for all save the godlike few. Having implanted an am-
biguous desire in the human breast, they failed to entirely appease it,
leaving us perpetually wanting, yearning, unfulfilled.

Epicurus and Zeno respond to this new form of human malady with
drastic medicine, aiming to cure us of unfulfilled longing. If the "school
of a philosopher is a surgery," as Epictetus observes, then theirs is one

of invasive procedure in which festering needs are cut out to make us
fit for our final end. 82 This is a radical treatment, for in essence it seeks
to fulfill the desire for happiness by eradicating desire itself. What sort
of medicine we are forced to ask, that aims to make us happy

is this,
by stripping us down to our barest needs, rendering us impervious even

to torture? We are left to decide what is more severe, the sickness or
the cure. Does such therapy ask of us too much or too little?
It may be wondered how many were successful in achieving this
dramatic state of renunciation. In the case of Epicureanism, the rigor-
ous demands of the master were frequently neglected in favor of a
much cruder hedonism that Epicurus would have abhorred. Stoicism
posed even further problems of fulfillment. Cicero can say that
"heaven willing, philosophy will ensure that he who has obeyed its laws
. . . will always be a happy man," but he adds immediately that the
question of "how far philosophy actually keeps this promise" is another
affair. In his view, "the mere fact that the promise has been given is
already a matter of the very 83

first importance."
Large numbers of men and women living in the ancient world un-
doubtedly agreed, a fact that underscores what is perhaps the most
significant contribution of these two schools. From the beginning,
Epicureans and Stoics offered their medicine to any who would take
it. Whereas Plato and Aristotle restricted happiness to the privileged
few, Epicurus and Zeno proposed to make gods of many, the former
accepting women and slaves into his garden, and the latter preaching
the natural kinship of all humankind. As either matter in motion or
emanations of logos, all were potential candidates for the salvation of
happiness, and many presented themselves as aspirants. By the time
of Jesus, there were Epicurean communities throughout the Mediter-
ranean world, and 450 years after Epicurus's death, the Garden was
still functioning. Stoicism, too, spread to become virtually a Roman
state religion, enlisting peasants and artisans, politicians like Cicero
and Seneca, emperors like Marcus Aurelius, and slaves like Epictetus.
With reason are Epicurus and Zeno regarded as founders of two of the
greatest schools of Athens, surpassed only by Plato and Aristotle.
The Parting of Ways
Sometime in the late fifth century bce, Prodicus wrote a tale. A con-
temporary of Socrates, possibly his early teacher and assuredly his later
rival, Prodicus belonged to a loose school of philosophers known as
the Sophists. In the opinion of their detractors, the Sophists argued

less for the sake of truth than for the fees they received to argue, a
practice that Socrates abhorred. And so, although Prodicus figures in
a number of Plato's dialogues, he is generally presented in a some-
what disparaging light.
The Symposium is no exception. When, at the beginning of the dia-

logue, Eryximachus proposes that every guest make a speech in praise
of Eros, he compares the task to the sort of eulogies once conducted

in praise of the legendary heroes and gods. "Prodicus," he says, "does
that sort of thing beautifully," referring to the type of tale that he was
known to write, of which the most famous was the tale in question,
4
The Choice of Hercules? The compliment is barbed, for Eryximachus
adds that he has also read eulogies of salt and other "such trifles,"
implying that Prodicus's choice of subject — the mythological heroes and

60 Happiness
gods of old — is not only outdated but fundamentally misconceived. The

urgent matter of the day, the speaker believes, like Socrates and Plato,
is neither the nature of trifling matter, nor the matter of mythical
beings, but the real forces that shape our lives, leading us to happiness.
Plato had other reasons to dislike Prodicus beyond his choice of sub-
jects for praise. Ranging from his Sophism to his rivalry with Socrates,
the list might possibly bear another. For it is perhaps not altogether
fanciful to suppose that the barbed allusion in the Symposium extends
beyond Prodicus's person and the subject of his praise to The Choke of
Hercules, a work whose defining episode involved an opposition that
Plato and Socrates were intent on destroying.

Consider the nature of the tale. At a critical moment in his life, the
young Hercules comes upon two women at a crossroads, both of ex-

treme stature. One is Virtue (arete), chaste and pure, dressed in
white; the other is voluptuous, dressed like a whore. As Hercules ap-
proaches, the latter rushes to meet him, crying, "I see that you are in
doubt about which path to take in life. Make me your friend; follow
me, and I will lead you along the pleasantest and easiest road. You shall
taste all the sweets of life; and hardship you shall never know." When
asked her name, she replies, "my friends call me Happiness \eudai-
monia], but among those who hate me, I am nicknamed vice" (kakta)^
After hearing her plea, Hercules turns away, choosing the more diffi-
cult road, the well-worn tragic path that leads to unavoidable suffer-
ing and pain. This, truly, is a hero's task. Virtue may well be Hercules's
reward, but in keeping with the ancient wisdom of the tragic tradi-
tion, this hero will not be happy. He cannot make himself so.
This is today the road less traveled. And though it is tempting to

add that Hercules's choice made all the difference, in reality nothing
could be further from the truth. The mythical tale is noteworthy pri-
marily as an illustration of a parting of ways, a last deviation from the

dominant path followed in the centuries to come. It may not be until
the end of the eighteenth century, with the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant, that a thinker would again so radically oppose happiness to vir-
tue. Already in Prodicus's time, Socrates and his followers undertook

to unite them, to make them coincide. Few since have dared to call
Albrecht Durer, Hercules at the Crossroads, ("Der Hercules"), c. 1498-99.

Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Gift of Col. David McC. McKell.
happiness a whore. And fewer still have believed that in pursuing it,
they would lead themselves astray.

Far more characteristic of the road taken is a slightly later tale, the
so-called Pinax or Tabula. Often attributed to another contemporary

of Socrates who figures in Plato's dialogues, Cebes of Thebes, the work
was in fact written centuries later, by an unknown author influenced
62 Happiness
by the Stoics. The tale chronicles a moment on a journey in which a
group of pilgrims arrives at the temple of Saturn and engages with its
wise old keeper about the meaning of a picture on the wall. The vast
tablet, they learn, is an allegory of human life, depicting the route of

those who aspire to live it well. Full of false paths and guarded enclo-
sures, the painting is organized in walled concentric circles, in each of
which dwell men and women who have been led off track by one of
life's many deviations: fortune or avarice, luxury or grief, ignorance or
intemperance, false learning or opinion, to name only a few. In the

innermost circle, at the height of all virtues, sits a "sedate, comely
woman, upon a lofty seat, in a liberal but plain and unaffected dress,
86
crowned with a flourishing crown, in a very beautiful manner." She
is happiness herself, the queen of virtue, attended by fortitude, jus-
tice, integrity, modesty, decency, freedom, abstinence, and those in-
trepid travelers who have chosen to enjoy her reign. The contrast with
Prodicus's work could not be more striking. Here, happiness is virtue.
All who fail to serve her, in a manner of speaking, are whores.
It seems somehow appropriate, or at least in keeping with the domi-

nant history of the West, that The Choice of Hercules was lost. It survives
only in pieces and in name. The Pinax, by contrast, weathered time in
at least thirteen Greek manuscripts that, although scattered in the

chaos of late antiquity, resurfaced in the hunt for ancient texts car-
ried out during the Renaissance. Convinced that the work's author had
learned happiness and virtue directly from Socrates, fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century scholars translated the tale into countless European
languages, cultivating and Christianizing it in the process. Often used
as a model for elaborate engravings and an illustration of the correspon-
dence between image and word, the work remained popular well into
the eighteenth century. 87
The triumph and endurance of this anonymous text symbolizes per-
fectly the triumph and endurance of a classical ideal. By the time of its
authorship, and for many centuries thereafter, men and women chose
the way to happiness as a matter of course. That they were prepared to
do so — to set out in the conviction that they might reach this end
largely of their own volition — is one of the highest achievements of
The title page to a 1523 edition of the works of Strabo, the first-
century Greek geographer, with commentary. The border is an

engraving by Hans Holbein the Younger of Cebes's Tablet, with
Happiness (Felicitas) reigning supreme at the top. [Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.]
64 Happiness
the classical world. The fork in the road had been abolished. The task
of the hero, the man of virtue, was no longer to turn aside, conceding
tragically like Croesus that "no one who lives is happy." The task was
rather to carry on, becoming godlike, blessed and happy of one's own
accord. Happiness was not in conflict with virtue. Happiness was virtue's
reward.
This departure, this change in direction, is profound. But though
its importance is difficult to overstate, it should be qualified, for few
figures in the ancient world ever discounted entirely the daimon in
eudaimonia — that chance or divine element in human affairs that de-

fies even our most careful calculation and planning. Enough of the
older tragic sentiment remained to console men and women in their
pain. If happiness was now a possibility, it was still rare.
As we shall see, it was only in the eighteenth century that human

beings took upon themselves exclusive responsibility for happiness,
casting aside both God and fortune, severing the ties that had long
held happiness to forces over which we have no control. Perhaps it was
this refusal (perhaps an inability) to bear the total burden of happi-
ness that sustained the ancients in their vaunted fortitude, protect-
ing them against what is a peculiarly modern onus: the weight we pile
upon those who not only suffer but suffer for their failure to be happy.
It is doubtful whether the ancients ever cultivated this form of guilt,
although as early Christian missionaries would discover in the first
centuries after the death of Jesus, guilt in its more general forms was
a temptation to which the ancient world was by no means immune.
We will return to this story. What should be stressed here is that in
the space of roughly two hundred years —from the middle of the fifth
century to the middle of the third century bce —ancient Greek think-
ers elevated the idea of human happiness to a privileged place in the
hierarchy of ends. Picked up in turn by their Roman successors, it
would remain there, virtually unchallenged in the West, until the time
of Christ. To be sure, Greeks and Romans alike disputed the means
to happiness. But as we have seen, the most powerful currents in an-
cient thought — the four great schools of Athens —shared fundamen-
tal assumptions. All could agree that happiness was an objective rather
—
than a subjective state, to be measured in lifetimes, not in moments.

Less a function of feeling than of rational development, happiness was
virtue's compensation, the harmony of a well-balanced soul. Pleasure
might accompany it, surely, but on the whole, sensual enjoyment was
viewed even by Epicurus with a certain skepticism and even outright
disdain. The product of perpetual craft, happiness required discipline
and hard work, conducted always under the hand of reason. For the
ancients, the achievement of happiness was an immensely difficult
task, yet one regarded as the natural telos of human life.
Looking back on these classical conceptions from the distance of over

two millennia, we see them imperfectly, through the glass of our own
assumptions. Viewed in this way, the schools' suspicion of pleasure
their efforts to discipline the passions in the pursuit of a higher end
than evanescent emotion —may strike many as odd. More inclined to
think of happiness as feeling good than being good, the modern observer
is apt to wonder whether there is not something distant, something
intangible and even cold about this rational happiness that scarcely
dares to crack a smile.
The inability to see clearly may be a mirror in its own right, a reflec-
tion of the limits of our own assumptions. And yet it is fair to ask whether
this lack of lucidity is merely a result of the remove of time. Did not the
ancients themselves struggle to see their highest end? It is revealing in
this connection that for all their emphasis on the happiness of mortals,
the ancients resorted time and again to analogies with the divine, liken-
ing the happy state to the transcendent. "You shall live as a god among
men," Epicurus promises, ensuring that the happy man "is not like a
mortal being." 88
A life of happiness for Aristotle, as for Socrates and Plato
before him, was "a god-like life," "superior to the human level," and as
such, difficult for mere mortals to conceive, let alone attain. Ever on the
horizon, just beyond the sight line, blurry and indistinct, happiness con-
tinued to entice. But in the rarefied air of the classical schools, many
lost sight or lost their way, while many others were never admitted at
all. Left to wander on life's devious paths beyond the confines of these
inner sancta, they searched for happiness where they could, until it was
found —refound— in the face of God.
PERPETUAL FELICITY
Here dwells happiness. The words,

Hie Habitat Felicitas. like the
image they annotate, are well preserved. Carved in red-painted
travertine, carefully suspended on the wall of a bakery in Pompeii,

they remained there for centuries, packed in ash by the eruption of
Mount Vesuvius that buried the city in 79 ce. 1 They are a vivid re-
minder that although higher happiness may be elusive, many people

at many times have sought felicity much closer to home.
Rome. The very name suggests power and prosperity, glory and
grandeur, earthly majesty and might. There are strong connotations
of discipline, too, of course —the fortitude and sacrifice of the legions
as they manned the frontiers, extending the borders of a tiny central-

Italian republic at the end of the sixth century bce outward into a
dominion that, by the time of Christ, held sway over much of the
world. And there are suggestions of decadence, the fabled fiddling of
Nero as his city burned, the jeering excess of the Circus, the outrages
of Caligula, the vomitoriums of the patrician class. But lying some-
where between these two extremes, and running somehow through-
out, is the via media of simple satisfaction, a delight in life's comforts
and the basic pleasures of existence that is evoked so candidly, so
unabashedly, by the crude lines of this proud Pompeian penis.
Hie Habitat Felicitas, "Here dwells

happiness," National Archaeological
Museum, Naples. Photo: Alinari/Art
Resource, NY.
Thcfascinum, as the Romans called the phallus, was a symbol of pros-

perity, fertility, power, and luck. Much like the horseshoe in later
times, it graced the entryways of a good many Roman buildings from

at least the second century bce, serving as an offering, an invitation,
and a charm to ward off bad fortune, while summoning the simple but
essential fruits of existence: security, bounty, fecundity. The connec-
tion with felicitas was straightforward. For though this word derived
immediately from fe/ix —meaning lucky, fortunate, or successful — the
2
radical sense of the term was "fertility." Closely associated with fruit-
fulness, felicitas implied the presence of a life-giving force, a dynamis
peculiar to plants, persons, or objects that radiated outward and could

be absorbed by others, or taken in. Arbores fdices ("happy trees," trees
of good fortune) were commonly incorporated into fecundity rituals
as a way to promote abundance and growth. And at Roman weddings,
witnesses frequently expressed their good intentions to the newly-
—
68 Happiness
weds with cries of "Feliciter" or "Felicia" —good fortune and fecun-

dity, happiness and success!
In a similar connection, Plutarch recounts the tale of Valeria, the
beautiful temptress who, in passing the Roman general Sylla Felix at
the theater, placed her hand directly on him and explained, "I too wish
3
to partake a little in your felicity {felicitas)" Like animal magnetism,
Sylla's felicitas — his sexuality, good fortune, and prowess in battle
was seen as a vital, communicable force. Valeria later attempts to get

closer to the source itself by sleeping with the famed general, a scene
that calls to mind Marlon Brando's infamous remark in Bernardo
Bertolluci's film The Last Tango in Paris. "Your happiness is my hap-

penis," Sylla might also have said in good conscience. The connection
would not have been incongruous.
Playing on the direct association between felicity and fecundity, the
penis of Pompeii was thus perfectly placed in a Roman bakery of the
first century ce, bidding bread, and other living things, to rise and fill
with life. Despite what to modern eyes may seem its somewhat shock-
ing manner of presentation, the fascinums' associations with happi-
ness —abundance and good fortune, procreation and power—were

hardly without precedent in the ancient world. The Greeks of the epic
age had described those who were olbios or makarios as not only rich in
eutychia (good luck, the direct Greek translation of the Latin felicitas) ,
but also rich in the things of this earth. That same precedent
prompted Aristotle to include a number of these attributes —wealth,
security, ample offspring, luck — in his list of "the features that people
look for in happiness" when they considered it in everyday terms. Even
the comparatively otherworldly Plato understood the powerful bonds
that connected eros to eudaimonia, and in many other religious and
philosophical traditions such associations were common.
Still, the Roman concept of felicitas is noteworthy for its particularly
candid expression, its frank avowal that worldly pleasures and powers
were signs of the beneficence of the gods. In the late Republic and
early Empire — as Rome attained the commanding heights of its pros-
perity and dominion — this expression grew even bolder still: Felicitas
was worshipped directly 4

as a goddess. In the years 151 and 150 bce,
—
the wealthy official C. Licinius Lucullus established a temple in her

honor in the Velabrum, the valley in Rome between the Capitoline
and the Palatine Hills. His grandson, the Roman consul L. Licinius
Lucullus, expanded it considerably, and then in 44 bce Julius Caesar
authorized construction of another near the Curia Hostilia, the meet-
ing place of the Roman Senate, so accentuating Felicitas's proximity
to power.
5
Official feast days and sacrifices — Festivals of Felicitas
6
were regularly held in the goddess's honor. And during the reign of
Galba in the first century ce, Felicitas began to appear on the back of
Roman coins in complement to the image of the emperor, often as
Felicitas Temporum ("The Felicity of the Times") or Felicitas Pub-

lica ("Public Prosperity"). Generally depicted with her trademark
caduceus, a wand coiled by a serpent that symbolized peace, and a
cornucopia bursting with fruits of the harvest that symbolized bounty,
the goddess circulated through the realm. Diffusing wealth and good
fortune, peace and security, fecundity of the womb and of the field,
Felicity united public power and private prosperity under the aegis of
the Roman state.
Yet if the cult of Felicitas suggests something of the Romans' ease

in their earthly city —an untroubled satisfaction with the things of this
world —we should not suppose that their comfort went unchallenged
or was ever entirely undisturbed. Well before the Romans conquered
Felicitas Temporum on a coin bearing the image of the

Emperor Vespasian (69-79 ce), © copyright the
Trustees of the British Museum.
70 Happiness
A Seated Felicitas Publica on a coin bearing the image

of the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 ce), © copyright the
Trustees of the British Museum
Greece in the second century bce, they had looked upon their classi-
cal brethren with high regard, absorbing the teachings of the Platonic,
Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Stoic schools. Cultivated by Roman aco-
lytes and innovative successors such as Cicero, Seneca, and Lucretius,
these teachings ensured that the higher happiness of the Greeks en-
dured to raise doubts about the felicity of pleasure and the efficacy of
daily enjoyments to take us to our end. The same impulse that had
led Socrates to suspect that true happiness lay beyond the vulgar he-
donism of the symposium persisted, prompting Romans, too, to ques-
tion whether all they had in Rome was enough to give them what they
desired.
The legacy of the Greeks was undoubtedly important in this regard,

feeding a stubbornhuman refusal to rest content in what we have. But
equally important was the spectacle of excess of having too much —
—and in the first century bce, that spectacle was already apparent
to some, generating deep misgivings about the sanctity of Roman
felicitas.
"The more the money grows the more the greed / Grows too; also
the anxiety of greed," Horace observed. 7

He was, with Virgil, the great-
est of the Roman poets, and it is no coincidence that he made his name
in that same remarkable century before Christ, when regret, and a
longing for simpler times, were very much of the mood. Amid unprec-
edented material splendor, the fall of the Republic, and the civil wars
that followed the death of Caesar in 44 bce, Horace looked back from
his own Augustan age to what he called "the virtues of plain living,"
the simple traits that he believed had once made Romans strong. 8
Even now they might be cultivated away from the metropolis and its
decadent delights:
Happy the man who, free from cares,
like men of old still works

his father's fields with his own oxen,
9
encumbered by no debt.
Honest, hardworking, self-reliant, robust, this was the happy husband-

man, the Horacian beatus vir, a solitary farmer content to work his fields
and cultivate his garden with quiet dignity and honor. He draws
simple, honest pleasures from simple, honest things: close friendship
and warm conversation, wholesome labor and sweat, the soothing
delights of nature, a drop of wine. Never taking his life for granted,
he understands that what is may be gone tomorrow: "Al-

here today
ways expect reversals: be hopeful in trouble, / Be worried when things
go well." 10 He avoids excess: "That man does best who chooses the
middle way." 11 And he is ever satisfied with what he has: "That man
alone is happy / And wears his crown secure who can gaze untempted
/At all the heaped-up treasure of the world." 12 Above all, he lives each
day with fullness, as if it were his last: "So my dear chap, while there's
still time, enjoy the good things of life, and never forget your days are
numbered." 13 In the celebrated translation of John Dryden:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,

Who can call today his own;
He who secure within can say:
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today. 14
Carpe diem. Seize the day. Press the juice from the grapes of life.
Blending Stoic virtue and self-sufficience with republican chastity,

Epicurean discretion, and a general preference for the Aristotelian
72 Happiness
middle way, Horace's recommendations for living draw on a loose set
of received classical ideals. They reflect a broader Roman eclecticism
and willingness to draw freely from the teachings of the classical
schools. But they also reflect the concern that the basic values of the
Roman character were being lost. Thus does Horace hark back again
and again to the oasis of his Sabine farm on the outskirts of the city,
dramatizing what he deemed a necessary return to the natural and the

Roman's natural return.
This is what I prayed for. A piece of land —not so very big,

with a garden and, near the house, a spring that never fails,
and a bit of wood to round it off. All this and more

the gods have granted. So be it. I ask for nothing else,
O son of Maia, except that you make these blessings last.
15
Here, the happy man is in his element. He feels good in his skin. His
needs are few, his nobility complete. Forming nature as he is formed
by it, he exudes innocence, well-being, and humble gravitas.
But as for me, my simple meal consists
Of chicory and mallow from the garden

And olives from the little olive tree.
Apollo grant that I be satisfied

With what I have as what I ought to have
And that I live my old age out with honor,

In health of mind and body, doing my work. 16
Like the noble Cincinnatus, immortalized by Livy, plowing and spad-

ing out a ditch, Horace's happy husbandman embodies a widely shared
Roman ideal, conjuring pastoral pleasures and rural retreats, the in-
dependence, innocence, and peace of a meditative country life. Much

the same can be glimpsed on the horizon of Cicero's musings at
Tusculum, his country seat, or seen ambling over the landscape of
Marcus Gato's or Marcus Varro's reflections on the pastoral life in De
Agri Cultura or Rerum Rustkarum, respectively. It is an attractive ideal,
and as such, it would provide the backdrop to centuries of Western

pastoral poetry, setting the scene as well for the Jeffersonian planter,
the English country squire, and countless other embodiments of

earthly content.
Yet this same idyll could quickly degenerate into escapist fantasy
or an idle dream of a vanished (or expectant) golden age. In Horace's
less guarded moments, he is capable of crossing that line:
So let us seek the Blessed Fields and Wealthy Isles,
Where every year the land unploughed gives grain,
And vines unpruned are never out of flower,

And olive shoots unfailing bud, and set their fruit,
17
And dusky fig ungrafted graces its own tree. . . .
Virgil is even less restrained, indulging in the Georgia and other works
pastoral fancies of rural retirement and boundless fertility:
O farmers, happy beyond measure, could they but know

their blessings! For them, far from the clash of arms, most
righteous Earth, unbidden, pours forth from her soil an easy
sustenance. . . . The peace of broad domains, caverns, and
natural lakes, and cool vales, the lowing of oxen, and soft
slumbers beneath the trees — all are theirs. They have
woodland glades and the haunts of game; a youth hardened
to toil and inured to scanty faire; worship of gods and rever-
ence for age; among them, as she departed from the earth,
Justice left the last imprint of her feet. . . . Happy is he
who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature's
18
working. . . ,
Innocent in and of themselves, these romanticized accounts of an

imaginary golden age nonetheless reveal a deep dissatisfaction with
the present, a period that was certainly gilded but manifestly less than
golden. Horace and Virgil might benefit from the munificence of their
74 Happiness
wealthy patron, Maecenas, and bask in the accolades of the emperor

Augustus. But when they turned their critical faculties from rural
retreats to the earthly city around them, they saw much to regret.
"As a result of envious greed few people can say that they've had a
happy life," Horace observes. 19 Gluttony, licentiousness, concupi-
scence, and envy. "So we can rarely find a man who says he
it is that
has lived a happy life and who, when his time is up, contentedly leaves
20
the world like a guest who has had his fill." The image of an age
ruled by passions without restraint is the inverse of the idyll of bu-
colic perfection. If the countryside was an oasis, the city was depraved.
This, at any rate, was the image that many would take away: from
classical republicans and their imitators down through the eighteenth
century, to Christian contemporaries and chroniclers of pagan per-
versions. Together they read in Roman records of moral decay a self-
indictment of the city of man.
But if Romans themselves recognized their divergence from a
happy via media, it was Christian commentators who did the most to
decry the pagan departure from the true road to happiness. Whereas
Horace confronted his age with an image of simple country joy and a
reminder of what real Roman fe/icitas could be, Christians savaged the
idol of earthly satisfaction and content. As Saint Augustine would

later demand to know, in mocking classical pretensions to happiness
and the Roman cult of Felicitas, "If the pagan books and rites are
true, and Felicity is a goddess, why is it not established that she alone
should be worshipped, since she could confer all blessings and, in
this economical fashion, bring a man to happiness? . . . Does anyone
desire anything for any other reason than to secure happiness?" 21
The rhetorical flourish is instructive: As we shall see, Christian
polemicists conceded the end; they disputed only the means. In the
Romans' refusal to abandon their false gods, they saw a sign not just
of their willful blindness but of the patent insufficiency of Felicitas
to deliver what they, like all men, truly desired. "How can a man es-
cape unhappiness, if he worships Felicity as divine and deserts God,
the giver of felicity?" Augustine insisted. "Could a man escape star-
vation by licking the painted picture of a loaf, instead of begging real

bread from someone who had it to give?" 22 False bread was what the
pagans had to offer, bread that, notwithstanding the promise of a
proud Pompeian penis, would never rise and fill with life but could
only weigh down with the force of death, leaving the spirit to starve.
Christianity alone could satisfy real human hunger in the knowledge
that man did not live simply by bread. For those who sought to re-
place fleeting fe/mtas temporum with a perpetual felicity for all time,
the body of Christ was the one true manna of those who would live
like gods.
Walking in the Way of the Lord
In the springtime of the year 203, a young North African woman was
taken into custody by Roman soldiers in the city of Carthage, in what
is now contemporary Tunisia. Twenty-two, of good family, well edu-
cated, married, and nursing a child, Vibia Perpetua was charged with
violating a decree issued the previous year by the Roman emperor
Septimus Severus outlawing conversion to Christianity. Still only a
catechumen, as yet unbaptized, she and a small group of companions,
including her personal slave, Felicitas, hastened to have themselves

ritually cleansed in custody, entering the church in full and so court-
ing the violent death with which they were promptly rewarded. On
what is now remembered as March 7, and what was then the birth-
day feast of Severus's son, Geta, the group was fed to wild animals,
mauled, and slain by the sword before jeering spectators in a small
Carthage arena. In this way did their flesh become food for pagan plea-
sure at the very moment that they themselves were taken into the
mystical body of Christ. 23
The persecution of Christians, as of Jews, was by no means an un-
precedented phenomenon in the Roman Empire of the early third cen-
tury. Since the death of Jesus in approximately 30 ce, the extraordinary

rise of the new faith bearing his name had drawn suspicion throughout
the empire, precipitating a number of persecutory campaigns in places
as far afield as Lyon, Rome, and Asia Minor. But those initiated by
76 Happiness
Severus were among the first to be carried out on an empire-wide basis
and among the first to strike with particular force in Roman North
Africa, where budding Christian communities had developed largely in
24
peace. In this respect, the festivities of Carthage set something of an
ominous precedent, initiating a wave of orchestrated violence that
would continue sporadically for the next century, culminating in the

Great Persecution of the emperor Diocletian in the year 303.
At the same time, they introduced pagans, firsthand, to the surpris-
ing fortitude of a revolutionary creed. For though the majority of the

spectators who gathered on this particular day in March had undoubt-
edly beheld blood sports before, it is unlikely that any had witnessed
a spectacle like that which unfolded on the feast day of Geta. As we

are told by a direct witness, Perpetua and her companions "marched
from the prison to the amphitheater joyfully, as though they were
going to be in heaven, with calm faces, trembling, if at all, with joy
rather than fear." When they were scourged and taunted, "they re-
joiced at this that they had obtained a share in the Lord's suffering." 25
And when they were persecuted and reviled, they were manifestly
glad. Embracing their ordeal with an eagerness that seemed to delight
in pain, they greeted death with open arms. By all accounts, the on-
looking crowd was uncomprehending. They did not know it, but their
response was fitting. For what these men and women were witness-
ing in the blood and dust of an African spring was nothing less than a
radical new vision of human happiness.
Steeped as it is in the primary narrative of suffering, the Christian
religion may fail to call happiness immediately to mind. It is, after all,
a tradition that has been described appreciatively as the "worship of
sorrow," a tradition whose foremost symbol is an instrument of tor-

26
ture. And yet these same facts notwithstanding, the promise of hap-
piness was absolutely central to the early development and reception
of the faith. "We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; ... as sor-
rowful, yet always rejoicing," the apostle Paul writes to his brethren
in Corinth sometime in the early 50s ce. 27 In effect, this was the cen-
tral paradox of the early Christian experience: The "good news" of
Christ's message was precisely his promise of redemption through suf-
fering —and through suffering the passage to an eternal felicity differ-
ent from anything ever known. We need only think of Christ's fre-
quent injunction to "rejoice and be glad" to appreciate that the appeal

of this new faith lay in more than just its invitation to participate in
the sacrifice of its founder.

Consider the nature of Christ's promise as recorded in the Gospels,
particularly in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain
in Matthew and Luke. Set down, many scholars argue, in roughly the
years 80-90 ce, each sermon begins with a series of "beatitudes" or bless-
ings, a venerable form so named because of the Vulgate translation of
the Greek term with which they begin. Beati in Latin, makarios in Greek,
the terms are often rendered in English as "blessed," although "happy"
would serve equally well, as indeed it does in translations such as the
French, where "heureux" from the Old French heur is used in the canon.
More revealing, though, is the original Greek term itself, a word that, as
we have seen, was employed by classical authors, including Plato and

Aristotle, to signify "happy" or "blessed." Virtually interchangeable with
eudaimon, makarios was frequently used as a direct synonym, although it
28
gradually acquired a slightly more exalted sense. The classically edu-
cated reader of the first century, in any case, would not have failed to
associate the word with the tradition of Greek philosophy.
Even more immediately pertinent, however, is the fact that makarios
was also the word chosen by Hellenized Jews in the second century
bce when they looked for an appropriate term to replace the classical
Hebrew asher or ashre (im) in the Septuagint, the Greek translation
of the Jewish Bible (Old Testament). Meaning "happy" or "blessed,"
asher is the term used in the so-called Ashrel, the Hebrew beatitudes
that one finds scattered throughout the various books of the Jewish
Bible.* "Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked,"
we read, "or take the path that sinners tread . . . but their delight is in
the law of the Lord" (Psalms 1:1-2). Or "Happy are those whose way
*"Asher" (Happy) is also the name of the founder of one of the twelve tribes of
Israel, the son of Jacob and the maid Zilpah, upon whose birth his mother declares,
"Happy am I!" (Genesis 30:12-13). It is probably further relevant in this connec-
tion that Asherah was a Canaanite goddess of fertility.
78 Happiness
is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord" (Psalms 1 19: 1). In these
cases, the first step to happiness is the step itself.
That connection may be more than just a coincidence or a bad pun.

Many lexicographers believe that asher is derived from the root 'sr (in
Ugaritic and Arabic, >r), meaning "to go," "to go straight," or "to ad-
vance." Others suggest a slightly different rooter, "to be upright." 29

And though, given the age and evolution of all Semitic languages, ety-
mologies of this sort are inevitably perilous, it is certainly the case that
asher and its many inflected forms gradually took on meanings close in
sense, if not in structure, to both of these roots. Variants of the term

are used in the Hebrew Bible synonymously with the noun "step," as
when the psalmist writes, "My steps have held fast to your path; my
feet have not slipped" (Psalms 17:5), thus rendering the beatitude
"Happy who walk in the law of the Lord"

are those . . . of special in-
terest.
30
The one who walks here who advances is — — also upright,
steadfast in pursuit of the commandments of God.
For all save the crippled and lame, however, there is probably noth-
ing inherently happy about putting one foot in front of the other. So
why this close connection? Any answer can only be speculative, but some
have suggested that the link with the verb sr points to an act in which
believers went in search of happiness. "It was probably the pilgrimage
to the temple," one scholar writes. Quite literally, "this act makes be-
31
lievers 'happy.'" Whether or not one is willing in this way to trace the
steps of the happy directly to the feet of the Western Wall, it is cer-
tainly the case that the nomadic tribes of Israel held movement in par-
ticularly high regard. Movement through time, movement through

space, movement as a model for the unfolding of humanity — this was
the central metaphor of the Exodus narrative, in which a people was
formed by marching to its collective deliverance along the route marked
out by Moses and the law of the Lord. Behind them lay the bondage of
Egypt, and on the horizon lay the happiness of the promised land, a place
of peace and rest and abundance, where milk and honey flowed.
Of course, the children of Israel never really get there. No sooner
have they begun their journey than they begin to stray, wandering in
the desert from the straight path of God. And not long after setting
foot in Canaan, they commit "evil in the sight of the Lord," resorting
to enmity, unkindness to strangers, the worship of idols, and other sins
(Judges 3:7). Milk and honey, as a consequence, do not flow. Spatially,

God's people have arrived in the promised land, but morally and tem-
porally, their destination must remain on the horizon. With good rea-
son does the Seder of Passover, the Jewish feast held in remembrance
of the Exodus from Egypt, conclude to this day with the saying "Next
year in Jerusalem." Even for those already there, deliverance lies in
the future, in another place, bidding us to set our course in its direc-
tion, to walk in its way.

The term asher thus signified happiness in several different senses.
At once journey and arrival, it implied the blessedness of living in line

with God's commandments, garnering his favor and keeping his ways,
andi\\c bounty of the final destination, the time when the Lord would
once again collect his chosen people in the promised land, ushering in
a period of everlasting justice and peace. This ultimate arrival in
Jerusalem would bring with it the total salvation and deliverance pre-
saged in Exodus. But in the meantime, the children of Israel must seek
to appreciate the journey, observing God's law with fidelity, while
rejoicing in the goodness of his creation:
Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways.
You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be
happy, and it shall go well with you.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your
children will be like olive shoots around your table.
Thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.
The Lord bless you from Zion. May you see the prosperity of
Jerusalem all the days of your life.
May you see your children's children. Peace be upon Israel!

(Psalm 128)
This is the happiness of nomads, shepherds, and farmers, the bless-

ings of a people long enslaved and continually at war with hostile ene-
mies and hostile terrain. Not surprisingly, the early tribes of Israel
80 Happiness
held aloft what the world only grudgingly offered up. A verdant oasis
flowing with milk and honey and a plentiful supply of rain were fitting
rewards for a parched people who had long wandered in the desert.
Like the early Greeks and virtually all traditional cultures, the peoples
of ancient Israel conceived of happiness in some measure in material
terms. To be happy or blessed was not only to know God's favor, but
also to safely enjoy the things that an uncertain world was so quick to
deny: prosperity, family, fertility, peace, security, longevity, a good
name. In this respect the descriptive epithet of the Hebrew beati-
tudes was close in meaning to the Greek makarios and could even stand
comparison with the Romans' more earthly felicitas.
Yet there were also crucial differences, and in many respects these
are the more important. The Jewish stress on deliverance — the col-
lective deliverance of God's chosen people — presaged a fundamental

innovation in the conception of human happiness. When God inter-
vened decisively in human history to deliver his children, the world
would be forever changed, transformed out of all recognition, perma-

nently altered. Human beings played an important role in this process,
for they would be delivered only when they had arrived. Their ability
to "step" forward on the path of God's law was crucial. But it was God's
shepherding grace that guided them forward and his decisive inter-
vention that would ultimately transform their lives. The envisioned

future reward would be unprecedented in character and kind. Listen
as the prophet Isaiah describes this future, in the voice of the Lord:
For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the
former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am
about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more
shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of
distress. (Isaiah 65:17-19)
Rather than simply return, that is, to some previously known state,
the inhabitants of the new Jerusalem would experience happiness of

another metaphysical kind. Many, to be sure, insisted on comparing

this happiness to that of already extant idylls — to the joy of a lost
golden age, say, or the perfect contentment known in paradise by

Adam and Eve. They could hardly do otherwise. But the distinguish-
ing characteristic of the New Jerusalem was that it was just that, new.
Always steps ahead on time's horizon, its happiness could only ever
be imagined until it was known.
A strange law of perspective operates in such circumstances. "As
the promise is postponed," one scholar observes, "so it is also elabo-
rated, heightened, and ultimately transformed. It loses its precise

historical and geographical dimensions, but it shines all the more
brightly in mental space. The promise becomes Utopian." 32 As the
prospect of the actual realization of the New Jerusalem receded in
time, its importance loomed ever larger. Already in the general pe-
riod in which Isaiah was writing —probably some two centuries before
the Babylonian captivity of the sixth century bce, when the defeated
Jewish people were scattered from the promised land — prophetic
voices began to call for, and to predict, the coming of a new leader,
a new savior, a Messiah to point the way back to the kingdom of God.
In the centuries that followed, other voices joined those of Isaiah and
Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah, Joel and Daniel, hoping to usher
in not only the end of the Jewish journey but the end of history it-
self. For those who heeded such apocalyptic predictions, the culmi-
nation of arrival would be the culmination of time, the advent not
only of milk and honey but of the free-flowing eternal paradise in
which suffering would be abolished forever. Here is one such voice
from the first century ce:
And then healing shall descend in dew

And disease shall withdraw,
And anxiety and anguish and lamentation pass from among
men,
And gladness proceed through the whole earth;
And no one shall again die untimely,

Nor shall any adversity suddenly befall. 33
82 Happiness
It was into this context of prolonged and lavish expectation that Jesus
of Nazareth stepped. And though this was only one context of many, its
influence was powerful and profound. Whether or not Jesus actually
uttered the words that are recorded, long after the fact, in John 14:6, "I
am the way," we can be fairly certain that he was greeted by many of his
earliest disciples as if he had. Christ (Christus), "the anointed one,"
seemed to these men and women to be the long-awaited savior who
would lead in a direction whose path was familiar but whose destina-
tion was uncharted. In doing so, he revealed a new truth, a new king-
dom, and not least, a new happiness. In form, content, and many of its
words, the beatific promise was recognizable. But it was also unmistak-
ably new. Here are the beatitudes as recorded in Matthew:
Happy/Blessed [makarios] are the poor in spirit, for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.

Happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Happy are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for
they will be filled.
Happy are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Happy are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Happy are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of
God.
Happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness's sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3-11)
And here they are recorded in Luke:
Happy/Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom
of God.
Happy are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Happy are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Happy are you when people hate you, and when they exclude
you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of
Man.
—
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is
great in heaven. . . . (Luke 6:20-23)
Access to heaven and dominion over the earth, justice, mercy, the di-
rect experience of God, laughter and rejoicing, the plenitude of a full
belly — this was a lavish promise by any measure, yet one partially rec-
ognizable to allwho had searched for the promised land on the horizon
of the holy. Those who pursued justice and the way of the Lord would
be given their due, granted mercy and intimacy in the family of God,
allowed to share in the rich legacy of his kingdom. The hungry would
be filled, the mournful would laugh, their gifts would be great.
This much — the end—was partly familiar to readers of Jewish scrip-
ture. But what were the followers of Jesus to make of the means, the
steps that he traced for all who would go happily in the way that led
through him? Whereas earlier sages, both Israelite and Greek, had
counseled the avoidance of suffering as a condition of happiness
urging their followers to flee, scorn, or simply bear it like Job — Christ
recommends suffering's active embrace. The emphasis is on the prom-
ise of future reward: Those who endure pain now will be granted plea-
sure in a time to come. But the beatitudes, like Christ's ministry as a

whole, also present a baffling injunction. Are we not asked to seek
happiness directly in poverty, in hunger, in tears — exalting even as we
are hated and reviled? And is not suffering itself —with its awful cul-
mination in death — to be treated as the very height of passion? "I
want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the shar-
ing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death," yearns the
apostle Paul, who understands that to suffer for Christ is a privilege
(Philippians 3:10). To seek happiness in sadness, pleasure in pain,
joy in sorrow, ecstasy in death — this was a strange route indeed.
It was certainly a significant deviation from the main thoroughfare

of the Jewish faith. If the children of Abraham had always been sensi-
tive to the prevalence of suffering, they rarely recommended it as such.
On the contrary, to take innocent enjoyment in the good things of

— to find pleasure in family, food, love, and wine, community,
Llife
84 Happiness
his creation in the Jewish tradition. This is the central message of the
Book of Ecclesiastes, composed probably in the third century bce.
Searching for satisfaction in knowledge, pleasure, labor, and toil, the
author of the text concludes that all human striving is pointless, de-
spairing in the well-known refrain "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity."
"So I hated life," the author writes initially, "because what is done
under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a chasing after
wind" (Eccl. 2:17). Crucially, however, this realization leads to a higher
wisdom, a greater acceptance of human limitations and God's will.

There is a time for everything: to weep and laugh, to mourn and dance,
to love and hate. God attends to all.
I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be

busy with.
He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put
a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot
find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy

and enjoy themselves as long as they live;
Moreover, it is God's gift that they all should eat and drink
and take pleasure in all their toil.
I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be

added to it, nor anything taken from it (Eccl. 3:10-14)
God alone is eternal. And so we must fear him and keep his command-
ments, "for that is the whole duty of everyone" (Eccl. 12:13). But this
does not preclude savoring the wholesome pleasures of existence:
Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with
a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do.
Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking
on your head.
Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your
vain life that are given you under sun, because that is your
portion in life. . . . (Eccl. 9:7-9)
We are urged to appreciate what we have and what we do while we

can.
How different, by contrast, is the way marked out by Christ, which

seems to lead in the opposite direction. For if the disaffected, the
"poor in spirit," are really makarios, and if those who mourn are really
blessed, are not the men and women who in the common view are
"sad" actually happy, and those who are treated as "happy" actually
sad? How difficult it is for moderns to fully comprehend those who

chose willingly this alternate route, embracing Christ's calling in
deadly earnest in the earliest days, seeking beatitude in martyrdom,

happiness in torment and grief.
It is in large part for this reason that the account of Perpetua and
Felicitas is so compelling. Based on a diary kept in prison by Perpetua
Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, 6th century,

Archbishop's Palace, Ravenna.
Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.
—
86 Happiness
herself, it is an archetype of the genre of personal passion (the passto) —

preserved, narrated, and embellished by an anonymous associate who
likely visited the condemned in prison and probably witnessed the
events in the arena firsthand. For no other previous martyrs do we
possess this type of evidentiary window. A chronicle of the willful as-
sumption of Christ's suffering, it is a precious source for anyone seek-

ing to understand the transformative power of this nascent faith.
Peering into Perpetua's world through this tiny crack of a docu-

ment, we catch sight immediately of the proximity and presence of
God. The anonymous narrator who introduces the tale calls attention
to this from the start, forbidding the reader to think that "supernatu-
ral grace was present only among men of former times." On the con-
trary, God works continually in the world, and he has reserved his most
"extraordinary graces" for the "last stages of time." Citing from the
Acts of the Apostles a passage that in turn is taken from the apocalyp-
tic prophet Joel, the narrator invokes the beginning of the end. "In
the last days, God declares, I my Spirit upon all flesh and
will pour out
their sons and daughters shall my manservants and
prophesy and on
my maidservants I will pour my Spirit, and the young men shall see
visions and the old men shall dream dreams." 34 The extraordinary
events surrounding the martyrdom of Perpetua and her companions,
the narrator implies, are signs that God is now pouring out his Spirit
in abundance, suggesting that the last stages of time are at hand.
Whether Perpetua herself believed this is not entirely clear. Cer-
tainly, in the first generations after Jesus's death, many of his dis-
ciples accepted the approaching end of time without question.
Having renewed God's covenant, Christ had died for our sins, but
he would soon come again —apparently in marvelous circumstances.
In the so-called Little Apocalypse of the Gospel of Mark (13:3-37)
a book generally regarded as the earliest of the four Gospels, written
between 65 and 75 ce —Jesus speaks of an imminent upheaval, sig-
naled by tremendous wars and famines and followed by the return

of the "Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory" to
gather the elect (13:26-27). Similarly, the Book of Revelation, likely
written around either the year 69 or 95 ce on the island of Patmos,
weaves together apocalyptic themes circulating in the early Chris-
tian community to paint a collective portrait of the parousia, the sec-
ond coming of Christ. Following the great battle at Armageddon, in
which the forces of the Lord will do battle with those of the Beast,
Jesus will descend to rule on earth for one thousand years (the mil-
lennium) before defeating Satan in a final confrontation. At that
stage, time will come to an end, heaven will reign on earth, and the
elect will be gathered with God in the New Jerusalem, where Eden's
tree of life will again bear fruit.
Drawing extensively on the imagery of the Hebrew prophets, writ-
ings of this kind grounded the ministry of Christ in centuries of Jew-
ish messianic and apocalyptic expectation, while taking literally the

promise recorded in Matthew that "the kingdom of God is at hand"
(4:17). Christ, it is true, had also cautioned that no one would know
the "day or hour" of his final return, a warning that, as the years passed,
seemed to argue against the belief that the parousia would occur any-
time soon. But the belief was kept alive by religious enthusiasts well
into the fifth century, to be revived periodically thereafter.
It is likely that Perpetua's Christian community was of their num-
ber. Not only were they well acquainted with various apocalyptic texts
(the Book of Revelations, as well as such noncanonical writings of the
second century as the Apocalypse of Saint Peter), but they were also
probably influenced by a millennial sect, the Montanists, who flour-
35
ished in Asia Minor from roughly 165 ce. Preaching a cultlike asceti-
cism in preparation for the final judgment, the Montanists believed
in the imminent end of the world, crediting the Holy Spirit with im-
parting new revelations to visionaries in the final days to complement
Christ's original teaching. For the Montanists, as for many other early
Christians, the Holy Spirit was a living force, manifesting itself in the
dreams of the chosen, speaking through Christ's followers in tongues,
giving voice to continued prophecy and prediction, suffusing the bod-

ies of its favored recipients. The shaking, quaking presence of which
we read today in the Acts of the Apostles was more for these men and
women than just the rustling of pages. It was a vivid description of the
powerful force moving through their lives.
88 Happiness
Regardless of whether Perpetua had direct contact with Montanist

teaching, she undoubtedly believed in the immanent presence of
Christ. Jesus of Nazareth may have died over a century and a half pre-
viously, but he continued to live, bringing men and women to birth
daily in the baptismal font, reviving them with his living flesh in holy
communion, and breathing new life into their spirits with his own. In
miraculous healings and glossolalia (speaking in tongues), in the ap-

parition of visions and wondrous signs, in the revelation of new
prophecy in trances and dreams, the Holy Spirit was present to
Perpetua in immediate, vivid ways.

This helps explain the eagerness with which Perpetua and her fel-
lows set out willingly on their road to death. For simply by paying token
obeisance to the emperor, it bears emphasizing —by denying their
identities as Christians —any one of these men and women could have
spared themselves their horrible fate. 36 Yet to do so was unthinkable
precisely because they viewed the call to martyrdom as a direct solici-
tation from God, a precious invitation from the ever present Christ to
participate directly in his passion, to suffer and die, as did he. This
was what Paul had described as the greatest privilege. Neither pun-
ishment nor condemnation, the call to martyrdom was, on the con-
trary, the ultimate mark of divine favor. In the communities of early
Christianity, there was no clearer sign that the Holy Spirit had settled
on one in the fullness of grace.
But what an immense burden this was to bear. Could one support
the weight of the divine presence? Could one shoulder the cross? If
martyrdom was a privilege, it was also a trial, the ultimate test of one's
worthiness before God. At heart, Perpetua's diary is thus a record of

spiritual struggle, a tortured account of her painful effort to pull her-
self free from the clutches of life.
The hands that would hold her grasped firmly. "While we were still
under arrest," Perpetua observes in the very first line of the account
written in her own voice, "my father out of love for me was trying to
persuade me and shake my resolution." 37 So, too, is she shaken by the
visits of her mother, brother, and child. "I was in pain because I saw
them suffering out of pity for me. These were the trials I had to en-
dure for many days." 38 Consumed by worry for her infant, whom she is
still nursing, Perpetua obtains permission to have the child stay with
her in prison while she awaits sentencing. But it is clear that this can
be only a temporary expedient. Soon, her father returns to try to bend

her again to his will:
Daughter, he said, have pity on my grey head —have pity on
me your father. ... Do not abandon me to be the reproach of

men. Think of your brothers, think of your mother and aunt,
think of your child, who will not be able to live once you are
gone. Give up your pride! You will destroy all of us!
. . . This was the way my father spoke out of love for me,
kissing my hands and throwing himself down before me.
With tears in his eyes he no longer addressed me as his
daughter but as a woman. I was sorry for my father's sake,
because he alone of all my kin would be unhappy to see me

suffer.
I tried to comfort him by saying: "It will all happen in the

prisoner's dock as God wills; for you may be sure that we are
not left to ourselves but are all in his power."
And he left me in great sorrow. 39
Intriguingly, Perpetua makes no mention of her husband here, or
anywhere else, causing us to wonder whether she considers him of

those kin who would not be "unhappy to see [her] suffer." Was
Perpetua fleeing more than just this world when she chose to go with
God? Was her withdrawal from her family tinged with resentment and
even anger at their failure to understand her, at their refusal to ac-
cept her identity as a follower of Christ?

We should not, though, allow such speculation to distract our at-
tention from the more salient issue: Perpetua's own conviction that
what moved her was the will of God. For it was ultimately this deep
and abiding sense that fed her courage, that allowed her to break with
what, for a young Roman woman, would have been the immensely
powerful hold of the paterfamilias. When, at the final sentencing of
90 Happiness
the prisoners, her father tries to dissuade her one last time, begging,
"Have pity on your father's grey head; have pity on your infant son.
Offer the sacrifice for the welfare of the emperors," Perpetua stands
firm, answering simply, "I will not." And when asked by the Roman
official if she is indeed a Christian, she is unflinching: "Yes, I am." In
that simple affirmation, uttered in the full knowledge of its final con-
sequences, Perpetua pulls free. Though her protesting father is beaten
by the presiding guards, moving her to pity, she is not shaken as be-
fore, but departs with the other prisoners "in high spirits," joyfully (et
hilares descendimus) . When later she learns that her child will not join
her again, having been successfully weaned, she accepts this calmly as
God's will. "So I was relieved of any anxiety for my child and of any
40
discomfort in my breasts." It is difficult to imagine a clearer, more
poignant, illustration of Christ's awesome injunction in Matthew
10:37: that whoever loves father or mother, daughter or son "more than
me is not worthy of me"; and that "whoever loses his life for my sake
41
will find it" (10:39).
But just what exactly did she and her companions hope to find?
Most immediately, they could expect the embrace of a new type of

family — a new community —based on radically different premises than
any they would have known. Broadly speaking, egalitarian and, broadly
speaking, communal, the early charismatic sects of Mediterranean
Christendom demanded renunciation — of money, of social ties, of
one's past — in return for deep solidarity and intimate support. 42 Un-
doubtedly, the apostle Paul's claim that in the community of Christ
there "was neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female"
(Galatians 3:28) was always more complicated in practice than in
theory. But in the several generations following Jesus's death, it was a
powerful ideal nonetheless. The fact that the well-bred Perpetua
could address her newfound companions —including the former slaves
Revocatus and Felicitas — as "brothers and sisters" is testimony to this
truth. In giving up her old family, Perpetua gained a new one.

Perpetua, moreover, clearly enjoyed a special place in this new com-
munity. Very early in the diary, she relates how one of her fellow pris-
oners approached her with a request: "Dear sister, you are greatly
—
privileged; surely you might ask for a vision to discover whether you
are condemned or freed." The prisoner asks for nothing less than a
vision from God, and Perpetua is confident that she can provide it.
"Faithfully I promised that I would, for I knew that I could speak with
the Lord, whose great blessings I had come to experience." 43 In di-
rect dialogue with the divine, Perpetua is singled out by the Holy
Spirit, and so is singled out within the community of which she formed
a part. For a young Roman woman, raised in traditions of deference to
men, this opportunity for leadership may well have proved attractive,
as it did for other Christian women of the early church.

Yet ultimately it was something more than just community —and
position within that community — that moved all of these men and
women to join this new, Christian family, to rip themselves free from
their former lives at the price of life itself. In Perpetua's richly evoca-
tive dreams, we gain much clearer insight into why.
The diary records four of Perpetua's visions, and a fifth by her com-
panion Saturus. Not surprisingly, all negotiate in one way or another
the tension of their upcoming trial in the arena. Perpetua dreams of

climbing "a ladder of tremendous height made of bronze, reaching all
the way to the heavens." To the sides are attached weapons of various
sorts: "There were swords, spears, hooks, daggers, and spikes; so that
if anyone tried to climb up carelessly or without paying attention, he
would be mangled and his flesh would adhere to the weapons." And at
the foot of the ladder "lay a dragon of enormous size, [who] would
attack those who tried to climb up and try to terrify them from doing
so." With the help of Saturus and "in the name of Jesus Christ,"
Perpetua treds on the dragon's head and is make
able to the ascent. 44
Replete with images drawn, most likely, from scriptural passages
with which she was familiar — the reference to Jacob's ladder in Gene-
sis 28:12, for example, or to the dragon described in Revelations 12
this lush vision plays out Perpetua's spiritual struggle, enacting and
resolving the anxiety of her approaching ordeal, her quest to go up to
God. In a later vision, this becomes even clearer, with Perpetua dream-
ing intriguingly that she is a man, naked and rubbed in oil, engaged
in combat with a gladiator of marvelous size. After defeating the
92 Happiness
opponent in the arena, she awakes to realize "that it was not with wild
animals that I would fight but with the Devil," and that ultimately
she would prevail. "I knew I would win the victory." 45
Such premonitions most likely gave comfort to Perpetua and her

companions, easing their worry about their upcoming trial in the ring.
Far more concretely, they offered palpable images of what they could
expect from a blessed death. The reign of paradise on earth might or
might not be at hand, but in the meantime, God would gather his fold
in the fields of heaven. At the end of her ascent up the ladder, Per-
petua envisions a resplendent resting place for those able to endure
the climb:
Then I saw an immense garden, and in it a grey-haired man

sat in shepherd's garb; tall he was, and milking sheep. And
standing around him were many thousands of people clad in
white garments. He raised his head, looked at me, and said: "I
am glad you have come, my child."

He called me over to him and gave me, as it were, a mouth-
ful of the milk he was drawing; and I took it into my cupped
hands and consumed it. And all those who stood around said:
"Amen!" At the sound of this word I came to, with the taste
of something sweet still in my mouth. 46
Perhaps a reference to the mixture of milk and honey that North

African catechumens were given at the time of baptism — their first
entry into new life — this "sweet something" is literally a foretaste of

what Perpetua hoped to find in the "immense garden" of eternal life.
Her companion Saturus is even more explicit, recording in the diary
his vision of how he and Perpetua are "carried towards the east by
four angels." "Free of the world," they see "an intense light" and know
that this is what the "Lord promised us." A "great open space" opens
up before them, a garden "with rose bushes and all manner of flowers"
and trees as tall as cypresses, "their leaves constantly falling." Fellow
martyrs greet them; others play in peace and serenity, shepherded
by the Lord:
Then we came to a place whose walls seemed to be con-

structed of light. And in front of the gate stood four angels,
who entered in and put on white robes. We also entered and

we heard the sound of voices in unison chanting endlessly:
"Holy, holy, holy!" In the same place we seemed to see an
aged man with white hair and a youthful face, though we did
not see his feet. On his right and left were four elders, and
behind them stood other aged men. Surprised, we entered
and stood before a throne: four angels lifted us up and we
kissed the aged man and he touched our faces with his hand.
And the elders said to us "Let us rise." And we rose and gave
the kiss of peace. Then the elders said to us: "Go and play."
To Perpetua I said "Your wish is granted."

She said to me: "Thanks be to God that I am happier here
47
now than I was in the flesh."
When Saturus awakes from his vision, he, too, can taste his future.
"And then," he writes, "I woke up happy." 48
Formed from the fertile stock of late Jewish reflection on the after-
life, pagan imaginings of the pastoral bliss of Elysium, and the rich
imagery of Gentile scripture, these remarkable visions reveal the ex-
tent to which the Christian heaven was assuming vivid shape. Even
more basically, they reveal the extent to which the promise of happi-
ness lay at the heart of the early Christian message. Deogratias, utquo-
modo in came hi/arisfui, hilarior sim et hie modo, Perpetua observes in
Saturus's vision of eternal life. Literally, "Thanks be to God that I am
now morejoyful [my emphasis] than I was in the flesh." Was it not pre-
cisely this prospect —the hope of achieving an end to suffering through
suffering itself — that steeled the courage of these martyrs, that

prompted them to the extraordinary sacrifices they so willingly as-
sumed? known how to draw conviction from his

Paul, for his part, had
convictions. "If with merely human hopes I fought with wild animals
at Ephesus," he writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, "what

would I have gained by it if the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and
drink, for tomorrow we die'" (1 Corinthians 15:32). Like Perpetua and
94 Happiness
her companions, Paul understood that the fleeting pleasures of the

world — mortal life itself —was but a small sacrifice to make in return
for life eternal. "Now is your time of grief," Christ tells his disciples in
the Gospel of John, "but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and
no one will take away your joy" (16:22).
This same promise is repeated throughout the New Testament,
and its effect is powerful. For to an even greater extent than with the
promised kingdom of the children of Israel, the happiness outlined in
the beatific vision was at once specific in its suggestion of rich rewards
and extremely, luxuriantly vague. Here the imagination could be set
free to revel in the delights of the kingdom of God, to fantasize the
total fulfillment that would justify one's earthly pains. The ecstatic
consummation of divine love, the release, the rapture, the bliss — the
happiness of the newly promised arrival would be entire, eternal, end-
less, and complete. For now it could only be imagined. "What no eye
has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived," Paul writes
in 1 Corinthians, is "what God has prepared for those who love him."
Now we see this only imperfectly, "through a glass, darkly, but then
face to face." 49 Even the perpetual felicity imagined by Perpetua and
Felicitas would be as nothing compared to the real thing.
But this was not only, to borrow a later phrase from Augustine, a
"happiness of hope," a compelling promise of future joy, but also an
injunction to rejoice now in the expectation of that promise's fulfill-
ment —even, or perhaps especially, in the face of great suffering. When

Perpetua awakes from her dream, she already tastes the sweetness of
new life; when Saturus comes to, he is happy already. "Rejoice and be
glad" — today—Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount, "for great is
your reward in heaven " (Matthew 5:12). It is telling that this com-
mandment follows immediately upon the last of the beatitudes in
Matthew: "Happy are you when people revile you and persecute you
50
and utter all kinds of evils against you falsely on my account" (5:1 1).
The ecstasy of the imagined reward was commensurate with the in-
tensity of the suffering expended to achieve it.
The beatific vision, then, entailed a decisive turn away from the main
paths of both classical and Jewish experience, as well as a frank rejec-
—
tion of the carpe diem hedonism of late Roman felkitas. Whereas in the
classical account, happiness encompassed the span of a lifetime, Chris-

tian beatitude was without end. And whereas classical happiness re-
mained a comparatively cerebral affair — cool, deliberative, rational
Christian happiness was unabashedly sensual in its imagined ecstasies.

Feeling, intense feeling, was what flowed forth with Christ's blood,
transformed in the miracle of the crucifixion from the fruit of intense

pain to the sweet nectar of bliss. The Stoics had suggested that the
happy man could be happy even on the rack, happy in spite of suffering.
Christianity took this a step further, proposing that happiness was not
just impervious to pain, but its direct outcome and consequence. The
rack, the instrument of torture —the cross —becomes the site and sym-
bol of a more general process of conversion, a place of spiritual alchemy
where the base metal of human pain is converted into the gold of divine
rapture. With good reason is Christ's suffering and death termed the
"passion." His infinite capacity to experience anguish is directly pro-
portionate to his infinite capacity to convey the experience of joy.

Thus, the crucifixion
— "a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness
to Gentiles," as Paul openly acknowledged (1 Corinthians 1:23) —was
treated by Christians as a triumph and cause for exaltation. The mo-
mentous site of victory over suffering, death, and despair, the cross
was an invitation to participate directly in the passion of Christ. "For
to this you have been called," Peter observes to the righteous, "be-
cause Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you
should follow in his steps" (1 Peter 2:21). In doing so, Perpetua and
her companions demonstrated their total confidence that Christ had
shown the way, and their complete faith in the prize that would com-
plete their journey.
And so happiness — or, in the Latin, felicitas —was an intimate, if
unlikely, partner in this early tale of Christian suffering, as was

Perpetua's servant herself. Of the latter we are told only toward the
end of the text that, being eight months pregnant, Felicitas worried
that she would be prevented from joining her companions in the arena,
for Roman law forbade the execution of expectant mothers. Sharing
her fears, her "comrades in martyrdom" prayed for an early birth,
—
96 Happiness
hurrying life so that Felicitas herself might die. Evidently, their prayers
were answered. Before their encounter in the ring, Felicitas delivered
a baby girl, freeing herself to set out with her friends on what they
described as "the road to hope." Both literally and figuratively, felic-
ity walked with them, as these beatissimi martyres, these "most happy
51
martyrs," walked to their final end.
The Happiness of Hope
Some two centuries later, on the very day of the year that Perpetua
and Felicitas had walked to their end, a congregation gathered in the
bustling Mediterranean port city of Hippo (now Annaba, Algeria) to
spiritually retrace their steps. Throughout North Africa and the

greater Roman world, others did the same, retelling the passio of the
two young women in a rite of remembrance that continues to this day.
Still others traveled on Roman roads to the tombs of the martyrs them-
selves, commemorating Perpetua and Felicitas directly as penitents
had done since shortly after their death. Great feasts they held there
{agape), joyous festivities flowing with food and wine, ardor and exu-
berance of such earthly intensity that in 397 the Council of Carthage
sought to curtail them. The pilgrims continued to come, regardless,
taking part in a wider cult of martyrs then exploding across the dying
Roman Empire. Drawn by talk of miracles and healings performed at
the martyrs' tombs, the pilgrims were moved by a desire to make

contact with the divine. For here one stood at the gateway to another
life, a place where the pious could catch sight of Paradise itself.
Those who participated directly in this cult of martyrs considered
themselves a lucky few. But the men and women attending feast day
services in Hippo possessed a luck of their own. For their bishop in
the first three decades of the fifth century was Aurelius Augustinus
Saint Augustine. A gifted orator, he spoke with particular rapture on
these days of remembrance. And so, after reading with tenderness
from the passio of Perpetua and Felicitas, he reminded his flock of why
they had died:

Today we are celebrating the feast of two holy martyrs, who

were not only outstanding for their surpassing courage when
they suffered, but who also, in return for such a great labor of
piety, signified by their own names the reward awaiting them
and the rest of their companions. Perpetua, of course, and
Felicity are the names of two of them, but the reward of
them all. The only reason, I mean, why all the martyrs toiled
bravely for a time by suffering and confessing the faith in the
52
struggle, was in order to enjoy perpetual felicity.
Augustine was preaching to a largely illiterate congregation and so

spoke more plainly than he otherwise might have done. But his as-
sertion that through their names, Perpetua and Felicitas bore witness
to the "gift we are going to receive" was a commonplace of his thought,

repeated on successive feast days, and underlined in many of his writ-
ings. 53 No other church father, in fact, spoke with such consistency,
rigor, and passion of the pursuit of happiness in Christian life.
Born and raised in the North African city of Thagaste, in what is
today inland Algeria, in 354, Augustine grew up only several hundred

miles from the Carthage of Perpetua and Felicitas, and in fact studied
in that city as a young man. The Carthage that Augustine experienced,
however, like the Roman Empire as a whole, was a vastly different
place from that the two martyrs had known. The conversion of Em-
peror Constantine around the year 313 had begun the process of trans-
forming Christianity from a persecuted sect into the official religion
of the realm, though the steady erosion of imperial power —culminat-

ing in the sacking of Rome in 410 by invading German tribes —ensured
that no creed ruled with the same force that had once fed martyrs to
the lions. The late Roman world of Saint Augustine was a place in
which ideas and creeds competed openly for takers like shouted wares
in a marketplace bazaar.
Augustine entered this marketplace with no clear idea of what goods
he might find. His mother, Monica, was a Christian, and perhaps also
a Donatist, a member of an intensely devout, and ultimately schis-
matic, sect that flourished in North Africa in the late fourth century.
98 Happiness
But Augustine's father was a poor, unlettered pagan who nonetheless

understood that classical learning was the ticket that carried bright
boys to better places. Enlisting the patronage of a local grandee, he
managed to send Augustine to school, first in Thagaste and then in
Carthage. He died while his son was still a young man, leaving Augus-
tine to seek spiritual guidance where he could. For already Augustine
had adopted the prejudice of educated pagans, looking down on the
faith of his mother as the fodder of the simpleminded.
Viewed from without, Augustine's intellectual journey in the fol-
lowing years holds to a straight line, leading from his student days to
his time as a teacher in Carthage to his march on Rome as an ambi-
tious young man to his seizure of the prestigious professorship of
rhetoric in the court city of Milan, at the extraordinary age of thirty.
Internally, however, Augustine wandered, zigzagging in search of
meaning and of what his classical education led him to believe was his
ultimate end. From the moment he read Cicero's encomium to wis-
dom, the now lost Hortensius, in his teens, he made the search for
higher happiness his final goal. And he believed, with great faith, that
philosophy was the staff that would guide him there. 54
Augustine covered more ground than most. In fact, his early life is
a veritable tour through the schools of late classical learning. He sought

happiness in the pages of Cicero and the Stoics. He inquired into the
secrets of Epicurus. He wrestled with the legacy of Aristotle, and he
engaged the tradition of Plato and his more modern (Neoplatonist)
interpreters. He also journeyed further afield, gazing at the stars in
the hope of divining his fate in the secrets of astrology. He became a
convert to the teachings of Mani, the third-century founder of Mani-

cheanism, an ascetic religion that portrayed the world as a struggle
between Matter and Spirit, Dark and Light. And he pushed on with
his professional pursuits in the hope that fame, honor, and fortune
would bring him what he desired. If Augustine later came to under-
stand the twists and turns of the pursuit of happiness — its psychologi-
cal highways and emotional cul-de-sacs — it was in large part because
he had traveled down so many of those roads himself.
With good reason does much of Augustine's writing — the largest
extant corpus of any single author of the ancient world — abound

in metaphors of movement. He describes himself as a sailor on a
"stormy sea" in search of a quiet port, a wayfarer on "crooked paths"
hungry and thirsty for shelter. Augustine was a seeker, and only when
he had lost himself on what seemed every available route did he fully
appreciate the depths of his misery. As he recounts in a poignant
scene in his autobiography, the Confessions, it was at the height of his
worldly success, on the eve of delivering a major speech in praise of

the emperor, that Augustine realized how far from his goal he had
strayed:
As I walked along one of the streets in Milan I noticed a poor

beggar who must, I suppose, have had his fill of food and
drink, since he was laughing and joking. Sadly I turned to my
companions and spoke to them of all the pain and trouble
which is caused by our own folly. My ambitions had placed a
load of misery on my shoulders and the further I carried it the
heavier it became, but the only purpose of all the efforts we
make was to reach the goal of peaceful happiness. This beggar
had already reached it ahead of us, and perhaps we should
never reach it at all. For by all my laborious contriving and
intricate maneuvers I was hoping to win the joy of worldly
happiness, the very thing which this man had already secured
at the cost of the few pence which he had begged. 55
Augustine understood, of course, that the drunken man's state was

illusory, or at best short-lived. Yet he still regarded him "the happier
man." Whereas the beggar was flushed with cheerfulness, Augustine
was "eaten away with anxiety." And whereas the beggar earned his
money for wine by wishing a good day to passersby, Augustine fed his
pride by "telling lies" in praise of the emperor's worth. All his learn-
ing had proved futile — it was "no source of happiness to me." He wan-
56
dered in circles. His misery was complete.
100 Happiness
Augustine broke free from this labyrinth of despair with his dra-
matic conversion to Christianity in 386. In the Confessions, he goes over
in painstaking detail the ground that led him to the garden in Milan
where he took his final step. As a consequence, that journey has re-
mained a subject of intense scrutiny ever since. But what is most ap-
parent is how Augustine's conversion responded to the failure of his
classical quest. In the future bishop of Hippo's monumental interpre-
tation, Christianity became not only "the way" to happiness but also
the way to account for the futility of all other earthly pursuits.
Augustine developed this interpretation slowly, over the course of
his entire Christian career. But it is significant that he was already

plotting its principal outlines within weeks of his conversion, giving
testimony to this fact in his first completed work, the revealingly en-
57
titled Debeatavtta, The Happy (or Blessed) Life. Written while he
awaited his formal reception into the church in the rite of baptism,
the work recounts a series of discussions with his mother and a small
group of friends who have joined him at a country house outside of
Milan for his birthday. In form, the work is a classical dialogue, likely
indebted to Cicero's Hortensius, in which Augustine himself assumes

the Socratic role and his mother and friends serve as interlocutors.
Each morning the small symposium gathers after breakfast, advanc-
ing in stages and through dialectical argument toward the final goal of
ascertaining the meaning of a happy life. "Neither dependent upon
fate nor subject to any mishap," happiness, the group learns, in good
classical fashion, must "always endure" and so cannot be "snatched
away through any severe misfortune." Intimately linked to the culti-
vation of the soul and to the attainment of wisdom, happiness is "full-
ness" or plenitude flowing in such a way that the one who experiences
it lacks nothing, knows no want. Those who are happy are "not in
need" but are filled with the "supreme measure" of wisdom. To be
happy is thus to be suffused with truth, to "have God within the soul,"
to "enjoy God." 58
In the final pages of the dialogue, Augustine illustrates this descrip-
tion with two metaphors that reveal his enormous debt to Plato, and
to the latter's third-century interpreters, Porphyry and Plotinus. Lik-
ening God to both a "fountain of truth" whose waters we crave and a

"hidden sun" that pours forth a light detectable only by the eye of the
soul, Augustine presents our yearning for happiness as the desire to
see without obstruction, a longing to completely satisfy our thirst. He
recognizes, however —and this is the catch — that neither of these
identical goals is attainable in life. Just as we "hesitate to turn with
courage toward [the] light and to behold it in its entirety," unable to
stand the intensity of its brightness, so are we unable to drink our fill.
In Augustine's view, we cannot receive our "supreme measure" on

earth:
As long as we are still seeking, and not yet satiated by the

fountain itself, satisfied, to use our word, by fullness
[plenitudo], we must confess that we have not yet reached our
measure; therefore, notwithstanding the help of God, we are
59
not yet wise and happy.
Destined to continue seeking until the end of our days, we may draw
closer to God, see him more clearly. But on the road of life, we will
always suffer thirst. Happiness, here, is not our measure.
Conceived in the Christianized language of Neoplatonic philoso-
phy, Augustine's early account of the search for happiness had not yet
acquired the theological rigor of his later works. Yet it expresses viv-
idly the truth of his own experience, providing an early account of his
discovery that the turn toward God is not an end but a beginning.
Pointing Augustine in the direction he would follow for the rest of his
life, De beata vita paved the way for his greatest work, The City of God
Against the Pagans. Begun in 413 when he was fifty-nine and completed
when he was seventy-two, just five years before his death, The City of
God consists of well over one thousand pages in modern editions and
is without question Augustine's magnum opus. On one level an at-
tempt to explain the unthinkable invasion of Rome in 410 — the first
violation of the "eternal city" by a foreign army in nearly eight hundred

years — the work is at the same time asumma, a summary of Augustine's
thought. The same reason that explained how the Christian God could
—
102 Happiness
allow a calamity on the order of the taking of Rome —and why the false
gods of the pagans were helpless to stop it — explained why men and
women suffer in this world. The City of God an explanation of evil, andis
of why the earthly quest for happiness is doomed.

Augustine undertook this sweeping exposition in a number of ways.
He provided, for example, a theory of history that accounted for human
events in terms of providential logic, showing how God's hand was for-
ever at work in the world, frustrating the pretensions of empires and

individuals to independence. Rome had grown mighty not through its
own initiative but because it served God's plan. And now God was real-
izing his larger purpose through Rome's fall, hastening time toward its
final end in the day of judgment. When that day would come, August-
ine emphasized (like others before), no one could know, and his insis-
tence on the point helped put an end to formal millennial speculation

within the church. Still, one could be sure that behind the apparent
chaos of human events lay a divine logic, not always discernible to the
naked eye but giving order and meaning to the whole nonetheless.
This was the grand explanation. There was another, closer to home.
For if the fall of Rome revealed the fragility of all human things, it also
exposed what Augustine called the "lust to domination" so long cen-

60
tral to Roman rule and now turned back on itself. In the awful spec-
ter of the rape and pillage of the eternal city, one witnessed directly
the savagery and cruelty that surround us at all times. "Men are plun-
dered by their fellow-men and taken captive, they are chained and
imprisoned, exiled and tortured, limbs are cut off and organs of sense
destroyed, bodies are brutally misused to gratify the obscene lust of
the oppressor, and many such horrors are of a frequent occurrence." 61
This was only the beginning of a list of the "vast mass of evils" that
covered the earth, and which had done so continually since the first
man and woman fell in the Garden of Eden. 62

In heeding the Devil's
temptation, "You will be like gods," Adam and Eve had abandoned the
Creator of their own free will, foolishly succumbing to the belief that
they could live of their own light, without the light of the Lord. The
rest of human history — filled with suffering, loneliness, and despair
served as a rebuke to this primordial presumption and pride.
—
This was the doctrine of original sin, a doctrine hardly original to
Augustine. Virtually all early Christians agreed that something fatal
had happened in the Garden of Eden, and that it was through our par-
ents' fault that imperfection had entered the world. Yet they disagreed
extensively over the ultimate consequences of this transgression and
regarding its final effect on the human race. In one influential view
articulated by Augustine's theological contemporary and rival, the
Roman Briton Pelagius — the Fall was not irrevocable but had been
undone by Christ. Men and women did not carry sin in their bones,
were not irreparably, congenitally marred. On the contrary, they were
fully capable of perfection, and it was their duty to realize this end,
heeding Christ's call to "be perfect, even as your father in Heaven is
perfect" (Matthew 5:48). In the Pelagian view, this was an obligation

that could be fulfilled.
Augustine objected deeply to this view, and it was largely as a re-
sult of his protracted battle against it that the church condemned

"Pelagianism" as a heresy, with monumental consequences for the
future of the West. According to Augustine, original sin was no minor
transgression but a totally transformative act. Banished from the "un-
alloyed felicity" of Paradise, Adam and Eve had bequeathed to pos-
terity the just punishment for their crime of pride, setting off a "chain
of disasters" that had permanently alteredhuman beings for the worse.
"The effect of that sin was to subject human nature to all the process
of decay which we see and feel, and consequently to death also. And
man was distracted and tossed about by violent and conflicting emo-
tions, a very different being from what he was in paradise before his
sin. . .
." 63 Nowhere were human beings now self-sufficient, free of
need; nowhere did they live as they wished. When they tried to love
with purity, they felt jealousy and contempt. When they struggled for
peace, hate reared in their breasts. Everywhere, we were at odds with
ourselves. Even our bodies eluded our control. Augustine the young
man and Augustine the wizened priest knew that lust "moves or fails
to move" our members "by its own right." And though he paused
with amusing deadpan to consider the case of those who can produce
at will "musical sounds from their behind (and without any stink),"
—
104 Happiness
he understood that such impressive bodily control could do nothing

to arrest the onset of disease, or to halt our sickness unto death. 64 We
were not masters of our selves.
Here was the cause of why Augustine and all others had failed
and would continue to fail — in their quest for happiness on earth. God
had condemned humanity to suffer the same punishment as our an-
cestors who had turned away from him. Vainly, we sought to live by
our own light, but in our awkward stumbling in the dark, we were
forced to confront the impossibility of that task. Amid the death and
suffering of the world, our very yearning for happiness was a bitter
reminder of our original sin, a bitter reminder of our own inability to
satisfy ourselves. With good reason did Augustine entitle a chapter of
his work "True happiness, which is unattainable in our present life."
And so it was in vain that "all these philosophers have wished, with
amazing folly, to be happy here on earth and to achieve bliss by their
own efforts." 65 Augustine took aim at the "effrontery of the Stoics,"
who with "stupefying arrogance" maintained that even a man "en-
feebled in limb and tormented in pain" would not blush to call this
life a "life of happiness." 66

To Augustine, such claims were patently
absurd. The heirs of Aristotle and Epicurus, at least, were more hon-
est in recognizing suffering for what it was. But they, too, were pre-
posterous in their efforts to escape it. Like those Romans who
worshipped directly before the goddess Felicity, their protestations
were pointless.
Augustine reserved words of praise only for the Platonists, reiterat-

ing the respect he had shown in Debeatavita, and which he maintained
throughout his life. They alone had directed man's gaze upward. They
alone had understood that a transcendent God was the "author of the
universe, the source of the light of truth, and the bestower of happi-
ness." And they alone had begun to chart the course toward that
"spring which offers the drink of felicity." Such were the similarities
between their thought and Christianity, Augustine believed, that he
was willing to speculate that Plato himself might have received knowl-
edge of the Old Testament while on a purported trip to Egypt. We
know that this was not the case. But Augustine's readiness to enter-
tain the idea is informative, highlighting how difficult it was for this
great adversary of the pagans to abandon completely his pagan past.

In the Platonic, and Neoplatonic, understanding of the journey of the
soul as a return to God — a journey back to the One from which we are
separated at birth —Augustine found a compelling model to describe

his own struggle to regain a vanished wholeness. He also found a vo-
cabulary readily adaptable to Christian ends. As no shortage of com-
mentators have observed, it was not the least of Augustine's many
contributions to the long-term development of Christianity that he
infused a strong element of Platonic thought into the faith. In doing
so, he helped ensure that the pagan goal of happiness as the rest or
completion of the soul remained very much a part of the Christian
promise.
Yet if Platonism was the "philosophy that approximates most nearly
to Christianity," Augustine fully understood that in the end it, too,
fell short of the mark. Like the other schools of the pagan world, the
Platonists flirted with the conceit that we could achieve happiness in

this world of our own free will. For human beings vitiated by original
sin, this was simply not possible; happiness was beyond our control.
God alone, through his grace, could transform and heal us. As Augus-
tine emphasized again and again, true happiness was "the gift of God,"
67
to be imparted only at death and only to the chosen few.
The disturbing implication of this judgment was that God in his
wisdom had "predestined" those who would be saved. And indeed the
rudiments of a theory of predestination can certainly be found scat-
tered throughout his works, as Martin Luther and John Calvin, among
others, would later observe. But unlike these men, Augustine refused
to dwell at length on the mysteries of the dispensation of grace. He
spoke rather with passion of what he called "the happiness of hope."
Beyond this world and its veil of tears, all Christians could take solace
in the thought that they were being led to the Lord, where our jour-
ney would be brought to its happy resolution and end. Here the
blessed would see God "face to face," see him eternally through the
spirit, and all desires would be fulfilled. Absolved of doubts, of fears,
of longings, we would be made right again, as our ancestors were in

—
106 Happiness
the beginning, when "true joy flowed perpetually from God." There
we could drink our fill, perpetually, in the kingdom without end. But
until that time we would always suffer thirst.
This vision of life was essentially "tragic" in the sense that it
downplayed the role of human agency in determining human fate,
and tragic, too, in that it presented earthly existence as invariably
steeped in suffering and pain. And yet by transforming the end of

existence from a boundary into a gateway opening up onto eternal
life, Augustine's account offered a very different take on the tragic
adage of old, "Call no man happy until he is dead." In the Christian
conception, happiness was death, a proposition that dealt a severe
blow to the impact of earthly fortune and the vagaries of chance. If,
as in the classical reckoning, death completed happiness, as it did

for Cleobis and Biton, marking the end of a favored life, in the Chris-
tian conception, death was both a culmination and a beginning — the
culmination of earthly pain and the onset of infinite beatitude, the
beginning of happiness without end. And whereas the classical hero
was thus wise to confront existence with continual foreboding
envisioning a happy ending only in hubris or as the unlikely inter-

vention of a god from the machine — the Christian pilgrim could
travel with the comfort of hope that he was moving in the direction
of a better place. The struggle of the journey was itself a constant
reminder that struggle was not in vain, for to suffer was to suffer in
righteous punishment, in expiation, in forward movement and

progress along the way. The trail of the journey becomes a trial, but
also a continual reminder that the pain of each step has a purpose.
This is the pilgrim's promise.
When viewed in this manner, the passing landscape of the world
need not beckon us to stay. For what a fleeting thing must be the
happiness of life when measured against happiness without end. And
yet there is another perspective to this same Christian glance, an
ambiguity in the tragic regard of Augustine that should give us pause.
The same author who speaks in the City ofGodoi our mortal lives as a
"kind of hell on earth" recounts with reverence the "innumerable

blessings" and many "good things of which this life is full." He speaks
of man as "a work of such wonder and grandeur as to astound the

mind," praising the "remarkable powers" of our reason and the "as-
tounding achievements of human industry." And he reflects with in-
credible tenderness on the "beauty and utility of the natural creation."
The manifold diversity of beauty in sky and earth and sea; the
abundance of light, and its miraculous loveliness, in sun and
moon and stars; the dark shades of woods, the color and
fragrance of flowers; the multitudinous varieties of birds, with
their songs and their bright plumage; the countless different
variety of living creatures of all shapes and sizes. . . . Then
there is the mighty spectacle of the sea itself, putting on its
different colors like changing garments, now green, with all

the many varied shades, now purple, now blue. Who could
. . .
68
give a complete list of all these natural blessings?
This is the voice of a man who loved life immensely, who would be
sorry to see it go; the voice of a man who felt deeply the loveliness of
the universe, who savored at every moment the precious wonder of
existence, who delighted in the simple fact of being in the world.
True, the world's very beauty and fragility, its transitory passing, and
our inability to hold it in our eyes, becomes a further cause of pain.
But this is the sweet sorrow of continual parting, the infusion of all
experience with the intensity of knowing that one may never come
this way again. Despite its inherent sadness, life is a precious gift,
and our knowledge of its transience only renders it more so. That,
too, is the voice of one who knows that the world is a passing landscape,
who knows that "as long as [man] is in this mortal body, he is a pil-
grim in a foreign land, away from God. . .

," 69
Mystical Return
Inhocparadiso, intelligibtliincessudeusdeambulat. "In this intelligible Para-

dise, God goes walking." And he asks, Adam, ubies?
108 Happiness
Adam, where are you? This is the voice of the creator rebuk-
ing human nature. It is as if He said: Where are you now after
your transgression? For I do not find you there where I know

that I created you, nor in that dignity in which I made you in
My image and likeness, but I rebuke you as a deserter from

happiness \beatitudinis\, a fugitive from the true light, hiding
yourself in the secret places of your bad conscience, and I
enquire into the cause of your disobedience. Do you suppose

that I do not know what you have done or whither you have
70
fled or how . . . ?
Though called by contemporaries "John, the Scot," the author of this
ninth-century gloss on the book of Genesis was Irish. Hence the epi-
thet later added to his name, "Eriugena," a native of the island of saints.
He was an heir to the treasures of learning that had been amassed in
the monasteries of this island refuge in the sixth, seventh, and eighth
centuries while so much in Europe was either lost or destroyed,
crumbled into pieces like the Roman Empire itself, crushed by the
force of invading Vandals, Huns, Saxons, and Goths. Yet by Eriugena's
time, the ramparts of this scholarly redoubt were themselves ex-
posed, threatened not by the forces that had decimated Rome but
by Northmen, Vikings, and Danes, who began to raid the Celtic fringe
in the late eighth century. Men like Eriugena went where they could,
living like Adam, in hiding, or fleeing abroad as refugees. They brought
with them bits of their precious trove: knowledge of scripture, knowl-
edge of the Latin fathers, and, what was most rare in ninth-century
Europe, knowledge of Greek. As the monk and scholar Heiric of

Auxerre marveled with some jealousy, "Ireland, despising the dangers
of the sea, is migrating almost en masse with her crowd of philosophers
to our shores, and all the most learned doom themselves to voluntary
exile to attend the bidding of Solomon the Wise." 71

The Solomon in question was Charles the Bald, grandson of
Charlemagne and king of the newly consolidated empire of the West
Franks. A patron of the arts, he converted his court into an asylum for
scholars, which emerged in the ninth century as the seat of a substan-
— —
tial revival of letters, the seat of what is now called the Carolingian
Renaissance. When Eriugena arrived there sometime around the year

847, he quickly proved himself to be a renaissance man, at once poet,
theologian, philosopher, and wit. What separates "a Scot from a sot?"
King Charles is said to have inquired of the hard-drinking sage. "Only
72
the table," Eriugena replied. The line is probably apocryphal, but it
reflects the indulgence with which Eriugena was received. Appointed

by Charles to head his palace school, John the Scot was given leave to
ponder the perplexities of Paradise and the revealed word of God.
It was in this role that Eriugena reflected at length on the passage
from Genesis referred to above: "They heard the sound of the Lord
God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the
man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God
among the trees of the garden" (Genesis 3:8). "What is meant by the
walking of Him Who is always everywhere?" Eriugena wondered, cit-
ing the question of St. Ambrose, who in the fourth century had won-
dered the very same thing. 73 Was this not a way of indicating the
general presence of God? And if so, then was it not also right to say
that "there is a kind of walking of God through the sequence of the
Holy Scriptures ... so that when we recall these passages, we recog-
nize the voice of the Lord as he is walking"? God, it would seem, is
forever "walking in the minds of men," but we, in our bad conscience
and sin, hide in shame, refusing to detect his presence, to return his
loving gaze. 74 The question that had haunted Augustine — how to go
to God? — gnawed also at this Irish sage, intensified perhaps by the
exile's natural longing for return. As Eriugena reflected in a long poem
dedicated to his patron, when listening to the scriptures he could hear
the voice of the almighty walking, calling us home:
For the God-Word proceeded from the womb of the Virgin
in an increase of the light that the darkness of night had

over-come
for us unhappy men [nos homines miseros], banished from the light of
paradise,
buried in the darkness of sin formerly committed,
110 Happiness
leaving of our own free-will the shining seats of light,
bound down in justice with the chains of unending death.

Thus the mortal race would pay and expiate its debts
and feel the pains deserved by its inflated pride.
The God-Word willed to restore to us and give us back our former

home. 75
How human beings, willful "deserters of happiness," could return to
the home they had forsaken of their own free will became for Eriugena,
like all spiritual exiles born of Adam and banished into the world, a
question of the utmost importance.
The question was not new. Central to the early church, it had been
posed in various ways ever since, occupying Augustine, among others,
as we have seen. Augustine's theology of sin was an explicit attempt
to account for our inability to return to the wholeness of our pristine

state —the state of paradise that human beings now recalled imper-
fectly in their yearning for a felicity that they could no longer realize
or see. Well suited to an increasingly institutionalized church forced
to come to terms with the fact that the kingdom of God was not im-
mediately at hand, Augustine's theology of sin sought to free us from
what he regarded as a dangerous illusion: the "Pelagian" belief, akin
to pagan arrogance, that we could achieve salvation —secure happi-
ness —on our own.
In countering this view, Augustine tried to strike a careful balance
between free will and grace, human agency and the dynamic power of
God. But it was a delicate balance, and in some minds it tipped dan-
gerously close to a tragic fatalism with respect to our position in the
world. As a consequence, long before Luther and Calvin weighed in, at
the time of the Reformation, with their attempt to propel Augustine's

authority further in this direction, figures in the church were devot-
ing critical energy to putting weight on the other side.
Eriugena was one of those figures, and the mid-ninth-century court
of Charles the Bald was a particularly important place for struggle
around the fulcrum. As an interested party observed in a letter to
Hincmar, the archbishop of Reims and a leading figure at Charles's

court: "New superstitions and a damaging doctrine on predestination"

had emerged, with voices spreading dubious judgments. Claiming the
authority of Augustine, these voices, the letter claimed, argued that
"God's predestination applies both to good and bad." 76 Not only, that
is, had God in his infinite wisdom prepared the elect for happiness
and salvation, but he had allegedly predestined the damned for de-
struction as well, bringing their souls into existence solely so that they
could then be destroyed. Praedestinatio gemma, contemporaries called

it, "twin predestination." By this view, either we were born to eternal
happiness or we were not. The unlucky, no matter how hard they
11
might try, " cannot correct themselves from error and sin"
Whether Augustine himself actually taught this doctrine remains a

contested question. But what is most immediately relevant is that
already in the ninth century there were people in the church who
worried about the dangers that such a doctrine could pose. Double
predestination, they argued, not only presented a terrible picture of
the true, loving God but also threatened to subvert all efforts at moral
and spiritual reform. Undermining free will, it would undermine the

church's position as the sole mediator of God's grace, unleashing havoc
on the world.
Eriugena weighed into this debate at the urging of Charles, produc-
ing in 850 or 851 De praedestinatione {On Predestination), a vigorous de-
fense of free will. A complex treatise, the work sought to deny that
the authority of Augustine could be used in defense of the doctrine of
double predestination, and in that aim it was not altogether success-
ful. The reasoning behind the attempt was tortuous. But Eriugena's
conclusions were perfectly clear: "And so with all the orthodox faith-
ful I anathematize those who say that there are two predestinations
or a twin predestination or one divided into two parts or a double,"
Eriugena observed. Just as God's eternal and unchangeable law had

"predestined no one to evil, since it is good, so has it predestined no
78
one to death, since it is life."
In making his case, Eriugena had swung to the other extreme — so
much so that De praedestinatione was suspected of tending too close to

the Pelagian heresy, overestimating the power of human agency while
—
112 Happiness
making light of the power of sin. As if to confirm the fact, a number of

Eriugena's other writings were later condemned. But though John the
Scot himself endangered a delicate balance, his general momentum
was consistent with the broader thrust of Catholic doctrine and prac-
tice as it was developing in the ninth century, and as it would con-
tinue to evolve for the next several hundred years. We had forsaken
happiness, Eriugena argued, of our own free will, but because of this
fact, we could be moved to return to it by similar means. By taking

proper steps to court God's gaze and to accept his grace, we could help
ensure that when he walked among us, his presence would be known.
Eriugena developed this belief throughout his writings, but it was
in a work that was not own that he did the most to influence the
his
thinking of those who came after. Again at the bidding of Charles

the Bald, he translated into Latin from the original Greek the whole
of the extant corpus of the writings of a then obscure author by the
name of Dionysius, falsely believed to have been the Athenian dis-
ciple of Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles 1 7:34: "But some
of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the
Areopagite. . .
." We now know that the Dionysius in question was in
fact no one of the sort (despite his own claims to the contrary). A pro-
digious author, he lived much later, perhaps in Syria, and probably in
the sixth century, although that cannot be established for sure. What
is clear is that this so-called Pseudo-Dionysius had read deeply in Pla-
tonic and Neoplatonic philosophy, which he blended skillfully with

Christian doctrine to create what he called, in the title of one of his
major works, "mystical theology."
Disparaging the body and all things material, Pseudo-Dionysius
presented the whole of reality —and God himself— as pure, unchang-
ing mind (nous), a super essence that encompassed all things but was
not perceptible by conventional means. Only by a process of radical
self-emptying and denial, mental discipline and ascetic purification,
could we train "the eye of the mind" to open to the presence of God.
All who failed to engage in this process —what Plato likened in his
famous metaphor of the cave as an ascent from darkness to light

would remain utterly blind to God's true radiance. As Pseudo-

Dionysius counsels at the beginning of The Mystical Theology:
My advice to you as you look for a sight of the mysterious

things, is to leave behind you everything perceived and
understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all
that is not and all that is, and, with your understanding laid
aside, to strive upward as much as you can toward union
with him who is beyond all being and knowledge. By an
undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and every-
thing, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted
to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything
79
that is.
To abandon oneself and everything besides may not seem a particu-
larly uplifting message, its central metaphor notwithstanding. But the

lure of renunciation and transcendence — the temptation leave to
one's sorrows behind and soar above all — rooted deep

earthly cares is
in the human psyche. Plato himself had put forth a compelling vision
of the erotic longing of the soul to merge in ecstatic union with what
lay beyond the limits of perceived reality. And when this vision was
integrated with an evolving Christian tendency to disparage the body
as the host of earthly sin, the result was a powerful impulse to spiri-
tual uplift. Like a thermal wind, it promised to bear aloft all who would
raise their minds to higher things, bearing us, as the medieval mystic
Hildegard of Bingen would observe, like "a feather on the breath of
God."
Already in the fourth century, the desert fathers had known such
powerful currents, straining and striving upward to see God through
great feats of earthly denial. These men were prepared to leave every-
thing behind, and in the person of Saint Simeon Stylites, their ascetic
daring achieved new heights. The fifth-century hermit erected a pillar
{stylos) in the sand that soared some sixty feet into the sky. Cut off
from the world, Simeon lived atop his perch for thirty-six years, having
114 Happiness
his meager food and water sent up at the end of a string. This was a
literal effort to bring oneself closer to God, and it was mimicked
throughout the Eastern church. As a much later recluse was moved to
observe, "A man that Studies Happiness must sit alone like a Sparrow
upon the House Top, and like a Pelican in the Wilderness." 80 By sev-
ering all contact with the world to focus only on happiness on high,
these solitary souls attempted to soar to private communion with God.
And then there were those emaciated ones who conceived of fasting
and dietary rigor as a way to a similar end — a means to cleanse the body
of the putrid flesh of the apple that weighed it down, so that the soul
could ascend upward to a more spiritual feast. Isidore of Seville recom-
mended the practice heartily in the seventh century, observing that to
fast "is a holy thing, a heavenly work, the doorway to the kingdom, the
form of the future, for he who carries it out in a holy way is united to
81
God, exiled from the world, and made spiritual." At roughly the same
time, an Irish hymn, perhaps known to Eriugena, invited the holy to
partake in the great feast of the eucharist. The word itself means "grati-
tude" or "giving thanks" (from eu + charts, thanks, grace, or joy). But it
is also akin to the Greek verb chairein, meaning "to rejoice." Whether
the monks who chanted the following lines were familiar with this root
(probably not), they surely soared in song as if they were:
Come. Holy people, eat the body of Christ, drinking the holy
blood by which you are redeemed. We have been saved by
Christ's body and blood; having feasted on it, let us give
thanks to God. All have been rescued from the jaws of hell by
this sacrament of body and blood. . . . The Lord, offered as
sacrifice for us all, was both priest and victim. . . . He gives
the celestial bread to the hungry and offers drink from the
living fountain to the thirsty. 82
"Happy are those called to his supper." 83 Christ as tender lamb, Christ
as unleavened bread, Christ as sweet wine became for the most

discriminating palate the only form of food, blessed morsels to sustain
the soul while the flesh wasted away into the mystical body of Jesus.
Those who practiced such penitential rigors probably did not require
theological pronouncements on predestination to know that they could
bring themselves to a higher state through effort of their own. Nor were
the musings of a Dionysius necessary to move their minds. Yet the co-
incidence of both these currents gave lift to a movement of Christian

mysticism in the ninth century that was just beginning its ascent. In
light of the received belief that Pseudo-Dionysius's writings were a
voice from the early church — a direct message from a disciple of
Paul — they proved tremendously influential. Few other writers, one

commentator observes, are "likely to have exercised a greater influ-
ence upon Christian mysticism," while another calls Pseudo-Dionysius

"the father of scientific mystical theology." 84 Scientific or not, his work
as translated and made known by Eriugena would have great impact for
centuries, influencing the likes of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint

Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, and
perhaps Hildegard of Bingen, to name only a few of the more important
voices in the Western mystical tradition affected by his work.
Mystical bliss. Gian Lorenzo

Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa,
1645-52, Cappella Cornaro,
Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.
Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.
116 Happiness
There is one possible exception to this pride of place —Anicius

Manlius Severinus Boethius, also a sixth-century author whose most
influential work was discovered and made widely known only in the
Carolingian age. Seeing that Boethius was likewise a Neoplatonist

and also deeply concerned with questions of free will and fate, it is
not surprising that Eriugena took a deep interest in his thought as

well. Eriugena wrote glosses on several of Boethius's works and also
composed a short account of his life, explaining how Boethius was

born into an aristocratic family at the end of the Roman Empire, then
imprisoned, and put to death as a Catholic martyr c. 524 by the
Ostrogothic king at Ravenna, Theodoric. But while awaiting execu-
tion, Boethius managed, like Perpetua, to compose a short tract, The
Consolation of Philosophy, which earned him the perpetual devotion of
Eriugena and the broader educated public of the ninth century. It
would prove, along with those of Dionysius, to be one of the most

important writings of the Middle Ages.
In part autobiographical, the work describes the intellectual jour-
ney of a condemned prisoner, the movement of his mind to God, as
he is guided by the faithful hand of Lady Philosophy, who appears

to him in the midst of his despair. When the prisoner inveighs with
the "white heat" of resentment against the bad luck of his incarcera-
tion, Philosophy points out that those who trust in Fortune are al-
ways destined to be deceived. "You must have heard how Croesus,

king of the Lydians, after being only recently an object of fear to
Cyrus, became thereafter a pitiable figure when consigned to the
flames of the pyre," Philosophy observes. 85 The "groans of tragedy"
would ever be heard when men placed their hopes for happiness in
the ephemeral goods of the world. Riches, high position, fame, plea-
sure, good feeling, and power
— "All these paths to happiness turn
out to be byways, and cannot guide a man to the goal that they prom-
86
ise." Like the body, "that most tawdry and frail of things," they
yielded only fleeting pleasures and certain pains. Mere "appearances
of the true good," these earthly ends were in fact illusions, for there
was just one such highest end. "We must acknowledge," Philosophy
enjoins, "that God is happiness itself."
87
—
Having reached this familiar conclusion, Philosophy then draws

another, considerably more bold:
Since men become happy by achieving happiness, and happi-

ness is itself divinity, clearly they become happy by attaining
divinity. Now just as men become just by acquiring justice,
and wise by acquiring wisdom, so by the same argument they

must become gods once they have acquired divinity. Hence
every happy person is God; God is by nature one only, but
nothing prevents the greatest possible number from sharing
88
in that divinity.
Here was a radical claim, built, to be sure, upon the classical common-
place that the happy man lived a "godlike life," but going well beyond
it to suggest that those who are happy literally become God, sharing
directly in his essential essence and participating in his spirit and power.
And though there were some scriptural precedents for this suggestion
Saint Peter's claim, for example, that Christ has given us everything
we need for "godliness," so that we may become "participants of the
divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) —Boethius did not allude to them here.
Rather, like Dionysius, he placed his trust in another guide to lead us

back from whence we came. "Under my guidance, along my path, and
in my conveyance you can return safely to your native land," Lady Phi-
losophy explains to the prisoner, before gesturing in the direction that

he must go. The steps that the prisoner will take to God involve not
walking but mystical, spiritual flight:
For I have wings equipped to fly
Up to the high vault of the sky.
Once these are harnessed, your swift mind

Views earth with loathing, far behind:
Climbs through the sphere of boundless air,
Surveys the clouds below it there;
Up through the sphere of fire can go,

Ablaze with aether's supple flow;
118 Happiness
Then to the starry halls can run,

89
Merge with the pathways to the sun. . . .
As in many of the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, the imagery here is
Platonic, probably borrowed directly from the account of the winged

souls in Plato's dialogue the Phaedrus. But the metaphor of ascent to-
ward light, with its attendant counsel to leave behind the darkness of
worldly things, was readily adaptable to more explicitly Christian ends.
It is in this way that Eriugena conceives of Saint John the Evan-
gelist as the perfect illustration of his own theory of "deification,"

the psychic and bodily transformation of the blessed into God, and
the incorporation — through him, with him, in him — into the unity
90
of the Holy Spirit. John in Eriugena's conception is the apostle who
achieved the greatest heights of contemplation, the apostle whose
fitting symbol is the soaring eagle. He is "the mystical bird, who flies
fast and looks upon the face of God," who in contemplating the word,
"rises above every visible and invisible creature, soars over all under-
standing, and, deified, enters into God who deifies him":
The voice of the mystical eagle sounds in the ears of the

Church. Let our exterior sense catch the sound that passes;
let our mind penetrate the meaning that abides. This voice is
the voice of the high-flying bird, not he that flies above the
material air and aether and the limits of the whole sensible
world, but he that transcends all contemplation, beyond all
the things that are and all the things that are not. He does
this with the swift-flying wings of profound theology, the
glances of clear and lofty contemplation. 91
And lest there be any doubt regarding his "Boethian" blessedness,

Eriugena is perfectly clear: "John was, therefore, not just a man, but
more than a man, when he rose above himself and all things that
are. . . . For he could not otherwise ascend to God, without first be-
coming God." 92
. «~ ^F'»
>/wi tl
3 1
Saint John with Eagle, early

9th century, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, The Cloisters
Collection, (1977.421).
John's mystical ascension, then, is preceded by a radical breaking
out of his human condition, an escape from the body and an abandon-
ment of the self in which the saint goes beyond the strictly human
confines of reason and understanding to achieve a state of divine illu-
mination and ecstatic union with God. This was bliss, divine rapture,
the convulsive flowing forth and coalescence with the love of God that
later mystics would not fail to describe in frankly erotic terms: as the
cleaving to the breast of Mary and the taking in of her warm milk, as
the consummation of the soul as "bride of Christ" in marriage with
the bridegroom Jesus, or any number of other highly charged images
that emanated from the minds of men and women who offered their
chastity to God. And though Eriugena conceived of an endless variety

of levels of mystical attainment —with each soul striving, in life as in
120 Happiness
death, to "know" with greater "knowledge," to experience ever closer

intimacy with the ultimately unknowable God —he conceived of the
mystical flight of John as the living standard by which others should
be measured. Those mortals who would emulate this saint in the pur-
suit of our highest good must strive also to "transmute into God," to
become God, to participate directly in his truth, to know if only in the
flash of a moment the intense spiritual happiness that would be ours
eternally in death. This was the exile's ultimate return.
If a number of Eriugena's more creative pronouncements "led him

into error," drawing him away from the strict orthodoxy of the church,
his general appeal to strive upward to God in an effort to become him
reflected the beginnings of a much broader current in the accepted
teaching and practice of medieval Christianity. Like the writings of
Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius that Eriugena so admired and imi-
tated, his Homily would become a familiar text in medieval libraries,
bidding the faithful to follow the evangelist's example, combining

philosophical reflection, intense meditation, and ascetic denial in the
attempt to return to, and then enter, our true home. 93
It need hardly be said that this was a privileged journey — a journey
to be carried out primarily in the sacred space of the monastery, con-

vent, or hermitage, where one could wrestle more effectively with the
many temptations of the world. No less than the philosophy practiced

in the schools of Greece and Rome, the perfection of Christian godli-
ness required education, training, and time — precious resources in
the Middle Ages that meant effectively that the higher happiness of
the theologians was a monopoly of those who could afford to devote
their lives to higher things. As a later writer, the Franciscan saint
Bonaventure would emphasize in his thirteenth-century Journey of the
Mind to God, "Since happiness is nothing else than the enjoyment of

the Supreme Good, and the Supreme Good is above us, no one can
enjoy happiness unless he rise above himself. . .
." 94
However true these words, Bonaventure's stress on lofty transcen-

dence should not allow us to overlook the far greater number who were
forced to cling much closer to earth, eking out an existence on the land
or huddling together in Europe's crowded cities and towns. Even one
Giotto di Biandolini, The Ecstasy of St. Francis, 1297-1300,

Upper church, San Francesco, Assisi. Note the
penumbra or halo around Saint Francis and
Christ indicating their beatitude.

as high-minded as Bonaventure, after all, could not be expected to

keep the advice of his order's founder, Saint Francis, "to glory in the
cross of tribulation and afflictions," with unerring devotion. Nor could

he expect to strive without fail "ever to be joyful" in living a life of
denial. "It is not right for the servant of God to show sadness and a
dismal face," Saint Francis added, but clearly the saints themselves
were sometimes wrong. Mere mortals, struggling to survive, could only
95
hope to steal a smile as best they could.
But we should not suppose that they never did. The ordinary people
of the long Middle Ages knew their moments of merriment. If they
managed to survive the perils of infancy —and probably close to a quarter
122 Happiness
of all babies died within a year of birth — they stood a decent chance
of living at least into their thirties, and so of weathering the climactic
shifts that killed their crops, and the pestilence, disease, and war that
killed their neighbors and friends. These were necessarily resilient
people, accustomed to pain but all the more receptive to pleasure

when they could find it: folklore and stories to entertain them at night,
a harvest festival or a religious feast, music, drinking, dance. 96 For

most, food was seldom abundant, and meat was rare, but a snared par-
tridge tasted the better for it, to say nothing of a fatted pig. And
though few could afford the luxury of (let alone read) an early recipe
book like the English Pleyndelit, many probably felt those words as they
sat by the fire with their bellies full. When their bellies were empty,
they could dream fantasies of the island of Cockaigne, where turkeys
flew ready-roasted and rivers ran with wine, or invoke one of the many
popular tales of other such mythical places, where human beings knew
no want. 97 A juggler, a magician, or a mendicant friarwho understood
the art of spinning a yarn could just as easily distract the mind with
pleasing illusions, in the same way that a joust or a hunt or a game of
chess might divert the lord of the manor. Monks in their monasteries
prayed for the salvation of souls; theologians scaled the heights of ec-
stasy; and the world labored to get by. Its gravity was strangely com-
pelling — so much so that even from the top of their candlelit towers,
theologians deigned to look down now and then, away from their
books, and some were drawn by what they saw.
Between Heaven and Earth
Rapid ascent to glory by imitation of Christ's passion — this was the

way to happiness chosen by Perpetua, Felicitas, and the other mar-
tyrs of the early church. More conscious of the waning of apocalyptic
power, Augustine counseled the acceptance of a difficult journey
through life — inevitably painful but sustained by elevating hope.
Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint Simeon, and Eriugena imagined a
new path to God, envisioning the flight of the soul upward in mysti-
cal bliss. Otherworldly all, none of these visions was strictly incom-
patible, and their paths often crossed, with martyrs and mystics, sin-
ners and saints coexisting in the common space of the church,

imagining together the possibility of perfect happiness in God. But
despite this apparent harmony, each new path opened up to God's
glory altered both the cumulative journey and the final place of
arrival, subtly transforming the image of happiness professed by
a church that was ever changing while striving always to stay the same.
The thirteenth century was a period of such subtle transformation,
in which Christians in Western Europe began to conceive of yet an-
other way to perfect happiness — a means, a path that combined loco-

motion with lift. To travel along this new way was not to race forward
with the rapid steps that had delivered Perpetua and Felicitas to their
passion. Nor was it to endure the tragic pilgrimage of Augustine, or
the world-renouncing takeoff and flight of mystical ascent. It was

rather to proceed deliberately, progressively, in a manner that com-
bined elements of all these routes, stepping and rising simultaneously
along what Saint Thomas Aquinas likened in the fourth book of his
Summa Against the Gentiles to a great "ladder of being." 98
The metaphor of the ladder had long figured in both pagan and Jew-
ish thought, extending as far back as the Book of Genesis, in which
Jacob dreams his memorable dream "that there was a ladder set up on
the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were
ascending and descending on it" (Genesis 28:12). The cult of Mithras
in the late Roman Empire made similar use of this symbol of spiritual
approach, and the same device was often used in place of the meta-
phor of flight to illustrate the Platonic and Neoplatonic ascent of the
soul. Ladders, not surprisingly, featured in depictions of Christian
contemplation from early on, appearing, as we have seen, in one of the
most vivid of Perpetua's dreams. Likewise, a ladder accompanies the
figure of Philosophy, who visits Boethius in his cell. She is described
as wearing a robe embroidered with two symbols, the Greek letters TT
and 9, that stand, respectively, for practical and theoretical philoso-

phy. In between can be seen "the depiction of a ladder, whose rungs
99
allowed ascent from the lower letter to the higher letter."
124 Happiness
The Deposition with Ladder (left), St. Peter's Church, Naevsted, Denmark
(c. 1375). Mills-Kronborg Collection, Courtesy of the Index of Christian Art,
Princeton University; and The ladder of Divine Ascent (Jacob's Ladder), Lambeth
Bible, mid-twelfth century, Lambeth Palace Library, London.
Although a venerable symbol, the ladder by the thirteenth century

was being used in new ways and with considerably greater fre-
quency. 100 It appears in paintings alongside the mangled body of the
crucified Christ, an inspiration and a tool for those who would raise
themselves to him. It features prominently in Canto 21 of "Paradise"

in Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Dante ascends to the seventh
heaven to behold "a ladder rising up so far above me that it soared
beyond the reaches of my sight," a ladder with "so many splendors
descending along its bright rungs that I thought every lamp in heaven
101
was pouring forth its rays." And it is the central symbol around which
Aquinas constructs his vision of the ordered hierarchy of the universe.
"The lowest level of all is that of non-living bodies," Aquinas explains,
Diptych with Coronation of the Virgin and the Last Judgement, French,
ca. 1260-70. Note the ladder with ascending angel in the lower left corner.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1970. (1970.324.7ab).
in which production, emanation, or movement is possible only "when

one body acts on another." The living things closest to these are the
plants, "in which there is already some interior production," the move-
ment of juices and the creation of seed. Then there is the level of
"animals endowed with sense-awareness," which have a "form of pro-
duction peculiar to themselves," and following the animals are human

beings, distinguished by intellect or mind, the "highest, most perfect
level of life." Intellect itself is also divided into further levels, proceed-
ing from that of human beings to the mind of angels, "in which intel-
lects know themselves ... by knowing themselves in themselves."
Finally, there is the "acme of perfection," pure intellect above the
highest rung, which belongs to God, "in whom to exist is to under-
stand ... so that in God the idea in his mind is what God himself is." 102
126 Happiness
An ordered universe, in which all creation has a purpose and place;
a hierarchy of existence proceeding from matter to mind; God as pure

intellect, thought thinking — the picture would have been famil-
itself
iar to those acquainted with the theme of the "great chain of being."
Implicit already in Plato but given its clearest formulation by Aristotle,
the great chain of being is an understanding of the universe as an in-
terlocked chain composed, in the words of its foremost historian, "of

an immense, or . . . infinite number of links ranging in hierarchical
order from the meagerest kinds of existents . . . through 'every pos-

sible' grade up to the ens perfectissimum" the perfect being, God. 103
Aquinas, in this instance, substitutes the metaphor of the ladder, but
the picture he paints is recognizably Aristotelian, a fact that is not at
all coincidental.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Aristotle had been completely

forgotten in the West, for even in the darkest days since the breakup of
Rome, a smattering of his writings was familiar to scholars and theolo-
gians. Yet his great works on ethics, metaphysics, and natural science
were largely unknown even by Augustine's time, preserved only, in
Greek original and Arabic translations, in the more civilized empires of
Byzantium and Islam. When, in the late twelfth and thirteenth centu-
ries, these works began to trickle back to Christian Europe — often ac-
companied by the sophisticated commentaries of Muslim and Jewish
commentators like Averroes and Maimonides — they presented Catho-
lic theologians with a major dilemma. For here was an entire intellec-
tual system, forceful, coherent, and self-contained, that made no
mention whatsoever of the Christian God. In the simplest of terms,
Aristotle must either be converted or disproved. And though this task
fell on many shoulders, one man bore the greatest burden. Thomas
Aquinas assumed the responsibility of converting Aristotle to Christ.
Born to minor gentry in a castle outside of Aquino, north of Naples,
in 1224 or 1225, Aquinas was intended early on for a career in the
church. His parents packed him off to monastery school at the age of
five, and in his teens he was transferred to the freewheeling Univer-
sity of Naples, where, like students throughout the ages, he experi-

mented with the new and unknown. He read fresh and innovative
writings, most importantly the expanded corpus of Aristotle, which

the Neapolitans had brought together earlier than most. In time he
joined the Dominicans, a recently formed order that sustained itself
by begging in the service of poverty, preaching, piety, and instruction.
For a young man of good family, this was a radical move. But Aquinas
fit well in his new habit of white wool. As a Dominican friar he was
able to see the world, traveling to Paris, to Cologne, and back to Paris,
where he taught at the Sorbonne. And with the Dominicans he was
able to satisfy his voracious appetite for learning.
Aquinas's contemporaries were duly impressed. The story is told that

he regularly dictated to multiple scribes —simultaneously—on differ-
ent subjects. Another legend credits him with the ability to compose in
104
his sleep. But whatever the extent of his powers, it is clear that
Aquinas possessed an astonishing capacity for synthetic production.
Both the Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1264), the "summary against

the gentiles," and the Summa Theologiae (1266-1268), the "summary
of theology," provide ample illustration of this capacity. The works are
vast compilations of Catholic theology, written to guide students and
teachers through the complexities of the faith. In the case of the
Summa contra Gentiles, the goal was to arm Dominican missionaries in
the field with rapid responses to the queries of unbelievers. The
Summa Theologiae, by contrast, composed in the high Scholastic style
of public disputation, aimed to answer any, and every, question the

world's most inventive minds might put to defenders of the faith.
From the basic
— "Does God exist?" — to the bizarre
—"Why do fat
men produce little semen?" (la. 119.2) —Aquinas is nothing if not

thorough, bringing the full force of the tradition to bear in his re-
sponses, drawing amply on the fathers of the church. At the same time,
he makes extensive use of the West's great intellectual rediscovery,
placing Aristotle, whom he refers to simply as "the philosopher," along-
side Augustine as twin defenders of the faith and twin authorities on
what rapidly emerges as a central Thomistic concern: happiness.
In many basic respects, Aquinas is content to confirm Augustine's
teachings on the matter. A theologian of the church, he is not in a
position to seriously question established tradition, nor is that his
—
128 Happiness
intention. Book 3 of the Summa contra Gentiles, for example, contains

a chapter entitled "Man's Ultimate Happiness Is Not in This Life,"
while the Summa Theologiae asks, with apparent candor, whether
there are any who are perfectly happy on earth. After considering the
question with direct reference to Augustine's City of God, Aquinas

concludes, unsurprisingly, that there are not. "True happiness"
105
{beatitudo perfecta) is "impossible" in life. Only in heaven will the
soul know the ecstasy of its final place of rest. Much like Augustine
and the Christian Neoplatonists, Aquinas interprets Saint Paul's as-
surance in 1 Corinthians 13:12 ("For now we see through a glass darkly;
but then face to face") as a promise of the beatific vision that awaits
us in heaven. 106 Gazing upon God unmediated by any obstruction
seeing perfectly with our souls, not imperfectly with our eyes —we
will partake of pure and everlasting bliss, "perfect pleasure — a more
perfect delight of the senses than that which animals enjoy, since
the intellect is higher than the senses." Nothing, nothing at all, will
be lacking, for "in that final happiness every human desire will be
fulfilled," and our joy shall be untainted by "sadness or worry that it
107
may be disturbed." In heaven, Aquinas affirms, the saints "shall
be inebriated by the plenty of thy house, and thou wilt make them
drink of the torrent of thy pleasure." 108 The saved will literally be
drunk on God.
Aquinas is every bit as thirsty as Augustine, ready to conceive of man
as a parched pilgrim, a wayfarer, homo viator. In these respects, he
walked comfortably in the footsteps of church doctrine, unwilling, and
unable, to stray too far from the beaten path. Yet Aristotle also forced
him to alter the inclination of his step. If complete happiness came
only in death, might there not still be a perfection of the journey, a
blessedness of the route? Perhaps, Aquinas proposed, we could hope
to find an "imperfect happiness" here on earth while traveling to the
"perfect happiness" of heaven.
The theological distinction between perfect and imperfect happi-
ness —what Aquinas is inclined to call beatitudo and felicitas, or beatitudo
and beatitudo imperfecta, though he sometimes mixes the terms — had
been put forth slightly earlier in the thirteenth century by William of
Auxerre, a professor at the University of Paris. But it was Aquinas who

developed the distinction most fully, and he did so by explicit appeal
109
to Aristotle.
In the Aristotelian world, recall, all things have a purpose — a final
end or telos that they are intended to fulfill in accordance with their
natures. When the circumstances are right, an acorn will become an
oak— a flourishing —and man become good man, happy
oak a will a a
man. the virtue of each — the unique form of excellence

It is distinct
toevery aspect of creation — reach highest stage of development,

to its
and perfectly to realize itself. In human beings, Aristotle believes, the
virtue that sets us apart, our highest faculty, is reason. And the telos
for which we are intended is to cultivate reason to its ultimate perfec-
tion, a process that will culminate in the final end — the end without
end —happiness.
Taking care to stress the role of God in this process of intention
and development, Aquinas nonetheless agrees with Aristotle's assess-
ment. In both the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae, he
leads the reader steadily down the Aristotelian path, reaching very
similar conclusions:
Man's ultimate happiness consists in the contemplation of

truth, for this operation is specific to man and is shared with
no other animals. Also it is not directed to any other end since
the contemplation of truth is sought for its own sake. In
addition, in this operation man is united to higher beings

(substances) since this is the only human operation that is
carried out both by God and by the separate substances

(angels).
no
Aristotle observes in the final book of the Nichomachean Ethics that
contemplation is the most "god-like" human activity, and Aquinas

agrees that reflection is what brings us closest to God. He is quick to
emphasize that the purest form of this reflection will come only in
heaven. But he recognizes that the activity has counterparts, how-
ever imperfect, here on earth. "In this life there is nothing so like
130 Happiness
this ultimate and perfect happiness as the life of those who con-
111
template the truth," Aquinas affirms. Aristotle was not wrong to
consider reflection the highest form of earthly happiness. His under-

standing was simply incomplete, for he had not yet been exposed to
divine revelation. Now that human beings possessed access to the
truth of Christ, the prospect of "double happiness" (duplex felicitas)
opened up before them:
The ultimate perfection of rational or intellectual beings is
twofold. In the first place, the perfection they can reach is
through natural capacities [in this world], for this can be

called bliss \beatitudo\ or happiness [felicitas] in a sense: thus
Aristotle identified our ultimate joy with his highest contem-

plative activity, that is to say with such knowledge as is
possible to the human mind in this life. . . . But beyond this
happiness there is yet another, to which we look forward in

112
the future, the happiness of seeing God "as he is."
We not only can be happy in a sense in this life, but can be happy
again in the next.
It must be emphasized that these two forms of happiness stand in
a clear relationship of hierarchy — as the imperfect to the perfect.
Aquinas leaves no doubt that there are many evils in life that cannot
be avoided, and that human beings will always be plagued by unful-
filled desire. Given that "full and sufficient happiness excludes every
evil and fulfills every desire," it follows that perfect happiness on earth
113
will forever elude us.
Nevertheless, Aquinas's opening up of a space in which "some par-

tial happiness can be achieved in this life" continued a process of
restoring agency to the individual that had received impetus from the
work of Eriugena and others during the Carolingian Renaissance. It
also restored independent dignity to the world. For by arguing that

there are certain "natural capacities" that permit men and women to
reach purely earthly goals, Aquinas put forth a less sweeping interpre-
tation of the effects of the Fall. "Human nature," he observed in the
Summa Theologtae, "is not so completely corrupted by sin as to be to-

tally lacking in natural goodness." Like a sick man who can still per-
form certain movements on his own, we are able to do some good
things on earth even in our natural (sickly) state. But in order to "move
with the full motion of a man who is healthy," we need to be cured. 114
Aquinas views life as a long process of healing, or to return to the

metaphor of the ladder, as a steady process of ascent in which we raise
ourselves ever closer to God. It is critical that he believes that we

participate in this process ourselves. The natural virtues staked out
by Aristotle — justice, fortitude, gentleness, and temperance —give

testimony to the power of the unaided human intellect to survey life's
terrain and to blaze trails to a better end. In Aquinas's optimistic view,

men and women are fully capable of discerning the natural laws that
give direction to their lives.
Yet in order to travel further in the direction of perfect happiness,
further toward recovery and health, we need assistance. To rely solely

on natural knowledge and the natural strength of the will is to ensure
that we will come up short, for natural virtue only ever leads to imper-
fect ends. In order to continue forward and upward in the direction of
the perfect happiness that is our final goal, we must follow Christ.
Here, too, we begin on our own, attempting to follow the rules re-
vealed in scripture under the guidance of the church, to live in keep-

ing with the beatitudes, to keep the living law. But for all mortals, our
natural abilities will ultimately hold us back. It is only when we have

received what Aquinas calls the "theological virtues" of charity, hope,
and faith that we will have the full strength to pull ourselves to our
final end. Infused by grace and granted by God, the theological vir-
tues are gifts freely given, bestowed on those whom the Lord, in his
wisdom, deems worthy. They make us better than ourselves. And
though Aquinas maintains that we can never know who might receive
them, or at what point, he does observe that "When a person begins
to make progress in the acts of the virtues and gifts, one can hope that
he will attain both the perfection which belongs to the journey and
that of the destination." 115 As we move closer to our own perfection,
we move closer to perfection itself.

132 Happiness
Thus, for Aquinas, happiness is a process, a continual becoming, in
which we rise to our full potential by fully realizing ourselves. Preemi-
nently a man of theory, a theologian and philosopher, Aquinas envi-

sioned our greatest realization and highest earthly happiness as a life
of pure contemplation — the life, in effect, of a monk. But if in this
respect Aquinas joined Aristotle in envisioning abstract reflection as

the most godlike way to live, he also shared with the author of the
Nichomachean Ethics a belief in the secondary human happiness of prac-
tical ethical achievement, the happiness, that is, of virtue in the world.
And also like Aristotle, Aquinas recognized the necessity of means to
cultivate higher ends. It was difficult to do good in the world when
one was starving or sick, difficult to give alms without alms to give,
difficult to live a life of contemplation without the basic necessities
of life fulfilled. None of these things — health, a satisfied belly, power,
wealth —were ends in themselves, and to treat them as such would

be fatal. But they could legitimately serve as means. 116
In more than just abstract ways, then, Aquinas, and the wider cur-
rent of which he formed a part, served to rehabilitate the standing of
life in this world, as well as to consolidate, on firm theological ground,
the role of human effort in contributing to our ascent up the ladder of
being. The fact that we could pull ourselves higher, partly on our own,
had the effect of narrowing the conceptual distance between man and
God, rendering human life potentially more heavenly.
There were some willing to go even further than this. The thir-
teenth-century rage for Aristotelian philosophy spread with such in-
tensity in certain quarters that the church grew alarmed, fearing (and
not without reason) a revival of the Pelagian heresy of old. In Paris, in
particular, students at the Sorbonne pursued the study of Aristotle
with enthusiasm, daring even to affirm his superiority to Christ. The
bishop of the city, Stephen Tempier, was forced to put an end to this
blasphemy. In 1277 he condemned some 210 propositions culled from

the manifestos of contemporary Aristotelians, including the claim that
"Happiness is to be had in this life and not another." 117 This was a
radical proposition, by no means the norm. But it was put forth regard-
less, and there were others like it. With justice has the eminent medi-
evalist Georges Duby traced what he calls the "mold" of earthly hap-
piness precisely to these radical Aristotelian circles. "Happiness made
by man alone, happiness which could be won by intelligence" — this
was the incipient dream that wafted out from the schools of Paris, al-
lowing its scent to settle on the courtly love of knights and their ladies,
and on the pages of such works as Dante's Divine Comedy and the Ro-
man de la rose. us
Of course, many continued to look suspiciously on the more earthly
of these productions, even for a time casting doubt on Aquinas him-
self. But these doubts were quickly dispelled, and in 1323, less than
fifty years after his death, Thomas Aquinas was made a saint. Ironi-
cally, his feast day was set for March 7, forcing the church to push that
of Perpetua and Felicitas back to the eighth. 119 By bringing Aristotle
into the Christian fold, the theologian from Aquino had cleared a new
path — a middle way —between heaven and earth, bidding us to linger
a little longer and savor the journey, pushing back perpetual felicity
by a day.
Journey to the End
Still they can be seen. Roadside markers. Indentations in stone. Walk-

ways smoothed by rough feet and the press of knees. Silent echoes of
passage. Traces of the movement of souls.
Europe remains covered in paths, and some are still well traveled.
Yet the sound of footsteps is only a patter now compared to the great
march of pilgrims who shuffled across the continent at the height of
the Middle Ages. Lumbering like armies, they were, in some cases,
precisely that — holy warriors who fell on Jerusalem or crossed the

Pyrenees in the tragic illusion that crucifying heretics or slaughter-
ing Jews was the way to their Lord. Santiago de Compostela, a city
that from the ninth century had served as the reputed resting place
of the remains of Saint James, grew to become the spiritual staging
ground for the reconquest of Muslim Spain. Amid the tens of thou-
sands of penitents who arrived each year were knights who prayed
134 Happiness
to Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor Slayer, to guide their
swords home.
Missteps, mistaken routes, fatal deviations, trails of blood: Medi-
eval pilgrims took countless wrong turns. More often, they struggled
innocently to find their way, walking alone and in groups, in long,

coarse tunics, a plain satchel at the side, a hat against the sun, a sturdy
wooden staff — braving wolves and thieves and the demons of night.
They traveled to Rome to gaze on the tombs of Peter and Paul; to
Canterbury or Walsingham; to Cologne for the relics of the three wise

kings; to Monte Gargano to pay homage to the memorial of the arch-
angel Michael; to Chartres for the Marian shrine. They set out for
Einsiedeln to see the Black Madonna, or Loreto to see the house of

the Virgin. They wandered to the edge of town to pray: at a grotto, at
the tomb of a local martyr, at the roadside image of a saint.
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Pilgrims, Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral.
—
These could be simple outings — a day's hike, a stolen hour before

sunrise — or great voyages, over sea and land from Dublin to Rome,
journeys measured in months. As the anonymous author of the twelfth-
century Pilgrim's Guide makes clear, a traveler might wander for weeks
on any of the four great routes that led through France to Santiago de
Compostela. 120 There was much to see. Formal stations connected
the way — basilicas, reliquaries, crypts to which the pilgrim could pay
homage. There were local curiosities, like the tomb of Leonard of
Limousin, the patron saint of prisoners, at Limoges. The author of
the Pilgrim's Guide doubted the authenticity of the relics there. But he
acknowledged that the thousands of chains that hung above them
the grateful offerings of former prisoners —were real indeed. There
was amusement as well — fellowship, stories, and song; adventure; and
the strange ways of distant lands. Probably French, and probably a

priest, the author of the Guide warned in coarse Latin of the barbarous
customs of Navarre. "Ugly, debauched, and perverse," the men of
those parts would kill a Frenchman for a pittance. And they "shame-
lessly fornicate [d] with animals." How the author knew that, he did
not say. 121
Why did they come, these sacred travelers? And why did they go?
Their reasons naturally varied — to do penance for a crime, to ask for
charity or forgiveness, to rid themselves of guilt. Some came to exor-
cise a sin, to fulfill an obligation, to give thanks. Others were drawn by

the promise of miraculous healings, the prospect of adventure, or a
simple change of routine.
But there was another, more basic reason that impelled these trav-
elers — a reason at once profound and prosaic: They desired to reach

the end. To set foot on the sacred ground of a pilgrimage site was to
stand at the point of entry to another world. Ad limina, medieval au-

thors called it, "on the threshold," a new beginning, a place of joy. Here
the dark curtains of the world opened, ever so slightly, to let in the
light of the eternal beyond. Here pilgrims could bathe in that light,
wash away the filth that gathered on life's way. Here they could drink,
give themselves the strength to carry on. And here they could catch a
glimpse, if only through stained glass, of the perpetual felicity that
136 Happiness
drew so many to this place. "Numerous, in effect, are the bodies of
the saintly martyrs and confessors who lie here —bodies whose souls
reside amidst the joys of Paradise," the author of the Pilgrim's Guide
observed in reference to the cemetery at Aliscamps, just outside of
Aries. 122 To set foot on sacred ground was to stand as close to the hap-
piness of heaven as most mere mortals could.
Adlimina was a privileged place. But though a threshold, it was also
a barrier that cordoned off the end of the earth, separating the sacred
from the profane. Through the broken bones of a martyr, one could
see the light of heaven, but while doing so, one stared directly at death.
The way to perpetual felicity lay across that great divide.
While waiting to take their final step, all men and all women were
forced to endure the trials of the journey. As the knight declares in
that classic account of late-medieval pilgrimage, Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales, "The world is but a thoroughfare of woe, and we are pilgrims
passing to and fro. . .

." The merry band of travelers encounters its
share of mirth along the way. But they understand that these moments
are fleeting,
For ever the latter end of joy is woe

God knows that worldly joy is soon ago. 123
The line might almost have been uttered by the chorus in an ancient
tragedy. Just as Augustine had conceived of life's pilgrimage in an
essentially tragic mode, many others continued to use the language
of fate and fortune to describe the daily happenings that befall us all.
Strictly speaking, of course, there was no room for fortune or chance

in the Christian conception of the world: God's providence governed
all. But from at least the time of Boethius, commentators, if not al-
ways in the strictest orthodoxy, had continued to use this pagan lan-
guage to emphasize the essential transience of all earthly things. 124
They, too, called no man happy until he was dead, and they knew that
even the most fortunate in this life would fall like Croesus in the end,
or meet their downfall in death like the Greek heroes of old. Well into
the Renaissance, fortune's wheel continued to turn, and it is a mea-

sure of that revolution — a conception come full circle — that the word
"happiness," like bonheur, Gliick, and the other terms that rolled from
European tongues in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, retained
its linguistic connection to hap. If, and when, one knew lasting happi-
ness, it would be only by the grace of a God who intervened from be-
yond the stage of the world.
This is where the link to the tragic past ended, and another began.
To be sure, there were other important similarities between Chris-
tian happiness and the happiness of the ancient world, particularly of
the post-Socratic kind. Christians, too, conceived of happiness as an
objective state at the end of a well-marked path. A summum bonum, a
highest good, happiness remained a te/os, an end, and virtue the prin-
cipal means to guide the way. But whereas the ancients had conceived
of virtue as almost entirely the result of human striving, won only by
the efforts of a happy few, Christians understood virtue as a divine gift,
obtainable, in theory, by all. There was disagreement over the role
human effort played in cultivating this gift —disagreement that would

explode in violence at the time of the Reformation. But few Chris-
tians denied that perfect happiness could be had only by grace. And
no Christian denied that although the identity of the elect was hid-
den from human view, all might receive it —whether male or female,
A fifteenth-century representation of Philosophy consoling Boethius

(left) and Fortune turning her wheel. Coetivy Master, Paris,
c. 1460-70, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, © The J. Paul Getty Museum.
138 Happiness
noble or slave, commoner or king. Popes as well as peasants set out on

pilgrimage and whirled in the dance of death. And popes as well as
peasants were entitled to the happiness of hope, and the hope of hap-
piness — ecstasy everlasting, eternal bliss that would make amends for
all our earthly pains.

Thus, despite its deep debt to the ancients, Christianity had blazed
new trails, removing happiness from the midst of the world, while
spreading its universal promise to the four corners of the earth. Trans-
forming the Jewish narrative of a people's deliverance in life into an

ethic of universal deliverance in death, Christianity profoundly altered
the Western gaze. Backward, men and women now looked, to a van-
ished period of happiness, a paradise lost. And forward, they yearned
for the moment when God would remake his kingdom in a paradise
regained. In the meantime, all must bear their burden as best they
could, taking heart in Christ's pledge of redemption, courage in the
example of the saints, and delight in the promise of perpetual felicity
to come.
A counsel to patience, the happiness of hope was a powerful force,
giving men and women the strength to carry on. At the same time, it
armed them with an explanation for their pain. In the medieval Chris-
tian conception, unhappiness was not an aberration, an individual fail-
ing or fault, but the natural condition of every human being since the
Fall. Continually renewed in Sunday sermons and the extraordinary
number of holidays that ordered Christian time —from the joyous cele-
brations of Christ's birth and resurrection (merry Christmas and happy

Easter) to the countless festivities in honor of the saints — the happi-
ness of hope provided men and women with a means to endure.
But it also could easily be used as a justification for suffering that
might otherwise be avoided, an excuse for needless inequality, oppres-

sion, and pain. Forever close at hand, Christian happiness was also,
always, just beyond reach. Did not the faithful ever feel that they were
being led along? Perhaps an element of suspicion was always right
beneath the surface, for in a sense it was called into being by Christian-
ity itself. In its rejection of Roman felicitas, Christianity had denied the
things of this earth, casting aspersions on sex and sensuality, wealth and
—
well-being, power and pride. Yet notwithstanding its continual re-

minder that our reward in heaven was ultimately inconceivable
"What no eye has seen, nor ear heard" — the church could scarcely fail
to present this reward in terms that appealed directly to the senses.

Beatitude would satisfy our hunger, quench our thirst, gratify all our
human desire will be fulfilled,"
longings. "In that final happiness every
Aquinas assured, and his assurance begs a question. Was not Christian-
ity promising the very thing it denied, "a torrent of perpetual plea-
sure," a lifeless lifetime of eternal bliss? If human desire was to be
rewarded then, why must it be denied so completely in the here and
now? Aquinas had already taken steps toward narrowing the gap be-
tween the imperfect happiness of earth and the perfect happiness of
heaven. In the coming centuries, men and women would bring the two
closer still.
From Heaven
TO EARTH
Early in the thirteenth century, Lotario dei Segni completed a short

manuscript to which he appended the name DeMiseria Condicionis
Humane, The Misery of the Human Condition. A cardinal and a deacon who
would later be ordained Christ's vicar on earth as Pope Innocent III,
Lotario was arguably less miserable than most. But that did little to
prevent him from doing full justice to the title of his work.
From birth to death, Lotario explains, men and women are simply
"vile." Conceived in the "stench of lust" and formed of the "filthiest

sperm," we spend our earthly days in misery, toil, and degradation. 1
Racked by envy and greed, tortured by vanity and rage, depleted by

gluttony, sloth, and lust, we are forever trapped in the webs of our
seven deadly sins, ensnared by our own iniquity. The effort to escape
is futile. "Who indeed has ever spent even a single delightful day in
his own pleasure?" Lotario asks. Guilt, anger, or concupiscence is ever
at hand to spoil the moment. "Sudden woe always follows worldly joy,
and what begins with gladness ends in sorry." 2 As with gluttony, so with
the product of all our desires: "What goes in vilely, comes out vilely,
expelling a horrible wind above and below, and emitting an abominable

sound." 3 The outcome of human appetite, in a word, is filth.
These are the by-products of man. "Alive, he brings forth lice and
tapeworms; dead, he begets worms and flies; alive, he produces dung
and vomit; dead, he produces rottenness and stench." 4 A seething,
stinking mass of sin, we suffer in this world. And all those who are not
saved will suffer in the next, rotting in the infernal darkness of hell,
knowing there "an unfailing supply of torments." With reason, it
seems, does Lotario offer a new beatitude: "Happy are those who die
before they are born, experiencing death before knowing life." With
reason do babies cry at birth. 5
Such kicking, screaming shrieks of despair were certainly audible
in the European Middle Ages. Partly as a consequence, it was once

commonly assumed that they typified the tenor of this so-called dark
age. A long black night that descended on Europe from the fall of the
Roman Empire until the awakening of the fifteenth-century Renais-
sance, this was a period, it seemed, when humanity wandered blindly
in ignorance and despair, fumbling like man in Lotario's dark vision,
"a sojourner on the earth, and a wayfarer," enduring the world as a
6
place of exile, "confined in the body as in a prison."
Few informed observers share this view today. On the contrary, they
tend to emphasize the technological and intellectual vitality of the
Middle Ages, drawing particular attention to the "renaissance" of
the Carolingian ninth century, and the "renaissance" that began in the
twelfth, leading to the establishment of the great European universi-
ties, the building of the High Gothic cathedrals, and the revival of
interest in Aristotle that reached its apogee in the work of Thomas
Aquinas. They might also point to the fact that contemplation of the
misery of the human condition was hardly unique to the Middle Ages.
Arguably, only after Europeans had endured the terrible carnage of the
Black Plague, which wiped out roughly one quarter to one third of the
total population in the second half of the fourteenth century, were
they fully prepared to take up De Miseria Condicionis Humane. Works
bearing that same title continued to appear throughout the great Re-
naissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while many others
spread the theme of contemptus mundi. To take only one example,

Thomas a Kempis's fifteenth-century masterpiece, the Imitation of
142 Happiness
Christ, went to great length to remind its readers, "Life on earth is truly
wretched." It was among the most widely read works of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. 7
It is misleading, then, to conceive of the transition to the European
Renaissance as a stark passage from dark to light. Rather, change oc-
curred as it more often does, in subtle modulations and tones. Those
critics, commentators, artists, and theologians who attempted to de-
pict happiness during this time drew their colors from the palette of
their predecessors, even as they combined and built them up in new
ways. They extended their interest in ancient authors, pushing on the
boundaries of Christian doctrine and testing the limits of original sin.
And they took upon themselves the unfinished projects of the Middle
Ages. The Misery of the Human Condition is a case in point. Lotario had
promised to follow that work with another that he believed would
serve as its perfect complement, a work to glorify the "dignity of
human nature." "Just as in this book the haughty man is humbled,"

Lotario wrote in the preface to De Miseria Condicionis Humane, "so in
the next the humble man [will] be exalted." 8 Lotario died before he
was able to compose his sequel. But authors in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries did so for him. Reviving interest in what the Romans
had termed the studia humanitis —grammar, rhetoric, poetry, ethics, and
history — the "humanists" of the Renaissance aimed to cultivate learn-
ing that would, in the words of Leonardo Bruni, one of their leading
proponents, "perfect man." In doing so, they carried the pursuit of
happiness in new and unexpected directions.
The Dignity of Man
If there were ever such a thing as "Renaissance Man," Giovanni Pico

9
della Mirandola was he. Born to a local prince in the northern Italian
duchy of Ferrara (Emilia Romagna) in 1463, Pico availed himself of his

noble circumstances to devote his life entirely to learning. He enrolled
at the University of Bologna when still a child, studying canon law there
before moving to the University of Ferrara, and then to the University
of Padua, a leading center of Aristotelian scholarship. He traveled the
European continent, spending time at the University of Paris, and gain-

ing entrance into Lorenzo de Medici's Platonic Academy in Florence,
where he befriended Marsilio Ficino, the greatest Platonist of the age.
He knew not only Latin and Greek but Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and
Syriac and used these languages in a quest to show the underlying unity
of all knowledge. For Pico, the newly rediscovered riches of classical
Greece and Rome, the mythology of ancient Egypt, the secrets of the
Talmud and Cabala, the mysteries of Zoroaster, and the wonders of the
natural world alike complemented the truths of Christianity. He made
it his short life's work to demonstrate this correspondence, offering to
do so, publicly, at the impressive age of twenty-three.
Vowing to pay the travel costs of anyone in Europe who would come
to Rome to debate him, Pico put forth nine hundred "theses" or con-
clusions on an astonishing array of subjects. They would, he claimed,
"show not that I know many things, but that I know things which many
people do not know." 10 Undoubtedly this was true. But Pico never had
the opportunity to prove the point. A Vatican commission deemed a
number of his theses of dubious orthodoxy, canceling the public dis-
Anonymous, 16th century, Pico della
Mirandola (1463-94). Galleria

Palatina, Palazzo Piti, Florence.
Photo: Scala/ Art Resource, NY.

144 Happiness
putation and forcing Pico to write a formal apology before quietly with-
drawing, first to France, and finally to Florence, where he spent the
last years of his life writing in a villa provided by Lorenzo de Medici at
Fiesole. He died at the age of thirty-one and is buried in the great
church of San Marco.
Although Pico produced a great many other works —including an Ital-
ian imitation of Plato's Symposium and a critique of astrology that later
influenced the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler —he is
invariably remembered for his nine hundred theses, or more precisely,
for their introductory oration, "De Dignitate Hominis," "On the Dig-
nity of Man" (1486). Often invoked as the manifesto of the Renaissance,
this brief essay, more than any single work of the period, has seemed to
11
generations of commentators to capture the spirit of the times. Jacob
Burckhardt, the greatest nineteenth-century scholar of the Renaissance,
wrote that it was in fifteenth-century Italy that "men and mankind were
. . . first thoroughly and profoundly understood," and that it was Pico
who plumbed their depths. "The loftiest conceptions on this subject,"
Burckhardt believed, were uttered in this brief oration, "which may
justly be called one of the noblest of that great age." 12
Burckhardt saw much that was noble in Pico. But it was above all
the Italian's apparent sense of the freedom and majesty of man that
captivated the Swiss historian, seeming to him to mark an abrupt de-

parture from all previous conceptions. Citing a long passage from "De
Dignitate Hominis," Burckhardt marveled at the liberality of Pico's
vision. "In conformity with thy free judgment," God tells Adam to-
ward the beginning of Pico's work,
thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of

nature for thyself. I have placed thee at the center of the
world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look
around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly
nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee.
Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the

molder and maker of thyself. Thou mayest sculpt thyself into
whatever shape thou dost prefer. 13
Here, in Burckhardt's view, was the very epitome of the Renaissance

achievement, what he called famously — borrowing a phrase — the
"discovery of the world and of man." Human
now be beings could
works of art. After the long sleep of the Middle Ages, in which men
and women "lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil . . .
woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession," they now,

Burckhardt contended, awoke to see themselves, and the world
around them, with open eyes. 14 Genuine "individuals," Renaissance
men were "modern," brimming with possibility and potential, able
to chart the course of their lives for themselves without stumbling
under the accumulated weight of Christian superstition. In these re-
spects,"De Dignitate Hominis" seemed the perfect counterpart to

Innocent Ill's De Miseria Condicionis Humane. Slowly, man was moving
from misery to dignity, and from there, to happiness on earth. 15
Burckhardt's vision of the Renaissance was, and remains, powerful.
In television documentaries and newspaper articles, in museum exhi-
bitions and travel brochures, one can still find many of its central fea-
tures offered up as received wisdom. Professional historians, however,

have come to think of this view largely as "myth." 16 By looking more
closely at Pico's work itself, one can see why.
Without question, the image of humanity presented in "De
Dignitate Hominis" is inspiring. Repeatedly Pico urges us to marvel
at ourselves. Nothing is "more wonderful than man," he begins, quot-
ing a variety of sources to emphasize the point. Unlike all other ele-
ments of creation, we have no fixed rung on the ladder of being, what
Pico calls "the ladder of the Lord," no decided place within the struc-
ture of the universe. Instead, we are "chameleons," able to "grow
downward" to become like beasts, or to climb upward, cultivating our
reason to join "the higher natures, which are divine." With justice are
we "thought to be a great marvel," the animal most genuinely "wor-
thy of wonder." 17
But if human mutability — the capacity to "fashion," "fabricate," and
"transform" ourselves —draws Pico's awe, it is not there that he places
the dignity of man. 18
Dignity lies in God, in whose image we are made.
And so it is how we choose to exercise our freedom to fashion ourselves
146 Happiness
that determines our greatness or our depravity, our dignity or our con-
tempt. In this respect, Pico shows himself to be wholly conventional.

"Let us spurn earthly things," he enjoins, "let us struggle toward the
heavenly. Let us put in last place whatever is of the world; and let us
fly beyond the chambers of the world to the chamber nearest the most
19
lofty divinity." By ascending toward God up the great ladder of being,
we become worthy of ourselves.
We are, to put it mildly, a long way from Burckhardtian modernity.
And this is to speak only of man's dignity. Like virtually every one of
his contemporaries who took up the subject, Pico was also prepared
to chronicle human shortcomings. Just as Innocent III had conceived
a paean to man's majesty as a necessary counterpart to his record of
human depravity, writers of the Renaissance frequently tempered

their wonder with dismay. When Hamlet declares that man was both
"the paragon of animals" and'a "quintessence of dust," he was merely
repeating common wisdom. In the Renaissance, no less than in the
Middle Ages, dignity and depravity were two sides of a coin. 20
Granted, Pico himself rarely wallows in filth. But in a work completed

several years after "On the Dignity of Man" —the Heptaplus, or the Seven-
fold Narration of the Six Days of Genesis (1489) —he makes it clear that
human freedom was curtailed by the fatal events in the Garden.
"Through the first Adam, who obeyed Satan rather than God and whose
sons we all are according to the flesh," Pico writes, "we degenerated into
beasts, disgracing the form of man." And now, in the aftermath of our
fatal free choice, it is only through the "newest Adam," through Jesus
Christ, that we "are reformed by grace and regenerated." Without him,
we are liable to succumb to our animal selves, for when "the image of
God has been blotted out by the stain of sin, we begin to serve the beasts
in us, wretchedly and unhappily . . . sinking to the ground, eager for
earthly things, forgetting . . . our Father, His kingdom, and the original
dignity given to us." 21
Mindful always of our own weakness, we must
say, with the apostle, "Our sufficiency is from God." 22
A significant corrective to the view that Pico was somehow an apolo-
gist for an early modern Prometheus unbound, the Heptaplus places
man in the only spot its Renaissance author could have conceived: the
center of the Christian cosmos. Created in God's image, man is in-
deed noble. The earth, the elements, and the beasts wait upon him,
the heavens labor on his behalf, the angels watch over his salvation
and beatitude. Composed of matter and spirit, reason and substance,
human beings are microcosms of the universe, "which we encompass
within us." But like the planets of the solar system, we are moved in
our orbits by God:
The heavenly bodies, although adapted to circular motion, are

not in themselves sufficient to perform this motion, but need
the divine mover to turn and revolve them. They are suited to
perpetual revolution only insofar as they can receive, not
produce it.
It is no different for us and the angels. Our nature is such

that we cannot go in a circle and come back upon ourselves, but
we can be moved in a circle and brought back to God by the
motive power of grace. Hence comes that saying, "Whosoever
are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God" [Romans
8:14]. "Who are led," it says, not "who move." We differ from
the heavens in that they are moved by the necessity of their
nature and we in proportion to our freedom. The moving spirit
knocks unremittingly at the door of your soul. If you fail to hear,
you will be left wretched and unhappy in your own torpor and
weakness. If you let it in, you will be carried back at once, full
of God, along the orbit of religion to the Father, to the Lord, to

possess life forever in him. . . . This is the true felicity. . . P
In Pico's pre-Newtonian, geocentric universe, gravity is grace, and the

human orbit, a Neoplatonic journey back to the Creator. It is in this
return to "the beginning from which we sprang," a return that culmi-

nates in the "contemplation of the face of God" at death, that "true
and perfectfelicity" lies. It is a journey, Pico makes clear, that we
cannot complete ourselves. "To this level man cannot go" but must
be "drawn" —by Christ, "who is felicity itself."
24
For this quintessen-
tial Renaissance figure, true felicity, perfect happiness, is not of this
148 Happiness
earth. Nor is it within our power alone to achieve, "since nothing can
rise above itself by relying on its own strength." 25
Pico does, it is true, speak also of a second, or "natural" felicity (felicitas
naturalis), which is independent of the motive power of grace. This is
the potential that lies within all created things to realize themselves in
the way that God has intended. Whereas circular motion, "through
which a body is carried around to the point from which it started," serves
Pico as the metaphor for perfect felicity, "linear motion, by which

the elements are carried to their proper places, stands for the felicity
through which things are established in the perfection of their own
nature." In Pico's physics, based overwhelmingly on Aristotle, only im-
mortal and incorruptible bodies (the planets and the soul) move in
circles. And they must be moved. But elements of a less exalted sort
"need no other force than the impulse of levity or gravity imposed on
them at creation, just as individual things are brought to their natural
felicity by their own proper impetus and force." All things in the cre-
ated world, that is, can propel themselves to a relative felicity in keep-
26
ing with the best workings of their own natures.
Thus, Pico can refer, rather strangely, to the "felicity" of fire, which,
when it has attained its natural perfection, "is happy to the extent that
it is capable of happiness." "More happy are the plants, which also have
life; and happier still are the animals, which have been allotted con-
sciousness, so that the more perfection they have, the more divinity
they find within themselves." At the top of this ladder is majestic man,
who exceeds all save the angels in his potential for natural happiness.
"Being possessed of those extraordinary endowments greatly condu-
cive to felicity, intelligence and the freedom of choice," man can cul-
tivate his innate gifts through philosophy. 27 Whereas religion "urges,
directs, and impels" us to perfect felicity, philosophy serves as the

28
"guide to natural felicity."
It is tempting to see here the "Renaissance spirit" that generations
of commentators have claimed to find: the carving out, in this world, of

an autonomous realm, where natural felicity might be pursued through
reason. Unquestionably, Pico makes room for such a realm, doing so,
moreover, by explicit appeal to the ancients. If his model of the circular

journey of the soul to perfect happiness is Neoplatonic, his linear meta-

phor of the movement of the individual to the end of natural felicity is
Aristotelian. As in Raphael's School of Athens, the two thinkers are har-
monized in Pico's thought. Together they counsel the discipline of the

passions, the cultivation of virtue, the development of reason, and the
quest for harmony and balance in this world, as in the next.

All of this is without question. It is not, however, without prece-
dent. In fact, although Pico does not say so directly, his distinction
between natural and supernatural happiness is largely a gloss on Saint
Thomas Aquinas's perfect and imperfect beatitude. In fundamental
respects, Pico merely develops this notion, reiterating Thomas's
emphasis on the gulf between the two types of beatitude. 29 Natural
felicity, Pico insists, is but "the shadow of [true] felicity." 30 And "who-
ever does not put his faith in Christ ... is rightly deprived not only of
the first felicity, but also of the second, the natural, since it is only a
corrupt and fallen nature that does not desire grace." In short, there
can be "no philosophy which separates man from religion." 31
It would, consequently, be a mistake to see the author of this lead-

ing Renaissance manifesto —and to see the Renaissance itself — as
carrying out a dramatic break with the "otherworldly" Middle Ages and
the patristic past of old. Pico was in truth a representative figure, but
not for the reasons frequently assumed. The humanism that he typi-
fied, like the period in which he lived, developed naturally, often in-
distinguishably, out of the concerns of preceding centuries. With good
reason does one leading scholar observe, "There was nothing particu-
larly new or original about Renaissance views of man." 32
But though the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
did not discover man or his happy world, they did intensify interest in
both. If not altogether in substance, at least in tone the movement

can be taken at its word. It did mark a "rebirth": in hunger, in enthu-
siasm, in the curiosity to know. More for his appetite than for his an-
swers, Pico was a symbol of his age. Hunting down lost manuscripts,
rummaging about in forgotten corners of monasteries, sifting through
the rubble of the ancient world, he and his fellow humanists pulled
treasures from the past, and above all from classical antiquity, to which
150 Happiness
they accorded a status, prestige, and sanctity greater than ever before.
They learned Greek and perfected their Latin on Roman models, at-
tempting to "purify" a language that humanists believed had been

debased during the Middle Ages. And armed with these tools, they
returned, reexamined, and revivified the sources themselves.
Leonardo Bruni undertook a new translation of Aristotle's Nichomachaen
Ethics (from Greek into Latin) so that contemporaries could be sure
of what the sage had said. It was one of some thirty-two new transla-
tions of the philosopher's work carried out during the quattrocento. 33
Others gathered, edited, and republished the works of the Roman

Stoics —above all, Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus —and they reac-
quainted Europeans with the basic doctrines of Epicurus, principally

through the study of his Roman imitator and successor, Lucretius.
Finally, the Renaissance witnessed a massive revival of interest in
Plato, whose collected works, in Greek, had been brought to Florence
from Constantinople in 1420 by the scholar Jean Aurispa. By 1440,
more than twenty-one translations were completed, with Bruni,
Ficino, and others issuing Latin and vernacular editions of the Sympo-
sium, Phaedrus, Phaedo, Crito, Republic, and the other dialogues, along
with extensive commentaries on Plato's work. Some even went so
far as to argue, echoing Augustine's judgment (though even more
strongly) that Plato's writings represented a pagan "theology," a sci-
ence of the study of the true God. It was partly Pico's acceptance of
this claim — that God could speak just as relevantly, if less directly,
through the words of the pagan authors as he did through the biblical
prophets — that drew to him the suspicion of the Vatican.
Pico took greater care in the future to contain his enthusiasm, but
the slip pointed to a potential tension. Just as the incorporation of
Aristotle into the teachings of the church by Aquinas had worked to
mitigate the impact of original sin, creating a space for the cultiva-
tion of a natural felicity on earth, so did the Renaissance's extended
engagement with classical thought make room for further reflection
on the potential for happiness in life. Accelerating a process that had

begun the moment Jesus of Nazareth set foot on Roman roads, the
humanists pounded classicism into Judeo-Christianity and Judeo-
Christianity into classicism. As Christian Stoics, Christian Platonists,

Christian Aristotelians, and even, warily, Christian admirers of
Epicurus, Renaissance scholars grappled again and again with the
overriding classical end. 34 Not surprisingly, they produced, as one
scholar has observed, "an extraordinarily large number of treatises
on such subjects as human happiness, misery [and] the greatest
35
good."
With titles like De Christiana felicitate, De Viri felicitate, and De Vitae
felicitate, these works ranged to a considerable extent along the axis

connecting the pure felicity of death to the imperfect happiness of
life. A Neoplatonist like Ficino, for instance, could observe in a long
letter on happiness written to Lorenzo de Medici that felicity is to be

found only in the mystical pleasures of the soul wrought by the be-
atific vision and the contemplation of truth. "Because the happiest
thing of all is to possess the object of one's love," he writes, with di-
rect reference to Plato; "whoever lives in the possession of what he

loves, lives content and satisfied."And since the love of God was the
highest love, "the happiness of man therefore consists in God alone." 36
A man of Stoic leanings, like the humanist Coluccio Salutati, by con-
trast, could draw on his deep readings in Cicero and Seneca to extend
the sway of happy activity on earth, emphasizing the importance of
practical virtue, based on the cultivation of reason, as a means to quell
the passions that upset us in life. Then again, Leonardo Bruni, pro-
foundly indebted to Aristotle, emphasizes the role played by fortune
and circumstance in shaping the happiness of even the most virtuous
life.
For it is possible for a wise and good man, learned and accom-
plished though he be in all the virtues, to be reduced to a
state of poverty, bereavement, or exile; he could lose his
country, have his patrimony taken from him, his children and
relatives killed. He might even be cast into a tyrant's prison,
be put upon the rack and subjected to horrible, pitiable

tortures. Who could still call him happy amid so many evils,
37
even though he were overflowing with virtues?
—
152 Happiness
Not, certainly, the humanists Lorenzo Valla or Gianozzo Manetti, the

latter of whom displays considerable indulgence toward earthly plea-
sures and delights in his treatise De Dignate et Excellentia Hominis on
the "dignity and excellence of man." Both scholars defended the con-
sonance of a chastened Epicureanism with Christianity.
Notwithstanding this considerable range of opinion, virtually no
humanist was prepared to doubt Pico's central assumption that true
or perfect happiness was not of this world. Many in fact continued to
dismiss the possibility of earthly happiness altogether, concurring with
the late-fifteenth-century Bolognese scholar Filippo Beroaldo, who
observed simply that "no one is happy." Neither the author nor his
audience seemed to see any contradiction between that conclusion
and the title of the work in which it was drawn, an Oration on Felicity?*
And yet, as Salutati was quick to point out, "We humans, stupid and
mad, strive to be happy nevertheless in the world, and, what is more
inane, we believe and boast that we are blessed and happy among these
39
false and mundane things." Whether foolishly misguided or not, more
than a few Renaissance men and women did strive for a measure of
worldly happiness, and their momentum carried them up against the
limits of received assumptions. In calling to account an author who
shared Beroaldo's views on the inherent misery of life, the Bolognese

notary and student of Aristotle Benedetto Morandi demanded to know
how one could write treatises on human happiness while denying the
prospect altogether. If human beings were incapable of felicity on
earth, he argued in his own "On Human Happiness," then "nature
would have conceded the faculty for acquiring [it] in vain." Vowing
to concentrate solely on the happiness of which "man is capable"
assisted by neither God nor the angels —Morandi went so far as to doubt
how one who had never known happiness in life could be expected to
enjoy it in death. Following Aristotle, and like Pico and Thomas
Aquinas before him, Morandi was prepared to carve out a realm, how-
40
ever imperfect, in this world for the pursuit of human ends.
It was precisely this impulse —an impulse born of the sustained
reengagement with classical thought, thought that took as its point of
departure the cultivation of earthly ends — that motivated men and
women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to begin to reconceive,

slowly, haltingly, happiness here below. The same spirit that could
lead Raphael to imbed the schools of Athens in the walls of the Vatican
could lead a painter as religiously inclined as Agnolo Bronzino to imag-
ine felicity clothed only in classical garb. His Allegory of Happiness
(Allegoria della felieita) is a modern rendering of the Romans' Felicitas
Publica, whose image and allegory had become widely known to the
humanists through their passion for collecting antique coins. 41

But whereas antiquarians and nusmismatists like Andrea Fulvio,
Enea Vico, and Sebastiano Erizzo lavished attention in long treatises
on "the almost infinite number of coin images" that graced Roman

specie, Bronzino focused exclusively on Felicitas Publica herself, lav-
ishing praise on the different goods of this earth that she conferred. 42
A pert-breasted young woman drawn in the elongatedly pudgy Man-

nerist style, Happiness herself commands the canvas as she commands
our gaze, set in grandeur on a regal throne. In one hand, she clutches
her trademark caduceus, and in the other, a cornucopia bursting with
fruit, symbols, respectively, of public peace and prosperity. To
Happiness's left stands Justice, dangling her scales. Coldly erotic, she
Parte Prima.,;
Z??! ^* l,
/ n''<, "* ^ lito |MrffalB!cf.("iJiv.a.^J -. -
FELICITA PVBLICA
Kmna
NeBi Mcdaglu d. Giolu ran qucftc Icttcre.
FELICITAS I'VBUU.
Felicitas Publica from Cesare Ripa's

honologia (1593), a widely reproduced
Renaissance manual providing
descriptions of hundreds of allegorical
images. Here Felicitas is seated on a
throne with her caduceus and horn of
plenty. Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Vale University.
154 Happiness
Orazio Gentieschi, Public Felicity Surmounting Perils, or

Triumph of Fortune, 1624, Musee de Louvre, Paris.
Relict
Public Felicity in an eighteenth-

century English translation
of Ripa's Iconologia (London,
1729). Yale Center for British
Art, Paul Mellon Fund.
Photo: Richard Caspole.
—
strikes a pose as if for the catwalk, draping a free hand seductively over
the base of her sword. Cupid/Eros, for his part, is more eager. Spilling
into Happiness's lap, this naughty nymph prepares to pierce her with
his golden shaft. But lest he transgress, fawning Prudence —Janus-
faced to look forward and backward, to the future and to the past
keeps watch over her delicate charge, guarding Happiness from
violation. Glory and trumpeting Fame hover overhead, while Time, in
possession of the celestial sphere, and Fortune, with her wheel of fate,
genuflect at Happiness's feet. At the extreme left, blind Envy flees
from view. Folly, in a fool's cap, is trod under Prudence's step, and
Justice subdues both Fury (clutching a broken sword) and Deceit

(lying prostrate under the wheel of fate). Time and Fortune, finally,
make quick work of Kairos, the Greek god of chance, who writhes,
defeated, at the very bottom of the canvas. Only the angels above
suggest the happiness of a higher realm. In the confined space of this
picture, Happiness reigns supreme.
As the court painter to Cosimo I de Medici, ruler of Florence from
1537 to 1574, Bronzino likely intended this work as a commentary on
his patron's reign. The masculine face of the prudential Janus bears a
striking resemblance to Cosimo himself, and the terrestrial globe that
Prudence holds is turned so that Italy lies at the very center of the
43
world. After decades of war and upheaval at the hands of foreign
armies, Florence, Bronzino suggests, had won prosperity and indepen-
dence, beating down Folly and Fury, making Fortune the servant of
its fate. Projecting military power into the surrounding Tuscan coun-
tryside, Cosimo had ushered in a revival of the arts and letters in the
city itself, promoting a campaign of public works whose perfect symbol

was the Uffizi, designed by Bronzino's friend Giorgio Vasari, where the
Allegory of Happiness is now housed. The city that produced Leonardo,
Machiavelli, and Michelangelo continued to shine with grandeur and
brilliance.
It may even have dared to smile. It is striking, in fact, that the same
lavish attention paid to earthly detail in so much Renaissance art was
trained, as well, on the beaming human face. Although smiles were
not unprecedented in Western painting and sculpture — they fre-
156 Happiness
Agnolo Bronzino, Allegory of Happiness, 1564, Galleria degli Uffizi,
Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.
quently enliven the faces of the kouroi, for example, those statues of
standing young men popular during the Archaic period of Greece in
the sixth and seventh centuries bce — since the advent of Christian-
ity they had been overwhelmingly reserved for religious figures. And
even in these circumstances, they were used only sparingly to brighten
the faces of those known to enjoy certain beatitude: the blessed Vir-
gin, Adam and Eve before the Fall, the angels, and the saints. 44
Smiling angels on the Cathedral of Reims, twelfth century (top),

Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY; smiling angelic figurines, thirteenth-
century French, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters
Collection, 1952 (52.33.2). Photograph, all rights reserved,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

158 Happiness
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, artists began to

depict the smiles of secular subjects. There are many examples, but
Leonardo's Mona Lisa is the most famous. In a Europe that continued
to value emotional restraint, her half smile created a lively contempo-
rary impression. Giorgio Vasari, who had not actually seen the work,
saw fit to remark in his classic Lives of the Artists that her smile was "so
enchanting that it was more divine than human." He also pointed out
that while Leonardo painted, he had his enchanting subject "con-
stantly entertained by singers, musicians, and jesters so that she would
45
be merry and not look melancholic as portraits often do."
Vasari's reference to melancholy is revealing in its own right. First
described by Hippocrates in the fifth century bce, and later elaborated

by Galen in the second century, melancholy (atra Mis in Latin) liter-
ally signified "black bile," derived from the Greek melan (black) + chole
Antonello da Messina, Portrait of an Unknown Man Smiling, 1470, (left) The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Benjamin Attman, 1913. (14.40.645).
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, early 1500's, (right) Musee de Louvre, Paris.
Photo: Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

(bile). According to late Medieval and Renaissance commentators,

who continued to regard Hippocrates and Galen as authorities on such
matters, melancholy was one of the four principal humors that gov-
46
erned human physiology and mood. When balanced harmoniously
with the other three —hot and moist blood, hot and dry choler, and cold
and moist phlegm — cold and dry black bile played an essential role in
maintaining human equilibrium. Whereas blood carried heat and mois-
ture throughout the body, phlegm nourished our cold and moist parts
like the brain and kidneys, and choler fed what was hot and dry, black
bile brought sustenance to the bones, gristle, and sinews. As such it
functioned much like earth, which, in this elaborately integrated physi-

ology/cosmology, also served as a cold and dry element, offsetting air
(hot and moist), fire (hot and dry), and water (cold and moist) in the
smooth running of the universal macrocosm. 47

In proper measure, melancholy was a vital humor, essential to
human health and well-being. But in superabundance it provoked a
physiological imbalance that greatly affected mood. Just as a profusion
of choler, phlegm, or blood provoked a choleric, phlegmatic, or san-

guine response (names we retain), a surfeit of black bile pouring out
from the spleen (where its excess was allegedly held) induced melan-
choly. Frequently associated with sadness and morbid depression,
this disorder could produce a slew of diverse symptoms of varying
severity, ranging from "windy melancholy" (flatulence), hemor-
rhoids, scabies, coughes, hoarseness, aches in the joints, and falling
sickness to somnolence, idiocy, madness, and other "cold and dry"

diseases chronicled with dark fascination in the annals of early mod-
ern medicine. 48
By reengaging with the classical tradition to treat excessive sadness
and melancholia as an aberration or disease —not just the natural ef-
fect of original sin — Renaissance medicine opened the way toward

thinking about means to cure it. Vasari's observation, in this respect,
that Leonardo relied on entertainment, music, and harlequins to put

a smile on Mona Lisa's face is instructive, for it is symptomatic of a
wider effort to devise ways to induce more positive mood. Ranging
from recommendations on diet to considerations of the effects of
160 Happiness
weather and climate on our state of mind, such medicinal advice was
dispensed in unprecedented volume during the Renaissance.
True, not all Renaissance humanists viewed melancholy as a prob-
lem. Pico's teacher Marsilio Ficino, for one, was inclined to see the
condition in a somewhat different light. Drawing on what he and
others considered, erroneously, to be a text by Aristotle that alleged a
close association between melancholy and genius, Ficino linked the
accumulation of black bile in certain special cases to breadth of imagi-
nation, intellectual acuity, and the powers of prediction and fore-
49
sight. Natural black bile is "conducive to judgment and wisdom," he
stated in The Book of Life (1489), arguing there that in its rarefied form,
"genial" melancholy was a condition and cause of creative genius. He

entitled chapter five of that work, accordingly, "Why the Melancholic
50
Are Intelligent."
Ficino's views were undoubtedly influential, contributing to a con-
temporary "vogue" of melancholy in elite circles, and a phenomenon

that would have a long and robust future: the glamorization of intel-
51
lectual despair. Yet more important from the perspective of happi-
ness were the early efforts to treat melancholy as a problem. In the
sixteenth century, especially, medical literature on the subject flour-
ished. "Never before," one historian writes, "had so much attention
been paid to [the] expression of hopeless . . . inner confusion." 52 When
the English polymath Robert Burton came to dissect the problem from
every conceivable angle in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, the body
was well prepared. "I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid
melancholy," Burton observed. He could think of no "more general
service" than to prescribe means to "prevent and cure" this "epidemi-
cal disease" that "so often, so much, crucifies the body and mind." 53
However imperfect, the attempt to find a cure for excessive sad-
ness and the willingness to dignify the smile in secular art may be
treated as indications that some were coming to see a modicum of
earthly happiness as consonant with the dignity of man. There are
other such indications. Historians note, for example, that beginning

in the fifteenth century, representations of the afterlife began to
take on a far more earthlv tone. 54 As earlv as 1431, Lorenzo Valla was
Albrecht Durer, Melancholia 1, 1514, © copyright the Trustees

of the British Museum.
describing the delights of heaven in surprisingly sensual terms in his

Epicurean-inspired dialogue On Pleasure:
With the others, individual parts of the body are given plea-
sure as the palate by food, the nostrils by the rose and the
violet; but with this kind, the whole body is partner to the
pleasure. It is a kind of joy, also, that is felt by not one but
many senses; let it be touched upon only most briefly here
162 Happiness
because it relates to formerly mentioned matters, like your

banquets, dances, and games. ... In the state of eternal
felicity that kind of pleasure will be much richer and more
plentiful. 55
A canon and biblical scholar, Valla is particularly interesting in that it
was he who first established, through textual analysis, that the writ-
ings of Pseudo-Dionysius could not have been those of Dionysius the
Areopagite mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles as a disciple of Saint
Paul. Challenging the apostolic authority of this work, he likewise chal-
lenged the purely contemplative understanding of the beatific vision
so dear to the Neoplatonists and medieval philosophers. Valla's heaven
is one of feasting and dancing and amusement, sweet as the smell of a
rose, where "not a day, not an hour, not an instant of time . . . will see
any diminution of honor, glory, or pleasure." And though he takes great

care in this work to stress that many pleasures in this life must be sac-
rificed for the purer pleasures of the next

—"we should not, therefore,
fear to renounce the affairs of man" — his conception of Christian vir-
Dancing in heaven. A detail from Fra

Angelico's The Last Judgement, c. 1431,
Museo di San Marco, Florence.
tue leaves little room for the rigors of ascetic denial. 56 Like a later work,
the monk Celso Maffei's Pleasing Explanation of the Sensuous Pleasures of
Paradise (1504), and other Renaissance descriptions of the afterlife, the
imagined pleasures of Valla's treatise were in part a reflection of the

greater acceptance of pleasure in the here and now.
Working within the limits laid down by late medieval theology,
Renaissance humanists did expand the scope of felicitas naturalis, mak-
ing more room for the imperfect pleasures of life, while beginning to
contemplate the daunting task of rendering human beings happier on
earth. This, to repeat, was only a gradual development. But it was no
less significant for that. By building upon the conception of human
freedom formulated originally by Aquinas and the late medieval
Aristotelians, the Christian humanists of the Renaissance explored the
boundaries of what was conceivable, in this life, by the unaided intel-
lect of fallen man. Not thoroughly incapacitated by we possessed

sin,
the freedom, they concluded, and the ability, to make the world a
better place. A celebrated humanist like Erasmus might devote a vol-
ume to the "praise of folly," concluding ironically that "to know noth-
57
ing is the only happiness." But it is quickly apparent that this "folly"
is in truth the highest wisdom: a blend of Saint Paul's "foolishness of
the cross" and the injunction of the man whom Erasmus described as
"Saint Socrates" to begin the search for truth with the avowal of igno-
rance. Together, such folly would not only reduce the suffering of the
world but also lead to self-knowledge, which Erasmus praised as an
essential point of departure in the search for happiness. 58 The other
place to start (and more important to end) was God. "All we have to
do is turn our minds to things spiritual," Erasmus avowed, and "the
way to happiness is a rapid one." 59
When viewed in this light, it is hardly surprising that a man of this

cast — a Christian humanist, a biographer of Pico, and a close friend of
Erasmus, no less, to whom the Praise of Folly was dedicated — first gave
the world a new word, Utopia. In Thomas More's masterpiece of that
name (1516), the inhabitants "love and reverence Almighty God, to
Whom we owe our existence and our potentiality for happiness." But
they also "regard the enjoyment of life ... as the natural object of all
164 Happiness
human efforts," striving on the basis of reason and intellect to provide

60
themselves with the means to enjoy. More's Utopia is, as the name
implies, an imaginary realm, "no place" or "good place" from the Greek
ou (no) 01 eu (good) + topos (place). Like Bronzino's Allegory, it sus-
pends time to triumph over fury, folly, fortune, and deceit. A product
of the imagination, set in a faraway place, the Utopia of More does not,
nor can it ever, exist, but serves, rather, as a foil to satirize the many
less than happy practices of the real world with which he was well ac-
quainted. Nonetheless, More's conception set a standard — a human
standard —by which to measure the real shortcomings of life with an
eye to improving them. By fully exercising their God-given freedom,
the work suggested, human beings could raise themselves and their
world closer to heaven.
Justhow high could one go without God's help, and how high
was one expected to go before God extended his hand to help pull
us along? The freedom of the Renaissance humanists their injunc- —
tion to rise to the utmost heights of human dignity was apt to pro- —
voke anxiety in humanity's highest achievers. Martin Luther was
such a man; in his struggles to fully realize himself, he grew conscious
of the sin that continued to weigh him down. As he did so, he con-
ceived a new image of Christian freedom and a new image of human
happiness.
To Kill the Old Adam
In late May of 1534, Martin Luther wrote a brief but extraordinary

letter to the young prince Joachim von Anhalt. Then in his fifty-first
year, the leader of the Reformation was twice the age of the sad prince,
who suffered from bouts of melancholy despair. Luther saw fit to offer
a word of advice:
Serene Prince, gracious Lord! [A mutual friend] has told

me that your Grace has been a little unwell, but are now,
thank God, again in good condition.
It often occurs to me that, as your Grace leads a quiet life,
melancholy and sad thoughts may be the cause of such

indisposition; wherefore I advise your Grace, as a young man,
to be merry \frdhlich], to ride, hunt, and keep good company,
who can cheer your Grace in a godly and honorable way. For
loneliness and sadness are simple poison and death, espe-
cially in a young man. . . . No one knows how it hurts a young
man to avoid joy [Freude] and cultivate solitude and melan-
choly. . . . Joy and good humor, in honor and seemliness, is the
best medicine for a young man, yea for all men. I, who have
hitherto spent my life in mourning and sadness, now seek
and accept joy whenever I can find it. We now know, thank
God, that we can be merry with a good conscience, and can
use God's gifts with thankfulness, inasmuch as he has made
them for us and is pleased to have us enjoy them.
If I have not hit the cause of your Grace's indisposition
and have thereby done you a wrong, your Grace will kindly
forgive my mistake. For truly I thought your Grace might be
so foolish as to think it a sin to be merry, as I have often done
and still do at times. . . . Your Grace should be joyful [frohlich]
in all things, inwardly in Christ and outwardly in God's gifts;
for he gives them to us that we may have pleasure in them

61
and thank him for them.
Luther knew of what he spoke. The ambivalence and tension that

runs throughout this letter —between melancholy and mirth, sin and
joy — ran throughout his life. From a young age, he had suffered what
he called tristitia (melancholy or excessive despair) and knew inti-
mately the solitude and sadness which he described to the prince.

He had also struggled bravely to be "joyful in all things," developing
a deep appreciation for the challenge of any such quest. It was not a
sin to be happy, Luther came to believe, but it was because of sin that
we were not. Eating away within us, concupiscence was an ever present
reminder of our inherent worthlessness, which only God's clemency,
the mercy of his "gifts" could dispel. As Luther had observed in a
166 Happiness
sermon written some years before, "Sin is pure unhappiness, forgive-

62
ness pure happiness."
Today, a conscience racked by excessive feelings of guilt and
shame, oscillating wildly between misery and joy, would summon
medical and psychological concern. Whether Luther himself suffered
an actual affliction will never be known for sure, although historians
have certainly suggested it, shedding a good deal of light in the pro-
cess on the psychological forces that may have shaped his develop-
63
ment. They call attention to a harsh and somber childhood, the
implacable demands of a father who sought to dissuade Luther from
his chosen career as a monk, and to a number of crises — fits, break-
downs, and prolonged periods of despair — that all this may have pro-
voked. It was at the end of one such period of extended depression
that Luther apparently achieved his "breakthrough," the dramatic
experience in the tower.
The year was 1519, two years after the young monk is supposed to
have nailed his famous ninety-five theses, protesting the sale of papal
indulgences, to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, setting in motion a

series of events that challenged the excesses and prerogatives of pa-
pal power. Luther may never actually have lifted a hammer. 64 In any
case, it was above all the so-called experience in the tower —named
after the room in the Augustinian Black Monastery in Wittenberg
where Luther kept his study — that led him to the dramatic reinter-
pretation of scripture that gave the Reformation its theological force.
As Luther himself later recalled the episode, his spiritual epiphany was
brought on by anxiety and dread:
Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was

a sinner before God with an extremely troubled conscience.
I could not believe that God was placated by my satisfaction.
I did not love, no, I hated the just God who punishes sin-
ners. ... I said, "Isn't it enough that we miserable sinners,
eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind

of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does
God heap sorrow upon sorrow on us through the Gospel and
—
through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his

wrath?" This was how I raged with a fierce and troubled
65
conscience.
Having, for some time, steeped himself in the writings of Saint Paul,
Luther was driven to distraction by his inability to answer a funda-
mental question: How is it that we are "justified" by God — made right,

that is, made just or righteous? How is it that we are saved? Accord-
ing to the dominant theological perspective that was already pro-
nounced in Eriugena, and that reigned supreme from Aquinas to Pico
to More, men and women could in some measure save themselves

through their own actions, by performing good works and living vir-
tuous lives. Infused through the sacraments, God's grace is forever

with us. We fulfill it by perfecting ourselves. "Facerequodinseest" "Do
what lies within you," ran the famous scholastic phrase. Be all you can
be. In keeping with the medieval image of the ladder, human liberty
entailed the freedom to raise oneself to God. 66
For Luther this vaunted "freedom" was in fact a form of subjuga-
tion. For how could we be certain, he wondered, that we had per-
formed enough good works we had been all

to merit salvation — that
that we can be? Like an unremitting father whose love we can never
earn, this God seemed to Luther a taskmaster who would never be
pleased. And though by all accounts Luther was, as he claimed, blame-

less, performing tremendous ascetic feats of fasting, self-flagellation,
prayer, and penance, he could not set his mind at rest. Fed by per-
sonal psychology and sustained by his long engagement with the the-
ology of Saint Augustine, Luther's sense of human worthlessness was
boundless. Trapped within himself, his guilt could not be appeased
until he was set free in the tower, while contemplating book 1,
verse 17, of Paul's Letter to the Romans:
Meditating day and night on those words, I at last, by the

mercy of God, paid attention to their context: "In it, the
justice of God is revealed, as it is written: 'The just person
lives by faith.'" I began to understand that in this verse the

—
168 Happiness
justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift
of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the justice

of God is revealed by the Gospel, but it is a passive justice,
i.e. That by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it
is written: "The just person lives by faith." Suddenly I felt
that I was born again and had entered into paradise itself
67
through open gates.
Here was the basis of Luther's greatest insight, the realization, drawn
from Paul, that we are "justified" made]ust, not punished with jus-
tice — through faith alone, and that this faith itself is a gift from God.
We cannot earn faith — it is freely given —and its effects are radical
and profound. As Luther observed famously in another work, his Pref-

ace to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans (1522):
Faith is a work of God in us which changes us and brings us to
birth anew from God [cf. John 1]. It kills the old Adam,
makes us completely different people in heart, mind, senses,
and all our powers, and brings the Holy Spirit with it. What a
living, creative, active, powerful thing is faith! . . . [It] is a
living, unshakeable confidence in God's grace; it is so certain,
that someone would die a thousand times for it. This kind of
trust in and knowledge of God's grace makes a person joyful
[froh/ich], confident, and gay [lustig] with regard to God and all
68
creatures. This is what the Holy Spirit does by faith.
This total, transformative power to kill the old Adam — the sinful,
selfish creature that lurks within us all — forms the basis of Christian
rebirth, that experience now described, in Luther's very words, as

"born again." To be "created anew," Luther felt, was to be "restored
to Paradise," to be released from the burden of guilt and sin that made
prisons of our persons. 69 Christian liberty, the freedom of Christian
man, was, quite simply, absolution.
How far this new form of "Christian freedom" — the title of one of
Luther's most famous works —was from the relative freedom of self
fashioning envisioned by Pico and the humanists. For the Protestant

variety rested upon the acceptance of the fundamentally unregen-
erate nature of unjustified humanity, of our natural slavery to sin in
the absence of rebirth, and of our impotence before God. Luther,
and to an even greater extent, the Reformation's other theological
giant, John Calvin, emphasized the corrupt and vitiated state of
those heirs to Adam not saved by grace. "The world is evil and this
life is full of misery," Luther observed, likening men and women in

another work "to savage wild beasts." 70 Calvin described human
beings as "teeming horde [s] of infamies," and was convinced that
"those who are under the curse of God enjoy not even the smallest
particle of happiness." 71 To the early leaders of the Reformation,
the misery of the inhabitants of the earthly city seemed altogether
clear.
In this respect, Luther, Calvin, and their many followers turned

back to the tradition of Saint Augustine, a tradition they believed had
been eclipsed, along with so much else, by the church's divergence
from scripture, its pagan accretions, and its overreliance on the theol-
ogy of Aquinas, which flirted openly, they believed, with the Pelagian
heresy of old. Luther's emphasis, too, on the radically transformative
power of faith, his renunciation of agency to God, and the stark con-
trast he drew between the old and new man recall much of the power
of the Pauline gospel and the effervescence of the early church. It is
likely that Perpetua and Felicitas would have understood something

of his palpable, personal sense of the presence of God and his joyous
embrace of the Holy Spirit.
Yet if in these ways the Reformation looked back — quite self-
consciously — to an earlier epoch in Christian history, it also pointed
forward to new understandings of the relationship between the human

and the divine. Most important, Luther and his successors shifted the
weight of religious responsibility from the church, as institution, to

the individual conscience. "The first step in Christianity," Luther
declared, after the preaching of repentance, is the "knowledge of one-
72
self." By declaring scripture alone to be the ultimate basis of Chris-
tian truth, they undermined the need for an elaborate priestly
170 Happiness
hierarchy to act as interpreters of revelation and intercessors before

God. All who believe are priests, Luther maintained, responsible for
receiving and spreading the word, caring for their own souls and those
of others. God's grace admitted of no hierarchy and no mediation. Just
as the reformers stripped Catholic cathedrals of the accumulated
"clutter" of the ages — jettisoning the veneration of saints, the wor-
ship of relics, and the ritual and pomp that separated the clergy from
the congregation — so, too, did they strip away the forces and institu-
tions (illiteracy, monasteries, penitential orders) that, in their view,
impeded direct confrontation with the divine. In the end, the faithful
would stand equal —and alone—before God.

A direct consequence of this reorientation was the erosion of rigid
distinctions between the sacred and the profane. If there was no hier-
archy in the ascent to God (only the division of the damned and the
saved), there could be no privileged place or profession in which to
pursue this end. Rotterdam was as holy as Rome, the mineshaft as
conducive to grace as the monastery, the pikeman as potentially up-

right as the priest. Marriage, the family, one's work and striving in the
world all became fields for the cultivation of God's glow in what the
philosopher Charles Taylor has called the "sanctification of the ordi-
nary," or the "affirmation of ordinary life." 73 For the Reformation's
children, there could be no especially exalted form of existence, sim-
ply exaltation itself, the conducting of one's worldly affairs —whatever

and wherever they might be — in the proper spirit. One should seek
God in all things, for in all things one could be found.
This was an outlook that developed most intensely in the Calvinist
variety of Protestantism, particularly that of Anglo-American Puritans,
for whom the notion of the "calling," or divine vocation, assumed cen-
tral importance. 74 But it was firmly rooted in the most basic of Protes-
tant propositions: Luther's assertion of the priesthood of all believers
and his contention that we are saved by faith alone. God had created
the world, and he "saw that it was good." But we had lost sight of this
goodness, viewing creation through the veil of tears that is human
selfishness, blinded by our own sin. That veil could be lifted by grace,
however, allowing us to see creation in the way the Lord had intended,
as "a pleasure garden for the soul." 75 It was Luther's fervent belief that
"we may be relieved of the blindness and misery in which we are
steeped so deeply, and may truly understand the Word and will of God,
and earnestly accept it." For thence we would "learn how to obtain an
abundance of joy [Freude] happiness , [Glikk], and salvation \Heil\, both

76
here and in eternity." As Luther emphasized to the young prince
Anhalt, we could hope to be "joyful in all things."
This was Luther's hope. He expressed it repeatedly, urging, un-

surprisingly for a man who had known suffering in his own upbring-
ing, that the family provide the first fruits of the harvest. 77 Whereas
Catholic tradition had long regarded marriage as a necessary but in-
herently compromising institution, Luther celebrated conjugal life,
abandoning his own clerical celibacy to marry a former nun, with whom
he had six children. To love one's wife, to feed one's children, to gov-
ern a family, and to honor one's parents were not mere "secular and
carnal duties" as the "papists" believed, but "Fruit of the Spirit." 78 In
the same way, Luther insisted that we pick freely from all of God's
bounty. The man who had once starved and flagellated himself in his
anxiety to be worthy of God now saw merit in drinking deeply of God's
creation.
Yet there is little to suggest that Luther ever managed to put his
anxiety completely to rest, or that he came to know the happiness in
all things that he recommended to the prince of Anhalt. On the con-
trary, he was plagued to the end of his days by intermittent spells of
depression. "Be strong and cheerful and cast out those monstrous
thoughts," he advised in another letter, stressing that "sometimes we
must drink more, engage in sports and recreation, aye, even sin a little
to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our con-
sciences. . . . What other cause do you think that I have for drinking
so much strong drink, talking so freely and making merry so often,
except that I wish to mock and harass the devil who is wont to mock
and harass me." 79
When one considers that for Luther, "all sorrows,
illnesses and melancholy come from Satan," it is clear that he did not
80
live always in the assurance of grace. "A Christian should be gay,"
Luther admitted, "but then the devil shits on him." 81
172 Happiness
That odd, if characteristic, scatological confession illustrates more

than just the paradox of Luther's personal psychology. It sheds light
on the paradox that Luther injected into the heart of Protestant the-
ology itself. Responding to the anxiety generated by the unbearable
demands of an implacable God, Luther sought to allay our dread by
total surrender to God's grace. But he did so by simultaneously em-
phasizing our inherent worthlessness and sin. Without grace,
we were nothing, prone to the promptings of guilt and prey to the
morbid attacks of Satan. Was anyone ever so sure of his salvation that
he was immune to doubt? The Protestant doctrine of predestina-
tion — that God had chosen a relatively small number of souls to
be saved through grace, and that all others, in Calvin's words, taken
from Paul, were "vessels of wrath" — hardly provided assurance of

solace. In relieving one form of anxiety, the Reformation substituted
82
another.
Yet (and this is the paradox) Luther's injunction that Christians
should be merry, and that if they viewed the world aright they would
be, was a powerful endorsement of earthly good feeling. To live life as
a justified man was apparently to experience the world as a "pleasure

garden for the soul." Had not God originally intended us to be happy?
And if so, what better way to serve him than to live as he desired? For
fallen, sinful creatures, this was a daunting task. But with the help of
God's grace, it could be achieved. To make merry was to spite the
Devil. Misery and melancholy were evidence of sin.
Thus did Luther attack the privileged place of suffering in the

Christian tradition. Pain, to be sure, was, and would always be, an in-
tegral part of the human experience, a fact that could lead Luther to
observe, in an Easter Tuesday sermon, that "he who has not seen ad-
." 83 was
versity does not understand happiness. . . But if suffering in-
evitable, it was no longer to be treated as an end in itself. Luther and

Protestants more generally dismissed with contempt the heroic as-
cetic embrace: no more hair shirts, no more fasting, no more ecstasies
of pain. Life was excruciating enough on itsown terms. We needn't
add to our afflictions by seeking them out, and when they did arrive,
as they inevitably would, we should do our best to bear our cross with
joy. As Calvin concluded, "If praise and thanksgiving to the Lord can
only proceed from a cheerful and joyful heart —and there nothing is
which ought to repress these emotions in us— how neces-

it is clear
sary it is to temper the bitterness of the cross with spiritual joy." 84

Even when suffering, the chosen should not be sad.
In both its "sanctification of the ordinary," then, and its broader
dictate to be "joyful in all things," the Reformation tended to moral-
ize and consecrate mood. Luther, like Calvin, significantly, was in-
85
clined to think of Hell as a psychological state. In earthly despair we
experienced a foretaste of the anguish of those eternally rejected by
God. Joy and good feeling, conversely, could be treated as an indica-
tion of divine favor. The experience of happiness on earth —unsullied
merriment and Christian joy —was an outward sign of God's grace. And
the very fact that this grace could never be known with total convic-
tion was itself further incentive to search for it in all things. 86 To

pursue happiness was to seek signs of assurance of future felicity. The
promise, in this life alone, was great. "When the favor of God breathes
upon us," Calvin insisted, there is nothing, whether poverty, misery,
exile, contempt, imprisonment, or ignominy, that "is not conducive
87
to our happiness."
And so, although Luther and his Protestant successors saddled

human beings with a renewed awareness of their dependence and sin,
they also set men and women free to search for happiness on the hal-
lowed ground of God's creation. "Tristitia omnis a Sathana" Luther af-

firmed on numerous occasions. "All sadness is from Satan." We should
88
flee it like the Devil. It was counsel that many of his followers took
to heart. When Luther's close friend and fellow theologian at Witten-
berg Philip Melanchthon published in 1540 his Commentarius de anima,
a work that seemed to extol, like that of Ficino, the virtues of melan-
choly, Luther's more faithful followers responded by reaffirming the
teachings of their master. Drafting statements, delivering sermons,
and posting placards, they condemned this sad vice, reminding the
flock that it was Satan who drew the unwitting into his "melancholic
bath," while advising that they draw on the useful "antidote" made
available by the "apothecary of the Holy Ghost." 89
174 Happiness
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Not all found the Protestant tonic so bracing. In its grim reminder
that only the chosen would be saved, the cure seemed to some worse
than the sickness it aimed to abolish. Sin lurked in the world, and it
lurked in the human breast, giving the devil more than his due to make
of us what we were without grace: miserable, wretched creatures
afflicted by sadness, anxiety, and doubt. Until men and women could
conceive of their emotional lives without Satan, and of their selves
without sin, happiness would remain, like the old Adam, menaced by
melancholy and shrouded in despair.
This notwithstanding, the Reformation's impetus to pursue earthly

happiness as affirmation of God's grace acted as a powerful force. For
though directed against the more generous interpretation of human
freedom defended by Renaissance humanists, it had the effect of
complementing that tradition's general broadening of the possibilities
and religious sanction of pursuing happiness on earth. Not only was

human dignity compatible with earthly pleasure, but there was righ-
teousness in the pursuit.
Gravitational Pull
When the young John Locke went up to Christ Church in 1652, the
quiet world of Oxford was a very different place from what it had been
only ten years before. During much of the preceding decade, a pro-
tracted civil war had torn England apart, pitting supporters of the
reigning monarch, Charles I, against the armies of Parliament and the
leading Puritan statesman, Oliver Cromwell. Parliament's victory,
capped by Charles's execution in 1649 (an event probably witnessed
firsthand by Locke while still a pupil at Westminster school), ush-
ered in a period of experimental government in which Cromwell pre-
sided over a republican commonwealth, and then over a protectorate,
ruled largely at his command. When Cromwell died in 1658, his son
clung to power for a mere two years before the country restored the
Stuart throne. It would take another twenty-eight years, and another
revolution — the "glorious" one of 1688 — to reconcile the nagging
question of the relationship between Parliament and the crown.

In unleashing the furies of war, the conflict of the 1640s also re-
leased a flood of speculation that dared to challenge long-held truths.
The same men and women who could carry out the murder of a monarch
cut into every manner of orthodox belief, hacking away at political and
176 Happiness
religious taboos. With unsettling names like Levellers and Ranters,

Muggletonians and Fifth Monarchists, Seekers and Quakers, Diggers
and Familists, Protestant sects from across the social spectrum con-
templated alarming things. Levellers dared to assert freedom by birth
and the equality of all men, touting natural rights and a Law of Na-
ture to guarantee them. Diggers pressed the claims of the dispossessed
to property and political participation, while other groups called into

deemed incompatible with justice
question a range of religious views
and reason. Why, asked a number of prominent Ranters, would God
condemn humanity for a single crime committed long ago by a man
(Adam) whom no one living ever knew? Familists denied that he had,
arguing that all God's children would be saved: Heaven lies within us,
we bear no sin at all. More than a few of these radicals were ready to
doubt the existence of Hell, a great many others to believe that

Christ's kingdom was at hand. And in the midst of this topsy-turvy
world — this world "turned upside down" —some caught a glimpse of
90
happiness falling from the sky. As the prominent Digger Gerrard
Winstanley demanded on behalf of the poor:
But why may not we have our heaven here (that is, a comfort-
able livelihood in the earth) and heaven hereafter, too . . . ?
While men are gazing up to heaven, imagining after a happi-
ness or fearing a hell after they are dead, their eyes are put
out, that they see not what is their birthrights, and what is to
91
be done by them here on earth while they are living.
Perhaps earthly happiness was a long-forgotten right of birth, covered

over by vicars and priests and princes to deny the people their due?
Winstanley's words were more radical than most. But his belief that
the happiness of heaven might be had here, too, was voiced in other
quarters.
Thus, the Reverend Thomas Coleman, preaching before Parlia-
ment on August 30, 1643, likened his countrymen's struggle against
Charles to the ancient Israelites' "long pursuit of happinesse." 92 The

turn of phrase was felicitous, and others used it, too, as the journey to
the promised land became a standard trope of radical polemicists. 93
Like the Ranter Abiezer Coppe, they urged the chosen people of
England to journey forth to "Spiritual Canaan (the living Lord), which
is a land of large liberty, the house of happiness . . . flowing with sweet
." 94
wine, milk and honey. . . In this place, the temporal and the ce-
lestial would be one.
As the allusions to Exodus make clear, many of these hopes had
been expressed before. When the Puritan millenarian Thomas Brooks
claimed that "being in a state of Grace will yield . . . both a Heaven
here, and Heaven hereafter," rendering "a man's condition happy, safe,
and sure," he was merely reaffirming much of what Luther and Calvin
95
had already said. So, too, was his widely held belief in the imminent
arrival of the New Jerusalem a variation on a recurrent theme. Shared
by Christ's followers themselves, anticipation of the millenarian
moment had resurfaced periodically ever since, erupting with particu-
lar force in the immediate wake of the Reformation among Dutch and
German Anabaptists. Even the English radicals' most shocking sug-
gestion — that sin itself might be a lie —was but the latest articulation
of the Pelagian heresy that had so incensed Augustine.

But if, in purely theological terms, the radical speculation of the
English civil war was not entirely without precedent, its scale and in-
tensity around the specific theme of earthly happiness most certainly
was. Those seeking (to cite the revealing title of a contemporary tract)
The Way to Happinesse on Earth did so with greater faith in the possibil-
ity of reaching that end than almost any group of men and women in
96
the West since the coming of Christ. The bloodshed of the civil war
cast a pall over such optimism, and the repression of the more radical
sects under Cromwell's consolidated Calvinist regime was more con-

vincing still. But a critical threshold was crossed. 97 As even a royalist
apologist was anxious to concede in the first year of the civil war, "We
must look through all things upon happinesse, and through happiness
upon all. . .
." For this force "giveth law to all our actions," he empha-
98
sized. "Happinesse is the language of all."
John Locke would come to agree entirely with these propositions,
and in fact he is rightly considered their most celebrated theorist of

178 Happiness
the seventeenth century. But just when and how he developed his
views —and whether and how the literature of the 1640s helped to
shape them — not is weentirely clear; lack sufficient information about
the genesis of Locke's thinking. Studying moral philosophy and medi-
cine, Locke lived quietly in Oxford until the late 1660s, first as a stu-
dent, and then as a tutor, writing comparatively little and publishing

nothing. And although (or because) he gradually became known in the
most advanced scientific circles of the day —befriending the likes of
Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Newton— he kept

later, Isaac a pru-
dent silence about the events that swirled around him in his youth.
Certainly, Locke was no admirer of the Stuarts. Only ten when the
civil war began, he was a Puritan by birth and the son of an officer in
Cromwell's army. Over the course of his life, Locke's religious views
evolved in unorthodox directions; but he never renounced his faith. Of
his deep suspicion of monarchs, his later career bears ample testimony,
suffusing the work for which he is today most often remembered, the
Two Treatises of Government. Historians have long suspected that the Two
Treatises may owe more than a little to the output of the 1640s, particu-
larly to that of the Levellers, with which there are notable similarities."
But in the absence of a direct, evidentiary link, they are left to conclude
that it was "from conversation and casual contact, not from documen-
tary acquaintance that Locke inherited the fruit of the radical writings
of the Civil War." 100
Much the same might be said about Locke's rela-
tionship to the mid-seventeenth century's fruitful writing on happiness.
For though there is no written testimony of a direct connection, it does
seem unlikely that he would have remained entirely unaffected by this
broader context. Protestant radicals had crossed a threshold, broken a

taboo, making it possible for men to conceive of their place in the world
in new ways. It was left to Locke to conceive a new theory of the human
mind to accommodate this novel aspiration.
Locke has almost nothing explicit to say about happiness in the
Two Treatises.
m But in his other masterwork, the Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, the subject figures prominently. Begun as early
as 1671, though not published until December 1689, the work — far
more than the anonymously issued Two Treatises — catapulted Locke

to international celebrity, earning him the lasting epithet "the New-

ton of the Mind." Whether he actually merited this title is a compli-
cated question. 102 But in a loose way, the man Locke referred to in
his introductory "Epistle to the Reader" as the "incomparable Mr.
Newton" almost certainly exercised an influence on the work's con-
tent and conception. Whereas Newton aimed to demonstrate the

universal laws of motion governing the operation of the solar system,
Locke aimed to unveil the universal laws governing the operation of
the human mind.

Such grand designs are hardly evident in Locke's own disingenu-
ously humble claim that his purpose in the Essay was to act like "an
under-labourer," "clearing the ground a little, and removing some of

the Rubbish, that lies in the way to knowledge." But as one ventures
into this dense, if well-marked, book, it becomes clear that by "rub-
bish" Locke meant quite a lot. With reference to the vast range of
peculiar, often conflicting habits, customs, and beliefs that litter the
world, Locke concludes that we cannot be born with any fixed notions
or ideas, moral or otherwise. If it were true, as many philosophers in
the classical and Christian traditions had alleged, that the law of na-
ture was inscribed in the hearts of all (or, as Locke's rough contempo-
rary Rene Descartes had maintained, that "innate ideas" accompanied
us at birth), then it would surely follow that young children and the
uneducated would agree on their duties, or at least know what they
are. But nowhere was this so, leading Locke to conclude that we are
born into the world with minds like an "empty cabinet" or a "white
piece of paper," a blank slate.
This was Locke's famous tabula rasa, and in the bulk of the Essay
he endeavored to show how the world writes upon it, imprinting itself
on our minds. Explaining this process in detail, he elaborates the com-
plex mechanics of the motion of thought that lead from the physical
sensations we receive from the external world to the formation of ideas
through perception, reflection, contemplation, and judgment. For

those interested in epistemology — the study of how we know— this
discussion is of landmark importance. But from the perspective of the

history of happiness, what is more interesting is what gets left aside.
180 Happiness
For not only does Locke's tabula rasa clear away the rubbish of innate
ideas, it wipes our slate clean of original sin. Locke was under no illu-
sions about the quantity of evil in the world. And he fully understood
the stubbornness of self-interest. But he refused to accept that we are
born into the world with minds inherently marred, deficient in rea-
son, and tending toward corruption.
To the degree that human beings give indication of any natural
propensity at all, it is in a very different direction. "What is it that
determines the Will in regard to our Actions?" he asks in the critical
chapter "Power" in book 2 of the Essay. Uneasiness, he answers: "Tis

uneasiness alone [that] operates on the will, and determines it in its
choice." Locke's blanket term for "all pain of the body" and "disquiet
of the mind," uneasiness is invariably accompanied by desire, which is
"scarce distinguishable from it." When we suffer the uneasiness of
pain, we desire to be relieved of it. And when we suffer the uneasi-
ness of an absent good, we desire the pleasure of its attainment. 103 To

be uneasy is to be restless, kinetically dissatisfied with our present
state, to desire change. Like an object acted upon by a force —and
throughout this chapter, Locke uses such Newtonian metaphors,
speaking of stones that fall, tennis balls hit by racquets, and billiard
balls struck by cues — the will of the uneasy individual is propelled into
motion, repulsed by pain, and attracted by pleasure. As one critic has
observed, Locke's "uneasiness of desire is the first vague pull of the
will entering a gravitational field." 104
But what is the source of this force field that creates uneasiness,
moving desire? Again, Locke is ready for the question:
If it be farther asked, what 'tis moves desire} I answer happi-

ness and that alone. Happiness and Misery are the names of two
extremes, the utmost bound whereof we know not; 'tis what
Eye hath not seen, Ear hath not heard, nor hath it entred into the Heart
of Man to conceive [1 Cor. 2:9]. But of some degrees of both,

we have very lively impressions, made by several instances of
Delight and Joy on the one side and Torment and Sorrow on
the other; which, for shortness sake, I shall comprehend
under the names of Pleasure and Pain, there being pleasure

and pain of the Mind, as well as the Body. . . .
Happiness then in its full extent is the utmost Pleasure we

105
are capable of, and Misery, the utmost Pain. . . ,
That we have come across similar reflections before may obscure the
tremendous novelty of this passage. Locke's argument here is remi-
niscent of Epicurus, who also envisioned pleasure and pain as the
motive forces of human action, the great movers of human desire. The
debt is straightforward, though not direct: Locke drew his Epicurean
views largely from a seventeenth-century French mathematician and
priest, Pierre Gassendi, who had attempted to build a Christian sys-
tem on the shoulders of Epicurus. 106 The Englishman was not quite
so foolhardy, but in truth he does seek to Christianize important Epi-
curean assumptions. Placing God at the heart of this passage, Locke

sets the Creator at one extreme of the scale of happiness, marking
off the distance from the misery of eternal damnation. And though
divine rapture — the happiness of heaven— is ultimately inconceivable,
Locke assumes that it is qualitatively of a kind with the pleasures we
know here. The foretaste of heavenly delight is no rarefied intellec-
tual attainment —no fleeting glimpse of beatitude — but something

we can savor, relish, and feel. More to the point, the pleasure we
experience in this life leads directly to that of the next. In Locke's
divinely orchestrated universe, pleasure is providential; in following
its promptings, we are led to God.
Pleasure as divine impetus? It is no wonder that a good many of
Locke's Christian contemporaries regarded his assertions with sus-
picion. Yet Locke never intended his model of the mind as an apol-
ogy for manner of indulgence. Nor did he see his theory of
all
providential pull as in any way eclipsing the prospect of human free-

dom. If God, in his wisdom, had made pleasure and pain the motive
forces that shape our will, he meant for us to use our liberty and rea-
son to decide what true pain and true pleasure were. And this, pre-
cisely, was where many went wrong. Although individuals were

infallible in their calculations regarding short-term pleasures and
182 Happiness
pains —responding with the of hand alacrity a thrust in a cookie jar

or pulled from flame — they frequently made egregious
a errors when
looking down the road, or failed to look at all. Following the detours
of custom, fashion, ill habit, or simple wrong judgment, they con-
tinually led themselves astray, exchanging lasting gain for more fleet-
ing fancy. It was thus of the utmost importance that the seeker of
happiness remain ever vigilant in calculating pleasures and pains.
"This is the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual Beings,"
Locke affirmed. As the "highest perfection" of our nature lay in "a
careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness," it was in-
107
cumbent that "we mistake not imaginary for real happiness."
But how was one to distinguish the two? This was the great ques-
tion, and given its magnitude, Locke's answer may strike us as less
than revolutionary. For in effect he concludes that the surest way to

real happiness is the road to everlasting life. Bet on the existence of
heaven, Locke maintains, and we cannot lose: "When infinite Happi-
ness is put in one Scale, against infinite Misery in the other; if the
worst, that comes to the pious Man, if he mistakes, be the best that
the wicked can attain to, if he be in the right, Who can without mad-
108
ness run the venture?" As Locke would reaffirm in a later work,
using the same metaphor of the scale, virtue was "visibly the most
enriching purchase and by much the best bargain." 109
To conceive of heaven as a "good bargain" was not exactly the quin-
tessence of piety. And indeed the title of the work in which Locke
makes this statement, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), is indica-
tive of his general orientation toward the faith. Religion could com-
mand our assent only when it was in accordance with reason, Locke
held, a conviction that led him many of the historical ac-
to discount
cretions of Christian dogma. Denying (like Newton) the doctrine of

the Trinity and relegating revelation to a subsidiary role to reason,
which he described as "natural revelation" — the true "candle of the
Lord" —Locke made of Christianity in essence a purely ethical creed.

Yet he retained faith in the afterlife as an indispensable guide to the
path we should follow here below:
2
Open [men's] eyes upon the endless unspeakable joys of

another life and their hearts will find something solid and
powerful to move them. The view of heaven and hell will cast
a slight upon the short pleasures and pains of this present
state, and give attractions and encouragements to virtue,
which reason and interest, and the care of ourselves, cannot

but allow and prefer. Upon this foundation, and upon this only,
1 10
morality stands firm.
The last line is revealing. For in fact Locke had skirted dangerously
close to imagining a world without such foundations. Given, as he had
argued in the Essay, that "pleasure in us, is that we call Good, and what
is apt to produce Pain in us, we call Evil," one could be led to conclude
that good and evil were merely matters of taste. 111 And since one man's
pleasure was another man's pain, in the absence of a better world to
justify this one, the road to happiness would branch out in countless
directions. It was a prospect that Locke was willing to contemplate

openly:
If therefore Men [have hope only in this life]; if in this Life

they can only enjoy, 'tis not strange, nor unreasonable, that
they should seek their Happiness by avoiding all things that
disease them here, and by pursuing all that delight them;
wherein it will be no wonder to find variety and difference.
For if there be no Prospect beyond the Grave, the inference is
certainly right, Let us eat and drink, let us enjoy what we delight
i n for tomorrow we shall die.
,
x 1
The reference, of course, was to a line of scripture, invoked, as we

have seen, by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:32 but also found in Isaiah
22:13. It captures equally well the Epicurean injunction — or that of
Horace's carpe diem —uttered without restraints. Locke was perfectly

prepared to complete the thought. "Were all the Concerns of Man
terminated in this Life," he added, then "why one followed Study
184 Happiness
and Knowledge, and another Hawking and Hunting; why one chose
Luxury and Debauchery, and another Sobriety and Riches" would be
simply "because their Happiness was placed in different things." Some
men liked lobsters, and others liked cheese. To try to satisfy them
with the same pleasure was an impossible task, a reflection that
prompted Locke to dismiss the inquiries of the ancients after a single
summum bonum consisting in virtue, or contemplation, or bodily de-

lights. They might just as reasonably have disputed, Locke quipped,
"whether the best Relish were to be found in Apples, Plumbs, or
Nuts." 113
Yet having entertained the thought that there might be as many
paths to happiness as there were pleasures of men, Locke backed away.
"The Manna in Heaven will suit everyone's Palate," he declared, urg-
ing that we make this the final object of our desire. 114 Since the an-
cient Israelites had taken up the road to Canaan, since the Greeks had
set out toward the highest good, since Christ had proclaimed, "I am
the way," happiness in the West had only ever been conceived as a
single journey to a single end. Locke was not willing to multiply the
paths in infinite directions.

The more radical Thomas Hobbes, Locke's contemporary and ac-
quaintance, was alone prepared to contemplate that possibility un-

flinchingly. Judging without reserve that there was "nothing simply
and absolutely" good or evil — only what we named the object of our
desire and the object of our hatred — Hobbes dismissed the idea of
happiness as a final end. "The felicity of this life consisteth not in the
repose of a mind satisfied," he observed: "For there is no such Finis
ultimus [utmost aim] or Summum Bonum [greatest good] as is spoken of

in the books of the old moral philosophers." Felicity, rather, was a
"continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the at-
taining of the former being still but the way to the latter." And so the
process would continue unabated, according to the pleasures and

tastes, the aversions and fears of each, until it was finally arrested. Even
the best scenario need be qualified and provisional. " Continual success
in obtaining those things which aman from time to time desireth, that
is to say, continual prospering, is that men call Felicity; I mean the
..
felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquility
of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can
never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without
sense." In Hobbes's view, human bodies could be at rest only when all
motion stopped. Until that time, they would be ruled by "a perpetual
and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." 115
This was not an altogether consoling picture. Yet it was one present
just below the surface in Locke. "We are seldom at ease, and free
enough from the sollicitation of our natural or adopted desires," he
acknowledged in the Essay, "but a constant succession of uneasiness . .
take the will in their turns; and no sooner is one action dispatch'd . .
but another uneasiness is ready to set us on work." 116 Here, too, the
individual was caught up in a restless and perpetual chase, an endless
pursuit. Given "the multitude of wants, and desires, we are beset with
in this imperfect State," Locke confessed, "we are not like to be ever
freed from [uneasiness] in this World." 117 Were it not for the haven of
peace in the next life, the pursuit of happiness would have no end.
As we will see in later chapters, this prospect would return to haunt
the Western imagination. But in Locke's own day, and for some time
thereafter, his readers were largely content to overlook such disconcert-
ing speculation. For whatever else might be said, Locke ^/legitimated

the search for happiness in this life, grounding it in science, human
impulse, and divine order. Whereas in the cosmos envisioned by the
humanists and their Protestant successors, men and women were ulti-
mately led to perfect happiness by the motive power of Grace, in Locke's

Newtonian system, human beings were pulled along by their own
weight. Here there was little room for divine intervention, little need
for grace: Happiness was in the nature of things. "Men's happiness or
misery is most part of their own making," Locke affirmed in his great
118
treatise on education. As he reaffirmed elsewhere, "The business of
men is to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature
subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure, and by the comfortable
hopes of another life when this is ended." 119 Thiswds a consoling picture.
In the thought of John Locke, then, one sees the fruition of a con-
ception of Christian happiness on earth that had developed and grown
—
186 Happiness
since Thomas Aquinas scattered the seeds oifelicitas in the imperfect

soil of the world. Nourished by the humanists' cultivation of the dig-
nity of earthly existence and the general Protestant injunction to pur-
sue happiness in all things, Locke's notion of happiness grew beyond

the limitations of both. For though it was still true that in comparison
to the "utmost bound" of pleasure to be tasted in heaven, the pleasures
of this life were not so sweet, Locke presented them as part of a con-
tinuum, of a kind with heavenly delights. The gap between perfect

happiness and happiness imperfect was not a vast chasm but a natural
progression from the pleasures of this world to the pleasures of the next.
Our "very lively impressions" of the one gave a sweet foretaste of the
other.The manna of heaven and the manna of earth were not such dif-
ferent things. Some pleasures, yes, remained better than others, but
pleasure itself was no longer bad. We should pursue it as best we could.
And we should be free to do so. If Locke seldom referred specifically
to what he described, in passing, in the Two Treatises on Government as
"political happiness," politics was undoubtedly present in his general
conception of man and mind. 120 Intended by our creator to pursue hap-
piness as a law of nature, we must not be impeded in our course or de-
flected from our path by the power of an outside force. It was not
sufficient, as the Roman emperors and other absolute monarchs had
done, simply to proclaim felkitas temporum, the happiness of the times.
Liberty was an indispensable condition of the natural trajectory of hap-
piness and of its proper pursuit. As long as we did no harm to others
or impeded their paths —we should be allowed to pursue our own.
This must also include the freedom to choose poorly, the freedom
to go awry. For in Locke's view, a necessary element of human dig-
nity —the "hinge" on which the liberty of intellectual beings turned
was our ability to determine pleasures and pains for ourselves. He

hoped, without question, that we would choose the right course, and
he possessed a clear conception of what this should be, urging like the
Renaissance humanists that our "highest perfection" lay in the "care-
ful and constant pursuit" of true happiness along the Christian path.
But for the same reasons that it was not government's prerogative to
legislate salvation by dictating religious faith, it was not government's

Peter Paul Rubens, The Felicity of the

Regency, 1623-25, Bibliotheque
nationale de France. Rubens
proclaims the happy reign in France
of Maria de Medici, mother of
Louis XIII, who ruled as regent
following the death of her husband,
Henry IV.
place to legislate happiness. In either instance, "toleration" must be

shown, as Locke emphasized in a famous open letter on the subject,
written in 1685, and first published in 1689. Of the many paths pur-
sued by men, he acknowledged:
There is only one of these which is the true way to eternal
happiness. But in this great variety of ways that men follow, it
is still doubted which is this right one. Now neither the care of
the commonwealth, nor the right of enacting laws, does dis-

cover this way that leads to heaven more certainly to the
magistrate, than every private man's search and study discovers
it unto himself. 121
Individuals should be left to answer to God and their own con-

sciences regarding the steps they take to attain happiness in this
life, as in the next.
Locke's extension of the principle of toleration from the realm of

ultimate happiness to that of happiness on earth would have important
188 Happiness
consequences for the development of democracy. By emphasizing in-
dividual liberty and choice, Locke placed the burden of pursuit on the
shoulders of men and women, not on their governments. To provide
the free space in which to pursue our ends was one thing, to secure
those ends another. Even the "right enacting of laws," Locke knew,
was unlikely to discover the "one true way" to happiness. We should
ever be wary of the attempt.
Nevertheless, by establishing the principle of the consent of the
governed, and by giving citizens the right to cashier their rulers when
they acted in defiance of the common good, Locke's ideas, like the
revolution they aimed to uphold, admitted a new place for happiness
in the political vocabulary of the West. If human happiness was genu-
inely intended by the laws of the universe and the order of creation,
then surely any government that impeded its attainment did not rule
in keeping with the natural order. Did it not follow, in some measure,
that governments had a responsibility to provide for the happiness of
the governed? Locke himself observed that "the public good is the rule
and measure of all law-making," and "If a thing be not useful to the
commonwealth ... may not
it presently be established by law." 122 But
what did "useful" imply? And if the limits of the pursuit of happiness
were those actions "destructive to human society," what did "destruc-
tion" entail? Far from ending debate on such questions, Locke's theo-
ries brought them to the fore.
Arts of Contentment
Fifteen years before John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understand-

ing graced the bookstalls of London, Richard Allestree published his
own Art of Contentment (1675). Few today will have heard of Allestree,
but in his own time, he cut quite a figure. The provost of Eton Col-
lege and a leading Royalist divine, Allestree had personally taken up
arms to fight with the forces of Charles I during the civil war. He
had since become a popular moralist, and with The Art of Contentment —
a work that went through over twenty editions, remaining in print
until the nineteenth century —he captured the tenor of his age in
language even a schoolboy could understand. "Though every man

would have happiness," Allestree began, the great majority lose them-
123
selves in "blind pursuits." This is regrettable, for God, who is "happy
in himself," has shown us "a more certain, a more compendious way
to acquire what we grasp after," laying out in the Gospel "a plain, a
safe, nay a pleasant path, as much superior both in the ease of the
way, and in the end to which it leads, as heaven is to Canaan." 124
Unlike the Israelites, we need not wander through the wilderness,
need not ramble in "wild pursuits after [happiness], we may form it
within our own breasts." Happiness lies within us all, and Christian-
ity shows the way. "'Tis certainly the most excellent, the most com-
At the The a t e r. in Oxford.

M. DC. LXXV.
The title page of a 1675 edition of Richard Allestree's Art of Contentment. Bodleian
Library, The University of Oxford.
190 Happiness
pendious art of happy living" ever formed. "All the lines of worldly
happiness are concentrated" there. It is the unum necessarium, the only
necessary thing we need to have the "grand and ultimate happiness"
of the next life, and this our "intermedial" happiness as well. 125
Allestree made these points in the book's first pages. As unimpeach-
able as it is conservative, the remainder of the work counsels thankful-
ness, deference to authority, and acceptance of one's circumstances:
precisely what might be expected from this Restoration supporter
of the Stuarts. But if Allestree was no revolutionary, he was nonetheless

taking part in a revolution — a profound rotation of the heavenly and
earthly spheres — that involved what one scholar has termed the
"reconceptualization of suffering" as a means to the art of content-
ment. 126 The primacy that Perpetua had once placed on reliving Christ's
passion in the journey to paradise and the value that many Catholics
had long seen in suffering as a way to God were being turned aside.
Gradually, the pleasures of earth were coming around, while Heaven,

so long the focus of Western eyes, receded a little farther into the ether
of space. And amid this upheaval in the cosmos, a new divinity was form-
ing, which religion, too, was learning to serve. Like its predecessors,
earthly happiness would show itself to be a jealous god.
This great reorientation of the human gaze —from the joys of heaven
to the happiness of earth — took place slowly, and in fact had scarcely
begun. It is nonetheless revealing that a man such as Allestree — a high
churchman and a defender of the Stuarts —could essentially agree with
a revolutionary latitudinarian like Locke. The potential for earthly hap-
piness lay within us, both believed, and though religion could show us
the way, there was increasing scope for thinking that we generated
momentum on our own. The two men would have agreed on little else.
But on happiness they saw eye to eye.
Their perspective was not unchallenged. Many continued to empha-

size the insuperable barrier of sin, and the inherent unhappiness of life,
believing, like the pious Restoration author of The Happinesse of Those who
127
Sleep in Jesus that our true reward comes only in death. Yet for all the
inertia of this belief —and it was considerable —the new perspective was
gathering force. The final two decades of the seventeenth century wit-
nessed an explosion of works on happiness, and the very titles are re-
vealing. Rummaging through a London bookstore, one might come

across A Persuasive to a Holy Lifefrom the Happiness that Attends it Both in this
World, and in the World to Come; or chance upon The Way to Health, Long
Life and Happiness, a discourse on temperance boasting "the most hid-
den secrets of philosophy . . . communicated to the world for a general
good"; or meet happily with England's Happiness Improved, or An Infallible
way to get Riches, Encrease Plenty, and Promote Pleasure, a tract extolling the
unlikely art of making "Wine of English grapes." 128 This, surely, was the
ultimate affirmation of ordinary life.
In formal theology, one can also trace the "diminishing emphasis"
afforded to the "spiritual benefits" of pain over the course of the sev-
enteenth century. 129 Another of the long-term consequences of the
Gerard Audrand and Pierre Mignard, The Felicity of the Blessed. Design for the cupola
of the church of Val de Grace, 1693. Musee de Louvre, Paris.

192 Happiness
Reformation, which frowned on gratuitous suffering, this change was

likewise reflected in the arts, where new value was appreciated in
pleasure. In music, for example, composers took to celebrating the

various delights of existence. Henry Purcell's 1683 ode "Welcome to
All the Pleasures," though nominally dedicated to Saint Cecilia, the
patron saint of music, is in fact a wider celebration of the pleasures of

art and the arts of pleasure:
Welcome to all the pleasures that delight

Of ev'ry sense the grateful appetite,
Hail, great assembly of Apollo's race.
Hail to this happy place, this musical assembly

That seems to be the arc of universal harmony.
It was a perfect statement of an emerging conception of the world.

Purcell's perspective was certainly shared by his sometime libret-
tist, the future poet laureate of England, Nahum Tate. In 1681, Tate
published an adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, which
sought to improve upon the original by, among other things, giving the
play a happy ending. Rather than conclude the drama in a bloodbath,
like the bard, Tate preferred to spare the life of the heroine Cordelia
as well as that of her lover, Edgar, so that the two might marry and
live, like Lear, happily ever after. As strange as these alterations may
seem today, Tate's adaptation proved tremendously appealing to con-
temporary audiences, holding the stage in preference to the original

130
well into the nineteenth century. It is tempting to read in its suc-
cess an evolving preference for the outcome expressed in its ending, a
growing conviction that human beings need not wait for the next world
to bring their lives to a happy conclusion.
This is probably pushing the interpretation a little too far. Yet it is
undoubtedly the case that one witnesses in the poetry of this period
the consolidation of a more general image of the "happy man," who
succeeds in living his days happily until the end. The image is that of
the happy husbandman in rural retirement, culled largely from the

131
pastoral visions of Horace and Virgil. In many ways, their idyll of
—
rural innocence had never been forgotten: Even medieval poets were
familiar with the message of Horace's carpe diem. 132 But the recovery
of his work that began in the Renaissance gave the theme a freshness
and a new poignancy. Already in the 1470s, Lorenzo de Medici could

write in the lyrics to a carnival song:
How lovely is youth

Yet it slips away;
If you would be happy, be so.
There is no certainty about tomorrow. 133
And in the middle of the next century, the French-born printer of

Antwerp, Christophe Plantin, penned a sonnet, "Le Bonheur de ce
monde" that can still be found hanging in the foyers and entry halls of
modern homes. The poem urges the Horatian themes of simplicity

and acceptance, harmony and peace, with Plantin, the Catholic son
of a servant, recommending a clean and comfortable house in the coun-
try, a garden and fruit trees, and "some excellent wine." Content your-
self with little, he counsels: a faithful wife, few children, no debts,
lawsuits, or quarrels. Live without ambition, be devout, keep an open
mind. And say your rosary as you tend to your vines, waiting sweetly
in the garden for death to come when it will. This is the "happiness
of the world." 134
poem tends to the more Stoic side of the Horatian for-
Plantin's
mula, as did much of the pastoral verse of the later-sixteenth-century
Pleiade, the group of French poets who also picked up on the theme
of rural retirement. Others followed Medici in hinting at stronger plea-

sures, but the majority imitated Horace in loosely blending Epicurean
and Stoic themes to craft new images of the modern Tem-
beatusvir.
pered always by the Christian spirit, the theme of the happy man in
rural retirement came intoown in seventeenth-century England,
its
when John Ashmore and Thomas Hawkins, among others, devoted

themselves to new translations of Horace's satires and odes. Dryden
followed with his own, turning also to Virgil and Lucretius; in be-
tween, some of the greatest poets of the century —Milton and Ben
194 Happiness
Jonson, Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan, Robert Herrick and

Abraham Cowley —cultivated Christian-inflected images of the Stoic
or Epicurean sage living in pastoral bliss. Thus Milton can invoke in
II Penseroso "retired leisure, / That in trim Gardens takes his plea-
sure," while Jonson translates approvingly from Horace, in poetry of
his own:
Happie is he, that from all Businesse cleere,

As the old race of Mankind were,
With his owne Oxen tills his Sires left lands,
135
And is not in the Usurers bands. . . .
The poet Joseph Hall counsels:
... let thy Rural Sanctuary be

Elizium to thy wife and thee;
There to disport your selves with golden measure. 136
And Robert Herrick exults:
Hail, the poor Muses richest Mannor Seat!
Ye Country Houses and Retreat,

Which all the happy Gods so Love,
That for you oft they quit their Bright and Great
Metropolis above. 137
Much of this poetry amounted, like Horace's own, to a none too subtle
critique of the corruption of the times. To preach rural retirement
was to urge withdrawal from the business of the world, a theme that,
in the hands of Royalist poets like Vaughan and Cowley, could be di-
rected explicitly against what they saw as the unfortunate ascendance
of Puritans. Indeed, the invocation of Epicurean themes of innocent
pleasure — like Allestree's Tory contentment —was frequently in-
tended by Royalists to contrast favorably with what they regarded,

however unjustly, as the pinched and crabbed asceticism of their
. —
rivals. But again, what is most compelling is the common ground. A

Puritan like Milton can end the last line of his poem "UAllegro" com-
menting on the pleasures of art and the world:
These delights, if thou canst give,
Mirth with thee, I mean to live.
And a Restoration poet and dramatist like William Wycherley is ready

with a response:
We from our selves alone, and not from Fate,

Derive our happy, or unhappy State. . .
If Fates Inconstancy we wou'd prevent,

138
We, in all States of Life, shou'd seek Content . . ,
Increasingly, the common goal of pleasure and happiness was shared.

What was disputed was only the means.
Nor were such affirmations confined to England. I have singled out
this blessed isle in part because it was unique in the history of happi-
ness, producing as the strange offspring of English Protestantism,
English science, and the English revolution an unprecedented ethic

of earthly content. The same country that had served as corpse for
Robert Burton's anatomy of melancholy — a land that would later breed
a distinctive form of sadness known simply as the "English malady"
may be said to have given birth to modern happiness.
But this is not to imply that children elsewhere fell stillborn in de-
spair. The general forces that had worked to create a space for earthly
happiness in England were at work abroad, too. In Scotland and Ireland,
in the American colonies, and on the European continent, influential
voices were beginning to draw similar conclusions from the combined

precedents of Renaissance humanism and innovative Christian theol-
ogy, imagining a place for pleasure and felicity on earth. As increasing
numbers began to think beyond the boundaries of sin, the scope for
Western happiness widened considerably. Within decades of the turn
of the century, what was still a trickle of names endorsing lives of earthly
196 Happiness
content grew steadily to become a torrent, producing more writing and

reflection on worldly happiness than the world had ever known. And
what, until then, had been only a guarded thought was proclaimed
openly: If happiness was a natural state, why could it not be attained
entirely by natural means, without divine guidance at all?
SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS
1691, Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet published^ Treatise on the Posi-

In
tion of the Earthly Paradise. One of Europe's foremost biblical schol-
ars and a member of the prestigious Academie Franchise, Huet hoped
to put an end to a controversy that had long divided the posterity of
Adam: Just where on earth had God placed his first children, and where
now did the remnants of that once great garden lie?
[The earthly paradise] has been located in the third heaven,

in the fourth, in the heaven of the moon, on the moon itself
. . . outside the earth, on the earth, under the earth, and in a

hidden place far removed from human knowledge. It has been
placed under the Arctic pole ... on the banks of the Ganges
or on the island of Ceylon. . . . Others have located it in the
Americas, others in Africa below the equator, others in the

equinoctial East. . . . Most have located it in Asia: some in
Greater Armenia, others in Mesopotamia or Assyria or Persia

or Babylonia or Arabia or Syria or Palestine. There have been
those who wished to honor our Europe. . . -
1
198 Happiness
Huet was referring to the veritable mountain of opinion that had

piled up over the ages, sending medieval knights and early modern
adventurers scurrying over much of the globe in search of our ancestral
home. With the help of advanced biblical scholarship and a firm grasp
of geography, Huet believed he could finally pinpoint the coordinates.

Carefully considering the relevant passages in scripture, he concluded
that paradise lay to the eastern end of Eden, and that Eden itself con-
stituted the better part of Babylonia. The happy home of humanity,
it seems, stood in the Tigris and Euphrates delta, in modern-day Iraq.
Well aware that this view had been put forth before, Huet was less
conscious that his view was slowly being eroded — less by competing
theories of the position of the earthly paradise than by a decline in
the all-encompassing belief in human sin. It may be true, as the famed
English soldier and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh once observed, that "all
of us have a deep-rooted desire to know the place where our first par-
ents lived." But the passion for the discovery of the place of the bib-
J. Moxon, Paradise, or the Garden of Eden, London, 1695. One of many such
geographical renderings of the Biblical Paradise. The Garden of Eden can
be seen in the right middle. By permission of the British Library.
lical Eden was driven above all by theological concerns. 2 Only by fully
fathoming the state of primordial happiness, many believed, could we

comprehend what we had become. It was awareness of sin that pow-
ered the search for our place of innocence, because it was sin that
determined the magnitude of our subsequent Fall. And so, as the pre-
occupation with inherent human evil waned, so did the need to know
the precise coordinates of a long-vanished Eden. At the end of the
seventeenth century, Huet's treatise was gratefully received by the
Sun King, Louis XIV. Just decades later, Voltaire spoke for the ex-
ploratory interests of a new age. "Earthly paradise," he quipped, mock-
ing Huet, "is where I am." 3
. This shift in perspective —from the longing gaze in the direction
of a vanished golden age to a steady look straight ahead —was never as
neat or as tidy as this juxtaposition might suggest. Paradise lost con-

tinued to exert its attractions long after the eighteenth century, just
as the paradise in Heaven continued to exert its pull. Yet the eigh-
teenth century did witness an important reorientation in outlook along

the lines suggested by Voltaire's bon mot. His friend and colleague
the philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvetius made a similar observation
with regard to declining fears in a punishing afterlife. "Hell is no more;

'tis Heaven now on earth," he observed in his long poem "Happiness." 4
Increasingly,men and women were coming to think of the world as a
place where human beings might legitimately cultivate if not paradise,
then at least a garden of earthly delights.
Indeed, in spaces like those at Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens in
England, and in Paris at the Palais-Royal, eighteenth-century Euro-

peans erected vast "pleasure gardens" where men and women could
go simply for the purpose of enjoying themselves, of having "fun." 5
The word itself was a relative novelty, introduced in English only in
the late seventeenth century as a variation of the Middle English/*?//,

meaning jester or fool. As places where fun could be had, the pleasure
gardens were forebearers of our modern amusement parks, offering
games and recreation, spectacles and refreshments, music, and sanc-
tuaries in which lovers could stroll. They put flesh on the new en-
dorsement of pleasure expressed in theory by the likes of Locke,
200 Happiness
symbolizing perfectly a wider eighteenth-century aspiration to create

space for happiness on earth. To dance, to sing, to enjoy our food, to
revel in our bodies —
and the company of others in short, to delight
in a world of our —
own making was not to defy God's will but to live
as nature had intended. This was our earthly purpose. As the poet
Alexander Pope declared in his celebrated lines:
Oh, happiness, our being's end and aim!

Good, pleasure, ease, content! Whate'er thy name:
That something still which prompts the eternal sigh,
6
For which we bear to live, or dare to die. . . .
The great goal of the century, it was expressed time and again. "Does
not everyone have a right to happiness?" asked the Abbe Pestre, the
author of the entry on that subject in the French encyclopedia ed-

ited by Denis Diderot. 7 Judged by the standards of the preceding
millennium and a half, the question was extraordinary: a right to hap-
piness? And yet it was posed rhetorically, in full confidence of the

nodding assent of enlightened minds. By midcentury the claim was
becoming commonplace, and by century's end it was more common
still. Clearly, human beings deserved to be happy. The question was
how could felicity on earth best be achieved?
Eighteenth-century authors sought to answer this question in un-
precedented numbers. No previous age, in fact, wrote so much on the
subject or so often. In France, Britain, and the Low Countries, in
Germany, Italy, and the United States, disquisitions on happiness
poured from the presses: reflections on happiness, treatises on happi-
8
ness, systems of happiness, discourses, essays, sketches, and epistles.
As far away as Warsaw, the College of Nobles saw fit to organize a lec-
ture series on the theme "Man's Happiness Here Below." 9 Even in
Saint Petersburg, the privileged were allowed to join in the fun. After
striking a favorable peace with the armies of the Ottoman Empire in
1775, Catherine the Great commissioned the French master of cere-

monies A. P. Pochet to organize celebrations in the new interna-
tional style. One thousand performers were thrust into service,
dancing, singing, tumbling, riding, and swimming in a gigantic spec-
tacle that featured three hundred mechanical horses, a boat pulled by

tritons on an artificial lake, a circus, a carousel, fireworks, and four
allegorical plays. Amid this revelry, the goddess Felicity assumed cen-
ter stage, drawn on a chariot by four white bulls to a massive "Temple
of Happiness." 10 Not since theRoman Empire had Felicity been wor-
shipped with such fanfare. And rarely had so much energy been de-
voted to her earthly pursuit.
Of course, pursuit and capture are two different things. The more
sober observers of the century — men like Samuel Johnson and Im-
manuel Kant —appreciated the difference. But there was a tendency
to blur the distinction and, in doing so, to complicate the answers to
a number of fundamental questions. For if happiness was truly a natu-
ral condition, a law of our nature and the way we were intended to be,
then how to account for the continued existence of misery? And if
earthly happiness was treated primarily as a function of good feeling,
R. Pollard and F. Jukes, engraving after Thomas Rowlandson,

Vauxhall Gardens, 1785, Elisha Whittelsey Collection,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
202 Happiness
Paris's pleasure garden, the Palais-Royal. Photo courtesy of the

Bibliotheque nationale de France.
the balance of pleasure over pain, then what of the age-old links tying
happiness to higher things: to God, virtue, or the right ordering of the
soul?Was feeling good the same as being good? Was being good feeling
good? Was happiness a reward for simply living, or a reward for living
well?
Authors of the eighteenth century wrestled with these questions,
and in their struggle to provide answers, they unwittingly revealed
what only the most enlightened souls of the century were prepared to
acknowledge. As one perceptive observer, the scientist, translator, and

spurned mistress of Voltaire, the Marquise du Chatelet, confessed in
her own Discourse on Happiness, to be happy "one must be susceptible

to illusions, for it is to illusions that we owe the majority of our plea-
sures. Unhappy is the one who has lost them." 11 Chatelet experienced
the full weight of these words, dying disillusioned and in despair.
Belief in happiness, she seemed to understand, remained, even in an

12
age of Enlightenment, a species of faith.
<"»&?
PROJKT D*UNE PETE XA'EIONALK JJE TIOOMPHK A1XEGORIQUE
A sketch from A. P. Pochet's diagrams for the Temple of Happiness,

Archives nationale de France.
204 Happiness
Felicific Calculus
But why this dramatic reorientation and shift in the eighteenth cen-
tury — a shift whose clearest index was the explosion of interest in
earthly happiness itself? Already, we have traced several important

factors: the development within Christianity of new attitudes toward
pleasure and sin; the belief worked out painstakingly from Aquinas
to the Reformation and beyond that earthly happiness might be
treated as a sign of grace; and the notion, developed by Locke and
others, that to delight in the world — to live happily — is to live as God
intended. In this view, the world was not a "vale of tears" but a place
to experience the sweet foretaste of even greater joys to come. "It is
a happy world after all," concluded the Reverend William Paley at the
end of the eighteenth century. 13 A Protestant divine and an impor-

tant natural scientist, Paley saw the imprint of God's providence in
the wonders of creation. The world was as it should be, reflecting the
happy design and purpose of its maker.
Paley's was a common perspective, one that came to be shared by
many Catholics as well. Already by the second half of the century,
otherwise orthodox members of the church were penning treatises
with popular titles like / Want to Be Happy, The School of Happiness, and
The Theory of Happiness, or the Art of Rendering Oneself So }* True, virtu-
ally all of these works continued to insist that religion was the founda-
tion
—"the unique basis" — of earthly happiness, to cite one such title
by the French author Madame de Genlis. And 15

they dutifully pointed
out that perfect happiness would come only in the afterlife with God.
But by presenting religion as a means to what was increasingly re-
garded as a legitimate earthly end, these authors were participating in
the radical reevaluation of the century, the slow transfer of sacrality

from the otherworldly God of old to the god of good feeling, the god of
happiness, which was extending its sway on earth.
These religious developments were at once cause and effect of this

broader shift in human aspirations. But so, too, were material factors:
the rise of nation states equipped with standing armies and civil ad-
ministrations better able to guarantee security and the rule of law;

advances in agricultural productivity and the greater availability of

arable land; the expansion of trade and the birth of consumer cultures
that widened access to luxury goods while providing disposable income
to spend on fashion, entertainment, or a trip to a pleasure garden. It is
all too easy to forget, in fact, that the pursuit of earthly happiness as
something more than good fortune or a millenarian dream is a luxury
in itself. Only when individuals are free from the vicious daily pursuit
of staying alive can they afford to undertake the pursuit of more ex-
alted goals. Whatever one's final definition of happiness, it is rarely
compatible with regular and periodic famine, the ravages of plague and
pestilence, or the threat of marauding armies.
Such scourges did not cease in the eighteenth century, but by com-
parison with earlier periods, the century fared well. To take one re-
vealing example, it is estimated that in the first half of the seventeenth
century, a third of the population of Central Europe was killed off by

war, starvation, and disease. 16 The eighteenth century saw its own
conflicts and crises, but not until its final decade, with the onset of
the French Revolution, did it approach anything close to that horren-
dous scale. Even the terrible carnage of the Napoleonic Wars did not
arrest the general upward trends. The total population of Europe,
which stood at roughly 120 million in the early 1700s, reached 180 to
190 million by century's end, shooting up precipitously after 1750.
Sustained by declining mortality rates and longer life spans, it would
17
never fall again.
Unquestionably, there were great imbalances in the scale of this

change —from region to region and from rich to poor. But though one
might qualify the following statement in a variety of ways, its basic
truth is difficult to deny: The struggle for existence —however imper-

fectly, however haltingly —was becoming less of a struggle for more
human beings. Improvements in livestock breeding boosted the sup-
ply of meat, ensuring more protein in the daily diet. The opening of
new land to cultivation, favorable long-term weather patterns, ad-
vances in agricultural productivity, and the introduction of hitherto
unexploited crops such as maize and the potato from the New World
meant that Europeans ate more than ever before. Fortified by this
206 Happiness
nutritional infusion, they were less susceptible to disease. The last
major outbreak of plague in Western Europe occurred in Marseille in

1720, and though typhus, dysentery, and influenza remained, those
blights could not stem the steady influx of men and women from the
countryside into the eighteenth century's expanding cities and towns.
Although that pattern of urbanization would not reach its high point
until the nineteenth century, in the 1700s the growth of urban cen-
ters was already creating new concentrated markets that served as a
catalyst for what historians describe as the "birth of consumer soci-

18
ety." By the mid-eighteenth century, a "favorable conjuncture" of
an expanding population and rising agricultural prices, coupled with a

greater availability of credit and a massive boom in foreign trade, was
paying dividends in the form of increased investment and sustained
economic growth. 19 The supply of consumer goods and commodities
available to the middle and upper classes grew by the decade. Whether
Brazilian coffee or West Indian sugar, Virginia tobacco or British por-
celain and textiles, luxuries were at hand and available to ever wider
segments of the population, subject, like the exploding market for styl-
ish garments, to whims and fancies, fashion and trends. They appealed
directly to the century's fascination with pleasure. As the French gov-
ernment minister and philosopher Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot ob-
served, people in modern commercial societies "as it were, bought and
20
sold happiness."
The statement was exaggerated for effect. But it does capture

nicely how well the emerging commercial economies of the eighteenth
century coincided with the new ethics of pleasure announced by
Locke and his many continental admirers. By buying and selling luxury
items and services with the explicit aim of enhancing pleasure and
reducing pain, men and women pursued happiness in the manner that
both Locke and Hobbes had described — as a "continual progress of
the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former
21
being still but the way to the latter." Economists and moralists, from
Adam Smith to Karl Marx, would find much of interest in this progress
of desire, and it was not always reassuring. Nevertheless, by giving men

and women greater confidence in their ability to control and improve
Nicolas Lancret, A Lady in a Garden Taking Coffee, c. 1742,

National Gallery, London. Bequeathed by Sir John Heathcoat
Amory Bt. Introduced into Europe only in the late seventeenth
century, coffee was a new luxury for the middle and upper classes.
Eighteenth-century fashions fueled the "buying of happiness.'

Photo: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY.
—
208 Happiness
their environment, these economic and material advances sapped the

power of traditional explanations that consigned life to inevitable suf-
fering. In a world apparently less subject to the devastating upheavals

of fortune or the angry hand of God, it became possible to imagine
moving forward more happily on life's way.
This last observation points to another factor that played an impor-
tant role in sustaining the pursuit of happiness as an earthly prospect:
the Enlightenment. Critics and commentators have attempted to de-

fine that term since at least the end of the eighteenth century, when
Immanuel Kant posed his famous question Was ist Aufk/arung PVJhat
is Enlightenment? — in the pages of a Berlin journal, the Berlinische
Monatschrift. Over two centuries later, historians continue to debate the
answers. They point out that the Enlightenment took different forms
in different places, from Europe to the Americas. They argue over
its precise dates, which range from the late seventeenth century to
the early nineteenth. Some have even suggested that it would make
more sense to speak only of Enlightenments, plural, to account for
the differences that divide the French from the British Enlighten-
ment, or the German from the American, or the Protestant from the
Jewish.
These debates are healthy and very much in keeping with the En-
lightenment spirit, regardless of the different forms this movement
assumed. For if historians today continue to debate the differences
and the fine points, few would deny that a significant cultural and
intellectual phenomenon swept Europe and the Americas in the eigh-
teenth century, and that collectively it raised the art of raising ques-
tions to a new level. If the Enlightenment cannot easily be reduced to

a set of basic propositions, that is in large part because it evinced cu-
riosity in all things. What is the purpose of this or that belief, the le-
gitimacy of a particular law? Are our traditions rational, our customs

and institutions sound? What are we doing on earth? Why are we here?
Sapereaude was the motto of Enlightenment, Kant declared: "Dare to
know." In order to receive answers, one must pose questions.
It is for this reason that Enlightened voices were often vigorous in
their defense of free inquiry and freedom of expression, demanding
tolerance and the right to question all things. Their defense bespoke
confidence in the possibility of social progress through knowledge, and
faith that better understanding could make the world a better place.
Drawing heavily on Newtonian science and Locke's new science of
the mind, they put forth a picture of a harmonious universe, governed
by discernible laws. And at the center of this universe, they placed
human beings unstained by original sin, programmed for the pursuit
of pleasure, and ready, willing, and able to improve their earthly lot. If
there was a central concern that animated the Enlightenment's many

questions, it was how to make life better. In brief, as one eminent
scholar has summarized, "The Enlightenment . . . translated the ulti-
mate question 'How can I be saved' into the pragmatic 'How can I be
happy?'" The answers, eighteenth-century men and women increas-
22
ingly believed, could be found through human effort and understand-
ing alone.
Of course, the philosophers of classical antiquity had also posed
questions in an effort to know themselves, and they, too, had focused
their answers on the subject of happiness, which they regarded as
largely attainable by human means. Enlightenment authors were

themselves quick to acknowledge the fact."The Greeks were the
teachers of the Romans," Diderot observed, "the Greeks and Romans
have been ours." 23 They looked to the writings of the Stoics and the
Epicureans, in particular, as models to be emulated, presenting their
own "modern paganism" as an effort to build on classical foundations
that had been corrupted, they charged, by the long "barbarism" and
"superstition" of Christian "fanaticism." 24
Yet despite undeniable similarities and common features, eighteenth-
century happiness was not classical eudaimonia. In the first place,
Enlightenment observers tended to put much greater emphasis on

pleasure and good feeling than was ever the case among their classical
counterparts. For Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, pleasure was of com-
paratively little importance in cultivating the good life, which was
deemed compatible with significant suffering and sacrifice. Even
Epicurus was at heart who sought first to minimize pain
an ascetic,
rather than to maximize pleasure. Though pleasure was a good in
210 Happiness
Epicurus's view, it was always subordinate to the greater goal of achiev-
ing peace (ataraxia), a self-sufficient state free of anxiety and unease.

In such a state, Epicurus reflected, the wise man would suffer "no
more pain by being tortured himself than by seeing a friend being

25
tortured." Worthy of a Stoic, the reflection would have struck most
Enlightened observers as perverse. Not for these men and women the
trials and tribulations of the rack, and not for thesemen and women
the quietude of a detached existence. Social, active, and engaged,
eighteenth-century understandings of happiness upheld positive feel-
ing unapologetically as a basic good. As the Marquise du Chatelet ob-
served typically, to be happy one must begin by realizing that "there is
nothing more to do in this life than to procure for ourselves agreeable

sentiments and sensations." 26
To maximize pleasure and to minimize
pain — in that order —were characteristic Enlightenment concerns.
This generally more receptive attitude toward good feeling and
pleasure would have significant long-term consequences. It is a criti-
cal difference separating Enlightenment views on happiness from

those of the ancients. There is another, however, of equal importance:
that of ambition and scale. Although the philosophers of the principal
classical schools sought valiantly to minimize the role of chance as a

determinant of human happiness, they were never in a position to
abolish it entirely. Neither, for that matter, were the philosophers of

the eighteenth century, who, like men and women at all times, were
forced to grapple with apparently random upheavals and terrible re-
versals of fortune. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is an awful case in

point. Striking on All Saints' Day while the majority of Lisbon's in-
habitants were attending mass, the earthquake was followed by a tidal
wave and much of the city and took the
terrible fires that destroyed
lives of tens of thousands of men and women. "Quel tristejeu de hasard
que le jeu de la vie humaine" Voltaire was moved to reflect shortly there-
after: "What a sad game of chance is this game of human life." He was
not alone in reexamining his more sanguine assumptions of earlier in

the century, doubting the natural harmony of the universe and the pos-
sibilities of "paradise on earth"; the catastrophe provoked widespread
reflection on the apparent "fatality of evil" and the random occurrence
The Lisbon earthquake as depicted in a contemporary engraving. Courtesy

of the Jan T. Kozak Collection of the National Information Service for
Earthquake Engineering, University of California, Berkeley.
of senseless suffering. It was shortly thereafter that Voltaire produced

his dark masterpiece, Candide, which mocks the pretension that this is
the best of all possible worlds. 27

And yet, in many ways, the incredulity expressed by educated Eu-
ropeans in the earthquake's aftermath is a more interesting index of
received assumptions, for it demonstrates the degree to which such
random disasters were becoming, if not less common, at least less ex-
pected. Their power to shock was magnified accordingly, but only

because the predictability and security of daily existence were increas-
ing, along with the ability to control the consequences of unforeseen
disaster. When the Enlightened Marquis of Pombal, the First Minis-
ter of Portugal, set about rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake, he
paid great attention to modern principles of architecture and central
planning to help ensure that if such a calamity were to strike again,
the effects would be less severe. To this day, the rebuilt Lisbon of
Pombal stands as an embodiment of Enlightened ideas.
Thus, although eighteenth-century minds did not — and could
not —succeed in mastering the random occurrences of the universe,
212 Happiness
they could —and did—conceive of exerting much greater control over
nature and human affairs. Encouraged by the example of Newtonian

physics, they dreamed of understanding not only the laws of the physi-
cal universe but the moral and human laws as well, hoping one day to
lay out with precision what the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico de-
scribed as a "new science" of society and man. 28 It was in the eigh-
teenth century, accordingly, that the human and social sciences were
born, and so it is hardly surprising that observers turned their atten-
tion to studying happiness in similar terms. Whereas classical sages had
aimed to cultivate a rarified ethical elite —attempting to bring happi-
ness to a select circle of disciples, or at most to the active citizens of

the polls —Enlightenment visionaries dreamed of bringing happiness
to entire societies and even to humanity as a whole.
The clearest illustration of this expansive impulse is contained in

that celebrated eighteenth-century phrase "the greatest happiness of
the greatest number," or what was meant as the same thing, "the
greatest good of the greatest number." The cornerstone of the En-
lightenment principle of utility, the phrase is generally associated with
the English lawyer and theorist Jeremy Bentham, but it was employed
by many others before him. Indeed, when Bentham declared in his
1776 Fragment of Government, "It is the greatest happiness of the great-

est number that is the measure of right and wrong," defining the prin-
ciple of utility as "that principle which approves or disapproves of every
action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have

to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in
question . . .
," he was merely reiterating what was already a wide-
spread eighteenth-century conviction. 29 Figures as diverse as the Scot-
tish moralist and University of Glasgow professor Francis Hutcheson,
the German scientist and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von
Leibniz, the Italian legal theorist Cesare Beccaria, the French philoso-
pher Claude-Adrien Helvetius, and the French historian and soldier
the Marquis de Chastellux had all employed the felicitous phrase in
30
various forms. They did so in a common effort to establish what one
critic has called the great Enlightenment attempt "to create a science
31
of man based on numerical gauges for all his activity."
Hutcheson, for example, observed in his 1725 Inquiry into the Origi-
nal of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, "that action is best, which procures
the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers, and that worst which,
in like manner, occasions misery." The first edition of the book in-
cluded in its subtitle a more revealing description, advertising the

work as "an attempt to introduce a mathematical calculation in sub-
32
jects of morality." Hutcheson later abandoned that description but
not the attempt itself. Central to the work is the effort to fashion al-
gebraic formulas to calculate benevolence, defined as the desire to

spread happiness to others. Letting B = benevolence, A = ability,
S = self-love, I = interest, and M = moment of good, Hutcheson fac-
tored out the following:
M = (B + S) x A = BA + SA; and therefore BA = M - SA = M - I, and

B =
M-I . In the latter case, M = (B - S) x A = BA - SA; therefore
A
BA = M + SA = M + I, and
B _
M + 1 .
33
It was efforts like these that prompted the English author Benjamin
Stillingfleet to satirize a growing European trend. His Some Thoughts
Concerning Happiness (1738) purported to be a translation from the
original German by one Irenaeus Kranzovius that would "clear up the
Confusion which has hitherto reigned in this Affair." 34 Given that
mankind in all ages had been thwarted in the search for happiness,
the work's "Mathematical Method" promised to dispel disagreement

by "Means of Definitions, Postulata, and Axioms." The piercing cer-
tainty of Stillingfleet's conclusions defied debate. "A wise man ought
to get out of the Way when he sees a Beam ready to fall on his Head,"
the German philosopher proves by calculation, adding that in coun-
tries where corporal punishment is inflicted on those who refuse to go

to church, a man's happiness was best served by attending now and
then. 35
It is easy to be amused by such humor today, mindful as we are of
the impossibility of confining morality in a mathematical straitjacket.
—
214 Happiness
Yet to dismiss the attempt altogether with a condescending laugh is
to risk forgetting the tremendous prestige of the new methods of

mathematics and the natural sciences in the eighteenth century
and hence the possibilities they seemed to open up to the study of
human affairs. It is also to avoid confronting a very real problem faced

by anyone who believes that human experience can be improved.
How are such improvements to be measured? By what indices can
human happiness be known? To men and women grappling with what
was a brand-new conviction — the belief in the possibility of social
progress — this was not a problem that could be lightly dismissed.
Thus, despite the skepticism of satirists like Stillingfleet, the

search for a science of happiness continued. Writing somewhat later
in the century, Beccaria continued to hold out hope of establishing a

"political arithmetic" to guide policy makers in their attempts to en-
sure the "greatest happiness shared among the greatest number." 36
Chastellux devoted himself to a complementary end, endeavoring to
enhance "the greatest happiness of the greatest number of individ-
uals" by studying the phenomenon as it had developed over time. His
De la Felicite publique, ou Considerations sur le sort des Hommes dans les
differentes epoques de Thistoire purported to be the world's first history of

37
happiness, and arguably it was. "Of all the speculations to which a
study of the past can give rise," Chastellux begins,
are there any more beautiful, more worthy of our attention

than those which have for their object the happiness of
humanity? Many authors have examined, with care, whether
one people was more religious, more sober, or more warlike
than another: none has yet attempted to find the happiest
people. 38
Setting out to do precisely that, Chastellux established what he called

indices du bonheur in an early attempt at comparative sociology. He
admitted that his calculations would be rough, for any precise com-
parison of "public felicity" would require knowledge of complex vari-
ables: levels of taxation; daily and yearly totals of the working hours
expended to secure basic "necessities and ease"; estimates of the lei-
sure time available to workers; and calculations of the hours individuals

could labor without succumbing to despair, to name only a few. In
the absence of such precise data, Chastellux relied instead on a cruder
scale, treating slavery and war as the greatest impediments to public
happiness, followed closely by religious superstition, which led, he

argued, to ascetic self-denial, unnecessary fear, and the misappropria-
tion of resources. 39 More positively, he contended that levels of popu-
lation and the productivity of agriculture correlated directly whhfe/icite
publique.
Chastellux's indicators were wholly consonant with widespread

Enlightenment assumptions. Conceiving of human beings as intended
by nature to achieve happiness on their own, Enlightenment critics
placed great emphasis on the many impediments that had long stood
in their way. The inhuman practice of slavery and the terrible disrup-
tions of war were among the most obvious, but they were of a kind
with a whole battery of barbaric customs, prejudices, injustices, and

false beliefs that Enlightenment thinkers believed had long prevented
the majority of human beings from attaining their natural end. Like
those twin evils of religious superstition and fanaticism, accumulated
customs and prejudices barred human beings from living as they
should. Remove them, and happiness would flourish. As the German-

born philosopher and Parisian socialite the Baron d'Holbach observed
in Common Sense, "Men are only unhappy because they are ignorant." 40
In Enlightened circles, the sentiment was as straightforward as the
title of the work implied.
A similarly Enlightened logic applied to Chastellux's identification
of population levels and agricultural output as positive indicators of

happiness. In the eighteenth century —when the twin threats of over-
population and agricultural dependence were not yet known —such
indices made better sense than they do today, indicating both the will
41
to perpetuate life and the ability to do so. They also had helped
Enlightened polemicists win, over the course of the century, the so-
called Battle of the Ancients versus the Moderns. Begun in the late
seventeenth century as an esoteric, and somewhat silly, dispute over

the relative merits of ancient and modern art —was classical poetry
better than modern verse? — the controversy broadened into a wider
debate over the relative merits of society. Was contemporary civiliza-
tion more flourishing, more robust, more prosperous than in the golden
age of Greece and Rome? Using population estimates, and the related
index of food supply, some of the century's finest minds argued that
42
it was. Chastellux, whose own work was in many ways a parting shot
at the ancients, was thus in good company and on solid Enlightened
ground.
Beginning with the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Medes,
Chastellux weighed each of his factors over time, pausing at length to
consider the civilizations of Greece and Rome before moving on to
Western Christendom and ending in his own century. He showed him-
self a sanguine man. For though he refrained from specifying particu-
lar countries, he concluded that the happiest peoples in history were
those of contemporary Europe and their transplanted offspring in
North America. On the whole, the positive outweighed the negative:
Harvests were greater, populations larger, wars fewer, and "enlight-
enment" {lumieres) better diffused than ever before. Even the persis-
tence of slavery could not tip the balance in favor of the past. By
comparison with ancient times, that terrible institution was now far
less prevalent, Chastellux argued, and headed for total extinction. It
made no sense to glorify the good old days. Comparatively speaking,

this was the happiest age.
The same general conclusion was shared by others. Basing his as-
sertion on the decline of superstition and the availability and extent
of pleasure, Helvetius declared the eighteenth century the "century
of happiness." 43 The Milanese economist Pietro Verri largely agreed,
arguing similarly in his Meditazioni sulla felicita (1763) that his was the
happiest epoch in all of human history, the most enlightened and the
least susceptible to senseless pains. Yet self-congratulation of this kind
should not be taken as a sign of complacency. The majority of En-
lightened advocates of the "greatest happiness for the greatest num-
ber" — Helvetius, Verri, and Chastellux included —saw their work as
an ongoing process. Where happiness was conceived as the balance of

pleasure over pain, robust population growth and fine harvests were
only the beginning of a pursuit that was just getting started. The scope
for maximizing and minimizing accordingly was practically endless. "In
civilized nations, and therefore in the whole of mankind, the sum of
well-being is perpetually on the encrease [sic]" Bentham observed,
echoing Locke. The Scholastic and classical belief in a final place of
rest, a summum bonum, was, like the age-old search for a "philosopher's
stone," "meaningless and absurd." 44 Pleasure could always be ex-
panded or enhanced, and pain could always be mitigated or reduced.
The opportunities for improvement were vast.
In this way, the principle of utility armed eighteenth-century critics
with a powerful tool that could be applied, as Bentham affirmed, to
"every action whatsoever," used to judge the usefulness of all things.
Did a given practice, on balance, bring pleasure or pain? Were the ef-
fects of certain laws, attitudes, or institutions beneficial to the great-
est happiness of the greatest number? Were specific governments

conducive to the greatest good? "Every authority that is not exercised
for the happiness of all can only be founded on imposture and force,"
Chastellux was prepared to assert. 45 It was a radical claim, but one that
was repeated often, for it followed naturally from central Enlighten-
ment assumptions. If human beings were meant to be happy — they if
even, as the most radical proclaimed, had a right to happiness — then

surely governments had an obligation, a duty, to provide it? They
could, as a consequence, be censured when they failed in that duty.
Bentham himself eschewed the language of natural rights, calling

them, infamously, in a commentary on the French Declaration of
Rights of Man and the Citizen, "simple nonsense . . . rhetorical non-
46
sense, nonsense upon stilts." In doing so, he gestured in a poten-
tially dangerous direction. For if the goal of government was really the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, and if individuals were
not protected by inherent rights — to liberty, say, or to property or
life —was it not perfectly possible to conceive of realizing the happi-

ness of the many at the expense of the few? Relatively soon, at the
time of the French Revolution, this dilemma would prove anything

but a theoretical concern.
218 Happiness
More immediately, there were other potential problems posed by

the standard of utility. Bentham himself may not have conceived of
happiness as a natural "right," but others did. And even he, like so
many in the eighteenth century, believed that happiness was the natu-
ral human condition, what one author called a "law of our being," "en-
graved on our hearts." 47 Seeing that happiness was the positive balance
of pleasure over pain, it followed that to deny pleasure to the majority
could be done only through ignorance or injustice. Pleasure and its sad
twin, pain, Bentham wrote in The Fragment on Government, were the
"only consequences that men are at all interested in." 48 In his most
detailed work on the subject, The Principles of Morals and Legislation,
Bentham laid this out even more clearly:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two

sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to
point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what

we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong,
on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to
their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all

we think. . . . The principle of utility recognizes this subjection,
and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of
which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason
49
and of law.
Given that human beings were largely slaves to sentiment — ruled by

the dictates of their feelings — utility would guide them in the only
way it could: by maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. The task
of the legislator was simply to arrange human affairs so as to further
that end, writing laws, passing judgments, spreading light to promote

the greatest good of the greatest number.
But was it really so clear that pleasure and pain were the simple
standards that Bentham and others took them to be? For ail its appar-
ent logic and appeal to common sense, the principle of utility was less
useful in practice than at first it seemed. For how can pleasure be
measured? In the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham devotes

a brief chapter to the subject, laying out six criteria to be used in
making this all-important calculation. By assigning values to the in-
tensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness,
fecundity, and purity of pleasure and pain, one could "sum up" the
totals of each and then "take the balance" of the whole. The resulting
figure would give, in theory, a rough approximation of the "general

50
good tendency" or the "general evil tendency" of an act.
Bentham's language here, as elsewhere, is that of mathematical

precision. But in his more candid moments, he was ready to acknowl-
edge the serious limitations of his method. Repeatedly, he confessed

the impossibility of assigning a value to the key variable of intensity.
And he even appeared, on one occasion, to disavow the very premise
on which his entire calculus was based — the premise of the compara-
bility of pleasure. "'Tis in vain," he observed in an undated manu-
script, "to talk of adding quantities which after the addition will
continue distinct as they were before, one man's happiness will never
be another man's happiness: a gain to one man is no gain to another:
you might as well pretend to add 20 apples to 20 pears."
51
The fact
that Bentham himself was able, in a revealing effort at precision, to
list some 54 synonyms of the word "pleasure" — from "ecstasy" to
"well-being" to "satisfaction" to "bliss" —only reaffirms what already

should be clear: that pleasure, like pain, is an uncertain term, and thus
an unstable coefficient with which to run a function. The "felicific cal-
culus" of Bentham was not the mathematics of Newton. 52 One man's
pleasure could just as easily be another man's pain.
This dilemma raised another, potentially more serious, for it was a
problem not only of calibration but of ultimate ends. Namely, was it
really so clear that pleasure was our highest calling? Bentham and his
Enlightened colleagues argued unapologetically that it was, describ-

ing the dynamics of sensation as both the determinant of how we act
in the world ("the chain of causes and effects") and the measure of
how we ought to act ("the standard of right and wrong"). To claim
otherwise, they believed, was either self-deception or blindness to
220 Happiness
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the true ways of human beings. Yet neither their arguments nor their
assertions were enough to prevent intelligent commentators from
continuing to maintain that there were other springs to action besides
pleasure — duty, honor, patriotism, and faith, to name only a few —and
that it was good that this was so. Otherwise, was one not forced to draw
a rather dubious conclusion — that feeling good is being good, that cul-
tivating pleasure, no matter what its form, was a virtuous moral end?
Bentham, to his credit, could be candid about the fact, acknowledg-
ing in a celebrated reference that the "quantity of pleasure being
equal, pushpin is as good as poetry," pushpin being a popular
53
eighteenth-century game. But for the sake of argument, it might
have been anything at all, including lobsters or cheese.
Indeed, the dilemma raised by Enlightened utilitarianism was pre-
cisely the dilemma foreseen by Locke, who had pointed out: "Were
all the Concerns of Man terminated in this Life," then "why one fol-
lowed Study and Knowledge, and another Hawking and Hunting; why
one chose Luxury and Debauchery, and another Sobriety and Riches,"
would simply be "because their Happiness was placed in different
54
things." Locke held out the hope that the prospect of otherworldly
salvation would help mortals give priority to their various earthly ends.
But he fully acknowledged that "if there be no prospect beyond the

grave," then the conclusion suggested by Horace, Paul, and Isaiah was
worth heeding. Carpe diem. Eat and drink. We should take our plea-
sure while we can.
By no means all Enlightened voices denied, like Bentham, the pos-

sibility of prospects beyond the grave. But many did, and so they were
presented with this difficult dilemma. If happiness really was, in
Locke's words, "in its full extent the utmost Pleasure we are capable,
and Misery the utmost pain," and if there really was no everlasting
heavenly bliss to direct our actions here on earth, then did it not make
perfect sense to eat and drink with abandon, to amass as much plea-
sure in life as one possibly could? This was the conclusion reached by
one man at midcentury. In his work and the scandal it provoked, we
are offered a banquet of Enlightened contradictions.
222 Happiness
The Happiness Machine
One last time the great gourmand reaches for his wine. Gas billows
from below, exploding in an awful taste of what, only moments ago,
seemed delightful. Truffles and pheasant have gone to bile.Some-
thing is terribly wrong. Eyes bulge, the trousers tighten, sweat forms
on the brow. Perhaps monsieur would care for more? Spilling forward
as the room sways, monsieur overturns his glass, catching as he falls
one final glimpse of the glories of eighteenth-century decolletage. But

the French ambassador's wife is no longer smiling. The celebrated
materialist, the man said to have claimed, "You are what you eat," has
just collapsed in his plate, the victim of too much pate and a life far
too sweet.
Stories this perfect are seldom true. And the story of the transub-
stantiation a table of Julien Offray de la Mettrie is no exception. He-
donist the scandalous physician most certainly was — sensualist and
scientist, atheist and bon vivant — he had even foretold the delights
of sucking pleasure from death. Love and the end "are consummated
by the same means — expiration," La Mettrie observed in his System of
55
Epicurus (1750). It would seem a fittingly climactic prognosis. And
true to the tale, La Mettrie did dine at the French ambassador's resi-
dence in Berlin shortly before his death. But it was only later that he
fell ill, and weeks after that he died, in 1751, at the still-unripe age of
forty-two. Whatever the final cause (which remains, to this day, un-
certain), it is clear that La Mettrie did not meet his fate in his plate,
or his end in pate.
Such stories, however, frequently possess a truth of their own. And

this one, too, is no exception. Peddled by Voltaire not long after La
Mettrie's death, the malicious news was picked up by stringers in
the international republic of letters, embellished, and put back on
the wire. Religious writers delighted in reporting how a sensualist
had met —and become— his just desserts. Others improvised with
the coda of a last-minute conversion. But it was the Enlightened
themselves who joined most vociferously in writing off La Mettrie
as a menace and a fool. "Dissolute, impudent, a flatterer, a buffoon,
[La Mettrie] . . . died as he ought to have died . . . killed by the ig-
norance that he professed," observed Diderot nearly thirty years

after La Mettrie's death. Diderot acknowledged that the scandal-
ous philosopher had been amply and "justly decried," but he could
not resist putting the boot in one more time, railing for three pages
at La Mettrie's "frivolity of mind" and "corruption of heart." 56
Why this Enlightened outcry? It is hardly a mystery why religious
observers regarded La Mettrie with contempt. An atheist whose early
work in science led to a treatise on venereal disease, La Mettrie ended

no better than he began. In the year of his death, he penned as his
final literary production The Little Man with a Long Pole, not a work in-
tended to lift the soul. 57 Voltaire, for his part, had personal reasons to
be unkind. At the court of the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, the
two exiles had competed for favor and La Mettrie had clearly won.
Frederick even deigned to deliver La Mettrie's funeral address;
Voltaire was deeply annoyed.
But what grudge did Diderot and the others hold, and why were
they so quick to dismiss La Mettrie as a "frenzied madman" (un vrai
58
frenetique) and even worse? Was he not, as he claimed, a child of the
Enlightenment, working to "break the chains of prejudice" and to il-
luminate all with the "torch of experience"? And did he not strive, in
everything he did, to further human happiness, conceiving of man as
a happiness machine? The truth in this story depends on the taste of
the teller, to say nothing of that of those who choose to hear.
Born in France in 1709, La Mettrie studied medicine at Paris and

Rheims, and then moved on to the University of Leiden, then the
greatest center of medical research in the world. 59 Several years later,
he returned to Leiden, but this time as a man on the run. The high-
est court in France had ordered that a book bearing his name be
publicly burned. Though La Mettrie was a patriot, having served as
a military doctor with French armies in the field, he did not think it
prudent to press the point. He fled back to the Netherlands, a coun-

try with a long tradition of tolerance, which by the mid-eighteenth
century had shown itself to be receptive to the idea of happiness on
60
earth.
224 Happiness
As the title suggests, the offensive book in question, UHistoire
naturelle de Fame (1745), was a scientific study of the soul. By compari-

son with the works that would follow, it was relatively mild. But it did
make several audacious suggestions. Without saying so outright, La
Mettrie hinted that what is called the soul is simply the sum total of
its bodily parts, the final product of the interactions of matter. Just as
the stuff of plants gives rise to living, creeping things, and the mate-
rial of animals begets creatures that howl and crawl, might not the mat-
ter of men spawn beings that live, think, and feel? In La Mettrie's daring
suggestion, matter itself could creep and crawl, think and feel. Matter
itself could live. When that suggestion was coupled with the equally
shocking speculation that the stuff of all living things —whether plants,
animals, or human beings —might be essentially the same, La Mettrie

was treading on very dangerous ground.
The suggestion was shocking because it threatened to collapse
what Western culture for the preceding two thousand years had vir-
tually always kept apart: matter and mind, the body and soul. For
the Greeks, as for their Christian heirs, the two substances were
separate and distinct, the one inferior to the other. To suggest that
our loftiest essence — the immortal breath blowing through our mor-
tal bodies — might be only gristle and bone was a radical claim. In
effect, it was to blur the lines between animal, plant, and man, hint-
ing that all were self-generating machines.
There were, it is true, ample precedents on which La Mettrie could
draw in constructing this materialist system. Epicurus, the notable
exception to the Greek tendency to separate mind and matter, had

taught that the entire universe, including the "soul," was simply a
compilation of atoms. In even greater detail, his Roman heir Lucretius
had extended this claim, using it as a basis to dispel false fears. Given
that we and the world were but a swirling mass of atoms, we needn't
be bothered by ghosts, ghouls, and other phantoms, just as we needn't
dread punishment in a world to come. Neither spirits in life nor souls
in death should cause us fear. They do not exist.
La Mettrie drew openly on this tradition, coming to think of his
own thought as an "Epicurean" system, however partial that claim

—
most certainly was. He also borrowed extensively from more recent

thinkers, drawing with some unfairness on Descartes, Locke, and a
host of contemporary scientists, including his Dutch teacher at
Leiden, Herman Boerhaave, the German neurologist Albrecht von

Haller, and many others. As one leading scholar has observed, La
Mettrie was in many respects "the great summarizer of the previous
half-century," who "distilled the essence" of the most radical ideas
that had circulated in Europe since the second half of the seventeenth
century, often underground. A "borrower, copyist, and plagiarist," he
was also a sensationalist who knew how to present those ideas with
61
audacity and aplomb.
But equally important, La Mettrie also attempted to paint his pic-
ture ofman and the soul from life — or, more accurately, from death
observing the human body from the inside out in his capacity as a
physician: on the operating table, the anatomist's slab, and the field
of battle.What he saw was a revelation. Muscles seemed to move of

their own accord; valves opened; pumps pumped. And when one
looked inside our furry cousins, one saw much the same. "Slit open
the guts of man and animals," La Mettrie later challenged. "How can
you grasp human nature if you never see how the innards of the one
exactly parallel the innards of the other?" 62 Like a clock ticking in its
casing, a wind-up toy, or a mechanical bird, man was, quite simply, a

machine, and life, mechanical motion.
This dramatic claim forms the central point and the very title of La
Mettrie's most famous work. Published in late 1747, within a year of
his return to Holland, UHomme machine makes explicit what he had
only dared to suggest before: "The human body is a self-winding ma-
chine, a living representation of perpetual motion." "Contraptions of
springs," well-tuned clocks, men and women are sophisticated models
of animals and plants. "Man is not molded out of more precious clay
than they," La Mettrie writes. "Nature employed the same dough for
both man and animals, varying only the leaven." And given that "the
transition from man to animal is not abrupt," we should think of our-
selves as part of a fluid continuum that has evolved from below. "An
ape full of intelligence is just a little man in another form." 63 It follows
226 Happiness
that the soul is but "an empty word to which no idea corresponds." 64
For far too long human beings had been induced to think about this
subject by people whose claims to knowledge had no basis in fact.
"What have others to tell us, above all, theologians?" La Mettrie asks on
behalf of "physician-philosophers" like himself, men who are guided by

"experience and observation alone." "Is it not ridiculous to hear [the
theologians] pronouncing shamelessly on something they are incapable
of understanding?" The vast majority of so-called philosophers were no

better informed. Beginning their investigations a priori — prior, that is,
to experience — they "take flight with the wings of the mind," soaring
into the nether world of meaningless abstractions. Only a posteriori, on
the basis of careful observation, "by unraveling the soul as one pulls out
the guts of the body," could one hope to gain real clarity.
65
When one
had done so, probing and illuminating the labyrinth that is man, it be-
came clear that the "soul" is the shell of a word, the vestige of more
primitive ways of thought. Viewed under the light of modern science, it
simply disappeared.
To have one's soul ripped out is an uncomfortable experience in any
age, a fact that accounts for much of the violent reaction to UHomme
machine. But for La Mettrie, the operation was a simple procedure, re-
storing to patients the prospect of health. By living in bondage to false
beliefs, human beings had made themselves sick, starving their bodies
in order to feed the illusions of the mind. Sacrificing life to death, and
this world to the next, they had transformed pleasure into sin. In La
Mettrie's view, this was a terrible subversion of nature, which every-
where showed signs of running smoothly on its own. "Nature has cre-
ated us uniquely to be happy, yes, every one of us, from the worm who
crawls, to the eagle who loses himself in the clouds." 66 Alone of all natu-
ral creatures, human beings denied themselves their natural due.
Happiness, it was clear, must begin by acknowledging frankly what
we are —material beings, sophisticated animals, complex machines.
This would lead in turn to the jettisoning of the vestigial doctrine of
the soul. But La Mettrie did not rest content there. Proclaiming the
material body, he moved on to proclaim the material world. If the soul
could not be found in the matter of man, neither could God be found
in the matter of the universe. The belief in either apparition, La

Mettrie held, was equally detrimental to the free reign of nature. And
though, for safety's sake, he put the argument of L 'Homme machine in
the mouth of a "friend," claiming "to take no sides" in the debate over
the existence of God, it was clear where his sentiments lay:
However, [my friend] continued, the world will never be

happy until it is atheist. Here are the reasons this abominable
man gives. If atheism, he said, were generally widespread, all
the branches of religion would be cut off at the root and die.
No more wars incited by theological arguments, no more
soldiers of religion, terrible soldiers! Then nature infected by
a sacred poison would recover its rights and purity. Deaf to all
other voices, tranquil mortals would follow only their own

spontaneous inner council . . . the only one that can guide us
to happiness along the happy paths of virtue. 67
Here was a general Enlightenment contention — the prejudices

that
of organized religion had caused great suffering — taken the to ulti-
mate extreme. For La Mettrie not only charged, like many others,
that blind religious superstition was an impediment to human happi-
ness, he also alleged that any belief in God whatsoever precluded the
full flowering of nature's bounty. This was no soft deism, the com-
fortable notion that a clock-maker God had started the world ticking
and then left it to run on its own. This was atheism, naked and plain.
As open-minded as the Dutch might be, they would have none of that.
Like the French, they threw La Mettrie's work to the flame, and
rather than suffer a similar fate, the disobedient doctor absconded
once again, leaving the country in early 1748.
He landed this time not in a state whose traditions and laws guaran-
teed a minimum of tolerance, but in one where freedom was dispensed
from on high, according to the whim of the monarch. Nonetheless, in
Frederick the Great, La Mettrie found a sovereign disposed to look
on his theories with indulgence, for Frederick was a skeptic himself.
He granted La Mettrie a pension; secured him a place at the Berlin
228 Happiness
Academy of Sciences; and turned him loose in his Potsdam palace,

fittingly named Sans-Souci, "without cares." It was there, unencum-
bered, that La Mettrie pursued the implications of his thought, pub-

lishing in the last three years of his life a spate of books that pushed
his ideas to their logical extreme.
Although the titles of these works ranged from The System of Epicurus
to The Art of Enjoying Oneself, The School of Sensual Pleasure, and The Anti-
Seneca or The Discourse on Happiness, the principal themes were essen-
tially the same: Happiness lay in pleasure, in pleasure alone, and all
who suggested otherwise were enemies of humanity, charlatans, or

both. Religion was a "fable," stoicism a "dangerous poison," the virtue
of pain a terrible lie. Purely and simply, pleasure was an affair of the
organs — a matter of the senses, the sensation of matter. We should
seek it any way we can. Without flinching, La Mettrie embraced with
open arms the prospect that had given John Locke such fear: In the
absence of a God to guarantee the way, the road to happiness branched
off into as many paths as there were individual tastes. "It is thus very
clear that with respect to happiness, good and evil are in themselves
indifferent. The one who receives more satisfaction from doing evil
will be happier than whoever receives less from doing good. . . . Hap-
piness is individual and particular, and may be found in the absence of
virtue and even in crime." 68 Slightly later in the same Discourse on
Happiness, La Mettrie is even more explicit:
May profane enjoyment [pollution] and sensual indulgence

[jouissance], those two lubricious rivals, succeed each other in
turn, melting you in pleasures, while making your soul as

sticky and lascivious as your body. When you are spent, drink,
eat, sleep, dream. If you insist on thinking on occasion, at
least do so amidst two wines, sipping the pleasure of the

present moment, or savoring the desire in store for you during
the hour to come. Finally, if not content to outdo yourself in
the great art of sensual pleasures, and if debauchery and
dissolution are to your taste, perhaps filth and infamy will be
more to your liking. Wallow in slime like a pig, and you will be
69
happy in their fashion.
When happiness was a matter of pleasure, and pleasure a matter of

taste, one could be happy simply by rolling in filth.
It should be said that La Mettrie himself had little passion for mud.
And though he repeatedly presented sensual pleasures —opium dreams,
succulent wines, and erotic passion — as models of happiness fulfilled,
he made efforts in his own life to distinguish between debauchery

and more refined indulgence. Still, his fundamental conviction that
taste — individual, subjective taste —was pleasure's ultimate judge led
him to acknowledge, quite happily, that one man's happiness was an-
other man's pain. As Locke had pointed out, some liked lobsters and
others liked cheese. La Mettrie only lengthened the table, so that all
desires would have a seat at life's banquet.
There was, however, relatively little place for reason at this feast.
It added no spice to happiness, and, more often than not, it interfered

with the sensations on the tongue. Cold reason "freezes the imagina-
tion and chases pleasure away," La Mettrie claimed. 70 Its proper place
was to be pinned down under the "despotism of pleasure." If sensa-
tion alone was the force that moved man's machine, then reason, like
a humble waiter, must be relegated to serve.
Such asides undoubtedly added zest to the palate of Frederick and

his dinner guests at Sans-Souci. But others were less amused. And
perhaps now we can understand why. For La Mettrie was not only
taking his scalpel to God and the soul; he was snipping the suture that
had held Western intellectual life together since the time of Socrates:
the link between virtue and human happiness; the link between hap-
piness, reason, and truth. Epicurus himself had not dared to go this
far. In the Epicurean vision, reason — prudence —was the essential

force that allowed one to distinguish between what would cause us
pain and what would bring true pleasure. Far from urging the expan-
sion of desires, Epicurus advised us to limit them as strictly as we
could. Bread and water were enough to feed the Epicurean sage.
—
230 Happiness
Happiness was virtue's reward. Nor had Augustine, or Blaise Pascal,
or any other Christian thinker inclined to mock the pretensions of

reason in fallen man, dared to doubt that happiness and truth might
not be linked. Reason was admittedly a limited guide. But in its awk-
ward stumbling, it could lead us to the place where a guide more sure
would help us on our way. The end of our journey was where happi-
ness lay. In the Christian tradition it was virtue, through the grace of
God, that would take us there.

La Mettrie denied these connections and, in doing so, helped to
make himself a pariah. But in his own view, he was the most enlight-
ened of all. Had he not further freed happiness from the accumulated
prejudice of the ages? And had he not done so by observation and ex-
periment alone? To liberate happiness from virtue and God, from rea-
son and the soul, was to serve the cause of nature and the body. It was
an astoundingly modern view, but not one for which the age of En-
lightenment was fully prepared.
Indeed, La Mettrie had exposed with his philosopher's scalpel

and even flaunted — a disturbing weakness in the body of Enlighten-
ment thought. For how, by the mainstream logic of Enlightenment
pleasure/pain calculus, could one really combat the disease of rampant
hedonism? Bentham and the utilitarians possessed one primary re-
sponse. The standard of utility, they countered, was not simply to

maximize pleasure but to maximize the pleasure of the greatest number.
The debauches of one man did not count for a lot in this calculation,
and in fact probably contributed, on balance, to the total sum of pain.
But the more important point is that by the standard of utility, the
moral imperative remained one of duty and service. The measure of
right and wrong, yes, was pleasure and pain. But the pleasure of the
majority counted for far more than the pleasure of the individual, and
the pleasure of the next man was just as important as one's own. It
was good, it followed, to serve one's neighbors, to strive to enhance

their pleasure and to reduce their pain.
This, in utilitarian terms, was "virtue," a word, revealingly, that was
never far from Enlightened lips. Virtue was the means to happiness,
the tool of happiness, the way to make a better world. And though the
unenlightened might not immediately appreciate the fact, virtue was

pleasurable in itself. Hutcheson made this argument at length, and so
did Bentham. Many others agreed. Remove human prejudices, they
maintained, cultivate reasonable action and reasonable thought, and

human beings would see that to work for the good of others was any-
thing but sacrifice — it was the highest form of happiness.
These were noble sentiments. But as a response to La Mettrie's
exposure of the weakness of Enlightened ethics, they were more of a
cover-up, a patch job, than surgical removal. The festering problem
remained: If human beings were moved solely, as the utilitarians ar-
gued, by sensations of pleasure and pain, then why individuals should

sacrifice the one and endure the other for the sake of their fellow men
was not at all clear. Despite Enlightenment insistence to the contrary,
it was also not at all clear why virtue should always be pleasurable, why
being good should be the same as feeling good. Perhaps one day, En-
lightenment visionaries dreamed, the interests of individuals could be
made to harmonize smoothly with the interests of humanity as a
whole. But skeptics could legitimately wonder whether, and at what

cost, that day would come. In the meantime, there were men and
women in the eighteenth century at once skeptical and cynical, ready
to do more than simply contemplate the extreme hedonism of La
Mettrie. A radical few put it into practice.
Listen, for example, to the boasts of Giacomo Casanova, the cele-
brated seducer and rake. A friend of Voltaire, he doubled as an En-
lightened philosopher, and was both an apologist —and an activist — for
the new happiness of the age:
Those who say that life is only a combination of misfortunes

mean that life itself is a misfortune. If it is a misfortune, then
death is happiness. Such people do not write in good health,

with their purses stuffed with money, and contentment in their
souls from having held Cecilias and Marinas in their arms and
being sure that there are more of them to come. Such men are
a race of pessimists . . . which can have existed only among
ragged philosophers and rascally or atrabilious theologians. If
232 Happiness
pleasure exists, and we can only enjoy it in life, then life is
happiness. There are misfortunes, of course, as I should be the

first to know. But the very existence of these misfortunes
proves that the sum-total of happiness is greater. 71
Casanova had no doubt about the existence of pleasure. As he explains

elsewhere in his memoirs, describing a successful attempt to seduce
a sixteen-year-old beauty, "Pleasure is immediate sensual enjoyment;
it is a complete satisfaction which we grant to our senses in all that
they desire; and when, exhausted or wearied, our senses want rest,
whether to catch breath or revive, pleasure becomes imagination;

imagination takes pleasure in reflecting on the happiness which its
72
tranquility procures it." Seeing that happiness is merely "all the plea-
sures" that one can procure, and that the only real barrier to pleasure
is "prejudice," Casanova recommends that "true philosophers" dis-
pense with prejudice entirely. In this way, happiness will be forever

at hand.
The Marquis de Sade could not have agreed more. "Renounce the
idea of another world; there is none. But do not renounce the plea-
sure of being happy and of making for happiness in this one," he ob-
serves in his "Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man" (1782). 73
For Sade, the world offered nothing higher than pleasure in its varied,
delicious forms. And pleasure was never sweeter, more intense, than
when it was lewd. So he sought with perfect logic to find "lewd plea-
sures" wherever he could. As he advises all libertines in the opening
letter to one of his most famous works, Philosophy in the Bedroom, "No
74
voice save that of the passions can conduct you to happiness."
Casanova and Sade, like La Mettrie, thought and lived at the ex-
treme, far outside the eighteenth-century norm. Serving time in

prison in payment for their pleasures (and as restitution for others'
pain), they were regarded by the majority of Enlightened men and
women of the century as monsters. And yet their readiness to push
Enlightenment assumptions to their logical conclusion —and to jus-
tify themselves and their happiness by the new Enlightened calcu-
lus — highlights even more graphically than the case of La Mettrie the
potentially disturbing trajectory of a view of happiness based solely on

calculations of pleasure and pain. Was there not something "bestial,"
something "monstrous," something "inhuman" about this extreme
hedonism of self-indulgence? Surely there was. But in making this
claim, in writing off the likes of Sade and La Mettrie as immoral men
scandalous degenerates lacking in virtue — Enlightened utilitarians
were forced to draw less on the self-evident principles of the age than
on the moral capital of the past. Without fully acknowledging the fact,
their own assumptions were what one noted scholar has described as
"parasitic," in that they lived off truths that they themselves no longer
nourished and sustained. 75
With respect to happiness, these were "truths" that had accumu-
lated slowly over the centuries, amassed by Hebrews and Hellenes,
classicists and Christians alike: that happiness and virtue, happiness
and right action, happiness and goodness were one. That happiness,
far from being a natural complement to life (to say nothing of a natu-
ral right), was not a gift of living but a reward for living well — a reward
that demanded self-sacrifice, commitment, even pain. In the eigh-
teenth century, there were still enough Stoics around and those who
knew their Bible —men and women steeped in classical teachings on
happiness and rich in the legacy of Christian virtue — so as not to ef-
face entirely the line that separated being good from feeling good. But
to a much greater degree than it avowed, the eighteenth century lived
on this inheritance —on borrowed time. 76
Happy Islands
At the end of his life, Jean-Jacques Rousseau looked back in sadness

with recrimination and regret. There were bitter charges of plots and
the treachery of men, confessions and denials, self-laceration and
despair. But amid these tempests floated an island of calm:
Of all the places where I have lived . . . none has made me so

truly happy or left me such tender regrets as the Island of
234 Happiness
Saint-Pierre in the middle of the Lake of Bienne [Switzer-

land]. ... I was barely allowed to spend two months on this
island, but I could have spent two years, two centuries and all
eternity there without a moment's boredom. ... I look upon

these two months as the happiest time of my life, so happy
that I would have been content to live all my life in this way,
without a moment's desire for any other state. 77
"What then was this happiness?" Rousseau asked. "Wherein lay this
great contentment?" The "men of this age would never guess the an-
swer," he believed, for it involved neither great pleasures nor newly
Enlightened truths. It was rather a state of perfect wholeness and
plenitude of being in which Rousseau felt himself "self-sufficient like
God," a state
where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to
establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no
need to remember the past or reach into the future, where

time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely
but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of

time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, plea-
sure or pain, desire or fear than simply the feeling of existence,
a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we
can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and
relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but
with a sufficient complete and perfect happiness which leaves
no emptiness to be filled in the soul. Such is the state which I
78
often experienced on the Island of Saint-Pierre. . . .
Who has not dreamed of such a state — a shelter, a private sanctu-
ary sealed off from the sufferings of the world, in which the source of
our happiness would be "nothing external to us, nothing apart from

ourselves and our own existence"? With good reason does the motif of
the happy island appear again and again in the Western imagination,
from the Blessed Isles of the ancient Greeks to Thomas More's Utopia
to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. In the eighteenth century, news of

Captain Cook's "discovery" of Tahiti and Hawaii inspired paeans to
the pristine happiness of unspoiled oases, adding details to the rever-
ies of earlier Enlightened dreamers like Philipp Balthasar Sinold von
Schiitz, the German author of Die gluckseligste Insul auf der ganzen Welt,
'
19
The Happiest Island in All the World. Ever since, travelers on holidays
have reenacted this venerable myth, flocking to once deserted isles to
restore —and hopefully to find — themselves.

Rousseau nurtured such thoughts, yearning like Robinson Crusoe
80
to build a private world for himself. By the end of his life, when he
sat down to write these words, he was living as a castaway, in self-
imposed exile in a small apartment in Paris. He severed friendships,

cut his ties to the beau monde, and, in return, was spurned by the
Enlightened of the day, rejected as a pariah, dismissed as a crank. He
gave himself over to long, solitary rambles in the countryside beyond
the city. And when he did appear in public, he ostentatiously flaunted
The Happy Isles. This fifteenth-century map by the Italian Grazioso Benincasa
shows the Happy or Blessed Islands concentrated in a large bay on
the west coast of Ireland. By permission of the British Library.
—
236 Happiness
his difference with rough manners and rough dress, abandoning wig
and stockings for long hair, shaggy beard, and a jet-black Armenian
cape. Unwashed and unkempt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a proto-
type of the alienated artist, a bohemian long before La Boheme.
Despite this disaffection, Rousseau also knew that to live as a
stranger among men was a flawed means of escape. In his more lucid
moments, he suspected that even his reverie of perfect happiness on
the Island of Saint Pierre was that of an "unfortunate man," the con-
solation of a castaway, the "compensation for human joys" that in truth
he genuinely desired. Although Rousseau did not confess, like a later
observer, Robert Frost
But Islands of the Blessed, bless you, son,

I never came upon a blessed one. 81
— he did entertain deep doubts as to whether such a place of lasting
happiness could exist in the modern world anywhere but in his memo-
ries or in his dreams. "I doubt whether any of us knows the meaning
of lasting happiness," he despaired, in what was at once a typical re-
flection of maudlin self-indulgence, philosophical conviction, and con-
82 83
genital emotional state. "Happiness leaves us, or we leave it."
Rousseau gave voice to these anguished speculations in prose of

intoxicating beauty, and he acted them out in a public persona that
provided an age anxious to be happy with the reassuring spectacle of
a man who openly confessed that he was not. In a century with a high
tolerance for sentimentality, Rousseau's histrionics of sadness were
well received, capturing perfectly the new cult of "sensibility" or "feel-
ing" that flourished in the arts. Indeed, despite his claim to be "alone
in the world," to have "been cast out by all the rest," Roussseau died
one of Europe's most celebrated men, and his fame allowed him to
dramatize his doubts about a number of central eighteenth-century

assumptions on a very public stage.
He dwelled particularly on the belief that pleasure was enough to
bring us to our end. "Happiness is not pleasure," Rousseau declared
flatly, rejecting what, for Bentham and Helvetius, like so many others,
84
was an undeniable truth. Repeatedly, he emphasized the point. "Even
in our keenest pleasures there is scarcely a single moment of which the
heart could truthfully say: 'Would that this moment could last for ever!'
How can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state which leaves
our hearts still empty and anxious, either regretting something that
is past or desiring something that is yet to come?" 85 Happiness, if it
existed at all, must be something more than this, Rousseau affirmed,

something more than the perpetual effort to satisfy an uneasiness that
even Locke confessed would never really go away. "The happiness for
which my soul longs," Rousseau counters, "is not made up of fleeting
86
moments, but of a single and lasting state."
In his misgivings about the viability of happiness and his open dis-
trust of pleasure, Rousseau was a critic of the mainstream Enlighten-

ment. But he was also, unequivocally, its child, and never is this more
apparent than when he overcomes his reservations to proclaim his
belief that one "must be happy." "That is the goal of every being which
senses," he adds. "That is the first desire which nature has impressed
upon us, and the only one which never leaves us." 87 This is Rousseau's
contradiction: on the one hand, the doubt and despair of ever being
happy in the world as he knew it, and on the other, the desperate
certainty that this must be so. In wrestling with this contradiction, he
hit upon a vexing thought. What if the advance of modern civilization
was the cause of this conflict, leading human beings not closer to their
intended end but farther away, farther away from themselves?
This was the disturbing prospect that Rousseau raised in his 1750
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. An answer to a public essay question
sponsored by the Academy of Dijon ("Has the reestablishment of the

sciences and the arts served to purify or to corrupt manners and
morals?"), the work argued unambiguously for corruption. "The
progress of the sciences and the arts has added nothing to our genu-
ine felicity," Rousseau maintained. 88 On the contrary, it had de-
tracted greatly from it. Setting humanity adrift in material luxury that
multiplied false needs, the vaunted progress of the age robbed us si-
multaneously of the things we needed to stay afloat. It undermined

religious faith; disrupted community and love of the homeland; sapped
238 Happiness
courage, inherent decency, and moral virtue; and everywhere took

from us what was natural, simple, and good. If happiness, as the En-
lightenment claimed, was our natural due, then modern civilization
was simply not natural.
Here, in rudimentary form, was the basis of what would prove

Rousseau's most lasting and influential insight: that the liberating po-
tential of modern civilization created conditions, in the process, that
undermined it. Modern society's conquest of nature, its perfection of

critical reason and scientific understanding, its staggering productive
capacities and consequent material prosperity, its dispelling of illu-
sions — the very things that made human happiness possible accord-
ing to the Enlightenment dream at the same time militated against
it, severing man from his fellow man, from the world, and from him-
self. "In the midst of so much industry, arts, luxury, and magnifi-
cence," Rousseau observes in his so-called SecondDiscourse, the Discourse on the
Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, "we daily deplore human
miseries, and we find the burden of our existence rather hard to bear
with all the ills that weigh it down." "Always asking others what we
are and never daring to ask ourselves. ... In the midst of so much
philosophy, humanity, politeness, and sublime maxims we have merely
a deceitful and frivolous exterior: honor without virtue, reason with-
out wisdom, and pleasure without happiness." 89 In Rousseau's maud-
lin picture, "civilized" humanity was all surface and no center, modern
man a shell of his true self.
And what was this authentic self? What would men and women find
if they dared to confront who they really were? Rousseau believed that
the answers to these questions had been buried beneath the pancake
makeup of an affected age, weighed down by powdered wigs and plat-
form hair. By scraping away such accretions and digging down to the
skin, he hoped to catch a glimpse of our pristine state, to see us, un-
sullied, as we really were.
This, in fact, is the explicit goal of nearly every one of Rousseau's

major writings. In the Second Discourse, he endeavors, by thought ex-
periment, to imagine what human beings were like prior to the onset
of the civilizing process. In his great treatise on education, the Emile,
he contemplates raising a child in accordance with the pure dictates

of nature. In his autobiography, the Confessions, he aims, as he states at
the outset, "to show to my fellow beings a man in all the truth of na-
ture." And in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau throws himself

into the heart of nature itself in order to rediscover his natural heart:
"As soon as I am under the trees and surrounded by greenery, I feel as
if I were in the earthly paradise and experience an inward pleasure as

90
intense as if I were the happiest of men."
This attempt to go in search of the self —to find and restore a lost
purity and natural order —was Rousseau's lifelong concern, as well as
his point of departure. As he observes elsewhere:
Let us begin by re-becoming ourselves, by concentrating our

attention upon ourselves, by circumscribing our soul with the
same boundaries and limits that nature has given to our being; let
91
us begin, in a word, by gathering ourselves here where we are.
This language, with its suggestion of self-exploration and retrieval —

finding the self, collecting the self, returning the self — is so common
to our modern vocabulary that it is easy to miss both the novelty and
the essential strangeness of Rousseau's words. But what can it really
mean to "lose oneself or to "find oneself"? In the famous parable of

the prodigal son in Luke 15:1 1-32, a wayward man goes astray and then
is found. But he is lost to his father and is found by God. Similarly,
Augustine, and others in the wake of Luther, had gone in search of
hidden grace within, hoping to discover the divine light that lay en-
folded in sinful human flesh. The conflict between the two (body and
mind) could lead as fine a navigator as Pascal to lose his way. "Where,
u
then, is this self?" Pascal asks ( Ou est done cemoi?") "if it is neither in
92
the body nor in the soul? What is the self?"
Rousseau was thus not the first to treat his own person as terra in-
cognita. But he was one of the first to secularize this language, to speak
of the soul, of the self, as a maze through which we wander in search
of a better nature, an elusive inner light. And so, what for many En-
lightenment thinkers was treated as a self-evident truth became for
240 Happiness
Rousseau a mystery, a riddle, and a problem. "But where is happiness?"

he asks. "Who knows it? All seek it, and none finds it."
93
Deeply per-
sonal, highly subjective, happiness is at the same time a fragment of a
long-lost, universal nature. Locked in the labyrinth of the mind, em-
bedded in all human beings, lay a truer, more authentic self waiting to
be freed. Rousseau placed his hopes of happiness in our ability to gain
access to this inner sanctum and to liberate what was inside.
As in all things, nature showed the way. For Rousseau had no doubt
that in his pristine state, man was perfectly content. As he observes in
one of many such passages:
It is thus that nature, which does everything for the best,

constituted [man] in the beginning. It gives him with imme-
diacy only the desires necessary to his preservation and the
faculties sufficient to satisfy them. It put all the others, as it
were, in reserve in the depth of his soul, to be developed

there when needed. Only in this original state are power and
desire in equilibrium and man is not unhappy. As soon as his
potential faculties are put in action, imagination, the most
active of all, is awakened and outstrips them. 94
Natural man, in other words, is content precisely because his needs

are in harmony with his desires. "The closer to his natural condition
man has stayed, the smaller is the difference between his faculties
and his desires, and consequently the less removed he is from being
95
happy." Natural man feels no impulses that go beyond his ability to
fulfill them. Satisfied with simplicity, he is satisfied with himself. His

soul is agitated by nothing.
All this changes, however, with the gradual development of society.
In the Second Discourse, Rousseau recounts this process in considerable
detail, re-creating the minute series of events that might have led natu-
ral man away from his self-contained innocence. The details —by
Rousseau's own admission merely speculative — are less important than
the larger force that drives them: what Rousseau calls "the faculty of
self-perfection," or simply "perfectibility." This is the fatal quality that
lies in reserve in the depth of the soul, the very quality that is at the
root of all progress. When called forth, it enables human beings to do

extraordinary things: to strive constantly to improve their circumstances,
to conquer nature, to organize themselves, to control, develop, and ex-

ploit. Yet at the same time, this faculty cultivates a ceaseless restless-
ness, breeding dissatisfaction with our present state. It urges us to
summon ever new desires and to place our reason in the service of their
fulfillment. It urges us to compare ourselves invidiously to our fellow
men, to strive to outdo them. It urges us constantly to outdo ourselves.

And this, in Rousseau's view, is the tragedy of development. For if
unhappiness, as he repeatedly insists, arises from "the disproportion

between our desires and our faculties," then progress —with its ever
expanding horizon of possibilities —continually undermines our peace.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the contemporary commer-
cial cultures of the West, where desire had been unleashed with
greater force than ever before. In the race to fulfill present needs, we
continually created new ones, resulting in a disturbing phenomenon.
"It is by dint of agitating ourselves to increase our happiness that we
convert it into unhappiness." We are, Rousseau concludes, our own
worst enemies. "In learning to desire, [we] have made [ourselves] the
slave of [our] desires." 96
This was the terrible paradox of modernity, and it caused Rousseau

at times to turn away from his age, looking with longing at unspoiled
oases and primitive peoples, hoping to return to an island of innocence.
But Rousseau also understood that once a society had embarked on
the process of perfectibility, there could be no real sanctuary, no turn-
ing back. As he observes with some regret in his first version of the
Social Contract, written in 1762:
Unfelt by the stupid men of earliest times, lost to the

enlightened men of later times, the happy life of the golden
age was always a state foreign to the human race, either
because it went unrecognized when humans could have
enjoyed it or because it had been lost when humans could
have known it. 97
242 Happiness
And so, the way to natural innocence being permanently barred,

Rousseau concludes that civilized man is left with only one viable
alternative.
As soon as man's needs exceed his faculties and the objects of

his desire expand and multiply, he must either remain eternally
unhappy or seek a new form of being from which he can draw the
resources he no longer finds in himself. 98
Political association, Rousseau makes clear, is the way to give man

that "new form of being" that will help atone for the vanished happi-
ness of the state of nature.
This is the explicit goal of the Social Contract as a whole, a work that
seeks toendow citizens with what they could not, in Rousseau's view,
otherwise possess, providing them with a new nature to replace the
one they have lost. By means of what he calls the general will, the social
contract aims to provide a civil and moral liberty to replace the lost
individual liberty of the state of nature. And by forcibly restraining
extremes of wealth, ensuring that all have what they need but not sig-
nificantly more, the state as "master" of the property of its citizens
will work to ensure moderation and fairness, substituting a "moral and

legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have
99
been able to impose upon men."
The result, Rousseau believes, will be the cultivation of "virtue,"
the indispensable criterion of social happiness. For it is virtue — the
readiness to serve others and to sacrifice oneself for justice and the
general good — that serves as the antidote to the debased egotism and
self-love {amour propre) that is the primary source of our discontent in

contemporary society. It is egotism that fuels vanity and ambition,
egotism that leads us into the invidious cycle of comparison and long-
ing, envy and need that Rousseau believes is the characteristic fea-
ture of contemporary commercial societies in their corruption. If
selfishness and inauthentic desire are the causes of our modern mal-
aise, then virtue and equality will be their cure. As Rousseau says in
his Political Fragments:

What causes human misery is the contradiction between our

condition and our desires, between our duties and our inclina-
tions, between nature and social institutions, between the
man and the citizen. Make man united and you will make him
as happy as he can be. Give him entirely to the state or leave
him entirely to himself; but if you divide his heart, you tear
100
him to pieces.
Man must either be an island unto himself or be subsumed in the

waters of the general will. There can be, it seems, no middle way.
To come across this language today — the talk of changing human
nature, of giving citizens a new being, or giving them entirely to the
state — is necessarily to do so through the prism of the many unhappy

experiments in social engineering carried out since Rousseau's time.
These do not inspire confidence in the plasticity of human nature, or
in the possibility that others can be "forced to be free." Those chill-
ing words are Rousseau's own from the Social Contract, and although
he explicitly states elsewhere that "there is no government that can
force the Citizens to live happily; the best is one that puts them in a
condition to be happy if they are reasonable," his qualification is not

entirely reassuring. 101 Nor should it be. For in critical respects,
Rousseau is the intellectual forefather of all who would regulate human
desire by controlling human needs, of all who would use politics to
create a new man and a new human nature, to alter our being in order
to make us happier than we were before. This is a goal of political
theology, for it aims not to provide us with anything we already pos-
sess as human beings —

to secure for us rights or liberties or protec-
tions or property —
but rather to give us back what we allegedly have
lost and now can have only if we "seek a new form of being" in the
world. In order to be happy in our fallen state, we must be created

anew. The reward, Rousseau suggests, will be a partial recovery of our
natural wholeness, and the creation of a new order of happiness that
cannot now be fully experienced or known.

The future happiness that Rousseau promises must be taken on faith.
For Rousseau does not, and cannot, justify his conviction on the basis of
244 Happiness
reason, or history, or observation. He does so by appeal to feeling. The

heart, Rousseau knows, in a truth originally put forth by Pascal, has rea-
sons that reason knows not, and in his heart, Rousseau has felt a mur-
mur of the promise that lies within us all. On the Island of Saint Pierre,
or communing with nature in a solitary wood, breaking bread with his
companions in Geneva, Rousseau had known moments, he writes,

"when I was myself, completely myself, unmixed and unimpeded." 102
And on the basis of such personal revelations, he believed that it could
be possible, that it must be possible, to recover this pure authenticity of
being in a more permanent form. Like most men of faith, certainly,
Rousseau was susceptible to grave doubts, at times to outright despair.
As he observed toward the end of his life:
Happiness is a lasting state which does not seem to be made for
man in this world. Everything here on earth is in a continual
flux which allows nothing to assume any constant form. All
things change round about us, we ourselves change, and no one

can be sure of loving tomorrow what he loves today. All our
plans of happiness in this life are therefore empty dreams. 103
Faith, however, can conquer all. Even in his doubts, Rousseau per-
petuated the hope — the great Enlightenment hope — that happiness,
still, must be our final end.

Thus did Rousseau reinject an element of religious longing into the
Enlightenment pursuit — a longing, that is, for what life itself could
not deliver on its own, but which drew us forward nonetheless. Nor
was this his only nod to the sacred past. Rousseau's naturalized account
of our fall from innocence — a fall precipitated by pride, exacerbated

by reason, and driven by the cravings of selfish desire — clearly re-
sembled the Christian narrative of original sin. And his insistence that
in order to atone for that "sin," we must reconstitute ourselves by again
becoming ourselves, recovering and re-creating the purity of a lost na-
ture by abandoning egotism, cultivating virtue, and transforming our

very being — this, too, had a familiar Christian ring. To men and women
at century's end, who sensed, with Rousseau, that even the greatest
maximization of utility would always leave us lacking — dissatisfied
with "a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the
pleasures of life" — this message was tremendously appealing. For it
reinvigorated the pursuit of happiness with what the purely material-

ist account had threatened to strip away: mystery and meaning, vir-
tue and reward, an understanding of happiness as something more than

the satisfaction of simple animal impulse. Human beings lived by
bread, Rousseau understood. But they remained spiritual beings, in
need of redemption. Child of the Enlightenment that he was in part,
Rousseau believed that man could redeem himself.
Enlightened Doubts
Samuel Johnson was a man of Christian faith who frowned at the pi-
eties of his age. When asked by James Boswell whether a "man was
not sometimes happy in the moment," Johnson replied, "Never, but
when he is drunk." Boswell, like Johnson, enjoyed his wine. And
Boswell, like Johnson, enjoyed his life, despite repeated bouts of
despair. On a later occasion, as the two raced through London in a
windblown flush, he felt moved to put the question again:
"Sir, you observed one day at General Oglethorpe's, that a

man is never happy for the present, but when he is drunk.
Will you not add, — or when driving rapidly in a post-chaise?"
Johnson. "No, Sir, you are driving rapidly from something to
104
something."
In the past or the future, one could be happy, but in the present, only
when not fully conscious.

The year was 1776, an unpropitious moment, it would seem in ret-
rospect, to mock the pursuit of happiness. But Johnson had already
articulated his views. His long poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes"
(1749) provides an early indication of the perspective he would adopt

on the conceit of the century:
—
246 Happiness
Let Observation with extensive View,

Survey Mankind, from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife,
And watch the busy Scenes of crouded Life. . . .
105
Pride, animus, envy, and folly animated these scenes, helping to en-
sure that earthly happiness, like all else of human making, would be
fleeting, destined for dust. "Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, /
And shuts up all the Passages of Joy. . .

." It was vanity to believe oth-
erwise, as Saint Augustine and the author of Ecclesiastes had known,

vanity to believe that human beings could rest content without faith
"that panting for a happier Seat" —vanity to believe that we were no
longer in need of celestial wisdom, which "calms the Mind, / And
makes the Happiness she does not find." For Johnson, human beings
were perennially restless. This was the way of the world. 106
With its Judeo-Christian emphasis on the sin of human pride and
the vanity of earthly pursuits, Johnson's message smelled somewhat
of old. But it was considerably more than a musty restatement of long-
held religious truths. Johnson's concerns about happiness, in fact, were
very much of the moment — so much so that he returned to the same
theme in greater detail in a later work, The History of Rasselas, Prince of
Abissinia (1759). An eighteenth-century parable, Rasselas follows the
wanderings of a young prince as he races from his edenic kingdom in
"the happy valley" to he knows not where. In the happy valley, Rasselas
has everything; no pleasure is spared. Yet his "hopes flow beyond the
boundaries of his life." Observing the flocks of the fields, he pines,
"When I see the kids and the lambs chasing one another, I fancy that
107
I should be happy if I had something to pursue."
Intent on satisfying this desire, Rasselas escapes the happy valley,

inventing a flying machine that whisks him to the world beyond. Here
he chases after the full range of "sublunary pleasures" and "sublunary
things," circling the globe in the hope of finding what he seeks. He talks
to wise men, to experts, and to veterans of every kind, exploring the
manifold paths that promise happiness at their end. But nowhere does
he find what he seeks. The conclusion of the work, "in which nothing is
concluded," ends with the very longing that sent Rasselas on his way.
If not for its humanity and humor, Rasselas might seem a depressing
tale. But its message is not entirely bleak. Johnson appreciated the
achievements of his age, and he said so often: His vision of the world
was no contemptus mundi. When Rasselas hears of life in contemporary
Europe and the many advantages enjoyed there — the fruits of knowl-
edge and science, industry and commerce —he speculates that "they
are surely happy . . . who have all these conveniences." He is told in
response by his African friend, a poet who has traveled the world: "The
Europeans ... are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy." 108
Johnson did not deny human progress any more than he refused to
smile. But he did worry that men of his age were forgetting their natu-
ral limits. Strong black coffee to clear the head of an evening's wine,
his work served as a sobering reminder of the ancient wisdom of the
Christian Fall. Whether pulling the reins of the post chaise, a cork from
a bottle, or an apple from the stem, desire led us onward but seldom
to peace. This was the human condition. To believe otherwise was an
illusion that could be sustained only when drunk.
A timeless message, Johnson's words were timely, too. For in the age's
obsession with happiness, he correctly identified a revolution in the
making. Whereas human beings, for centuries, had regarded suffering
as their natural condition, they were coming to think of happiness as a
natural right. The change was profound. "The time is already come," a
man of the modern view tells Rasselas, "when none are wretched but
109
by their own fault." Neither original sin nor the mystery of grace, the
movement of the stars nor the caprice of fortune controlled our fate.
Intended to be happy, we should'be happy, if only we dared to claim our
due. Bringing with it a whole new range of attitudes that clashed with
venerable taboos, the new bearing on happiness attacked impediments
to sexual pleasure, material prosperity, self-interest, and simple delight
for simply standing in the way. As baseless fears and prejudices were
overcome, the new joy would spread. Even a yearly almanac distributed
on the continent in 1766 felt obliged to make the point:
—
248 Happiness
May the New Year and those that follow bring happiness and
peace to the hearts of all men. We can be certain of this
happiness if philosophy continues to enlighten the world and
if men of all nations, joined together by talent, cultivate the
arts and humanity more and more. These are the miracles that
talent and art have wrought; let us cultivate them in peace, and
the social bond will encompass more and more of us as man-
kind enjoys unprecedented prosperity. 110
That the readership of these almanacs was made up of comparatively

humble folk from the countryside is significant. For like the literary
device of the happy ending that was emerging as a new, and increas-
ingly common, convention in popular fiction and stories for children
resolving the dilemmas of protagonists in this life, not the next —such
works suggest how far, and how wide, the promise of happiness could
spread. 111 The seed of a dream had been planted that continues to
grow to the present day, steadily expanding an aspiration that, prior
to the eighteenth century, had been confined primarily to a happy

few. Whether they were conceived as the blessed ones, who resembled
Homer's gods in beauty and comforts and attainments; or Aristotle's
fortunate, enabled by circumstance to devote themselves to the cul-
tivation of virtue; or Calvin's elect, certain of God's grace; or the
Catholic saints, endowed with the capacity to soar upward to God,

even while still on earth — those who had aspired to the precious prize
of happiness on earth were a relative minority and elite. All others

might make do as best they could, hoping for a smattering of earthly
joy and contentment. Yet they were resigned to the belief (the hope)
that real happiness would come only in death.
But now that the end was now, or rather of this life, the long Chris-
tian apprenticeship in happiness deferred had a curious effect. For now
that the end was now, did not everyone have the right to hope for sal-
vation? The new faith, like the old, was universal in its potential, and
the good news of the modern gospel was free to travel with missionary
speed. All could be happy. All should be happy. All would be happy
someday. These were the miracles that talent and art were making in
the world. Scarcely a century before, rulers had been required to lead
in the service of the faith and morals of their subjects, to lead in the
service of God. They were now being asked to serve a different lord.
"Happiness is in truth the only object of legislation of intrinsic value,"
the English utilitarian Joseph Priestley observed. 112 From the great-
est good to the greatest number, this was the voice of a new age.
Happiness portrayed as a goddess, surrounded by bounty. Thomas Burke

after I. F. Rigaud, Happiness, 1799. Collection of the author.
Photo: Daniel Kariko.

250 Happiness
Without completely dismissing the liberating potential of this creed,
Johnson detected its darker side. As a companion of Rasselas inquires,

"What ... is to be expected from our pursuit of happiness, when we find
the state of life to be such, that happiness itself is the cause of mis-
ery?" 113 Was it really so clear that human beings were intended to be
happy, that they could make themselves so? The supposition itself,
Johnson understood, involved an assumption —an article of faith —about

the purpose of human existence, about man's final telos and end. And if
this supposition were wrong, as he well believed, then it placed on

human beings a terrible burden: a responsibility they could never en-
tirely fulfill. The result, as Rousseau had intuited but never precisely
seen, was a new type of unhappiness: the guilt and sorrow one experi-
ences for not being happy in a culture that demands it.
Johnson was not alone in raising these concerns. Some of the

Enlightenment's greatest defenders were susceptible to doubts. In
a moment of hesitation, no less a clear-eyed observer than Voltaire
could give himself pause, penning in the same year as Johnson's mas-
terpiece "The Story of a Good Brahmin." Like Rasselas, Voltaire's
exotic hero spends his life in search of happiness yet finds that he is
at a loss to explain "why evil pervades the earth." "I am ready some-
times to despair," the Brahmin observes, "when I think that after all
my seeking I do not know whence I came, whither I go, what I am

nor what I shall become." When confronted with the example of an
old woman of simple faith "who thinks of nothing, yet lives content-
edly," his consternation swells. Might man's unhappiness actually
increase "in proportion as his understanding and his insight grew"?

It is worth recalling that the same century that put forth the view
that the end of ignorance would bring a smile to the human face also
114
bequeathed to posterity the phrase "Ignorance is bliss." That
phrase begged a question: What if reason and happiness were ulti-
115
mately opposed?
Toward the end of the century, Immanuel Kant was prepared to
assert just that. "In fact," he comments in his Groundworkfor the Meta-
physics of Morals, "we find that the more a cultivated reason devotes
itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man
get away from true contentment."
116
He used the observation to de-
liver a broadside at the utilitarian tradition:
This principle of one's own happiness bases morality upon

incentives that undermine it rather than establish it and that
totally destroy its sublimity, inasmuch as motives to virtue are
put in the same class as motives to vice and inasmuch as such
incentives merely teach one to become better at calculation,
while the specific difference between virtue and vice is
entirely obliterated. 117
"Making a man happy is quite different from making him good," Kant
further observed. He used the term "happy" in its eighteenth-century
sense, as pleasure or good feeling, and clearly he was right. For if the
proposition that doing good (living virtuously) meant feeling good
(being happy) was always dubious, it was more dubious still that feel-
ing good meant being good. Virtue, Kant reaffirmed, with an air of
common sense, was sometimes painful. And those who were happy,
who felt good, were sometimes bad. 118
Kant developed this thought at much greater length, coming to the
conclusion that happiness, "at least in this life," was not necessarily a
part of nature's plan. Moral virtue, rather, the development of a good

will, was what reason recognized "as its highest practical function,"
and reason, he affirmed, was not necessarily compatible with happi-

ness. This was an unsettling thought, and although Kant continued to
leave open the possibility that reason, virtue, and happiness might
somehow be reconciled in God or in a future state ("for all hoping aims
at happiness"), he fully admitted that this could not be demonstrated
analytically or perceived by the senses. By Kant's moral imperative,
our duty in this life was to act in such a way as to render ourselves
"worthy of happiness." 119
We then might legitimately "hope" to "par-
120
take of it" in some other state in keeping with our worth. But he
acknowledged that this must always be an act of faith.
252 Happiness
Not all were so forthright. Concealing, denying, or simply failing to
recognize Kant's objections, many continued to insist that happiness was

our naturally intended end, perfectly consonant with reason, virtue, and
truth. This was a long-established connection, supported by centuries
of classical and Christian authority 7
. It could not easily be dissolved. And
so the radical materialist attempt to do so — to treat human happiness
like the happiness of animals, as a simple function of pleasure and
pain —encountered stiff, often reflexive resistance. Mounted initially
by religious voices and those within the mainstream Enlightenment,

and then, more powerfully, by Rousseau, this resistance took the form
of a reassertion of the venerable ties connecting happiness to moral and
metaphysical reward. Tending to deny the naked assertion that good
feeling alone was the final human good, it returned happiness to the
privileged place that it had enjoyed since Socrates. Happiness was a
godlike state, the full and final flourishing of man.
Already, in the tremendous popularity of the divine Jean-Jacques,
one can see evidence of the powerful reaction moving in this direc-
tion. It would continue into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

carrying with it both great promise and great peril. For if what Kant
had asserted could only ever be an article of faith — the belief that
all human beings could make themselves happy was a

reasonable —
powerful ideal when recognized as such, it would prove dangerous
indeed when the critical element of faith was either covered over or
rejected out of hand. When they of little faith believe with the cer-
tainty of zealots that human beings can be made happy like gods, hap-
piness is often the first thing sacrificed in its own name.

A MODERN RITE
He was an unlikely bearer of glad

the village of Sarzeau, still less
tidings, this stocky lawyer
an obvious apostle of happiness.

from
But these were revolutionary times, and Joseph-Marie Lequinio was

a revolutionary man. Of that he had given ample proof, rising up
through the ranks from humble beginnings in the Breton countryside
to serve as mayor in the regional capital of Rennes in 1789; tribunal
judge at the city of Vannes shortly thereafter; and, in 1791, deputy to
the legislative assembly in Paris. Some at this stage might still have
claimed to detect a whiff of the barnyard about the man, who, it is
true, had devoted spare time to writing tracts on agricultural science
prior to the outbreak of the French Revolution. But only a halfhearted

revolutionary could feel shame at proximity to the soil. And at fifty-
one, Lequinio knew what he was about. He devoted himself now to

cultivating /w//toz/ science, falling in line with the radicals of the as-
sembly who grouped around Maximilien Robespierre. Assailing the

"fanaticism" of the Catholic Church, Lequinio deplored its centuries-
long effort to keep humanity in darkness. He attacked the privileges
of the aristocracy, which fed, like leeches, on the blood of the people.
He condemned the "despotism" of the French king Louis XVI, and
254 Happiness
with the destruction of the monarchy earned for himself an elected

place in the newly constituted representative assembly, the national
convention. On January 16, 1793, Lequinio duly did his part, voting
for the death of the old king, albeit with an uncharacteristic tinge of
regret. It would have been preferable, he mused, to condemn the
despot to a life in the galleys. But matters of state security,
1
alas, did
not permit such indulgence.
Indeed, it was on just such a matter that Lequinio found himself
here in the western port city of Rochefort, standing without indul-
gence in a former Catholic church in the autumn of 1793. He served
as an official "representative-on-mission" of the directing revolution-
ary government, dispatched to the provinces by the Jacobins, the
dominant faction in power, and charged with spreading the word. The
group took its name from its place of meeting in Paris, the former
w it Irmi* J'uijmM- iomme arJem/ rt plan )t ri<,u*ur . It3?>rmiaut «rfWf' p*r /» fmft^um, tttta^L i ttr ,et ««#
fumssm/ iv.f Inutt am*r «m ffJr
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The happy man of the Revolution. "In the guise of an ardent young man full of
vigor, the French are regenerated by the Constitution, which carries them to
happiness, while blind fanaticism, pride, and ferocious ignorance are repulsed by its
shield." Philippe-August Hennequin, 1793, Bibliotheque nationale de France.

monastery of the "Jacobin" (Dominican) religious order. But like their
leader, Robespierre, the Jacobins disavowed most other connections

to this past, declaring instead the abolition of the Christian religion
and the Gregorian calendar to which the faith had given rise. In the
place of these antiquated forms, they vowed to establish a new society
and social contract, based in large part on the principles of Rousseau.
From the highest reaches of the convention — in the upper seats
known as "the Mountain" —the Jacobins were laying down a new cov-
enant and a new law, a new form of being for the man of virtue and a
new concept of time to honor their creation.
And so, what otherwise would have been a Sunday in early Novem-
ber 1793 was now a decadi in the month of Brumaire in the Year II,
the tenth day of the ten-day week, set aside for reverence and rest in
the second year since the destruction of the Bourbon monarchy. And
what otherwise would have been a Christian house of worship was now
Rochefort's "Temple of Truth," proclaimed as such several days ear-
lier by Lequinio himself, who had personally seen fit to expel the stub-
born priest who clung, foolishly, to superstitions of old. After a scuffle

on the church floor, Lequinio overcame the man, and the dark hall was
flooded with the light of the times. He stripped the building of its
outworn relics and replaced them with the trappings of a reasonable

people, in the classical aesthetic of ancient Greece and Rome. Only
months previously, Lequinio had published his Prejudices Destroyed, by
a Citizen of the Globe. Here, he was putting the theories of cosmopolitan

man into practice.
There may have been an occasional cough as Lequinio took his
place at the pulpit, the scratch of workmen's boots, perhaps, side-

long glances, the rustling of clothes. But the words that echoed in this
former church now wrapped in the fanfare of the ancients were no
doubt arresting and clear:
Brothers and friends, I am going to speak to you today about

that which interests you all, about an object for which you all
yearn and sigh, and toward which all What

your actions tend.
does each of you want? What do we all want? What do we
256 Happiness
search for from the first instant we become capable of desire

until the time our blood runs cold in our veins and our needs
are annihilated? All, in a word, whoever we are —big or small,
strong or weak, young or old —we all dream of happiness; we

want only to be happy, we think only of becoming so. Let us,
then, see if there are means that will allow us to arrive at this
goal, and explore what they might be. 2
We cannot, of course, be sure, but it is hardly far-fetched to imagine

that some in this revolutionary congregation allowed their gazes to
wander at this point, looking up and out beyond the speaker to where
the stained glass had so recently transformed the light of the world.
It would have been a familiar reflex, after all, to search for illumina-
tion from on high. But as if anticipating the possibility of such primi-
tive regression, Lequinio checked his congregation abruptly and

brought it back down to earth. "Do not wait for me to talk to you of
angels, and arch-angels, of paradise and Elysian fields . . . of all these
ridiculous farces that have been paraded for so long before you and
other peoples," he scoffed:
Do not wait for me to entertain you with seductive talk of the

celestial heaven that priests used to promise after death,
provided that, during your lifetime, you did for them all that
they wanted, working like stupid beasts until the last hour. It
is through this illusion of the mind, and through this promise

of a future life, that impostors have governed the ignorant and
credulous people of the world, keeping them in slavery and
misery, while frustrating their enjoyment in the here and now
3
with a false promise of eternal happiness in the future.
No, those who would live in freedom must abandon such puerile illu-
sions: There was no future life. When our fibers harden, our heart
stops, and our blood ceases to flow, we are no longer. Bodies decom-
pose, reverting to their constituent elements, which serve, in turn,
to create "new beings —worms, fish, plants, and a thousand other liv-
ing things." But "never will there be anything more of us again ex-
cept in scattered molecules," and in the memories of our survivors.
4
No, citizens, there is no future life.
For a sermon ostensibly on happiness, this may have seemed a mor-
bid message. But Lequinio insisted emphatically that it was not. He

urged his listeners to rejoice at the fact that their childish illusions had
been stripped away. In place of "imaginary happiness," "real enjoy-
ments" were now within their grasp. The representative-on-mission

held out before them nothing less than this tantalizing prospect — of
happiness "real and absolute" in this life.
"There are those," Lequinio continued, "who place their happiness
in great fortune," others in luxury, still others in beautiful women.

This one here loves to dine, that one there to gamble: Each makes of
his happiness what he would, according to his fancy. But what a ter-
rible mistake this is, a fatal confusion of passions and pleasures with
happiness. The former are fleeting —the drunkard always has a hang-
over in the morning, the libertine suffers "a thousand infirmities" as

the fruit of incontinence. And the desire for pleasure — subjective,
ephemeral, of body or of mind —can never be satisfied. The moment
we have one thing, we want another, and man "is pushed by his rest-
lessness and by his ambition to search farther and farther, running, in
this way, from desire to desire." Such a man will end his career "hav-
ing always imagined that he was going to be happy, and in truth, hav-
ing experienced only a tumultuous succession of pleasure and disgust,
desire and remorse." No, citizens, "happiness does not exist in
jouissances personelles" in personal pleasures. 5 It is something more noble

than that.
Where, then, did this elusive happiness hide? Not in any primitive
oasis. Invoking a number of themes dear to the Jacobins' beloved
Rousseau, Lequinio dismissed with disdain the reverie that happiness
might still be found by returning to the "state of the savage." "Only in
society can man really be happy," he emphasized, "for it is there that he

is able to satisfy all his needs and to surmount all obstacles through the
arts and sciences; there that he can procure all the enjoyments that the
human heart might desire." It was there, alone, that man could create
258 Happiness
the new form of being that would replace the one he had lost. But this
optimal state would be achieved only when the "aristocracy of riches"

had been destroyed. Hitherto, the people had not "dared dream of so-
cial equality," not "dared dream that the rich man is only so because of
the work of the people." They must dare to do so now.
Although fully consonant with the Jacobins' unprecedented attack
on social privilege and their first halting steps toward the redistribu-
tion of wealth, these were radical propositions. Lequinio warned that

they would be in vain unless the social revolution was accompanied
by a "moral revolution" in the "minds and hearts" of the people. A new
society required a new man. "Where must we search for happiness?
Apotiikosj in i.' Hoi s.m \i . s\ i !i.\Nsi..vrio\ \i I'wiiiion
A contemporary engraving of the Apotheosis of Rousseau. Bibliotheque

nationale de France. On October 11, 1794, Rousseau's remains were
transferred to the Pantheon in Paris, the former Church of St. Genevieve,
which had become the resting place of the spiritual saints of the Revolution.
Where, citizens? Inside ourselves, in the bottom of our hearts, in self-
abnegation, in work, in the love of others. This is the secret."

Through labor, Lequinio claimed, we make ourselves independent,
useful to our fellows, healthy, and worthy of their esteem. Through
self-sacrifice, we grow impervious to the blows of fortune, for a soul
steeled against hardship will rise above the "vicissitudes of chance, the
inconstancies of political upheavals, and the uncertainties of health."
Unhappiness lies not in outward circumstances, however disastrous
these may we allow them to cause us. The
be, but in the affliction
self-sacrificing man, "the man who says to himself, I want to be happy,
I want to be above all adversity," will suffer no affliction. For the "man
who has made a sacrifice of himself" transcends "all accidents, all
losses, all developments." The universe could come crashing down

around him, and his equanimity would remain complete.
But not only does this remarkable creature, this man "who has made
a sacrifice of himself," look with scorn on the slings and arrows of outra-
geous fortune, he also treats with indifference the many "passions that
trouble the human heart." Never does he lose himself to pride, ambi-
tion, avarice, or jealousy, and never does he chase after those fleeting
pleasures that reward us with only paltry satisfaction. The man who has
made a sacrifice of himself "lives entirely for the happiness of others,
finding his own felicity in the felicity of the public." He helps the un-
fortunate, the indigent, the suffering. He is a tender father, a faithful
husband, a trusting friend. And above all, this self-sacrificing man is a
patriot, one so calm, so self-assured, that if ever he were called upon to

die for his country — to ascend the scaffold
—"he would mount its steps
with firmness, sure of his conscience, consoled by his good actions, cer-
tain that his death would be followed by the regret and affection of
posterity." This, Lequinio concluded, was the happy man, a man of
"virtue." All who searched for happiness in this way would "be sure to
find it." And for those who did not, may the "sacred love of the patrie . .
force every individual to take the only road that can lead them to the
end they propose —the end of happiness." 6
We have, regrettably, no record of how the citizens of Rochefort

responded to this piece of revolutionary good news. But we would be
.
260 Happiness
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"A rising sun announces the dawn of French felicity."
Paris, 1791. Bibliotheque nationale de France.
on fairly solid ground if we said that they almost certainly would have
been perplexed — perplexed and more than a little disturbed. For it
was at precisely this time, and in precisely this place, from the bocages
of Brittany down to the marshes of the Vendee, that considerable
numbers of citizens began to take up arms in opposition to the Revo-
lution. Men like Lequinio —representatives-on-mission—had been
dispatched to suppress them with all necessary force to maintain the
security of the state. As the convention had decreed, infamously, on

September 5, 1793, just two months before, "terror was the order of
the day."
Lequinio, it appears, was good at taking orders and even better at
carrying them out. Shortly after delivering his paean to the promise of
happiness, he wrote to Paris to report that he had struck with the
excellent fortune of "finding in Rochefort more men to operate the
guillotine [guillotineurs] than [he] needed." He chose one, dined with

the man and his two colleagues, Guezno and Topsen, and then put
them to work. Dozens of heads fell in the city before Lequinio moved
on to Brest, La Rochelle, and the Vendee, where he boasted of "blow-
ing the brains out" of several prisoners himself. 7 The claim would later
come back to haunt him. After the fall of the Jacobins, Lequinio was
charged with atrocities committed in and around Rochefort and the
Vendee, including that of making children walk in the blood of their
slain parents. 8
It is thus safe to assume that some of those gathered in Rochefort's
Temple of Truth would have heard Lequinio's exhortation that "the

man who has made a sacrifice of himself should do so literally by —
mounting the scaffold —with a considerable degree of unease. And what
would they have made of his closing invocation calling on the "sacred
love of the patrie" to force all citizens to seek happiness along a single
way? Forced marches they would have understood — also forced entry
and force of arms. But forced happiness was a different matter.

As shocking as it might seem, Lequinio's promise of earthly happi-
ness was being proclaimed throughout Europe, heralded by revolution-
aries bearing glad tidings within France and spread by crusaders at the
end of a bayonet beyond its borders. The Declaration of Rights of Man
and the Citizen (1789) had pledged in its preamble to work for the
"happiness of everyone" ("au bonheur de tous") and the founding docu- ,
ment of the present regime, the Constitution of June 24, 1793, took
that promise seriously. "The goal of society is common happiness," it
"
declared in its very first article: Le but de la societe est le bonheur commun"
How fitting that the Jacobins should make happiness a central con-
cern. "Occupy yourself uniquely with the happiness of a great people
262 Happiness
and the happiness of humanity," Robespierre demanded characteris-

tically of his fellow citizens on September 25, 1792. 9 His followers
took him at his word. When plans were considered to redraw the map
of Paris, an ambitious architect proposed a great avenue leading from
the place de la Revolution to its necessary endpoint —where else? — the
square of happiness, la place du bonheur.^ And when it came time to
determine just what should be celebrated on each of the thirty-six
decadis of the revolutionary calendar, a decree of May 7, 1794, pro-

posed a litany of noble themes, including heroism, love, humanity, and
justice, to name only a few. On the final day of rest — the sacred decadi
that would bring the year and this liturgical cycle to a close — the law
specified the celebration of a "festival of happiness." Monsieur A. P.
Pochet, the French designer of Catherine the Great's Temple of

Happiness, dashed off a note to the Ministry of Interior, offering his
services, but he received no reply. 11 In space as in time, the Revolu-
tion could be counted on only to embrace the new, for in space as in
time, the Revolution would end in happiness. And happiness, the
Jacobin leader Saint-Just declared in the spring of 1794, was "a new
12
idea in Europe."
Saint-Just's claim was overstated — in truth, his "new idea in Europe"
was no such thing. And neither were the Jacobins entirely unaware of
the fact: Their proclamation of happiness relied rather heavily on the
past. Although many in Lequinio's congregation probably missed it, the
trained ear would have heard in his secular sermon clear references to
classical philosophy, particularly to the tradition of Stoicism, with its
invocation to spurn suffering and to control the passions, to leave noth-

ing to chance. And merely by looking around their rapidly redecorated
temple, contemporaries would have seen allusions to what the Jacobins
were openly proclaiming throughout the country: the return to the clas-
sical virtue of the ancient world. From the outset, the Revolution had
witnessed a self-conscious embrace of the style of the ancients.
But with the constitutional monarch deposed, the revolutionaries
were free to drape their republic in iconography unsullied by emperor
or king. With chariots and togas, Corinthian columns and laurel crowns,
busts of Cicero, Socrates, Brutus, and Cato, they sought to usher in a

new world by way of the old, reviving what was best in the simple,
unsullied spirit of antiquity. 13 As Saint-Just himself declared proudly
on a different occasion, "We have offered you the happiness of Sparta
and of Athens in their most glorious days; we have offered you the
happiness of virtue, comfort, and the mean; the happiness that is born
of the enjoyment of what one needs, without excess; we have offered
you a happiness of the hatred of tyranny, of the delights of a cottage
and of a fertile field tilled by your own hands. We have offered to the
people the happiness of being tranquil and free." 14

For all their pretensions to herald the dawn of a new era, it is clear,
neither Lequinio nor his Jacobin comrades would have denied the
influence of the ancient past on their modern idea of happiness. But
they certainly would have balked at the suggestion that Christianity,
too, was playing a shaping role. Yet how else are we to explain this
curiously Christlike "man who makes a sacrifice of himself" willingly
giving up his own life for the salvation of humankind? Proclaimed from
the pulpit, Lequinio's new man finds happiness in living "entirely for
the happiness of others," even at the cost of personal suffering or

death. Looking askance at pride and pain, avarice and ambition, he is
the friend of the humble, the poor, the downcast, the meek. He feeds
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. With his aid, and with
his might, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
And what of Lequinio's insistence that "happiness does not consist

in personal pleasures"? In making this claim, he was rejecting one of
the most —
common assertions of his age the age, that is, of Enlight-
enment. And although, in doing so, he drew on both the tradition of
the Stoics and on Rousseau, Lequinio's refusal to reduce happiness to
good feeling alone also paid unwitting homage to Christianity. To re-
duce happiness in this way, he charged, was to reduce man to beast
a beast who chased, who pursued, one desire to the next, and who
arrived at death "having always imagined that he was going to be
happy," but in truth, having experienced only "a tumultuous succes-
sion of pleasure and disgust." Man, admittedly, might be a collection
of molecules. But he was not an animal. He remained a spiritual being.

Happiness must be something higher than mere physical sensation
—
264 Happiness
something more than fleeting pleasure, something nobler, more pro-

found. With this, too, the pious men and women who once worshipped
before the altar of this former church would have agreed. Happiness,
even still, retained the aura of its religious past.
The divide separating the "imaginary happiness" of Christianity

from Lequinio's "real happiness," then, was narrower than the
representative-on-mission would have his listeners believe. But ironi-
cally, it was the final lines of his sermon —the end leading to the end
that tied his modern homily most closely to what had come before.
Ironic, for it was here that the representative-on-mission invoked not

the past but the future, consoling his flock with a vision of happiness
to come. And ironic, too, because this same "promise of a future life,"
this same "false promise of eternal happiness in the future," was the
very basis on which he, like his Christian predecessors, justified the
need for the terrible sacrifices of the present. Lequinio looked forward
to a time when "all tyrannies will be annihilated and all hypocrisy will
disappear. All thrones will crumble, all limits be effaced"; a time, fi-
nally, "when humanity will live as a single family, in a world that is one
patrie^ All would be happy there, and the man who had made a sac-
rifice of himself could die content in the knowledge that his sacrifice
would be remembered in the "regrets and affections of posterity." 16
In the future, the redeemer would be redeemed. In the future, those
who did not see real happiness now could imagine its coming, take
comfort in its imminent arrival. Happy are those who believe but do
not see. No less than the Christian heaven, Lequinio's future was
founded on faith.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociologist Emile

Durkheim examined the French Revolution in his Elementary Forms of
Religious Life. Durkheim was interested in a broader phenomenon: how
human beings invest their lives with religious meaning and signifi-
cance. But he saw the Revolution as a particularly striking example
of "society's ability to make itself a god or to create gods." 17 This
process —what the historian Mona Ozouf has since described as the
"transfer of sacrality" from God to the nation, the Old Regime to the
New Regime, and Heaven to earth — is especially apparent in the many

revolutionary ceremonies and festivals presided over by the likes of

Lequinio. 18 In these modern rites, the representatives of a new society
attempted to invest their creation with sacral status, to give their newly
baptized citizens a convincing sense of purpose, an end, a goal. For what,
finally, would give meaning to their lives when every Christian altar had
been overturned? The answer was the subject of Lequinio's sermon.
"The world is full of Christian ideas gone mad," G. K. Chesterton
once observed. It is worth thinking of modern happiness as one of
those ideas. 19
The heir to not only the metaphysics of the classical
world but to the promise of Christian salvation, happiness received
Christianity's legacy of universal hope, charging it with a powerful
democratic potential and missionary appeal. This appeal was all the
stronger for its deep ties to the past —even, or especially, when those
ties were not acknowledged as such. Did not Lequinio and his breth-
ren catch a glimpse of those ties as they stood at the pulpits of their
former churches, preaching sermons on the approaching rapture and
demanding self-sacrifice in the name of the "true happiness" to come?
For that matter, did not even the most radical materialists —La Mettrie,
Bentham, Sade —perceive in their ostensibly more profane happiness
of perpetual pleasure a strange secularization and coming to earth of
what had been, for centuries, an otherworldly Christian dream? Prob-

ably not. And yet to envision our highest good in life as an unbroken
series of agreeable sensations — the maximization of pleasure and the
minimization of pain —was to call to earth the unbroken ecstasy, the
eternal bliss of heavenly delight. "Perfect pleasure — a more perfect

delight of the senses than that which animals enjoy" is what Aquinas
had promised in the heavenly city, that "final happiness" where "every
human desire" will be fulfilled. His counterparts in what has been
called the "heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers"
promised something of the same — the perfection and perpetuation of

20
bliss. Paradise, as Voltaire had said, is where I am.
Or better, where I will be. For try as he might, Voltaire, like most
moderns, could not entirely pin happiness down. Despite the efforts
of a minority of eighteenth-century radicals to define the human end
as subjective pleasure alone, happiness retained with the Enlightened
266 Happiness
majority vague associations with the splendors of its metaphysical and

theological past. Surrounded in truth, in virtue, in reason, happiness
promised more than just good feeling, though it promised that, too,
suggesting plenitude and deliverance, remuneration and reward for

individuals and peoples alike. Like the heaven of yesteryear, the fu-
ture of happiness was a field broad enough, vague enough, to inspire

the faith of legions.
In the case of Lequinio and the Jacobins, however, faith was not
enough to move mountains. The Mountain, rather, was moved,
toppled by political opposition, as it crumbled under its own weight
in the summer of 1794. Lequinio himself managed to survive, lying
low and setting about the long task of reinvention that would take him
eventually to Newport, Rhode Island, as under-commissioner for com-
merce during the reign of Napoleon. Securing forgiveness for the crimes
he had committed during the Revolution, he spoke little of happiness.
And on the final decadi of the Year II (1794), no one seems to have spo-
ken of it at all. The festival of happiness would have to be postponed.
Yet the future, like human dreams, refused to disappear. Although
the French Revolution pointed out the tremendous dangers of at-
tempting to realize the reverie of happiness on earth, it did not dispel
the hope. Ever looming on the horizon, this hope bid not only the citi-
zens of France but the citizens of the modern Western world to walk
forward in its pursuit. In this respect, the postrevolutionary French
landscape more closely resembled that of other advanced nations in
Europe and the Americas than one might otherwise suppose. For
there, too, the happiness of the future was emerging as the great
legitimating concept of national governments and individual lives,

pulling across the political spectrum to lead in the direction of a bet-
ter world. And there, too, happiness could be seen as the object of
many eyes, part of the religions both civil and sacred that invested
earthly existence with significance, meaning, purpose, and hope. 21
This collective march toward happiness was not always forced, as
in the case of the French Revolution. And many, of their own volition,
turned aside, displaying the fortitude of Hercules in choosing another

way. But on the whole, the momentum of modern culture has been in
the direction of earthly content, accompanied by a steadily expanding
sense of prerogative, entitlement, means, and due. Do we not feel
today that all human beings, in the best of possible worlds, deserve to
be happy? In our lives and in our loves, in our work and in our play, in
sickness and in health, happiness draws with omnipresent force, a
force that is all the more compelling for our inability ever to clearly
conceive it, and its own protean power to shape itself in keeping with
our projected desires. As the philosopher Pascal Bruckner has aptly
observed, happiness has become the "sole horizon of our democracies,"
a vision that for many is the measure of all things. 22 Whereas for most
men and women at the dawn of the modern age, God was happiness,
happiness has since become our god.
In these respects, Saint-Just was not altogether mistaken when he
proclaimed the novelty of the idea of happiness as it emerged from an
Enlightened world. But precisely because it also carried with it ves-
tiges of the classical and Christian past, happiness was laden with tre-
mendous force. Enveloped in the clinging incense of Christian promise

and lit by the persistent glow of classical reward, happiness continued
to intimate salvation and wholeness, the final godlike goal of man. It
is a perfect illustration of what has been called the "strange persis-
tence of transcendence" in the West, a dream that carries with it the

deepest longings of old. 23
As we shall see in the second half of this book, Lequinio and the
Jacobins were not alone in refusing to reduce happiness to the sum of
all pleasures, in believing with the faith of Rousseau that a higher
happiness could be had here on earth. That belief was a stubborn
and very modern — faith, but one that collided time and again with the
hard realities of life in the modern world. Even in those places like
the United States, where the pursuit of happiness was treated as an
individual responsibility and choice, the end could demand means that
threatened to subvert it, transforming the smiling face into a sullen

frown. Happiness, we might say, has proved a taskmaster as hard, at
times, as the God it has sought to replace.

PART II
Spreading the Word
We must not believe therefore, that at any time and whatever

the political situation, the passion of materialistic pleasures
and the beliefs fostered by it could satisfy a whole people.
Man's soul is vaster than we think; it can entertain both the
taste for earthly goods and the love of the goods of heaven.
Sometimes a people seems to be pursuing only one of them;
but soon it will seek the other.
—Tocqueville, Democracy in America
You higher men, do learn this, joy wants eternity. Joy wants
the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep eternity.
—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Questioning
the Evidence
Several years before he struck glory with his sword, Napoleon

Bonaparte sought glory with his pen. It was the summer of 1791,
roughly the time, as William Wordsworth would recall in the eleventh
book of The Prelude, when it was "bliss to be alive" and "very heaven"
to be young. Napoleon, who had the good fortune to be both, was also
in France:
Not in Utopia, —subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, — the place where, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all!
("Residence in France," The Prelude, book 11)
Here the young officer resolved to conquer literary fame. Taking leave
of his regiment, he worked intensely, reading and writing for months.
And in August, he stormed the citadel, submitting an entry to a prize
essay competition sponsored by the Academy of Lyon. The question
272 Happiness
"What truths and feelings are most important to instill happiness in
men?" —was perfectly suited to those heady times.

Napoleon's answer, however, was not. Despite a handful of revo-
lutionary platitudes and stock Enlightenment phrases
— "man," we
learn, "is born to be happy" — the essay, on the whole, provides evi-
dence to the contrary. A note of gloom pervades the work. "When ennui
takes possession of a man's heart," Napoleon tells us, "sadness, black
melancholy, and despair will follow. If this state endures, he will give
himself to death." 1
Having already written a brief reflection on sui-
cide, Napoleon was well acquainted with the theme. He returns to it
here, speaking graphically of "opening up one's own entrails." The

"void, the terrible solitude of the heart," seems to haunt the young
soldier:
When [a man] asks himself, "Why have I been created?" then

he, I believe, is the most wretched of all men. . . . How does
he go about existing, this empty heart? How can he live the
life of animals with the moral faculties that are peculiar to our
nature? Happy he could be if he did not possess these facul-
ties! This man is thrown into despair by trifles. The slightest
setback seems to him an intolerable calamity. ... In the void

of solitude, will not an interior passion say to him, "No, I am
2
not happy."
Although Napoleon chose not to include this passage, taken from a

draft of his final paragraph, in the version of the essay he submitted to
the Academy, it remains abundantly clear that he was haunted by this
same "interior passion," the whispered suspicion that happiness might

not be our natural due. In order to stifle it, he recommends the culti-
vation of "feeling," that "consoling agent" that brings us comfort and

release in times of misfortune. Climb a peak of Mont-Blanc, Napo-
leon suggests, and behold the sunrise: "May the first ray of light enter
your heart." Stroll along the sea and watch the great orb plunge "into
the bosom of the infinite." "Melancholy will lead you, and you will
abandon yourself to it." Wander in the countryside and listen "to the
perfect silence of the universe"; take refuge in the cabin of a shep-

herd, sleep before a burning fire, and at midnight "return into your-
self" to "meditate on the origin of nature." Or pass in front of the altar
of Saint Peter's Cathedral in Rome at ten p.m. and stay until dawn,
bearing witness to the mystery as the "darkness of night" gives way to
3
the "pallor of the morning."
Napoleon had read his Rousseau and was well acquainted with other
maudlin writers in the tradition of eighteenth-century sensibility and
the sublime. But there is something new here, a hint of a changing
aesthetic and emotional style that goes beyond its eighteenth-century
precedents. The withdrawal into the self and the projection outward
into nature; the stoking of the hot glow of the moment and the inten-
sity of feeling, the mystery, the melancholy, the yearning, the doubt
all of this provides a taste of what we now call vaguely, if necessarily
4
(for there is no better word), Romanticism. Even before his exploits
on the battlefield had earned him the status of the quintessential

Romantic hero, Napoleon was giving proof of his worthiness of that
mantle.
Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define in large part because
it was always less of a self-conscious movement than a broader cultural
ethos —one that in art, literature, music, and philosophy spilled well
beyond the boundaries of its specific historical moment in the first
third of the nineteenth century. With his genius for anticipation,
Napoleon seems to have captured a hint of the Romantic sensibility.
But it was not enough to carry the colors at the Academy of Lyon. A
five-man panel deemed his efforts uninspired, with one judge dismiss-
ing them as "worse than mediocre." 5 Candidate #15's hopes of liter-
ary fame were routed. Years later, the wound of rejection had still not
entirely healed. When Talleyrand, that mischievous courtier, pre-
sented the emperor with a copy of his youthful manuscript, Napoleon
read only a few pages before casting it into the fire. So, it seems, did
the great man dispense with the illusions of youth.
Perhaps this is fitting, for as Hegel would later observe, it is not the
fate of world-historical individuals to experience "what is commonly
called happiness." 6 In Napoleon's case, this was not for lack of effort.
274 Happiness
"Only the happy man is worthy of his creator," he emphasized in his
youthful discourse, and he struggled throughout his life to be a man

of worth. How bitter must have been his acknowledgment of fail-
ure —both to himself and to those he had led. "I have meant to
make France happy," he confessed before his generals at his surren-
der at Fontainebleau. "I have not succeeded. Events have turned
against me." 7
This was an egregious understatement. More properly speaking,
Napoleon had turned against events and, in doing so, had dragged his
countrymen and the whole of Europe into a series of futile wars respon-
sible for the suffering of millions. But then, it was always the way of this
dynamic man to act on a gigantic scale. In his struggle to achieve a hap-
piness that in his heart he knew might be an impossible dream, Napo-

leon dramatized a broader Romantic conflict and challenge. His was the
struggle of all who are born as heirs to the Enlightenment's self-evident
truth — raised to believe that they are meant to be happy —and then
haunted by the suspicion that the evidence of the world suggests other-
wise. This was the Romantic conflict. The challenge was to overcome
it, believing in joy and "happiness unthought of," even when one could
not hear or see. In his struggle —and in his failure —Napoleon embod-
ied this great Romantic quest.
Odes to Melancholy
"Ich weifi nicht, was soil'es bedeuten I Da/3 ich so traurigbtn. " ("I do not know
what this can mean, that I am so sad.") The line, often sung, set to
music by Liszt, Clara Schumann, and others, opens one of the most
famous of all German poems, Heinrich Heine's "Die Lorelei." The
literal translation in English fails to do it justice, but Mark Twain,
that painstaking student of what he called, with affection, "the awful
German language," was perhaps slightly more successful:
I cannot divine what it meaneth,

This haunting nameless pain
If the source of Heine's complaint was difficult to divine, it is com-

paratively easy to place: The speaker of the poem is haunted by the
legend of a fatal siren, a beautiful maiden (die Lorelei) who calls sail-
ors to their deaths along the banks of the Rhine.

Heine was not always so direct in pointing out the sources of his
sadness. A German Jew who converted to Protestantism to ease his

assimilation, he fell afoul of state authorities nonetheless and was
forced to live much of his adult life as an exile in Paris. Torn between
two cultures and two religions, Heine also straddled professions (he
was both a journalist and a poet) and aesthetics (he was an admirer of
Romanticism and one of its sharpest critics). A student of Hegel and
a friend in Paris of Engels and Marx, Heine warned of communism's
future threat to the world. He was a conflicted soul; but perhaps for
that very reason, he struggled in virtually all of his work to understand

and to interpret the meaning of the suffering of his time.
It was Heine, along with the poet Jean-Paul Richter, who first in-
troduced the term Weltschmerz ("world suffering") to capture a new,

and elusive, form of pain. 8 Neither man, admittedly, loaded the word
at the outset with the full weight that it would accumulate over the
course of the century: world weariness, or literally "world pain," the
acute anguish brought on by the simple fact of being in the world. But
then neither man was unfamiliar with these sentiments, either, and
already by the first decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans were
complaining of a mysterious disease with precisely these symptoms.
They called it the maladk du Steele or, simply, the maldusiecle, the sick-
ness of the age.
There were precedents for this sickness, just as there were already
terms that could be used to describe it. The publication of Goethe's
Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774 had produced a veritable cult of mis-
ery among disaffected youth, giving rise to the word Werthersfieber
("Werther's fever") to describe the lovesick sadness and forlorn dis-

affection that gripped so many who modeled themselves on the work's
eponymous hero. Neglecting Goethe's later advice
— "Dare to be
happy!" — they adopted the plain blue frock coat and buff waistcoat
of Werther as the uniform of the man of feeling. 9 In France, the
276 Happiness
enormously powerful example of Rousseau had much the same effect,
moving legions to confessions of woe, while in England the pastime of

lingering morbidly in graveyards had flourished since the publication
of Thomas Gray's popular "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

in 1751. Reading the happy eighteenth century against the grain, one
can turn up no shortage of odes to "melancholy," that venerable term,
and sonnets to "spleen," traditionally considered the seat of black bile
but used from the late seventeenth century in English, and from the
mid-eighteenth century in French, to describe listless sadness and
immobilizing despair. Ennui ("boredom," but with a more generally
depressive sense) also began in the eighteenth century to be associ-
ated with maladies of the soul. The French word quickly made the
rounds of Europe, where, by the end of the century of lights, it was
turning up in various tongues.
It can be argued, in fact, that the mal de Steele was in truth the maldes
deuxsieeles, the sickness of two centuries. 10 Making room for the latter
half of the age of Enlightenment, this proposition highlights a cultural
dynamic we have seen at work in Rousseau: The same century that

consolidated happiness as an earthly end also bred new forms of de-
spair. As individuals struggled, and failed, to achieve their "natural"
goal, happiness and spleen, felicity and ennui were caught up in a
common continuum to develop in tandem.

True in embryo for the latter part of the eighteenth century, this
proposition is even more true for the decades that followed, when
artists and writers, philosophers and musicians, flaunted their dis-
affection with an intensity that make Werther and Rousseau seem re-
strained. Consider Chateaubriand, weeping his way across Europe in
convulsive sobs. "Sorrow is my element," he writes at the turn of the
century. "I only discover myself when I am unhappy." 11 The French
Romantic Pierre-Simon Ballanche claimed in 1808, "Only sorrow mat-
ters in life, and there is no reality beyond tears." 12
Byron, a man so
weary of the world that he complained even of having to conjugate
"the accursed verb ennuyer" ("to be bored"), provided an entire gen-

eration with a model and ideal type of the histrionics of sadness, "gorg-
ing himself on gloom." 13

The Italian poet Leopardi did much the same,
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Study for Le Reve du Bonheur, 1819, Musee de Louvre, Paris.
filling his widely read works with the "stubborn, black, horrible, bar-
barous melancholy" that was an "eternal and inseparable" part of his
14
life. Nor were contemporaries immune to the attractions of the
Schlegel brothers, of Schiller, Holderlin, or the countless other Ger-
man chroniclers of the Zeitkrankheit, the "sickness of the time," for
whom happiness was "tepid water on the tongue." 15 They could not
resist Shelley, who lived, he felt, in an "age of despair," whose world
16
was "a dim vast vale of tears." Or Keats, who could "scarcely remem-
17
ber counting upon any Happiness" at all in his short, unhappy life.
And this is only the beginning of a list that could fill volumes. Why,
after the long age of Enlightenment, we must ask, this newfound will-
ingness to see the world through tears? To return to Heine's ques-

tion, what could such sadness mean? Wherein lay its source?
Contemporaries were quick to offer answers. In the Prelude, Words-

worth attributed the new mood to disillusionment
— "this melancholy
278 Happiness
waste of hopes o'erthrown" —engendered by the failed promise of the

18
French Revolution. Present in France in the summer of 1790, and
then again for nearly a year in 1791-92, Wordsworth shared firsthand
the tremendous optimism of the moment. When the Revolution's
aspirations ran to blood, he felt the wound directly. Those who looked
on from afar could be similarly moved by the spectacle of happiness
promised and happiness deceived. For Shelley, the hope and failure
of the Revolution was "the master theme of the epoch in which we

19
live." His view was widely shared.
Others extended only the time frame so as to include the European-
wide destruction of the Napoleonic wars. Alfred de Musset, a leading
French Romantic, observed, "The maladie du stick comes from two

causes: the people who have passed through 1793 and 1814 carry two
wounds in their heart. All that was, is no longer, and all that will be is not
yet made. Do not search any farther for the secret of our ills."
20
Touring
the battlefields of Europe, Byron agreed that much had been destroyed.
His thinly veiled mouthpiece, Childe Harold, is inspired to wonder while
standing on the blood-soaked fields of Waterloo, this "place of skulls":
Did man compute

Existence by enjoyment, and count o'er
Such hours 'gainst years of life, — say, would he name threescore? 21
A mere handful of days, counted out in hours, seemed a small mea-

sure for a life.
The upheavals of the Revolution and the letdown of its aftermath

gave rise to such thoughts, prompting many to conclude that these
were the causes of the sickness of the age. But others were inclined to
take a longer view. At a safe remove from Europe, the American Ralph
Waldo Emerson marveled that "history gave no intimation of any soci-
ety in which despondency came so readily to heart as we see it and

feel it in ours." Indians, Saxons, and other "primitive" peoples, he al-
leged, were immune to this affliction despite lower levels of "external
prosperity" and "general well-being." "Yet we are sad & they were
not. . . . Why should it be?" 22
The very framing of the question im-
plied an answer: that the process of development bred its own discon-
tent. Greatly indebted to Rousseau's analysis of the paradox of cul-
tural progress, this line of inquiry enjoyed widespread currency among
analysts of the modern malaise. As one of their most forceful repre-
sentatives, the German dramatist and critic Friedrich Schiller de-

clared, "It was civilization itself that inflicted this wound upon modern
23
man." Given apparent confirmation by the "dark, satanic mills" that
were beginning to mar the modern landscape, such contentions sent
countless Romantic souls packing in search of virgin forests and virgin
minds in a rite of pilgrimage that continues to the present day. Un-
spoiled nature and unspoiled humanity, they believed, could offer
balm to those afflicted by the sickness of the times.
Alongside the jarring experience of the recent past and the slowly
powerful push of civilization, another force exerted its influence on
the Romantic mood. Once again it is Heine who shows us the way,
observing in an essay that charts the intellectual development of the
early nineteenth century that an old flower had given new bloom. This
was a "passion flower," he claims, rising from the blood of Christ, in
whose chalice can be seen "the instruments of torture" used at the
crucifixion ("hammer, tongs, nails"); a melancholy flower "by no means

ugly, only eerie," the sight of which "arouses in us an uncanny plea-
sure like the convulsively sweet sensations which result even from
suffering itself; an alluring flower whose "most gruesome attraction
consists in this very ecstasy of suffering." That old flower, Heine ob-
served, was Catholic Christianity, and its latest bloom was Romanti-
24
cism, what he called the "Romantic school."
Heine restricted his comments exclusively to German Romanti-
cism —with its formal embrace of the poetry and culture of the Chris-
tian Middle Ages. But one can certainly detect a strong Christian
fragrance in Romanticism's various other national flowerings. The

scent conjures different images in different places: from the Gothic
revival churches of nineteenth-century England and America, to
the mysticism of an Emerson or a Blake, to the elegiac longing of
Coleridge, Carlyle, or Chateaubriand, to the lonely crucifixes in the
landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. Yet rising over the back of this
280 Happiness
varied and complex bouquet is often the same "sweet sensation of

suffering" that Heine identified as Christianity's essence. As Jean-Paul
Richter could acknowledge in a statement that might be applied to
other Romantic media as well, "The origin and character of all mod-
ern poetry can be derived so easily from Christianity that one might
just as well call Romantic poetry Christian." 25
The statement was considerably exaggerated, but it contained more
than an element of truth. For although the fact is often overlooked,
the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the most concerted
effort of Christian revival since the Reformation and its Catholic re-
sponse. In large part a reaction against the excesses of the Enlighten-
ment and the French Revolution, this religious renewal was marked
by intensive missionary activity, the expansion of seminaries, and great
waves of church building. Spanning the Catholic-Protestant divide, it
took different forms in different countries, animating the English

evangelical revival and the Second Great Awakening in the United
States; the high-church Oxford Movement of John Henry Newman;
the push to consolidate Catholic schooling in Austria, Italy, France,
and Spain; the German pietism and religion of feeling promoted by
Friedrich Schleiermacher; and the intense devotional movements of
popular religiosity that fed the resurgence of pilgrimages on the con-
tinent in the second half of the nineteenth century. Collectively, these
various movements helped to ensure that Christianity as a whole re-
tained both cultural vitality and intellectual resonance well into the
twentieth century.
The flowerings of Romanticism took root in this soil. Which is not
to say that Romantics shared unreservedly in the orthodoxies of the
faith. There were those, to be sure, who succeeded in fully prostrat-
ing themselves before the altar. But far more common was the posi-
tion of Thomas Carlyle. The Scottish son of a Calvinist preacher, and
a leading proponent in England of German philosophy, Carlyle saw
much to admire in the Christian religion. Yet he recognized that how-
ever much one might desire it, the Enlightenment could not be un-
done. "The Mythus of the Christian Religion look[ed] not in the
eighteenth century as it did in the eighth," he observed in his first
The task, accord-

major work, Sartor Resartus, or the "tailor retailored."
ingly, was "to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new
Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture." Put another way, God must be
clothed anew. 26 This was the task of the times —
to find new forms to
accommodate the spiritual yearning of humanity— and in this search,
the Scottish renegade was not alone. The attempt to fashion new spiri-
tual raiments for a post-Enlightened age — to make the supernatural
natural and the natural, supernatural, in Carlyle's celebrated phrase
was a broad Romantic challenge. 27

It is here that Heine's insight is so fruitful. Despite his considerable
antipathy toward the Christian tradition, he fully recognized that "for

eighteen centuries this religion" had been "a blessing for a suffering
humanity"; that the "blood of the crucified Christ" had served as a
"soothing balm flowing down into the wound of mankind"; and that the
"gruesome attraction" of the faith, just like the sickly-sweet scent of

the passion flower, was its ability to make an "ecstasy of suffering," to
transform pain and putrefaction into "uncanny pleasure." 28 Was this not
the secret of the sweet suffering of Christianity's latest bloom? Heine
did not develop the thought, yet it is striking how many Romantics,
whether indebted self-consciously to Christianity or not, seemed to
writhe in the ecstasy of pain. As Wordsworth confessed in The Prelude:
Dejection taken up for pleasure's sake

And gilded sympathies, the willow wreath,
Even among those solitudes sublime,
And sober posies of funeral flowers
Culled from the gardens of Lady Sorrow
Did Sweeten many a meditative hour, (book 6, 483-88)
Keats, too, in his celebrated Ode on Melancholy, extols the pleasures of

dejection, recommending that we take them much further afield:
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

. . . Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
—
282 Happiness
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave

Or on the wealth of globed peonies; . . .
Or in the "peerless eyes" of a mistress. The world, in this reckoning,

became a field on which to project one's sadness, to luxuriate in one's
29
despair.
Such maudlin mannerisms could quickly become a pose, a gloomy
Romantic affectation. And in fact it is to Romanticism that we owe
the still-powerful, if deeply insidious, myth that the true man of feel-
ing, the artist, the intellectual, must by definition be a suffering soul.
"Who would willingly possess genius?" Byron asks, with typical self-
indulgence. "None, I am persuaded, who knew the misery it entails
. . . destructive alike to health and happiness." 30 Something like the

opposite would seem to be the case. Ensconced in smoke-filled cafes,
how many dark-clad youth have willingly taken up misery ever since
in the hope of knowing the genius that it might entail?
And yet, among the first generation of Romantics, there was also
something different at work — the recovery of truths that the Age of
Enlightenment had tended to forget. By equating pleasure with the
good, and by conceiving all evil as pain, Enlightenment thinkers had
willfully turned their backs on what Christianity had for so long openly
embraced: the endless fascination, even the dark delights, of suffer-
ing. Without question, the Christian tradition had always contained a
counterveiling impulse: to relieve our neighbor's distress. But the way

to fulfill this command was by taking up the cross, following Christ in
sacrifice of oneself for the good of others, thereby converting suffer-
ing into personal merit and spiritual reward. Pain was transformative;
it was the way back to God.
As we have seen, the Reformation tended to mitigate the heroic
embrace of pain, downplaying the glorification of self-imposed suffer-
ing. But neither Calvin nor Luther ever supposed that pain could be
entirely abolished, or that this was even a reasonable goal. A necessary
concomitant of a fallen world, pain was a fact of existence to be ac-
cepted and borne —preferably with joy.
In the general Enlightenment conception, by contrast, pain was at

once unnecessary and contingent, an unadulterated evil. Fleeing it
instinctively, individuals suffered pain only out of blindness, duress,
or the force of circumstances. The symptom of ignorance or the fruit

of injustice, pain could never be the way of truth, and still less the
way of pleasure. It was something to be banished from the world,

something to be cured or rooted out, not to be savored or transformed.
This was, and remains, a noble creed, one that stands behind much
ongoing humanitarian effort to eradicate world suffering. Yet it also
lies exposed to the very charge that the Romantics themselves dra-
matized so effectively: that suffering is natural to the human condi-
tion. To pretend that it is otherwise —the result, merely, of ignorance
or error or outmoded belief —was not only unconvincing but self-
deceptive. Suffering, the Romantics countered, was an inherent

truth of the world and so must be acknowledged openly, in the light
of day. As Schiller enjoined, we must "confront evil destiny face to
31
face."
This was not merely a call to see the world with open eyes. Nor
was it a delight in suffering for suffering's sake. That embrace would
come later, with the rise, in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, of Symbolist poetry and aesthetic Decadence. Whereas those
movements exuded lurid fascination with sickness and decay in their
own right, the Romantics' preoccupation with pain was meant to
serve a higher purpose. "Only in the knowledge" of the dangers that
face us, Schiller continued, only by confronting the suffering and
tragedy of life, could there be "salvation for us." Suffering was agate-
way to a richer life, a door that led to a fuller understanding of the
self and the world, a passage that opened out into the intensity of
human experience. "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains
and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?" Keats
32
asks in a famous letter to his brother. Rediscovering a truth long
close to the Christian sage, Keats understood that suffering was nec-
essary to educate the self, to make us more complete human beings.
Pain, in a word, was transformative. It humbled individual pride,
"
284 Happiness
opening us to the possibility of empathy and compassion. And it in-
stilled in us an appreciation for the common lot of humanity. Far

more than pleasure, pain exposed us to the intensity of human expe-
rience, carving out room for the exhilaration of feeling. A "place
where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways,"
the world, Keats knew, was "A Vale of Soul-Making." 33
The Romantics, then, reinvested pain —and especially emotional
pain —with significance and depth. True to their name, they gave it
romance and allure. They also gave it purpose. We might almost say,
in answer to Heine, that the meaning of the suffering of the age was
precisely the suffering to give it meaning. People of substance
suffered, as they should, for this was a proper response to the world
and a means to a higher end. The Romantics, in this respect, were
fitting heirs to the Christian tradition. Yet they were also, we should
not forget, children of the Enlightenment. And when such children
descended into the valley of darkness, they did so with the hope,
the faith, that they would find sunshine on the other side.
The Romantics had a term for this precious ascent: They called it
"joy."
Odes to Joy
Joy, a leading scholar has observed, "is a central and recurrent term
34
in the Romantic vocabulary 7.
Used at times synonymously with hap-
piness, but in possession of its own distinct sense, joy wells up from
within and rains down from above. It is the counterpoint to despair,
and often its bosom brother. Thus does Coleridge conceive of this
"strong music in the soul" that surges forth in the midst of one of his
greatest poems, "Dejection: An Ode":
O pure of heart! Thou need'st not ask of me

What this strong music in the soul may be!
What, and Wherein it doth exist,

This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,

This beautiful and beauty-making power.
Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that n'er was given,
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,

Joy, Lady! Is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A New Earth and new Heaven . .
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud

Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud.
Virtually by themselves these lines supply the material of a Roman-

tic manifesto, touching on a broad range of themes associated with
the Romantics' conception of joy. At once a cloud and a shower, joy is
both a force that pours down upon us and the precipitate of that power.
Joy is light, joy is glory, joy is reserved for the pure of heart. And when
its sweet music wafts through the soul, it transforms us, as it trans-
forms the world, making a new heaven and a new earth, wedding
Nature to the self.
Coleridge wrote these lines in 1802, sometime before his more

avowed confessio fidei, his confession of Christian faith. The religious
imagery is unmistakable, nonetheless, and it is revealing. For what

Coleridge is proposing in joy is nothing less than the overcoming of
human alienation, the breaking down of the boundaries that divide
us from the world and from those around us. In joy, he ventures, we
merge with something greater than ourselves, overcoming individual
isolation.
This belief rested on two fundamental assumptions shared widely

in Romantic circles. The first involved a rejection of the Enlighten-
ment conviction that the human mind was simply a passive recipient
of the data of experience, a tabula rasa, in Locke's words, written upon

by the sense impressions of the world. Developed most thoroughly in
the tradition of German idealist philosophy that derived from Kant (to
which Coleridge himself was greatly indebted), this new view presented
—
286 Happiness
the mind as an active force, responsible for giving shape to experience,

for ordering, categorizing, and combining our impressions of the world.
To borrow the metaphor of the critic M. H. Abrams, the Romantic
mind was not a "mirror" that simply reflected the world, but a "lamp"
that projected outward, blending and infusing its surroundings with
35
color, depth, shadow, and light.
This profound reorientation in the understanding of the operations

of the mind took different, often highly complex, forms in different
countries. But more often than not, it was combined with a second as-
sumption: that there was more to the world than first met the eye.
Whereas Enlightenment observers looked out at the universe and saw

matter in motion — the finely calibrated movements of a machine
Romantics claimed to sense something else: Spirit, Idea, Life, Mind,
Nature, Being, the Infinite. The terms, often capitalized, were loose and
frequently interchangeable, struggling as they did to define the indefin-

able. Often, too, they hinted at a vague pantheism, the identification of
the workings of nature with the divine. An organic force that bound to-
gether all living things, a union and harmony that eluded both telescope
and mathematical formula, this "Nature," in Coleridge's conception, was
an underlying order that could not be seen, only intuited, felt, divined.
And here was the link to joy. For joy resulted from our ability to
connect with this larger order and force, to stray outside the confines
of the self. As Holderlin observes, typically: "To end that eternal

conflict between our self and the world, to restore the peace that
passeth all understanding, to unite ourselves with Nature so as to form
one endless whole — that is the goal of all our striving." 36 Yet as he and
others well knew, this was no easy task, for it depended not only on
our capacity to intuit and feel Nature, to divine the beauty of the
world, but also on our ability to project the lamp of the mind outward
in such a way that this beauty could be illuminated and perceived. As
Coleridge continues in "Dejection: An Ode":
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

Enveloping the Earth . . .
To find that inner light is a critical element of the Romantic quest.

It is symptomatic of the elusive nature of this quest that Coleridge
imagines it in a poem that despairs of its very possibility. The pros-
pect of joy, paradoxically, is revealed in "Dejection: An Ode," a work

in which the author bemoans the loss of his ability to feel Nature's
beauty. Bowed down by affliction, Coleridge has lost what "nature gave
me at my birth / My shaping spirit of Imagination," the latter being
Coleridge's technical term for precisely that faculty that issues forth
light. "Imagination" gives color and order to the world. It is not, in
Coleridge's usage, what causes us to see what can't be seen, to "imag-
ine" what is not there. Imagination, rather, allows us to see as we

should see, as we ought to see.
It is significant that he speaks of it as a possession of birth. For like
so many Romantics, Coleridge was inclined to think of the ability to

experience joy as a birthright, the natural endowment of the child.
The child regards all things with freshness and wonder. The child plays
and creates in perfect unity and wholeness. The child is at one with
the world, experiencing daily its deep magic and meaning, sending
forth his light. "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," Wordsworth
declares in "Intimations of Immortality." William Blake is even more
explicit in his poem "Infant Joy":
"I have no name;

I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy, but two days old.
Sweet Joy I call thee:

Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee!
288 Happiness
Like this unnamed child, all of us were once "children of joy"

who harbor some recollection, however fleeting, of a more perfect,
contented state. In this respect, the Romantics furthered the En-
lightenment belief that a measure of happiness was a natural hu-
man endowment. Yet virtually all agreed that we quickly fell from
this prelapsarian state. In his Philosophical Lectures, Coleridge indi-
cates why:
In joy individuality is lost and it therefore is liveliest in youth

. . . [before] the circumstances that have forced a man in
upon his little unthinking contemptible self, have lessened

his power of existing universally. To have a genius is to live in
the universal, to know no self but that which is reflected not

only from the faces of all around us, our fellow creatures, but
reflected from the flowers, the trees, the beasts, yea from the
surface of [the waters and the] sands of the desert. 37
Whereas the "circumstances" of the world turned a man inward upon

himself, it was self-love —pride— that kept him bound in the prison of
his person. Here is the clue to why Coleridge denied a "New Earth and
new Heaven" to "the sensual and the proud" in the passage from the
"Ode to Melancholy" cited above. Not only was the transformation
induced by joy something far deeper than the frisson of sensuality, it
could not even be "dreamt" by those whose concerns were confined

to their own petty pleasures and pains. To be focused in this way on
one's self was to sever the connection to the universal that alone could
transform us in joy.
There is, it seems, a tension at the heart of this Romantic creed.
On the one hand, joy lies within, and it is only by mining deep down
through the impacted rock of personal suffering that we can tap its
source. Continuing the inward quest of Rousseau, the Romantics

make of joy a highly personal force. It is a Romantic in spirit, the
American Walt Whitman, who later best captures the highly personal
nature of happiness and joy in his extended poem "Song of Myself":

There is that in me — I do not know what it is —but

I know it is in me . . .
I do not know it — it is without name — it is a word

unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol . .
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death — it is form, union, plan — it is eternal life
it is Happiness. 38
Subjective, intimate, individual, this force — call it happiness, call it
joy — is virtually indescribable, a mysterious, private possession bur-
ied within. Yet on the other hand, this force simultaneously transcends
the self, rendering our individual concerns and private cares a poten-
tial barrier to fusion with the "form, union, plan" of the wider world.
At once a gateway and a closed door, the repository of memories of
childhood bliss and the home of present pain, the Romantic self be-
comes the we must somehow learn to transcend.

site of a struggle that
In order to truly be ourselves, we must break free of our selves. In

order to access our private, personal joy, we must link up with the
universal joy that animates the world.
A fall from innocence precipitated by self-love and pride; an origi-
nal state of wholeness now lost; an internal struggle to be "born again"

in joy; a mysterious universal power buried within — all this should
sound familiar. Plainly, there are strong Christian precedents much for
of this language, and it is probably revealing that the Romantics made

such special use of the term "joy" itself, a word with close links to fre-
quent Gospel commandments

— and be "rejoice glad," be "filled with
—and word
joy" atainted by Enlightenment
far less accretions than
"happiness" itself. As Carlyle sought to emphasize in Sartor Resartus:
There is in man a Higher than Love of Happiness. . . . Was it
not to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs,
the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suf-
fered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of
the Godlike that is in Man . . . ?
39
290 Happiness
Carlyle used the term "blessedness" to distinguish this higher state

from Enlightenment happiness. But his critical appeal to the tran-
scendent, to the "godlike" in man as the distinguishing feature, was

frequently seized upon by those who used the term "joy" with simi-
lar intent. Indeed, Romantic joy bears a striking resemblance to the
perennial spiritual force that Christians call "grace." It is the power
that frees us from, returns us to, and completes ourselves, the power
that connects us to the divine, transforming our vision of the world.
Like the pilgrim who struggles overland to return to the blessedness
of God, like the saint who searches for signs of the liberating power
within, the Romantic thirsts for the healing power of joy. In joy we
lose ourselves, so that in joy we may be found.
There is, however, a crucial distinction. Rarely do Romantics speak
of joy as a force that is divinely conferred. Joy, rather, is immanent,
dwelling dormant within us all as it dwells within the world. Unlike
Christian grace, joy is not granted from on high, mediated through the
church, or infused directly into the soul by the word of Christ. It is
already there, already here, waiting to be recovered — a process that
involves great sacrifice and pain. But the burden is ours to bear and is
to be carried to completion in this life. The Romantic promise is of

happiness, not in another world but in this one.
Which takes us to the very heart of Romanticism's contradiction and
appeal. For what is Romantic joy if not a partially secularized dream of
experiencing heaven on earth; the dream of recovering the lost child
within who whispers to us daily, like the New Adam, of what we once
were and again might be? It is Wordsworth, above all, who underlines
the point in his Home at Grasmere, a work in which he chronicles a re-
turn, both literal and figurative, to his childhood dwelling. After a long
and painful pilgrimage amid the "realities of life so cold," Wordsworth

comes back to himself:
A termination, and a last retreat

A Center, come from wheresoe'er you will,
A Whole without dependence or defect,
Made for itself; and happy in itself,
A Perfect contentment, Unity entire.
And here, the distant thought
Is fetch'd out of the heaven in which it was.

The unappropriated bliss hath found
An owner, and that owner I am he.
The Lord of this enjoyment is on Earth
and in my breast. 40
The distant thought, the happiness of heaven, has been achieved by

mortal incarnation, the word made flesh.
But how, we immediately wonder, can such complete joy be sus-

tained? Restless wanderers that they were, the Romantics proposed
many routes, but the common end, one suspects, remained equally
elusive. There is, for example, the way so dear to Wordsworth him-
self, the way of Nature that beckons with the invitation to find one-
self along its divine path. The German painter Philipp Otto Runge
captures perfectly the prospect of swirling, mysterious joy to be had
when taken up in the arms of the infinite:
When the sky above me teems with innumerable stars, the

wind blows through the vastness of space, the wave breaks
in the immense night; when above the forest the reddish
morning light appears and the sun begins to illuminate the
world, the mist rises in the valley and I throw myself in grass
sparkling with dew, every blade and stalk of grass teems

with life, the earth awakes and stirs beneath me, and every-
thing harmonizes in one great chord; then my soul rejoices
and soars in the immeasurable space around me, there is no
high or low, no beginning and no end, I hear and feel the
living breath of God who holds and supports the world, in
whom everything lives and acts: this is our highest feeling
41
God!
292 Happiness
There is, too, the way of love. "Wherein lies happiness?" Keats asks
in "Endymion." In that which beckons, he answers:
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Fully alchemiz'd, and free of space. Behold

The clear religion of heaven.
The most "self-destroying" of all the earthly elixirs, love has the power
to effect this transformation, to make "men's being mortal, immor-
tal." It is the "hope beyond the shadow of a dream."
To the mystical transports of love and the ecstatic swoon of nature
might be added the Romantics' enraptured fascination with earlier
epochs in human history or their wanderings, real and imagined, among

the "primitive" peoples of foreign lands. In both instances did some
Constance Mayer-Lamartiniere, The Dream of Happiness, Musee de Louvre, Paris.

claim to find evidence of the "happy infancy" of humanity, an analog

to the joyful wholeness that they often attributed to youth. Measured
in entire cultures (and with ample condescension), such thoughts led
some to search for happiness, like Chateaubriand's Rene, on Native
American plains. They prompted others to scour for traces of a lost
golden age amid the ruins of Greece, or Rome, or the Christian Middle
Ages, when whole peoples allegedly lived on better terms with the
world and with themselves. And they led the likes of Coleridge and
his circle of Cambridge undergraduates to plan excitedly for the
founding of what they called a "pantisocratic," or all-governing, com-

munity on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania,
where devoted "children of nature" would recover the prelapsarian

state through an experiment in communal living. 42
Such efforts, almost by definition, were destined to fail. No more

could they re-create a lost innocence, permanently slake the thirst for
joy, than could the most desperate of Romantic stratagems for conjur-
ing bliss: the resort to mind-altering drugs. The English poet Thomas
de Quincey may have believed, after his first use of opium, that he
had discovered the panacea for all human woes, the "secret of happi-
ness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages." But
as he recounts in the Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), the
"apocalypse" of "divine enjoyment" quickly gave way to the hell of
addiction. Happiness could not be "bought for a penny." 43 Wanting

"to be God," man falls "lower than his real nature," Baudelaire observes
of his own experiments with hashish. The attempt to induce an "arti-
ficial paradise" — to travel through the deliberate disordering of the

senses to states of childlike wonder and fascination — is tinged from
44
the outset by the ironic knowledge of its own futility.
It is possible to say as much of all these Romantic stratagems to arrive
at the final destination of joy — a joy that is more, that is, than an ephem-
eral glimpse, a fleeting moment, or a passing feeling. In their darker
moments, Romantic voices were prepared to admit as much, suggesting

that they knew it all along. "There is not a joy that life can give like that
it takes away," Byron understood. For Keats, as for so many others, the
goddess of melancholy keeps her "Sovran shrine," in the "very temple

294 Happiness
of Delight." "Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu . .

." is a
figure eternally taking leave. But despite this knowledge, the hope, the
faith endures that joy — lasting joy —can transform our existence into
something more precious. "Let us believe in a kind of optimism in which

we are our own gods," Shelley affirms, stressing that it is "best that we
45
should think all this for the best even though it be not."
This defiant optimism, this quixotic persistence in pursuit, is per-
haps the Romantics' most compelling trait. And so it is only right

that they should proclaim it repeatedly from their highest altar, the
altar of art. "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments
of the happiest and best minds," Shelley maintains. It spreads "sweet
46
news of kindred joy." "All art is dedicated to joy, and there is no
higher and no more serious undertaking than to make man happy,"
Schiller agrees. How fitting that he should write a poem entitled
"Andie Freude" an "Ode to Joy," that Beethoven would set to music
in realization of a long-held dream. Composers like Bach had for
centuries set music to "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"; Beethoven now

celebrated the desire for joy itself. It was even more fitting —and fit-
tingly Romantic —
when the final stunning chorus of Beethoven's
that
final symphony boomed out in triumph at the inaugural performance

in Vienna in 1824, the composer, long since deaf, was unable to hear
the words. Like the music and the applause, they played only in his
mind:
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods, daughter of Elysium

Intoxicated with your fire, heavenly one, we enter your shrine.
Your magic power reunites what strict custom has divided;
All men become brothers where your gentle wing rests.
Be embraced, you millions! This kiss for all the world!
Brothers! above the canopy of the stars there must dwell a
loving Father!
Do you fall to your knees, you millions? World, do you sense

your Maker?
See him beyond the stars! Beyond the stars he must dwell! 47
The Salvation of Art
"Joy was never my thing, so I find his Ode to Joy banal, which
Beethoven can be when he tries to be happy. . .
." 48 This, at any rate,
was the judgment of the dour Swedish playwright August Strindberg,
writing in the second half of the nineteenth century. Setting aside
the struggle for joy, Strindberg focused on a rather different image
of the master composer: a copy of Beethoven's mask, originally cast
by the Viennese sculptor Franz Klein. Grim, taut, pockmarked, it hung
in Strindberg's Stockholm apartment, flanked by candles. The brow
furrowed and the jaw set in defiance, the mask captured —did it
not? —the deep metaphysical pain of a man whom fate had robbed of
his hearing and then tortured on the rack of his own brilliance. Seen
in this light, the image was an icon, the symbol par excellence of the
tragic intensity of the heroic artist, suffering unto death in a world of
pain.
Franz Klein, Life Mask of Beethoven,

1812, Beethoven-Haus, Bonn.
296 Happiness
Strindberg was hardly alone in his interpretation, or in his posses-

sion; Klein's mask was widely reproduced. The French painter Rosa
Bonheur kept a copy on the wall of her studio, as if to defy her name,
a reminder of artistic angst. The Italian symbolist Gabriele d'Annunzio
crowned his with a wreath of laurels. And thousands more contem-
plated the apparently haunting image in music shops, antique stores,
and private homes across Europe in the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries. To an age enthralled by the new "sciences" of physiog-
nomy and phrenology, the face was the mirror of the mind, just as the
eye was the lamp of the soul.
But masks, of course, can be deceiving, and Franz Klein's cast of

Beethoven is no exception. In the first place, what Strindberg and
many others assumed was a death mask had in fact been cast from life,
in 1812, some fifteen years before Beethoven met his maker. And the
look of strained agitation that haunted his face was less the reflection
of a state of mind than the product of the procedure itself. As the plas-
ter dried about his features, Beethoven struggled to breathe, reveal-

ing, one scholar observes, "not a melancholy of soul, but simply the
49
claustrophobic apprehension of near suffocation!" More than any-
thing else, the mask underlines the cautionary wisdom of Ballanche:
"We lack a form of measurement to appreciate the sum of happiness
and sadness which is reserved for each man. . . . We only see external
appearances, the secret and private things escape us." 50
Which is not to say that Beethoven lived, immortally beloved, in
eternal bliss. He himself commented on the mask to a visiting
Rossini, "Oh! un infelice" "an unhappy one." The Italian composer

echoed the sentiment, speaking later of the "indefinable sadness
51
spread over his features." As Beethoven's moving "Heiligenstadt
Testament" alone makes clear, the German composer was hardly
immune to pain. Penned in 1802 in the Austrian town outside of
Vienna that bears its name, the testament reveals the emotional
turmoil braved by Beethoven as he struggled to hide his advancing
deafness from his family and friends. In a final paragraph added to
the main part of the will on October 10, he concludes on a plaintive
note:
O Providence —grant me at least one — has

full day otjoy it
been so long since true joy echoed within — Oh when —oh

When oh Divine One, can I find it again in the temple of
nature and of men —Never?—No—Oh that would be too
52
hard.
Far too hard. Fortunately, Beethoven still had life to live. And though
he never secured the lasting happiness that he demands of his two
brothers near the end of the testament ("during my lifetime I have
thought often of you and ways to make you happy —be so"), Beethoven
did aspire throughout his career to the joy that animates the final
movement of his final symphony. 53 As much as melancholy, as much
as spleen, this search was an integral part of his life, as it was of the
wider enterprise of early Romanticism.
Why, then, did Strindberg choose to see only the scowl, dismissing
the search for happiness as unworthy of a serious artist? The answer
goes far beyond any personal peculiarities of vision. And though the
history of the creation of Beethoven in the image of a suffering hero is
a story unto itself, the immediate impetus in this case is clear enough.
Like so many in the second half of the nineteenth century, Strindberg

was influenced profoundly by a man who succeeded in altering the
image not only of Beethoven but of Romantic art in general and its
accompanying search for happiness.
In the history of modern philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer is in
many ways an anomaly. A gifted, graceful stylist, he was arguably the

most poetic philosopher to write since Plato, a position challenged only
by Rousseau before him, and after by Nietzsche. Though profession-

ally trained at a number of German institutions and granted a doctor-
ate by the University of Jena in 1813, he lived and thought as an
outsider, at once fiercely independent and supremely self-confident.
"My philosophy is the real solution of the enigma of the world," he
declared typically. "In this sense it may be called a revelation." 54 Not-
withstanding a brief unsuccessful teaching stint at the University of
Berlin in 1 820, Schopenhauer worked largely on his own, doing so with
impressive precocity. His entire system of thought was formulated in
298 Happiness
his twenties. And though he continued to write until his death in
Frankfurt in 1860, the main themes are all present in a book pub-
lished in 1819, The World as Will and Representation (revised and ex-
panded in a second volume in 1844). Finally, and perhaps most
distinctly, Schopenhauer adopted a curiously benevolent attitude
toward religion, despite his own uncompromising atheism. Seeing in
Christianity important confirmation of his work, he also regarded the
Hindu Upanishads and the teachings of the Buddha with interest and
respect. He was among the first Western thinkers to engage seriously
with the philosophy of the East.
In all of these ways, Schopenhauer was a man apart. But it was above
all his temperament that set him at the greatest distance from those
who had come before. In the history of happiness, Schopenhauer is
without precedent. He is, simply, the greatest pessimist in the West-

ern tradition.
Scholars often turn to psychological analysis to explain this bleakness,
and it is undeniable that Schopenhauer showed signs of depression from

a young age. "When I was seventeen," he later recalled, "I was affected
by the misery and wretchedness of life, as was the Buddha when in his youth
he caught sight of sickness, old age, pain and death." This world, he had
already decided, "could not be the work of an all-bountiful, infinitely
good Being, but rather of a devil, who had summoned creatures into
existence in order to gloat over the sight of their anguish and agony." 55
A stint, largely against his wishes, as an employee in the family mer-
cantile business seems to have done little to improve his outlook, nor
did the death of his father, most probably by suicide in 1805. And
Schopenhauer's relationship with his mother was never good. In 1814
they broke definitively. He remained a lifelong bachelor, with notori-
ously unsavory opinions on the subject of the other sex.

Schopenhauer's personal psychology must be taken into account
when considering his views. Yet it is also important to recognize that
Schopenhauer himself — a psychologically insightful man —would

have scoffed at such speculation. To see the world as the source of
suffering, and human life as inherently unhappy, he believed, was
not the product of psychological distortion. On the contrary, it was
the sole conclusion at which a healthy, clear-eyed observer could

arrive. To regard the world in any other way, he believed, was willful
blindness.
Schopenhauer had little doubt that his contemporaries suffered
massively from such illusion. He returned to the theme again and
again. "Every immoderate joy," he writes in The World as Will and Rep-
resentation, "always rests on the delusion that we have found something
in life that is not to be met with at all, namely permanent satisfaction
of the tormenting desires or cares that constantly breed new ones.

From each particular delusion of this kind we must inevitably later be
56
brought back." Whether we choose to acknowledge the fact or not,
the world will constantly remind us of this bitter truth through the
power of its pain, for "everything in life proclaims that earthly happi-
ness is destined to be frustrated, or recognized as an illusion. The

57
grounds for this lie deep in the very nature of things." And though
we are often led to this sad discovery by privations and disappoint-
ments from without, the root cause of our suffering lies within. This,
too, we often refuse to see:
We frequently shut our eyes to the truth . . . that suffering is
essential to life, and therefore does not flow in upon us from

outside, but that everyone carries around within himself its
perennial source. On the contrary, we are constantly looking

for a particular external cause, as it were a pretext for the pain
that never leaves us, just as the free man makes for himself an
58
idol in order to have a master.
Unlike so many of the earlier Romantics, Schopenhauer finds not a

seed of joy planted within, waiting to be given nourishment and bloom,
but only a germinating source of pain. Imbedded in our very person
is the kernel of all despair.
What, precisely, is this elementary cause, this perennial bad seed?

Schopenhauer refers to it as the "will," or more precisely as the "will-
to-life" or the "will-to-live" {Will zum Leben) . An absolutely central term
in his vocabulary, it is, for all its prominence, difficult to define, in part
—
300 Happiness
because Schopenhauer conceived of the will as a force to which we

can give no precise representation. Underlying the world of appear-
ance, the will is a manifestation of another dimension, a surging, striv-
ing force that permeates all living things and animates the universe as
a whole. Analogous in certain respects to the pantheistic doctrines so
dear to the Romantics, Schopenhauer's theory of the will differs es-

sentially in that its author refused to equate the will-to-life with di-
vinity of any kind. For Schopenhauer, there is no God, and the

will-to-life is devoid of any teleological meaning or goal. The will, in
short, is blind, striving without purpose or end simply to reproduce

itself, to continue and carry on.
Schopenhauer's division of the world between representation or
appearance on the one hand, and will or pure essence on the other,
corresponded in his view to Kant's celebrated distinction between
"phenomena" (appearance) and "noumena" (thing in itself). It also
bore comparison, Schopenhauer believed, with Plato's notion that

behind the world of perceived reality lay an immaterial realm of per-
fect ideas or forms. What is most important to grasp here, though, is
Schopenhauer's general contention that lurking beneath the appar-

ently placid surface of the world is a powerful elemental life force
"its innermost essence" — that surges constantly in great flows.
Difficult to conceive of in the abstract, the idea of this force assumes

much greater clarity when applied by Schopenhauer to human beings.
Thus, the will encompasses "all desiring, striving, wishing, demand-

ing, longing, hoping, loving, rejoicing, and the like. . .
," 59 It is the life
force that impels us forward, that causes us to hunger and to yearn.
Lurking below the surface of our selves, just as it lurks below the sur-
face of the world, the will-to-life both guides and subverts our con-
scious representations and apparently rational ends. As such, its
powers are frequently unconscious. "We often do not know what we

desire or fear," Schopenhauer recognizes with acuity. "For years we
can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it
60
come to clear consciousness." Of such repressed longings, the most
powerful is the "sexual impulse," what Schopenhauer considers the
"kernel of the will-to-live":
[It is the] invisible central point of all action and conduct. . . .
[It] peeps up everywhere, in spite of all veils thrown over it. It
is the cause of war and the aim and object of peace, the basis
of the serious and the aim of the joke, the inexhaustible
source of wit, the key to all hints and allusions, and the
meaning of all secret signs and suggestions. . . . This, however,
is the piquant element and the jest of the world, that the
principal concern of all men is pursued secretly. . . . Indeed,
we see it take its seat at every moment as the real and heredi-
61
tary lord of the world.
With good reason did Schopenhauer regularly assert that the genitals
are the "focus of the will."
Passages like these reveal why Schopenhauer is considered a pre-

scient psychologist, a man who anticipated a number of the core doc-
trines of Freud. More important, his psychological insight gives teeth
to his biting critique of happiness. "Its desires unlimited, its claims
inexhaustible," the will propels us headlong in grasping pursuit of

permanent gratification that can never be achieved. "No possible sat-
isfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to
62
its demand." The instant one desire is satisfied, it is replaced by
another in a process of continual striving whose consequences are
doubly catastrophic. In the first place, the restless activity of the will
guarantees conflict with others, whose desires cannot fail to clash with
our own. And in the second, it assures continual individual dissatis-
faction, for the pleasure of desire satisfied pales before the pain of
desire unfulfilled. As Schopenhauer affirms repeatedly, pain is "posi-
tive" and pleasure "negative," meaning that we feel the one as an in-
tense presence, but the other predominately only by default, as the

absence or removal of discomfort, desire, or pain:
We feel desire as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it has

been satisfied, it is like the mouthful of food which has been
taken, and which ceases to exist for our feelings the moment
it is swallowed. We painfully feel the loss of pleasures and
302 Happiness
enjoyments, as soon as they fail to appear; but when pains cease

even after being present for a long time, their absence is not
directly felt, but at most they are thought of intentionally by
means of reflection. For only pain and want can be felt posi-
tively; therefore they proclaim themselves; well being, on the

contrary, is merely negative. 63
It may be that Schopenhauer underestimates the degree to which

pleasure, too, is experienced as a positive presence. But this does
little to detract from the force of his central claim regarding the
voracity of the will, which is reminiscent of Hobbes's "perpetual
and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in
death." In Schopenhauer's analysis, happiness is the will's mirage

on the horizon of longing, a "leading ideal hovering before us," a
64
"chimera."
It is for these reasons that Schopenhauer conceives of the "notion
that we exist in order to be happy" as the only "inborn error." It is
inborn, he says, because "it coincides with our existence itself," bound
up with the blind striving of the will-to-live, whose successive satis-
65
faction "is what we think of through the concept of happiness." For
Schopenhauer, however, it is clear that this concept is the greatest of
illusions, one that our experience of life will almost certainly dispel in
the end. And so he pours scorn on all who would perpetuate this illu-
sion rather than permit us to see it for what it is:
Accordingly optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious

doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's
happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone
believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and
enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot,
he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses

the whole point of his existence; whereas it is far more correct
to regard work, privation, misery, and suffering crowned by
death, as the aim and object of 66
life.
Laughing with Voltaire at the claim that this is the "best of all
possible worlds," Schopenhauer goes far beyond him by making the

contrary case. Were the world to contain any more suffering, he con-
tends —any more cruelty, evil, and want — its inhabitants would sim-
ply die out, and the world, as we know it, cease to exist. The conclusion
to be drawn is that this is the "worst of all possible worlds," and our
67
existence in it, a form of hell.
An image of existence as an inescapable vale of tears, a picture of

the world in which men and women are led astray by congenital de-
fect, governed by insatiable desires and lusts: Schopenhauer's vision
bears a remarkable likeness to the most dire Christian accounts of the
plight of unredeemed humanity. It is a similarity that he was perfectly
prepared to acknowledge, noting, for example, that the Christian doc-
trine of the Fall possessed an "allegorical" (though not a literal) truth,
and that its general appraisal of "the vanity of all earthly happiness"
68
was entirely sound. In Schopenhauer's view, moreover, Christianity's
"true spirit and kernel" — its contempt for the world —was shared by
Brahmanism and Buddhism. He frequently noted their similarities,
arguing that the "spirit of Christian morality is identical with that of

69
Brahmanism and Buddhism." All three traditions located the root
cause of human suffering in misdirected desire. And all three sought

to quell this voracious force through strategies of renunciation.
Revealingly, Schopenhauer, too, urges us along what he calls the "road
to salvation." The term is potentially misleading, insofar as Schopen-

hauer does not countenance a God who helps us on our path any more
than he believes in heaven, reincarnation, or an afterlife. Salvation is
salvation from ourselves, self-liberation from the terrible driving force
of the will. Looking with admiration to the example of religious ascet-

ics, Schopenhauer recommends that we likewise attempt to deny the
will and combat its promptings. Sexual abstinence, the purposeful con-
trol of appetites and lusts, the deliberate attempt to make our life "as poor,
hard, and cheerless as possible," this is the "narrow path of the elect, of
70
the saints." For these select few able to overcome and defeat desire,
Schopenhauer holds out the promise of a type of secular beatitude or
—
304 Happiness
nirvana: "that ocean-like calmness of the spirit, that deep tranquility,
that unshakable confidence and serenity, whose mere reflection in the
countenance ... is a complete and certain gospel." 71

This is the high road to salvation, the road of the yogi, sadhu, or as-
cetic saint. But its extraordinary demands ensure that it can be followed
by only a few. The great majority are forced down a different route, one
strewn with "thorns upon thorns." Unable to discipline and control their
will-to-life, it instead is beaten down by the inevitable sufferings and
disappointments of the world. "Suffering is the process of purification
by which alone man is in most cases sanctified, in other words, led back
from the path of error of the will-to-live." 72
The world becomes our
cross — a symbol for which Schopenhauer has the highest reverence
the site of torture on which the will-to-life is steadily broken. Not all
will be cleansed by this "process of purification, the purifying lye of
which is pain," for many go kicking and screaming to their death, still
73
under the spell of the will. But for the "fortunate," death can only
come as a relief, a final cessation. Theirs is a strange privilege indeed:
"to die willingly, to die gladly, to die cheerfully, is the prerogative of

74
the resigned."
Consistently bleak, unrelentingly grim, Schopenhauer's modern
contemptus mundi is so dark that one would be at a loss to explain
its subsequent appeal if not for an important caveat. But merci-

fully, Schopenhauer stakes out one further path to renunciation. In
aesthetic contemplation, he suggests, before the high altar of art, we

can achieve temporary respite from the relentless prompting of de-
sire. Standing before a great painting or a sublime natural landscape,
swept up in a moving symphony, poem, or play, the observer may ex-
perience a momentary cessation of longing, a fleeting escape from the
"thralldom of the will." "The storm of passions, the pressure of desire
and fear, and all the miseries of willing are then . . . calmed and ap-
peased in a marvelous way." 75
For an instant, we lose ourselves as we
step into "another world," giving up consciousness of the subjective,
aim-oriented striving that is our natural course. "All at once the peace,
always sought but always escaping us on [the] path of willing, comes
to us of its own accord, and all is well with us. It is the painless state
. . . the state of the gods; for that moment we are delivered from the
miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal
76
servitude of willing."
Schopenhauer believed that this state of momentary transcendence
was achievable in various media. But it was above all in music, he ar-
gued, that we could experience the fullest extent of the "salvation"

and "blessedness" of art. Music was "the copy of the will itself," a di-
rect rendering of the ceaseless striving and the deviations of longing

that moved through the universe and our inner being. 77 In the devel-
opment of music through time, the mind recognized the patterns of
its own inner workings, experiencing the full range of desire's triumphs
and disappointments: discord and reconciliation, harmony and disso-
nance, suspension and satisfaction. And it did so in the purest pos-
sible terms, by capturing "the inner nature, the in-itself, of every
phenomenon." In its inexhaustible possibilities, that is, music did "not
express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that afflic-
tion, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy,
pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a
certain extent in the abstract. . .

." Recognizing all these emotions in
their "extracted quintessence," we are comforted in the process, our
own striving is suspended, and we achieve a momentary peace. If only
temporarily, the wretched of the earth can find solace, watching as
music floats before them "a paradise quite familiar and quite remote
78
. . . easy to understand and yet so inexplicable."
It is often pointed out that Schopenhauer was distinctly unsuited to
the path of ascetic renunciation. And it is doubtful that his own
will-to-live was violently broken on the cross of his existence, which was
comfortably padded with all the amenities available to the
nineteenth-century European bourgeois. Living quietly and indepen-
dently off the income of a sizable inheritance, Schopenhauer spent the
last decades of his life in a comfortable house in Frankfurt, writing in
the mornings, walking in the afternoons, reading the foreign papers at
his men's club, dining out, and attending the opera or theater by night.
Often he gathered with friends to discuss ideas, and he indulged in his
fair share of erotic, if short-lived, affairs. When, after a career of almost

306 Happiness
complete obscurity, his fame began to grow in the 1850s, this theorist
of the vanity of human existence was distinctly pleased. He went so far

as to employ a group of researchers to scour the European press for clip-
pings and mentions of his name. Clearly, if Schopenhauer ever tasted

the sweetness of salvation, it was of the artistic kind alone.
It was this aspect of his philosophy that endured. Few may have
possessed the fortitude to take up his call to live in renunciation as a
secular saint, but many found his vision of aesthetic redemption ex-
tremely attractive. It is no exaggeration to say that Schopenhauer
proved one of the most influential writers of the second half of the
nineteenth century, shaping the views not only of August Strindberg
but of a whole host of artists and thinkers, of whom the most famous
was Richard Wagner, but that also included the young Nietzsche,
Proust, Mahler, Turgenev, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and
Thomas Hardy, to name only a few. In Schopenhauer's vision of re-
demption through art, they found a powerful creed, one that anointed
them with an extraordinary calling. A minister who suffers in sacrifice
in order to offer his flock a fleeting glimpse of salvation, a temporary

respite from pain, the artist in the Schopenhauerian vision is nothing
less than a secular priest. For men and women losing faith in a tran-
scendent purpose to the world, this proved a compelling calling, all
the more so in that it bid its followers to retrace, by secular steps, the
way of a religious journey whose momentum remained powerful, how-

ever much this otherwise might be denied. Before a work of art, the
modern pilgrim could stand still on a threshold and experience like
his religious forebears the fullness of beatific promise. But as he gazed

across the way at the prospect of happiness, he must now wonder: Was
this a window that opened onto a better world? Or simply the sacred
space of art's own making — a retreat —with nothing beyond itself?
The Temple of Longing
Although reduced to rubble in World War II, the House of the Seces-
sion has been carefully restored. It serves today more or less as its
creators intended: a quiet sanctuary and "refuge," a "temple of art,"

a sacred space "to show modern man his true face." 79 Built in 1898
by the architect Josef Olbrich as an exhibition hall for the Viennese
avant-garde who gave it its name, the building is most often associated
today with the painter Gustav Klimt, a leading Secessionist who col-
laborated closely on the building's design. One of his greatest works,

the Beethoven Frieze, now hangs permanently in the sanctuary's sanc-
tum sanctorum.
Covering three walls of the closely confined space, the numerous
panels of the Beethoven Frieze are practically a Gesamtkuntswerk — a total
work of art — in their own right. But when originally shown at the
House of the Secession in 1902, they were only a small portion of a

much larger artistic whole: a series of votive offerings dedicated around
the exhibition's central work, Max Klinger's brooding sculpture of
Beethoven. The architect Josef Hoffmann transformed the interior of
the building into a shrine. Gustav Mahler performed a reorchestrated

version of the fourthmovement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And
Klimt's elaborate frieze provided his own interpretation of the "Ode
to Joy." Here modern art paid homage to the image of a saint. As the
critic Carl Schorske has observed, "If ever there was an example of
collective narcissism, this was it: artists (Secessionists) celebrating an
80
artist (Klinger), celebrating a hero of art (Beethoven)."
As stated in the exhibition's catalog, the aim of this exercise in col-
lective narcissism was to work for the "purposive development of in-

terior space" (Innenraum). It should come as no surprise to learn that
happiness was called upon to fill the void of this inner realm. 81 Faith-
fully depicted in Klimt's frieze, the journey begins, according to the
catalog, with the "longing for happiness" (die Sehnsucht nach Gluck) rep-
resented in the series of drawings along the left wall as the dream and
rapture of soaring women, the misery of weak humanity naked and
kneeling in supplication, and the paragon of Strength, heavily armed,
who takes up the "struggle for happiness."
Along the second, shorter wall stands a group of hostile forces: the
apelike giant Typhon, "against whom even gods fight in vain," and his
many hideous offspring, including the three gorgons Sickness, Madness,

308 Happiness
"Die Sehnsucht nach Gluck" (The Longing for Happiness). Detail of the
left panel of Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, Secession Building, Vienna.
Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
and Death on one side, and Lust and Unchastity, Excess, and Gnaw-
ing Grief on the other. What is truly extraordinary, however, is that
the "longing for happiness and the wishes of mankind" do not engage
the hostile powers that block their path. Rather, they "fly over and
away" above them, transcending the need to enter into conflict at all.
Their resolution, in the third wall, is thus assured. "The longing for
happiness finds solace in poetry," and "the arts," a flowing cascade of

beautiful women, "lead us to an ideal realm, where alone we can find
pure joy, pure happiness, and pure love." There, a "choir of the angels
of paradise" sings from a slightly altered chorus of the "Ode to Joy":
Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, middle panel, Typhon flanked by Sickness,

Madness, Death, Lust, Unchastity, Excess, and Gnawing Grief.
Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, right panel, The Choir of Angels

of Paradise and the rapturous Kiss. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Freude, schoner Gotterfunken,
Diesen Ku/3 der ganzen Welt!
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,

This kiss for all the world!
The longing for happiness finds its resolution in the mystical, sen-
sual embrace of art.
It was Stendhal, cited approvingly by Baudelaire in the Painter of
Modern Life, who said, "The beautiful is neither more nor less than the
82
promise of happiness." In this sanctuary, Klimt has fulfilled that
promise, creating a realm of beauty that allows us to soar for a moment
above the struggles of daily life. In doing so, he was being true, if not
to Beethoven himself, who struggled until the end to believe in a "lov-
ing Father beyond the stars," then at least to the Beethoven formed
in the image of Schopenhauer. For Klimt, like so many of his genera-
tion, had steeped himself in this philosopher's work, especially as
summarized and interpreted in Richard Wagner's widely read essay,
"Beethoven," which Klimt knew well. Just as "Christianity stepped
forth amid the Roman civilisation of the universe," Wagner observes
a
310 Happiness
there, "so Music breaks forth from the chaos of modern civilisation.
Both say aloud: 'our kingdom is not of this world."' 83 It is Beethoven

who bears this divine music aloft, spreading the word of a higher call-
ing and deeper truth. "Let anyone experience for himself how the
whole modern world of Appearance, which hems him in on every side
to his despair, melts suddenly to naught if he but hears the first few
84
bars of one of those godlike symphonies." Interpreting his hero in
these Schopenhauerian terms, Wagner hears in Beethoven's music the
striving of the will
— "a supernatural life, an agency now soothing, now
appalling, a pulse, a thrill, a throb of joy, of yearning, fearing, grief and
ecstasy" —which carries us, in the climax of the Ninth Symphony's

final ode, to "the nameless joy of a paradise regained." 85
Wagner would develop more sinister fantasies of the "regeneration"
of man, reserving special animus for the Jews, who allegedly barred,
like Typhon, the way to the happiness of the German people. Klimt
never shared those thoughts, and indeed, whereas Wagner urged ac-
tive engagement in the world, foreseeing a central role for art in the
development of a "new religion" and a new, glorious Reich, Klimt with-
drew into the womb of his own creation. To flee the world into the
image of art, or to remake the world in art's image —both were Ro-
mantic fantasies, and they belied a common conviction: that the world,
to the naked eye, was not a happy place. The longing for joy, the hap-
piness of salvation remained. But an early Romantic suspicion —

questioning of the Enlightenment's self-evident truth —had evolved
through Schopenhauer into a much stronger doubt that only redemp-
tion or revolution could stay.
Something of this same suspicion lingered among men of a very
different cast —men who on the surface, at least, seemed less suscep-
tible to the sickness of the age. Heirs to the liberalism of Locke and
proponents of the pursuit of happiness, they identified themselves as
"liberals" and were identified as such. Their more radical adversaries,
however, dismissed them as minions of the "bourgeoisie," that amor-

phous group against whom Romantics and revolutionaries alike con-
stantly railed, even as they freely accepted their funds. It is true that
those of the liberal persuasion were inclined to see capitalism as a force

for good. And they were strong advocates of representative govern-

ment, particularly as it had taken shape in England and the United
States. They also tended to be suspicious of the influence of the
masses and distrustful of the power of the state. Upholding the liber-
ties of the individual above all else, they maintained the sanctity of
civil society and defended the importance of the rule of law.
Despite these differences from their bohemian and revolutionary
opponents, heirs to the liberal tradition were forced, like them, to
engage continually with the legacy of the Enlightenment. Weighing
the evidence of its self-evident truths, they also pondered the prob-
lem of the pursuit of happiness, and as they did so, they struggled to
maintain their faith in the Enlightenment's central promise of re-
demption in the world, "the place where, in the end, / We find our
happiness, or not at all."

Liberalism and
its Discontents
the year 1800, while Napoleon pondered power and the pursuit
In
of happiness, and the "Ode to Joy" was still unheard, a pamphlet
appeared in Dublin. Offered for a penny by William Watson of Capel-
Street ("Printer to the Cheap Repository for Religious and Moral
Tracts"), The Path to Riches and Happiness was a bargain by any stan-
dard, and it promised a huge reward: wealth and well-being, felicity
and fortune, riches and joyful return. 1

The coupling is significant, as is the fact that the work's late au-
thor, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, was born in America. No other country
has been so closely associated with the words that smile on the face of
its founding document — the "pursuit of happiness." And no other
country has been so intimately connected with the dream of pursuing
happiness by pursuing fortune. Franklin himself died both happy and
rich and so could legitimately claim expertise on either subject. A close
reader of the draft of the Declaration of Independence, he ratified the
use of Jefferson's felicitous phrase and most likely suggested the sub-
stitution of "self-evident" for "sacred and undeniable" as a description
of its truth. He was also the author of numerous practical reflections
on the "way to wealth." Viewing America as prime territory for the

cultivation of riches, Franklin saw God's earth as offering abundant

evidence of our license to cultivate happiness. "Wine," he once ob-
served in a creative gloss on the Gospel account of the wedding at
Cana, "is living proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy." 2
Franklin found many such proofs, convinced as he was that "all
3
among us may be happy." But though he occasionally bade his read-
ers "wealth and happiness" at the close of his yearly reflections in Poor
Richard's Almanack, it is not at all clear that he saw a necessary connec-
tion between the two. Like Aristotle, Franklin certainly believed that
a minimum of life's conveniences were necessary to the pursuit of the

good life. "Wherein consists the Happiness of a rational Creature?" he
asks. "In having a sound mind, a healthy body, a Sufficiency of the
Necessaries and Conveniencies of Life, together with the Favour of
God, and the Love of mankind." 4 But virtue, "the mother" of happi-
ness, Franklin repeatedly stressed, was the surest means to realize
those ends. 5 Found in people, not in things, happiness could fill us

only when inflated by self-reliance, upright living, simple pleasures,
and self-respect:
Human Felicity is produc'd not so much by great Pieces of

good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that
occur every Day. Thus, if you teach a poor young Man to
shave himself, and keep his Razor in order, you may contrib-
ute more to the Happiness of his Life than in giving him a
thousand Guineas. The Money may be soon spent, and the
Regret only remaining of having foolishly consum'd it. But in
the other Case, he escapes the frequent Vexation of waiting

for Barbers, and of their sometimes, dirty Fingers, offensive
Breaths, and dull Razors. He shaves when most convenient to
him, and enjoys daily the Pleasure of its being done with a
good Instrument. 6
"Who is rich?" Poor Richard asks on another occasion. "He that is con-
7
tent." By this calculation, the pursuit of happiness was a comparatively
straightforward affair that had little to do with the pursuit of wealth.
314 Happiness
Which raises the question: Were happiness and capitalism happi- —

ness and democracy — so readily compatible as many who were drawn
to America's shores in the coming years were inclined to think? Or did

a tension lie at the heart of these seemingly natural allies from the
outset? Were the paths to riches and happiness one? In order to at-
tend to these questions, we need first to revisit the age of Enlighten-
ment in that annus mirabilis, 111 6.
Trivial Pursuits
Few words in American history are more familiar than the following
lines from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty & the
pursuit of happiness.
Though these words were drafted by Thomas Jefferson in June 1776,

and adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on the
fourth of July, the meaning of their self-evident truth, ironically, has
long been a matter of dispute. Picking over the phrases after the fact,
many have wondered what Jefferson actually meant, and nowhere is
their confusion more apparent than in confronting "the pursuit of
happiness." Was this a meaningless phrase, a "glittering generality"

that has sent generations grasping after an illusion? 8 Or did it possess
a far clearer sense, one that was immediately intelligible to those who
9
spoke the "now lost language of the Enlightenment"? For citizens
of the United States, the stakes in these debates are high, for they
place on the table nothing less than the country's self-image, a cen-
10
tral tenet of its "civil religion." And to others, the matter is hardly
less important, for in a direct way, it speaks to what has gradually
become a global concern: the place of happiness in the American way
of life.
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A draft of the Declaration of Independence, in Jefferson's hand, spelling out

the "pursuit of happiness," Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Supporters of the view that the "pursuit of happiness" made per-

fect sense at the time can point to the fact that the Continental Con-
gress itself did not trip on the phrase. Although delegates scrutinized
every line of Jefferson's draft —cutting and slashing with the precision
of men, many of whom were lawyers, who took the meaning of lan-
guage seriously — not a single one recorded reservations about the

"pursuit of happiness." Nor did any object to the other use of the term
"happiness," several lines later, when Jefferson asserts the right to
"alter or abolish" any government that is destructive of self-evident
truths. In this case, the Declaration maintains, a people is perfectly
within its rights to found a new government, "organizing its power in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety 6c
happiness." Congress saw fit only to protest Jefferson's third use of

the word, striking "The road to happiness 6c to glory is open to us too"
from the final lines of the draft. 11

Of course, congressional silence, then as now, hardly means that a
phrase is perfectly understood, let alone that the people's representatives
316 Happiness
are of one mind as to its ultimate interpretation. But Jefferson himself,

when queried years later as to where he had drawn the material for the
Declaration, replied that its hallmark was precisely its common touch,
its ability to bring together what he called the "harmonizing sentiments
of the day." The Declaration, he said, made one of many, and many of
one:
This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not

to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before
thought of, not merely to say things which had never been
said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of
the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their
assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we

are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of prin-
ciple or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and

previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the
American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone
and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests
then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether

expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the
elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke,
12
Sidney, &c.
An "expression of the American mind," the Declaration represented

the collective good sense of the eighteenth century. By bringing to-
gether bits and pieces from the four corners of his age, Jefferson pro-
duced a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.
If we examine the specific phrase the "pursuit of happiness" with

these same observations in mind, the results are intriguing. Take, for
example, the name Locke, cited by Jefferson above and often consid-
ered the single most important influence on the Declaration as a
whole. When applied to the "pursuit of happiness," Locke's name has
yielded an old and stubborn interpretation that reads the Declara-
tion as evidence of a cover-up. According to this view, Jefferson is
said to have substituted the ambiguous "pursuit of happiness" for

the third term in the allegedly Lockean trilogy of "life, liberty, and
property." Clouding over the Founding Fathers' "real" intentions
the protection, it seems, of their own estates — happiness is thus
presented as an ideological smoke screen that obscures the deeper
interests of its materialist-minded proponents. In this interpretation,
once particularly attractive to Marxists but by no means confined to

them, the Declaration thus provides a clever cover for capitalism and
the accumulation of wealth, hiding those "true" intentions under a
smiling face. 13
There are many problems with this reading, not least that Locke
himself never used the phrase "life, liberty, and property." He does,
it is true, speak in the Second Treatise of Government of "life, liberty and

estate," and "lives, liberties, and fortunes," as Jefferson well knew. And
Locke certainly considered property, broadly conceived, a noble thing,
to be accumulated through labor and protected by governments that

rule on our behalf.
But what is more interesting is that Locke makes no mention of
the "pursuit of happiness" in the Second Treatise. As we have seen, he
uses that phrase (many times) only in the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, a work with which Jefferson was also intimately famil-
iar. There, it will be recalled, Locke presents happiness as a natural
and wholesome part of a divinely orchestrated world in which human

beings are led along by pleasant sensations, ending, if they get it right,
in God. For Locke, the "gravitational" pull of happiness was the pull
of pleasure, and pleasure had as many sources as men had palates.
Some liked "luxury and debauchery," others "sobriety and riches"; still
others preferred glory, hunting, or study. What gives pleasure "to dif-
ferent men," Locke stressed, "are very different things." 14

Now Locke, undoubtedly, would have included property on his own
list of pleasures. A source of enjoyment in its own right, property, he
believed, was also a bastion of freedom and a bulwark of independence.

Many eighteenth-century Americans agreed, and in this respect, they
were more than prepared to couple property and happiness in a single
phrase. In the very same month that Jefferson labored over the draft of
the Declaration of Independence, the State of Virginia's Constitutional
318 Happiness
Convention adopted, on June 12, 1776, George Mason's Virginia Dec-

laration of Rights. A close friend of Jefferson, Mason had shown his
fellow Virginian a version of the draft, which Jefferson had in his pos-
session at the time of writing the Declaration of Independence. The
words are revealing:
All men are created equally free and independent, and have
certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any
compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are
the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring
and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happi-
ness and safety. 15
Here, the natural right to pursue happiness (and to obtain it) is bound
up not only with security, life, and liberty but also explicitly with
property. Even earlier, in his widely read Rights of the British Colonies
Asserted'and Proved (1 /'64) , James Otis had made a similar connection,
observing that the end of government is "to provide for the security,
the quiet, the happy enjoyment of life, liberty, and property." 16 Otis,
if not Locke, used the happy phrase, and it was picked up and employed
again in the Declaration of Colonial Rights and Grievances, endorsed
by the First Continental Congress on October 1, 1 774. Still later, when
James Madison proposed a series of amendments in the form of a Bill
of Rights to be added to the newly ratified American Constitution, he,

too, associated happiness with life, liberty, and property:
Government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the
benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life
and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and
generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. 17
These (and all other) references to happiness were subsequently cut

in the final debates over the Constitution's Bill of Rights. But similar
formulations linking happiness, life, liberty, and property survived in
the texts of a number of state constitutions, including those of Virginia

(1776), Pennsylvania (1776), Vermont (1777), Massachusetts (1780),

and New Hampshire (1784). The constitutions of Georgia (1777),
North Carolina (1776), New Jersey (1776), and New York (1777)
18
invoke happiness without reference to property.
In any case, it can hardly be doubted that for many Americans
Jefferson included —property in the eighteenth century was a value
associated with the pursuit of happiness, taking its place alongside life,
liberty, and security as basic rights that merited government protection.

But this is a very different thing from saying that happiness and prop-
erty were one and the same, or even inextricably linked. As some histo-
rians have rightly asked, if Jefferson had really intended the "pursuit of
happiness" to stand for "property" and nothing else, then why did he
not simply use the term as others before him had? And why, they specu-
late further, did Jefferson advise his friend, the Marquis de Lafayette,
to remove the inalienable right of property from the draft of the Decla-
ration of Rights that the Frenchman penned in 1 788?
In the face of such questions, it is tempting to conclude that if
Jefferson's reference to the "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration
has a Lockean origin at all, then its source must be the Essay Concern-
ing Human Understanding and not the Second Treatise of Government. "The
pursuit of happiness" would then best be rendered the "pursuit of
pleasure," which for Locke was simply an empirical description of a
truth about human nature. Property might legitimately draw us for-
ward. But so might many other things. The pleasures we chose to pur-
sue —and how—were ultimately a matter of taste. This "variety of
pursuits shews," Locke affirmed, "that every one does not place his
19
happiness in the same thing."
Given the widespread discussion of happiness in the age of En-
lightenment, however — say nothing of the tremendous breadth
to
of Jefferson's reading— would be

it narrow the
perilous to interpre-
tative field in this way. The truth of the matter, as we shall see in a
moment, is that there are a number of other legitimate interpretations
of the "pursuit of happiness," and that Jefferson was able to combine
and conflate them in new and interesting ways. Nevertheless, adher-
ing to a strict Lockean reading has its merits, for Jefferson was never
—
320 Happiness
one to spurn pleasure, and he thought highly of Locke's model of the

mind. Following out the implications of reading the phrase in this way
is hardly a pointless exercise, and it may well be revealing.
The first thing to note is that the word "pursuit" is interesting in
itself. In the English language of Locke, like that of Jefferson, the word
had a harder meaning than it does today. It retained, as the critic Gam-
Wills has pointed out, a close link with its cognates "prosecute" and
"persecute." leading Dr. Johnson to list the word in his eighteenth-
century Dictionary of the English Language as follows:
To Pursue ... 1.To chase; to follow in hostility.

Pursuit ... 1. The act of following with hostile intention.
If one thinks of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive (and

in Scottish law, criminal prosecuters were called "pursuers," a
usage with which Jefferson was familiar), the "pursuit of happi-
ness" takes on a somewhat different cast. 20 We are inevitably re-
minded of the "uneasiness" referred to by Locke in the endless

human struggle to secure pleasure and avoid pain, a struggle, Locke
believed, that would never end given the "multitude of wants, and
desires, we are beset with in this imperfect State." In this life, it
bears repeating:
We are seldom at ease, and free enough from the solicitation
of our natural or adopted desires, but a constant succession of

uneasiness out of that stock, which natural wants, or acquired
habits have heaped up. take the will in their turns; and no
sooner is one action dispatch'd. which by such a determina-
tion of the wiffwe are set upon, but another uneasiness is ready
to set us on work. 21
Thomas Hobbes was more explicit when he claimed that the "felicity
of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied." But Locke's
point was much the same. Like a clever man on the run. final felicity
the full satisfaction of desire —would always elude capture.
Hence, it is tempting to add, the note of hostility toward the thing

that forever escapes our grasp, the daimon that haunts us. To pursue
happiness, in this sense (to follow with hostile intention), was in some
measure to engage in a repeatedly frustrating game, in which desire
could never be permanently satisfied. And lest this sound too far-
fetched, it is worth recalling that there was strong precedent for pre-
cisely such ambivalence toward happiness in centuries of Christian
tradition. Although God, since at least the time of Augustine, was

considered happiness incarnate, the desire for happiness was at the
same time a constant reminder of our separation from him, a nagging
source of pain and an ever present souvenir of what we could not have
in this life due to our original transgression. In the dire Augustinian
tradition, the desire for happiness was a sign of our punishment, if also
the way to salvation.
Whether Locke himself made such conscious associations is far from

clear. What is certain is that he worried deeply about being led along
by desire on pointless pursuits. It is for this reason that he placed such

stock in reason to guide us along the path to God. The prospect of
salvation opened up by a reasonable Christianity exerted an incentive
to not chase desire anywhere it led, to resist our baser instincts and
the futile pursuit of "transient pleasure." Precisely because tomorrow
we would die —and then be judged—we could not always eat and drink
with abandon.
A great many men and women in eighteenth-century America
shared this general perspective. Desire without limits, they believed,
was dangerous, as was desire whose yearnings focused only on the self.
Like Locke, they looked to God for guidance in their pursuit. Thus, the
Presbyterian minister Robert Breck, for example, preaching in New
England in the 1720s, stressed repeatedly that "the surest way to ad-
vance a people's happiness and prosperity" was to pursue the Christian

path, to "walk in [God's] ways." Only the "religious and righteous" could
be "happy and flourishing," a temporal truth that applied to individuals
and societies alike. "To be desirous of, to have an eye to, and in their
sphere to seek the welfare & prosperity of a People, [was] incumbent

on all."
22
The reverend Noah Hobart, pastor of the First Church of
322 Happiness
Christ in Fairfield, Connecticut, was more specific, preaching not only

that "Public Happiness is the original Design and great End of Civil
Government" in keeping with God's intention, but that "There are
many Things relating to men's Persons, of such Nature and Importance
that they cannot be happy, nor indeed so much as comfortable without
some Security for the quiet Possession, and Enjoyment of them." "Of
this kind," Hobart instructed his flock, were "Life, Liberty, Reputation,
Ease and the Like." But no less essential was the "morality" and "vir-
tue" taught by the Christian religion. "The firm Belief of such Things"
was "so essentially necessary to Social Happiness, that he deserves to
be an Enemy to mankind, who endeavours to weaken [them]." 23 Simi-
larly, Benjamin Lord, the Congregationalist pastor from Norwich who
baptized Benedict Arnold, preached on the subject "Religion and Gov-
ernment subsisting together in Society, [are] Necessary to their
24
Compleat Happiness and Safety." It was a common theme. If not all
agreed with the Harvard- educated pastor Samuel Dunbar, who declared
in 1760 that the "presence of God with his People" was "their only Safety
and Happiness," few denied the essential connection. 25
These are merely a handful of the hundreds of such sermons
preached over the course of the century that linked social welfare and
the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of Christian ethics. Frequently,
they also invoked the example of ancient Israel in imitation of their
predecessors in seventeenth-century England. A fortunate people in
a blessed country was thus presented as God's children, led happily
forward in pursuit of the freedom and justice of the Promised Land.
In such accounts —and there were many— it was generally not forgot-
ten that the Promised Land was also a land of milk and honey, rich
and abundant in peace and prosperity. But whether invoking the ex-
ample of Israel or not, these writers invariably presented Christianity as
an indispensable aid to earthly content. Like the pious author of True

Pleasure, Chearfulness, and Happiness, the Immediate Consequence of Religion,
they agreed that to allege "God himself does not delight to see his
creatures happy" was blasphemous. Equally, they concurred that to
think of happiness without love of one's neighbor —without Christian
charity, denial, and constraint —was profane. 26
Did Jefferson himself think of the pursuit of happiness in these

terms, agreeing with his fellow revolutionary Samuel Adams that "to
be possessed of the Christian principles, & to accommodate our whole
deportment to such principles, is to be happy in this life"? 27 Admit-
tedly, Jefferson was not the most pious man in the New World. By
birth an Episcopalian, he strayed far from the theological convictions
of his childhood church, gradually developing a set of personal beliefs
that came close, in practice, to Unitarianism. Without ever officially
joining the fold, he subscribed to a number of the Unitarians' basic

theological tenets, denying the doctrine of the Trinity, discounting
the divinity of Christ, and looking skeptically on miracles and all other
supernatural additions to the creed. Like the English Unitarian Joseph
Priestley — a central figure of the English Enlightenment and long
Jefferson's friend —the author of the Declaration demanded that his
religion be rational or not at all.
Yet Jefferson never tired of praising the historical Jesus as a great

moral teacher, describing Christ's "system of morality" in a letter to
Priestley as "the most benevolent & sublime probably that has been
ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the
antient philosophers." 28 As proof of his conviction, Jefferson privately
undertook the outrageous task of editing the Bible, paring the books
of the New Testament down to what he regarded as the simple teach-
ings of Christ. The result, the so-called Jefferson Bible, is a breviary
of Christian ethics. As Jefferson observed in a letter to a friend, "The

doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man." 29
Simple or complex, Jesus's doctrines were undeniably an important
element of the "harmonizing sentiments" of the day and regarded by
many as an authoritative guide to the pursuit of happiness. Curbing
and restraining the pursuit of individual pleasure and interest, they
must be considered an important element of the wider context of re-
ception of the Declaration's celebrated phrase.
Much the same may be said of the three other names mentioned
next to Locke's in the letter from Jefferson cited above: Aristotle,
Cicero, and Algernon Sidney. A Greek philosopher, a Roman Stoic,
and a seventeenth-century English theorist who was executed on

324 Happiness
suspicion of plotting to overthrow Charles II would seem to have little
in common. Yet over the last thirty years, some of the leading voices in
30
Anglo-American history have argued, convincingly, that they do. Trac-
ing a consistent language of liberty that runs from the ancients to the
revival of classical thought in Renaissance Italy and on to the Atlantic
world of seventeenth-century Britain, these historians draw attention
to a "classical republican" tradition that had great influence in eigh-
teenth-century America and whose understanding of liberty and happi-

ness differed in fundamental respects from that of Lockean liberalism.
Whereas Locke tended to view liberty as freedom from the violation of
natural rights, the classical republican tradition conceived liberty in
more active terms as direct public participation. And whereas Locke
saw happiness as the judicious calibration of pleasure, classical republi-
cans understood happiness, with strong Stoic inflections, as civic virtue.
Thus, for Locke, liberty was a defense — a barrier — against the gov-
ernments, institutions, and individuals that invariably sought to im-

pede our natural due. Protected accordingly, we would be left free to
pursue "happiness" in any way we saw fit. For the classical republican
tradition, by contrast, liberty emerged from active devotion to the
public good (civic virtue). And from civic virtue emerged happiness,
both individual and social. Frequently demanding self-sacrifice, de-
nial, and pain, civic virtue had little to do with pleasure. In fact, in the
classical republican analysis, the happiness of modern societies was
gravely threatened by the egotism, luxury, and corruption that turned
individuals away from the pursuit of the larger social good. Private
pleasure corrupted civic virtue and hence the happiness of individ-

uals and society as a whole.
This, in short, was a very different understanding of happiness than

the one traceable to Locke. But did Jefferson share it? Students of
American history disagree on the question, and it is likely, as a conse-
quence, that they have tended to exaggerate the distinctiveness of the
classical republican and the liberal traditions. Admittedly, when one
thinks of Jefferson the connoisseur of wine, Jefferson the libertine, or
Jefferson the man who described himself in a letter of 1819 as an "Epi-
curean," it is hard to imagine him as a dour classical republican who
took pleasure only in the public good. 31 But that he could at times
invoke classical republican themes is without question. The two
traditions —and the two conceptions of happiness—most likely co-
existed in his mind and even overlapped.

What is certain is that, similar to the case of Christianity and regard-
less of Jefferson's privately held views, there were many in eighteenth-
century America and the Constitutional Convention who would have
interpreted "the pursuit of happiness" in just these classical republican
terms. Like Christianity, they were part of the harmonizing sentiments
of the day, helping to ensure that Lockean pleasure was tempered and
controlled by a strong dose of public virtue.
There was one other important intellectual current that performed

this function: the Enlightenment itself, and more specifically in the
American context, the Scottish Enlightenment, that fertile breeding

ground of Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Adam
Ferguson, and Adam Smith. Like his educated countrymen, Jefferson
was familiar with the work of all these writers, in particular that of
Hutcheson, as well as his Swiss disciple Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui,
whose conceptions of happiness may well have influenced Jefferson's
32
own. Trained as a Presbyterian minister, Hutcheson had taken upon
himself the task in the early eighteenth century of responding to the
great moral challenge posed by Locke's Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing: If the principal stimuli of human behavior were pleasure and
pain, how could men and women be expected to act out of anything
but hedonistic self-regard? Locke himself, as we have seen, had con-
templated this specter well before it was completely disrobed in the
writings of La Mettrie. But Locke's own response — that reason led to
the reasonableness of Christianity, and so to Christian self-sacrifice

seemed only to confirm the problem. According to Locke, heaven
was but the greatest of all pleasures, a "bargain" that outweighed the
sacrifice of temporary pain. In the Lockean view, even virtue was
selfish: We were good only to ensure our fate. Genuine benevolence,
it seemed, was not possible for mortal man.
Francis Hutcheson believed that it was, and his ability to formu-
late a theory of why, in the language of Locke himself, helped to
326 Happiness
ensure his tremendous popularity in enlightened circles. For rather

than revert to a pre-Lockean view of the mind — putting his trust,
say, in innate ideas, or an inherent conscience hardwired to the

soul — Hutcheson expanded Locke's sensationalist model. In ad-
dition to the physical senses that register pleasure and pain (touch,
taste, sight, and sound), Hutcheson maintained with Locke's pu-
pilAnthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, that
human beings possess a "moral sense," a capacity to respond plea-
surably to goodness in others and in ourselves. In the same way that
we take pleasure in contemplating the selfless acts of great moral
figures, we take pleasure in performing our own acts of benevo-
lence. The surest way to promote "private pleasure," it turns out,
is by doing "publicly useful" things. We become happy when we
"reflect upon" our "virtuous actions." We pursue happiness by
being good.
It may be objected that this was merely another form of "selfish-
ness": another, if roundabout, means of maximizing the pleasures of
the self. Be that as it may, the crucial point is that Hutcheson's model
conceived of the interests of individuals as tied to the interests of
society as a whole. Our "constant pursuit of publick Good," he af-
firmed, "is way of promoting [our] own Happi-
the most probable
33
ness." By bringing virtue to others, we bring pleasure to ourselves.
It is not hard to see why this theory —
and its numerous variants in
Britain, Europe, and America —was so popular. For in effect it said
what enlightened men and women wanted to hear: Virtue was plea-
surable; pleasure was virtuous; and human beings were naturally so-
cial. When raised in healthy environments (and when prejudice and

superstition were removed), they would act toward one another with
genuine kindness. The world, after all, was a happy place.
Perceptive critics have made the case that this benevolent concep-
tion of the "pursuit of happiness" lay at the heart of Jefferson's under-
standing of the term. 34 It is likely that they have pushed their case
too far, but in doing so they have also shown what is now difficult to
deny: Among enlightened Americans like Jefferson, the moral sense

theory enjoyed considerable sway. Shaping and inflecting eighteenth-
century understandings of happiness, it, too, must be taken into ac-
count when considering the Declaration's felicitous phrase.

In all of these ways, therefore, the pure Lockean interpretation of
happiness as the pursuit of pleasure was qualified and constrained. As
moral sense theorists or the reasonably religious, as Christians or clas-
sical republicans, contemporaries would have understood the pursuit
of happiness as more than the pursuit of personal pleasure or the ac-
cumulation of private gain. And yet, if Jefferson's enjoinder to pursue

happiness was thus, on several counts, an enjoinder to act for the bene-
fit of the greater good, it also promoted a dynamic of a somewhat dif-
ferent kind. In this respect, it does make sense to speak, if not of a

cover-up, then at least of what one contemporary described as "arti-
fice" and another, more boldly, as "deception."
The words are those of two men whose work was well known to
Jefferson, and whose fate was also bound up closely with 1776: David
Hume, who died in that year, and his close friend Adam Smith, who
published in that year The Wealth ofNations, a work that Jefferson would
later desribe as the single greatest work on political economy. 35 Central
figures of the Scottish Enlightenment trained in moral philosophy,
both men were friends of Francis Hutcheson and were deeply affected
by his work. Smith studied with Hutcheson at Glasgow before going
up to Oxford, and Hume was prompted to write to the older moralist
early in his career, seeking wisdom. "For pray what is the end of Man?"
Hume inquired. "Is he created for Happiness? For this life or the next?
For himself or his Maker?" 36 Puzzling over such questions throughout
his life, Hume was at times given to melancholy and doubt, plagued
by his inability to arrive at certain truth. But on such occasions, he
turned, as he tells us in his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature, to a
powerful antidote:
I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am

merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours'
amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear

so cold and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my
37
heart to enter into them any farther.
328 Happiness
By throwing himself into the "action and employment and the occu-
pations of common life," Hume declared elsewhere, he was able to
find respite from the riddles of existence. 38
Hume's common sense approach to the problem of existence —and

his common sense endorsement of everyday life — is both rare and re-
freshing in a philosopher. He took the point further. Not only was it
often healthy to pursue our passions wherever they might lead us — to
a game of backgammon, say, to a dinner with friends, to the board-

room, or to the bedroom —but this same apparently trivial striving, this
same day-to-day yearning after simple pleasures and fleeting rewards,

was the very thing that made the world go round. In struggling to sat-
isfy our passions, reason searched out new ways to fulfill our desires.
It was, Hume famously observed, passion's slave, toiling in the service
of greater comfort and fulfillment. What Locke had identified as the
ceaseless striving of pursuit —the movement from uneasiness to plea-
sure to uneasiness — Hume validated as the motor of civilization, driv-
ing all progress in human affairs.
Whether this ceaseless striving would ever bring us happiness,

Hume was inclined to doubt. Even our "most enlarged and generous
projects," when looked at from the grand scheme of things, seemed
"frivolous." 39 And when "we reflect[ed] on the shortness and uncer-
tainty of life ... all our pursuits of happiness" appeared "despicable."
Nonetheless, Hume saw these pursuits, like a turn at the backgam-
mon table, as immensely beneficial, a distraction from the riddles of
existence and a powerful engine of growth and improvement. What
he called the "artifice of nature" — the blind striving of desire
— "hap-
pily deceived us" into believing that our actions were worthwhile, even
when they weren't; that they could make us happy, even when they
could not. 40
Jefferson knew Hume's writings well, and so did Adam Smith, who
took up this same line of inquiry in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, a
work published in 1759 that Jefferson studied closely in the early
1770s. 41 With even greater precision than Hume, Smith detailed the
manner by which human beings' mistaken belief — their illusion — that
they could make themselves happy through frivolous pursuits might

still have positive consequences. His example of such "deception" is
highly instructive —and perhaps surprising — for it involved nothing

less than the pursuit of property.
Imagine, Smith ventures, the case of a "poor man's son," who,
driven by ambition, "admires the condition of the rich." If he could
only acquire wealth, the poor man believes, "he would sit still con-
tentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the thought of the happi-
ness and tranquility of his situation." "Enchanted with the distant idea
of this felicity," he works around the clock in "the pursuit of wealth
and greatness," his eyes ever on his prize:
Through the whole of his life, he pursues the idea of a certain
artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for
which he sacrifices a real tranquility that is at all times in his

power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at
last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable
to that humble security and contentment which he had
abandoned for it. It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body
wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled . . .
that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are

mere trinkets of frivolous utility no more adapted for procur-
ing ease of body or tranquility of mind than the tweezer cases

42
of the lover of toys. . . .
True happiness, Smith believed, showing his partial indebtedness to

the Stoics, lay in "tranquility and enjoyment," which had less to do
with economic condition than it did with virtue. 43 The "beggar who
suns himself by the side of the highway" may well possess the same
44
happiness as kings. But this very illusion of the poor man's son (that
felicity can be won through greatness and wealth), this same "decep-
tion which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of man-
kind," had prompted men "to found cities and commonwealths, to
invent and improve all the sciences and arts . . . which have entirely
changed the face of the globe. . .
." This "deception" drove the steady
advance of civilization and the expansion of prosperity that in Smith's
330 Happiness
view were the defining features of commercial societies. 45 Maximiz-

ing individual liberty while promoting general affluence, modern com-
mercial societies were to the benefit of the greatest number. But
whether they promoted individual happiness was another question,
one whose answer depended far less on the wealth of nations than on
the moral qualities of the men and women who inhabited them.
"Happiness is the aim of life, but virtue is the foundation of hap-
piness," Jefferson observed toward the end of his career, echoing
Franklin's observation that "virtue and happiness are mother and daugh-
ter."
46
A commonplace of classical philosophy, as dear to Aristotle as it
was to Cicero, the statement captures well what few, if any, of the
Founding Fathers would have denied. Endorsed by the principal au-
thorities on which Jefferson drew in drafting the Declaration, his state-
ment nonetheless reveals an inherent tension in the opposition of its
second clause that is also the tension of the American experiment.

Happiness indeed was the aim of life. And virtue, self-discipline, the
ordered arrangement of desire were indeed the way to that end. But
whether the goal itself could be fulfilled depended on individual de-
cision and choice; happiness could never be imposed. And in that
liberty — that freedom — lay a dilemma. For as Smith clearly recog-
nized, and as he argued at length in The Wealth of Nations, "augmen-

tation in fortune is the means by which the greater part of men
47
propose and wish to better their condition." The greater part of
men, that is, pursued happiness through wealth, a route that the so-
called father of capitalism knew to be a devious path. And although
this "deception," this trivial pursuit, was undeniably a powerful en-
gine of growth, it was a dubious means to lasting satisfaction. Smith
himself denied the connection, as did Jefferson, Franklin, and many
others.
The "pursuit of happiness," it should now be clear, was launched
in different, and potentially conflicting, directions from the start,
with private pleasure and public welfare coexisting in the same

phrase. For Jefferson, so quintessentially in this respect a man of the
Enlightenment, the coexistence was not a problem, for it reflected a
wider eighteenth-century assumption and article of faith: that indi-

vidual interest and the greater good, private and public happiness,
could be reconciled. This faith was by no means blind, resting as it
did on a realistic appreciation of the passions and desires that moved

the minds of men. But in order for it to be sustained, it depended
heavily on the self-restraint of individuals to curb their excesses and
enthusiasms. In religion, in classical virtue, in the education of rea-
son, and in the public-mindedness of the moral sense, Jefferson and
his contemporaries saw the forces that would perform this essential
task, ensuring that the pursuit of private pleasures did not veer off the
thoroughfare of public good.
And yet, as Hannah Arendt once observed, the public and private
aspects of the pursuit of happiness — in tension from the outset
were soon at open odds, in her opinion, to the great benefit of the
latter. "Jefferson's new formula," she writes, "was almost immedi-
ately deprived of its double sense and understood as the right of citi-
zens to pursue their personal interests and thus to act according to
the rules of private self-interest." 48 This is an exaggeration —and an
oversimplification —dismissing as it does the long and stubborn per-
sistence of American public-mindedness. But it correctly identifies
the trajectory of a central and propelling tension, one that, as she
also pointed out, was exacerbated only by "the impact of mass immi-
gration." For many who arrived on America's shores in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, or who viewed it from afar, America
was a "promised land where milk and honey flow," as still today. 49
To pursue happiness in such a land was quite rightly to pursue pros-
perity, to pursue pleasure, to pursue wealth. But as others would also
come to appreciate in shedding their illusions, pursuit and arrival,
capture and pursuit, could be very different things.
Strange Melancholy
When a disgruntled American complained that his country was not

providing him with happiness —and so failed to live up to its bill
Benjamin Franklin is said to have replied: "The constitution only gives

332 Happiness
you the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." 50
Although evocative of the good doctor's wit, the oft-repeated saying
is almost certainly apocryphal. Having worked on both documents

himself, Franklin well knew that it was the Declaration, not the Con-
stitution, that bequeathed us this right.
Still, the legendary response is in keeping with Franklin's general

convictions, and the grumbling sentiment that might have provoked
it in the first place was real enough. As the late historian Howard
Mumford Jones has shown, Americans took great pains to register such
complaints in the nineteenth century, filing hundreds of lawsuits in
state and federal courts that accused their governments and fellow
citizens alike of impeding their sacred right to happiness. 51 Despite
the clarity of Franklin's alleged response, the distinction between the

pursuit of happiness and its attainment did not always seem so clear.
The cynic may be inclined to see in this early litigious grumbling

the roots of America's "culture of complaint," a precedent for what
has become an unfortunate national tendency — the readiness to seek
restitution for unhappiness in the courts. Admittedly, a good number
of groups had ample reason to press their claims in that way —African-
American slaves, to name only the most obvious. They could point to
the bitter irony that in a draft passage of the Declaration, Jefferson
had accused England's George III of waging
cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred
rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who
never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery
in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their

transportation thither. 52
Tellingly, Jefferson made no mention of a right to pursue happiness

for this distant people; and tellingly, the passage was dropped alto-
gether from the final draft. But the omission was duly noted, allow-
ing African-Americans and others one day to demand fidelity to the
phrase that all are created equal, endowed by their creator with cer-
tain unalienable rights.
The history of the pursuit of happiness in America, in this respect, is
the history of the pursuit of equality and freedom — the slow, ever
imperfect extension of the right to pursue happiness to all. Yet when

considered from a slightly different perspective, this same process of
expanding equality can be said to have had potentially unhappy conse-
quences. And here, perhaps, the cynic, or at least the skeptic, may be
on firmer ground. For in a society in which the unhindered pursuit of
happiness (to say nothing of its attainment) is treated as a natural, God-
given right, the inability to make steady progress along the way will in-
evitably be seen as an aberration, a suspension of the natural order of
things. Either, it is logical to conclude, the pursuer has been impeded

an injustice and violation — or the pursuer has failed to generate ample
momentum for the chase. In either case, the result is disconcerting,
leading one to suspect that an unhappy, if unintended, consequence of
the pursuit of happiness may well be the production of discontent.
This was precisely the conclusion drawn by one of America's most
perceptive observers, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his magisterial Democracy
in America. Published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, the work is a
long account of a short stay, a chronicle of the many impressions gen-
erated by Tocqueville's travels in the young republic between May
1831 and February 1832. Charged on behalf of the French government
with studying America's penal system, Tocqueville drew conclusions
about pursuits of a greater magnitude than just those involving fugi-
tives of the law. The restless pursuits he observed in the New World,
Tocqueville believed, represented the face of humanity's future. And
though there was much in that face to suggest a smile, one could also
discern the nascent cracks of a frown.

The ambivalence of this twin regard comes across most plainly in
Tocqueville's direct comparisons of the New World with what it had
left behind:
In certain remote corners of the Old World you may some-

times stumble upon little places which seem to have been
forgotten among the general tumult and which have stayed
still while all around them moves. The inhabitants are mostly
334 Happiness
very ignorant and very poor; they take no part in affairs of

government and often governments oppress them. But yet
they seem serene and often have a jovial disposition.
In America I have seen the freest and best educated of men
in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world; yet it
seemed to me that a cloud habitually hung on their brow, and

they seemed serious and almost sad even in their pleasures.
The chief reason for this is that the former do not give a
moment's thought to the toils they endure, whereas the latter
never stop thinking of the good things they have not got. 53
This was no elegy for underdevelopment, or a paean to pastoral vir-
tues a la Rousseau. Nor was it an idyll to which those of a more con-

servative cast are sometimes drawn: the romanticization of the past.
Tocqueville saw little virtue in ignorance, scant romance in poverty,
and even less in political oppression. On the whole, he was inclined

to welcome the changes that America augured for the future: greater
opportunity and social mobility; the expansion of democracy and civic

participation; increased commercial activity, industry, and trade.
Yet with the prescience of a Rousseau or a Marx, an Adam Smith or

an Edmund Burke, Tocqueville understood that these same forces
were exacting a price. The evolution toward freedom and prosperity
intensified the rhythms of existence at a frantic pace, creating new
needs and desires, while continually multiplying expectations. As he
observes in another passage, again comparing the New World (the free
world) to the Old:
When one passes from a free country into another which is not
so, the contrast is very striking: there, all is activity and
bustle; here all seems calm and immobile. In the former,
betterment and progress are the questions of the day; in the
latter, one might suppose that society, having acquired every
blessing, longs for nothing but repose to enjoy them. Never-

theless, the country which is in such a rush to attain happi-
ness is generally richer and more prosperous than the one that
seems contented with And considering them one by

its lot.
one, it is hard to understand how this one daily discovers so

many new needs, while the other seems conscious of so few. 54
From a world in which the inhabitants have little but expect nothing,
a world in which the people are relatively content because their needs
are few, one passes to the frenetic tumult of modern America. Here
the hopes of infinitely expanding desire are turned loose with aston-
ishing force. "No one could work harder to be happy," Tocqueville
observes of Americans, marveling at the ceaseless, restless energy they
expend in search of a better life. 55 Rushing from one thing to the next,
an American will travel hundreds of miles in a day. He will build a
house in which to pass his old age and then sell it before the roof is
on. He will continually change paths "for fear of missing the shortest
cut leading to happiness." Finally, though,
Death steps in . . . and stops him before he has grown tired of
this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always

56
escapes him.
In dogged chase until the end, the restless American is brought up

short only by the finality of death.
Tocqueville might easily have cited Herodotus in this connection,

or Plato, Saint Augustine, or any number of other moralists who had
already probed the restlessness of human desire. He did not do so here.
But like them, he understood that "that which most vividly stirs the
human heart is certainly not the quiet possession of something pre-
cious but rather the imperfectly satisfied desire to have it and the
continual fear of losing it again." 57
The restlessness of desire — this
primal source of dissatisfaction, this uneasiness, as Locke and Smith

had observed —was also a powerful source of improvement. And in
America, that source had been tapped directly, owing to the country's
unique social and political makeup, pumped furiously by its growing
equality. When "distinctions of rank are blurred and privileges abol-
ished," Tocqueville grasped, "when patrimonies are divided up and
336 Happiness
Old World pleasures. George Morland, The Happy Cottagers, c. 1790-92,

John Howard McFadden Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
education and freedom spread, the poor conceive an eager desire to

58
acquire comfort, and the rich think of the danger of losing it." In the
land of opportunity, the New World of milk and honey, "the taste for
physical pleasures" was the primary cause of American restlessness. 59
Thus, whereas in the stratified societies of the Old World, the

wealthy were comparatively secure in their comforts and the poor
dared not dream of acquiring them here below, in the fluid mobility
of America, citizens were "continually engaged in pursuing or striving
to retain [their] precious, incomplete, and fugitive delights." Men and
women in this society of "middling fortunes" had "enough physical
enjoyments to get a taste for them, but not enough to content them."
They could not "win them without effort, or indulge in them without
anxiety." 60 And whereas in the Old World, inequality was the general
rule and so attracted little attention, in America, "where everything is
more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed." The "more equal
men are," Tocqueville concluded, "the more insatiable will be their
longing for equality." Striving ever to match their fellow citizens, and
enticed always by the imminent possibility of a better life, Americans
pursued an elusive equality with the same dogged futility with which
they pursued happiness:
That is a quality which ever retreats before them without

getting quite out of sight, and as it retreats it beckons them
on to pursue. Every instant they think they will catch it, and
each time it slips through their fingers. They see it close
enough to know its charms, but they do not get near enough
to enjoy it, and they will be dead before they have fully
61
relished its delights.
And that, Tocqueville concluded in a famous line, "is the reason for
the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in
the midst of abundance, and of that disgust with life sometimes grip-
62
ping them in calm and easy circumstances."
If one were to turn away from the text at this point, it would be
tempting to conclude that Tocqueville saw more frown than smile on
the face of humanity's future. But open-eyed though he was, Tocque-
ville was also cautiously optimistic — a realist but not a pessimist. At first
sight, he confessed, there was "something astonishing in this spectacle
of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance." Upon re-
flection, he acknowledged that in truth this was a "spectacle as old as

63
the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it."
The novelty of America, in other words, lay not in the perennially rest-
less pursuit of happiness, but in the extension of that pursuit to an
entire culture on a scale hitherto unknown. And though that presented
its own set of challenges, it also suggested that America might draw
solace from the collected wisdom of the ages.
There were encouraging signs that American culture so far had
been able to do just that, maintaining values that served as an
antidote to the insatiable striving of desire, curbing the potential
338 Happiness
materialism and solipsism of individual pursuit. And although these

values were many, Tocqueville placed two at the top of his list: the
"doctrine of self-interest rightly understood," and the more general
"spirit of religion."
The first of these Tocqueville described as the "best-suited of all
philosophical theories to the wants of men in our time." As it took

shape in America, however, the doctrine was less a set of formal philo-
sophical prescriptions than a widely received cultural ethos that en-

couraged men and women to find points of convergence between their
individual interests and those of the social whole. Almost instinctively,
Americans understood that self-sacrifice was a matter of self-interest,

that by serving others they could serve themselves. "An enlightened
self-love continually leads them to help one another and disposes them
freely to give part of their time and wealth for the good of the state."
It was, they knew, in "each man's interest to be good." 64
A living link to a number of those key "harmonizing sentiments"
that Jefferson had captured in his pregnant phrase, self-interest rightly
understood bore directly on Americans' happiness. For those "who

teach this doctrine tell men that to be happy in life they must watch
their passions and be careful to restrain their excesses, that lasting
happiness cannot be won except at the cost of a thousand ephemeral

pleasures, and finally, that one must continually master oneself in
order to serve oneself better." Here, Tocqueville believed, was the

source of America's saving grace, the necessary restraint that ensured
the restless pursuit of happiness did not degenerate into hedonism or
solipsistic self-regard. Conveying truths that moralists had cultivated
throughout the ages, the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood
instilled the belief that "in order to gain happiness in this world" a
man must refuse to yield "blindly to the first onrush of his passions,"
learning rather to "habitually and effortlessly sacrifice the pleasure of

65
the moment for the lasting interests of his whole life."
If the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood was thus Ameri-

cans' "strongest remaining guarantee against themselves," the spirit
of religion, to which it was often applied, was no less important. 66

Raised as a Catholic, Tocqueville struggled throughout his life with
>,..-
B. Johnson, The Paths of Life, 1805, Courtesy of Map Collection, Yale University
Library. The circuitous paths of this amusing document lead to such dead-ends as
"Haughty Hill," "Weeping Shade," "Faltering Alley," and "Gambler's Hold." The
successful traveler on life's way arrives at "Happy Old Age Hall" (bottom left).
faith, but he nevertheless maintained with the utmost conviction the

social importance of religion, above all in democratic and commercial
societies. The short space of human life, he knew, "can never shut in
the whole of man's imagination; the incomplete joys of this world will
never satisfy his heart." "Incredulity is an accident; faith is the only
67
permanent state of mankind."
340 Happiness
There are, of course, many varieties of faith. But what Tocqueville

found most intriguing about the American spirit of religion was its
sublunary disposition. Whereas Old World priests had once spoken "of
nothing but the other life" and "hardly took any trouble to prove that
a sincere Christian might be happy here below," preachers in America

were "continually coming down to earth":
Indeed they find it difficult to take their eyes off it. The
better to touch their hearers, they are forever pointing out
how religious beliefs favor freedom and public order, and it is
often difficult to be sure when listening to them whether the

main object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the
next world or prosperity in this. 68
Tocqueville shows himself conscious in this passage of a theme that

we have been tracing over many chapters: the consolidation, since the
seventeenth century, of earthly happiness as the ultimate human end
and the consequent transformation in human expectations. In the
wake of that transformation, virtually every institution, practice, and
belief could be treated as a means to the fulfillment of this new end,
even, and perhaps especially, religion. And in America, this process
was considerably advanced, prompting men of God to vaunt religion's
utility — its capacity to make us happier and more prosperous in this
life —with enthusiasm.

In this respect, religion was paying homage to an end higher than
itself —an end higher even than God. But Tocqueville also knew that
religion served admirably to temper our more rapacious earthly crav-
ings, working in tandem with the doctrine of self-interest rightly
understood to nudge us gently away from an exclusive preoccupation

with our own pleasures and concerns. Faith was the necessary check
on the love of physical pleasures. For though man, quite rightly, "takes
delight in [his] proper and legitimate quest for prosperity, there is a
danger that in the end he may lose the use of his sublimest faculties
and that ... he may at length degrade himself if not restrained. That,
Tocqueville believed, was the great "peril" of democratic nations. And
given that the "passion for physical pleasures . . . can never satisfy a
whole people" any more than it can permanently satisfy a man, then
what was true of individuals was also true of the nation writ large: "In
democracies as elsewhere, it is only by resisting a thousand petty urges

69
that the fundamental anxious longing for happiness can be satisfied."
The spirit of religion provided the will for that resistance, the force
to restrain oneself, and the impetus to act in the service of others. It
also turned our thoughts toward the future, imbuing us with constancy
and hope —an effect, Tocqueville observes, that works "as much in
favor of happiness in this world as of felicity in the next." So central

was the need to set such distant goals for human endeavor that
Tocqueville urged even secular philosophers and men of power to
devote themselves to that task. "As the light of faith grows dim, man's
range of vision grows more circumscribed." He turns in on himself and
on his times. And as soon as citizens have "lost the way of relying
chiefly on distant hopes, they are naturally led to want to satisfy their
least desires at once." 70
Scanning the horizon of humanity's future, Tocqueville saw both

cause for cautious optimism and cause for genuine concern. On the
one hand, he worried that the pursuit of happiness would be reduced
to the pursuit of prosperity and private pleasure alone, a reduction that
would most certainly undermine it. Pursuing happiness solely in that
way would not only impoverish all who engaged in the chase but con-
tinually frustrate their ability to reach their goal. Only by harnessing
desire with healthy restraints could Americans learn to live within
their ever expanding means.
The tools to accomplish this task, on the other hand, were already
in place, a legacy of the society that had produced the Founding Fa-
thers and their original dreams of pursuit. But whether the spirit of
religion and the publicly oriented spirit of self-interest rightly under-
stood would continue to work for the future was uncertain. In his
darker moments, Tocqueville conceded, "No power on earth can pre-
vent increasing equality from . . . disposing each citizen to get wrapped
up in himself." 71 The potential consequences of this development
were disturbing.
342 Happiness
It was in this frame of mind that Tocqueville returned at the end

of his work to a theme that he had introduced in Volume One: the
"tyranny" or "despotism" of the majority. These terms, he admitted,
were no longer sufficient, for what he sought to describe was an alto-
gether new phenomenon. It is striking that he implicates "happiness"

directly in this new type of oppression:
I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism

may appear in the world. In the first place, I see a multitude
of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit
of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their
souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost
unaware of the fate of the rest.
Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective

power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment
and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thought-
ful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. ... It likes to see
the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of
nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness
72
but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it.
In warning of the political risks posed by the withdrawal into private

pleasures, Tocqueville was taking up a theme that his predecessor
and countryman Benjamin Constant had already articulated. A noted

theorist of the classical liberal tradition in his own right, Constant had
cautioned in a famous reflection on the differences between ancient
and modern liberty, first delivered as a speech in 1819, that modern
political authorities would be only too ready to allow us to become
absorbed "in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the
pursuit of our particular interests." "They will say to us," Constant
ventured, "what, in the end, is the aim of your efforts, the motive of
your labors, the object of all your hopes? Is it not happiness? Well,
leave this happiness to us and we shall give it to you." 73 And this,
Constant warned, was the ultimate danger, the renunciation of po-

litical liberty in return for the happiness of "diversions." One must

assume the responsibility of being happy for oneself.
Constant took these cautionary words one step further, and it is
worth repeating them here, for in effect they address a central ques-
tion raised by the classical liberal experiment. "Is it so evident," he
asked, "that happiness, of whatever kind, is the only aim of mankind?"

That he should need to pose the question at all is indicative of the
times in which he wrote, a post-Enlightenment century. But his re-

sponse is even more interesting:
If it were so, our course would be narrow indeed, and our

destination far from elevated. . . . No, Sirs, I bear witness to
the better part of our nature, that noble disquiet which
pursues and torments us, that desire to broaden our knowl-
edge and develop our faculties. It is not to happiness alone, it
is to self-development that our destiny calls us; and political
liberty is the most powerful, the most effective means of self-

74
development that heaven has given us.
The goal of liberalism, in Constant's view, was not happiness but the
development of the individual, an end for which political liberty was
the ultimate means. That such liberty would include the liberty to
go awry — to make poor choices, to make a mess of one's life, to make
oneself sad —Constant freely acknowledged. He also entertained
openly what others since have often been reluctant to face: the pos-
sibility that liberty's greatest product might not be happiness, but
on the contrary, that "noble disquiet which pursues and torments us"
to the grave, the possibility, in short, that liberty and happiness might
be in tension, or even at odds.
A Crisis of Faith
"M. de Tocqueville's is, in our eyes, the true view of the position in
which mankind now stand." So observed John Stuart Mill in a glow-
344 Happiness
ing account of the first volume of Democracy in America, published in

the London Review in 1835. Inclined, like his French colleague, to see
the young republic as the image of humanity's future, the English phi-
losopher and civil servant agreed that "a government, substantially a
democracy . . . may [one day] subsist in Europe" and that it "may
secure to the aggregate of human beings living under it, a greater sum
of happiness than has ever yet been enjoyed by any people. . .
." 75
On the face of things, this was an altogether happy prospect. Yet like
Tocqueville, Mill regarded the future with a furrowed brow, worrying
that an increase in aggregate happiness might be offset by a rise in indi-
vidual pain. In a long review of the second volume of Democracy in America,

he gave voice to those concerns, quoting at length Tocqueville's pas-
sages regarding the "spectacle of so many lucky men, restless in the

midst of abundance." If anything, Mill concluded, Tocqueville's analy-
sis was not trenchant enough.
Admittedly, Tocqueville's warnings about the dangers of a "tyr-
anny of the majority" — a "tyranny, not over the body, but over the
mind" —were apt. But his conclusion that the cause of this tyranny,
like the cause of the attendant restlessness of American life, could

be traced exclusively to a growing equality was ill conceived. In
making that claim, Mill argued, Tocqueville had conflated cause
and effect, failing to explain why areas of much greater equality
such as French Canada displayed so little of "that go-ahead sprit,
that restless, impatient eagerness for improvement" evident in
America. At the same time, Tocqueville's account completely ig-
nored the important case of Great Britain, an "aristocracy" where

extremes of wealth and poverty were massive, and "equalization of
condition" little advanced. Though in "complete contrast" to its
former colony in this respect, England nonetheless shared many

common features on the moral and cultural plane. Mill emphasized
the same "petty pursuit of petty advancements in fortune," the
same "treading upon the heels of one another," the same "habitual
dissatisfaction," the same ubiquitous desire to improve one's con-
dition but "never to enjoy it." The cause of these common fea-
tures —and thus the true source of the strange restlessness in the
midst of prosperity — should be traced not to equality but to the

very heart of commercial civilization itself. "Let the idea take
hold," Mill warned, "that the most serious danger to the future
prospects of mankind is in the unbalanced influence of the com-

mercial spirit. . .
," 76
Mill's warnings are particularly worthy of note. For not only was he
one of the most discerning critical defenders of classical liberalism, he
was also deeply interested in happiness. On the face of things, this,
too, might seem a happy match. But the reality, as Mill came to par-
tially understand, was more complex.

A childhood prodigy who was reading Greek by the age of three, Mill
was quite literally a child of happiness, if not always a happy child. His
father, the historian and economist James Mill, was an important figure
in the Utilitarian movement, a close friend and neighbor of Jeremy

Bentham. Baptized with Bentham's benediction, Mill was raised as an
apostle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, receiving
no other formal lessons in faith. As Mill himself would later recall, this
made him something of an anomaly in the religiously saturated Victo-
rian age
—"one of the very few examples . . . of one who has, not thrown
77
off religious belief, but never had it."
Mill claims never to have felt the lack, and yet it is striking to listen
to his own account of the response to his first serious engagement with
the writings of Bentham, read, oddly, in French translation while he
was abroad in his early teens. As Mill tells us in his wonderfully candid
Autobiography,
When I laid down the last volume ... I had become a differ-
ent being. The "principle of utility," understood as Bentham

understood it . . . fell exactly into its place as the keystone
which held together the detached and fragmentary compo-
nent parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my
conceptions of things. now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine,
I
a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a
religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made

78
the principal outward purpose of a life.
346 Happiness
Mill, by his own admission, had come into the fullness of faith, find-
ing "religion," a "creed," and an "object in life" with which his "own
79
conception of happiness was entirely identified." It is all the more
poignant that he would come to doubt his faith, perhaps to lose it
entirely.
The immediate cause of this development was what Mill describes

in the Autobiography as a bout of despair that would probably be clas-
sified today as clinical depression. Often analyzed by historians, the

possible reasons for this breakdown are many: the pressures of an over-
bearing father, the accumulated denials of a youth devoted exclusively
to scholarly pursuits, the absence of intimacy and love. Regardless of
the primary cause, the effect, quite clearly, was shattering. "I was ac-
customed," Mill writes,
to felicitate myself on the certainty of a happy life which I
enjoyed, through placing my happiness in something durable

and distant, in which some progress might be always making,
while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment.
This did very well for several years, during which the general
improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as
engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed
enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But
the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. 80
It was the autumn of 1826, and Mill had fallen into "a dull state of
nerves," growing listless and indifferent, similar to that state "in which
converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first 'con-
viction of sin.'" In such a state, Mill was prompted to ask himself
whether, if all his goals in life could be realized, if all his dreams of
reform and progress could be carried out, this would be "a great joy
and happiness" to him. He was forced to admit that it would not. At
this point, he says:
My heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my

life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have
been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had
ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any inter-
est in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. 81
He had lost his faith in happiness.

Fortunately, both for himself and for posterity, Mill was able to pull
himself out of this pit of despair. He relied neither on therapy nor
medication to do so but took instead the Romantic cure, finding so-
lace in Coleridge's "Dejection, an Ode" and "medicine" in the poetry
of Wordsworth. These and other poets bathed his analytical soul in a
warm wash of beauty and feeling, those "perennial sources of happi-

ness" on which Mill would draw for the rest of his life. In the Roman-
tic cultivation of emotion, he found the "source of inward joy, of
sympathetic and imaginative pleasures" that helped cure him of de-
spair. Bringing his inner life into greater harmony with the world
around him, they opened his heart to passion and love. 82
But what of his faith in happiness, the pursuit of which had ceased
to charm? Mill tells us that his crisis had two "marked effects" on his
opinion and character. The first was to impress upon him the impor-
tance of the "internal culture of the individual," forcing him to think
of human development not simply, as his father and Bentham had

done, in terms of outward sources of pleasure and pain but also as the
inward "cultivation of feelings," the nurturing of long-stifled emotion.
And yet the lasting effects of his upheaval went beyond a mere ad-
justment of what had been an essentially Enlightenment faith, a
deepening of the pleasure/pain calculus with a dose of Romantic feel-
ing. Arguably, Mill never fully recovered his old faith in happiness, de-
spite his claims to the contrary.
Consider the following remarkable confession from the Autobiogra-

phy, in which Mill explains the other lasting consequence of his crisis:
I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is
the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now
thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it
the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have
348 Happiness
their minds fixed on some object other than their own happi-
ness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of
mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a
means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something
else, they find happiness by the way. . . . Ask yourself whether
you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to
treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the
purpose of life. . . . This theory now became the basis of my

83
philosophy of life.
This is an insight that Hume certainly possessed and that in key re-
spects has been borne out by modern psychological research. To for-
get oneself in an all-consuming activity, to feel the "flow" of immersion

in a cause or pursuit, can often yield happiness indirectly, by the by. 84
But true as this may be, the theory clashes starkly with the opening
line of this startling avowal, in which Mill denies that he ever wavered
in his conviction that happiness is the "end of life." Only lines later
does he reveal that "the only chance" for happiness is to treat some
other end'as life's purpose and goal.
The confessions of the Autobiography were made relatively late in
Mill's life, drafted in the 1850s, amended in the 1860s, and published
in 1873, the year of his death. But they are not the only instance of
such revealing avowal. Mill's essay "Bentham," written several years
after its subject's death and published in the London and Westminster
Review in 1838, contains the following damning reflection:
At present we shall only say, that while, under proper explana-

tions, we entirely agree with Bentham in his principle, we do
not hold with him that all right thinking on the details of morals
depends on its express assertion. We think utility, or happiness,

much too complex and indefinite an end to be sought except
85
through the medium of various secondary ends. . . .
Again, the judgment may be valid on its own terms, but as the great
historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin once observed, it destroys "at one blow
the proudest claim, and indeed the central doctrine, of the Benthamite
system" — that happiness (utility or pleasure) can be used as a valid
standard of conduct. 86 In a later work, his celebrated essay Utilitarian-

ism, first published in 1861, Mill went to even greater lengths to dis-
tinguish his thought from Bentham's, declaring that although he still
considered pleasure to be the standard of happiness, some pleasures

were better than others. "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied,"
Mill argued in a memorable line, "than a pig satisfied; better to be
Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." Happiness, he stressed, was
not the same thing as contentment, but involved the pursuit of "no-
bler feelings," "higher pleasures," and higher things. 87
But what might those be? What, to return to the question posed in
Mill's Autobiography, were those "other ends"? The question, in Mill's
eyes, was crucial, for as he had observed in his essay on Bentham,

"Whether happiness be or be not the end to which morality should be
referred — that it be referred to an end of some sort, and not left in the
dominion of vague feeling or inexplicable internal conviction ... is
essential to the very idea of moral philosophy; is, in fact, what renders
88
argument or discussion on moral questions possible." What end, or
ends, would take the place of happiness for the salvation of moral
philosophy?
Throughout the body of his work, Mill considers various candidates:
justice, dignity, love, independence, diversity, self-sacrifice, beauty,
and liberty, among them. But whether these are to be considered final
ends in themselves, or the means to a single, higher end (happiness),

or simply as species of it, Mill never clearly says. Nor does he give us
a precise account of the order of their importance, although a strong
case can be made for the primacy of liberty, the subject of his most
celebrated work, On Liberty (1859), and the higher end that justifies
the "libertarianism" he espouses there.

It is noteworthy that very rarely in that work — the most important
of his explicitly political writings —does he discuss happiness at all,
and the first instance in which he does so is to establish liberty's pre-
eminence. As he writes in introducing the famous "harm principle,"

the centerpiece of Millian liberalism:
350 Happiness
The object of this essay is to assert one very simple prin-
ciple. . . . That principle is that the sole end for which mankind
are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with
the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.
That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilized community, against

his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either
physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully
be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him
to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the
opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right. 89
Liberty, plainly, trumps happiness. And though Mill adds immedi-

ately afterward that there is every reason to attempt to "remonstrate,"
"reason with," "persuade," or "entreat" another to act in the inter-
ests of his own happiness or good, the choice must always rest with
the individual. "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the indi-
vidual is sovereign." He has the right to make himself miserable, if
that is what he chooses.

In making this claim, Mill not only broke definitively with the vul-
gar Utilitarianism of Bentham but also placed himself unequivocally
in the tradition of those, like Constant and Tocqueville, for whom lib-
erty was the indispensable good, vital to human dignity, nobility, and
development. Was this, then, the "other end" to which Mill had re-
ferred in his Autobiography as the "only chance" — the end external to
happiness that, when treated as the purpose of life, might bring it "by
the way," as an ancillary effect?
Mill speaks often as if that were the case, invoking liberty —of con-
science, of assembly, and, most critically, of "tastes and pursuits, of
framing the plan of our life to suit our own character" — as a vital foun-
dation for happiness and one of its necessary conditions. On the two
other occasions in On Liberty in which he invokes happiness, he does
so precisely in that connection, speaking of an individual's ability to
define his own conduct through his own character as one "of the prin-
cipal ingredients of happiness" and observing later that where the full
diversity of human experience is stifled, individuals will not "receive

90
their fair share of happiness." In a similar vein, Mill observes in his
celebrated essay "The Subjection of Women" (1869) that the "most
direct benefit" of all those associated with women's liberation would
be "the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of

the species." "He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal
independence as an element of happiness," he challenges, "should
consider the value he himself puts upon it as an ingredient of his
own." 91
This is the language of a born-again Romantic — liberty as liberation,
a throwing off of the stifling constraints that stand in the way of self-
realization and self-actualization, a surging forth of one's unique na-

ture and authentic character, a true definition of self. It is what the
Germans called Bildung, and what, in Mill's view, was all too scarce in
the contemporary world. "Society," he writes grimly in On Liberty, "has
now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threat-
ens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal
impulses and preferences." "A person whose desires and impulses are
his own ... is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses
92
are not his own has no character." In Mill's opinion, there were too
few characters in the modern world.
Thus, whereas Tocqueville feared, with a residual Christian moral-
ism, the excess of individual interest and desire, Mill believed that
these were in short supply, particularly in his own country, where a

pervasive "theory of Calvinism" had inculcated obedience and self-
sacrifice at the expense of self-assertion and expression. In all things
did the mind bow to this yoke: "Even in what people do for pleasure,
conformity is the first thing thought of." "Christian self-denial" cer-

tainly had its place in the litany of virtues, but so did "pagan self-
assertion." Mill called for a strong infusion. "It is not by wearing down
into uniformity all that is individual in themselves," he emphasized,
"but by cultivating it and calling it forth . . . that human beings be-
93
come a noble and beautiful object of contemplation."
But if in these ways Mill's analysis departed somewhat from Tocque-
ville's, he wholeheartedly agreed that the society of his day posed the
—
352 Happiness
risk of crushing individuality and character like never before. And in
this process, the culprit was less the lingering Calvinist spirit than the
nature of modern civilization itself, with an all-consuming commer-
cial capitalism and middle-class democracy as its defining features. What
Mill had described in his review of Democracy in America as the "growing
insignificance of individuals in comparison with the masses" on the one

hand, and the "petty pursuit of petty advancements in fortune" on
the other, were the twin forces leveling all that was unique in modern
society. And just as he had called for "generous and cultivated minds"
to decry this "most serious danger to the future prospects of mankind,"
providing "individual testimonies against it," and nurturing "opinions
and sentiments different from those of the mass," in On Liberty he
adopted precisely this course, urging "eccentricity" for the sake of
breaking through the "tyranny of opinion." 94 "Unless the intelligent part

of the public can be made to feel [the value of individuality]," Mill
warns, "to see that it is good there should be difference, even though not
"
for the better, even though, as it may appear to them, some should befor the worse,
then individuality will be doomed. 95
And here we arrive at the center of a key tension in Mill's thought.
For however praiseworthy we may find his libertarian defense of dif-
ference and individual development, it is not at all clear that it is con-

sonant with his stated faith in the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. Mill himself suggests as much, in the highlighted passage
above, and his own doubts summon once again the disturbing pros-
pect raised by Tocqueville and Constant: that the pursuit of liberty
and the pursuit of happiness might sometimes, even often, be at odds.
Mill sought bravely to deny this, arguing instead that the pursuit
of liberty could be that "other end" that would deliver happiness
indirectly, by the way. By this route might others avoid the paradox
that Mill himself had experienced with so much pain: that of making
happiness the direct object of his existence — the aim of his pursuit
and in so doing stifling his true character and killing the thing he loved.
Mill's warning bears serious reflection — as much for entire societ-
ties based on the pursuit of happiness as for individual lives. But it
does not follow that in serving as a final end, liberty can or should also
be a means. For those oppressed by a tyrannical majority, certainly, or

constrained by hostile opinion, liberty and happiness will generally go
hand in hand. But it is hardly certain that others — the majority, the
greatest number — will agree. In urging eccentricity, difference, and

distinction, Mill was arguing for a freer society, a more diverse soci-
ety, we might even say a better society. But whether this would be a
happier society as well is not easy to say. One man's "liberation," alas,
can easily feed another's unhappiness or a mother's pain — in ways too

subtle to be detected (or legislated against) by the principle of harm.
Like Constant and Tocqueville, Mill understood that liberty
self-development, the full realization of self —was a worthy goal in its
own right. But his belief, his faith, that this precious end would in turn
serve as a means to the higher end of happiness rested at least in part
on the tenets of his youthful religion.
There is another thought, in many ways more troubling still: that the
majority might actually prefer its petty pursuits of petty fortune

—"the
hurried snatching of petty pleasures" — to noble disquiet, higher joys,
and Socratic delights. This was a thought that the likes of John Stuart
Mill were not entirely equipped to conceive. If asked to choose between

the life of a dissatisfied philosopher and a happy pig, they knew how they
would respond. But what to do with a majority that freely chose less
sophisticated pleasures, even the satisfactions of mud?
The Capitalist Ethic and the Spirit of Happiness
In the autumn of 1904, a middle-aged German couple disembarked

in New York after passage across the Atlantic, hoping to find relief
from suffering and perhaps to begin a better life. They put faith in
the promise of professional advancement, and they looked forward to

seeing the "spirit of capitalism" at first hand. They were not alone.
Close to five million of their countrymen had already emigrated to
the United States, making German Americans the single largest group
of European immigrants in the country after the British, surpassing
even the Italians and 96
Irish.
—
354 Happiness
Edmund Youngbauer, Die Jagd nach dem Gliick (Chasing After Happiness), late
nineteenth century, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Photo:

Smithsonian American Art Museum /Art Resource, NY.
Max and Marianne Weber were typical in these respects, but in
almost every other they were not. A Prussian professor of economics

and a sociologist of upper-middle-class background, Herr Weber had
been invited to the United States to deliver a prominent lecture at an
international conference in Saint Louis. He didn't intend to stay. And
though he had truly suffered in the Old World, the cause was neither
poverty nor discrimination but an undiagnosed nervous disorder
probably acute depression — that left him unable to work for long
stretches at a time.
The prospect of a trip had lifted Weber's spirits, allowing him to
return to his desk to complete the first half of the book that would
make him famous. The journey itself completed the therapy. After
three and a half months of intense travel in the United States, Weber
returned to Germany to finish The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capi-
talism, enthralled by what he had seen. "The spirit of capitalism," he

wrote to a friend, was everywhere apparent. With a power and fore-
sight that would place him on a par with Tocqueville and Mill as an
analyst of modern society, Weber came to the conclusion that America
stood at the forefront of a process that was sweeping Western society.
Everything "opposed to the culture of capitalism was going to be de-
97
molished with irresistible force."
What was the source of this all-consuming culture, the "spirit" that
lay at its heart? Weber's answer is famously contested, and it hinged
on a connection with religion. In the Protestant anxiety over the fate
of individual salvation, he argued, lay the motive force behind an im-

petus to capital accumulation, regarded as a sign and partial assurance
of God's blessing. Combining ascetic renunciation, a notion of work
as divine calling, and a critically rational disposition, the Protestant
faith, Weber argued, brought together nascent capitalism's essential

qualities: the restriction of consumption in favor of the accrual of capi-
tal, and a religiously consecrated ethic of discipline, delayed gratifica-
tion, industry, and thrift.
Paul Frenzeny, Temperance, Industry,

and Happiness, from Harpers Weekly,
March 14, 1874, Fine Arts Museum

of San Francisco.
356 Happiness
Weber considered Benjamin Franklin to be the perfect embodi-

ment of this Protestant ethic, a tireless proponent of the virtue of a
job well done and a faithful heir to the Calvinist discipline of his fa-
ther. This despite the fact that Franklin himself, in Weber's view, was
98
a "colourless deist." The label should give us pause, for it is a singu-
larly inappropriate description of a man who once wrote to the Royal
Academy of Brussels proposing that it seek to do something truly use-

ful, like discover a way to remove the smell from farts; a man who on
another occasion advised a friend to take an aged mistress on the grounds

that the "lower parts" continued to the last to be "as plump as ever,"
99
adding that besides, older women "are so grateful." Whatever his other
shortcomings, Franklin did not lack color, even if Weber's portrayal of
him did. The error of perception prompted a portrayal of the capitalis-
tic ethic rendered exclusively in black and white:
The summum bonum of this [Franklin's] ethic, the yearning of

more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of
all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely
devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say, hedonistic, admix-
ture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from
the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single
individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely
irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by
100
acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life.
Franklin, like his Puritan forebearers, Weber argued, perpetuated an

ethic that denied earthly happiness in the service of accumulation
and work —accumulation and work whose benefits would be enjoyed,
if ever at all, only in an imagined life to come. As belief in that next
life waned — hastened, Weber judged, by the inexorable rationaliza-
tion of human experience that accompanied the process of modern-

ization — all that was left behind was the impetus to work itself, now
stripped of its former transcendent purpose and meaning. "People
filled with the spirit of capitalism today," Weber emphasized, "tend
to be indifferent, if not hostile," to religion. "The thought of the pious
boredom of paradise has little attractive for their active natures." If
one were to pose the question "What is the meaning of their restless
activity?" to ask why they are "never satisfied with what they have,"
these people would tell you that they work to provide for their pos-
terity, or more often and "more correctly" that "business with its
continuous work [had] become a necessary part of their lives." "That,"

Weber concluded, "is in fact the only possible motivation," one that
"at the same time expresses what is, seen from the view-point of per-
sonal happiness, so irrational about this sort of life, where a man exists
the sake of his business, instead of the reverse. ." 101
for . .
There was, however, another motivation, one that was also a hold-
over from an earlier ethic, but one that Weber's account may have
prevented him from seeing. Although Franklin did distinguish the
pursuit of happiness from the pursuit of wealth, he rarely shunned the
"enjoyment of life," and it is unlikely that he considered the accumu-
lation of fortune as completely devoid of eudaemonistic or hedonistic
"admixture." What is true of Franklin is even more true for the many
who came after— the millions, like Weber himself, who arrived on
America's shores fleeing Old World pain for New World delight. As
Adam Smith had anticipated, and Tocqueville and Mill had confirmed,
a great many of these men and women believed that the pursuit of hap-
piness and the pursuit of wealth were one, regardless of the veracity
(or the rationality) of their faith. And they often sought nothing more
than the freedom to pursue their happiness accordingly, making a
better life for themselves and their families, while enjoying a few of
the fruits of their toil along the way. This may not have been mud
far from it — but it also fell well short of the lofty heights of self-
development that had captivated Mill. It recalled the earthy warmth

of Horace — his "virtues of plain living" — or the simple hedonism recom-
mended by the nineteenth-century poet Edward FitzGerald, albeit with
a modern spin. In place of FitzGerald's "A book of verses underneath
the bough / Ajug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou," one might hope for
a house and a few luxuries, a picket fence, a faithful spouse, and a de-
102
cent suit of clothes. Philosophers like Mill might disparage such
middle-class aspirations. But they were not ignoble dreams.
358 Happiness
Weber himself appreciated some of this, observing toward the end

of The Protestant Ethic that "in the field of [capitalism's] highest devel-
opment, the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its reli-
gious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely

mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport."
There are echoes of Hume in this claim, reverberations of the pursuit
of activity as distraction —backgammon for the soul — the pursuit of

work as the pursuit of play. But by and large, Weber's was a much
colder view. The idea of duty in the calling of work, he observed,
"prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs." And
where the fulfillment of this calling "cannot directly be related to the
highest spiritual and cultural values . . . the individual generally aban-

dons the attempt to justify it at all."
103
We work as disenchanted souls,
he believed, in a disenchanted world, following blindly the behest of
an outworn ethic and creed.
Yet by focusing only on the engine of a bygone creed —the Protes-
tant ethic —Weber failed to acknowledge an atavism of an even older

sort, a "higher" spiritual and cultural value that, as venerable as Croesus,
was neither predominately Protestant nor exclusively Christian. That
value —happiness—continued to entice with attractive force, provid-
ing a justification for work and sacrifice, a basis for meaning and hope
that only loomed larger on the horizon of Western democracies. In-
deed, it was during the very period when Weber was writing that
America, and the West more generally, began to undergo what the
sociologist Daniel Bell has described as a monumental transformation,
"the shift from production to consumption as the fulcrum of capital-
ism." Bringing "silk stockings to shop girls" and "luxury to the masses,"
this transformation made of "marketing and hedonism" the "motor
forces of capitalism," driving over all restraints that stood in the way
of the enjoyment of material pleasures with a momentum that would
104
have surprised even Tocqueville. As inhibitions of desire were
thrust aside, and as opportunities for satisfaction grew, "economic
growth," Bell observes, became "the secular religion of advancing in-
dustrial societies: the source of individual motivation, the basis of
political solidarity, the ground for the mobilization of society for a

common purpose." 105 If economic growth was now a secular religion,
the pursuit of happiness remained its central creed, with greater

opportunites than ever before to pursue pleasure in comfort and
things. These satisfied desires, but as they did so, they created others
at a dizzying pace, multiplying uneasiness and threatening to confine
us in proliferating needs.
This Weber saw. "Material goods," he observed at the end of The
Protestant Ethic, "have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable
power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history." If at
one point they lay on the shoulders of the saint "like a light cloak,
which can be thrown aside at any moment," that cloak had since be-
come "an iron cage" from which "the spirit of religious asceticism had
escaped," heavy and perhaps immovable, pinning us to earth. 106 Weber
failed to detect the pursuit of happiness in this confining space, but
the failure may have been willed. Scoffing at "optimistic dreams of
happiness" and at politics based on its pursuit as "flabby eudaimon-
ism," he granted no place in his political economy for these mundane
107
quests. As he emphasized in a speech delivered in 1894:
I believe that we must renounce human happiness

[Glucksgefuhl] as the goal of social legislation. We want
something else and can only want something else. We want to
cultivate and support what appears to us valuable in man: his
personal responsibility, his deep drive towards higher things,

108
towards the spiritual and moral values of mankind. . . ,
In so stating the aim of politics this way, Weber added his own voice to
a venerable tradition that included the likes of Constant, Tocqueville,

and perhaps even Mill. Yet he fully acknowledged that it was from this
"pessimistic standpoint that we arrive at ... a point of view that ap-
pears to me much more idealistic" than the striving for a positive feel-
ing of happiness. For the tragic truth of the matter was that the "feeling
of happiness" was "greater in animals than in men." 109 In Weber's mind,

the pursuit of what was highest in humanity —the cultivation and de-
velopment of human beings —was the loftiest of all goals.
—
360 Happiness
But toward what final end this process of development should be

directed, Weber, like Mill, could not say. Indeed, he believed that
insofar as he served the true vocation of a man of "science"
(Wissenschaft) , he was unable to say. Only the naive or the deluded, he
believed, still clung to the "illusion" that science in any of its forms
whether social or natural —could provide certain answers to the most
pressing of human questions: What shall we do and how shall we live?
This, of course, had been the basic question of the Greeks. But
after centuries of struggling to provide a definitive answer, it was
time to acknowledge that science could no more provide that answer
than it could reveal "the 'way to true being,' the 'way to true art,'
the 'way to true nature,' the 'way to true God,' [or] the 'way to true
110
happiness.'"
That Weber considered the "way to true happiness" the last of
these "former illusions," the one that succeeded the place of God, is
revealing. He certainly believed that "the naive optimism in which

science — that the technique of mastering which
is, upon life rests
science — has been celebrated the way happiness" was crumbling

as to
all around. "Who [still] believes in this?" he asked scornfully, "aside

from a few big children in university chairs or editorial offices." With-
out clear moral directives and certain commands, each must find and
obey the "demon who holds the fibers of his very life." 111
This was the central dilemma of any society in which, as Adam

Smith had observed, every man was left genuinely free "to pursue
his own interest his own way," to find his daimon for himself. Laws
could guarantee the pursuit of happiness. But the attainment, the
"catching," must be left to individuals. As Smith well knew, and as
Tocqueville, Mill, and Weber could see, individuals were precariously

susceptible to the suasion of their fellow men. Without proper moral
guidance, they must often fail. Was there not a danger, especially in
the new hedonism of consumer-driven economies, that the majority
would be overwhelmed by what Smith had called the "deception" that
wealth and comfort alone could bring them what they want? Was there
not a danger that in pursuing their elusive happiness, they would lead
themselves and their fellow men astray?
This was the same thought that had given Rousseau such pause.
We yearned for what our neighbor had — fine clothes, trinkets and
baubles, a more splendid house —and chased what our neighbor
chased, not because these things contributed to our genuine happi-
ness, but because we believed that they would. The desires of men in
society were determined largely by the desires of their fellow men.

And from this Rousseau reasoned that any system that tolerated in-
equality was potentially ruinous, for invariably it would perpetuate

envy and enmity, sapping virtue and sowing strife, blurring false de-
sires with genuine needs. The same "deception" that Smith saw as
the engine of growth in commercial societies was, for Rousseau, the
cause of human pain.
Like the American Founding Fathers and their classical-liberal
heirs, the father of capitalism believed that the risks of self-delusion

far outweighed the perils of attempting to dictate others' needs. But
even after the failed experiments in social engineering of the French
Revolution, many others were not so sure. Moved by what they saw as
the injustices of the market and the dubious choices of individuals
when motivated by self-interest, rightly understood or not, they con-
templated more ambitious solutions to the problem of discontent.
"The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something
against which human nature rebels," Friedrich Engels observed of mid
nineteenth-century London:
The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding

past each other, are they not all human beings with the same
qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being
happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in
the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by
one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing
112
to do with one another. . . ,
The "brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his pri-

vate interest," struck Engels as "repellent and offensive," and he was
hardly alone. Many shared his central assumption that the happiness
362 Happiness
of all lay in a common route, belying an unruffled faith that "science"
could still be counted upon to reveal the "way to true happiness."

Weber's judgment that only "big children in university chairs" could
still evince that belief would prove tragically premature. For just as
he wrote those words in the immediate aftermath of World War I, men
and women to the east were consolidating bold claims on behalf of
"science" in defense of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The sci-
ence of socialism, they believed — the "scientific socialism" of Marx

and Engels —would serve as the guide to true happiness, turning in-
dividuals away from their petty pursuits and toward their common
deliverance.
Building
happy worlds
T T appiness our being's end and aim' at bottom, we will count

is if
A A well, not yet two centuries old in the world." The claim was 1
that of Thomas Carlyle, who borrowed the line from a pillar of the
Enlightenment, the poet Alexander Pope. Carlyle's chronology was
nearly flawless (he wrote in the 1840s). And with regard to the dra-
matic transformation that this new idea was working in the world, the
irascible Scot was equally astute. As he observed in the ironically en-
titled chapter "Happy" of Past and Present, first published in 1843:
Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has had his
head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all
human and divine laws ought to be, "happy." His wishes, the
pitifulest whipster's, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the
pitifulest whipster's, are to flow on in ever-gentle current of
enjoyment, impossible even for the gods. The prophets

preach to us, Thou shalt be happy; thou shalt love pleasant
things, and find them. The people clamour, Why have we
2
not found pleasant things?
364 Happiness
In the preceding year — the summer of 1842 — hundreds of thousands

of workers had taken to England's streets to protest against falling
wages, abominable working conditions, political disenfranchisement,
and the rising cost of bread. Dramatizing the uncertainties of Britain's
new industrial economy, their actions moved Carlyle to both sympa-
thy and indignation at false promises made. With stinking sewers and
hellish factories, modern life could scarcely be said to maximize the
greatest good for the greatest number. The "Greatest-Happiness
Principle," he scowled, was "fast becoming a rather unhappy one." 3
Carlyle attacked the heirs of the utilitarian tradition —Benthamite
reformers and liberal economists — for failing to fulfill their promises.
A Romantic at heart, he was also skeptical of the very notion that hap-
piness could be provided by pleasure alone, delivered on demand in
the form of pleasant things. This, he claimed, was a "pig philosophy"

that reduced human beings to the level of beasts. The liberals, econo-
mists, and statesmen who now upheld this line — preaching competi-
tion and "a cold universal Laissezfaire" —were false prophets.
4
Modern
economics, Carlyle observed in an oft-repeated line, was a "dismal
5
science," and "Mammonworship a melancholy creed." Even if one
succeeded in extending pleasure to all, this would never be enough to
give human beings what they need.

And what was it that human beings truly needed? Consult history,
Carlyle challenged, compare past and present, and one would gain
insight into this pressing question. A close-knit community, purpose-
ful labor, a sense of God — these were the necessary requisites so evi-
dent in the England of the Middle Ages but so lacking in the world of
today. If the power of industry had created vast wealth, which bulged
in the pockets of the few, the many toiled as lifeless drones, chasing
an illusory happiness without success or fulfillment. So, too, had the

bonds of community been torn asunder. "Our life is not a mutual help-
fulness," Carlyle complained, "but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-
war, named 'fair competition' and so forth, it is mutual hostility." 6
Pitting individual against individual, the market's rules of engagement

left all in "isolation" and the "totalest separation." Finally, the gospel
of Mammon denied the greatest human need: for God, or the godlike
in man. "God's Laws are become a Greatest Happiness Principle,"
Carlyle lamented. "There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost

7
his soul."
According to Carlyle's analysis, it was clear that the relief of suffer-
ing required more than simple pleasure. Community, meaningful

labor, and the experience of God would be essential to the restoration
of human beings. But how to provide those things, Carlyle did not
really know. Like others of his century, he was inclined to look nostal-
gically to the past. Yet he also knew that there could be no simple
return to simpler times. He spoke vaguely of the coming of new "he-
roes," of building a "true aristocracy," of giving religion new clothes.
But his was a protest not a plan of action, a reckoning with past and
present not with the future.
Reviewing the work in the year after its publication, Friedrich
Engels found much in it to applaud. "Of all the fat books and thin
pamphlets which have appeared in England in the past year .
," Karl
.
.
Marx's lifelong collaborator observed, this "is the only one which is
worth reading." 8 Then living in Manchester, and engaged in a study

of the conditions of the English working class, Engels shared Carlyle's
analysis of England's present state, with only minor qualifications:
This is the condition of England, according to Carlyle. An idle
landowning aristocracy ... a working aristocracy submerged in
Mammonism, a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates. A

Parliament elected by bribery, a philosophy of simply looking
on, of doing nothing, of laissezfaire, a worn out, crumbling
religion, a total disappearance of all general human interest, a
universal despair of truth and humanity, and in consequence a

universal isolation of men in their own "brute individuality";
a chaotic, savage confusion of all aspects of life, a war of all
against all, a general death of the spirit, a dearth of "soul," that
is, of truly human consciousness: a disproportionately strong
9
working class, in intolerable oppression and wretchedness. . . .
366 Happiness
Engels's close agreement with Carlyle does not end there. Despite
his recognition that the Scottish critic was hardly a socialist, he looked
with favor on his proposition that an "endless significance lies in work,"
that "labour is life," that "all true work is sacred." "Blessed is he who
has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness," Carlyle observes
in a modern beatitude that Engels cites with approval. 10 He whole-
heartedly agrees that it is in community alone that one can find one's
way. And he shares the conviction that in the past lies the key to
the understanding of human destiny. Only on the subject of religion
does Engels take pains to distinguish his views from Carlyle's largely
German-inspired idealism. Yet even here, Engels the radical un-
believer shows a surprising indulgence:
We too are concerned with combating the lack of principle,

the inner emptiness, the spiritual deadness, the untruthful-
ness of the age; we are waging a war to the death against all
these things, just as Carlyle is, and there is a much greater
probability that we shall succeed than that he will, because

we know what we want. We want to put an end to atheism, as
Carlyle portrays it, by giving back to man the substance he has
lost through religion; not as divine but as human substance.
11
Engels and his comrades would overcome atheism by making a god of

man. They would discover in history the "revelation of man." Indeed,
Engels says explicity, "God is man." With these striking formulations,
he promised to solve the "riddle of our time" — the Sphinx's riddle,
the riddle of humanity that Carlyle had affirmed contained the "secret
of all unhappy men and unhappy nations." "Happy is the man who
answers it aright," Engels observes. 12
He would deliver that answer.
As we shall see, responding to the riddle of the times involved noth-

ing less than confronting the riddles of the past, in particular that most
perplexing of problems: Why had human beings suffered throughout
the ages, living continually in contradiction with themselves? That
question had exercised the Romantics, but increasingly, it was ex-
tended to encompass not only the maladie du siecle but the sickness of
Odilon Redon, Mystical Knight

(Oedipus and the Sphinx), 1 894,
Musee Bonnat, Bayonne. Photo:
Erich Lessing / Art Resource,
NY. Carlyle observes in Past and
Present, "That he who dwells in
the temporary Semblances, and

does not penetrate into the
eternal Substance, will not
answer the Sphinx-riddle of
Today, or of any Day."
all time. With his protean powers, his knowledge and science, his tech-
nology and advanced understanding, could not man comprehend where

he was and where he was going, what he might become? "There is no
other salvation," Engels affirmed, than "returning firmly and honestly,
not to 'God,' but to [man] himself." 13 Human beings would find them-
selves in the past, reveal themselves in history. But in order to follow
— the
that story of Marx and Engels's solution of the
story of riddle
human return —we need recount some

first to Collectively,
others.
they tell of the consummation of an enormously powerful view of
happiness that became, in time, a religion of its own.
History and the Unhappy Consciousness
There is a celebrated section in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (1807)
that treats what this most German of German philosophers described

as the "unhappy consciousness." To the unsuspecting reader, uniniti-
368 Happiness
ated in the mysterious arts of Hegelian hermeneutics, the section will

appear, like so much of his writing, virtually incomprehensible. At every
turn and in every paragraph, defiant passages block the reader's way,
frustrating the advance of even the most intrepid inquirer:
In the process, however, consciousness experiences just this

appearance of particularity in the unchangeable, and of the
unchangeable in particularity. Consciousness becomes aware
of particularity in general'in the immutable essence, and at the
same time it there finds its own particularity. For the truth of
this process is precisely that the double consciousness is one
14
and single.
Passages like these prompted the more cogent Schopenhauer to dis-

miss Hegel as an intellectual charlatan, the "producer of monstrous
articulations of words that cancel and contradict one another . . . gradu-
ally destroying so completely his ability to think, that henceforth hol-
15
low, empty flourishes and phrases are regarded by him as thoughts."
Schopenhauer, it is true, bore a grudge. When, briefly in 1820, he of-
fered a course at the University of Berlin at the same time as his rival,
not a single student opted for Schopenhauerian pessimism over the

Hegelian system. Alone in his lecture hall, Schopenhauer complained
of the caprice of youth. But when he came, years later, to write a new
preface to The World as Will and Representation, he was forced to acknowl-
edge the extent of Hegel's influence. For twenty years, this charla-
tan had been extolled "as the greatest of philosophers so loudly that
the echo was heard throughout Europe." 16 As a leading modern com-
mentator has observed, with the possible exception of Marx, "no phi-
losopher of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries has had as great an
impact on the world as Hegel." 17
Why this tremendous influence? Although the answers to that ques-
tion are necessarily many and complex, one essential clue can be
found in the section from the Phenomenology of Mind referred to above.
Strictly speaking, "unhappy consciousness" {ungluckliches Bewusstsein)
was Hegel's term for a way of looking at the world that had been
shaped by the historical force of pre-Reformation Christianity. By lo-
cating the divine in a "remote beyond," Christianity had erected a fatal

division between the sacred and profane. Striving always for the un-
changing spiritual God, men and women ran up continually against the
changing needs and limitations of the material world. Their desires
and demands were thus forever in conflict. "Divided and at variance
with itself," the unhappy consciousness was a battlefield in which ir-
reconcilable enemies raged. "Consciousness of life," as a consequence,

existence and action, [was] merely pain and sorry. ." 18
"of its . .
In many respects this analysis was not original. Saints Paul and
Augustine never spoke, precisely, of the "unhappy consciousness" or
invoked Hegel's other term, "the alienated soul," but it is clear that
something of this basic notion was perfectly in keeping with their

understanding of the human condition. "For the good that I want to
do I fail to do," Paul says famously in Romans 7:19, highlighting the

degree to which human beings are divided within. "I practice the very
evil that I do not want." A long line of theologians had developed the
thought. Fatally rent by sin, human beings were condemned to live in
conflict with themselves and with each other: Happiness was not in
their constitutions.
It was precisely here, however, that Hegel introduced a revolution-

ary twist. For the "unhappy consciousness" in his reading was not a
permanent feature of the human condition, a congenital defect to be

remedied only by grace, but rather a transitional stage in the evolu-
tion of world history. True, all hitherto existing ages had known forms
of what Hegel called "alienation" or "estrangement" (Entfremdung or
Entausserung) a profound sense of being sundered from one's environ-
,
ment, one's fellows, and one's self. But to the close student of world
history, it became apparent that the forms of human alienation devel-
oped progressively over time, evolving in keeping with different his-
torical contexts and different cultural circumstances. Thus, to Hegel,

the "unhappy consciousness" of Christianity actually represented an
advance over earlier, classical cultures that had failed to adequately
address the spiritual dimension of humanity. In turn, the Christian
unhappy consciousness was giving way to a more harmonious balance
370 Happiness
between our dual yearnings for spiritual and material freedom. In a

process of creative destruction that had taken on particular force since
the Reformation, men and women were being led to transform their
outer world to more closely reflect their inner need for spiritual free-
dom. Gradually, progressively, human beings were overcoming alien-
ation. Someday the unhappy consciousness would prove a relic of the
past.
Of this there could be no doubt: The historical process was work-

ing in the service of human deliverance. Looking backward, the view
admittedly was bleak. At no point had man yet attained that "harmony
with himself that Hegel associated with genuine happiness. As he
later acknowledged, "It is possible to consider history from the point
of view of happiness, but history is not the soil in which happiness
grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history."
On the contrary, human history had served as an altar, a "slaughter
bench" to which the "happiness of peoples" had been brought for
sacrifice.
19
But looking forward, it became clear that men and women
would not have suffered in vain. For this same process of creative
destruction was leading humanity ever closer to its final realization,
the full flowering of "Freedom."

Notoriously, Hegel was never entirely clear as to what this final
Freedom would entail, a vagueness that undoubtedly contributed to
its appeal. And many were at a loss to explain his odd suggestion that
his native Prussia represented the closest thing to Freedom's contem-
porary realization, an ideally rational state. Still, there were some tan-
talizing suggestions to tempt his followers' fancy. In The Philosophy of
Right, for example, the work in which Hegel discusses Freedom at
greatest length, he makes clear that its ultimate realization would be

social. Final Freedom, that is, would entail not just the overcoming of
individual alienation —reconciling men and women to nature and to
themselves —but also the overcoming of social alienation, reconciling
men and women to each other. In a context of close-knit, organic com-
munity, the freedom of each would be bound up with the freedom of
all. In Hegel's view, the development of this process could already be
seen at work in contemporary civil society:
In the course of the actual attainment of selfish ends —an

attainment conditioned in this way by universality — there is
formed a system of complete interdependence, wherein the

livelihood, happiness, and legal status of one man is inter-
woven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all. On

this system, individual Happiness, &c. depend, and only in
this connected system are they actualized and secured. 20
With the progressive march of Freedom, individuals were being rec-
onciled to one another while at the same time being reconciled to
themselves.
A necessary corollary to this process was that men and women would
cease to experience desire "inauthentically" in a manner not purely
consonant with their own true needs. Like Rousseau, Hegel appreci-
ated quite early on that in modern commercial societies, individuals'
desires and needs were generated by the desires and needs of others.
Implanted by advertising, dictated by fashion, and determined by style,
individual desire was always socially determined, shaped by the particu-

lar contexts in which we live. And nowhere was this more true than
with luxury items and the sources of pleasure that can be continually,
endlessly refined. In an economy of rapid innovation, yesterday's state-
of-the art convenience could quickly become a source of pain.
What the English call "comfort" is something inexhaustible

and illimitable. Others can reveal to you that what you take to
be comfort at any stage is discomfort, and these discoveries
never come to an end. Hence the need for greater comfort
does not exactly arise within you directly; it is suggested to
you by those who hope to make a profit from its creation. 21
Such a situation created a "system of needs" that were anything but,

generating desires that failed to respond to authentic longings, while
placing individuals in conflict with the collective good.
In the state of Freedom, these tensions between private interest
and public good — long assumed by those in the liberal tradition to be
372 Happiness
a permanent feature of social life —would gradually wither away. Indi-
vidual desires would still be shaped by social forces, but now each mem-
ber of the community would truly want just what was of genuine service
to the community as a whole. In turn, the community would look after
each of its members like integral parts of a body, perfectly articulating
their separate needs. In such a state, the conflict between freedom and
necessity would cease to exist. All would want only what they should
want; all would want only what they needed.
It has often been remarked —and with reason— that Hegel's vision
of the triumph of Freedom is not only Utopian but also potentially dan-
gerous in its obliteration of the distinction between the individual and
society. This would seem even more the case when one considers the
nature of the force guiding this great world-historical deliverance.
Hegel gave it different names at different times. He called it "Idea."
He called it "Reason." He called it "Spirit." He called it "God." And
whatever else one might say about the complicated religious views of
this man whose early professional training was in theology, it is clear
that his use of the divine epithet in this instance was not wholly mis-
placed. For his was a system that gave logic, direction, and purpose to
the whole of human history; a system that explained the riddle of

human unhappiness in unqualified terms. Like the Romantics, Hegel
refused to turn a blind eye to the undeniable fact of suffering, to dis-
miss it blithely, in the Enlightenment tradition, as solely the result of
ignorance, a deficit of pleasure, or interested error. Yet neither did he

throw up his hands in Romantic despair, seeking ephemeral solace
from the pain of human existence in fleeting joy or the illusions of art.
Still less did he attempt to alleviate public misery by maximizing per-
sonal liberty, harnessing individual selfishness and desire to virtue.
Rather, Hegel explained suffering, describing his narration of history as
the "recollection and Golgotha of the Absolute Spirit." 22 This was
what Christians since Leibniz had called theodicy. Hegel himself used
the term. But his was a "true theodicy," he claimed, a science that
explained suffering rather than explaining it away. 23 Offering justifi-
cation for the pain of the past and the promise of future redemption,
Hegel's system gave reason to unhappiness and offered hope that it
would one day be brought to an end. This, in large measure, was the
secret of its success.
It was, moreover, the secret of success of a great number of move-

ments that flourished in the nineteenth century. Not all were explic-
itly indebted to Hegel. But all shared his conviction that the new
"science" of history held the key to the riddle of man. Like him, they
promised forms of deliverance, forms of redemption. And like him,
they saw, on the horizon of the future, the glimmer of happiness's ris-
ing sun. But whereas Hegel was content to speak in the abstractions
of German idealism, others were prepared to describe the coming

world in far more explicit terms.
No-Place Is Someplace
Nauvoo, Illinois, would seem an odd place at any time to undertake a

great experiment in human happiness. But in 1849 only two years —
after angry local mobs had expelled the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) for the sin of having chosen this
Mississippi port city as their Zion — the designation was more unlikely
still. Undaunted, several hundred "New Icarian" socialists arrived in
that year, intent on planting joy.
The Icarians were hardly in a position to quibble. Humble artisans
and workers, for the most part, they had recently fled the urban squalor,
political repression, and economic uncertainties of an industrializing
Europe. Lured from the Old World by the promise of freedom and fer-
tile lands in the New, they had arrived initially in Texas intent on build-
ing there the "New Icaria," the ideal city described by their visionary
leader, the Frenchman Etienne Cabet, in his Utopian tract Voyage en Icarie
(1840). In Texas, they would put an end to social strife, while putting
into practice what Cabet described as "true Christianity," a species of
egalitarian communism in which private property would be abolished

and all would work in harmonious fellowship toward the common good.
Expecting Eden, the Icarians found deception instead: no welcome,
no preparations, no land. Cabet had not even arrived, and when he did,
374 Happiness
VOYAGE
ICARIE
M. CABET.
FRATERMTE
9
SOUUTI
.'I DIP.
CIVILLI premier trvoir.

nocua oowtwcm
2)irrc. HOJIII.1CI
1ITL
Miloal »f* h«»olu«. iii\ am -r« force*.
The title page to an 1848 edition of

BONHEUR COMMUN.
Cabet's Voyage to Icaria, promising
PARIS
"fraternity" and "mutual happiness." jLOIVIEAO DCrOrTLMtK.BUI IF vl-J irnl f MJtllun, li.
D«M Us D^p«tt«wcr,:i pewftoii
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript

Library, Yale University.
his followers were ready to sue him for fraud. Somehow, with blandish-
ments and persuasion, the charismatic leader succeeded in rallying their
spirits and assuring them that all would be well. He recalled the chant
they had sung on the decks as their ship sailed from Le Havre:
Arise, workers stooped in dust,
The hour of awakening has sounded.

To American shores the banner is going to wave,
The banner of the holy community.

No more vices, no more suffering,
No more crimes, no more pain,
The august Equality advances itself:
Proletariat, dry your tears.
Soldiers of Fraternity,
Let us go to found in Icaria,
The happiness of Humanity! 24

If Icaria could not be built in Texas, then let it be raised in Nauvoo!

With a ready-made meeting hall, a temple, barracks, and other facili-
ties left behind by the Mormons, the site was well suited for an ex-
periment in communal living. It was also cheap. And so, somewhat
bedraggled, with funds already waning but enthusiasm still high,
Cabet and company set about creating a happy world in Illinois based
on fellowship, sexual equality, and common ownership.
The experiment proved short-lived. Within scarcely a year, a tornado
had decimated the once spectacular Mormon temple, fires had razed
the stables and windmill, and a cholera epidemic had carried off twenty
settlers. Financial constraints forced the community to rely on the sale
of whiskey to the local population to finance its operation, while mis-
management, disease, and the authoritarian tendencies of Cabet led to

further dissent among his followers. Despite some successes — a thriv-
ing workers' orchestra, free education, and the partial integration of the
sexes —by 1856 the community had split into two factions, with the
majority burning Cabet in effigy and banishing him from Icaria. He
would die later that year in St. Louis, broken, lonely, and depressed. The
"happiness of Humanity," clearly, was not yet at hand.
The story of the Icarian settlement in Nauvoo, at once tragic and
darkly comic, is symbolic of the wider fate of the so-called Utopian
socialist movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. Like
Cabet's Icarians, the followers of such men as Robert Owen ( 1 771—
1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), and Henri de Saint-Simon
(1760-1825) attempted to build model communities in Europe and
America, squatting on ground once occupied by Christians. They ul-
timately failed, although in doing so, they succeeded in registering

powerful indictments of the world around them, dramatizing both the
tremendous costs and the staggering potential of modern industry and
science. In the process, they gave new impetus to the dream of happi-
ness in all its contradictions, promising perpetual felicity in this life
to many who had never dared consider the thought.

There is, in fact, no more central term in the lexicon of these early
socialists. The poor son of an ironmonger from Wales, Robert Owen
found time to study Bentham while accumulating a self-made fortune
376 Happiness
in textiles. The word "happiness" was never far from his lips. Whether
pursuing practical reforms for his workers at his model factory in New
Lanark, Scotland, penning treatises on perfect communities, or at-
tempting to create such communities in England or America, Owen
sought always to promote the greatest good of the greatest number.
In the process, he went far beyond anything Bentham had ever con-
sidered, dreaming of a:
Rational System . . . purposely formed to promote the well-

being and happiness of every man, woman, and child, of every
clime and color [that would] by degrees amalgamate the
human race into one cordially-united intelligent family, with
one language, one interest, and one object, namely, the
25
permanent happiness of all.
As announced in Owenite publications, and proclaimed by Owenite

publicists, the goal of their leader was nothing less than "happiness
from birth to death, for all." In the coming kingdom, happiness would
flow so freely that "all that have life," including the beasts of the field,
26
would know it.
Saint-Simon also affirmed that in the finely calibrated social system

of the future, every man would be induced to work joyfully "for his
own happiness, for that of his family, and for that of humanity." 27 Born
a count, he had fought with French forces in the American Revolu-
tionary War, joining Washington at the Battle of Yorktown. He was
later taken prisoner by the British in the West Indies. During France's
own Revolution, Saint-Simon made a fortune speculating in confis-
cated real estate (he was even rumored to have tried to buy Notre
Dame Cathedral) but was then imprisoned by the Jacobins and sub-
sequently lost everything he had through the treachery of a business
partner and his own extravagance. In the decades that followed, Saint-
Simon survived a suicide attempt, a stint in a madhouse, and visita-
tions by the ghost of his alleged ancestor Charlemagne. Yet still he

managed to surround himself with some of the brightest young men in
Europe and to produce an impressive body of writing on the state of

European society. In virtually all of it, Saint-Simon looked happily for-
ward. With justice does his tombstone at the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery

in Paris read, "The Golden Age is not in the past it is in the future."
Charles Fourier also painted a consistently joyous picture of the
coming "Dawn of Happiness" and of its sweet foretaste in his ideal-
ized community, the Phalanx:
Universal happiness and gaiety will reign. A unity of interest

and views will arise, crime and violence will disappear. There
will be no individual dependence —no private servants, only
maids, cooks, and the like, all working for all (when they
please). Elegance and luxury will be had by everyone. The
Phalanx will be devoted to the service of useful labor, of the
sciences, the arts, and of cuisine. It will render industry
attractive, and end the evil distinction between Producers

28
and Consumers.
Fourier's writings are replete with such bold speculations, laid out in
the straightforward, if grandiose, terms of a man who professed a life-
long disdain for the abstractions of philosophers and the absurdities

of lettered men. This hardly protected Fourier from sweeping absur-
dities of his own, but it did give even his wildest pronouncements an
earthiness often lacking in the writings of social theorists like Hegel.
In the eyes of this failed traveling salesman, when happiness finally
blossomed in the world, it would be not a matter of theoretical so-
phistication but the sweet smell of satisfied desire.
Happiness, then, was a common category of this early socialist lan-

guage, invoked with great frequency by Cabet, Owen, Saint-Simon,
and Fourier. Which is not to say that these men presented happiness
in identical terms, or that they proposed attaining it in precisely the
same way. Divergence and disagreement abound. Whereas Cabet and
Owen, for example, envisioned perfect equality, the common own-
ership of goods, and grassroots autonomy as final conditions of a
happy world, Saint-Simon imagined a technocratic hierarchy in

which highly skilled elites would manage industry, science, and the
378 Happiness
Dominique Louis Papety, Un Reve de bonheur, Musee Vivenel,

Compiegne. Photo: Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.
Papety's painting, shown at the Paris Salon of 1843,
was inspired by his reading of Fourier.
arts in the service of the masses. Fourier retained a place for private
property, spurning total equality as unsuited to individuals whose

needs and abilities varied widely. In his opinion, happiness entailed
the full satisfaction of the passions, which, in his idiosyncratic psychol-
ogy, varied extensively according to 810 basic personality types:
Happiness, about which so much, or rather so much nonsense,

has been talked, consists in having many passions and many
means of satisfying them. [In the present civilization] we
have few passions and hardly sufficient means to satisfy a
quarter of them; this is why our globe is for the moment one
of the most miserable in the universe. Other planets may
experience equal unhappiness, but none can suffer more. 29
In the perfect world of the Phalanx, personalities would be matched

to complement one another, and the passions — for love, friendship,
ambition, touch, taste, and the like —given ample room to play. In
contrast to the comparatively chaste communities envisioned by

Owen, Cabet, and Saint-Simon, Fourier imagined a "new amorous
world" of free love liberated from the many constraints imposed on
our sensual needs.
These are only a number of the many distinctions that one can draw
between these systems. Arguably of greater significance are the simi-
larities. For though these early socialists might disagree over the par-
ticulars of pleasure in the world to come, they were far more united
regarding the immediate sources of pain. In great detail, they decried
the changes that were beginning to transform the landscape of early
capitalism: the swings of the business cycle that periodically left en-
tire sectors of the workforce on the brink of starvation; the terrible
conditions of factories and mines, in which women and children were

forced to toil like beasts alongside their husbands and fathers; the bru-
tal crowding of slums and hovels, where untold numbers were drawn in
waves of urbanization, rendered fodder for sickness and disease. It may
be argued that such conditions were hardly worse than the formidable
challenges of survival that faced the poor in preindustrial economies.
But they were undeniably new, and so all the more threatening for
their lack of precedent.
A large part of the appeal of the Utopian socialists, in fact, was their
ability to give poignant voice at an early stage of capitalist development

to the ravages and uncertainties of change. Often with prescience, they
generalized from the experience of the advanced industrial centers in
Europe to construct broad analyses of the apparently chaotic nature of
modern society. For Saint-Simon, the "sentiment of egotism" that he

believed was a characteristic feature of modern economies had "be-
come dominant in all classes and in all individuals." 30 Owen lashed out
at the spirit of "contention and opposition" that pitted man against
man and class against class, while Fourier railed against "industrial
anarchy" and its "illusions of happiness." Bankruptcy, smuggling,
usury, speculation, hoarding, parasitism, and cheating were the "vices

inherent in the commercial mechanism," and they were vast. 31 The
world that had been created by modern industry and commerce was a
380 Happiness
THE CRISIS.
THE CRTSI8; OR TBS < If
ERROR AND MISERY, TO TRUTH AND RAPP1NE8!
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t .
J ifr-Aw b ». «sj f-t-

J
r-1 - •
'i -| -f~ ~i' •
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ffc.. ***.*.!...**— <tj<m»«l-*i- feioanst 1 - -«- «M J— w-.,, -,,
ram*. «4 t. «rm « t* r~« <=«»< < •- -—" "* *•"* '»*" —' «~" «•»»
mummtn t . **-> iJhj » IV*; t jwfci
> .! . t. ky ww '"* » '
Robert Owen, The Crisis
or the Change from Error and

Misery to Truth and Happiness
(1832). By permission of
the British Library.
canting, hypocritical world that protected the strong and brutalized

the weak; a world that fomented social strife, leaving vast numbers of
the population without resources or agency; a topsy-turvy world that
saw the wretchedness of the people increase "in direct proportion to
the advance of industry." 32

Adept at articulating the suffering of transition and change, the
Utopian socialists registered powerful protests on behalf of the vulner-
able against what they saw as the more destructive features of mod-
ern economic life. Their visions of happiness, accordingly, were based
in large measure on removing these sources of pain. As one of Owen's
deputies, John Gray, observed in a widely circulated Lecture on Human
Happiness in 1825:
Let societies be formed for the purpose of annihilating the

causes, whence the evils of mankind arise, — societies, not to
relieve the miserable, but to abolish the cause of misery; not
to assist the poor with money, but to abolish the causes of

poverty; not to detect thieves, but to take away the multitude

of temptation to steal; societies having for their avowed
purpose an equal distribution of the means of happiness to all,
and of the combining of all mankind in unity, peace, and

concord. Only give birth to societies founded on this principle;
they will ask for no continued support. 33
Do away with the sources of misery, and happiness would follow natu-
rally on its own.
Such observations give credence to a point later made by George
Orwell: "Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has
toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having
toothache." 34 They also follow logically from Enlightenment assump-
tions, which tended, as we have seen, to present happiness as a natu-
ral condition and course. Happiness, in the Enlightened view, was
impeded only by pain-inducing prejudice, practice, and false belief.
Remove those obstacles, and individuals would be free to follow their

natural trajectory.
The Utopian socialists —above all, Owen with his acknowledged

debt to Bentham —were heirs to this aspect of the Enlightenment
tradition. Yet their thinking about happiness also departed signifi-
cantly from what had come before. In the first place, whereas Enlight-
enment theorists and their liberal successors tended to conceive of
happiness primarily in individual terms, the Utopians regarded the

community as the sole category in which discussions of happiness
made sense. There were, to be sure, important precedents for this
emphasis: Plato, whom Robert Owen invoked directly, equated hap-

piness and justice in the Republic, making every member of his ideal
realm subservient to the broader collective good of the polis. Other

classical philosophers did much the same. There were also important
warrants for such communitarian thinking in the Catholic tradition.
And in their own ways, Rousseau, and later, the Jacobins, reinvigorated
the emphasis on the social whole even at the expense of its parts.
The Utopian socialists, however, went beyond those earlier prece-

dents, arguing that happiness must be extended to all. It was not
—
382 Happiness
enough, they maintained, merely to provide the conditions in which

some were allowed to maximize personal pleasure. And it was not
enough to think of the community as an abstraction, the sum total, in
Bentham's words, "of the interests of the several members who com-
35
pose The whole was greater than its parts. Unless all were happy,
it."
none could be happy. The sight of suffering of even a few was a re-
buke to the many.
This emphasis on the complete and total extension of happiness
with its attendant appeal to the least fortunate members of society
provided early socialists with a powerful source of attraction, as well

as an incisive means to criticize contemporary society, in which so
many, so plainly, suffered terribly. It also helped to justify their with-
drawal into self-enclosed communities. For given the present stage of
social development, Utopians argued, the happiness of the whole could
be ensured only in isolation. The New Icaria of Cabet, or the Phalanxes
of Fourier would thus serve as temporary oases, an avant-garde for the
wider transformation that would follow.
That this wider transformation was coming, and coming soon, was
not in doubt, a conviction that the Utopians based largely on their read-
ing of the past. And here, in the unfolding of history, was another key
aspect of the Utopians' understanding of happiness that distinguished
them from their forebears. Much like Hegel, although without his
scope and without his abstraction, the Utopians conceived of history
as purposeful development, an organic unfolding of creation, destruc-
tion, and rebirth. Rather than see the past, as many Enlightenment
thinkers had done, as the dark record of fanaticism and superstition,
the Utopians understood history as process. "Each age has its own
character," Saint-Simon affirmed, and thus each age must be under-
stood on own 36
its terms. Looking backward,
he saw periods of rela-
tive cultural
—
wholeness "organic ages" — such the ancient world
as
or medieval Christendom, giving way, in turn, to "critical ages," in
which the norms and beliefs that had made sense in a given epoch were
called into question and eventually succumbed to the creative de-
struction of the new. The present period —encompassing the whole
of the upheavals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution
was just such a critical age, an age of transition. But it was already giv-
ing birth to a new organic age that, in Saint-Simon's view, would mark
the end of this long historical cycle of creation and destruction. The
final age would not only be organic, it would be golden.
Fourier also envisioned history as a continual oscillation between
periods of "harmony" and periods of "social chaos," agreeing that a new
dawn of happiness was on the horizon, even if it was still hard for many
to see. "Beset by long-standing misfortunes and bound by the chains
of habit," people still imagined that they were destined "to a life of
privations." It would "take some time for them to become accustomed
37
to the idea of happiness that awaits them." Dawn, nonetheless, was
breaking. When Robert Owen waxed lyrical on the approaching "ter-
restrial paradise," he spoke for all Utopians. "The period for introduc-
ing the Rational System, for remodeling the character of man, and for
governing the population of the earth in unity, peace, progressive

improvement, and happiness, is near at hand; and no human power
can successfully resist the change. . .
." 38 History was on humanity's
side.
The very term that Owen used to describe this coming dawn
"terrestrial paradise" — is indicative of one other distinctive feature
of this early Utopian socialism: its self-conscious religiosity. It is true
that Owen liked to portray himself as an heir to the freethinking,
anticlerical tradition of Bentham. But neither he nor his followers
could avoid invoking with regularity the biblical language of Protes-

tant Christianity. His talk of the "Second Coming of the Truth" and
his Book of the New Moral World spoke for themselves, highlighting
Owen's effort to define a "new religion" —based on reason, history,

and affective sentiment — to replace what he believed were the un-
tenable aspects of the faiths of old. His direct appeal to the down-
trodden and the meek, his insistence on describing the coming
kingdom in millennial terms, and his willingness to contemplate the
progressive understanding of the "moving Power of the Universe"
allowed more avowedly Christian followers to see in Owen's "reli-
gion of charity" a purer form of the teaching of Christ. When one such
disciple, John Finch, wrote to "Father Owen" in 1838 asking to
384 Happiness
become a "bishop" in the church of his "New Moral World," he was

39
giving voice to a much wider impulse.
This impulse was also on display among the followers of Fourier,
who proved adept at subsuming his theories into narratives of the
Christian millennium. Toward the end of his life, Fourier himself gave
increasing, if never entirely wholehearted, encouragement to this
trend, speaking of himself as the Messiah of Reason. His disciples
showed far less restraint, embracing their departed master as "the man
chosen by Christ" to usher in the kingdom of God on earth. In America,
a "Church of Humanity" was established, in which parishioners sang

Fourierist prayers and worshipped before busts of Christ and his au-
40
gust successor.
Even clearer was the religious dynamic at work in the thought and
practice of Cabet and Saint-Simon. Cabet spent the last fifteen years
of his life attempting to demonstrate that the Gospels provided clear
evidence that "the entire philosophy, the entire social doctrine of
Jesus Christ and of Christianity constituted, in essence, Community."
In Cabet's reading, Christ was a revolutionary who had attacked the
Roman and Jewish aristocracies and who preached "the abolition of
slavery, the equality and Fraternity of men and people, the freeing
of women, the abolition of opulence and misery, the destruction of
priestly power, and finally, the community of goods." 41 As Cabet
stressed in the Voyage to Icaria and again at length in his 1846 tract, The
True Christianity, "communism [was] the same thing as Christianity in
the purity of origin." 42

Saint-Simon thought of his own doctrine as Christianity new and
improved. Developing this view slowly throughout the course of his
career, he gave it purest expression in his final work, The New Chris-
tianity. "Religion must direct society toward the great goal of the rapid
improvement of the conditions of the poorest class," he urged. 43 It was
religion alone that could move men to live as brothers, religion alone
that would lead human beings to give up their selfish independence.
His disciples took him at his word, establishing a monastery of sorts at
their retreat at Menilmontant on the outskirts of Paris. There they
said Saint-Simonian mass long after the master's death, dispatched
pilgrims throughout the whole of Europe, and even set out on a jour-
ney to Egypt to investigate reports of a female messiah.
Such outlandishness highlights the fact that these "religions" were

far from orthodox in any conventional Christian sense. Quick to at-
tack what they regarded as the injustices and absurdities of the estab-
lished churches, they borrowed from doctrine and scripture as they
saw fit, doing away almost entirely with discussion of an afterlife, or
the divinity of Christ. Characteristically, Saint-Simon reduced the

whole of Christianity to one precept, the golden rule, the sublime
injunction to treat one's fellow as one's brother. It was only, he under-
scored, by seeking "to procure for humankind the greatest degree of
happiness that it can achieve during its worldly existence, that you
44
will succeed in establishing Christianity." This was an earthly ethic
par excellence, like all these religions, a religion of life.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume, as generations of commenta-

tors have done, that the religious language of the Utopian socialists was
merely an aberration, a late, false turn, somehow peripheral to the core
experiment of early socialism itself. On the contrary, religious language

was central to these Utopian movements precisely because it was
religion — the Christian religion — that they sought to replace. As an
insightful recent observer has noted in the context of Fourier's early
writings, "'socialism' began as an attempt to discover a successor . .
45
to the Christian Church." As every one of these early Utopians under-
stood —drawing in this respect on the wider cultural climate of Ro-
manticism and the religious revival of the first part of the nineteenth
century — the Enlightenment had opened up a void that needed to be
filled. Just as in that other great age of transition, the time of the pas-
sage from classical civilization to Christianity, "the need of a religion,
capable of replacing the old, was [now] making itself felt." 46 The Uto-
pian socialists understood that need and attempted to respond accord-
ingly. Bread was of great importance, they knew. But there was more
to life than bread.
Which takes us to the heart of these movements' power as well as

to their glaring paradox. For what the Utopians offered was nothing
less than imminent transcendence, heaven on earth, the kingdom of
386 Happiness
God made by men. Happiness everlasting — this was the impossible

promise put forth to men and women primed to expect the final
satisfaction of desire, a definitive end to pain, the ceaseless flowing
abundance of a new golden age in which all would be gods except

God himself.
Needless to say, it was precisely such contradictions that spelled

these movements' failure, underscoring the "utopian" in Utopian so-
cialism. Yet before they are lumped together with all those dreamers,
before and since, who have dreamed of perfect worlds, it is worth re-
flecting on the ironies of the term. The phrase "utopian socialism" was
first employed by Marx and Engels to distinguish their own "scien-
tific socialism" from the "pocket editions of the New Jerusalem," the
"new social gospel" heralded by their predecessors. 47
When viewed
from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, this condescen-
sion is amusing, for the dreams of Marx and Engels now scarcely seem
less utopian than those of Cabet, Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon. But
the irony of the term considered against its historical background is
even richer. "Utopia," it will be recalled, was Thomas More's inven-

tion, a word derived in the early sixteenth century from the Greek ou
(not) or eu (good) + topos (place) to signify "no place" or "good place."
Intended as a foil, More's literary kingdom was a critical standard
against which to weigh the human folly of his time. But the term it-
self underscored its fanciful nature. In a world of imperfection, per-
fection was impossible; strictly speaking, Utopia could not exist.

In the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution,
however, as men and women became increasingly conscious of the
incredible possibilities of modern industry and science and of their
"natural right" to happiness, Utopia took on new meaning. The writ-
ings of Fourier, Owen, and Saint-Simon, accordingly, were treated just
like Cabet's Voyage to Icaria — not simply as thought experiments,
models to be contemplated, but as blueprints to be put into effect.
And so they were. Owen's model textile factory at New Lanark paved
the way for more ambitious attempts to translate his Utopian theories
Some sixteen model communities were launched be-
into practice.
tween 1825 and 1830, the most famous at "New Harmony," Indiana,
in 1825-27. The followers of Fourier quickly followed suit. In Roma-

nia, France, and Russia, in Great Britain, Brazil, and other parts of the
New World, Phalanxes were established, including some thirty across
the United States during the fifteen years following Fourier's death
in 1837. With the exception of their monastic base in Paris, the Saint-
Simonians did not attempt to found model communities. But they

dispatched their missionaries and exported their gospel throughout
the world, working to make realities of dreams. Cabet's Icarians were
not alone.
However fleetingly, however imperfectly, the "no-place" of Utopia
was being transformed in the nineteenth century into "some-place."
The early socialists fell short of perfection. But in their blend of reli-
gion, science, and the elucidation of the past, they gestured toward the
future. The point was not to contemplate a better world but to make it,
not to interpret but to change. In spreading the post-Enlightenment
An early nineteenth-century engraving of Owen's factory and model community

in New Lanark, Scotland, after the original by John Winning. Photo courtesy
of the New Lanark Conservation Trust.
388 Happiness
dream of happiness to even the humblest of humanity, they prepared

the way for far more ambitious attempts to come.
Solving the Riddle of History
When one is flipping through the pages of that dusty monument to
the culture of communism, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, happiness is
not the first subject that comes to mind. Yet there it is, tucked in-
conspicuously between "Hammerhead Stork" {Scopus umbretta) and

"Hard Alloys." Happiness:
The human spirit's consciousness of that state of being which

corresponds to the greatest inner satisfaction with the condi-
tion of one's existence, to a full and meaningful life, and to
the realization of one's life purpose.
A "normative and value-bound concept," happiness, the reader fur-
ther learns, has a "historical and class basis":
In the history of moral consciousness, happiness has been

considered an innate human right; but in practice, in a society
of class antagonisms, as F. Engels pointed out, the oppressed

classes' striving toward happiness has always been ruthlessly
and "lawfully" sacrificed to the ruling classes' identical striving.
In what the encyclopedia calls this "bourgeois-individualistic inter-
pretation of happiness," the rich man's search for pleasure is the poor
man's pain, a search that "divorced from social aims, degenerates into
egoism, . . . tramples upon the interests of others and morally cripples
the human personality." "If one wishes to be an animal," the entry
continues, citing Marx, "one may, of course, turn one's back on the
sufferings of humanity and worry about one's own skin." But true com-
munists would think more highly of man, recognizing that it was only
"through conscientious service to people and through a revolution-
ary struggle to transform society, to realize the ideals of communism,

and to achieve a better future for all humanity that man imbues his
life with that higher meaning and is granted that profound satisfac-
48
tion which he perceives as happiness."
The latter are not Marx's precise words. And "happiness" is prob-
ably not the first topic that comes to mind when flipping through the
pages of his works, either. The combative scholar and activist could be
scathing on the subject, pouring scorn on the happy fantasies of both

"false" socialists and "true" capitalists alike. When asked, in a parlor
game, to give his own definition of the word, Marx replied in English
49
without hesitation: "Happiness: to fight." This would not seem the
response of a contented man.
Marx's own father certainly had such concerns, writing to his son in
1837, when young Karl was just nineteen years old, "Does your heart
correspond to your head? Does it have room for the softer feelings of
this world, which provide such essential comfort for the man of feel-
ing in this vale of woe?" Herr Marx granted that his son was "obvi-
ously animated and ruled by a demon not given to all men," but
whether this daimon was of a heavenly or a Faustian variety, he did
not know. "Will you ever —and this is the doubt that causes me the
most pain —be receptive to true human happiness . . . ? Will you ever
... be able to spread happiness to your immediate surroundings?" 50
Good bourgeois that he was, Marx's father worried chiefly about
"domestic happiness," and on this score, his son was reasonably suc-
cessful, fathering a flock of children with his first love, Jenny, to whom
he remained faithfully attached (if not always faithful) throughout his
life. But in theory, at least, Marx was obliged to discount such happi-
ness, depicting marriage and the nuclear family in his writings as a
bourgeois institution whose pleasures were illusory and whose days

were numbered. More certain as a source of satisfaction was work.
Marx grew convinced of this proposition at an early age. While still
a schoolboy, he drafted an essay in Latin, "Reflections of a Young

Man on the Choice of a Profession" (1835), which emphasized the
sacred importance of work as a determinant of well-being. The
choice of a "sphere of activity," he observed, "is a great privilege of
—
390 Happiness
man over the rest of creation, but at the same time it is an act which
can destroy his whole life, frustrate all his plans, and make him un-
happy." Man's freedom entailed a perilous choice. Either he could
live in keeping with the "general aim" intended by the "Deity"
that of "ennobling mankind and himself — or, choosing wrongly, he
might devote his life to pointless labor for which he possessed little
talent or relish. Worse still, he could choose a profession that in-
volved "reprehensible acts" or that forced him to be a "servile tool."

In all of these cases, self-contempt would form in the breast like a
serpent, "sucking the life-blood from one's heart and mixing it with
the poison of misanthropy and despair."
What did the young Marx conclude was the proper choice, the high-
est choice? His answer is at once soaringly world-historical and deeply

grounded in the past:
History calls those men who have ennobled

the greatest
themselves by working for the common good; experience
acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest
number of people happy; religion itself teaches us that the
ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the
sake of mankind, and who would dare to set at nought such

judgments?
If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most
of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because
they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experi-
ence no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will

belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetu-
ally at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of
noble people. 51
It is safe to say that tears have been shed on Marx's grave, whether of
sadness or of joy. But more surprising to many will be his early invoca-
tion of Christ, that "ideal being," as a model of virtuous behavior. The
mature Marx quickly abandoned these childish illusions. Yet he never
entirely severed the umbilical cord that tied happiness to salvation
in his thought. The "critique of religion is therefore in embryo a critique

of the vale of tears, whose halo is religion," Marx commented famously
in his 1844 "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right." 52 A critique of Marx, by contrast, is a critique of the remnants

of religion in his philosophy. And the halo of this is happiness.
Many still instinctively deny such connections between Marx's "sci-
ence," on the one hand, and what he tried so hard to condemn as a dan-
gerous addiction, "the opium of the people," on the other. Certainly it
is hard to find Marx himself saying anything nice about religion after his
"conversion" to atheism at university in the late 1830s. And his choice
of subject for a doctoral dissertation — a study of the philosophy of na-
ture in the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus —would seem

ideally suited to a man preparing himself for a career as an unrepentant
materialist. Describing Epicurus as the "greatest representative of
Greek Enlightenment," one who "investigates the essential relationship
of the human soul," Marx cited Lucretius's encomium to the sage of
pleasure with obvious approval:
When human life lay groveling in all men's sight, crushed to

the earth under the dead weight of religion whose grim
features loured menacingly upon mortals from the four quar-
ters of the sky, a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes
in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge.
Fables of the gods did not crush him, nor the lightning flash
and growling menace of the sky. . . . Therefore religion in its
turn lies crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are
lifted level with the skies. 53
Is this not the heroic image of Marx himself so venerated by later

admirers? — that of the man who toppled idols, dispelling the fears of
the masses so as to prepare them, like Epicurus, for genuine happi-
ness? As Marx would comment several years later in one of his most
celebrated lines: "The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness
[illusorischen Glikks] of the people is the demand for their real happi-
ness [wirklichen Glucfo]." 54

—
392 Happiness
It is precisely here, in the pledge to provide "real" happiness in the
space once occupied by religion, that one catches a hint of the sacred
halo. It is a pledge reminiscent of the gospel of Lequinio and the
Jacobin representatives-on-mission — a ray of the promise that, when
"lifted level with the skies," humanity would live, as Epicurus had
claimed, "as gods among men," leaving their unhappiness behind.
This sacred promise —with its vestigial elements of religious re-
demption —can be seen most clearly in Marx's critical writings of the
mid- to late 1840s, above all in his "Economico-Philosophical Manu-

scripts of 1844," and the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right," written in the same year. Preoccupied in these

works with the concerns of the radical followers of Hegel — the so-
called Young or Left Hegelians who wished to push the master's teach-
ings in a more revolutionary direction —Marx put forth as an explicit
political goal what Hegel himself had understood as the natural work
of the spirit: the overcoming of human alienation and the healing of
the unhappy consciousness. Making ample use of Hegel's words
{Entdusserung and Entfremdung) to describe the condition of contem-
porary human alienation and estrangement, Marx considerably ex-
panded Hegel's analysis of their causes and kinds.
Unlike animals, who are "immediately one" with their life activity
and surroundings, human beings are out of sorts. 55 They are estranged
from nature, which they view as foreign, hostile, something to be con-
quered, exploited, or subdued. They are estranged from themselves
and their fellow men, whom they regard similarly as aliens and out-
siders, having lost their original sense of what Marx termed "species-
being," their natural sense of communal identity and belonging to the
human species. And they are estranged from their active function
their labor —which they regard dehumanizing. There were other
as
forms of alienation as well — most important, alienation from God,

whom Marx regarded, following the German philosopher Ludwig
Feuerbach, as a human invention invested with abstract power that
drained human beings of life, lording over them as a hostile, reified
creation. Alienation was thus the subjugation to idols of human mak-
ing, and of these there were many.
But it was above all the estrangement from life activity — the alien-
ation of labor — that Marx regarded as the crucial concern. For in his
rapidly evolving system, man was homo faber, a creature who defines
himself by what he makes and does. Economic activity —work—was
thus the key to all else, a fact that was most apparent among the poor
in contemporary capitalist societies, where, Marx believed, human
alienation was more pronounced than at any other stage in human
history. In the dismal factories of Manchester studied by Engels, in
the sweatshops of Paris, and throughout the developed world, human

beings were being forced to produce objects over which they exercised
no ownership or control, and for which they could feel no immediate
connection. The fruit of their labor confronted them, in Marx's words,
"as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer." 56
At the same time, the activity of modern production —with its
forced regimentation and division of labor —was an equally powerful

source of estrangement. In his labor, the worker "does not affirm him-
self but denies himself," Marx observed, "does not feel well but un-
happy, does not freely develop his physical and mental energy but
mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker, therefore, feels
himself only outside his work, and feels beside himself in his work.
He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is
not at home." The activity of the worker's labor, like the object of his
57
toil, "belongs to another; it is the loss of his self."
This twofold process of alienation —from the act of production and

from the product of labor —had, in Marx's opinion, profound conse-
quences, setting in motion a chain of effects that intensified the con-
tradictions of capitalism. "A direct consequence of man's alienation
from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-
being," he noted, "is the alienation of man from man. What is true of
man's relationship to his work, to the product of his work, and to him-
self, is also true of man's relationship to the other man, and to that
man's labor and the object of his labor." And so the chain reaction
continued: the awful truth of capitalism was that the various forms of
alienation that it induced "transform [ed] the consciousness which man
has of his species" in such a way that one's fellows became nothing more
394 Happiness
than distant strangers, means to personal ends, while individuals

themselves lost touch with all but their most rudimentary needs. 58
It is worth pointing out, as Marx himself was fond of doing, that
Adam Smith foresaw similar consequences. The Glasgow professor
never subjected his readers to the circumlocutions of Hegelian dia-

lectic. But in a key passage of The Wealth of Nations, he laid out the con-
sequences of capitalism's most distinguishing feature — the division
of labor —with unsettling frankness:

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the
far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great
body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple
operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of
men are necessarily formed by their ordinary
the greater part of
employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing
a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps,
always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to
exert his understanding. ... He naturally loses, therefore, the
habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and

ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. 59
The "torpor of his mind," Smith continued, and the "corruption" of his
body render such a man incapable of sharing in rational discussion, of
participating in the joys and duties of social life, of judging of the "great
and extensive interests of his country," even of bearing arms in defense
of his homeland. Dexterity in his particular trade thus comes at the
expense of his "intellectual, social, and martial virtues." And lest there
be any doubt regarding the gravity of this situation, Smith emphasized

that "in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which
the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must neces-
60
sarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."
This was a dramatic conclusion, but it was also the place where the
two analysts of capitalism parted ways. Smith placed his faith in pub-
lic schooling and civic education to balance the atomizing effects of
commercial society, whereas Marx called for the complete abolition

of private property and the institution of communism. And whereas
Smith, ever the individualist, was disinclined to search for government
solutions to metaphysical dilemmas, Marx believed that through poli-
tics man could be made complete, whole, happy. In a nod to Rousseau,
Marx defined true emancipation as "the return of man to himself as a
." 61 And in a flourish of world histori-
social, i.e. really human, being. . .
cal proportions, he defined communism as the "solution to the riddle
of history":
the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and

nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of
the conflict between existence and essence, between objecti-
fication and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity,
between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle
of history and knows itself to be this solution. 62
Communism would thus mark the end of history envisioned by Hegel,

the overcoming of alienation, and the resolution of all the conflicts
that had made man a mystery to himself since well before the first
puzzled onlooker stood in bewilderment before the Sphinx.

That this promise involved a "religious" assurance, a pledge of the
abolition of human contradiction and the final onset of true ("real")
human happiness is something that insightful contemporaries did not
fail to appreciate. The German anarchist Max Stirner was arguably the
most perceptive, criticizing Marx along with Feuerbach and other
Young Hegelians for building a "human religion" on the remains of
Christianity:
The human religion is only the last metamorphosis of the

Christian religion ... it separates my essence from me and
sets it above me ... it exalts "Man" to the same extent as any
other religion does its God or idol ... it sets me beneath Man,
and thereby creates for me a vocation. 63
396 Happiness
Gustave Moreau, Oedipus and the

Sphinx, 1864,The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Bequest
of William H. Herriman, 1920.
(21.134.1)
In the same way that centuries of faithful had sacrificed themselves

in the name of Christ, individuals were now being asked to genuflect
before "Man." In Stirner's view, the assumption of a vocation, an ob-

ligation to serve humanity, derived exclusively from an inherited sense
of religious duty.
Marx felt keenly the force of this criticism, and he attempted to
respond to it in a lengthy work of 1845-46, The German Ideology. But
though he railed at Stirner for nearly two hundred pages, his reply was
mostly bombast. Rather than answer Stirner's principal charge regard-
ing the religious origins of communism, Marx sought to avoid it by
purging his thought of all vestigial traces of Hegelian idealism. In a
move that would be hailed by subsequent observers as a great theo-
retical breakthrough, he renounced the role of ideas in shaping his-

tory and human consciousness in favor of the celebrated "materialist
conception of history." "In direct contrast to German philosophy,

which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to
heaven," Marx proudly declared. 64
Henceforth, all ideas — all moral-
ity, law, religion, philosophy —would be treated as the simple reflec-
tion of the "real life-processes" of production. Ideas were simply
"superstructure," entirely dependent on the "real" economic relation-
ships of men.
Insofar as it gave Marxism its vaunted "scientific" appeal, this great
turn was extraordinarily successful. It also succeeded, as the most re-
cent editor of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, Gareth Stedman

Jones, has observed, in covering over the "tracks" that had led from
religious humanism to communism (a move that was significantly
aided by the fact that many of Marx's important writings of the 1840s
were not published until long after his death). 65 If the coming crisis of
capitalism and the victory of the proletariat were not the result of
conscious human striving, and still less of permutations in the realm
communism could hardly be accused of religious hocus-
of ideas, then
pocus. The process was inscribed in the very nature of things. Com-
munists did not struggle in the name of "Man." They did so because
they could do nothing else. This was the way of the world.
And yet —and this, precisely, was Marxism's genius — the same
teleological structure borrowed from Hegel and the Utopian social-
ists and by them from Christianity remained in place beneath the

inexorable laws of history and the scientific certainties of dialectical
materialism. At the end of the line lay the same religious promise of
fulfillment, the end of alienation, the return of man to himself, the
full flowering of real human happiness. The abstract nature of this

metaphysical promise was only enhanced by the concrete assurance
of the material riches to be had with the coming of the revolution.
After the onset of true communism, suffering in all its forms would
be abolished.
Thus, Marx combined the sensual allure of the Utopian social-
ists —with their explicit appeal to the magnificence and bounty of
398 Happiness
the coming society —with Hegel's more subtly religious promise of

final freedom and the end of the unhappy consciousness. Both mate-
rial pleasure and spiritual fulfillment — the best of both the Enlight-
enment and Romanticism —were on offer. Dressed up in historical
laws and packaged in a pseudo-science that covered over its true debt
to religion, this was a powerful doctrine indeed, all the more so for
Marx's refusal to describe in any but the barest terms the nature of
the life to come. Devoting himself instead to demonstrating the
economic laws that would guarantee the constitution of the new city
of man, Marx allowed his followers to imagine for themselves what

the walls of this city would contain and the splendor of the riches
within. The outlines were inevitably hazy, but they drew the eye
from the privations of the present and allowed each to project his
private dreams on the space in between. In simple, steadfast faith,
every man could imagine that his own vision would somehow, some-
day, correspond to the vision of all.
That happiness lay at the center of this collective vision no one

could doubt. It was an unassailable element of the creed. As Engels
observed in a draft of the aptly entitled "Communist Confession of
Faith," "there exist certain irrefutable basic principles which, being
the result of the whole of historical development, require no proof."

These were that "every individual strives to be happy," and that "the
happiness of the individual is inseparable from the happiness of all." 66
Present alike in Marx's youthful reflections and the later definition of
happiness in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, these were beliefs bound up
in a much older notion of collective deliverance. The children of God
had become the children of Man, and like the former, they would wait
patiently, confident that history would reveal in time what now could
only be imagined.
Riddles Revealed
"The story is told," Walter Benjamin tells us, "of an automaton con-
structed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, an-
swering each move of an opponent with a countermove." "A puppet

in Turkish attire," the German-Jewish critic continues,
and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed

on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that
this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little
hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and

67
guided the puppet's hand by means of strings.
The story, properly speaking, was no story at all but a gem of historical
fact. Beginning in 1770, the so-called Turk — a dazzling chess-playing
contraption devised by the Austrian impresario Baron Wolfgang von

Kempelen —had indeed toured Europe, provoking fascination, won-
der, and disbelief wherever it performed. By appearance a miracle of
modern science, the automaton, in truth, was an elaborate hoax whose
gadgetry and technological sophistication provided cover for its genu-
ine animating force. A midget with the skills of a grand master moved
the arms of the Turk, which, under successive owners, seduced au-
diences well into the nineteenth century, confounding (and even de-
feating) the likes of Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Benjamin
68
Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Walter Benjamin himself probably knew of the story's basis in fact.
But the essay for which this brief vignette serves as an opening gambit
was more concerned with unveiling historical deception than revealing
historical truth. In "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the automa-
ton plays for Benjamin as metaphor, allowing him to pull away the veil:
One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device

[the chess-playing automaton]. The puppet called "historical
materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for
anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as
we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. 69
Theology, Benjamin disclosed, was the hidden dwarf who moved the
historical materialist's hands.
400 Happiness
Charles Gottlieb de Windisch, "The Turk," 1783. Photo courtesy

of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Written as he fled from Nazi forces in 1940, and just months before
he committed suicide in the mistaken belief that his capture was im-
minent, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" represents Benjamin's
final reckoning with his relationship to historical materialism. For some
time that relationship had been strained — not only by the rumors and
revelations of Stalin's crimes but even more so by Benjamin's own
enduring fascination with historical idealism in the form of messianic
Jewish theology. If that relationship had always made him a curious
Marxist ("a theologian marooned in the realm of the profane," as his

longtime friend Gershom Scholem observed), it also granted him the
insight to perceive connections that others preferred to ignore. 70 With
his faith in the redemptive possibilities of communism shattered by

the Nazi-Stalin pact of 1939, Benjamin felt free to reveal the hunch-
back who hid in the communist's cabinet. How appropriate that he
should turn, in the very next paragraph, to a discussion of what united

them in their game:
Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly

colored by the time to which the course of our own existence
has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy
in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people
we could have talked to, women who could have given them-
selves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indis-
71
solubly bound up with the image of redemption.
The same freedom from envy toward the future that had once prompted
good souls to wait in patience for the coming of the Lord now moved
the masses to trust blindly in the natural course of progress. But
"progress," Benjamin affirmed, was a storm that obliterated everything
through which it traveled, "piling up wreckage upon wreckage" in its
wake. In the present, all who wagered with the "Turk" of historical
materialism were fated to lose. And in the future, any such wagerers
would be dead.
Despite his unveiling of the communist's cabinet, it is not clear that
Benjamin successfully freed himself from its illusions. His devastat-
ing critique of historical-materialist progress notwithstanding, he fin-
ished his cryptic essay by holding out hope that human beings might
still be fully redeemed. "For every second of time was the strait gate
72
through which the Messiah might enter," the essay ends. This was
political theology of an apocalyptic, not historically progressive, sort.
But it was political theology all the same.

Nonetheless, Benjamin's essay possesses the considerable virtue of
full disclosure. In pulling aside the communist veil, he exposed the
works, allowing us to see the mechanism by which historical materialism
harnessed the hidden power of theology to the promise of happiness.
Producing victory after victory on the chessboard of world affairs, this
union left wreckage upon wreckage in its wake. But still the faith
endured that "our new happy life" was at hand. The phrase is that of
the Ministry of Plenty in Orwell's 1984. But it was uttered in fact as
402 Happiness
well as in fiction —by many otherwise intelligent people with solemn

assurance — until only recently.
Given what is now known about the horrors of the communist ex-
perience in virtually every one of its concrete applications, it seems
remarkable that so many for so long could have sustained the faith that
happiness was at hand. Yet when we bear in mind that this faith like —
the larger Marxian project of which it formed a part was a symptom —
of a much broader post-Enlightenment conviction, then the credulity
is in some ways easier to comprehend. Consider that Marx's central
assumption — that human labor could serve as the agent of our deliv-
erance, the means and site of human transformation — is today almost

as widespread as it was remarkable in Marx's time. An index unto it-
self of the power of the Enlightenment injunction to seek happiness

in all things, it is a measure of the belief that human beings can make
themselves happy through effort of their own.
/HOBNMblN CTAilHH-CMACTbE HAPOflHOE?

"Our Beloved Stalin is the People's Happiness!" (1949).
("Contact-Culture," 2000. V. Koretskiy, 1949.)
"Glory to the Great Stalin, the Constructor of Happiness!" (1952).

("Contact-Culture," 2000. N. Petrou, K. Ivanov, 1952.)
Work — toil with one's hands — had for centuries prior to the En-
lightenment been regarded as an imposition, a terrible necessity,
God's curse for Adam's sin. Sweat on the human brow was an eternal
reminder of the condemnation to seek out sustenance from the
blighted earth beyond the Garden, scattered with thistles and thorns.
With reason had European societies barred the most fortunate — the
happy aristocratic few —from working with their hands. By definition,
a life of privilege was a life without labor. And the happiness of death
was the eternal rest of peaceful repose.
That men and women should come to believe —even to expect — that
work, too, should sustain their happiness, serving as a source of satisfac-

tion in its own right, is therefore a recent and quite remarkable devel-
opment. When Marx, in his youth, set about choosing a profession to
fulfill his end, he was exercising what was still a privilege of the well-to-
do. But he rightly discerned that the force of industry was slowly trans-
forming the nature of work, multiplying both its productivity and its
404 Happiness
possibilities, in ways that would extend this privilege outward. Work,

Marx believed, would one day become for all what it had been for him
since his youth, a calling and a source of deliverance, a means to a
higher end.
This hope was kept alive by generations of visionaries. As the En-
glish socialist and artist William Morris dreams proleptically toward
the end of his Utopian masterpiece News from Nowhere (1890), "Thus
at last and by slow degrees we got pleasure into our work; then we
became conscious of that pleasure, and cultivated it, and took care that
we had our fill of it; and then all was gained, and we were happy. So
may it be for ages and ages!" 73 Homo faber homo felix est. Man becomes
happy in his work.
Marx and his followers did much to further this hope. But they did
not invent it. In truth, the belief that we can make ourselves happy
through effort of our own has been a part of the Western tradition since
Socrates and the Greeks attempted to wrest eudaimonia from the
clutches of fortune. Happiness, in their view, was the product of the
refined craftsmanship of living —something, at least in part, that we
could make on our own. And although the Greeks and their succes-
sors restricted this trade —
confining the highest human end to life's
master artisans, an elite guild of "workers," who could build their lives
better that the common lot —Christianity and then the Enlighten-
ment destroyed this closed shop, bidding all to work toward their
deliverance, and to find deliverance in their work. In keeping with the
greatest good of the greatest number, happiness should be sought in
all things, even in the sweat of one's brow.

Perhaps this larger dynamic helps to explain one of the delicious
ironies of history: Marx's contention that not only should we enjoy the
fruits of our labor, but labor itself should be our fruit, is today a central
tenet of the capitalist creed. The actual realization of this ideal, to
be sure, is still the prerogative of the privileged: It remains a luxury
(or a burden) to seek more than remuneration in one's work, as it was
for Marx himself. But the ideal — the hope of finding satisfaction,
fulfillment, and happiness in one's labor — now widespread. Where
is
communism failed to provide the promised manna of the gods, the

market invites us to work patiently in pursuit, making pleasure of our

labor like so much else, and so, by enjoying what we do, to move
steadily toward our hallowed end.
But what if the very premise, cultivated by so many hands since

Socrates, was misconceived? What if virtue, work, all our striving and
sweat was simply not enough to make the animal man a happy crea-
ture? This was the old tragic surmise, dismissed by the philosophers
of the Enlightenment and the followers of Marx as so much fatalistic
prejudice. The scientists of socialism preferred to cling to what Weber

mocked as "the naive optimism in which science . . . has been cele-
74
brated as the way to happiness." Natural and human scientists
anthropologists of the animal man —would show themselves equally

reluctant to dispense with this optimism, even when the logic of their
discoveries was not consoling.
—
JOYFUL SCIENCE
Are animals happy? Are they happier than human beings? Are
human beings animals? Questions of this kind have evolved natu-
rally out of the Western intellectual tradition, and their fossils can be
found embedded deep in the bedrock of the past. That great zoolo-
gist Aristotle, who helped frame the dominant answers for the suc-
ceeding millennium and a half, concluded that man was indeed an
animal but of a very special kind apolitical animal (politikon zoon),
naturally social and set apart from the lesser beasts by his faculty of
reason and the refined composition of his soul. Unlike nonhuman

animals, who, together with children and natural slaves, "do not share
in happiness," man is endowed with the ability to attain the highest
good. 1
It is happiness that makes us truly human.
But if happiness — a life lived according to virtue — is the culmination
and quintessence of human existence, it is also, Aristotle hastened to
add, a "god-like life," an existence "superior to the human level" that
allows mere mortals to partake in the divine. This Greek conclusion is
one that Christians, we have seen, were perfectly content to embrace.

as
Christ may have likened himself to a sacrificial lamb, the lamb of God
(agnusdei), and addressed his flock as a shepherd to sheep; Saint Francis
may have preached sermons to the birds. But not all of God's creatures,
Christians knew, were equally blessed. Only man was made in the image
of the Creator, and only man was born for ultimate felicity. "The brutes
and things below him can neither go nor be drawn to that level," Pico
della Mirandola maintained, summing up in the fifteenth century a

venerable theological tradition. The renowned humanist spoke in gra-
dations, acknowledging that even an inanimate object can be said to be

"happy to the extent that it is capable of happiness" — to the extent,
that is, that it attains its own formal perfection. "More happy are the
plants," Pico added, "which also have life; and happier still are the ani-
."
mals, which have been allotted consciousness. . . But of all the living
things that creep and crawl on the earth, man, it was clear, was the "ani-
2
mal that is most happy." Only he could be drawn to God.
Both classical and Christian commentators concurred in granting
human beings a special place in the ordered hierarchy of creation —

superior link in the great chain of being — that sanctioned their do-
minion over the beasts. But it was also clear that the very faculties that
conferred this happy place —reason and freedom of —could will lead
them down to levels of depravity that even the lowest creatures did
not know. Slithering on their bellies like the serpent that had defiled
them, human beings could turn their precious gifts to evil ends, ren-
dering themselves most miserable in the process. From the vantage
point of this lowly place, it was perfectly possible to look up to the
animal kingdom with admiration and even envy.

Thus, the theme of "theriophily" — the jealous love of animals
runs in counterpoint to the more dominant celebratory hymn of man. 3
In a famous first-century dialogue by Plutarch, for example, "On the
Rationality of Beasts," the Romanized Greek argues that animals are
in many ways happier than human beings. As the dialogue's chief pro-
tagonist, a talking pig named Gryllus, explains to a puzzled Odysseus,
beasts are braver, more chaste, and more temperate than human
beings. Spurning irregularity and excess, depravity and misplaced pas-
sion, they live within their means, ruled for the most part only by "es-
sential desires and pleasures." 4 Were it not for the favor of the gods,
human beings would be at a natural disadvantage.
408 Happiness
Writing centuries later in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, John

Calvin was ready to concede the same point. Like the majority of edu-
cated men knew his Plutarch, and he granted that
of his time, Calvin
Gryllus "reasons most skillfully, when he affirms that, if once religion
is banished from the lives of men, they ... are in many respects, much
more wretched than the brutes. ." The only thing that makes human
. .
beings superior, Calvin judged, "is the worship of God, through which
5
alone they aspire to immortality." Montaigne spoke less of the Cre-
ator. Yet the celebrated skeptic agreed that it was only by "foolish
pride and stubbornness that we set ourselves before the other ani-
mals. . .
." Impoverished by inconstancy, irresolution, uncertainty,
grief, superstition, ambition, avarice, jealousy, and a host of other
"untamable appetites," human beings had "strangely overpaid" for
their fine reason. They would do better, Montaigne ventured, to "be-
come like the animals in order to become wise," and so to become

6
happy.
Plutarch, Calvin, and Montaigne are strong voices; there were
others. But by and large, this tradition of the "happy beast" remained
the preserve of contrarians and humblers of human pride. When
Descartes proposed in the first half of the seventeenth century that
animals were "automata" —beast-machines operating without reason,

feelings, or souls —he only widened what was already centuries-old a
divide. Yet without intending to do so, he also stimulated a disturbing

line of inquiry. What if human beings, too, were beast-machines, en-
dowed with feelings, yes, and reason, to be sure, but not with souls?
This was the unsettling conjecture posed by La Mettrie, and though
he was more radical than most in proclaiming man, like the animals, a
sophisticated machine, the general tendency of his inquiry was in
keeping with the tenor of the times. In both the natural and human
sciences, the gap between animals and human beings was narrowed in
the eighteenth century and, by the most radical, even closed.

In this respect, as in so many others, the age of Enlightenment
marked a monumental shift, engendering speculation that was pro-
foundly and radically new. Yet as we have already seen in the case of
La Mettrie, this attempt to demote man from the kingdom of God was
met with widespread hostility and tremendous unease. La Mettrie's

suggestion that we should indulge freely in the happiness of the barn-
yard
— "wallowing in slime like a pig" — provoked outrage, while the
general advice of his Utilitarian successors proved similarly threaten-
ing. Jeremy Bentham may have amused his neighbors by keeping a
"beautiful pig" as a pet, one that would "grunt contentedly as he
scratched its back and They may even have been touched by
ears." 7
his claim that animals, like human beings, experience feelings of plea-
sure and pain. "The question is not," Bentham stressed, "can [ani-
mals] reason, but can they suffer?" 8 The "humanity" of this position
notwithstanding, most still found the "pig happiness" of human be-
ings a difficult concept to swallow. As J. S. Mill was quick to empha-
size, it is better to be an unhappy human being than a satisfied pig.
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—
410 Happiness
But what if the animal in question was a monkey, not a pig, and what
if the monkey was a man? This was the unthinkable question put to
the world by Charles Darwin, who as early as the 1830s was putting
the question to himself. "He who understands [a] baboon [will] do
more towards metaphysics than Locke," he scrawled in a private note-
book in 1838.
9
The field of happiness would be profoundly altered by
the force of his speculation. And as developments in biology propelled
changes in philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, the gravitational

pull of pursuit was corrected to account for what were hitherto hid-
den powers: instinctual drives, hereditary traits, and ultimately, the

influence of genetic code. Sinister to some, liberating to others, these
powers seemed by the twentieth century to be extending their do-
minion, like fate, over all creatures, man and beast alike.
The Survival of the Happiest
Although Charles Darwin never produced a formal discourse on hap-

piness, there is some indication that he considered doing so. In the
middle of several pages of notes on the subject in one of his early, un-
published workbooks, Darwin writes intriguingly, "Begin discussion
by saying what is Happiness." 10 Only two years previously, in 1836,
he had returned from his epoch five-year journey to South America

and the Pacific on the H.M.S. Beagle and was now busily engaged in
completing his account of that trip. Published the following year,

the Voyage of the Beagle contains only scattered references to happi-
ness. So what the "discussion" might have been — a projected article,
a public lecture, a portion of a larger study — is unclear. Darwin, un-
fortunately, never says, and neither does he fully account for the
statement that immediately follows. "When we look back to happy
our recollections are pleasant [?] n
"
days, are they not those of which all
We his readers are forced to look back ourselves, flipping through

earlier pages in his notes in search of further clues. We come upon
this broken fragment:
Definition of happiness the number of pleasant ideas passing

though mind in given time. — intensity to degree of <happi>
12
pleasure of such thoughts
And several pages earlier, there is this:
Nothing shows one how little happiness depends on the

senses.; than the <small> fact that no one, looking back to
his life, would say how many good dinners ... he had had, he
would say how many happy days he spent in such a place. 13
Whereas in the above passage Darwin seems to contradict the notion

that happiness is based on the senses, slightly later he has this to say:
Simple happiness <<as of a child >> is large proportion of
pleasant to unpleasant mental sensations in any given

time. ... But then sensation may be more or less pleasant &
unpleasant, in same time, — therefore degrees of happiness
Entire happiness, not being so desirable as . . . intense happiness
even with some pain . . . Pleasure more usually refers to the
sensation . . . when excited by impressions, & not mental or
14
ideal ones. . . .
Such fragments are undoubtedly difficult to decipher. But it seems

that Darwin is proposing various degrees of happiness, ranging from
the "simple," based purely on impressions of the senses, to the more
complex, which involve mental or ideal impressions such as recollec-
tion or imagination. "Entire happiness," notwithstanding the seductive
name, is actually of the simpler sort, and so inferior in both intensity

and kind to the "higher" happiness of the philosophers, as Darwin
makes clear:
A healthy child is <<more>> entirely happy . . . than per-

haps well << regulated >> philosopher —yet the philosopher
.
412 Happiness
has a much more intense happiness — so when same

is it . . .
man is compared to peasant. — To make greatest number of

pleasant thoughts, he must have contingency of good food, no
pain. . . .
These thoughts are most pleasant, when the conscience

tells our [mind], good has been done — <<& conscience free
from offence >> — pleasure of intellect . . . pleasure of imagi-

nation . . . these pleasures are so very great, that every one
who has tasted them, will think the sum total of happiness
greater even if mixed with some pain. —than the happiness of
a peasant, with whom sensual enjoyments of the minute make
large . . . portion of daily < happiness > <<pleasure>>. A
wise man will try to obtain this happiness. 15
A modicum of material comforts, an absence of pain, a clear con-

science, and a taste for the pleasures of the intellect — this is the hap-
piness of the "philosopher," the "wise man," to which state Darwin
himself almost certainly aspired. The same general goal would not have
been foreign to Aristotle, Epicurus, or Horace, or to any number of
other thinkers we have encountered thus far. Indeed, the many ref-
erences in Darwin's notes to Coleridge, Montaigne, Locke, Bentham,

Adam Smith, Kant, and Mill give ample evidence of his prodigious
reading and desire to situate his thinking about happiness in the con-
text of a much broader tradition. There are "two classes of moralists,"
he writes in a different notebook from the same period: theorists of
the moral sense, on the one hand, and those, likeBentham and Mill,
on the other, who tend phenomena from acquired
to derive moral
experience (the calculus of pleasure and pain). "One says our rule is
what ^'///produce the greatest happiness. The other says we have a —
moral sense. —
But my view <says> unites both <<and shows them
to be almost identical>>." 16
Here, after having so far largely restated the views of others, Darwin
hints at genuinely originality. Speaking of an "instinctive" moral sense,
he observes, "In judging of . . . the rule of happiness we must looker

forward. .
— certainly because it is the result of what has generally been
best for our good far back" Enticingly, he then adds, "Society could not
go on except for the moral sense, any more than a hive of Bees without
their instincts." 17 Darwin is positing not only what he called "instinc-
tive emotions" —emotions conditioned by heredity and the long expe-

rience of pleasure and pain —but developed moral
also a finely instinct,
similarly honed by long experience. Both bear directly on our social in-
teractions, and both are bound up closely with happiness.

Looking to the remote past, Darwin speculates that certain strong
passions and "bad feelings" that are "common to other animals &
therefore to [our] progenitors] far back" were "no doubt originally
necessary." 18 Revenge, for instance, once served as a primitive form of
justice, anger secured our safety, and jealousy acted as a "positive
check" on licentiousness. But though it was not odd that man should
have developed such strong emotions in the first place ("with lesser
intellect," Darwin adds, "they might be necessary & no doubt were
preservative"), experience has shown that we now need to "check"
19
these instincts in the service of happiness. In a striking formulation,
Darwin observes, "Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil pas-
sions!! —The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!
— 20
In
a very real way, it seems, human beings must struggle with the beast
within.
But this was merely the vista opened up by looking "far back." Gaz-
ing "far forward," the view was rosier, for it seemed to Darwin that
our more aggressive impulses were "slowly vanishing." "Civilization is
now altering these instinctive passions — which being unnecessary we

,
call vicious." Whereas "jealousy in a dog, no one calls vice," human

beings now properly condemned this passion and a whole range of
other atavistic emotions —evidence of the moral improvement of hu-
manity, and hence of the progressive happiness of the species. As dis-
tinct from the lesser beasts and the "savage," "civilized man" was
"endeavoring to change that part of the moral sense which experience
. . . shows does not tend to [the] greatest good." 21
Darwin showed himself here to be the optimist that he would re-
22
main throughout his long and self-described "happy life." Yet ever
the balanced observer, he acknowledged that there could be holes in
414 Happiness
his analysis through which doubters, like Thomas, might poke their
fingers in disbelief. It was far from clear, he confessed, that his natu-
ralistic account of the "rule of happiness" would "agree with that of

the New Testament." 23 And even more gravely, it was not at all cer-
tain that human beings could so easily transcend the devil of their
descent. In an extended passage treating what Darwin called the "gen-
eral delusion about free will," he observed that human beings' belief
in their own moral agency stemmed largely from their inability to dis-
cern the true motives of their behavior. "Originally mostly INSTINC-

TIVE, and therefore now [requiring a] great effort of reason to discover
them" —these motives remained hidden to all save the man "who has
thought very much" about them. 24
Even that wise man — in this case,
Darwin himself —seemed loath to confront what the evidence he was

amassing might also suggest: that far from being free to alter our be-
havior for greater happiness and the greatest good, human beings
might be captive to the hidden motives that ruled them, slaves to the
beast within.
Darwin never completed the formal "discussion" of happiness that
these rough reflections were apparently intended to serve. Nor,
clearly, did he ever intend for prying eyes to pick over the broken syn-
tax of his notes. But having done so, we are in a position to see what
otherwise might well be obscured: his intense early interest in the
subject of happiness and the way it reemerges, with surprising consis-
tency and similar contradiction, in the work in which he most closely
compares the behavior of the lower animals with that of human be-
ings, The Descent of Man (1871).
Over thirty years had elapsed in the interim, and Darwin was now
at the height of his career, as the successful author of The Origin of
Species (1859) and the acknowledged father of the theory of evolution
and its attendant doctrines of adaptation, mutability, and natural se-
lection. Extremely controversial, The Origin of Species had inevitably
raised, though not explicitly addressed, the question of the place of
human beings in evolutionary theory. It was to that question that Dar-
win turned in The Descent of Man, arguing unambiguously for the "close
similarity" between human beings and the lower animals "in embryonic
development as well as in innumerable points of structure and consti-

tution. ..." Like all species, man had "descended from less highly orga-
nized forms" ("ape-like progenitors"), and indeed still bore "in his
25
bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
This was equally true of emotions as it was of morphology. "The
fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as our-
selves," Darwin explained, "is so well established, that it will not be
necessary to weary the reader by many details." 26
He provided them
nonetheless, describing the many, often amusing, seldom wearying,
means employed by the beasts to give expression to a range of emo-
tions, from love, envy, and anger to jealousy, curiosity, and resentment.
In both The Descent of Man and then in a work devoted exclusively to
the subject published the following year, The Expression of the Emotions
in Man andAnimals (1872), Darwin described cases of spiteful monkeys,
terrified storks, and enraged bees. He explained that "some dogs and
horses are ill-tempered, and easily turn sulky; others are good-tempered;
and [that] these qualities are certainly inherited." 27 And he argued
that joy and happiness were emotions not unique to man:
The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and

pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhib-
ited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs,
etc., when playing together, like our own children. Even

insects play together, as has been described by that excellent
observer . . . who saw ants chasing and pretending to bite each
other, like so many puppies. 28
Although Darwin did not possess the knowledge of genetics that would
have helped him understand the crucial mechanism that governed
this process, his general insight that mood and affect —grumpiness
and good temper —were heritable traits was profoundly insightful. His
first forays into what is today the thriving field of evolutionary psy-
chology would prove revolutionary.
But did this mean that human beings and other animals merely re-
acted to the external stimuli of pleasure and pain? Darwin acknowledged
416 Happiness
Darwin's studies of sadness, from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
1872. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
the critical role played by pain and pleasure in the process of evolu-
tionary development. Yet whereas those in the Utilitarian tradition
maintained that actions were beneficial only if they produced pleasure
and minimized pain, Darwin reversed the proposition, arguing instead
"that natural selection produced pleasure only if that pleasurable state
induced beneficial actions." 29
And these beneficial actions — actions
that furthered reproduction and survival —were to be calculated in
evolutionary terms not with reference to the individual but with re-
spect to the group. Returning to a theme that he had taken up in his
1838 notebooks, Darwin again put forth the notion of a "social in-
stinct," selected to benefit group survival:

The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of

the parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems
to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with
their parents; and this extension may be attributed in part to
habit, but chiefly to Natural Selection. With those animals

which were benefited by living in close association, the indi-
viduals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best

escape various dangers, whilst those that cared least for their
comrades, and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers. 30
Gradually, many of the lesser beasts had developed instincts amenable

not only to their own survival but also to that of the group. Like man,
they were social, even political, creatures, conditioned to sympathy,

affection, loyalty, bravery, and other qualities that furthered group
cohesion and existence. Taking pleasure in social interaction, they
were also prepared to undergo pain — or inflict it — in service of the
greater good. Darwin singled out the case of animals perpetually ready
to utter the danger signal, and so expose themselves to peril, in de-
fense of the community. And he highlighted the disturbing example
of the worker bee that kills its brother drones, or the queen bee that
kills its daughter-queen
— "the desire to destroy their nearest rela-
tions having been in this case of service to the community." 31

Darwin had little doubt that if human beings were raised like bees
in a hive, they would act similarly, pointing out that in the case of in-
fanticide, they already did. But his larger point was more optimistic.
For in the social instinct of animals, Darwin found the precursor of
the moral instinct of man. The one, he believed, was just an exten-
sion of the other, an impulse honed by natural selection and higher
human consciousness to sympathy, affection, regard for one's image
in the eyes of others, and concern for their welfare. Darwin fully rec-
ognized that this moral instinct would frequently come in conflict with
other, more selfish desires. It is "untenable," he stressed, "that in man
the social instincts (including the love of praise and fear of blame) pos-
sess greater strength, or have, through long habit, acquired greater
strength than the instincts of self-preservation, hunger, lust, vengeance,

——
418 Happiness
&c." 32 Though envy, hatred, and other passions of self-preservation

would "more commonly lead [man] to gratify his own desires at the
expense of other men," it was also precisely this conflict between com-
peting natural impulses that gave rise to conscience. As Darwin had
intimated in his 1838 notes, and now repeated here, by virtue of his
superior mental faculties, man "cannot avoid reflection: past impres-
sions and images are incessantly and clearly passing through his
mind." 33 And so, after indulging a stronger selfish impulse at the ex-
pense of his social instinct, man "will then feel remorse, repentance,
regret, or shame. ... He will consequently resolve more or less firmly
to act differently for the future; and this is conscience; for conscience
34
looks backwards, and serves as a guide for the future."
In looking toward the future on this occasion, Darwin gave indi-
cations of the same optimistic tendency recorded in his private re-
flections of the 1830s. At times he waxes sanguine, noting, "Man

prompted by his conscience, will through long habit acquire such
perfect self-command, that his desires and passions will at last yield
instantly and without a struggle to his social sympathies and in-
stincts. . .
," 35 In another passage, he invokes Kant in a triumphant
vision of man as a self-legislating moral actor:
But as love, sympathy and self-command become strength-

ened by habit, and as the power of reasoning becomes clearer,
so that man can value justly the judgments of his fellows, he

will feel himself impelled, apart from any transitory pleasure
or pain, to certain lines of conduct. He might then declare
not that any barbarian or uncultivated man could thus think
I am the supreme judge of my own conduct, and in the words
of Kant, I will not in my own person violate the dignity of
humanity. 36
This is an appealing picture of human independence and moral agency.

But what of Darwin's earlier concerns about the "general delusion of
free will"? More pressingly, what about the place of happiness in his
revised picture of humanity? Kant, it will be recalled, had emphasized

the tension between a life of moral duty and individual happiness.

The two, he believed, would often be at odds. Darwin also is aware of
this tension —between, in his terms, the social instinct and individual
desire. Though he makes reference "to that feeling of dissatisfaction,
or even misery, which invariably results . . . from any unsatisfied in-
stinct," he does not explore this insight in any significant detail. As

we shall see, it would be seized upon to great effect by Sigmund Freud.
More potentially troubling for those hoping to discover a firm basis
for human happiness in our animal nature are Darwin's final conclusions
regarding the Utilitarian tradition. Summarizing the argument of his two
principal chapters comparing the mental powers of man and the lower
animals, Darwin explicitly cites and rejects Bentham's and Mill's con-
tentions that the motive for every human action must be pleasure or
pain. "But man seems often to act impulsively," Darwin counters:
That is from instinct or long habit, without any consciousness

of pleasure, in the same manner as does probably a bee or ant,
when it blindly follows its instincts. Under circumstances of
extreme peril, as during a fire, when a man endeavours to save
a fellow-creature without a moment's hesitation, he can

hardly feel pleasure. . . . Should he afterwards reflect over his
own conduct, he would feel that there lies within him an

impulsive power widely different from a search after pleasure
or happiness; and this seems to be the deeply planted social
37
instinct.
Darwin intended this observation to reflect well on human beings

and arguably it does — saving us from the unflattering Utilitarian
assumption that our behavior is driven always by selfishness or by cum-
bersome calculations of pleasure and pain (the greatest-happiness
principle). In Darwin's words, it removed the reproach of "laying the
foundation of the noblest part of our nature in the base principle of
selfishness." Yet when he then proceeds to discuss the larger "pur-
pose" of the social instinct in both the lower animals and man, he is
led away from happiness in the direction of something else:

420 Happiness
In the case of the lower animals it seems much more appro-

priate to speak of their social instincts, as having been
developed for the general good rather than for the general
happiness of the species. The term, general good, may be

defined as the rearing of the greatest number of individuals
in full vigour and health, with all their faculties perfect,
under the conditions to which they are subjected. As the

social instincts both of man and the lower animals have no
doubt been developed by nearly the same steps, it would be
advisable, if found practicable, to use the same definition in
both cases, and to take as the standard of morality, the
general good or welfare of the community, rather than the

general happiness. 38
At first reading, Darwin's substitution of the general good for the gen-
eral happiness may seem innocuous. But when we consider that the
"general good" amounts simply to the survival of the species, it be-
comes far less clear that the good and happiness were as closely linked
as Darwin would have liked to believe. "No doubt the welfare and
the happiness of the individual usually coincide," he observed, "and
a contented, happy tribe will flourish better than one that is discon-
tented and unhappy." But consider what "flourishing" entails. In The
Origin of Species, Darwin himself had painted a vivid picture, charac-
terizing the attempt to rear the greatest number of individuals in full
vigor and health as a "Struggle for Existence" and "the great battle of
life." We customarily "behold the face of nature bright with gladness,"
he pointed out, but the smile was deceptive. "We do not see, or we
forget, that the birds which are idly singing around us . . . are con-
stantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or
their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of
prey. . .
." Starvation, pestilence, competition, and slaughter were
endemic to the struggle of existence:
In looking at Nature, it is most necessary . . . never to forget

that every single organic being around us may be said to be
striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives
by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy destruction
inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each genera-

39
tion or at recurrent intervals.
Each generation "has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruc-
tion. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with

the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is
felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy,
and the happy survive and multiply." 40
Not all, to say the least, found this image of the "survival of the
happiest" particularly consoling —something of which Darwin was well
aware. And though he bravely put a positive face on his conclusions in
The Descent of Man — maintaining that over time our social instincts
would grow stronger, the struggle between our higher and lower im-
pulses less severe, and "virtue will be triumphant" — it is never clear
41
that his own findings justified such optimism. As he freely admitted
elsewhere, "there seems to be no more design ... in the action of
natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows." If this
were the case, then Darwin's assumption of fair weather and gentle
breezes — his confidence in the happy course of humanity —was
founded less on fact than on faith.
Darwin, to his credit, admitted as much, acknowledging toward the

end of his life in a poignant section of his Autobiography, dealing, appro-
priately enough, with his religious beliefs, that it might rightly be asked
how "the generally beneficent arrangement of the world" can be ac-
counted for. Some writers, he recognized, had been "so much impressed
with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt if we look to
all sentient beings, whether there is more of misery or of happiness."
But "according to my judgment," Darwin responds, "happiness decid-

edly prevails, though this would be very difficult to prove." Revealingly, he does
not try to prove it, asking us instead to "grant the truth of the conclu-
sion" and then to entertain several "considerations" that might serve to
uphold it —uphold, that is, the "belief that all sentient beings have been
formed so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness." 42
—
422 Happiness
Darwin includes among these his familiar arguments regarding the

role of pleasure in furthering natural selection: "Sentient beings have
been developed in such a manner . . . that pleasurable sensations
serve as their habitual guides." And though he acknowledges that
both pleasure and pain can cause animals to "pursue that course of
action which is the most beneficial to the species," he argues that
pleasure is the stronger force. "Pain or suffering of any kind, if long
continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action. . . .
Pleasurable sensations, on the other hand, may be long continued

without any depressing effect; on the contrary they stimulate the
whole system to increased action." 43
It can hardly be doubted that pain or suffering in its more extreme

forms must have a deadening effect on all sentient beings. But in its
lesser forms — as mild hunger or sexual desire, anxiety or uneasiness

this is clearly not the case. Nor is it apparent that pleasurable sensa-
tions, when long continued, stimulate action (think of an excellent
backrub) Indeed, a. number of contemporary evolutionary psychologists,
although indebted to Darwin in many other respects, have argued pre-
cisely the opposite case. In what they call the "tragedy of happiness" or
the "hedonic treadmill," they point out that human beings display an
undeniable tendency to quickly accommodate themselves to their plea-
sures — to grow bored —and then become anxious or uneasy in their sat-
isfaction. Like junkies in need of a fix, we need variety in our pleasures
or greater doses of the same when the initial "rush" wears off. It is this
longing — a form of pain — that sends us in renewed pursuit.
According to this perspective, it is the hedonic treadmill — the re-
peatedly painful pursuit of pleasure — that has been adapted by natu-

ral selection to sustain us in life. As the noted cognitive scientist
Steven Pinker explains, "[contemporary] evolutionary theory predicts
that a man's reach should exceed his grasp, but not by much." 44 In
other words, although natural selection has conditioned us to experi-
ence pleasure in activities that contribute to our survival, it disposes
us to quickly adapt to them and then to strive for a little more. In this
view, enduring satisfaction or permanent contentment would not be
conducive to survival. It is in our interest —and so in our genes —always
to be slightly wanting, restlessly searching for further satisfaction. A

bit of anxiety keeps us on our guard against danger, and a bit of unful-
filled desire keeps us on the chase, ever eager to ensure our survival
and that of our kin.
Whether the insights of this Darwinian variation on Darwin would

have caused the man himself to alter his conclusion that the "sum" of
our habitual and recurrent pleasures "gives, I can hardly doubt, most
sentient beings an excess of happiness over misery," is of course un-
certain. But it is interesting to note that even on Darwin's own terms,
the balance was narrowly won. "Many occasionally suffer much," he
conceded, adding that "such suffering is quite compatible with the
belief in Natural Selection, which is not perfect in its action, but tends
only to render each species as successful as possible in the battle for

life with other species That there is much suffering in the world,"
he continued, "no one disputes." Where he did take issue was with
the view that this suffering could be compatible with the existence of
God. Darwin's investigations of the natural world afforded no place in
his mind, he claimed, for theodicy:
Some have attempted to explain [the suffering in the world]

in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral
improvement. But the number of men in the world is as

nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and
these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A
being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could
create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and
omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that
this benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can
there be in the suffering of millions of the lower animals
throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from
the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelli-
gent first cause seems to me a strong one. . . ,

45
Belief in a benevolent creator was incompatible with the purposeless

suffering of the world: Theodicy could not be sustained.
a
424 Happiness
But how, one is left to wonder, could Darwin sustain his own faith,
his faith not in God but in human happiness? For in effect he con-
tinued to cling to a species of theodicy, arguing that the terrible
suffering of the world worked, unwittingly, for the "moral improve-
ment" of humanity, and so would continue to augment the balance of

pleasure over pain. "Believing as I do," he continued just pages later,
"thatman in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than
he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient
beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued
slow progress." Intolerable, yes, but as he fully acknowledged, this was
the gathering consensus of science, which believed that the "sun
46
with all the planets will one day grow too cold for life." Confronted,
looking backward, with the "suffering of millions of the lower ani-
mals throughout almost endless time," and faced, looking forward,
with the total extinction of earthly life, it took a brave individual —
defiantly optimistic individual — to maintain an unflinching smile in
the present. Darwin was such a man. Many contemporaries felt obliged
to respect his fortitude. But many more found it difficult to share
his faith that a small surplus of pleasure in the balance sheet of sen-
sations could justify the happiness of man.
Ecce Homo
Never a shepherd, Zarathustra was a friend of the solitary beast. He

detested flocks and hated herds. But when he wandered alone on
mountaintops, his spirit soared with eagles and floated to earth, gen-
tly, with doves. Unafraid of serpents, he made his home in caves, wait-
ing for laughing lions. And he loved creatures that have no settled home,
hardened for hard journeys, like the dromedary, ready to bear difficult
loads. In order to be born again, and then to be raised anew, man must
evolve: "Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit
47
becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child."
Thus spoke Zarathustra. And so in this case did Friedrich Nietzsche,
telling by way of his mythical prophet a fable and truth that was close
to his own heart. Anyone who would dare to roar like a lion at all that
had been said and done must first take on his back that same load,
carry its weight like a beast of burden, suffer under its strain. Only
then could he claw out in defiance, and only then, when he had freed
himself from its weight, could the "preying lion" become a child
"innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled
48
wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes." This creature of affirmation,
this blessed child, would then pull himself upward to his own (self-)
transcendence, growing to overcome humanity. Man, Zarathustra says

in another metaphor, "is a rope stretched between animal and over-
." 49
man {Ubermensch) He could either dance along the line to a higher
place or go crashing into the abyss.
Nietzsche was especially fond of high-strung metaphors and taut
language; at times they fell away from him. But in this case the meta-
phor of metamorphosis was sure-footed: Nietzsche knew of what he
spoke. Like a great painter or composer, this thinker-cum-artist had
borne the weight of the Western tradition on his back, working with
and through some of its most pressing concerns. And like the defiant
lion that he grew to be, he lashed out at its weight, cutting away the
ties that held him to the past. Whether he evolved into a child — or
the towering overman — is doubtful. But his efforts to do so irrevoca-

bly altered the landscape of Western thought.
The son of a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche began his university ca-

reer as a student of theology before becoming a professor of ancient
Greek philology. He was thus deeply schooled in both the classical and
Christian traditions, and in grappling with the weight of these traditions,
he was forced to come to terms with happiness. The subject is central
to his work, accompanying him at every stage of his intellectual evolu-

tion. But as is so often the case, his passion for happiness exists in ten-
sion with a profound and enduring sadness. As he could confess toward

the end of his career in a gloss on Heine's "Die Lorelei," "The fact is
'that I am so sad; the problem 'I don't know what that means.' . .
." 50
Nietzsche proclaimed an early faith in the redemptive possibilities
of art. While still a student, he came across a copy of Schopenhauer's

The World as Will and Representation in a used-book shop — a discovery
— —
426 Happiness
that proved a critical event in his life. As he later explained: "Every

youthful soul hears this call ['Be yourself!'] day and night and
trembles when he hears it; for the idea of its liberation gives it a pre-
sentiment of the measure of happiness allotted it from all eternity
a happiness to which it can by no means attain so long as it lies fettered

51
by the chains of fear and convention." Schopenhauer awakened in
Nietzsche a yearning for liberation, a yearning to become what he was

and what he could be. Critically, he also held out the possibility that
art could be the vehicle of his transformation.
Giving shape and substance to Nietzsche's incipient views,
Schopenhauer's thought also informed his first major work, The Birth
of Tragedy, a study, appropriately enough, of Greek tragoidia and the
tragic spirit in life. "Uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest
suffering" and "keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence,"
the early Greeks, Nietzsche argued, had been led by their sensitivity
to create powerful means of defense to protect them in their pain. The
pantheon of Olympian gods, who "justified human life by living it
themselves," was one such mechanism, providing security, comfort,

and hope. But of much greater interest to the young Nietzsche was
another tragoidia — that sublime Greek creation that in honoring the
god Dionysus offered to all who beheld its spectacle a form of redemp-
tion and "metaphysical solace." 52 As they sat transfixed before the
primitive stage, cultivated Greeks were given a taste of the "eternal

delight of existence." If only for a moment, they were permitted to
become themselves, invited to experience the full plenitude of "pri-

mal Being." 53
This, in Nietzsche's view, was the healing balm of "true tragedy."
One would have to transform Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" into a paint-
ing, he mused, in order to fully appreciate the Greeks' intense fu-
sion of beauty and being. But though he conceded that tragoidia
could no more be re-created in its original purity than the pantheon
of Greek gods, Nietzsche believed for a time that he had discovered
a modern analog to ancient myth in the music of Richard Wagner
a new form of tragic art capable, as Schopenhauer had promised, of
providing temporary respite from the incessant roar of the Will. In
Wagner's scores, Nietzsche heard moments of "musical ecstasy,"

achieving "the peak of rapture of the world" that seemingly con-
firmed the truth of his famous statement in The Birth of Tragedy,
"Only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world and existence be
eternally justified." In his imagination, the "qualified and dedicated
spectators" who attended Wagner's modern operas at Bayreuth were
the contemporary counterparts of the ancient Greeks. At Bayreuth
one would find, Nietzsche fantasized, "the ardor of people who are at
the zenith of their happiness and who feel that their whole being is
condensed in this very state of happiness, which invigorates them for
further and higher aspirations." 54
The reality, predictably enough, proved less appealing. Disillu-

sioned with the bourgeois patina of Bayreuth, Nietzsche grew disillu-
sioned, too, with Wagner and his attempt to create a modern religion
of art. As he later acknowledged of his early infatuation, "Behind my
first period smirks the face of Jesuitism, by which I mean conscious
clinging to illusions and forced incorporation of them as the basis of
culture." 30 What Wagner was prepared to admit outright — that the
task of art in a post-Enlightened age was to "salvage the essence of
religion" —Nietzsche now renounced as misguided and confused. 56
The Romantic dream of aesthetic redemption was suitable only for
those unable, or unwilling, to abandon the "consolations of religion." 57
Yet Nietzsche had his own difficulties abandoning those consola-
tions, however much he might protest the fact. This assertion may
surprise those who recall his dramatic pronouncement "God is dead,"
or associate his name immediately with such titles as The Antichrist. But
as one of his more perceptive biographers has observed, it required no

great courage to kill God in the late nineteenth century. 58 European
radicals had been doing it for two hundred years. If Nietzsche felt the
need to commit deicide in so flagrant a fashion, it was in part because

only by resorting to such extreme measures could he free himself from
a lingering attachment. Not without reason was this son of a clergy-
man nicknamed the "little pastor" as a child, and not without reason
did Nietzsche describe himself as a "plant born near a churchyard." 59
His efforts to achieve "ecstasy" and "rapture" in art were wholly
428 Happiness
consonant with his need to "justify" existence, to "transcend" or "over-

come" man. Even after he had renounced the "Jesuitism" of his ear-
lier illusions, the quasi-religious goal of redemption remained.

This can be seen most directly in his efforts to achieve emancipa-
tion from "animal existence." Like so many men of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, Nietzsche was deeply troubled by the
theories of Darwin. 60 Not only did they seem to erode the foundations
of Christianity, but they also presented grave difficulties for any new
attempt to justify humanity on a higher plane. As the prophet mocks in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a

painful embarrassment." "Once you were apes," he adds, "and even now,
too, man is more ape than any ape." 61 How human beings could tran-
scend their primitive origin —and aspire to a happiness worthy of a
higher being —became for Nietzsche a critical problem.
Vincent Van Gogh, Still Life with Bible, 1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
The former lay preacher Van Gogh here juxtaposes ancient and modern scripture:
the Bible and Emile Zola's novel, La Joie de vivre, the joy or happiness of life.
Photo Credit: Snark/Art Resource, NY.

In his lauding early essay on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche observed that

the only men "who are no longer animals" are "philosophers, artists, and
saints."
62
He had come to have his doubts about artists and about art's
ability to transform humanity. But what of the other two? A philosopher
by practice, if not by training, Nietzsche had great reverence for the
craft. Yet he dismissed the majority of its practitioners as "cabbage
heads" and harbored serious reservations about their power to deliver

the happiness that human beings craved. Indeed, it was philosophy, he
charged, that had originally destroyed the redemptive solace of Greek
tragedy. And it was philosophy that had led human beings in false pur-
suit ever since. The great initiator of this elusive quest — a man at once
awesome, terrible, and sublime —was Socrates.
Although Nietzsche's views on Socrates are notoriously complex,

there is little doubt that he regarded him as a pivotal figure, the "vortex
63
and turning point of Western civilization." Socrates is the "great ex-
emplar of theoretical man," the "archetype of the theoretical optimist,"
and one "who dared, single-handed, to challenge the entire world of
Hellenism." 64 Rejecting the tragic acceptance of the inherent uncertain-
ties and conflicts of life, Socrates was moved rather by the "illusion that
thought . . . might plumb the farthest abyss of being and even correct
65
it." His faith was that knowledge could be the "true panacea" of exis-
tence. This, Nietzsche believes, is the "grand metaphysical illusion" that
lies at the heart of Socrates's teaching, animating his central trinity: "Vir-
tue is knowledge; all sins arise from ignorance; only the virtuous are
happy." These "three basic formulations of optimism," Nietzsche in-
sists, spelled the death of the tragic spirit, saddling humanity with the
fundamental error that reason alone held the key to virtue and happiness. 66
Despite important refinements in his thinking, Nietzsche never
abandoned this fundamental conviction. At the end of his career, just
two years before his descent into madness in 1890, he returned to the
theme, sketching in his notes that "the problem of Socrates" could be

reduced to "his equalization of reason = virtue = happiness." This
was an "absurdity" from which the philosophers of antiquity had
never been able to free themselves. "What do men want?" Socrates's
successors asked. They offered only one answer to the question:
430 Happiness
"Happiness." And "if man does not in fact achieve happiness," why is
that? "Because," Nietzsche continued in the post-Socratic voice:
Because he blunders in respect of the means. —What is
unfailingly the means to happiness? Answer: virtue.—why

virtue? — Because it is supremely rational and because ratio-
nality makes it impossible to err in the choice of means: it is
67
as reason that virtue is the way to happiness.
This fundamental Socratic error — so central to all subsequent classi-
cal thought —had been embraced ever since.
It was precisely this same false equation that animated the think-
ing of the Enlightenment, with its insistence on bringing happiness
to humanity through the triumph of reason. The eighteenth century's

added emphasis on pleasure only worsened the predicament, for as
Nietzsche was fond of repeating, pleasure was not humanity's true

end. "Man does not strive for pleasure, only the Englishman does," he
quipped, directing his contempt at those who walked "clumsily" in
the footsteps of Bentham. Yet he knew that the search for "the great-
est happiness for the greatest number" was not confined to Britain.
On the contrary, the demand for "English happiness"

— "comfort and
fashion (and at best a seat in Parliament)" —was widely shared. 68
Mas-
querading under the title of virtue and harnessing the services of in-
strumental reason, happiness of this sort would do little to help man
transcend his animal origins. At best it would make him a fattened pig.
Nietzsche leveled a similar charge at the cleft-footed heirs of the
socialist tradition, those "levelers" who strive with "all their powers [for]
the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack

of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone." "The two songs and
doctrines which they repeat most often," Nietzsche continued, "are
'equality of right' and 'sympathy for all that suffers' —and suffering it-
self they take for something that must be abolished."™ This Nietzsche
felt to be as futile as it was misconceived. The aspiration itself, more-
over — to sympathize with all suffering and then to try to resolve it in
everlasting comfort and repose —pointed to the lasting influence of

another man whose impact on Western civilization was immense, sur-
passing that of even Socrates. That man was Jesus of Nazareth.
Nietzsche's view of Christ was no less complicated than his view of

Socrates — a perspective indicative of a much broader ambivalence to-
ward the figure of the ascetic and saint that matched his equally con-
flicted feelings toward the figures of the philosopher and the heroic
artist. But again, what is not in doubt is Nietzsche's estimation of
Christ's impact, and of the tradition that grew up (however wrongly) in
his name. Although he came to regard this influence as almost entirely
negative, Nietzsche never abandoned his immense respect for the disci-
pline, self-control, and self-overcoming of the Christian ascetic and saint.
As a young man, Nietzsche had written to his sister regarding what

he already regarded as the irreconcilable conflict between Christian-
ity and the search for truth. "If you want to attain peace of mind and
happiness," he advised, "then you should have faith; if you want to be
a disciple of truth, then you should probe." Nietzsche's views on all
of these matters — happiness, faith, truth, and Christianity —would

evolve considerably as his thought matured. Even so, he was always
careful to distinguish between what he considered the relatively pure
teachings of the historical Jesus and those of his successors, particu-
larly the apostle Paul, whom he held accountable for having reerected
on a grand scale everything that "Christ had annulled through his way
of living": ecclesiastical structure, dogma, theology, cults, priests, a
church. Still, Nietzsche's early appreciation of Christianity as a source
of happiness never wavered. Sketching a series of notes on the history
of the Christian religion two years before his breakdown, he could
observe, "The Christian way of life is no more a fantasy than the Bud-
70
dhist way of life: it is a means to being happy."
It was, avowedly, an impoverished form of happiness, another in-

sidious "happiness of the herd," just as "English happiness" was a
debased and superficial form of satisfaction, appealing above all to
the weak. Yet the psychological attraction of Christianity was no less

real for that. To the downtrodden, the mediocre, and the oppressed, it
offered ennoblement as "God's elect," transforming present misery and

suffering "into a preparation, a test, a training," as well as "something
——
432 Happiness
which will one day be balanced up and paid back with enormous in-
terest in gold, no! in happiness." This, Nietzsche noted wryly, was

what Christians called "bliss." 71 But he understood that their return
would be paid in more than just choirs of angels. What constitutes
the "eternal bliss" of the Christian paradise? he asks, quoting Saint
Thomas Aquinas in response: "The blessed in the heavenly kingdom
will see the torment of the damned so they may even more thoroughly enjoy
11
their blessedness" Though Nietzsche was being typically mischievous,
his central point was perfectly serious, reminiscent of the following
celebrated passage by Heine, a man whom Nietzsche adored:
I have the most kindly temperament. My wants are modest

a hut, a thatched roof, a good bed, good food, milk and butter,
all very fresh; flowers at my window, a few beautiful trees at
my door. And if the good Lord wants to make my happiness

complete, he will give me the pleasure of seeing some six or
seven of my enemies strung up on those trees. With all my
heart I shall forgive them, before their death, all the evil they
have committed against me while I was alive. Yes, one should
always forgive one's enemies —but not until they are hanged. 73
"To see somebody suffer is nice," Nietzsche later quipped, "to make
somebody suffer even nicer." 74 The psychological appeal of Christian-
ity lay not only in its tranquilizing promise of deferred reward, but also
in the way that it directed human resentment in the here and now.
Christianity's bid to make the first last and the last first was also an at-
tempt to create power from powerlessness and strength from weakness.

It had succeeded all too well, bestowing on the downtrodden the crown
of virtue, and so enabling these so-called good men to exalt in their moral
victory over "evil enemies." As in all things in life, Nietzsche came to
believe, Christianity was ultimately about power.
It was in large part for this reason that Nietzsche looked with fasci-
nation, and even respect, on Christianity's consummate practitioners

its ascetic athletes and virtuosos, its martyrs and saints. For in these
strangely disciplined individuals he found an intriguing example of the
will to power over others and over oneself. Terribly misled regarding
means and ends, they nonetheless lived in keeping with an admirable

goal — to transcend animal existence, to overcome themselves, to be-
come like God. They did so, though, at a tremendous cost, for their
efforts involved a terrible sundering of the self, erecting a fatal divi-
sion between our wretched animal nature and our eternal spiritual
soul. In struggling for the victory of the one over the other, the Chris-
tian athlete had succeeded in making man feel shame "at being man"
The result of this trial was, paradoxically, to render human beings less
fit than animals. Weighed down by guilt, despairing of life itself, they
had become more wretched than the beasts:
[It is by this means] that the animal "man" is finally taught to

be ashamed of all his instincts. On the way to becoming an
"angel" . . . man has upset his stomach and developed a furry
tongue so that he finds not only that the joy and innocence of
75
animals is disgusting, but that life itself is distasteful.
Once an ape, man had devolved into something less, and now suffered
waves of nausea, hating the very thing he was. Before he could seek
transcendence, he must learn to accept himself.
Walking in the Upper Engadine mountains of Switzerland, near Sils-
Maria
—"6,000 above the ocean andfeet far higher still above all things
human!" — Nietzsche saw the of light this transcendence. The date
was August 6, 1881, and in his subsequently published Ecce Homo —
"Behold the Man," an allusion to the words spoken by Pontius Pilate
when he first sets eyes on Christ in John 19:5 —Nietzsche provides an
illuminating description of his own "revelation":
Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth century have a

clear idea of what poets of strong eras called inspiration? If not,
I will describe it. . . . The concept of revelation in the sense

that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and
subtlety, becomes visible and audible, shaking us to the core
and knocking us over —simply describes the fact. . . . This is
434 Happiness
my experience of inspiration; I have no doubt that we would

have to go back thousands of years to find anyone who could
say to me "it is mine also." 76
The substance of this self-described "revelation" was Nietzsche's idea

of the "eternal recurrence" —an idea that has never been as clear to
interpreters as it was, evidently, to him at the time of its annuncia-

tion. In seeking to explain it, Nietzsche later tried to ground the
notion on what he considered (inaccurately) to be a truth deducible
from contemporary science: that if matter and energy were finite, and
time infinite, then all combinations of the former — all life —were des-
tined to recur eternally in endless repetition.
Nietzsche accepted this odd idea as a propositional truth, treating it
with total seriousness, although he was not above joking that his "deep-
est objection" to the concept was the frightening prospect of the eter-
nal recurrence of his mother and sister, whom he regarded as fools.

77
Whether one is able to conceive of the concept with clarity is less impor-
tant in the context of Nietzsche's understanding of happiness than is
the fact that it gave him precisely what he had struggled, and failed, to
find in religion, morality, and art: a path to immanent transcendence. If

we are fated to live each moment of our lives eternally, he reasoned — or
at least if we are prepared to entertain the possibility of doing so —then

every aspect of our existence becomes pregnant with cosmic significance
and universal possibility. A "devastating idea" for those condemned to
mediocrity or a less than happy fate, eternal recurrence, Nietzsche be-

lieved, was cause for celebration for those who could bear it.
Nietzsche himself, as he wrote to a friend shortly after his epiphany,

wept 78
"tears of joy" at the thought. And in only a matter of months
he had completed a work, conceived in bliss, which announced the
coming of a new age and a new type of man. To be heralded by "pre-
paratory human beings"
— "more fruitful human beings, happier
beings" — coming age would
this result
in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happi-

ness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter,
a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually
bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea,

feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest
fisherman is still rowing with golden oars! This godlike feeling
would then be called —humaneness. 79
A vision —
man this, Nietzsche openly
of a fully redeemed, godlike
acknowledged, was a species of faith. And yet it was a faith in life, a
"faith in oneself"" as opposed to the faith in God or science of old.
Whereas those were founded on the outmoded "association of moral-

ity, knowledge, and happiness," Nietzsche's faith in humanity would
be grounded in what he called gaya scienza, "joyful science," the dis-
coveries of which pointed the way to unprecedented rewards. "We
know a new happiness," he announced with added conviction in a
preface to the second edition of the work. 80 All of his remaining ef-
fort was devoted to sustaining this claim.
As trite as the phrase now seems, to develop "faith in oneself was

an enormously challenging task, Nietzsche argued, in large part be-
cause the faiths of old continued to undermine its possibility. Still
suffering from the legacies of the Socratic and Christian traditions,

human beings denied much that was vital and spontaneous in them-
selves, reflexively denigrating their most basic instincts, dispositions,
and drives. Egoism and selfishness, sensuality and lust, aggression

and the will to power — these "animal urges" were deemed unwor-
thy of civilized human beings. And so they were denied or redirected
in insidious ways, adding to humanity's vast accumulation of guilt
and "shame at being man. " We had learned to despise what we are,
Nietzsche insisted. In order to develop faith in ourselves, we would

have to unlearn this loathing. Only then could self-realization replace
self-denial.
The way to this self-realization — the precondition of man's over-

—
coming of man thus lay, ironically, in the acceptance and reintegra-
tion of his long-denied animal self. This "hidden center needs release
from time to time," Nietzsche emphasized in one of his most influen-
tial works, The Genealogy of Morality. "The beast of prey 'man'" felt
436 Happiness
trapped by civilization's attempts to make of him "a tame and civi-
lized animal, a household pet." For maximum health, he needed room

to roam.
In pressing this point, Nietzsche could be intentionally provocative,

even reckless, and in light of the subsequent appropriation of his theo-
ries by the Nazis and other unscrupulous interpreters, it is hard to read
his more inflammatory passages without discomfort. Speaking of those
"noble races" who once indulged in violence and power with a "shock-
ing cheerfulness and depth of delight in all destruction" — races who,
in returning to "the innocent conscience of the wild beast," are able
to leave the scene of a "hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and
torture in a mood of bravado and spiritual equilibrium as though they
had simply played a student's prank" —Nietzsche observes:
At the center of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the
blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling

round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release
from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to
— Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese
the wild: nobility,
Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings — requirement in this

81
they are all alike. . . .
Despite Nietzsche's unquestionable contempt for anti-Semites and

Aryan nationalists, such passages lent themselves easily to misinter-
pretation. And yet it is clear from the context that the "blond beast"
is not a specific racial ideal but the "preying lion" that lurks in all
conquering peoples, ready always to rip apart a culture's careful re-
straints. Brimming with confidence, this is the innocent yet terrible

force that rises in human beings who are free to unleash their inner
animal, to fully indulge their will to power. Unrestrained by con-
science, such men do not "doubt their right to happiness." They are
not "ashamed of their happiness." They do not say, "It's a disgrace to
be happy. There much misery." 82 These are creatures who know
is too
no guilt or resentment, who are not burdened by pity or regret. They
are happy in who and what they are.
Though the release of the prowling beast was a necessary step in

the process of self-realization — a step on the way to becoming what
—
we are Nietzsche never regarded this liberation as an end in itself.
The lion, recall, would give way in the final metamorphosis to a new
beginning, a born-again child who could evolve into the higher human
being, the overman, the man who transcended man. To reach this
highest stage meant not only the full integration of the beast within
but also the "sublimation" of its powers into something loftier than
mere violence. Well before Freud, Nietzsche was employing that word
in this distinct sense, stressing our need to mediate and channel baser
instincts into higher goals. Cruelty, aggression, the will to dominate
and conquer were all part of our animal nature. But they were not ends
in themselves. They must be put to nobler uses.
And what might those be? To what ends should human beings di-
rect their protean will to power? In an analysis that influenced Weber,
Nietzsche admitted candidly that he did not know, that he could not
know: The world and an exhausted Western culture, he believed, were
no longer able to provide convincing answers to such questions. The
point was to create them, and this was precisely the task of the higher
men, who having borne on their backs the burden of Western culture
and then thrown it off, would be free to lead on toward new endeav-
ors, establishing new tasks, new values, and new goals. These higher
men, these overmen, would justify humanity, leading the way to de-
liverance. "Let us face ourselves," Nietzsche implores these select few
with reference to the Greek myth of a region beyond Boreas, the North
Wind, where happy men can dwell:
We are Hyberboreans; we know very well how far off we live.
"Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the
Hyperboreans" — Pindar already knew this about us. Beyond
the north, ice, and death our life, our happiness. We have
discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the
exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has
found it? Modern man perhaps? "I have got lost," sighs
modern man. This modernity was our sickness. 83

—
438 Happiness
However bracing when read alone at night, such metaphoric leaps

and poetic bounds inevitably frustrate when one tries to bring them to
earth in the light of day. Notwithstanding Nietzsche's high-wire antics,
one suspects that he may have lost his way somewhere on the line that
led from animal to overman. What he hoped to leave behind him is rea-
sonably clear, and with respect to happiness, there can be few doubts at
all. The lion had lashed away at the camel's back, leaving much of its
burden in tatters. No longer could the seeker expect to find higher

happiness through reason, goodness, or truth. Still less could this be
found along the way of resignation, respite, pleasure, or comfort. From
Schopenhauer's belief that only fleeting moments of happiness could
be had in artistic release from the thralldom of the will, Nietzsche had
moved in the opposite direction, coming to believe that in the exercise
of the will alone could one find happiness, that happiness appeared only
in the "triumphant consciousness of power." 84
"Men of profound sadness," Nietzsche observed, "betray them-
selves when they are happy: they have a way of embracing happiness
as if they wanted to crush and suffocate it, from jealousy: alas, they
85
know only too well that it will flee." There is something of this same
desperation in Nietzsche's spirited paeans to happiness, his attempt
to cling to what he knew to be fleeting, to make eternal what he knew
to be not, to taste as a man what was reserved for God. "Joy wants it-
self," says Zarathustra, "wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants every-

thing eternally the same." 86 There can be no doubting the desire, but
it is hard to see how it possibly can be fulfilled anywhere but in the

suspended realm of faith.
When Nietzsche is brought back to humanity's natural habitat

with both feet, or all four paws, on solid ground — it is clear that he
was more successful as beast of burden and defiant lion than as over-
man. Certainly, his ecstatic visions appealed to many. Yet his gaze is
most piercing not when directed upward but when focused down and
within. In emphasizing our psychological kinship to the animals that
we are, he stressed powerfully that there is more to the human psyche
than can be comprehended by what he referred to contemptuously as
the modern "religion of comfortableness." 87 This yearning for an end
Henri Matisse, Sketch for Le Bonheur de Vivre, 1905-1906, San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. Bequest of Elise S. Haas, © Succession H. Matisse,
Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
to all struggle, for an end to all pain, was what motivated the "last men"
of modern societies, who had peopled the earth in ever greater num-
bers since the eighteenth century. "'We have invented happiness,' say
the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was
88
hard to live, for one needs warmth." But in their warmth and their
creature comforts, Nietzsche believed, these last men of modernity

were small men, men who, in scurrying away from the Hyperborean
regions, were forgetting essential truths, forgetting that to live was to
struggle, suffer, and yearn, and that human happiness was ultimately
bound up with this striving. "How little you know of human happiness,
you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappi-
ness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in
your case, remain small together." 89 "/Vb/for pleasure does man strive: but
90
for power," Nietzsche adds elsewhere in much the same spirit. Un-
less, and until, human beings comprehended this uncomfortable
—
440 Happiness
truth —venturing into the dark, sometimes cold regions of the psyche
they would remain blind to their deepest motives, cut off from their
ultimate potential for true happiness.
Tragic Happiness
Sigmund Freud read a smattering of Nietzsche as a student, and in
1900 he purchased a copy of the collected works. It was the year of

the philosopher's death and also of the publication of Freud's Inter-
pretation of Dreams. Later, Freud claimed never to have indulged in
his new possession, telling a friend that he resisted studying Nietzsche

because "it was plain that I would find insights in him very similar to
91
psychoanalytic ones." Freud didn't reveal how he knew this. But it
is plain that important themes in his own work have much in com-
mon with Nietzsche's. Like his predecessor, Freud granted a central
role to the unconscious in determining human behavior, and he also
saw the overcoming of guilt as a primary human task. He accepted
the death of God without anguish, regarding religion as an illusion
without a future, and he looked with open eyes at the dark side of
the human character, attempting to shed light on our lust for power
and aggression, our resentments and manifold sexual desires.
To an even greater extent than Nietzsche, Freud regarded Darwin

as the pivotal figure of modern thought. He referred to him always as
the "great Darwin" and indeed was partially induced to study biology
and medicine at university after coming into contact with his work.
"The theories of Darwin," Freud wrote in his autobiography, "strongly
attracted me, for they held out hopes of an extraordinary advance in
our understanding of the world. . .
," 92 Building on the same theories,
Freud made extraordinary advances of his own, coming to see the mind
of the animal man, like the body, as a product of evolutionary devel-
opment —adaptive, dynamic, governed by instinctive forces, non-
rational drives, and atavistic traits.
But if in these respects Freud paid homage to his predecessors,

duly assuming their weight, he was very much a defiant lion when it
came to the subject of happiness. Whereas Darwin continued to
cling, almost despite himself, to a delicate belief in the moral im-

provement of mankind, treating the maximization of happiness as
an end to which humanity should strive, Freud retained few such

Victorian pieties. "Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of ani-
mals," he observed laconically, "unless, perhaps, it may be supposed
to lie in being of service to man." This supposition was merely hu-
bris, a relic of "human presumptuousness." Seeing that "the ques-
tion of the purpose of life had been raised countless times and had
never yet received a satisfactory answer," Freud concluded that we
93
had a "right to dismiss it" altogether.
Nor did Freud, like Nietzsche, continue to hold out hope in the
"overcoming" of human contradictions or the overcoming of man.
Ironically, given Nietzsche's lifelong interest in the literature of Greek
tragedy, Freud was the more uncompromisingly tragic thinker of the
two. It was not by coincidence that he used the name of the consum-
mate hero of Greek tragoidia —Sophocles's Oedipus Rex— to describe
what he regarded as the most basic of all human conflicts. In the in-
herent struggle between parent and child, Freud saw evidence that a
bit of tragedy was embedded in all of us from the beginning. "One feels
inclined to say," he observed in another connection, "that the inten-
tion that man should be 'happy' is not in the plan of 'Creation.'" 94
This tough-minded aspect of Freud's thought —aware and accept-
ing of the innate conflicts of human experience — not always ade-
is
quately appreciated today. For in a development that Freud himself

would have regarded with a mixture of amusement and contempt,
many of his less orthodox successors have seen fit to promote
psychology's general calling in much more ambitious terms as a form
of secular salvation — leading, as one critic has observed, to the "tri-
umph of the therapeutic," the replacement of the altar by the couch. 95

On a less cosmic scale, but from a strictly Freudian perspective, one
no less symptomatic of the stubborn human need to defend against
pain by means of self-delusion, whole schools of contemporary psychol-
ogy now promise "authentic happiness" to their patients. 96 It is a
promise that Freud himself never would have thought to extend. Early
—
442 Happiness
in his career, he put the matter clearly. When asked by a patient how
he proposed to help her, even though, as she had already acknowl-
edged, her illness was closely bound up with the particular circum-
stances of her life, Freud had this to say:
No doubt fate will find it easier than I do to relieve you of

your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that
much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your
hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental
life that has been restored to health you will be better armed
97
against that unhappiness.
Taken from Studies on Hysteria, copublished with Josef Breuer in
1895, this is Freud's famous avowal that the goal of what he would
first term "psychoanalysis" the following year was in fact relatively
humble. It aimed to cure gratuitous or self-imposed suffering
neurosis — in order to restore "common" or "ordinary" unhappiness
(gemeines Ungluck). Although Freud's faith in his abilities was always

robust, he never claimed to possess a cure for fate or a remedy for
the human condition.

Freud maintained this essential qualification throughout his career,
developing it in greatest detail in his classic of 1930, Das Unbehagen in
der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) . Freud originally proposed to

call the work Das Ungliick in der Kultur ("Unhappiness in Civilization"),
a title that is much more revealing. 98 For in fact, the book's central
theme is the frustration of man's perennial quest for happiness. Set-

ting aside what he took to be the unanswerable question of the pur-
pose of human existence, Freud turned instead "to the less ambitious
question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the
purpose and intention of their lives." "What do they demand of life
and wish to achieve in it?" he asked. "The answer to this can hardly
be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy
and to remain so." 99
Delineating his critical terms with concision, Freud maintained that

the endeavor to become happy has two sides, a positive and a nega-
tive. "It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure,
and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.
In its narrower sense the word 'happiness' only relates to the last."
Happiness, in brief, is the sensation of pleasure — a definition that
leads Freud to a straightforward conclusion. "What decides the pur-

pose of life," he summarizes, "is simply the program of the pleasure
principle," the effort to maximize pleasurable sensations. 100
In many ways, this formulation is reminiscent of Bentham, among
others. A natural human endowment that "dominates the operation
of the mental apparatus from the start," the pleasure principle is a
primitive and demanding force that governs the "primary process" of

101
the mind. According to Freud, however, the pleasure principle soon
comes up against a "secondary process" that constrains human beings
to curb their crude desires in keeping with the "reality principle." As
the young mind develops, it is forced to regulate its demands for im-
mediate gratification, thus making concessions to the external envi-
ronment, to other people, and to other things ("reality"). Postponing

present enjoyment for the sake of later rewards, it learns to calculate
consequences, weighing benefits and costs in the continued interest

of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.
This is where the similarity with Bentham breaks down. For al-
though in Freud's opinion the two principles of pleasure and reality

may achieve an uneasy truce, he viewed their relationship as essen-
tially antagonistic: The demand for pleasure is forever at war with
reality. Insatiable, the pleasure principle battles all that seeks to im-
pose limits on it —whether this be the internal "secondary process"
of the mind or the external constraints of the surrounding environ-
ment. In either case, it is a battle that the pleasure principle is des-

tined to lose. As Freud put the problem in Civilization and Its Discontents, its
program "is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macro-
cosm as much as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of
its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run
102
counter to it."
The struggle for happiness doomed from the start, condemned

is
internally by the nature of our mental endowment and externally by

444 Happiness
nature itself. On the one hand, Freud pointed out what others before
him had observed: the insatiability of human desire. "What we call
happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden)

satisfactions of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree,"
Freud explained. "It is from its nature only possible as an episodic

phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure prin-
ciple is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment,"
and then trails off accordingly. When one's thirst is slated, the satis-
faction of drink declines. Like children who quickly tire of the nov-
elty of their birthday toys, "we are so made that we can derive intense
enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
Thus our possibilities are already restricted by our constitution." 103
By adding the authority of psychiatry to the philosophical conclu-
sions of moralists, Freud anticipated the "hedonic treadmill" (the trag-
edy of happiness) of later Darwinian theorists. He had, of course, no

more access to this recent theoretical development than Darwin did.
Yet it is more likely that he would have embraced it. For Freud wrote
with a different temperament and in a different time. He had wit-
nessed the incredible carnage of World War I, and he watched as the
first stirrings of fascism laid waste to any residual Victorian optimism.

But quite apart from this immediate historical context, Freud believed
that firm evidence already warranted conclusions in keeping with
the tragedy of happiness. On display internally in the psychological
makeup of every human being, this evidence could also be gathered
externally by studying the nature of being in the world. The condi-
tions of existence, Freud concluded, matched our infinite desire for
pleasure with infinite possibilities for pain.

For the sake of conceptual clarity, Freud reduced these manifold
possibilities to three general categories. We are threatened with suf-
fering, he claims:
from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution

and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warn-
ing signals; from the external world, which may rage against us
with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and
finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which

comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than
any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addi-
tion, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than
104
the suffering which comes from elsewhere.
However "fatefully inevitable," these sources of suffering had done

little to discourage human beings from trying to deceive them. Freud
discussed in detail the many ways in which men and women have at-
tempted to trick fate in the pursuit of happiness, beginning with the
most aggressive —hedonism. "The unrestricted satisfaction of every
need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's

life," Freud acknowledged, "but it means putting enjoyment before
caution, and soon brings its own punishment." 105 What he considered
"the crudest, but also the most effective" means of averting suffer-
ing
— "the chemical one" — fell prey to similar drawbacks. He con-
fessed that he found such methods "interesting" and expressed regret
that the "toxic side of mental processes" had not received proper
scientific study. But having himself experimented with cocaine, he
was able to speak from experience when he observed that substances
that allowed the user to "withdraw from the pressure of reality and
find refuge in a world of one's own" were dangerously attractive and
potentially harmful, responsible in certain circumstances for the use-
less waste of a "large quota of energy " that might be 7
far better em-
ployed. The chemical means to happiness, he concluded, could never
be anything more than a temporary expedient. 106
7
A similar form of withdrawal (and another strategy for attaining
happiness) was "voluntary isolation," "keeping oneself aloof from other

7
people," the strategy of the hermit. Freud acknowledged that this

might secure the "happiness of quietness," but he clearly regarded the
strategy as an admission of defeat. "Against the dreaded external world
."
one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it. . .
The same could be said of another extreme means of attempting to

defend against the external world: "killing off the instincts as is pre-
scribed by the worldly wisdom of the East and practiced by Yoga."

—
446 Happiness
Freud had in mind the ascetic practice of renunciation of the sort
achieved by the saints. But again he judged this strategy lacking. "If it
succeeds, then the subject has . . . given up all other activities as
well —he has sacrificed his life; and, by another path, he has once more
only achieved the happiness of quietness." 107 The remedy was more
severe than the condition it sought to cure.
"Another and better path," Freud believed, was that of "becoming
a member of the human community," and "working for the good of
all." Or even more ambitiously, one could "try to re-create the world,
to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable

features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity
with one's own wishes." But Freud never put much stock in Utopia.
Whoever "sets out upon this path to happiness," he judged, "will as a
rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him." Of similar fragility
were those strategies that attempted to perceive the world through
imagination or illusion. "At the head of these satisfactions through

fantasy," Freud placed the "enjoyment of works of art," although he
cautioned that "the mild narcosis" that this induced could bring about
no more than a "transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs."
The aesthetic approach
— "in which happiness in life is predominantly
sought in the enjoyment of beauty" —was prey to many of the same
shortcomings that he saw, in more direct form, in faith. With charac-
teristic scorn, Freud wrote off the religions of humankind as "mass-
delusions," belittling their "attempt to procure a certainty of happiness
and a protection against suffering through a delusional remolding of re-

ality." It was a strategy that he ranked on a par with the flight into fan-
108
tasy of neurotic illness.
Far more promising, in Freud's view, were the pleasures to be had

through sublimation and the healthy "displacements of libido" in-
volved in creative and productive work. Although not even the most
engrossing forms of labor could provide "impenetrable armor against
the arrows of fortune," Freud commended "professional activity"
especially "psychical and intellectual work" — as a source of "special
satisfaction," particularly when freely chosen. "No other technique for
the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmlv to realitv," Freud

maintained. It was a conviction with which Marx would have agreed.

And although Freud maintained that work was not sufficiently "prized
by men" as a path to happiness, it deserved to be so. 109
Finally, Freud addressed the "way of life which makes love the cen-
ter of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being
110
loved." This was, he stressed, a strategy that came "naturally enough
to all of us" given that it was invariably based on a yearning for the
satisfactions of infancy, as well as what is our most "intense" and

"overwhelming" sensation of pleasure —sexual (genital) love
— "the
prototype of all happiness." 111 In Nietzsche's comment that sex is "the
happiness that is the great parable of a higher happiness and the high-
est hope," Freud might have found wisdom to match his own earlier
statement in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess that "happiness is the belated

112
fulfillment" of a "prehistoric" or "childhood wish." In any case, he con-
ceded that erotic love perhaps "does in fact come nearer to this goal [of
the positive fulfillment of happiness] than any other method." 113
Yet Freud hastened to add that "the weak side of this technique of
living is easy to see," for otherwise "no human being would have
thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other." We are
"never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so help-

lessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love." A
good deal of the energy of psychoanalysis, in fact, was devoted to try-
ing to understand the daunting complexities of sustaining love in the

face of its many threats. As a devoted father and husband, Freud knew
the pleasures that love could bring. But as a student of human nature,
he also knew that they were seldom uncomplicated. Eros and the ego,
our conscious understanding of the world and ourselves, were inextri-
cably linked, love and aggression seldom far removed. Even in the
cradle of Cupid, the conflicts that animate the tragic stage were readily
apparent. 114
Although Freud disavowed the history of happiness as a futile field
of inquiry —judging it too difficult "to form an opinion whether and in

what degree men of an earlier age felt happier and what part their
cultural conditions played in the matter" — his list of strategies of
pursuit nonetheless coincides remarkably well with many of the means

448 Happiness
115
and methods examined in this book. Socrates's and Plato's subli-
mation of Eros into intellectual striving, the ascetic renunciation rec-

ommended by Epicurus and the Stoics, Augustine's happiness of hope,
Rousseau's praise of voluntary seclusion on his blessed isle, Marx's
revolutionary dream of remaking the world, the Romantic quest for
love, Schopenhauer's commendation of the illusion of art, the hedo-

nism of Sade and La Mettrie, the drug-induced euphoria of Baudelaire
and Thomas de Quincey, the subtle virtues of work recommended by
Weber, Marx, and Smith — all of these strategies we have encountered
in the course of this book, following, like Freud, the arguments made
in their behalf.
Freud was well aware that he might have added other strategies to
his list. But "in spite of [its] incompleteness," he felt confident to
venture the conclusion, "The program of becoming happy, which the
pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled." The statement
was less bleak than it might seem, for Freud added immediately that
"we must not — indeed, we cannot— give up our efforts to bring it [the
program of becoming happy] nearer to fulfillment by some means or
other." 116 This was the human predicament in Freud's eyes: tragic in
its plight, but also tragic in a more uplifting sense, one that empha-
sized man's heroic refusal to succumb passively to the decrees of fate.
Human beings would struggle for happiness until the end. Far from
despairing at our inevitable defeat, Freud saw something noble in our
very defiance.
Nor did he admit that the fact that happiness was not in the plan of
"creation" might have a "paralyzing effect" on human behavior. If it
was true that by no path to happiness "can we attain all that we de-
sire," it was also true that there were "many paths which may lead to
such happiness as is attainable by men," even if "there is none which

117
does so for certain." Pleasure, to put it another way, was better than
pain, and so there was no reason we shouldn't seek to maximize our
total share whenever possible. True, we would never completely mas-
ter nature, and our bodies, forever subject to decay, would always have
"a limited capacity for adaptation and achievement." But Freud in-
sisted, "If we cannot remove all suffering, we can remove some, and
can mitigate some: the experience of many thousands of years has

118
convinced us of that."
Freud was less optimistic about our ability to address the third
major source of unhappiness — social suffering —arguing at length that
the renunciation of erotic and aggressive impulses demanded by civi-

lization would inevitably exact a heavy price. Whereas Darwin had
envisioned a somewhat easier accommodation of man's more primi-
tive instincts in society, Freud maintained that the cost of containing
our aggressive and sexual urges would be high. Among our "instinctual
endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness," he
pointed out. And though many were loath to admit it, "Man is a wolf
to man" {Homo homini lupus) , a creature as ready to regard his neighbor
as enemy to be exploited as a friend to be loved. 119 Organized soci-

an
ety might force human beings to constrain their desire to "satisfy their
aggressiveness" on others. But it did so only by redirecting that ag-
gression within. The result, as Nietzsche had argued in the Genealogy
of Morality, was an inevitable measure of frustration, anxiety, and dis-
placed guilt. "The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss
of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt," Freud

stressed. 120 "Civilized man [had] exchanged a portion of his possibili-
ties of happiness for a portion of security." 121
Yet even with regard to social suffering, Freud's analysis was not
completely without redemptive possibilities. On the one hand, he left
open the prospect that "we may expect gradually to carry through such
alterations in our civilization that will better satisfy our needs." 122 And
on the other, he saw psychoanalysis as a means for dealing with anxi-
ety and guilt, allowing us to learn to sublimate our aggressive and de-
structive impulses into healthier, more productive behavior. On this
considerably restricted terrain, the pleasure principle had some room

to maneuver. As Freud observed, "Happiness, in the reduced sense in
which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the
individual's libido." There were, accordingly, as many paths to pleasure
as there were palates, each shaped by an individual's own unique psy-

chic constitution. Whereas the predominantly erotic individual would
give first priority to emotional relationships, the narcissist, who inclines
450 Happiness
toward self-sufficiency, would seek primary satisfaction in internal

mental processes. The man of action, by contrast, would remain wed-
ded to the external world, and so forth in keeping with individual pro-
clivities. Freud pointed out that "just as a cautious business-man
avoids tying up all his capital in one concern," we would do well not
"to look for the whole of our satisfaction from any single aspiration."
He also knew that "there is no golden rule which applies to everyone."
"Every man," he stressed, "must find out for himself in what particu-
lar fashion he can be saved." 123
The reference to salvation, of course, was ironic, an allusion to the
celebrated line of Frederick the Great, who proudly defended his
policy of religious toleration by noting, "In my State every man can be
saved after his own fashion." For Freud, "salvation" had been reduced
further still to the "economics of libido," stripped down to sensation
alone. Gone were any last links to a transcendent calling, to the nec-
essary virtues, to higher meaning, or to truth. Happiness, as Locke had

once feared, could now really be just lobsters or cheese.
"Long ago," Freud reflected, man had "formed an ideal conception
of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To

these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his
wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore, that these
gods were cultural ideals." But today, Freud continued, man "has come
very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god
himself." Freud acknowledged that the process was still incomplete. It
would be better to say that man has become "a kind of prosthetic God,"
capable of donning the "auxiliary organs" of technology to make himself

truly powerful and magnificent. Moreover, man could console himself
with the thought that his development would "not come to an end pre-
cisely with the year 1930 ce," the year of Freud's writing. "Future ages
will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in
this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still
more." Yet creator that he was, man, in one critical respect, was still not
made in the image of his ideal likeness. "In the interests of our investi-
gations," Freud cautioned, "we will not forget that present-day man does
not feel happy in his Godlike character." 124 With godlike powers, but
without God's serenity, could man rest content in his dissatisfaction,

this final remnant of his humanity? If Freud's life's work implied that
he would have to, it also suggested that he would not.
Brave New World
Just two years after the publication of Freud's Civilization and Its
Discontents, Aldous Huxley issued a warning of a very different sort.
Untroubled by the possibility of inherent impediments to human

happiness, this grandson of "Darwin's Bulldog," Thomas Henry
Huxley, worried instead about the potentially dehumanizing future
of an overly contented world. The lone hero of his 1932 classic Brave
125
New World is forced to proclaim the "right to be unhappy." His
futile attempt to resist the troubling course of human evolution and
the latently oppressive happiness that Huxley saw lurking at the heart
of modern civilization still holds a lesson for us all.
Raised in squalor on a reservation outside the developed world,

Huxley's hero John is a "savage," taken with high expectations to what
he believes will be an environment where "beauteous mankind" can
fully flourish. And indeed, in this "brave new world," John discovers
that "everybody's happy nowadays." Built on the "solid ground of daily
labor and distraction," happiness is the sole purpose of a society in
which free sexuality is encouraged from a young age, and the steady
consumption of material pleasures is ensured throughout life. The
inhabitants of the brave new world acknowledge only two gods
— "Our
Ford and our Freud" — the great innovator of mass production on the
one hand, and the man who released them from guilt on the other,
freeing the world for the total triumph of the pleasure principle. Here,
everything that is unpleasant or that causes pain has been removed.
Exercise, synthetic food, and high-tech medicine do away with old age,
prolonging youth indefinitely. Delayed gratification is all but eradicated,

and the family, that perennial source of oedipal animosity and lifelong
conflict, has been replaced by a system of genetic breeding and condi-
tioning designed to control the moods, desires, and expectations of its
452 Happiness
offspring. In a tribute to the teachings of T. R. Malthus, the nine-

teenth-century author of An Essay on the Principle of Population; or A view
of its past and present Effect on Human Happiness, citizens now regularly
perform the "Malthusian Drill" and don "Malthusian belts" to prohibit

pregnancy through ultra-convenient birth control. In addition, easy
access to abortion mitigates the unpleasant consequences of mating,
ensuring guilt-free sex and sustainable levels of population. Finally,
for anyone whose satisfaction remains incomplete, a highly sophisti-
cated entertainment industry provides sense-around movies (the

Feelies) with simple plots and dazzling effects to distract and en-
gage, while a safe and effective mood-altering drug (Soma) is readily
available to put a constant smile on one's face, providing "all the ad-
vantages of Christianity and alcohol" and "none of their defects." In

this brave new world, "faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good" is
unquestioned.
Unquestioned, that is, by all save the awkward few, of whom the
"Savage" proves to be the most persistent. Clinging to atavistic
views, he dares to imagine that there might be more to life than good
feeling — yearning, instead, for knowledge, moral improvement, and
higher consciousness. As he explains to the "world controller" of the
brave new world in protesting his "right to be unhappy": "I don't want
comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want free-
dom, I want goodness. I want sin."
The price paid for happiness, the Savage knows, is too high. And
so, in a futile attempt to flee this "hard master," he returns to the wild,
living in isolation, mortifying his flesh, and praying to God in an effort
to purify his soul. His escape is short-lived, however, interrupted by
the insatiable media curiosity of the entertainment industry, at the
head of which is Darwin Bonaparte, a celebrated big-game photogra-
pher famous for having captured a gorilla's wedding on film. Combin-

ing the all-conquering instincts of the general with the curiosity in our
primitive ancestry of his namesake, Darwin violates the Savage's tem-
porary sanctity, exposing him to hoards of prying tourists who regard
him as they would a caged animal in a zoo. These civilized onlookers
throw peanuts to the Savage "as to an ape," driving him into the re-
gressive posture of an "animal at bay." His only escape from these tor-
mentors is Soma. But when he awakens after a night of chemically
induced sanctuary, he blinks at the terrible light in "owlish incompre-

hension." The only way for this animal-man to preserve his dignity is
to commit suicide. Regarded by the highly evolved as an ape, the Sav-

age is in fact the last remnant of a dying species — man.
In retrospect, it is astonishing that this book was written in the
midst of the Great Depression, only fourteen years after the bloodiest
war in human history and just seven years prior to the outbreak of a
conflagration that would subsume the world in horrors even greater.
But Brave New World sees beyond the immediate horizon of the
present into a future that can only startle the contemporary observer.
Whereas the other dystopian masterpiece of the twentieth century,
George Orwell's 1984 (1949), now seems a brilliant, if dated, reflec-
tion of the concerns of the Cold War, Brave New World continues to
shock with its portrayal of an anodyne consumer society governed by

the pleasure principle, immediate gratification, and the cult of youth.
Like our own, its citizens are distracted by an arts and entertainment
industry that emphasizes entertainment at the expense of art; encour-
aged wherever possible to eradicate the unpleasant rather "than learn-
ing to put up with it"; led along by the unfailing allure of prosperity,
sexual satisfaction, and eternal youth; conditioned to abolish guilt and

memory and regret. This is the happiness of Nietzsche's last men —
happiness freed of its final attachments to virtue, transcendence, and
self-development, reduced at long last to comfort and good feeling
alone. In this brave new world, the final Sovereign Good rules without
rivals in absolute supremacy. But it is an impoverished king, unwor-

thy to lead creatures who would live as gods, or men, or even apes.
Could the animal-man really be herded in this way — in the manner
of the Brave New World? Huxley knew that something deep in our na-
ture bridled at the prospect, yearning perpetually, like the Savage, for
more. And yet this same realization led him to what was perhaps his most
prescient —and disturbing— observation, that in the relentless search
for happiness, human beings would endeavor to alter their very nature,
tampering with the last bastion of fate: their genetic constitution.
CONCLUSION:
HAPPY ENDING
Vladimir: Say you are, even if it's not true.

Estragon: What am I to say?
Vladimir: Say,I am happy.
Estragon: am happy.
I
Vladimir: So am I.
Estragon: So am I.
Vladimir: We are happy.
Estragon: We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now

that we are happy?
Vladimir: Wait for Godot. 1
What do we do now, now that we are happy? When Samuel Beckett's

Estragon first posed this question in French at the tiny Theater of
Babylon in Paris in 1953, it must have sounded odd. "To write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric," the German philosopher Theodor Adorno
had already observed in a famous (if dubious) judgment. 2 To speak of
happiness, surely, was even more so. By conservative estimates, forty
million people had died in the slaughter of World War II, and by 1949,
with the Soviet Union's first successful test of the atomic bomb, the
world's superpowers seemed poised to render these numbers a pittance.

Was not talk of happiness in such circumstances absurd?
If so, then Beckett's medium was well chosen, for strictly speaking,
he wrote not poetry but theater, the theater of the absurd. And to the
extent that the stage still captured the surreal spectacle of the world,
his "tragicomedy in two acts" captured well the dogged pursuit of hap-
piness in the face of overwhelming despair. Despite their conclusion
that men are "pigs" and people "bloody ignorant apes," Vladimir and
Estragon continue to hope amid the skeletons and the emptiness that
surrounds them. In their "immense confusion," they are presented only
with the certainty that "the tears of the world are a constant quantity,"
yet they stumble on regardless, waiting for salvation, waiting for Godot.
They remember the tales of the Gospels, the maps of the holy land, the
Dead Sea. "That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for
our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy," Estragon muses. And
when he sleeps, he wakes to recall, "I was dreaming I was happy." It is
an activity that serves nicely to "pass the time." Even as the two wan-
derers know in their heart of hearts that there is "nothing to be done,"
they bumble on. And there is life in their bumbling.
This history of happiness began with the development of tragedy
(tragoidia) on the classical stage and in history itself. There, the tragic
hero was one who carried on despite irreconcilable conflicts and over-
whelming odds, struggling to maintain honor and pursue his end in
the knowledge that unhappy chance can never be controlled. "Short

as his life is, no man is so happy," Herodotus reminds us, "that it shall
not be his lot, not only once but many times, to wish himself dead
rather than alive." 3 The tragic hero endures all, carrying on until the
final moment as best he can.
In this sense, Beckett's Waiting for Godot is unquestionably tragic,
and indeed, its "tragedy" is even more pronounced than that of its clas-
sical predecessors. For unlike the tragoidia of ancient times, the mod-
ern variant must do away completely with the convention that had
always sustained a ray of hope until the end. Here, there can be no
deus ex machina waiting in the wings to produce a final, miraculous
salvation, no god in the machine poised to swoop down to spirit away
—
456 Happiness
the heroes, to save Croesus from the flames, to resolve our fate.
Vladimir and Estragon yearn for the mysterious Godot, a man whose
arrival they believe will ensure that "we'll be saved." But Godot, of
course, never appears. The god in the machine has become the ghost
in the machine, who haunts by his absence, leaving only a wisp, a trace,
the faint sensation of spiritual presence, an evanescent hope of happi-
ness whose kingdom is resolutely of this earth.
The hope that God, or Godot, or some other holy ghost might one
day bring salvation has not been extinguished entirely. May it never
be. But few would deny that the horrors of the first half of the twen-
tieth century rendered such hope harder to sustain. With waning faith
that a deus ex machina will save them, Beckett's heroes can only cling
to the prospect of an earthly happiness that they know instinctively
to be wanting. They pretend to

—
be happy "Say you are, even if it's
not true" —but the moment they do so, they realize that they are still
in need. "What do we do now, now that we are happy?" they wonder.
Their faith in this earthly end is undermined by the ironic knowledge

of its insufficiency and unattainability. Even if Vladimir and Estragon
were happy, we suspect, they would not be content. They would con-
tinue to wait. Theirs is a fate more tragic than even that of the heroes
of old.
And yet there is a strange nobility in their patient persistence
the nobility, perhaps, of the fool —but a nobility nonetheless, a hero-
ism proportionate to an age wanting hope. Vladimir and Estragon

remind us that it might still be possible to make poetry in life. "What's
the good of losing heart now?" Vladimir demands. "We should have
thought of it a million years ago. ..." Later he adds with greater con-
viction, "At this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us,
whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too
late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel
fate consigned us! What do you say?"

It is a noble challenge, and one that arguably had already been taken
up on the stage of the world by a tragic hero of a very different sort,
the historical actor Primo Levi, who suggests not only that poetry is
possible after Auschwitz, but that it was possible, uncannily, even

while there. Describing his own "journey towards nothingness" in that

very place, Levi reflects:
Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happi-

ness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider
the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattain-

able. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these
extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our
human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our
ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this
is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncer-
tainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it:
for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The
inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every
lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from
our misfortunes, and make our consciousness of them inter-
4
mittent and hence supportable.
Incredibly, even in the Lager (camp), one could still have hope; even
in the Lager, one could still draw comfort from the finality of death;
even in the Lager, one could still find distraction —and take relief
in the preoccupation with material cares. It was not resignation or an

abstract "will to live," Levi tells us, that kept him alive, but "the very
discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst." For each obstacle was a
hurdle to be overcome, a hurdle that kept him focused on the finite,
the here and now. Behind the immediate agony of frozen fingers might
lie the dull throbbing of hunger, the irritation of lice, the discomfort
of sleeplessness, the regret of family far away, the pain of an open sore.
But as soon as the cause of the first stress was removed (if it were at
all), one would be "grievously amazed to see that another lies be-
hind, and in reality a whole series of others." As Levi came to real-
ize, "Human nature is such that grief and pain ... do not add up as a
whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater,
according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our
means of surviving in 5
the camp." Similar to the way we are led along
458 Happiness
in life by the endless pursuit of pleasures, we are led along —even

saved —by the endless revelation of pain.
This in itself may not be a happy thought, but it is a reminder of

how relative, always, are our perceptions of misery and joy. Another
tragic hero, the psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl, was led to
similar conclusions by his own experience at Auschwitz. The size of
human suffering is "absolutely relative," he writes: It will expand like
gas to fill the room of a conscious mind and a human soul. But it fol-
lows from this "that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of
joys." Frankl speaks of how the "meager pleasures of camp life pro-
vided a
—
kind of negative happiness, 'freedom from suffering,' as
Schopenhauer put it," and of the intensification of inner life that

helped "the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation, and
spiritual poverty of his existence." And he speaks of the heightened
sensitivity to natural beauty amid so much man-made ugliness. A
glimpse of a mountain or the spectacle of a sunset was a sublime re-
minder of "how beautiful the world could be" Et fax in tenebris facet. And
the light shineth in the darkness. Man for Frankl, as for Dostoyevsky
6
before him, is a being who "can get used to anything." It is at once an
uplifting and a harrowing thought.
Both Levi and Frankl were exceptional men, tragic heroes on the
world's stage, whose affirmation and endurance in the face of inde-
scribable suffering is impossible for most of us to conceive, let alone

to match. Rare is the individual, even under normal conditions, who
can summon the strength to produce a work like Levi's Survival at
Auschwitz or Frankl's Mans Searchfor Meaning, published just a year after
his liberation from the camps. And yet as unique as these two men
undoubtedly were, their ability to recover from their experiences — to
seek meaning, poetry, and happiness again after suffering a terrible

blow of fortune — is indicative of a widely shared human propensity. A
great deal of recent psychological research reaffirms this fact, arguing
strongly in favor of an innate human capacity to respond to the out-
rages of fate. Studies have found, for example, that after experiencing
a major setback — losing a job, say, or going through a divorce — most

people will revert relatively quickly to their set pattern of mood.
Within anywhere from three months to a year, the vast majority will
get back to their ''normal" selves, including those who have undergone
major accidents. Remarkably, as several fascinating studies have docu-
mented, even those who have been rendered quadriplegic in car or
motorcycle accidents seem to fit this pattern. As one psychologist

summarizes:
Without minimizing catastrophe, the consistent and astonish-

ing result is that the worst emotional consequences of bad
events are usually temporary. With major setbacks or injuries,

the emotional after-effects may linger a year or more. Yet
within a matter of weeks, one's current mood is more affected

by the day's events —an argument with one's spouse, a failure
at work, a rewarding call or a gratifying letter from a dear

friend or child — than by whether one is paralyzed or mobile,
blind or sighted."
This is not to make light of catastrophic misfortune, or to suggest that
anyone can ever fully recover from an event as shattering as the Holo-
caust. Levi himself committed suicide forty-two years after his lib-
eration. And though it is probably significant that he suffered from

depression before Auschwitz as well as after, it would be perverse to
suggest that his life circumstances had no bearing on his long-term

happiness. The same can be said with respect to the lasting effects
of sustained child abuse or other extensive psychological trauma.
Sometimes it is simply impossible to escape the past.
Nonetheless, evidence on the whole suggests an astounding human
resilience.* We are designed to carry on, it seems, and most often we
do, regardless of what happens to us. The root of the word notwith-
standing, happiness — or at least our general mood — is evidently much
less dependent on happenstance than long was thought.
*The exception to this pattern is depressive illness, which appears to interrupt the
mind's natural "thermostat" of mood, sending the afflicted into downward spirals
that are often controllable only by therapy or medication, if at all.
460 Happiness
That proposition can be freeing, a source of solace or strength. But

there is another side to this same data, just as there is another side to
Beckett's play. If it is true that the end of a relationship or the death
of a friend will probably have little bearing on our long-term frame of

mind, it is equally true that neither will much of the bounty of good
fortune. The same research that testifies to human beings' ability to
pick themselves up after a fall also suggests a dismaying tendency to

when we have risen too far from the norm. Studies
waft back to earth
of people who have won the lottery, for example, or who have a par-
ticularly fine day at the races, present the mirror image of the findings
on accident victims: After a short period of elation (several weeks or
several months), they invariably return, like the wave in a sine curve,
to where they were before, hovering around what psychologists call,
in another metaphor, the rough "set point" on the "thermostat" of

mood. 8 We may believe that if we only had a million dollars, or if we
only got a new job — or if we only got the girl or boy—our lives would
be transformed, that we would finally be happy. It is certainly pretty
to think so. But a growing body of research suggests otherwise. 9 In

the specialized terms of the trade, human beings seem to suffer from
"impact bias," a distortion of the "impact" or effect that hoped-for
pleasures will have. Surprisingly often, it turns out, we are prone to
exaggerate the degree of fulfillment we will derive from anticipated

pleasures, or we misjudge altogether. And even when we do plot our
forecasts with greater wisdom and precision, our natural disposition is
to adapt to new pleasures much more quickly than we expect.

In many respects, this is merely another way of describing the phe-
nomenon of the "hedonic treadmill," the tragedy of happiness iden-
tified by post-Darwinian evolutionary psychologists, who note our
tendency to grow restless with what we have. And this, in turn, is
merely a recognition of what many of the moralists examined in this
book have long known about the insatiability of human desire. Human
beings' proclivity to grow accustomed to, and then dissatisfied with,
the pleasures of this world is a phenomenon as old as humanity. Even

in paradise, we would do well to recall, Adam and Eve grew restless,
and so no doubt will we, whatever our surroundings.

In light of this long history, it is probably worth treating the recent

"revelations" of psychologists as less genuinely revealing than they and
their publicists would have us believe. Still, the studies of "impact bias"
and "affective forecasting," just like the ruminations on the "hedonic
treadmill" and the "tragedy of happiness," do shed empirical light on a
process of pursuit whose rhythms we have followed in a less clinical

context over the course of roughly two and a half thousand years. From
the moment Socrates declared that happiness should be the goal of good
living, human beings have searched for its secret without end. But de-
spite their uninterrupted efforts — their countless experiments and tri-
als — this search has yielded few certain discoveries. If there is a secret
to happiness, a modern wit has said, then that secret is closely guarded.
It may be so well kept that few, if any, know what it is.
This specter of perpetual pursuit —an endless search through the

ages for an apparition that may not even exist — induces
surely a ghostly
chill, the same haunting feeling of absence and expectation that lingers
on the stage well after the curtain has fallen on Waiting for Godot. Yet we
should not forget that this same spectacle can just as easily make us
laugh. Beckett's play, after all, is not strictly a tragedy but a tragicom-
edy, a work that reaffirms "that the tears of the world are a constant,"
yes, but that quickly reassures that "the same is true of the laugh."
Caught up in a universe they don't understand, uncertain of their situ-
ation and fate, Vladimir and Estragon are as much clowns as tragedians,
men who struggle to take their boots off at the beginning of the play
and fight to keep their pants up at the end. After Vladimir leaves his fly
undone in a fit of absentmindedness, he agrees that he should do it up,

declaring to Estragon with all the gravity of Irish slapstick, "Never ne-
glect the little things in life." These are men who expose themselves to
human folly, and who are themselves completely exposed. We are in-
vited to sympathize with their plight, but we are also asked to laugh.
For their efforts to entertain themselves — to pass the time — are ours.
Something of this same comic spectacle is on display with even

sharper wit in Beckett's Happy Days, a play first staged at the Cherry
Lane Theatre in New York City in 1961. In the years since the debut
of Waiting for Godot, any concern about the pursuit of happiness after
462 Happiness
Auschwitz had long since faded. Beckett's adopted home of France

was in the midst of what would come to be called les trentes glorieuses —
the "thirty glorious years" of economic expansion that followed the
deprivation of the postwar period. The Germans and the Japanese
were experiencing their own economic "miracles," and the United
States was enjoying "boom time," a period of phenomenal growth that
consolidated its position as the richest country in the world, while
producing a generation of children — the "boomers"—more materially
privileged than any in previous history. This massive expansion of the
consumer economy would be coupled in the early 1960s with the in-
vention of the birth control pill and the first stirrings in the loins of
what would prove a successful cultural assault on many of the "hang-
ups" and prejudices that continued to bar the way to pleasure. By
1972, who dared were free to indulge in the "joy of sex," as the best-
all
selling book of that name and year proclaimed. The work would go on
to sell millions and millions of copies.

The time and the place were ripe for Happy Days, and Beckett did
not disappoint, producing a work that was both prescient in its por-
trayal of the ubiquity and triumph of happiness as an ideal of uninter-

rupted good feeling, and very much of the moment. "I used to pray. I
say I used to pray. Yes, I must confess I did," avows Winnie, the work's
late-middle-aged protagonist, who appears onstage in act 1, embed-
ded in a mound of earth that rises to her waist. "Not now." 10
It is true
that she begins the play with the familiar words "For Jesus Christ sake
Amen. . . . World without end," and lapses occasionally into what she
describes as the "old style," speaking of "blessings" and "mercies," and
other such "boons" that help her "through the day." Perhaps, Winnie
even ventures on one occasion, "someone is looking at me still." But
such consolation is crowded out by the far more pervasive thought:
"Oh this is going to be another happy day!"
Winnie reflects on the "happy memories" of the past, and the "happy
day to come" —and this, she declares, "is what I find so comforting when
I lose heart and envy the brute beast." Even as the ground rises in the
second (and final) act to surround all but her head, Winnie remains
defiantly optimistic in the face of this mounting confirmation of her own
mortality. "What matter, that's what I always say, it will have been a
happy day, after all, another happy day." She combs her hair, she brushes
her teeth, she takes pleasure in the distant company of her fading hus-
band. No, she "can't complain." "So much to be thankful for." "No pain."
And though the presence of a revolver in her purse belies this self-as-
surance — as do the silences in her final halting lines —we are not meant,
I think, to doubt the sincerity of her faith: "Oh this is a happy day, this
will have been another happy day! (Pause.) After all. (Pause.) So far."
Like Vladimir and Estragon, Winnie is heroic — alternately touch-
ing, tragic, and quixotic. But also like them, she is ridiculous, absurd.
Crying happiness in the face of death with undaunted insistence, she

is forced to qualify her claim just as it leaves her mouth, switching to
the future perfect tense. This will have been a happy day. The future
perfect, it should be clear, is a time that never is, never shall be, and
never was. It only will have been. The future perfect, like the perfect
future, exists only as an act of faith.
The spectator who is amused by the antics of Happy Days will find
humor, too, in the comedie humaine that has succeeded it. For surely there
is something amusing about the frenzy with which men and women have
pursued happiness in the West ever since. If the apparent calm of the
1950s and early 1960s was shattered by the dislocations and upheavals
that followed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, the
restless search for happiness as pleasure and good feeling only intensi-
fied. It was in that very year that a little-known advertising executive
by the name of Harvey R. Ball created the first copy of a modern icon
that would compete for prominence in certain quarters with the Cross
and the Star of David. Produced on contract to soothe the anxious work-
ers of the amusingly named State Mutual Life Assurance Company in
Worcester, Massachusetts, as their firm merged with another, the

"smiley face" earned Ball a $45 commission. He never filed a trademark
or copyright papers, which from a purely financial standpoint must have
been sad, for soon the symbol was providing assurance and reassurance
to millions. In 1971 alone, devotees of happiness purchased fifty mil-
lion smiley-face buttons, and today the image adorns T-shirts, statio-
nery, plastic bags, key chains, and car bumpers throughout the world. 11
464 Happiness
And this was only the first crack of a much fuller grin. In magazines
and Hollywood endings, on billboards and TV, people in the West
would be saturated as never before by images of the smiling faces of
"real" people enjoying themselves eternally, as is their right. It is dif-
ficult to remain impervious to this constant good cheer. Some studies

even suggest that the physical act of smiling itself helps, physiologi-
cally, to induce a better mood. But it might be argued, in a darker vein,
that images of artificial happiness only reinforce the real sadness, guilt,
and sense of inadequacy felt by those who cannot find it in themselves

to share in the mirth. In either case, few today can be accused of not
trying. Who among us never smiles for the camera? A glance at the
family photo album will confirm that our grandparents' generation was
seldom so quick to present itself in this light. And when we think that
the smile of Mona Lisa, just five centuries old, was something of an
anomaly and a shock in its time, we get an idea of how much we — how
much the world — has changed. 12
It is more than simply our modern
good teeth that we are anxious to display.
As a symbol of cultural aspiration, the smiley face captured perfectly
the will to good feeling that has continued to propel us forward to the
The signature Harvey Ball Smiley Face.

(Harvey Ball Smiley Face image
used with permission from
World Smile Corporation.)
present day. That this symbol was created by an advertising agent

offered, almost, as a gift — is all the more fitting. For few figures in con-
temporary Western society play as central a role in perpetuating the
prospect of perpetual pleasure. If advertising can be said to be the busi-

ness of selling dreams, the dream now is often a variation on the theme
of happiness — at all times, in all places, in all things. Have a Coke and
a smile. Indulge in "happy hour," savor "genuine satisfaction." Or
spend a weekend, as the national branding campaign of Aruba tempts,
13
on "happiness island," the island "where happiness lives." Whether
the invitation is to experience pleasure through consumption itself or
to enjoy, by association, one of the many attributes we tend to con-
nect with good feeling — victory, self-esteem, love, familial harmony,

relaxation, sex, success, or infinite other possibilities — the invitation
is largely the same. It is an invitation to travel, to go where all is calm,

14
and beauty, and luxury, to go where one is happy.
Who can deny that we have traveled far? To examine the indexes
for the consumption of food, housing, medical care, recreation, travel,
Double Happiness cigarette advertisment, Hong Kong, 1995.

© Viviane Moos/CORBIS.
466 Happiness
domestic services, and a thousand other categories over the last one
hundred years is to learn, incontrovertibly, how much better off we
15
are materially than any people in the history of the world. Not only
do we have the means and the wherewithal to entertain ourselves in
infinitely more ways, but we can do so for much longer. The average life
expectancy for men and women in the United States has shot up from
46.3 and 48.3 years, respectively, in 1900 to 74.1 and 79.5 in the year
2000. In the European Union, the average life expectancy in 2002 was
75.5 years for men and 81.6 years for women, an increase of roughly
thirty-three years since the beginning of the twentieth century. 16 Those
who enjoy bemoaning their fate must acknowledge that on average they
can do so for far longer and in far greater comfort than ever before.
And yet to conclude from this data that human beings in the West
are growing progressively happier as a direct result of material and sci-
entific advances would be a mistake. Careful surveys conducted in the
United States since 1950 show that the number of Americans describ-
ing themselves as "happy" has remained virtually constant at 60 per-
cent, while the number characterizing themselves as "very happy" has
actually declined from 7.5 to 6 percent. Meanwhile, the incidence of

unipolar depression seems to have risen sharply. And though much of
this increase may simply be due to the fact that we are better able, or
more willing, to diagnose depression than ever before, it would none-

17
theless be rash to assume that human happiness is steadily on the rise.
Nor does it take statistical data to arrive at this conclusion. It was

Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, who cautioned against the pre-
sumption that technical and material progress alone would bring hap-
piness in its wake. "One would like to ask," he observes:
Is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal

increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I
please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hun-

dreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible
time after a friend has reached his destination that he has
come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does
it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously
reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection in
women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening

the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that
18
might be added to benefits of this kind. . . .
Freud took none of this for granted. But he responded that in terms
of happiness, "most of these satisfactions follow the model of the
'cheap enjoyment' extolled in the anecdote — the enjoyment obtained
by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night
and drawing it in again." "If there had been no railway to conquer
distances," Freud continued,
my child would never have left his native town and I should
need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the
ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not

have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a
cable to relieve my anxiety about him. 19
And so on. We should not count on cell phones, in other words — to
take one contemporary advance that both moves us forward and sets
us back, combining convenience and annoyance, pleasure and pain

to make us any happier.
This is a conclusion that would not have surprised Adam Smith, who
knew, as we have seen, that for all their riches, real and apparent,
"baubles" and "trifles" can never bring us happiness on their own. He
likely would not have been surprised, either, by the data collected over
the last several decades by sociologists intent on measuring the reported
satisfaction, or "subjective well-being," of peoples around the world.
This type of inquiry is necessarily imperfect, but the results are still
intriguing. Based on surveys in which people are asked to report on

their personal level of satisfaction ("Taken all together, would you say
that you are happy, very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"), the
data on subjective well-being suggests that although there is some cor-
relation between happiness and material prosperity, it ceases to be a

factor at what, by Western standards, are comparatively low levels.
468 Happiness
People living in poverty report consistently lower levels of subjec-

tive well-being than people who are comparatively better off, as can
be seen from the figures below. When average national annual income
is plotted against average reported happiness on a graph, the curve
shoots up steeply at first. But then a curious thing occurs; it levels off
somewhere around the $10,000-$ 13,000 mark. After that point, a rise
in income seems to produce diminishing happy returns. One of the

leading researchers in the field concludes, "Among advanced indus-
trial societies, there is practically no relationship between income level
and subjective well-being." 20
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a 60
Azerbaijan
• • Latvia
£ 55
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30 J L J L J I I L
1000 5000 9000 13000 17000 21000 25000
GNP /capita (World Bank purchasing power parity estimates, 1995 U.S. $)
Subjective well-being by level of economic development (R = 0.70,

N= 65,p < 0.0000). Source: World Values Surveys; GNP/capita
purchasing power estimates from World Bank, World Development
Report, 1997. Figure courtesy of Ronald Ingelhart.
GNP/Capita
Diminishing happy returns. Figure courtesy of Ronald Ingelhart.
That revealing piece of data has given social scientists great room
to speculate on what does account for the rise and fall of happiness of
cultures after a country has crossed the critical threshold. Why, for
example, do Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, and Norway consistently

report higher average levels of subjective well-being than Japan, Ger-
many, the United States, and France? Is this a function of income
distribution and inequality, the availability of social services, specific
religious or historical traits? Or perhaps, as others have argued, it has

to do with closer family connections, the degree of participation in the
political process, or even better genes. The possibilities are practically
endless —complicated all the more by the fact that such a complex
phenomenon as subjective well-being is decidedly not monocausal.
Sociologists and social scientists, as a consequence, have had a field
day trying to push one pet theory over another. As one might expect,
they have reached no consensus. They probably never will.
It is nonetheless interesting to note how often their apparent cor-

relations tend to echo themes voiced by earlier figures in the history
470 Happiness
of happiness. John Stuart Mill, for one, might take comfort in the fact
that data suggests a link between subjective well-being and various
forms of freedom, even if that data is far from conclusive. 21 Darwin's
contention that family, friendship, and social relations bear strongly
on happiness seems to be borne out by a number of studies, as is the
view expressed by religious observers throughout the ages that there
is a link between happiness and faith. 22 Max Weber might be surprised
to learn that Protestant nations historically report slightly higher levels
of subjective well-being than their Catholic counterparts, and surely

Karl Marx would be abashed by the strikingly low returns of commu-
23
nist and former communist societies. And yet perhaps he, like Smith,
Hume, and many others, would feel vindicated by statistics that show
a strong correlation between overall subjective well-being and satis-
faction in one's work. 24 The likes of Rousseau, certainly, would be

perplexed to learn that it is hard to show a relationship between in-
come inequality and lower levels of subjective well-being. 25 But per-
haps they would take heart in a study that aims to demonstrate a
connection between happiness, active political involvement, and par-

ticipatory democracy in Rousseau's native Switzerland. 26 Finally, it is
not difficult to imagine what Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Freud

might make of the many studies that seem to indicate a precipitous
recent rise in depressive disorders in cultures devoted to the pursuit

of happiness.
Based as they are on the analysis of (self-) reported feelings, studies
of subjective well-being make no claims to objectivity. The difficulty of
isolating individual causal factors and identifying with precision the

outcomes they might determine guarantees a built-in margin of error
and plenty of room for political and ideological disagreement. Like
Bentham's felicific calculus, modern "happiness studies" are not an
exact science. And so when critics attempt to use them to uphold bold
and sweeping conclusions to press particular policy agendas —proclaim-
ing the "loss of happiness in market democracies," as one author does, 27
or the superior temper of a bygone age, as some politicians are wont to
do —we should be highly skeptical. Indeed, for reasons that I hope this
book has made clear, there is good reason to be skeptical, or at least

cautious, of all conscious efforts to promote what George McGovern

called, in the 1972 presidential elections, a "politics of happiness." For
almost always such claims appeal to a deep and vulnerable desire — to
an intense, enduring, but often poorly understood human longing to be

healed of the dissatisfactions of being human. That desire —and the
faith in its fulfillment —may be the source of noble aspirations and great
accomplishments. But it can also be the cause of terrible suffering.
Which is not to suggest that we should simply turn our back on
good feeling, blithely tolerating unhappiness that is not, in Freud's
phrase, "ordinary." John Stuart Mill put the matter well. In response
to the objection that unhappiness is endemic to life and that there-
fore we should learn to live with it, he answered, "Unquestionably it
is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nine-

teen twentieths of mankind, even in those parts of our present world
which are least deep in barbarism; and it often has to be done volun-
28
tarily by the hero or the martyr." But that this should be used as an
excuse for the complacent acceptance of avoidable suffering was for
him unconscionable. The moral imperative of the child of the En-

lightenment remained what it had been for the more avowedly reli-
gious figures who came before: We are bound to seek the relief of
others' pain.
Mill's observation is as relevant today as it was in the second half of

the nineteenth century. And yet there is a critical difference between
aiming to alleviate senseless suffering and striving to overcome "ordi-
nary unhappiness," the restlessness and longing inherent to being
human. And here we would do well to pay heed to some of our recent
cultural indicators and to reflect on the pressures they create. Is there
not something deeply ironic, we might ask, about the international
publishing success of a book entitled The Art of Happiness: A Handbook
for Living, written by a Buddhist? Its author, the Dalai Lama, is by all
accounts a wise and kindly man. But the fundamental revelation of

the Buddha, the first of his "Four Noble Truths," is that all life is suf-
fering. Somehow this seems to have been forgotten.

In fairness to the Dalai Lama, his book is no more incongruous than
a 1990 work by the evangelical Christian Billy Graham, The Secret of
472 Happiness
Happiness, or R. L. Kremnizer's The Ladder Up: Secret Steps to Jewish

Happiness, or the many other titles that one could cite from centuries-
old religious traditions now pressed into service at the altar of the truly
modern god. And of course these works are positively restrained when
one compares them to the torrent of secular titles that now pour regu-
larly from the publishing houses of the West. Count, if you can, 14,000
Things to Be Happy About and 33 Moments of Happiness, or mark the calen-
dar to find happiness on the 30-Day Plan. You can take the short route,
101 Ways to Happiness, or the long route, One Thousand Paths to Happi-
ness, which apparently is an "emerging science." Add up the 1 Strate-
gies for Wealth and Happiness with America's "foremost business
philosopher," or learn to eat to be happy with The Book of Macrobiotics:
The Universal Way of Health, Happiness, and Peace. It is a "proven fact" that
happiness can be found in feng shui astrology, certainly in love, and
most definitely in the power of dianetics. For those who like to go
slower, there are Baby Steps to Happiness, but rest assured that Infinite
Happiness, Absolute Happiness, Everlasting Happiness, and Happiness That
Lasts are still within your reach. Happiness Is a Choice, it seems, and
Happiness Is a Choice for Teens. But then again, Happiness Is Your Destiny,
Happiness Lives Within You, Happiness Is No Secret, Happiness Is a Serious

Problem. And never forget that happiness is also a Healthy Life and a
Kitchen in Maine, that you can have Happiness Without Death, Happiness
Without Sex, or happiness in Home Business. There is Compulsory Happi-
ness, Dangerous Happiness, happiness for Black Women Only, and Gay Hap-
piness. And now you needn't confine joy to old standards like cooking
or sex but can experience the Joy of Juicing, the Joy of Not Working, the
Joy of Yiddish, the Joy of Weight Loss, and the joy of almost anything else
you might imagine. In short, Find Happiness in Everything You Do. 29
The very prevalence of these titles is a sign that all is not well. But
imagine what would happen if any of these books were actually to de-
liver what they promise. As the novelist Will Ferguson has speculated
in a wickedly funny satire, Happiness", life as we know it would cease to
exist. Certainly a good many people —from bartenders to therapists to
Hollywood executives —would be out of work. Fortunately for them,

there seems little danger of this happening anytime soon.
It is easy, and probably healthy, to laugh. And yet the joke comes at
a price, paid for in pain. In part the necessary expense of the human
creature, who still exists somewhere between beast and god, our suffer-
ing in its current form goes beyond the simple restlessness and anxiety
of longing — the "noble disquiet" that has always haunted human be-
ings. we have steadily added another since the age of
For to that burden
Enlightenment: the unhappiness of not being happy. Collectively, we
possess more than ever before, and still we long, expecting to be happy,
and are saddened when we are not. And though in some respects this
suffering is the ultimate luxury —the indulgence of those whose most
pressing needs have been satisfied — it is, very
for that wide- reason,
spread and acute in the affluent societies of the West. It may be com-
forting for some to believe that the anxious pursuit of happiness is a
peculiarly American affliction, and in some ways, no doubt, this is true.
But the forces that drive this pursuit are pervasive in Western culture,
and they are being exported rapidly to other parts of the globe. 30
Is not this desperate longing for good feeling — this frantic, frenzied
pursuit — a symptom of the evaporation of meaning, or the belief in

meaning, in other ends? Long ago, Aristotle concluded that the human
telos could not be pleasant distractions and amusements,
Dept, Bezet Bag (Global Happiness),

2000, San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art. Gift of Bert Zuidema,
© Dept.
—
474 Happiness
"
^Mfe —ii. * ~
-^^*^B^^B
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Robert Rauschenberg, Happiness,

1994, San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. Gift of Felissimo,
© Robert Rauschenberg/Licenced
Jr
byVAGA, New York, NY.
for it would be absurd if the end [of life] were amusement,

and our lifelong efforts and suffering aimed [only] at amusing
ourselves. We choose practically everything for some other
end —except for happiness, since it is [the] end —but serious
work and toil aimed [only] at amusement appears stupid and

excessively childish. Rather, itseems correct to amuse our-
selves so that we can do something serious. .
31
We should rest and regenerate ourselves, Aristotle believed — take

pleasure and relaxation, find amusement and relief in order to pre-
pare ourselves for serious endeavors, not so that we might work with
renewed energy toward the final goal of more pleasure and good feel-
ing. Even David Hume, who was so appreciative of the utility of dis-
traction, never thought that backgammon — or golf, or a weekend in
Biarritz —was an end in itself. Is not such a life — as Aristotle believed
and Beckett concurred — really somewhat "absurd"?

Yet in order to act otherwise, to undertake "serious" endeavors, liv-
ing life according to virtue or virtues, we must first decide what those
endeavors should be. And that is precisely the problem for many in
the contemporary world who find it hard to set long-term goals other
than good feeling, to chart meaningful narratives that give hope, con-
viction, and purpose to their lives. How ironic in this connection, if
also telling, as the critic Andre Comte-Sponville has observed, that

happiness, "that subject so central for so long to the philosophical tra-
dition, has been almost completely abandoned by contemporary phi-

losophers, or at least by those who have dominated the second half of
32
the twentieth century." Engrossed in language games and analytical
analysis, deconstruction and hermeneutics, professional philosophers
have largely ceded the Greeks' great question —What constitutes the
good life? — to popular psychologists, advertising executives, and other
peddlers of good feeling. The unwillingness to even grapple with sub-

jects that for centuries dominated the discussion of the constituents
of happiness —duty and purpose, virtue and truth — is indicative of a
broader crisis of confidence in reason's ability to set the final goals of

our pursuits. Some still find sustenance in faith, whether derived from
religion or from the Enlightenment, its heir. But "as the light of faith
grows dim," Tocqueville anticipated, "man's range of vision" will grow

more circumscribed. And when citizens "lose the way of relying chiefly
on distant hopes, they are naturally led to want to satisfy their least
33
desires at once." Hence the impatience for pleasure, the restless-
ness for good feeling that powers so much of modern life, potentially
propelling us toward the very world that Huxley once feared.
This is by no means an idle fear. Consider the pioneering work car-
ried out by the behavioral geneticist David Lykken and his Dutch
colleague Auke Tellegen, first published in 1996. 34 Drawing on de-
cades of research, the two men analyzed data pertaining to the long-
term mood, behavior, and character traits of some three thousand
identical and fraternal twins. What they found is that in the case of
identical twins — twins who share an exact genetic endowment
mood, or subjective well-being, was remarkably similar over time, re-
gardless of whether they had been raised together or separated at

476 Happiness
birth. This was not the case with fraternal twins —whose genetic en-
dowment differs — strongly suggesting that genes rather than circum-
stances were the critical factor in establishing the happiness "set

point." At the time, Lykken and Tellegen were prepared to specu-
late from the data that the degree of the heritability of the set point
of mood might be as high as 80 percent, with Lykken observing else-
where that "trying to be happier is like trying to be taller" — in a
word, pointless. 35
Though he has since qualified that claim —and has
even, amusingly, written a "how-to" book on achieving joy and con-
tentment — his estimation of the heritability of happiness has only
36
grown. "Nearly 100 percent of the variation across people in the
happiness set point seems to be due to individual differences in

genetic makeup," he writes. 37 Others who study the heritability
of happiness put the figure somewhat lower but rarely at less than
50 percent. Just as Darwin observed that "some dogs and horses are
ill-tempered, and easily turn sulky; others are good-tempered and

these qualities are certainly inherited," a growing consensus among
scientists has come to see human beings, too, as predisposed to
cheeriness or crankiness, melancholia or joy, depending on the state
of their genes.
It should be stressed that this research is only in its beginning stages.
Scientists have not yet isolated a "happiness marker" in our DNA, and
it is clear that no single gene of this type exists. Instead, there are
probably dozens, even hundreds, that play a role in determining the

natural endowment of the set point of mood. 38 Moreover, as a chas-
tened Lykken and many of his colleagues who study happiness take
pains to insist, accepting the heritability of happiness does not mean
that we must simply bow down before the fate of our genes. The inter-
action of inherited traits with environmental factors remains an ex-

tremely complicated process, and it is almost certainly the case that
particular behavior will influence whether we live at the upper reaches
of our set range or toward the bottom. "The true formula is not Nature
versus Nurture," Lykken writes, "but, rather, Nature via Nurture." We
can go along at the mercy of what he calls our "genetic steersman," or
we can make efforts to help guide the helm. 39
Psychologists like Lykken, who make it their business to study
happiness professionally —and to write about their results —have no

shortage of advice about how to do this, some of it surprising, some of
it common sense, some of it conflicting, some of it probably wrong.
They point out the eddies and swirls of downward depressive cycles,
of destructive behavior such as substance abuse, and of correctable de-

viations such as excessive shyness, resentment, or fear. At the same
time, they beckon to the smoother waters of productive activity, of
nurturing relationships, of coming to terms with the past. And they
gesture toward the motivational force of cultivated optimism and the
power of positive thinking. Much of this makes good sense. Yet one
needn't be a cynic to point out that books that promise "authentic
happiness" will invariably sell more copies than those that emphasize
the futility of striving for too much. In their attempts to put a happy
face on the data, upbeat assessments of this kind tend to obscure the
deeper and more unsettling point: that what the ancient Greeks were
prepared to ascribe, in the wisdom of their ignorance, to the gods,
fortune, the luck of birth, or the simple nature of things may well be
the greatest determinant in shaping our happiness after all. As Lykken
and Tellegen summarized, "We are led to conclude that individual
differences in human happiness ... are primarily a matter of chance." 40

But if mood is in many ways fate, and the way we feel in our skin is
overwhelmingly a function of genes, the entire history of happiness
suggests that human beings, in their restlessness, will never simply
accede to a preordained destiny, especially if that destiny leaves some-
thing to be desired. Already, there are signs of a new rebellion against
the unfairness of the genetic lottery that occurs at conception. "We

have entered the golden age of self-medication," proclaims a recent
cover story in the ever fashionable New York magazine. The article re-
ports on the increasingly popular use of mood-altering drugs —from

selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, Zoloft,
and Celexa, to benzodiazepines like Ativan, Xanax, and Klonopin.

This, in itself, is hardly news: The stunning advances in psychophar-
macology carried out since the creation of the first antipsychotic drug,
chlorpromazine, in 1952 have been well documented. 41 We live in a
—
478 Happiness
"Prozac nation," increasingly a Prozac world, and for many millions of
people who have suffered needlessly and without other recourse, this
is a development to be welcomed.
But the article in question recounts a different phenomenon: the use
of psychotropic medication not for therapeutic purposes but for lifestyle
enhancement. "Drugs have become like hair products or cosmetics," the
author notes, in what he refers to glibly as "brain styling."
When you relinquish the idea that your moods and weirdnesses
are a constant, not to be messed with, any mental unpleasant-
ness becomes fair game for treatment with a touch of this, a
milligram of that. And once you start tinkering with things

between your ears, more and more areas that could use fix-
ups tweaking — become apparent. 42
New York magazine, clearly, is no psychopharmacological authority. But

as a barometer of contemporary cultural trends in a city that sets stan-
dards for the world, it is a gauge to be watched. And so when the author
of this piece observes, "The line between medication and recreation
has become blurred," and then asks, "What is really the difference
between fixing ourselves and pleasing ourselves?," we should be lis-
tening. It is a telling question.
In fact, as the distinguished panel of experts of the President's

Council on Bioethics observed in a recently published report, "Beyond
Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness," the time when
we are able to use advances in our understanding of the science of
mood "beyond therapy" —beyond, that is, "the usual domain of medi-
cine and the goals of healing" — is already upon us.
43
There is every
indication that such use will only increase, for precisely the same forces
that have brought us where we are today are taking us there.

To raise concerns about this development is not to adopt a Luddite
stance toward the many dramatic developments in genetic and phar-
macological technologies. Advances in our ability to control and to
correct depression and other forms of needless mental pain hold out
exciting possibilities for the ongoing quest to reduce human suffer-

ing. They are to be encouraged. And yet it is worth considering deeply

the simple fact that there is, and can be, no baseline index of mood,
no objective standard of what it is to feel normal, to experience a "typi-
cal" human balance between pleasure and pain. In the absence of such
a standard, there is every reason to expect that our restless pursuit of
good feeling will exert an ever stronger pressure to define "normal"
happiness upward, pushing the average set point of mood to an ever
higher place. And in a market culture, in which the pharmaceutical

industry is governed like all others by the laws of supply and demand,
there is every reason to believe that those who develop, research, and
sell psychotropic drugs will respond to, and feed, this very pressure.
Already, in the intense multibillion-dollar competition to manufacture

and market antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications, one can
see evidence that the line separating therapy from lifestyle enhance-
ment has been crossed. Again, one needn't be a cynic to appreciate
that the same market forces that operate in the material world are at
play in the market of the mind. The lure of happiness will find a com-
fortable place in the buying and selling of medication to alter mood. It
already has.
The prospect of actually manipulating our genes to enhance our
happiness is admittedly further off —but not that much further. And
here, there will be similar pressures to improve on the handiwork of
nature. For who is to say that another's pain is simply what must be
suffered, that another man, another woman, is, or will be, happy
enough as made? In societies that value happiness in all things, will
we really decree that others must be "victims" of the fate of their

genes? Given the present cultural mood, this seems unlikely.
But when, and if, human beings decide to take this fateful step in
the quest to live as gods, they should know that in doing so, they will
be leaving a piece of their humanity behind. For to judge by the yearn-
ing and pursuit —the noble restlessness — that has driven Western
culture for the past several thousand years, there are certain things
that human beings will never know — certain riddles they will never
answer — if they are to remain mere mortals. The holy grail of perfect
happiness is one of those things, and like that precious mythic relic,
—
480 Happiness
said to have gathered blood from the side of the son of man, it, too,
may exist only in our minds, a deliverance cup and a chalice to hold
our pain. To take that cup — to answer the riddle, to break the spell
would be to sacrifice something of ourselves. We may well discover
that the knights who dare to do so are less like the brave crusaders of
lore than like Cervantes's knight of the sad countenance, Quixote, who
learns at the end of his journeys that the road is better than the arrival.
Acknowledgments
One of the
portunity
great pleasures of writing this book has been the op-
has afforded to talk with people from many differ-
it
ent walks of life about a subject that concerns us all. I recall, with
fondness, the retired diplomat at the Council on Foreign Relations
who recounted to me his perfect moment of happiness: driving
through the former Soviet Union in the 1950s in a plastic convert-
ible. A young scholar from Prague described happiness as an onion:
When you peel it, the center disappears, and when you slice it, you
cry. There was the exotic dancer who mused, while dancing, that
happiness is family and friends; the Viennese fitness instructor who,

in broken English and without full appreciation of the force of his
words, described happiness as "a good fuck"; my dear dinner com-
panion Leslie Teicholz, who listened to my laments over curry and
then outlined the history of happiness on the back of our menu; the
delightful mother of a delightful woman, Melissa Erico, who declared
that happiness is "ridding oneself of demons." Finally, I remember
my friend, the painter Sebastien King, as he lay dying of cancer at
age thirty-five. Happiness, he said with an enigmatic smile, is an open

window.
482 Acknowledgments
—
Many others regrettably, too many to mention here have shared —
with me their poignant reflections, adding to my insight and to my
stock of happy memories. I am grateful. I am grateful, as well, to John
Merriman, Jon Butler, Jane Levin, Frank Turner, and Maria Rosa
Menocal, who graciously arranged for me to teach at Yale University
on several occasions at short notice, buoying my spirits and my bank

account. Tony Judt has been a font of ever generous assistance and
ever sage advice. He and Jair Kessler made the Remarque Institute at
New York University a happy place to spend a year, and then some.
The many kind people at the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom
Menschen in Vienna offered a six-month haven during the upheavals
that followed September 11, providing me with Gemutlichkeit and in-
tellectual sustenance. Pascal Dupuy and his wife, Anne, have long
done the same a la maniere franco -ecossaise. And most recently, my col-
leagues at Florida State University have offered similarly enriching
fare, with a generous helping of southern charm.
Jeanine Pepler memorably helped to get this project off the ground,
and my literary agent and longtime friend, Tina Bennett, has been
quite simply a joy and a marvel to work with in every possible way.
Morgan Entrekin and Stuart Proffitt each provided more publishing
insight and editorial acumen than any young author has the right to
expect, and Brando Skyhorse skillfully shepherded both me and the
manuscript through production. Erich Eichman at the Wall Street Jour-
nal, Alex Starr at the New York Times, Jenny Schuessler at the Boston Globe,
Alessandro Stille at Correspondence magazine, Jim Miller at Daedalus, and
Steven Lagerfeld at the Wilson Quarterly all gave me the opportunity to
work out some of my ideas in print. Peter Buijs of the Jewish Historical
Museum in Amsterdam shared with me his research on Dutch happi-
ness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Professor Jill
Kraye kindly did the same with her work on happiness in the Renais-
sance. Kate M. Ohno, assistant editor of the papers of Benjamin
Franklin at Yale University, aided me with research on Franklin's con-
ception of happiness and also allowed me to consult her own reflec-
tions on the subject, and Joyce Chaplin at Harvard offered timely
advice and valuable insight on Franklin's true thoughts on happiness.
Acknowledgments 483
Valerie French of American University very kindly read my chapter on

the ancient world with a classicist's eye. And many thanks are due to
Katherine Connor Martin, Anoush Terjanian, Grant Kaplan, Amanda
Fritz, Joe Horan, and Alexander Mikaberidze, who provided indispens-
able research assistance at various stages, as well as to Leslie Jones,
Christine Giviskos, and the dozens of archivists, curators, and research-
ers at the many museums I have consulted, who provided friendly and
efficient help in locating and obtaining art and illustrations. The final
revisions to the manuscript were carried out in the garden oasis of the
Columbia Institute of Scholars in Paris, a perfect place to complete

one's happiness. My thanks are due to Mihaela Bacou, Danille Haase-
Dubose, and Charles Walton for their generosity.
An immensely talented trio of young historians whom I have the

privilege to call my friends —David A. Bell, David Armitage, and D.
Graham Burnett — all did their best to keep me honest (without, I fear,
complete success) with their careful readings of the manuscript. Mark

Juergensmeyer and Mark Lilla listened and advised; Max Boot listened
and grinned; and Geoffrey Cowley grinned and listened, as I, in turn,
listened and learned. David Greenberg helped to plot pursuits and

kindly shared his knowledge of many things, as did Jeffrey Freedman
and the European history reading group at Yeshiva University.
On a personal note, Father John McGuire; my godparents, Douglas
and Roseline Crowley; and Dr. William Sommer each looked after my
happiness according to their skills and my needs. Old family and
new —McMahons, Matsons, and Burkes —provided warm and wel-
coming bases from which to mount my expeditions and forays. Finally,
my dear friends Michael Friedman and James Younger and my new

wife, Courtney, have proved themselves steady partners — in this and
many other pursuits.
NOTES
Preface
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy ofWorld History. Introduction: Reason

in History, Second Draft (1830), trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1975), 78-79.
2. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W.
Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 27.
3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans, and ed. James Strachey,
intro. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 41.
4. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library,
1994), 78.
5. Those interested in the comparative sociology of subjective well-being will
find useful introductions in Ed Diener and E. M. Suh, Subjective Well- Being Across
Cultures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Ruut Veenhoven, World Database
Press, 2000);
of Happiness, www.eur.nl/fsw/research/happiness; and Darrin M. McMahon, "De-
veloping Happiness," in Correspondence: An International Review of Culture and Society
10 (Winter 2002-2003).
6. Some initial insightful reflections on this enterprise may be found in Anna
Wierzbicka, "Happiness in Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Perspective,"

Daedalus 133, no. 2 (Spring 2004).
7. Howard Mumford Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1953), 63.
8. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, eds. Kerry McSeeney and Peter Sabor (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 145.
9. The foundational statement of the "Cambridge School" remains Quentin
Skinner's classic essay, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,"
486 Notes
History and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53. On the history of emotions, see Barbara H.
Rosenwein, "Worrying about Emotions in History," American Historical Review 107
(2002): 821-845, and Peter N. Stearns with Carol Z. Stearns, "Emotionology:
Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards," American Historical
Review 90 (1985): 813-816. Both Annabel Temple-Smith, at the University of
Queensland, and Marco Roth, at Yale, are currently writing dissertations on the
role of happiness in literature.
10. Cited in Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the
British Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 2000), 88.
Introduction
1. Herodotus, The History, 1.30. All citations from Herodotus are taken from
the fine translation of The History by the late David Grene (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987).
2. Ibid., 1.33.
3. See Aristotle's allusions in the Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (In-
dianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 13.44.
4. Cornelius de Heer, Makar, Eudaimon, Olbios, Eutychia: A Study of the Semantic
Field Denoting Happiness in Ancient Greek to the End of the Fifth Century B. C (Amsterdam:
Adolf M. Hakkert, 1969).
5. "Hymn to Apollo," lines 465-466, in the Loeb Classic edition, Hesiod,
Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1998), 357.
6. "Hymn to Hermes," lines 249ff., in ibid., 381.
7. Hesiod, Works and Days, line 826, in Gregory R. Crane, ed., The Perseus Project,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, May 2004.
8. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1985), 180. See, in general, the section "Daimon," 179-182.
9. Herodotus, The History, 1.32.
10. Ibid., 1.30.
11. Ibid., 1.31.
12. Ibid., 1.32.
13. Ibid., 1.86. I have altered Grene's translation slightly here, substituting
"happy" and shortening the syntax. The term in
for "blessed" in the first citation
both sentences which Grene translates exclusively as "blessed." For rea-
is olbios,
sons that I have indicated, however, the use of "happv" is not inappropriate.
14. Ibid., 1.86 and 1.91.
15. Semonides of Amorgos, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," in Greek Lyrics,
trans. Richmond Lattimore, 2nd edition (Chicago: Universitv of Chicago Press,
1960), 11-12.
16. Horner,//^/, 17.446.
17. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, act 4, scene 4, final lines. The
speaker is Lucentio.
18. Jackson Lears, Somethingfor Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking Press,
2003).
Notes 487
19. Dennis Prager, Happiness Is a Serious Problem (New York: HarperCollins,

1998). See chap. 1, "Happiness Is a Moral Obligation."
20. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 13.37.

21. Cited in Burkert, Greek Religion, 181.
22. Aeschylus, The Persians, part 2, strophe 2, trans. Seth Benardete, cited in
Charles Freeman, The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World (New
York: Penguin, 1999), 244.
Chapter One
1. Oswyn Murray, "Life and Society in Classical Greece," in John Boardman,
Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray, eds., The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 244.
2. Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New York: The
Free Press, 1991), 3-4.
3. Simon Hornblower, "Greece: The History of the Classical Period," in The
Oxford History of Greece, 156-157.
4. Pericles's celebrated "funeral oration" is recorded in Thucydides, The His-
tory of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Dutton, 1950),
book 2, chap. 37.
5. Ibid., book 2, chap. 38.
6. Murray, "Life and Society in Classical Greece," in The Oxford History of Clas-
sical Greece, 259.
7. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, book 2, chap. 41.
Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Betton-
8.
son (London: Penguin, 1984), book 18, chap. 3, 301.

9. The other major source of information on Socrates is provided by his con-
temporary and friend Xenophon (c. 430-354 bce) in a number of writings, chiefly
the Memorabilia, the Symposium, and the Apology, collected and translated in volume
4 of the Loeb Classic edition of Xenophon's works, translated by O. J. Todd.
10. 278 E, 279 A. The Greek word here is not eudaimonia
Plato, The Euthydemus,
but euprattein, "doing well." It is clear from the context, however, that the expres-
sion is used synonymously with eudaimonia. See Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics, Old and
New (Ithaca, N.Y.:' Cornell Univ. Press, 1999), 35-36, esp. note 20.
11. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Tom Griffith (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1989), 205 A. In the citations from the Symposium that follow, I draw
principally on Griffith's translation and text, which includes the original Greek. In
certain cases, where noted, I have made alterations, as I do here, using the classic
translation of Benjamin Jowett by way of comparison.
12. See, for example, the Gorgias, 472 C, and the Republic, 352 D.
13. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1985), 163.
14. Ibid.
15. Jon D. Mikalson, Ancient Greek Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 92.
16. Euripides, The Cyclops, ed. David Kovacs, lines 170-171, in Gregory R.
Crane, ed., The Perseus Project, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, February, 2005.
.
488 Notes
17. Cited in Peter Levi, "Greek Drama," in The Oxford History of Greece, 199.
18. Alcman of Sparta, "Maiden Song," in Greek Lyrics, trans. Richard Lattimore,
2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 33-34.
19. Euripides, The Cyclops, lines 495-502.
20. A fine summary of the recent scholarship on the symposium may be found
in Oswyn Murray, ed., Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990). See also James N. Davidson, Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming
Passions of Classical Athens (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), esp. 43-49.
2 1 Eubulus is cited and discussed along with the tossing of furniture in David-
son, Courtesans & Fishcakes, 47-48.
22. On the hetaera and prostitution in ancient Athens, see Davidson, Courte-
sans and Fishcakes, 73-136.
23. See Davidson, Courtesans & Fishcakes, 312-315. On the range of Greek philo-
sophical responses to the issue of pleasure, see J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor,
The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).
24. Xenophanes of Colophon, "The Well-Tempered Symposium," in Greek Lyr-
ics, IA-1$.
25. Ibid, 25.
26. On Plato's (and Socrates's) general thinking about the institution of the
symposium, see Manuela Tecusan, "Logos Sympotikos: Patterns of the Irrational in
Philosophical Drinking: Plato Outside the Symposium," in Murray, ed., Sympotica,
238-260.
27. Plato, The Protagoras, 347 D, in Gregory R. Crane, ed., The Perseus Project,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, February 2005.
28. Plato, Symposium, 180 B.
29. Ibid., 186 B, 188 D-E, 189 D.
30. Ibid., 195 A-B.
31. Ibid., 186 A-B.
32. Ibid., 193 C-D.
33. Ibid., 202 E.
34. Ibid., 203 D-E.
35. Ibid., 203 A.
36. Ibid., 200 E.
37. Ibid., 202 C.
38. Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and revised by C. D. C. Reeve
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 490 B.
39. Cited in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Anchor Books,
1989), 149. The line is taken from the preface to the fourth edition of Freud's Three
Essays, published in 1920.
40. Plato, Symposium, 211 C.
41. Ibid., 211 D. See the Republic, 490 B, and the Phaedrus, Z49-Z51.
42. Plato, Phaedrus, 256.
43. Plato, Symposium, 213 D-216 E, 218 B.
44. Tecusan, "Logos Sympotikos" 241.
45. Plato, Apology, 36 D.
46. Plato, Symposium, 219 C, 221 C-D.
47. Plato, Republic, 559 C, 561 A, and 562 D.
48. This is the phrase of Julia Annas. See her enlightening discussion of Plato,
Notes 489
happiness, and the quest to become godlike in Platonic Ethics, chap. 3, as well as
her general study, The Morality of Happiness (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1993).
49. Plato partially acknowledges this dilemma in the Phaedrus, 249-250, where
he attempts to account for it by speaking explicitly of the transmutation of the
soul. All souls,he suggests, have beheld "true being" before passing into human
form. But "all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world." Only those
few who retain glimmer of the light of the former world will thus be drawn to the
a
genuine happiness that is synonymous with the good. This doctrine would be devel-
oped at length by Plato's third-century successor Plotinus, whose Neoplatonic spiri-

tuality influenced Saint Augustine, among others.
50. Symposium, 205 D.
51. Coleridge cited in Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London:
Flamingo, 1999), 492.
52. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1985), 1.1.
53. Ibid., 1.51.
54. Ibid., 1.81.
55. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.5, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon
(New York: Random House, 1941).
57. Ibid., 1.7, 1.73.
58. Ibid., 1.73.
59. Ibid., 1.43.
60. Ibid., 1.81.
61. See, especially, Aristotle's Politics 7.1-7.3 for Aristotle's discussion of hap-
piness in the context of political rule.
63. Ibid., 13.37-13.43.
64. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 55. My thinking about Aristotle and happiness
more generally is indebted to this rich study.
65. The one exception, the sect of the Cyrenaics, proves the rule. Distinguish-
ing themselves by denying any final end to human life at all, the Cyrenaics vowed
to live like their founder, Aristippus of Cyrene in Libya, only for momentary plea-
sures. If that aspiration seems modern today, to the ancients, it was retrograde
a willful abdication of philosophy's quest to discern order in the world, and to
define our place within it. Happiness was the wave of the future, and, Cyrenaics
aside, lovers of wisdom joined unanimously in its pursuit.
66. Cited in Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hel-
lenistic Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 102. My argument
in this section is indebted to Professor Nussbaum's careful study.
67. Cited in ibid., 14.

68.Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991; first published 1925), 2:127,
111.
69. Epicurus, "Vatican Sayings," no. 47, in The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal
Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Fragments, trans, and ed. Eugene O'Connor (Amherst,
N.Y.: Prometheus, 1993), 81.
490 Notes
70. Epicurus, "Letter to Menoeceus," in The Essential Epicurus, 63.

71. Cited in Laertius, Lives, 2:195.
72. Seneca, "On the Happy Life," in Moral Essays, trans. John Basore, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992; first published 1932), 2:115.
73. See Cicero's discussion in the "Tusculum Discussions" in On the Good Life,
trans, and intro. Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 1971), 58-59.
74. See the definitions of "stoic" and "epicure" in Webster's New Collegiate
Dictionary.
76. Epicurus, "Vatican Sayings," no. 33, in The Essential Epicurus, 80.
77. Epicurus, "Ethical Fragment," no. 69, in The Essential Epicurus, 99. See the
virtually identical "Vatican Sayings," no. 68.
78. "Vatican Sayings," no. 4, in The Essential Epicurus, 11.
79. Seneca, "On the Happy Life," 129-131.
80. Cited in Laertius, Lives, 2:217.
81. Epictetus, The Discourses, ed. Christopher Gill, trans. Robin Hard (London:
J. M. Dent, 1995), book 3, chap. 24, 207. My analysis here draws on V J. McGill,
The Idea of Happiness (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 49-57.
82. Epictetus, The Discourses, book 3, chap. 30, 204.
83. Cicero, "Tusculum Discussions," 63.
84. Plato, Symposium, 177 B.
85. Xenophon, Memorabilia, book 2, 1.21. Prodicus's original text was lost, but
significant sections of it are recorded by Xenophon, from which I cite here.
86. This citation is taken from an English translation of the original Greek made
by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftsbury, at the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century. The work "The Picture of Cebes" is included in Cedes in England:
English Translations of the Tablet of Cebesfrom Three Centuries with Related'Materials, intro.
Stephen Orgel (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1980), 74.
87. On the work's textual history in the early Renaissance, see Cebes' Tablet, ed.
Sandra Sider (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 1979). For a selection
of the many paintings based on the work, see Reinhold Schleier, Tabula Cebetis
(Berlin: Mann, 1973).
Chapter Two
1.Michael Grant and Antonia Mulas, Eros in Pompeii: The Secret Rooms of the
National Museum of Naples (New York: Bonanza Books, 1982), 109.
2. On this theme, I have drawn on the work of David L. Thurmond, Felicitas:
Public Rites of Human Fecundity in Ancient Rome (Ph.D. diss., University of North Caro-
lina at Chapel Hill, 1992), 57-58.
3. See the account in Plutarch, "Sylla," Plutarch s Lives, the Dryden transla-
tion, ed. Arthur Hugh Clough, intro. James Atlas, 3 vols. (New York: Modern Li-
brary, 2001), 1:636.
4.On the goddess Felicitas, see the article "Felicitas" in Charles Daremberg
and Edmund Saglio, eds. Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques et romaines, 5 vols. (Paris:
Notes 491
Hachette, 1877), 1:1031-1032; and J. A. North, Roman Religion (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 32-33.
5. Samuel Ball Platner, The Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome, 2nd rev.
ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1911), 229-230, 394; Samuel Ball Platner, A Topo-
graphical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 207;
Martin Henig and Anthony King, eds. Pagan Gods and Shrines of the Roman Empire
(Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1986), 41.
6. See "Felicitas" in Daremberg and Saglio, eds. Dictionnaire des antiquites, 1 103 1 :
Depending on which of the various Roman calendars one consults, the primary
festival days for Felicitas seem to have been October 9 and July 1.
7. Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace), Ode III. 16 (To Maecenas), in The Odes
of Horace, bilingual edition, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1997), 211.
8. Horace, Satire II. 2, in Satires and Epistles, trans, and intro. Niall Rudd (New
York: Penguin Books, 1987), 89.
9. Horace, Epode II (Beatus ille), in Horace: The Complete Odes and Epodes, trans.
David West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4.
10. Horace, Ode 11.10 (To Licinius), in Odes of Horace, 127.
11. Ibid.
12. Horace, Ode II. 2 (Avarice), in Odes of Horace, 107.
13. Horace, Satire II. 6, in Satires and Epistles, 116.
14. Horace, Ode III. 29 (To Maecenas), in Odes of Horace, 253. 1 have used the
Dryden translation here, in place of that of David Ferry.
15. Horace, Satire II. 6, in Satires and Epistles, 116.
16. Horace, Ode 1.31 (A Prayer), Odes of Horace, 83.
in
17. Horace, Epode XVI (Altera iam territur), in Complete Odes and Epodes, 19.
18. Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Georgics,book 2, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid
1-6, Loeb Classic edition, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 169-171. Virgil's fourth eclogue
contains a similarly lavish picture of the Golden Age.
19. Horace, Satire LI, in Satires and Epistles, 39.
20. Ibid., 43.
21 Augustine, Concerning the City of GodAgainst the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson,
intro. John O'Meara (London: Penguin Classics, 1984), 161-162. The worship of
Felicitas is discussed esp. in part 1, book 4, chaps. 18-25.
22. Ibid., 165.
23. My account of Perpetua's life and martyrdom draws heavily on Joyce E.
Salisbury, Perpetuus Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman (New
York: Routledge, 1997) and B. D. Shaw, "The Passion of Perpetua," Past & Present
139 (May 1993): 3-45.
24. To be precise, one should note that in the year 180, twelve Christians were
beheaded for treason by order of the Roman governor in Carthage. They were not,
however, executed in the arena. On the persecutions in general, see the classic
study by W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a
Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (New York: Anchor Books, 1967).
25. The "Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas," in The Acts of the Chris-
tian Martyrs, trans, and intro. Herbert Musurillo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000),
492 Notes
125-126. The witness was the anonymous editor or author of the account of
Perpetua's last days, and most likely male. See Salisbury, Perpetual Passion, 70, and
B. D. Shaw, "The Passion of Perpetua," esp. 20-21.
26. On Christianity as the "Worship of Sorrow," see Thomas Carlyle, Past and
Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 155
(chap. 4, "Happy"). Carlyle also uses the term in a slightly different connection in
Sartor Resartus.
27. 2 Corinthians 6:8-10. All subsequent references to scripture are taken from
the New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), unless otherwise noted. Occasional alterations in the translation,
based on other accredited versions of the text, have been made where indicated.
28. See, for example, the discussion in Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of
Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
29. See the G. Johannes Botterwick and Helmer Ringgren,
article "ashre," in
Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, trans. John T. Willis, rev. ed. (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1974), 445-446; and David J. A. Clines, ed.
The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press,
1993), 1:436-437.
30. Similarly, Job declares, "My foot has held fast to [God's] steps; I have kept
his way and have not turned aside" (Job 23:11).
31. '"ashre," in Botterwick and Ringgren, eds. Theological Dictionary of the Old
Testament, 446.
32. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 118.
33. This is from the Syriac Book of Baruch, cited in Walzer, Exodus and Revolu-
tion, \l\-\ll.
"Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas," 107.
34.
See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in
35.
Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 76; and Frederic
J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 38-39. Due in large part to its belief that
the Holy Spirit continued to impart new revelations to visionaries, Montanism was
deemed a heresy around the year 200.
36. See Salisbury, Perpetua s Passion, 79-80; and A. J. Droge and James D. Tabor,
A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Fran-
cisco: HarperCollins, 1992).
37. "Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas," 109.
38. Ibid., 111.
39. Ibid., 113.
40. Ibid., 113-115.
41. In addition to the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras, the Shepherd of
Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, Enoch, and the Gospel of Thomas, Perpetua and
her community were familiar with the Pentateuch, the letters of Paul, the Book of
Revelations, and probably some of the writings of the apostolic fathers (in particu-
lar those of Tertullian). They probably did not know the canonical Gospels them-
selves. See Salisbury, Perpetua s Passion, 74, 69, 96, 102.

42. See, for example, Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christian: The Social World
of the Apostle Paul (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983).
Notes 493

44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 119.
46. Ibid., 112-113.
47. Ibid., 121.
48. Ibid., 123.
49. 1 Corinthians 2:9 and 1 Corinthians 13:12. The second citation is that of
the King James translation.
50. Both the statement of beatitude and the injunction to rejoice is mirrored
almost precisely in Luke 6:22-23.
52. Augustine, "On the Birthday of the Martyrs Perpetua and Felicity," Ser-
mon 282, in The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle, part 3, Sermons, vol.
8, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1994), 81. This is one
of three surviving sermons delivered by Augustine on the feast day of Perpetua
and Felicitas. All are undated but were likely delivered between 400 and 410.
53. Ibid.
54. See, for example, Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pince-Coffin (New
York: Penguin, 1987; published 1961), book
first 8, chap. 7, 169.
55. Augustine, Confessions, 118-119.
56. Ibid.
57. Augustine, The Happy Life, trans. Ludwig Schopp (New York: Cima Pub-
lishing, 1948). Augustine had written one other treatise, De pulchro et apto {On the
Beautiful and Fitting) in the year 380 as a younger man, but this was subsequently
lost.
58. Ibid., 57-58, 80-83.

59. Augustine, Happy Life, 183. I have altered the translation here.
60. Augustine, Concerning the City of God, book 14, chap. 28, 593.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 863. Augustine attempts to provide such a list in book 22, chap. 22,
1065.
63. Ibid., book 14, chap. 23, 571.
64. Ibid., book 14, chap. 17, 578. The account of the "Peto-man" is given in
book 14, chap. 25, 588.
65. Ibid., book 19, chap. 4, 852.
66. Ibid., 855.
67. See, for example, ibid., book 5, chap. 17, 205; book 5, chap. 18, 207;
book 4, chap. 25, 166.
68. Ibid., book 22, chap. 24, 1075.
69. Ibid., book 19, chap. 14, 873.
70. Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae, Periphyseon {De Devisione Naturae), ed. Edouard
A. Jeauneau, trans. John J. O'Meara and I. P. Sheldon-Williams, 5 vols. (Dublin:
Institute for Advanced Studies, 1995), 4:232-233.
71. Heiric cited in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1972; 1945), 401.
72. Often repeated, this line is cited in C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A
Short History, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 99.
73. Eriugena, Periphyseon, 4:231.
494 Notes
74. Ibid.
75. "Verses of John the Irishman to King Charles," printed in John J. O'Meara,
Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 185.
76. in O'Meara, Eriugena, 34.
Cited
77. Emphasis added.
Ibid.
78. Cited in ibid., 39. O'Meara provides a particularly concise and cogent sum-
mary of the predestination controversy on pp. 32-51. See, as well, Dermot Moran,
The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 27-35.
79. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete
Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 135.
80. The words are those of the seventeenth-century English hermit and poet
Thomas Traherne. They serve as the epigraph to Isabel Colegate's A Pelican in the
Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002).
81. Cited in Caroline Walker Bynum's magisterial Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The
Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), 36.
83. This is a line from the Roman Catholic Mass that is still in use today.
84. See Louis Dupre and James A. Wiseman, eds. Lightfrom Light: An Anthology
of Christian Mysticism, 2nd ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 2001); and Dom Cuthbert
Butler, Western Mysticism: The Teaching of Augustine, Gregory ami Bernard on Contempla-
tion and the Contemplative Life, 3rd ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 6.
85. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans, and intro. P. G. Walsh (New
86. Ibid., 22, 51.
87. Ibid., 51, 55, 59.

88. Ibid., 59.
89. Ibid., 72.
90. For a concise explanation of this complicated concept in Eriugena's
thought, see Deirdre Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena, Great Medieval Thinkers
Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 95-96, 100-102.
91. "Homily of John Scot, the translator of the Hierarchy of Dionysius," full
text of the manuscript reproduced and translated in O'Meara, Eriugena, 158-176,
which is in turn based on the detailed rendering of the text by Edouard Jeauneau,
Homelie sur le prologue de Jean (Paris: Editions du cerf, 1969). The passages cited
here are from section 1 and section 4 of the Homily.
92. Cited in ibid., section 5.
93. On the diffusion of the Homily, see O'Meara, Eriugena, 158.
94. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner, ed.
and intro. Stephen F. Brown (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 5.
95. Saint Francis cited in Lesley Smith, "Heavenly Bliss and Earthly Delight,"
in Stuart McCready, ed. Discovery of Happiness (London: MQ Publications, 2001),
132.
96. On these popular medieval pastimes, see the lively account provided in
Smith, "Heavenly Bliss and Earthly Delight."
97. See Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001).
Notes 495
98. Cited in Thomas Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. Timothy

McDermott (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), part 3, "The Ladder of
Being," 115-116.
99. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 4.
100. On the theme of the ladder, see Walter Cahn, "Ascending to and Descend-
ing from Heaven: Ladder Themes
Medieval Art," in Santi e Demoni NeWAlto
in Early
Medioevo Centro Italiano di Studi SulPAlto Medioevo,
Occidentale, 2 vols. (Spoleto:
1989), 2:697-732; and R. Crabtree, "Ladders and Line of Connection in Anglo-

Saxon Religious Art and Literature," Medieval Literature and Antiquities: Studies in
Honour of Basil Cottle, eds. M. Stokes and T. L. Burton (Cambridge: Cambridge
101. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and the
Paradiso, trans. John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 2003; 1954), 778.
I have altered this translation slightly.
102. Aquinas, in Selected Philosophical Writings, "The Ladder of Being," 115-116.
103. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978; 1936), 59.
104. See Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), 7.
105. Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, book 3, chap. 48; Summa Theologiae, first
part of part 2, question 3, in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, trans, and ed.
Paul E. Sigmund (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). All subsequent references to
the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae are to this edition unless
otherwise noted.
106. The citation from Corinthians here is from the translation of the King
James Bible.
107. Summa contra
Gentiles, book 3, chap. 63.
See Lawrence F. Hundersmarck, "Thomas Aquinas on Beatitude,"

108. Ibid.
in Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss, eds. Imagining Heaven in the Middle
Ages: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 165-183. "Perfect
pleasure," the "perfect delight of the senses," in Summa contra Gentiles, book 3,
chap. 63.
109. The subject is treated exhaustively in Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the
Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas's Moral Science (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997). See also George Wieland,
"Happiness: The Perfection of Man," in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval
Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism 1100-
1600, eds. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), 673-686.
1 10. Summa contra Gentiles, book 3, chap. 37.
111. Ibid., chap. 63.
112. Summa Theologiae, la. 62. I, cited in Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas,
230.
113. Summa Theologiae, part 2 (first part), question 5.
114. Ibid., question 109.

115. Ibid., question 69.a.2.
116. See Deal Hudson, "Imperfect Happiness," in Happiness and the Limits of
Satisfaction (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 151-168.
.
496 Notes
117. Cited in George Wieland, "The Reception and Interpretation of Aristotle's

Ethics," in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 663.
118. See Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980-1420, trans.
Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), chap. 7, "Happiness, 1250-1280," esp. 184-186. On the theme of happi-
ness in Dante, see Larry Peterman, "Dante and Happiness: A Political Perspec-
tive," Medievalia et humanistica, New Series 10 (1981): 81-102.
1 19. The date was subsequently changed. Today the feast day of Perpetua and
Felicitas falls on March 7, and that of Aquinas on January 28.
1 20. Le Guide du Pelerin de Saint- Jacques de Compostelle texte Latin du Xllesiecle, trans,
and ed. Jeanne Vielliard (Macon: Imprimerie Protat Freres, 1950).

121. For the author's comments on Leonard, see ibid., 55-57 and 27-29, for
his highly biased, if colorful, description of the people of Navarre.
122. Ibid., 37.
123. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales,"The Knight's Tale," part 2, "This world
nys but a thurghfare ful of wo
/And we been pilgrymes, pasynge to and fro"; "The
Nun's Priest Tale," "For evere the latter ende of joye is wo / God woot that worldly
joye is soone ago." Similar sentiments may be found throughout the text.
124. See, for example, Jerold C. Frakes, The Fate of Fortune in the Early Middle
Ages: TheBoethian Tradition (New York: E. J. Brill, 1988).
Chapter Three
1 Lotario dei Seigni, DeMiseria Condicionis Humane, ed. Robert E. Lewis (Ath-
ens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 94. Lewis's fine edition contains both
the Latin original and an English translation. I have made slight changes to the
English rendering where I have seen fit.
2. Ibid., 128, 130.

3. Ibid., 166.
4. Ibid., 204.
5. Ibid., 102. Lucretius makes a similar observation about babies in his De
Rerum Natura.
6. Ibid., 124.
See Jean Delumeau's discussion of the Imitation of Christ in his Sin and Fear:
7.
The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 23-24; and more generally his treatment of
Renaissance bleakness in part 1, "Pessimism and the Macabre in the Renaissance,"
chaps. 1-5.
8. Seigni, De Miseria Condicionis Humane, 92.
9. The title of William G. Craven's Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Symbol of His
Age: Modern Interpretations of a Renaissance Philosopher (Geneva: Droz, 1981) is alto-
gether representative in this respect.
10. Pico della Mirandola, "On the Dignity of Man," trans. Charles Glenn Wallis,
in On the Dignity of Man, ed. Paul J. W. Miller (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 34.
11. See, for example, S. Dresden, Humanism in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret
King (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
Notes 497
12. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. X.

Middlemore (Oxford: Phaidon, 1945), 215.
13. This is cited at the very end of part 4 of Civilization of the Renaissance, "The
Discovery of the World and of Man," 215-216. Burckhardt paraphrases several

preceding lines from this famous passage, beginning in Pico's own voice only at "I
have placed thee" and continuing beyond what I have cited here. In place of
Burckhardt's translation, I have used that of Charles Glenn Wallis, in Paul W.
Miller, ed. On the Dignity of Man, 4-5.
14. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 81.
15. Burckhardt himself mentioned happiness only occasionally and somewhat
inconsistently. Still, the general thrust of his widely influential argument was to
emphasize the Renaissance's rehabilitation of growing awareness of
life and its
human potential within it. Not many subsequent

critics found in
surprisingly,
Burckhardt the basis for the view that a positive attitude toward happiness was
integral to the time. See Charles Trinkaus, "The Happy Humanist, a Modern Cre-
ation," in Adversity's Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1940).
16. See Peter Burke, "The Myth of the Renaissance," The Renaissance, 2nd ed.
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 1-7.
17. Pico, "On the Dignity of Man," 1-3, 9.
18. Ibid., 6.
19. Ibid., 7.
20. See, for example, Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 18-25; and Charles Trinkaus, In
Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Lon-
don: Constable & Co., 1970), 1:174, 320.
21. Pico della Mirandola, Heptaplus, trans. Douglas Carmichael, in Miller, ed.
On the Dignity of Man, 125-126.
22. Ibid., 144. The citation is from 2 Corinthians 3:5: "Not that we are com-
petent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from
."
God. . .
23. Pico, Heptaplus, 151-152.

24. Ibid., 151.
25. Ibid., 150.
26. Ibid., 151. Pico's discussion of felicity, perfect and imperfect, is laid out
most thoroughly in the proem to the Seventh Book of the Heptaplus, "Of the Felic-
ity which is Eternal Life."
27. Pico, Heptaplus, 149.

28. Ibid., 153.
29. On Pico's relationship to Aquinas, see Fernand Roulier, Jean Pic de la Mirandole
{1463-1494), Humaniste, Philosopheet Theologien (Geneva: Slatkine, 1989), 565.
30. Pico, Heptaplus, 150.
31. Ibid., 153.
32. Jill Kraye, "Moral Philosophy," The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philoso-
phy, eds. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 306.
33. Roulier, Jean Pic de la Mirandole, 57.
34. For representative examples of all these varieties, see Jill Kraye, "From An-
498 Notes
cient to Modem Happiness: Petrarch to Descartes," in Stuart McCready, ed. Dis-

covery of Happiness (London: MQ
Publications, 2001).
35. Trinkaus, Adversity's Noblemen, 42.
36. Marsilio Ficino, "Quid quod habet gradus, quod est aeterna,"
est foelicitas,
Language Department of the School of Eco-
in The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans.
nomic Science, London, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller, 6 vols. (London: Shepheard-
Walwyn, 1975), 1:173, 177.
37. Leonardo Bruni, "The Isagogue of Moral Philosophy," in The Humanism of
Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts, trans, and intro. Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins,
and David Thompson (Binghamton, N.Y.: Renaissance Society of America, 1987),
271.
38. See the discussion of the Oratio de foelicitate in Trinkaus, Adversity's Noble-
men, 117-118.
39. Salutati, cited in Trinkaus, Adversity's Noblemen, 87.
40. Morandi, cited in Trinkaus, Our Image and Likeness, 291. Morandi was re-
sponding to Giaovanni Garzoni, author of, among other works, De miseria mundi. See
the extensive discussion in ibid., 271-291.

41. Kraye, "From Ancient to Modern Happiness," 146.
42. On the popularity and importance of Roman coin collecting during this pe-
riod, and the vital role of Fulvio, Vico, and Erizzo in particular, see John Cunnally,
Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1999).
43. See Graham Smith, "Bronzino's Allegory of Happiness," Art Bulletin, 66, no. 3
(September 1984): 390-398. The preceding description relies heavily on Smith's
allegorical analysis.
44. Paul Binksi, "The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic
Smile," Art History 20 (1997): 350-374.
45. Cited in Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon
(New York: Harcourt, 2001), 19.
46. On the centrality of Galen and Hippocrates during the Renaissance, see
Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York:
W.W.Norton, 1997), 171.
47. For Renaissance speculators, ever fond of analogies, the alleged correspon-
dence between the humors and the elements provided ample scope for conjecture
about the role of environment in shaping mood.
48. See Lawrence Babb, Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melaneholia in English Lit-
erature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1951), 7,
56-58.
49. We now know that the passage in question (the Problemata, XXX, 1 ) was most
likely the work of Theophrastus. See Hellmut Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker
in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1966), 60-62.
50. Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life {Liber de Vita), trans. Charles Boer (Wood-
stock, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1994), 8. The full title of the more literal Ital-
ian translation of the Latin original reads, "Perche malinconici sono

i geniali, e quali
malinconici siano cosi e quali al contrario." See chap. 5 of De Vita, ed. Albano Bioni
and Giuliano Pisani (Padova: Edizioni Biblioteca dell'Immagine, 1991), 22.
51. See Winfried Schleiner's careful study, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the
Renaissance (Wiesgaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991); and Babb, Elizabethan Malady.
Notes 499
52. John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum,
1994), 463.
53. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. and intro. Holbrook Jackson
and William H. Gass (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 20, 120-121.
54. See the concise account in Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven:
A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 5, "The
Pleasures of Renaissance Paradise."
55. Lorenzo Valla, De Voluptate, On Pleasure (later entitled On the True and False
Good), trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch, intro. Maristella de Panizza
Lorch (New York: Abaris, 1977), 305.
56. Ibid., 305, 317.
57. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice, intro. A.H. T. Levi (New York:
Penguin, 1971), 78. The
borrowed from Sophocles's play Ajax.
line is
58. See Erasmus, the Enchiridion; or, Handbook of the Militant Christian, trans, and
intro. John P. Dolan (Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides Publishers, 1962), esp. 75-79, "The
Crown of Wisdom Is that You Know Yourself." The reference to "Saint Socrates"
appears in the 1522 colloquy Convivium religiosum.
59. Ibid., 137.

60. Thomas More, Utopia, trans, and intro. Paul Turner (New York: Penguin,
1965), 92. The "chief subject of dispute" among the philosophers in Utopia, More
tells us, is "the nature of human happiness" (91). See the extensive discussion in
book 2, 90-98.
61. Martin Luther to Prince Joachim of Anhalt, May 23, 1534, cited and trans-
lated in Preserved Smith, The Life and Letters of Martin Luther (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1911), 322-333. 1 have altered Smith's translation in keeping with the origi-
nal in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 69 vols. (Weimar: Hermann
Bohlan, 1883), 7:65-67.
62. Luther, Sermon for the 19th Sunday after Trinity; Matthew 9: 1-8, in the Ser-
mons of Martin Luther, 5 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1983), 5:198.
63. The classic text is Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis
and History (New York: W. Norton, 1958). W
64. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking
Penguin, 2003), esp. 119-120.
65. Luther, "Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther's Latin Works"
(1545), Luther's Works, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut I. Lehman, 55 vols.
(Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1955-1986), 34:336-337. 1 have altered this
translation slightly in places, based on the "Vorrede zum ersten Bande der
Gesamtausgaben seiner lateinischen Schriften Wittenberg 1545," in Luthers
Werke, 54:176-187.
66. See Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996),
67-68.
67. Luther, "Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther's Latin Works" (1545),
Luthers Works, 34:337. I have altered this translation slightly.
68. Luther, "Vorrede auff die Epistel S. Paul: an die Romer," in D. Martin
Luther: Die gantze Heilige Schrifft 1545 Deudsch auffs new zugerich, eds. Hans Volz and
Heinz Blanke, 3 vols. (Munich: Roger & Bernhard, 1972), 2: 2254-2268, as trans-
lated by Brother Andrew Thornton at the Project Wittenberg site: http://www.
iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/german.bible/rom-eng.txt.
500 Notes
69. See the "Freedom of a Christian Man," in Luther's Works, 31 :360; and "Pref-
ace to the Complete Edition of Luther's Latin Works," in Luther's Works, 34:337.
70. Martin Luther, The Large Catechism ( 1 530) comment on the fifth command-
,
ment. The full text is What Does This Mean?: Luther s Catechism Today,
reproduced in
ed. Phillip E. Person (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1979), 85.

71. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen, 8th ed.,
2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1949), 1:761 (book 3, chap. 7).
72. Martin Luther, "Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians," chap.
1, verse 16 (1535), in The Protestant Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (New York:
Harper & Row, 1968).
73. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). I draw here in particular on part 3,
chap. 13, "God Loveth Adverbs."
74. For an analysis of Calvin's thought in relationship to the question of happi-
ness, see Heiko A. Oberman, "The Pursuit of Happiness: Calvin Between Human-
ism and Reformation," in Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays
in Honor of Charles Trinkaus, eds. John W. O'Malley, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald
Christianson (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993), 251-287.

75. Martin Luther, "A Simple Way of Praying" (1535), cited in Delumeau, Sin
and Fear, 26.
76. Luther, The Large Catechism (1530), comment on the fourth commandment,
in Luther s Catechism Today, 82.
See Luther's extensive discussion of happiness and family life in ibid.
77.
Martin Luther, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, chap. 3, verse 1,
78.
cited in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 26.
79. Luther to Prince Joachim of Anhalt at Dessau, June 12, 1534, cited in
Smith, Life and Letters, 324. Again, I have altered Smith's translation slightly.
80. Martin Luther, Table Talk, 1, number 122, cited in Delumeau, Sin and Fear,
180.
81. Cited in Erikson, Young Man Luther, 245.
82. It is this side of the Protestant experience that is most often emphasized.
For a strong statement of the view that "Calvinism and Puritanism were condu-
cive to despair," see John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritan-
ismand the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
83. Martin Luther, "Sermon for Easter Tuesday" (1524), in The Sermons of
Martin Luther, trans. John Nicholas Lenker, 8 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker
Book House, 1983), 2:305.
84. Calvin, Institutes, 1:776 (book 3, chap. 8). I have altered this translation.
85. Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, 27.
86. My argument here bears comparison with Max Weber's famous account in
the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism regarding the search for outward signs
of salvation in the evidence of worldly prosperity. For a discussion of Weber's views
on happiness, see chap. 7 below.
87. Calvin, Institutes, 1:771 (book 3, chap. 8). I have altered this translation.
88. Cited in Schleiner, Melancholy, 67.
89. See the discussion in Schleiner, Melancholy, 74, and more generally 56-98.
90. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English
Notes 501
Revolution (London: Penguin, 1999; 1972). Professor Hill draws his title from a con-
temporary broadside ballad, "The World Turned Upside Down," published in 1646.
91. Cited in Hill, World, 140-141.

92. Thomas Coleman,
The Christians Course and Complaint, Both in the Pursuit of
Happinesse Desired,andfor Advantages Slipped in that Pursuit: A Sermon Preached to the
Honorable House of Commons on the Monthly Fast Day, August 30, 1643 (London: I. L.,
1643), 8.
93. See, for example, John Greene, A Briefe UnvailingofGodandMans Glory, in

which is 1. A Brief rehearsail of Happinesse ingenerall; 2. How this Happinesse is manifested
by Jesus Christ; 3. The Soules Song of Love (London: Thomas Faucet, 1641), 1.
94. Cited in Hill, World, 339-340. This same citation prompted the eminent
scholar Michael Walzer to muse in passing that "perhaps happiness is simply the
secularized version of religious joy." Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books,
1985), 106-106. Even if only in passing, Professor Walzer had hit upon a profound
insight.
95. Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth; or, A Serious Discourse Touching a Weil-
Grounded Assurance of Men s Everlasting Happiness and Blessedness (London, 1657), Pref-
ace (exact page numbers obscured).
96. Robert Crofts, The Way to Happinesse on Earth Concerning Riches, Honour,
Conjugal/'Love, Eating, Drinking(London, 1641).
97. Given the importance of happiness as a concept in subsequent Western
political thought, a careful study of the use of the term in the context of the En-
glish civil war and the English revolution would make a fine project for an enter-
prising graduate student.
98. Richard Holdsworth, The Peoples Happinesse. A Sermon Preached in St. Maries
in Cambridge, Upon the 21 of March, being the day of His Majesties Happy Inauguration
(Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1642), 2, 5-6. Holdsworth was master of Emmanuel
College and vice chancellor of the university.
99. The argument for this connection is made most forcefully by Richard
Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
100. Peter Laslett, Introduction to John Locke, The Two Treatises of Government,
ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 75.

101. In addition to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which contains
Locke's principal reflections on the subject of happiness, one should see his
minor essay "Pleasure, Pain, and the Passions" (1676), and the two fragments
"Happiness A" (1676) and "Happiness B" (1678), all of which are reproduced in
Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
102. On the relationship between Locke and Newton, see Lisa J. Downing,
"Locke's Newtonianism and Lockean Newtonianism," Perspectives on Science: His-
Social'5 (Fall 1997): 285-31 1; and G. A. Rogers, "Locke's Essay

torical, Philosophical,
and Newton's Principia," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 217-232.

103. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991; first edition 1975), 250-254.
104. See Garry Wills's concisely brilliant analysis in his Inventing America: Jefferson s
Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 241-242.

. .
502 Notes
105. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 258.

106. See Edward A. Driscoll, "The Influence of Gassendi on Locke's Hedo-
nism," International Philosophical Quarterly 12 (March 1961).
107. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ibid., 266.
108. Ibid., 282. Locke's observations in this passage bear an interesting, if
unwitting, relationship to Blaise Pascal's famous statement of the wager in the

Pensees.
1 09. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures, ed.
I. T. Ramsey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 70.

110. Ibid, (emphasis added).
112. Ibid., 269-270.
113. Ibid., 268-269.
114. Ibid., 277.
115. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition
of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), part 1, chap. 11, 57-58,
and part 1, chap. 6, 34-35. On Hobbes's statements on good and evil, see part 1,
chap. 6, 28-29.
117. Ibid., 263. See also 254 ("For as much as whilst we are under any uneasi-
ness, we cannot apprehend ourselves happy, or on the way to it.") and 273.
118. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, eds. Ruth W. Grant and
Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 10.
119. Cited in Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the
British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 100.
120. Locke, Two Treatises, 338 (chap. 8, para. 107). On this theme of "political
happiness," see also Locke's reflections in his minor essay "Civil and Ecclesiasti-
cal Power" (1674), in Locke, Political Essays, 216-221.
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, in Political Writings of John
121 Locke,
ed. and intro. David Wootton (New York: Mentor Books, 1993), 407.
122. Ibid., 411.
123. Richard Allestree, The Art of Contentment (Oxford, 1675), Preface (pages
unnumbered).
124. Ibid., and 1-2.
125. Ibid., and 2-3.
126. Ann Thompson, The Art of Suffering and the Impact of Seventeenth-Century Anti-
Providential Thought (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 170. Pro-
fessor Thompson discusses Allestree's work in particular in the context of this
reconceptualization, showing how the "doctrine of contentment" and the "art of
contentment" evolved as a broader theme in seventeenth-century English theology.
127. Edmund Calamy, The Happinesse of those who Sleep in Jesus; or, the Benefit that
Comes to the Dead Bodies of the Saints Even While They are in the Grave, Sleeping in Jesus
. (London: J.H. for Nathanael Webb, 1662).
.
1 28. A Persuasive to a Holy Life from the Happiness that Attends it Both in
John Ray,
this and in the World to Come (London: Sam Smith, 1700); Thomas Tryon, The
World,
Way to Health, LongLife and Happiness; or, A Discourse of Temperance 2nd ed. (Lon- . . . ,
don: H. C. Baldwin, 1691); England's Happiness Improved; or, An Infallible way to get
Riches, Encr'ease Plenty, and Promote Pleasure (London: Roger Clavill, 1697).
Notes 503
129. Thompson, The Art of Suffering, vii.

130.See Keith Parson and Pamela Mason, eds., Shakespeare in Performance (Lon-
don: Salamander Books, 1995).
131. This theme, in the English context, is treated thoroughly in Maren-Sofie
Rostvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954).
132. See Hale, Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 432.
134. Christophe Plantin's poem in the original (mid-sixteenth century):
Le bonheur de ce monde
Avoir une maison commode, propre et belle,
Un jardin tapisse d'espaliers odorans,
Des fruits, d'excellent vin, peu de train, peu d'enfans,
Posseder seul sans bruit une femme fidele,
N'avoir dettes, amour, ni proces, ni querelle,

Ni de partage a faire avecque ses parens,
Se contenter de peu, n'esperer rien des Grands,
Regler tous ses desseins sur un juste modele,
Vivre avecque franchise et sans ambition,

S'adonner sans scrupule a la devotion,
Dompter ses passions, les rendre obeissantes,
Conserver l'esprit libre, et le jugement fort,
Dire son Chapelet en cultivant ses entes,
C'est attendre chez soi bien doucement la mort.
135. Jonson cited in Rostvig, The Happy Man, 324. The discussion of English
poetry that follows is indebted to Professor Rostvig's fine analysis.
136. Hall cited in ibid., 140.
137. Herrick cited in ibid., 303.
138. Wycherley cited in ibid., 380.
Chapter Four
1 Cited in Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth & Tra-
dition, trans. Matthew O'Connell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 168.
3. Voltaire, Le Mondain (1736). The last four lines of the poem read:
C'est bien en vain que, par l'orgueil seduits,

Huet, Calmet, dans leur savante audace,
Du paradis ont recherche la place:
Le paradis terrestre est ou je suis.
4. Claude-Adrien Helvetius, Le Bonheur, poeme allegorique, in Oeuvres completes

d'Helvetius, 14 vols. (Paris: Chez Didot, 1795), 13:89. On the waning of belief in
504 Notes
Hell, see the standard account by D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1964).
5. On the English pleasure gardens, see Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and
the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), 269-270. On the Palais
Royal, see Darrin M. McMahon, "The Birthplace of the Revolution: Public Space
and Political Community in The Palais-Royal of Louis-Philippe-Joseph d'Orleans,"
French History 10, no. 1 (March 1996).
6. Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 4.
7. [Abbe Pestre "Bonheur," Encyclopedic, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences des

] ,
arts et des metiers, Nouvelle impression en facsimile de la premiere edition de 1751-

1780, 35 vols. (Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann Verlag, 1966-67), 2:322. "Chacun n'a
t-il pas droit d'etre heureux, selon que son caprice en decidera?" For other ex-
amples of the phrase the "right to happiness," see Anne Robert Jacques Turgor,
Deuxieme lettre sur la tolerance (Paris, 1754), and Guillaume Thomas- Frangois Raynal,
Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des Europeens dans les
deuxlndes, 10 vols. (Geneva, 1780), 9:232.
8. For a general introduction to this vast literature, see Robert Mauzi, Videe
du bonheur dans la litterature et la pensee francaises auXVIIIe siecle (Paris: Albin Michel,
1994), and Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Mon-
tesquieu to Lessing, trans. J. Lewis May (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, 1969; 1946),
14-26.
9. Hazard, European Thought, 17.
10. See A. Programme dune Fete Allegorique representee par le Corps des
P. Pochet,
Nobles Cadets de terre de St. Petersbourg, a roccasion de la paix de 1115 avec la Cour
Ottomane, contained in the French National Archives, AN F 1C I 85. The celebra-
tions took place in 1778.
11. Marquise du Chatelet, Discours sur le bonheur, intro. Elizabeth Badinter
(Pairs: Editions Payot & Rivages, 1997), 32.
12. For an insightful rumination on these questions of happiness applied
specifically to the case of women, see Cornelia Klinger, "Vom Schwierig-Werden
der Frage des Glucks in einer Zeit ohne Sinn und Ziel," L'Homme: Zeitschrift fiir
Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 10, no. 2 (1999): 173-192.
13. William Paley, Natural Theology (London: Wilks and Taylor, 1802), 490.
14. [A. J. Durand], Je Veux etre heureux. Entretiens familiers sur la religion (Paris,
1782); Joseph-Aignan Sigaud de la Fond, LEcole du bonheur (Paris, 1782); Philippe

Louis Gerard, La Theorie du bonheur, ou Uart de se rendre heureux (Paris, 1801).
15. [Caroline-Stephanie-Felicite du Crest] La Religion consideree comme Punique
,
base du bonheur & de la veritable philosophic (Paris, 1787).

1 6. See Theodore K. Rabb, The Strugglefor Stability in Early Modern Europe (New

1 7. See Isser Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress, 1 115-1 189
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), esp. 103-109.

18. See, for example, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth
of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of 18th- Century England (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1985), or Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The
Birth of Consumption in France 1600-1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000).
19. Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe, 123-130.
Notes 505
20. Turgot cited in Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet,
and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Press, 2001), 242.
21. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition
of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), part 1, chap. 11, 57-58.
22. Porter, Enlightenment, 22.
23. Denis Diderot, Plan d'une universite pour le governement de Russie, in Oeuvres
completes, eds. Jules Assezat and Maurice Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris: Gamier, 1875—
1877), 3:477.
24. See the classic account of Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation
(New York: Knopf, 1966-69), esp. vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism.
25. Epicurus, "Vatican Sayings," no. 56, in The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal
Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Fragments, trans, and ed. Eugene O'Connor (Amherst,
N.Y.: Prometheus, 1993), 82.
Marquise du Chatelet, Discours sur le bonheur, 32-33.
26.
words and reactions are cited and discussed in Bronislaw Baczko,
27. Voltaire's
Job, Mon Ami. Promesses du bonheur et fatalite du mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 17ff.
28. Vico's ScienzaNuova (The New Science) was first published in 1725. Vico's
work, however, was almost totally unknown beyond his immediate circle until the
nineteenth century.
29. Jeremy Bentham, "Preface to the first edition," A Fragment on Government,
in A Bentham Reader, Mary Peter Mack (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 45.
ed.
30. See Robert Shackleton, "The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number:
The History of Bentham's phrase," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 90, ed.
Theodore Besterman (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1972), 1461-1482; Joachim
Hruschka, "The Greatest Happiness Principle and Other Early German Anticipa-
tions of Utilitarian Theory," Utilitas3, no. 2 (November 1991): 165-177; and David
Blumenfield, "Perfection and Happiness in the Best Possible World," in Nicholas
Jolley, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 381-410.
31 Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson s Declaration of Independence (New York:
Vintage Books, 1978), 150-151.
32. Hutcheson cited in Shackleton, "The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest
Number," 1466-1467.
33. Hutcheson's formulas cited in Wills, Inventing America, 149.
34. [Benjamin Stillingfleet], Irenaeus Kranzovius, Some Thoughts Concerning
Happiness . . . translated from the Original German (London: Printed for W. Webb,
1738).
35. Ibid., 5, 11.
36. Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, trans, and intro. David Young
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 5, 14.
37. It should be noted that Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger in Despotisme orientale
( 1 755) Voltaire in Essaisur les moeurs
, ( 1 756) and Adam Ferguson in An Essay on the
,
History of Civil Society (1767) also touched on themes relating to the history of hap-
piness as conceived by Chastellux, albeit less explicitly.
38. Francois Jean, Marquis de Chastellux, Dela Felicite publique, ou Considerations
sur le sort des Hommes dans les differentes epoques de I'histoire, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Chez
Marc-Michel Rey, 1772), 1:9.
39. Chastellux, De la Felicite publique, 1:10.

.
506 Notes
40. Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, Common Sense, or Natural Ideas Opposed
to Supernatural (Ml 2), in Isaac Kramnick, ed. The Portable Enlightenment (New York:
Penguin, 1995), 145.
41. Ironically, when, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the British demog-
rapher Thomas Malthus sought to argue that overpopulation was the principal threat
to modern societies, he retained the link to happiness, entitling the second edi-
tion of his Essay on the Principle of Population, A View of Its Past and Present Effects on
Human Happiness (London: Royal Economic Society, 1803).
42. Most famously, David Hume in his "Essay on the Populousness of Ancient
Nations" (1742).
43. Helvetius, Le Bonheur, in Oeuvres, 13:90.
Jeremy Bent ham, Deontology, 1.4, in Deontology Together with a Table of the
44.
Springs of Action and the Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Amnon Goldworth (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983), 134 and n. 2. Voltaire makes the same observation in his
article "Bien, Souverain bien," in the Philosophical Dictionary of 1764.
45. Chastellux, De la Felicite publique, 2:10 and 2:54.
46. Bentham cited in Ross Harrison, Bentham (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1983), 38.
47. Abbe Pestre, "Bonheur," 322.
Bentham, A Fragment on Government, "Preface to the first edition," 51.
48.
49. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, eds. J. H.
Burns and H. L. A. Hart, intro. F. Rosen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 11
(chap. 1, section 1).
50. Ibid., 38-41 (chap. 4, sections 1-6).

51. Cited inJohn Dinwiddy, Bentham (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 50. On Bentham's avowal of the impossibility of calculating the intensity
of pleasure, see James Steintrager, Bentham (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1977), 30-31.
52. Bentham, A Table of the Springs of Action, 87. It is not entirely clear that
Bentham used the exact phrase "felicific calculus," although he often spoke of "ap-
plying arithmetical calculation to the elements of happiness" and certainly saw
Newton as his great model. See the discussion in Harrison, Bentham, 138-141.
53. On the genesis and misappropriation of Bentham's phrase, see Harrison,
Bentham, 5.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch

54.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991; first edition 1975), 268-269.
55. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Systeme dEpicure ( 1 750), in Oeuvres philosophiques,
2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 1:376.
56. Denis Diderot, Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron ( 1 779), in Oeuvres
completes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varlot, 25 vols. (Paris: Hermann, 1986),
25:246-248.
57. [Julien Offray de la Mettrie] Le Petit homme a longue queue
, ( 1 75 1 )
58. This is the phrase of another atheist and materialist, the Baron d'Holbach,
du monde physique et du monde moral, ed. Josiane
in his Systeme de la nature, ou des lois
Boulad-Ayoub, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1990) 2:339.
59. On La Mettrie's medical career and its influence on his thought, see
Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1992).
Notes 507
60. On the subject of happiness in the Dutch Republic during the age of
Enlightenment, see Peter Buijs, "De mens is tot geluk geschapen. Naar een
geschiedenis van het geluk in de republiek ten tijde van de Verlichting," Tijdschrift
voor Geschiedenis 108, no. 2 (1995): 188-208.
61. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Moder-
nity 1650-1150 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 708-709.
62. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Man A Machine, trans. Richard A. Watson and
Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 36.
63. Ibid., 32, 65, 50, 41,75.
64. Ibid., 59.
65. Ibid., 29-30.
66. Ibid., 53.
67. Ibid., 58.
68. La Mettrie, UAnti-Seneque, ou Discours sur le bonheur, in Oeuvres, 2:263.
69. Ibid., 2:286.
70. La Mettrie, Systeme de Epicure, in Oeuvres, 1:380. See also L'Art de Jouir
(1751).
71. Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, trans. Willard R. Trask, 12 vols. (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 2:14. 1 have altered Trask's trans-
lation slightly.
72. Ibid., 3:194-195.
73. Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade, "Dialogue Between a Priest and a
Dying Man," in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans, and ed.
Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965), 174.
74. Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, in ibid., 185.
See the discussion in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making ofthe Mod-
75.
ern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 339 and more
generally, 328-340.
76. I make this argument at greater length in my article "From the Happiness
of Virtue to the Virtue of Happiness 400 B.C.-A.D. 1780," Daedalus 133, no. 2
(Spring 2004).
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans, and intro. Peter
France (New York: Penguin, 1979), 81-83.
78. Ibid., 88-89.
79. Philipp Balthasar Sinold von Schiitz, Die gliickseligste Insul auf der ganzen Welt,
oder Das Land der Zufriedenheit (Frankfurt, 1 728).
Rousseau speaks often of Robinson Crusoe in his treatise on education, Emile;
80.
or, On Education, intro. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
81. Frost's two-line poem "An Answer" is cited in Sergio Perosa, From Island to
Portraits: Four Literary Variations (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2000), 2. 1 am grateful to
Professor Perosa for sharing this work with me.
82. Rousseau, Reveries, 88.
83. Rousseau, Emile, 447.
84. Rousseau, Political Fragments, part 6 ("On Public Happiness"), section 3, in
The Collected Writings of Rousseau, eds. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans.
Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly, 8 vols. (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1994), 4:40. On Rousseau's understanding
of happiness in general, see Stephen G. Slakeve, "Rousseau & the Concept of
508 Notes
Happiness," Journal'of the Northeastern Political Science Association 11 (Fall 1978): 27-
45,and Ronald Grimsley, "Rousseau and the Problem of Happiness," Hobbes and
Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds. Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters
(New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 437-461.
85. Rousseau, Reveries, 87-88.
86. Ibid.
88. Rousseau, First Discourse {Discourse on the Arts and Sciences) in The Basic Po-
litical Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress, intro. Peter Gay (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987), 19.
89. Rousseau, The Second Discourse {Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of In-
equality Among Men) , in Basic Political Writings, 81.
91. Rousseau, Lettres morales, in Oeuvres completes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and
Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 4:1112 (Letter 6).
92. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962),
298 (fragment #688).
94. Rousseau, Emile, 80-81. See, similarly, Political Fragments, part 6, 40, and
Second Discourse, part 1.
95. Ibid.
96. Rousseau, Emile, 81-82 and 446.
97. Rousseau, On the Social Contract; or, Essay about the Form of the Republic (first
version, the so-called Geneva Manuscript), in Collected Writings, 4:77.

98. Ibid., 82 (emphasis added).
99. Rousseau, On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right, book 1, chap. 9.
100. Rousseau, Political Fragments, in Collected Writings, 4:41.

101. Ibid., 4:43.
103. Ibid., 137.
104. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson L.L.D., ed. Roger Ingpen, 3 vols.
(Boston: Charles E. Lauriat, 1925), 2:520, 605.
105. Samuel Johnson, "The Vanity of Human Wishes, the Tenth Satire of
Juvenal Imitated," in The Complete English Poems, ed. J. D. Fleeman (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971), 83.

106. Ibid., 89, 92.
107. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. D. J. Enright
(London: Penguin Books, 1985), 47, 45.
108. Ibid., 65. On the complexities of Johnson's views on happiness, see Adam
Potkay, The Passionfor Happiness: Samuel Johnson & David Hume (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 2000).
109. Johnson, Rasselas, 87.
110. Cited in Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Gold-
hammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 129 (emphasis
added). Roche comments on the revolutionary message of these works, which for
so long had counseled resignation and patience. "[The new almanacs] taught
people that even humble folk could be happy, so why should anyone remain re-
signed to his fate?" Ibid.
Notes 509
111. Walter Pape, in a World of Misery: A Literary Conven-

"Happy Endings
tion Between and Utopia in Children's and Adult Literature,"
Social Constraints
Poetics Today 13 (Spring 1992): 179-196. I am grateful to Annabel Temple-Smith
of the University of Queensland for bringing this work to my attention.

112. Cited in Porter, Creation of the Modern World, 204.
113. Johnson, Rasselas, 1 16-1 1 7.
1 14. The phrase is that of the English poet Thomas Gray, although the thought
behind it is very old. See Mark Lilla, "Ignorance and Bliss," The Wilson Quarterly 25,
no. 3 (Summer 2001): 64-75.
115. Voltaire, "The Story of a Good Brahmin" (1759), in The Portable Voltaire
(New York: Penguin, 1977), 436-438.
116. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W.
Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 8-9.
117. Ibid., 46.
118. Ibid.
119. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), unified edition, trans.
Werner S. Pluhar, intro. Patricia Kitcher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 736-737.
120. Ibid., 742. In general, see the section "On the Ideal of the Highest Good,
as a Determining Basis of the Ultimate Basis of Pure Reason."
A Modern Rite
See "Lequinio, Joseph-Marie," in J. Fr. Michaud's Biographie Universale

1.
45 vols. (Paris, 1854), 24:243.

ancienne et moderne, nouvelle edition,
2. Archives National F17 A1003, plaq. 3, no. 1263, "Du Bonheur," par
Lequinio, Representatif du peuple envoye dans le Departement de la Charente

Inferieure: prononce dans le Temple de la Verite, ci-devant l'Eglise catholique de
Rochefort, le deuxieme decadi de Brumaire, Tan second de la republique frangaise,
une et indivisible, 1-2.
3. Ibid., 3-4.
4. Ibid., 5.
5. Ibid., 6-8.
6. Ibid., 18-19.
Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror During the French Revolution: A Sta-
7.
tistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 140.
Greer places the number of death sentences handed down by the revolutionary
tribunal of Rochefort between November 1793 and February 1794 at forty. See
also Jacques Duguet et al., La Revolution francaise a Rochefort, 1189-1199 (Poitiers:
Projets Editions, 1989), 74.
8. "Lequinio, Joseph-Marie," in Michaud, Biographie Universale, 24:243-244.
9. Maximilien Robespierre, "Sur l'inculpation de dictature" (25 Septembre
1792), cited in F. Theuriot, "La conception robespierriste du bonheur," Annales
historiques de la revolution francaise 1 92 ( 1 968) 216.
:
10. Systeme de denominations topographiques pour les places, rues, quais, etc. de toutes
les communes de la Republique, par le Citoyen Gregoire (Paris: Imprimerie National,
n.d. [pluviose, year 2]), 14. See also, Branislaw Baczko, "From the Place de la
Revolution to the Place du Bonheur: The Imaginary Paris of the Revolution,"
510 Notes
Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Social Progress, trans. Judith L. Greenberg
(New York: Paragon House, 1989), 280-365.
11. The undated letter from Pochet to Citoyen Benezeque can be found in the
French National Archives, F/lcI/85. The decree of the national convention of
18 Floreal, Year II, instituting the "Fetes decadaires" and listing their individual
themes, can be found in F/lcl/84.
12. "Rapport au nom du comite de salut public, sur le mode d'execution du
decret contre les ennemis de la revolution, presente a la convention nationale,"
13 Ventose an II (March 3, 1794), in Oeuvres completes de Saint-Just, ed. Michele
Duval (Paris: Editions Gerard Lebovici, 1984), 715.
13. On the influence of antiquity on the attitudes and aesthetics of the revo-
lutionaries, see Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 5, 52-53, 273-275; H. T.
Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1937); as well as Lynn Hunt's classic, Politics, Culture, and Class in the
French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
14. Saint-Just, "Rapport au nom du comite de salut public sur les factions de
l'etranger," 23 Ventose an II (March 13, 1794), in Oeuvres completes, 729-730.
15. Lequinio, "Du bonheur," 21-22.
16. Ibid., 18-19.
17. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans, and intro.
Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995).
18. Mona Ozouf, "The Revolutionary Festival: A Transfer of Sacrality," chap. 10
of Festivals and the French Revolution.

19. Chesterton cited in Pascal Bruckner, Leuphorie perpetuelle: Essai sur le devoir
de bonheur (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2000), 55-56. Bruckner suggests but does not
develop in detail the Christian roots of modern happiness in this characteristically
insightful essay.
20. See the still-suggestive account of Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the
Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979;
1932).
21.This is a theme emphasized with particular force by Marcel Gauchet. See
his "Croyances religieuses, croyances politiques," Le Debat 115 (Mai-Aout 2001):
3-14, and, more generally, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Reli-
Oscar Burge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
gion, trans.
22. Bruckner, LEuphorie perpetuelle, 84.

23. Luc Ferry, L'Homme-Dieu, ou le Sens de la vie (Paris: Editions Grasset &
Fasquelle, 1996), 32.
Chapter Five
1. Napoleon Bonaparte, Discoursde Napoleon sur les veriteset les sentiments quilimporte
le plus aux hommes pour leur bonheur (Paris: Baudouin Freres, 1826), 42-43.
d'inculquer
2. Cited in Andy Martin, "Napoleon on Happiness," Raritan 19, no. 4 (Spring
2000), 96.
3. Napoleon, Discours de Napoleon, 36-39.
Notes 511
4. A characteristically sage discussion of the meaning of "Romanticism" is pro-

vided in Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Harper 6c Row, 1979), chap. 1,
"For Lack of a Better Name."

5. Cited in Martin, "Napoleon on Happiness," 14.
6. G. W.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Rea-
F.
son in History, Second Draft (1830), trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975), 85.
7. Cited in Peter Quennell, The Pursuit of Happiness (Boston: Little, Brown,
1988), 111.
8. Heine first uses the term in his Gemdldeaustellung in Paris (1831), and then
again in the foreword to Gestandnisse (1854). Jean-Paul Richter uses it in his Selina
oder die Unsterblichkeit (1827). See William Rose, From Goethe to Byron: The Develop-
ment of "Weltschmerz" in German Literature (London: George Routledge, 1924).
9. On Goethe's own interesting reflections on happiness, see T. J. Reed,
"Goethe and Happiness," in Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, ed. Goethe Revisited: A Col-

lection of Essays (New York:Riverrun Press, 1984); and Julie D. Prandi, "Dare to be
happy/" A Study of Goethe's Ethics (Latham, Md.: University Press of America,
1993).
10. See, for example, the discussion in D. G. Charlton, "Prose Fiction," in vol.
1 of The French Romantics, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),
169. Jean Deprun, La Philosophic de la inquietude en France au XVIIIe siecle (Paris:
J. Win, 1979) is also suggestive.

11. Cited Quennell, Pursuit of Happiness, 57.
in
1 2. Cited in Anne Vincent

Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimen-
tality in France, trans. Teresa Bridgeman (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 106.
13. Cited in Eleanor M. Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist: Moods and Themes of Melan-
choly from Gray to Keats (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 320. The
gloomy phrase is from Byron's poem "Darkness."
14. Letters of April 30, 1817, and March 3, 1817, cited in Poetes du Spleen:
Leopardi, Baudelaire, Pessoa, ed. Philippe Daros (Paris: Champion, 1997), 61, 66.
15. Cited in Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 141.
16. Cited in Marilyn Gaull, Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1988), 199; and M. H. Abrams, Natural'Super'naturalism: Tradition and Revo-
lution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 328.
17. Keats to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, ed.
Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press , 1958), 1:186.
18. Wordsworth, "The Prelude," Book 2, lines 448ff.
19. Shelley to Lord Byron, September 8, 1816, cited in Abrams, Natural Super-
naturalism, 328.
de Musset, La Confession d'un enfant du siecle, in Oeuvres completes en prose,
20. Alfred
eds. Maurice Allem and Paul Courant (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 78. This autobio-
graphical work was first published in 1835.
21. Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," Canto the Third, XXXIV.
22. Emerson cited in Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation
on Hope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 51.
23. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans.
512 Notes
and eds. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967),

33 (Sixth Letter).
24. Heinrich Heine, "The Romantic School," in The Romantic School and Other
Essays, eds. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1985), 3.
25. Jean-Paul Richter cited in Honour, Romanticism, 295.
26. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
147.
27. "Natural Supernaturalism" is the heading of book 3, chap. 8, of Sartor
Resartus. It is also the title of M.

H. Abrams's still-remarkable Natural Supernatural-
ism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). Abrams's chief concern is the "seculariza-
tion of inherited theological ideas" in Romantic thought. As will become apparent,
I am deeply indebted in this chapter to his interpretation.
28. Heine, "Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,"

in The Romantic School and Other Essays, 134.
29. On the way in which aesthetic culture since Wordsworth can "be said to
maintain an antagonism to the principle of pleasure," see Lionel Trilling's still-
trenchant essay "The Fate of Pleasure," in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and
Learning (New York: Viking Press, 1965; 1955).
30. Byron cited The Gloomy Egoist, 321.
in Sickels,
31. Schiller cited in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 443.

32. Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, April 21, 1819, in Letters, 2:102.
33. Ibid.
34.Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 276.
35.M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradi-
tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).
36. Holderlin cited in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 238.

37. Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures 1818-1819, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London:
Pilot Press, 1949), Lecture 5, 179.
38. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass.
39. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 146.
40. Cited in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 289.
41. Cited in Honour, Romanticism, 73.
42. On Coleridge's dream of the pantisocratic community, see Richard Holmes,
Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Flamingo, 1989), esp. 59-89.
43. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings,
ed. Grevel Lindop (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 38-39. On this
subject more generally, see Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Lon-
don: Faber, 1968).
44. Baudelaire, "Le Poeme du haschisch," in Oeuvres completes, ed. Claude
Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1:438.
45. Shelley in a letter to Maria Gisborne, October 13 or 15, 1819, cited in
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 447.
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 434.
46. Shelley cited in
This translation of Beethoven's adaptation of Schiller's poem is taken, with
47.
several alterations, from Nicholas Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 109.
48. Strindberg cited in Alessandra Comini, "The Visual Beethoven: Whence,
Notes 513
Why, and Whither the Scowl?" in Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg, eds.
Beethoven and His World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 309,
n. 1. The account of Beethoven that follows draws heavily on Professor Comini's
wonderful article.
49. Comini, "The Visual Beethoven," 290.

50. Ballanche cited in Vincent Buffault, The History of Tears, 106.
51. Beethoven and Rossini cited in Comini, "The Visual Beethoven," 288.
52. Ludwig van Beethoven, Briefwechsel Gesamtausgabe, ed. Siegard Brandenburg,
7 vols. (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1996), 1:123.
53. Ibid.
54. Cited Hollingdale's "Introduction" to Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays
in R. J.
and Aphorism, and ed. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1970), 31.

trans,
55. Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, 4 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne, ed.
Arthur Hiibscher (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 4:119 (Colera-Buch, no. 89).
56. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Willand Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne,
2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 1:318.
57. Ibid., 2:573.
58. Ibid., 1:318.
59. Cited in Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43. I have made ample use of this masterful,
and masterfully brief, summary by one of the world's leading Schopenhauer scholars.
60. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2:209.
61. Ibid., 2:513-514.
62. Ibid., 2:573.
63. Ibid., 2:575.
64. Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, 4:36 (Cogitata I, no. 52).
65. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2:634.
66. Ibid., 2:584.
67. Ibid., 2:583-586.
68. Ibid., 2:580, 444.
69. Ibid., 2:633.
70. Ibid., 2:638.
71. Ibid., 1:411.
72. Ibid., 2:636.
73. Ibid., 2:639.
74. Ibid., 2:508.
75. Ibid., 1:196.
76. Ibid., 1:196.
77. Ibid., 1:257. See, in general, vol. 2, chap. 39, "On the Metaphysics of Music."
78. Ibid., 1:264.
79. These are the words of the Secession building's architect Josef Olbrich, as
well as those of the noted Viennese architect Otto Wagner, as cited in Carl E.
Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), 215-
217.
80. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, 254.
81. The following citations from the exhibition catalog are taken from Gerbert
Frodl, Beethovenfries (Salzburg: Verlag Galerie Welz, 1997), 14.
.
514 Notes
82. The line from Stendhal can be found in his On Love. Baudelaire cites him,
with minor reservations, in the section "Beauty, Fashion, and Happiness," in The
Painter of Modern Life.

83. Richard Wagner, Beethoven, in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, 8 vols., trans.
William Ashton Ellis (London: 1897), 5:120.
84. Ibid., 5:120.

85. Ibid., 5:86-87 and 5:102.
Chapter Six
1 The Path to Riches and Happiness, by the late Doctor Benjamin Franklin (Dublin:
William Watson, n.d. [1800]).
2. On God's desire that human beings be happy, see esp. Franklin's "Articles
of Belief and Acts of Religion" (1728), in Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Other
Writings, ed. Russell B. Nye (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 163-165.
3. Cited in William Temple Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Ben-
jamin Franklin, 3 (London, 1817-1818), 2:94-95.
vols.
4. "Queries to be asked the Junto," in Benjamin Franklin, Writings (New York:
Library of America, 1987), 210-211.

5. Poor Richard (1776), cited in Writings, 1238 ("Virtue and happiness are
mother and daughter").

6. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Norton Critical edition, eds. J. A. Leo
Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 108 (part 3).
7. Franklin, "Poor Richard Improved, 1 755," in Writings, 1283. "Content is the
Philosopher's stone, that turns all it touches into Gold" (1758).

8. "Glittering generality" is the title of the first chapter of Howard Mumford
Jones's The Pursuit of Happiness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1953).
9. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson s Declaration of Independence (New York:
Vintage, 1979), xiv.
10. On the making of a specifically American "civil or civic religion," see the
provocative new history by Walter A. McDougal, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A
New American History 1585-1828 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), esp. 321-370.
11. Jan Lewis, "Happiness," in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolu-
tion, eds. Jack P. Green and J. R. Pole (Cambridge, England: Blackwell, 1994), 641.
On the discussion of happiness in America, see also Ursula M. von Eckardt, The
Pursuit of Happiness in the Democratic Creed: An Analysis of Political Ethics (New York:
Frederick Praeger, 1959).
12. Thomas Jefferson
to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in The Basic Writings of Thomas
Foner (New York: Halcyon House, 1950), 802.
Jefferson, ed. Philip S.
13. On the range of these positions, see Lewis, "Happiness," 642-643.
14. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 269.
15. Mason cited in Jones, Pursuit of Happiness, 12. On Jefferson's knowledge of
Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and its relationship to the
Declaration of Independence, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the
Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1997), 125-134.
16. James Otis cited in Ibid., 4.
Notes 515
17. Madison cited in Ibid., 21.

18. All these state constitutions may be consulted freely online.
20. My discussion of "pursuit" borrows from Wills, Inventing America, 245.
22. Robert Breck, The Surest Way to Advance a People's Happiness and Prosperity, as
it was delivered in a Sermon at Shrewsbury, a New Plantation, on Wednesday, June 15, 1120
(Boston: S. Kneeland, 1751), 3, 11; Robert Breck, The Only Method to Promote the
Happiness ofa People and their Posterity, a Sermon preached before the Honourable the Lieut.
Govemour, the Council, and Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New-
England, May 29th 1128 (Boston: B. Green, 1728), 22.
23. Noah Hobart, Civil Government, the Foundation of Social Happiness, A Sermon
Preached before the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut, at Hartford, on the Day of
Their Anniversary Election, May 10th, 1150 (New London: T. Green, 1751), 3, 6-7,
24-25.
24. Benjamin Lord, Religion and Government subsisting together in Society, Necessary
Compleat Happiness and Safety, a Sermon Delivered in the Audience of the General
to their
Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut, on their Anniversary Election at Hartford, May 9th,
1151 (New London: Timothy Green, 1752).
25. Samuel Dunbar, The Presence of God with His People, their Only Safety and Hap-
piness. A Discourse delivered at Boston in thepresence of His Excellency the Govemour, Thomas
Pownall, esq. . . . (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1760).
26.True Pleasure, Chearfulness, and Happiness, The Immediate Consequence of Religion
and concisely proved (Philadelphia: William and Thomas Bradford, 1767), 12.
fully
The author of this amusing work points out that Christ performed his first miracle,
turning water into wine, at a wedding feast where "jollity and joy" was the domi-
nant mood. The choice, it seems, was significant, for "he who condescended to
work a miracle upon such an occasion, cannot be justly imagined to have been a
gloomy, melancholy spectator only, of such joy and happiness."
Adams cited in Jones, Pursuit of Happiness, 68. Interestingly, Adams also ob-
27.
serves,"We too often mistake our true happiness, and when we arrive to the en-
joyment of that which seemed to promise it to us, we find that it is all an imaginary
dream, at best fleeting and transitory."
28. Jefferson to Dr. Joseph Priestley, April 9, 1803.
29. Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822, in Basic Writings, 114.
30. These include Bernard Bailyn, J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon Wood, and Lance
Banning.
31 Jefferson to William Short, October 3 1 , 1 8 1 9, in Basic Writings, 764. Jefferson
continued, "I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as
containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have
left us."
32. The case for Hutcheson's influence is made most forcefully in Wills, In-
venting America, esp. 149-164 and 240-255. On the importance of Burlamaqui, see
Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1978).
33. in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern
Hutcheson cited
Identity(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 261.
34. Most notably, Garry Wills.
.
516 Notes
35. On Jefferson's admiration for The Wealth of Nations, see Jerry Z. Muller,
Adam Smith in His Time and Ours (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1993), 15.
36. Hume cited in Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (New York: Pica-
dor, 2001), 87. In what follows, I draw heavily on Ignatieff s analysis.
37. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books,
1992), 269 (book 1, section 7).
38. Hume cited in Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 89.
39. Hume, "The Sceptic," in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F.
Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 176.
40. Ibid.
41 On Jefferson's reading of Hume and Smith, see Wills, Inventing America, 202.
42. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie
(Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 181.
43. Ibid., 149. See also the astute analysis of Smith's views on happiness in
Charles L. Griswold, Jr., Adam
Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 217-227, from which I have drawn.
44. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 185.
45. Ibid., 183-184.
46. Jefferson, cited in Charles B. Sanford, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1984), 36. Franklin, Poor Richard
(1746), in Writings, 1238.
47. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), 1:341.
48. Hannah Arendt, "The Pursuit of Happiness," in On Revolution (New York:
Penguin, 1990; 1963), 135.
49. Ibid., 139.
50. This spurious phrase is reproduced on countless websites and online quo-
tation sources.
51. See Jones, Pursuit of Happiness, 29-61. On the subject of happiness in con-
temporary litigation, see Brendan I. Koerner, "What's Your Happiness Worth?"
Legal Affairs, January-February 2004.
52. Cited in Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History
of Political Ideas (New York: Vintage, 1958), 180-181 (emphasis added).
53. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., trans. George Lawrence,
ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988), 2:535-536.
54. Ibid., 1:242.
55. Ibid., 1:243.
56. Ibid., 2:536-537.
57. Ibid., 2:530.
58. Ibid., 2:531.
59. Ibid., 2:536.
60. Ibid., 2:531.
61. Ibid., 2:538.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 2:536.
64. Ibid., 2:526-527.
65. Ibid., 2:528-529.
Notes 517
66. Ibid., 2:527.
67. Ibid., 1:296-297.

68. Ibid., 2:530.
69. Ibid., 2:543-548.
70. Ibid., 2:547-548.
71. Ibid., 2:527.
72. Ibid., 2:691-692.

Benjamin Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of
73.
the Moderns" (1819), in Political Writings, trans, and ed. Biancamaria Fontana
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 326.
74. Ibid., 327.
John Stuart Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America," in Collected

75.
Works, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 18:54-57.
76. John Stuart Mill, "De Tocqueville on Democracy in America (II)", in Col-
lected Works, 18:178-198.
77 . John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin,
1989), 52.
78. Ibid., 68.
79. Ibid., 68, 111.
80. Ibid., 111-112.

81. Ibid., 112.
82. Ibid., 121.
83. Ibid., 117-118.
The psychological literature on flow was pioneered by, and is summarized
84.
in,Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York:
Harper &
Row, 1990); and Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday
Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
85. John Stuart Mill, "Bentham," (1838) in Dissertations and Discussions Political,
Philosophical, and Historical, 2 vols. (New York: Haskell House, 1973; reprint of the
1859 edition), 1:384.
86. Isaiah Berlin, "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life," in Four Essays on Lib-
erty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 180-181.
87. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 57-58.
88. Mill, "Bentham," 385.
89. Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 9.
90. Ibid., 54, 65.

91. Mill, "The Subjection of Women," in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. and
intro. John Gray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 576.
92. Mill, On Liberty, 57.
93. Ibid., 58-60.
94. Ibid., 64.
Ibid., 71 (emphasis added).
95.
Approximately 5.5 million Germans emigrated to the United States be-
96.
tween 1816 and 1914. See Gunter Moltmann, "The Pattern of German Emi-
gration to the United States in the Nineteenth Century," in Frank Trommler and
Joseph McVeigh, eds. America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three- Hundred-Year
History, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1:14.
518 Notes
97. Cited in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, "Max Weber in America," The American

Scholar 69 (Summer 2000): 105.
98. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott
Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), 53.
99. See Franklin, "A Letter to a Royal Academy" (1781), and "On Choosing a
Mistress" (1745). Both texts are reproduced in the amusing edited volume Fart
Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School, ed. Carl Japikse
(Columbus, Ohio: Enthea Press, 2003).
100. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 53.
101. Ibid., 70.
102. The lines are from verse 12 of Fitzgerald's poem "Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam."
103. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 181-2.
104. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Twentieth Anniver-
sary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 293 (Afterword: 1996). These com-
ments follow a summary and discussion of Weber's Protestant Ethic.
105. Ibid., 237-238.'
106. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 181.
107. Cited in John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy
(New York: Basic Books, 1996), 56, 131.
108. Max Weber, "Die deutschen Landarbeiter" (1804) in Gesamtausgabe,
Abteilung 1, Schrijten und Reden, Band 4, Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat und Volkswirt-
und Reden 1892-1899, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Rita

schaftspolitik. Schriften
Aldenhoof (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1993), 339-340.

109. Ibid.
110. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociol-
ogy, trans, and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1958), 143.
111. Ibid., 143, 156.
112. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. and intro.
David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 37.
Chapter Seven
1. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (New York: New
York University Press, 1965), 157. The following citations from this work are all
drawn from the critical chap. 4 of book 3, "Happv."
2. Ibid., 155.
3. Ibid., 156.
4. Carlyle, Past and Present, "Democracy," 210.
5. Ibid., 149. Carlyle uses the phrase "dismal science" not in Past and Present
but in the "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," first published in
Fraziers Magazine in 1849.
6. Ibid., 148.
7. Ibid., 139-140.
8. Engels's review, written in January 1844, was first published in the Deutsch-
Franzosische Jahrbucher in that vear. All citations refer to the translation of the text
Notes 519
by Christopher Upward, available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/

works/1 844/df-jahrbucher/carlyle. htm
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York:
Harper Torchbook, 1967), 253.
15. Schopenhauer cited in David Simpson, ed. The Origins of Modern Critical
Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticismfrom Lessingto Hegel (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1988), 331.
16. Schopenhauer, "Preface to the Second Edition," The World as Will and Rep-
resentation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2vols. (New York: Dover, 1969), l:xxi.
17. Peter Singer, Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), vii.
18. H ege 1 ,Phenomenology of Mind, 251-252.

19. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason
in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 78-
79, 69.
20. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, part 3, section 2, para. 183.
21. Ibid., para. 191.
22. Hegel cited in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolu-
tion in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
23. Cited in ibid.
24. Cited in Robert P. Sutton, Les Icariens: The Utopain Dream in Europe and
America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 50.
25. Robert Owen, The Book of the New Moral World ( 1 842) (New York: Augustus
M. Kelley Publisher, 1970), part 7, 64.
26. Owen, The Book of the New Moral World, part 7, 69. The discussion of
animals is included in part 3, chap. 15, 80-81. For Owen's general emphasis
on happiness, see J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen
and the Owenites in Britain and America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969),
48.
27. Henri de Saint-Simon, "Le Nouveau christianisme," in Le Nouveau chris-
tianisme et les ecrits sur la religion, ed. H. Desroche (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 81.
28. Charles Fourier, Theory of Social Organization (1820), online at History

sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/l 820fourier.html
29. Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 95.
30. Saint-Simon, Le Nouveau christianisme, 181.
31. Charles Fourier, "The Vices of Commerce," in The Utopian Visions of Charles
Fourier, Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, trans, and eds. Jonathan
Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971),
116-118.
32. Fourier cited in Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His
World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 197.
33. John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness (London, 1826), 6.
34. George Orwell, "Can Socialists Be Happy?," Tribune, December 20, 1943.
520 Notes
35. Bentham cited in James Steintrager, Bentham (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1977), 30.
36. Citation from "Quatre opinions sur la religion" (1808) in Le Nouveau chris-
tianisme, 65. Saint-Simon's theory of history is worked out in detail inthe second
volume of L 'Industrie (1817) and in LVrganisateur (1818).
37. Cited in The Utopian Visions of Charles Fourier, 201.
38. Owen, The Book of the New Moral World, Introduction, xxi, and part 7,
chaps. 1, 3.
39. Cited in Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 124.
40. See the wonderful account in Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative:
Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1991), 279-281.
41. Both quotes cited in Christopher H. Johnson, Utopian Communism in France:
Cabetandthelcarians, 1839-1851 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 94-95.

42. Etienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie (Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley Publisher,
1973), 567-568, 574. The work was first published in 1840.
43. Saint-Simon,Le Nouveau christianisme, 149.
Emile Durkheim, Socialism and Saint-Simon, trans. Charlotte Sattler,
44. Cited in
ed. Alvin W. Gouldner (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1958), 191.
45. Gareth Stedman Jones, "Introduction," The Theory of Four Movements, ed.
Stedman Jones, xxvi.
46. Saint-Simon, "De l'ancienne a la nouvelle revelation," in Le Nouveau chris-
tianisme, 50. Saint-Simon made this statement in the context of the breakup of the
Roman Empire, but he frequently noted the similarities between that period and
the present day. See, for example, his comments in the 1808 Introduction aux travaux
scientifiques du XIXe siecle, cited in ibid., 66.
47. These citations are taken from Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto
(1848). The differences between "scientific socialism" and "utopian socialism"
are elaborated on at length by Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, first pub-
lished in La Revue Socialiste in 1880.

48. "Happiness" [25-376-2], The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a translation of the
3rd edition, 31 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1973-1983), 25:48. On the "commu-
nist system of political happiness," see Ghita Ionescu's thoughtful Politics and the
Pursuit of Happiness: An Enquiry into the Involvement of Human Beings in the Politics of In-
(London: Longman, 1984), esp. 133-148.
dustrial Society
49. "Confessions of Marx" (1865), in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka
(New York: Penguin, 1983), 53.
50. HeinrichMarx to his son, March 2, 1837, in The Portable Marx, 10-11.
Marx, "Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession," in Karl
51.
Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 49 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1975), 1:8-9.
52. "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduc-
tion" (1844), in The Portable Marx, 115.
53. Marx, "Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of
Nature," in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1:73.
54. "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduc-
tion," in The Portable Marx, 115. The German reads, "Die Aufhebung der Reli-
Notes 521
gion als des illusorischen Gliicks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklkhen
Gliicks."
55. Marx, "Economico-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844," First Manuscript,
"Alienated Labour," in The Portable Marx, 139.
56. Ibid., 133.
57. Ibid., 136-137.
58. Ibid., 140.
59. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), 2:781-782.
60. Ibid., 782.
61. Marx, "Economico-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844," Third Manuscript,
"Private Property and Communism," in The Portable Marx, 149. On the return or
"leading back" of "man to himself," see also Marx's 1844 essay, "On the Jewish
Question," in which he cites Rousseau directly.
62. Ibid., 150.
63. Cited in Gareth Stedman Jones, "How Marx covered his tracks: The hid-
den link between communism and religion," Times Literary Supplement 51 '5 (June /
7, 2002): 14. In what follows, I draw heavily on this insightful piece.

64. Marx, "The Materialist Conception of History," vol. 1, The German Ideology
(1845-1846), in The Portable Marx, 169.
65. Stedman Jones, "How Marx covered his tracks," 14.
66. Friedrich Engels, "Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith" (1847), in
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 6:96. This short "confession" was not published
until 1969.
67. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253.
68.Poe did not play the Turk himself but only witnessed a virtuoso perfor-
mance Richmond, Virginia. On the story of the automaton, see Tom Standage,
in
The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth- Century Chess-Playing Machine
(New York: Walker & Co., 2002).
69. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 253.
70. Gershom Scholem, cited in Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Poli-
tics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 84.
71. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 254.

72. Ibid., 264.
73. William Morris, News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs, ed. Asa
Briggs (London: Penguin, 1962), 300.
74. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
trans, and eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1958), 143.
Chapter Eight
1. Aristotle, Politics, 1252a and 1280a.
2. These citations are taken from Pico della Mirandola, "Of the Felicity
Which Is Eternal Life," the seventh exposition of his Heptaplus (1489), trans. Douglas
Carmichael, in On the Dignity of Man (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 147-153.
522 Notes
3. "Theriophily" is defined and discussed in George Boas, The Happy Beast in

French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1933), 1-63.
4. Plutarch, "Beasts Are Rational," Plutarch's Moralia, trans. Harold Cherniss
and William C. Helmbold, 15 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1949), 12:517.
5. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 1, chap. 3.
Montaigne, "Man Is No Better than the Animals" and "Man's Knowledge

6.
Cannot Make Him Happy," Apology for Raymond Sebond, in The Complete Essays of
Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1965), 330-367.
7. Bentham cited in Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Mod-
ern World (London: Penguin, 2000), 349.
8. Cited in ibid.
9. Charles Darwin, "Notebook M" (1838) in Charles Darwin s Notebooks, 1836-

1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, trans, and ed. Paul H.
Barrett et al. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 539.
10. Ibid., 550.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 548. Note: < > indicates Darwin's deletion; << >> indicates
Darwin's insertion.
13. Ibid., 546.
14. Ibid., 550.
15. Ibid., 549.

16. Darwin, "Old and Useless Notes," in Charles Darwin s Notebooks, 609. The
passages cited from these notes are all dated "October, 1838."
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Darwin, "Notebook M," 550.
21. Darwin, "Old and Useless Notes," 609.
22. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, ed. Nora
Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 68.
Darwin, "Notebook M," 549.
23.
"Old and Useless Notes," 608.
24. Darwin,
25. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in The Works
of Charles Darwin, eds. Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman, 29 vols. (London:
Pickering &
Chatto, 1989), 21:114 and 22:631, 644. This is the final revised edi-
tion of 1877, which I have used throughout.
26. Darwin, Descent of Man, in Works, 21:73.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
This is the formulation of Robert J. Richards, whose analysis in Darwin and
29.
theEmergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), esp. 217-219, I have followed closely.
30. Darwin, Descent of Man, in Works, 21:109.
31. Ibid., 21:110.
32. Ibid., 21:116.
Notes 523
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 21:118.
35. Ibid., 21:119-120.
36. Ibid., 21:114.
37. Ibid., 21:124-125.
38. Ibid., 21:125.
39. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Pres-
ervation of Favoured Races in the Strugglefor Life, ed. J. W. Burrow (London: Penguin,
1968), 116-119.
40. Ibid., 129.
41. Darwin, Descent of Man, in Works, 21:129-130.
42. Darwin, Autobiography, 88.
43. Ibid., 89.
44. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 391.
For a general overview, see Pinker's section, "The Happiness Treadmill," 389-
393; David M. Buss, "The Evolution of Happiness," The American Psychologist 55,
no. 1 (January 2000): 15-23; and J. H. Barkow, "Happiness in Evolutionary Per-
spective," in N. L. Segal, G. E. Weisfeld, and C. C. Weisfeld, eds. Uniting Psychology
and Biology: Integrative Perspectives on Human Development (Washington, D.C.: Ameri-
can Psychological Association, 1997).
45. Darwin, Autobiography, 89-90.
46. Ibid., 92.
47. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Penguin, 1987), 25.
48. Ibid., 27.
49. Ibid., 14.
50. Cited in Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley
Frisch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 20.
51. Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator," Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 127.

52. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday,
1956), 29-30, 50.
53. Ibid., 102.
54. The citations in this paragraph are all taken from Safranski, Nietzsche, 103—
107.
55. Nietzsche cited in Safranski, Nietzsche, 141.
56. Wagner cited in Safranski, Nietzsche, 95.
57. Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intro. Richard
Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 251 ("Assorted Opin-
ions and Maxims I," no. 169).
58. See Safranski, Nietzsche, 307-308.
59. Ibid., 308.
60. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed.
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 136-137.
61. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 12.
62. Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator," 159.
63. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 94.
64. Ibid., 84, 92, 94.
.
524 Notes
65. Ibid., 93.

66. Ibid., 88.
67. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage, 1968), 236-238. The passages are dated "March-June 1888."
68. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 156-157.
69. Ibid., 54.
70. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 98.
71 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy ofMorality, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-
Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 30.
72. Genealogy of Morality, 32. Nietzsche cites Aquinas, from the supplement to
the third part of the Summa Theologiae, in the original Latin.
73. Heine, Geddnke und Einfalien, cited in The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine,
trans, and ed. Frederic Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), 488. I have made
several slight alterations to this translation after consulting the original.
74. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, 46.
75. Ibid., 46-47.
76. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R. J. Hollingdale,
intro.Michael Tanner (London: Penguin, 1992), 72 ("Thus Spoke Zarathustra,"
section 3). I have altered Hollingdale's translation slightly in several places.
77. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1 1 ("Why I Am so Wise," section 3).
78. Cited in Safranski, Nietzsche, 222.
79. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,
1974), 228-229, 268.
80. Ibid., 37.
81. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, 25.
82. Ibid., 96-97.
83. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, para. 1. I have used here the translation cited in
Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 385.
84. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 530 (fragment 1023).
85. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 224.
87. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 270.
89. Nietzsche, Gay Science, Zl§.
90. Nietzsche cited in Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 262. This is a point that Nietzsche
makes repeatedly in Will to Power. See, in particular, fragments 434 and 704.
91. Freud cited in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Anchor
Books, 1989), 46 n.
92. Freud cited in Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psy-
choanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 13.
intro. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 24.
94. Ibid., 25.
95. This is the well-known argument of Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Thera-
peutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper Row, 1966). &
96. Happiness is the avowed aim of the movement known as "positive
psychology." See Martin R. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive
Notes 525
Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (New York: Free Press,
2002).
97. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans, and ed. James
Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 305.
98. On Freud's original title, see Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, 544.
99. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 24—25.
100. Ibid., 25.
101. Ibid. Freud explains the pleasure and reality principles most thoroughly
in his 1910 paper, "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning."
102. Ibid., 25.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid., 26.
105. Ibid., 26-27.
106. Ibid., 27-28.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid., 27-32.
109. Ibid., 29-30, and 30, n. 5.
110. Ibid., 32.
111. Ibid, 33, 56.
112. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 188. On Freud's comments about happiness to
Fliess, see his letters of January 16, 1898, and May 28, 1899, in The Complete Letters
of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1881-1904, trans, and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff
Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1985), 294, 353.
113. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 32.
114. Ibid., 33.
115. Ibid., 41.
116. Ibid., 34.
117. Ibid., 34-36.
118. Ibid., 37.
119. Ibid., 68-69.
120. Ibid., 97.
121. Ibid, 73.
122. Ibid., 74.
123. Ibid., 34-35.
124. Ibid., 44-45.
125. All citations are taken from the Perennial Classics edition of Aldous
Huxley, Brave New World (New York: HarperPerennial, 1989).
Conclusion
1 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York:
Grove Weidenfeld, 1982), 39. All subsequent citations from the play are taken from
this edition.
2. Cited in Martin ]ay,Adorno (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1984), 19.
3. Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1987), 486 (7.46).
526 Notes
4. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart
Woolf (New York: Collier Books, 1987), 13.
5. Ibid., 13, 66.
6. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, rev. ed. (New York: Washington
Square Press, 1984), 36, 58-67.
7. David G. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness: Who Is Happy —
and Why (New York:
William Morrow and Company, 1992), 48. Myers summarizes this literature, as
does Stephen Braun in The Science of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mood (New
York: John Wiley, 2000), 27-55.
8. See the literature discussed in Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness:
Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potentialfor Lasting Fulfillment (New
York: Free Press, 2002), 47-48.
9. For a concise summary of this research, pioneered by psychologists and
economists like Daniel Gilbert, Tim Wilson, George Loewenstein, and Daniel
Kahneman, see Jon Gertner, "The Futile Pursuit of Happiness," New York Times
Magazine,September 7, 2003.
10. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts (New York: Grove Press,
1961), 50. All subsequent citations are taken from this edition.
1 1. All details on the life of Harvey R. Ball are taken from his obituary by Wil-
liam H. Honan, "H. R. Ball, 79, Ad Executive Credited with Smiley Face," New
York Times, April 14,2001.
12. On the fascination with the Mona Lisa, an image that has itself become a
modern icon, see Donald Sassoon's wonderful Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a
Global Icon (New York: Harcourt, 2001).
1 3. On the central place of happiness in contemporary advertising, see William
Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising: Persons,
Products, and Images of Well- Being (New York: Methuen, 1986).
14. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit ofModern Consumerism (Lon-
don: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
15. Such figures are marshaled concisely for the United States in Stanley
Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
16. U.S. life expectancy figures taken from the website of the National Center
for Health Statistics at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/. European figures taken from the
2002 Eurostat report at http://europa.eu.int/comm/eurostat/.
17. For a cogent summary and analysis of the data, see "Happiness: Has So-
cial Science a Clue?," the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures delivered at the
London School of Economics in March 2003 by the economist Richard Layard.

All three lectures can be consulted in PDF format at http://www.lse.ac.uk/col-
lections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/events/2003/20030 106tl439z001.htm. In
addition, see Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessonsfrom a New Science (New York: Pen-
guin, 1995). For a discussion of the increase in depression and a summary of the
data on Americans' estimation of their own happiness, see Gregg Easterbrook, The
Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random
House, 2003), esp. 163-165.
intro. PeterGay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 40.
Notes 527
19. Ibid.
See Ronald Inglehart, "Globalization and Postmodern Values," in Washington
20.
Quarterly 23 (Winter 2000), 217. A judicious summary of the research on wealth and
well-being is provided by Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi, "Money and Happiness:
Income and Subjective Weil-Being Across Nations," in Ed Diener and Eunkook M.
Suh, eds. Culture and Subjective Well-Being (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 185-
218.
21. See Ruut Veenhoven, "Freedom and Happiness: A Comparative Study in
Forty-four Nations in the Early 1990s," in Diener and Suh, eds. Culture and Subjec-
tive Weil-Being, 257.
See Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Happiness, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,
22.
1987), 71-89 and 165-178.
23. Ronald Inglehart and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, "Genes, Culture, Democracy,
and Happiness," in Diener and Suh, eds. Culture and Subjective Weil-Being, 171-175.
24. Argyle, The Psychology of Happiness, 89-110.
and Diener and Oishi, "Money and Happiness: Income and Sub-
25. Ibid., 186,
jective Weil-Being Across Nations," in Diener and Suh, eds. Culture and Subjective
Well-Being, 205-207.
26. Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the Economy
and Institutions Affect Human Weil-Being (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2001).
27. The book in question is Robert E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market De-
mocracies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).
28. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1998), 62-63.
29. All these genuine titles can be retrieved via a simple search onAmazon.com.
30. A particularly insightful, if bleak, analysis of this situation in the context of
Western Europe is provided in the novels of the French writer Michel Houel-
lebecq. Significantly, one of Houellebecq's early collections of poetry is entitled
La poursuite dubonheur, "the pursuit of happiness." He treats the theme recurrently
in his fiction as well.
31. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1985), 13.23.
32. Andre Comte-Sponville, Le Bonheur, desesperement (Paris: Editions Pleins
Feux, 2000), 10.
33. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., trans. George Lawrence,
ed. J. Mayer (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988), 2:547-548.
P.
34. D. T. Lykken and A. Tellegen, "Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon,"
Psychological Science 7, no! 3 (May 1996): 186-1 89.
35. Ibid., 188.
36. The original claim and the retraction are discussed in David Lykken, Hap-
piness: The Nature and Nurture of Joy and Contentment (New York: St. Martin's, 1999),
3-4. The work includes a detailed account of the research on the heritability of
happiness.
37. Ibid., 58.
38. Braun, The Science of Happiness, 51.
39. Lykken, Happiness: The Nature and Nurture, 60.
528 Notes
40. Lykken and Tellegen, "Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon," 189.

41. On this subject, see the fine study by David Healy, The Anti-Depressant Era
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
42. Ariel Levy, "Pill Culture Pops," New York, June 9, 2003.
43. Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (Washington, D.C.,
October 2003). This seminal report may be accessed online at http://www.bioethics.
gov/reports/beyond therapy.The council was chaired by the distinguished Univer-
sity of Chicago M.D. and ethicist Leon R. Kass.
INDEX
Abrams, M. H., 286 Aphrodite, 33, 34

Adam and Eve, 81, 168, 403. See apocalyptic predictions, 80, 81, 85-
also Fall; Garden of 87, 93-94. See also promised
Eden; original sin land
to kill the old Adam, 168-75 Aquinas, Thomas, 124-33, 139, 141,
Adams, Samuel, 323 149, 150, 163, 167, 169, 186,
advertisements, xii, 464-65 204, 265, 432
Aeschylus, 8, 15, 28 on perfect and imperfect
Agathon, 26, 31, 37 happiness, 128-30
agency. See fate; free will; volition Arendt, Hannah, 331
aggression, 413 Aristophanes, 32-33
Alcibiades, 37-38 Aristotle, 9, 12, 41-50, 51, 58, 65,
Alcman of Sparta, 28 68, 150, 152,313,316,323,
alcohol consumption, 26-32, 34, 38, 330, 406, 473-74
99, 245 Aquinas and, 127, 129-33
Alexander the Great, 43, 53 doctrine of the mean, 48
alienation and estrangement, 369, on great chain of being, 126
392-95, 397, 407, 408. See also on life of happiness, 12, 65
"unhappy consciousness" Nkhomachean Ethics, 43, 46, 48, 49,
188-90
Allestree, Richard, 129, 132, 150
altruism, 259 vs. Plato, 41-42, 45
Ambrose, Saint, 130 Politics, 48-49
Ancients vs. Moderns, 215-16 on telos, 413-14
angels, 156-57 art, 155-56, 158, 159, 306-10, 446
animals, 225-26 salvation of, 295-306
happiness, humans, and, 349, Art of Happiness, The (Dalai Lama),
406-10, 428, 435-36, 438, xiii, 471
452-5?>, 416. See also asceticism, 55, 87, 305, 446. See also
Darwin renunciation
Annunzio, Gabriele 296 d', asher, 11-19
antidepressants, 477-78 atheism, 227, 298, 366
Antonella da Messina, 158 Athens. See Greece; Greek literature
530 Index
Augustine, Saint (Aurelius Beroaldo, Filippo, 152

Augustinus), 96-105, 122, 169 Biandolini, Giotto, 121
Aquinas and, 127-28 Bible. See Lord; Old Testament;
life history, 96-99 specific topics
on paganism, 74-75, 101-4 Bill of Rights, 318-19

Platonism and, 100, 104 biological factors and happiness,
predestination and, 111 475-78
on Socrates, 24 Biton, 6
theology of sin, 109-10 Blake, William, 287
writings "blessedness," 3, 77, 290. See also
The City of God Against the Pagans, beautitude; eudaimonia;
101-4, 106, 128 makarios; olbios
Confessions, 98-99 blessings of Jesus, 77
De beata vita {The Happy Life), bliss. See beatitude; joy; mystical bliss
99-101, 104 Boerhaave, Herman, 225
Aurelius, Marcus, 52, 59 Boethius, Manlius Severinus, 116-
Auschwitz, 456-59 18, 123, 137
Averroes, 126 Bonaventure, Saint, 120-21
boredom {ennui), 272, 276
Bacon, Francis, 235 Boswell, James, 245-46
Ball, Harvey R., 463, 464 Brahmanism, 303
Ballanche, Pierre-Simon, 276, 296 Brando, Marlon, 68
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 293, 309 Brave New World (Huxley), 451-53
beautitude, 77, 121, 130, 139. See also Breck, Robert, 321
blessedness; joy; mystical bliss Breuer, Joseph, 442
perfects, imperfect, 128, 149 "bride of Christ," 119
beautitudes, 77-8, 82-3 Bronzino, Agnolo, 153, 155, 156
beauty, 35-36, 106 Brooks, Thomas, 177
Beccaria, Cesare, 212, 214 Bruckner, Pascal, 267
Beckett, Samuel, 454-56, 461-63 Bruni, Leonardo, 150, 151
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 294, 295- Buddha, 298
97,307,309-11 Buddhism, 303, 471
Beethoven Frieze, 307-9 Burckhardt, Jacob, 144-45
Bell, Daniel, 358-59 Burke, Edmund, 334
Benjamin, Walter, 398-401 Burke, Thomas, 249
Bentham, Jeremy, 212, 217-21, 230- Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques, 325
31,236,265,345,347,364,375- Burton, Robert, 160, 195
76, 381-82, 409, 412, 419, 430 Byron, George Gordon, 276, 278,
Freud compared with, 443 282, 293
vs. Mill, 349, 350
utilitarianism, 212, 217-19, 230, Cabet, Etienne, 373-75, 377, 384

231,350,409 Calvin, John, 105,110,169, 172,
"Bentham" (Mill), 348, 349 173, 177,282,408
Berlin, Isaiah, 348-49 Calvinism, 170, 351, 352, 356
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 115 Camus, Albert, ix
Index 531
capitalism, 314, 317, 329-30, 345, classical republican tradition, 324—25

364, 371. See also consumer Cleobis, 6
society; Engels; Marx; Smith; Coleman, Thomas, 176
Weber Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42, 284-
criticism of, 345, 355-58, 361-62, 88, 293, 347
379-81, 393-95 collective happiness, 365-66, 372,
capitalist ethic. See also liberalism 382, 466, 468-69
spirit of happiness and, 353-62 correlates of, 467-70
Carlyle,Thomas, xv, 280-1, 289-90, working toward, 261-62
363-67 comedies, 29. See also Beckett;
Casanova, Giacomo, 231-32 humor; satyr plays
Catherine the Great, 200, 399 commercial society. See consumer
Cecelia, Saint, 192 society
celebrations and festivities, 28-29, communion with God, 114. See also
69,76,95-96, 122,200-201. mystical return
See also symposia communism, 388-89, 395-98, 400-
"festival of happiness," 262, 266 404. See also Engels; Marx;
chance, 11-12, 105, 136, 259, 477. Utopian socialism and socialists
See also luck; fortune communities, Utopian. See Nauvoo
Charlemagne, 108, 376 Comte-Sponville, Andre, 475
Charles the Bald, King, 108, 110 Constant, Benjamin, 342-43, 350,
Chastellux, Marquis de, 212, 214-17 352-3
Chateaubriand, 276 Constitution(s)
Chatelet, Marquise du, 202, 210 American, 318
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11, 136 of June 24, 1793,261
Chesterton, G. K.,265 state, 318-19
children, 48, 287-88 consumer society, 206-8, 371 462, 465 ,
"children of joy," 288 contemplation, 49, 129-30, 132

"children of nature," 293 contentment, arts of, 188-96
Choice of Hercules, The, 59-60, 62 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, xvi, 326
Christianity, 12, 74-77, 82-139, creation, 170-71
150-1, 164-75, 182-86, 188, Croesus, 1-4, 6-7, 9, 20, 25, 36, 53,
248, 263-7, 279-80, 303, 383- 136,358,456

85, 397, 431-2. See also Jesus Cromwell, Oliver, 175
Christ; Lord; specific topics crucifixion, 94
on the nature of human beings, Cyclops (Euripides), 27-28
406-7 Cyrenaics, 489, n.65
nineteenth-century revival of, 280
"Romantic school," 279-84 daimon, 3-4, 14-15, 64

Christians, persecution of, 75-76 Dalai Lama, xiii, 471
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 17, 52, 55, Dante, Aligheiri, 124
58,59,70,72,97,98,99,150, Darwin, Charles, 410-424, 470
262, 316, 323, 330 Christianity and, 428
City Dionysia, 20, 26 on emotions, 413-18
civic virtue, 324 on evolution, 414-17, 421-23
532 Index
Darwin, Charles {continued) satisfaction of, 56-58, 301

on free will as delusion, 414, 418 suffering and, 301-5
Freud on, 440 destiny. See fate
on happiness, pleasure, and deus ex machina, 9, 455
suffering, 410-14, 419, D'Holbach, Baron, 215
421-24 Diderot, Denis, 200, 209, 223
Nietzsche and, 428 Diggers, 176
on social instinct, 416-20 dignity of human nature, 142-64
on theodicy, 423 depravity and, 145, 146
writings Diogenes Laertius, 52
Autobiography, 421 Dionysus, 26, 27, 29, 111-12, 115,
The Descent of Man, 414-15,421 118, 162
The Expression of the Emotions in disease, 205-6
Man and Animals, 415,416 disillusionment, 277-78. See also
The Origin of Species, 414, 420 illusions and deceptions
"De Dignitate Hominis" (On the Divine Comedy (Dante), 124, 133
Dignity of Man), 144-45 divinity, 3-4, 14. See also gods; Lord
death, 6, 7, 105, 138, 304 "domestic happiness," 389
happiness after, 2, 105, 136, 152, 204 Dominicans, 127
with honor, 5-6, 87 "double happiness," 130, 465
La Mettrie and, 222, 225, 226 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 458
Declaration of Independence, 314— drugs, 293, 448, 477-78
19. See also Jefferson Drydenjohn, 71, 193
and right to "pursuit of Duby, Georges, 133
happiness," 13,314-19,323, Dunbar, Samuel, 322
326-27, 330, 332 Durer, Albrecht, 61, 161
Declaration of Rights of Man and Durkheim, Emile, 264
the Citizen, 13, 217,261
deliverance, 79,80, 138 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 433-35
democracy, 20, 22, 23, 43, 53-54, 314 Ecclesiastes, Book of, 84, 246
Plato on, 38-40 economics. See money and
and "tyranny of the majority," happiness
342, 344, 352 Eden. See Garden of Eden
Democracy in America (Tocqueville), egalitarianism. See equality
333, 344, 352. See also egotism, 242, 379, 450. See also
Tocqueville entitlement; pride
depression, 346, 466, 470. See also Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 278
melancholy emotions, 272, 413-18. See also
Descartes, Rene, 179, 225, 408 specific emotions
desire(s), 56, 138-39, 240, 321. See history of, xiv
also Eros empathy, xii
eradication of, 58 Engels, Friedrich, 275, 361-62,

knowledge of, 56 365-67, 386, 388, 398
restlessness of, 335-36 enlightened doubts, 245-52
Index 533
Enlightenment, xiv, 208-12, 215, eudaimonia, 3-4, 11, 31, 33, 45, 49,
217,227,230-33,237,245-52, 64, 68, 77, 404. See also makarios
263, 274, 280-83, 285-86, 288, Euripides, 27-28
311,314,330,363,372,381- evil, 250, 283. See also good and evil;
82, 385, 398, 402, 405, 430, sin
471 evolution. See Darwin
and attainability of happiness, 13, Exodus, 78-79, 177
209
centrality of, 13-14, 408 faith, 167-68, 264, 267, 435. See also
characterizations of, 208, 209, 212 future reward happiness
and pleasure, 209-10 Fall, the, 102-3, 130, 138, 244, 247, 303
pursuit of, 14,209,244 fatalistic worldview, 19, 110
utility principle, 212. See also fate, 7-11, 19,25, 105. See also
utility, principle of predestination
Scottish, 325, 327 felicific calculus, 213, 219, 230, 470.
Enlightenment thinkers, 13, 208- See also utilitarianism
10,212,221,230,231,245-252 felicitas, 67, 68, 74, 80, 95, 138
entitlement, sense of, 14 Felicitas, 75, 95
Epicurus, 50, 56-59, 65, 224 Felicitas, cult of, 69, 74, 104
life history and overview, 52-53 felicitas naturalis ("natural felicity"),
Locke and, 181 148, 163
Marx on, 391 Felicitas Publica ("Public
on pleasure and pain, 52, 54, 55- Prosperity"), 69, 70, 153, 154.
58, 65, 181, 209-10 See also "public felicity"
on reason, truth, and happiness, Felicitas Temporum ("The Felicity
229
56, of the Times"), 69
equality, 332-33, 336-37, 361, 430. felix, 11, 67
See also Declaration of Ferguson, Will, 472
Independence festivals. See also celebrations and
Erasmus, Desiderius, 163 festivities
Eriugena (John the Scot), 107-9, of happiness, 262, 266
111, 116, 118-20 Ficino, Marsilio, 151, 160, 173
Eros, 31-35, 40 Finch, John, 383-84
Common, 32 Fitzgerald, Edward, 357
Heavenly, 32-33 forgiveness, as pure happiness, 166
Plato and, 31-35, 68, 112 fortune, 3, 10-11, 47, 105, 136, 151,
eroticism. See sexuality 155, 257, 259. See also chance;
Eryximachus, 59 fate; luck
eternal paradise, 80-81, 138, 139 fortune's wheel, 11, 136-37, 155
ethical achievement. See also moral Fourier, Charles, 377-80, 383-85, 387
sense and moral agency; Francis, Saint, 121,406-7
virtue(s) Frankl, Viktor E., 458
happiness of, 132 Franklin, Benjamin, 312-13, 331-
eucharist, 114 32, 356, 357
534 Index
Frederick the Great, 227-28, 450 God, 204. See also heaven, and earth;
free will, 9, 110, 111. See also volition Lord; mystical return; specific
as delusion, 414, 418. See also fate topics
freedom, 13, 14, 144-46, 164, 182, belief in, 227, 365, 366, 450
186, 208. See also Brave New freedom to raise oneself to, 167—
World; democracy 69
Christian, 167-69 as happiness, 116-17
to raise oneself to God, 167-69 happiness as living the way
Freedom, final, 370-72, 398. See also intended by, 204
emancipation; Utopian true happiness as the gift of, 104-5
socialism and socialists gods, 3-4, 7-9, 12-15, 25. See also
"freedom from suffering," 458 Eros; Felicitas, cult of; Lord
French Revolution, 253, 254, 258, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 275
264—266. See also Lequinio Gogh, Vincent van, 428
Frenzeny, Paul, 355 good and evil, 183, 184, 250, 251,
Friedrich, Caspar David, 279 283. See also virtue(s)
Freud, Sigmund, xii, xiii, xiv, 35, good life, 43-45. See also virtue (s)
301,419,437,440-51,466- government, 20-21, 188. See also
67 democracy; Locke; specific topics
and Bentham, 443 grace, 105, 146, 164-65, 167, 168,

pleasure principle, 443 170, 172
and Darwin, 440, 444 compared with, 290
joy
Godlike character of man, 450 175-88
gravitational pull,
and Nietzsche, 440-41 Gray, John, 380-81
"ordinary unhappiness," 442 Gray, Thomas, 276
and tragedy, 441 "great chain of being," 126
writings Greece, ancient, 22-24, 64—65. See
Studies on Hysteria, 442 also Aristotle; happiness, birth of
Civilizationand Its Discontents, the desire for; Plato; Socrates
442-451 government and politics, 20-23.
Frost, Robert, 236 See also democracy
"fun," 199 greed, 70, 74, 140. See also
future reward, 80, 83, 264, 265. See temptation
also apocalyptic predictions; Greek literature, 19-20, 426. See also
death; faith; heaven specific writers and philosophers
guilt, 64, 135, 140, 166-68, 250,
Garden of Eden, 102-3, 146, 198- 433, 435-36, 440, 449, 453, 464
99. See also Adam and Eve
Gassendi, Pierre, 181 Hall, Joseph, 194
genetics and happiness, 475-76. See Haller, Albrecht von, 225
also Darwin happ, 11, 137
Genlis, Madame de, 204 happiness. See also specific topics
George III, 332 as attainable by everyone, 13,

Glikk, 10-11, 137, 171 189,251,252
Index 535
birth of the desire for, 24-40 history of, 1-2

books on, 471 Jefferson and, 326. See also
"buying" of, 206, 207. See also Declaration of
money and happiness Independence
and capitalism. See capitalism Locke and, 185, 186
as characterizing an entire life, 7 meaning of the, 320
and Christianity. See Christianity pursuit of wealth and, 357
and communism, 395, 397, 398, right to the, 13
402-03, 470 Schopenhauer on, 301
concept(s) of, 25, 36 Tocqueville on, 341
as indeterminate, xi-xii, 265-66 responsibility for one's, 53
and death, 6, 7, 83, 93-94, 104- right to, 14, 200,247
05, 120, 128, 136, 138, 147, root and etymology of the word,
190,231,248,304,403 10-11
definitions, 46, 389, 411 science of. See also felicific
as eternal and universal, xiii calculus; research on
as "god-like life," 406 happiness; utilitarianism
history of, 214
xi, xiii-xvi, biological factors, 475-78
beginning 455
of, as subjective, xii, 470
Freud on, xii, 447-48 difficulty of judging another's
18th century as "century of happiness, xii, xiv. See also
happiness," 216 felicific calculus
and Judaism, 75-83 things that inhibit, 74
and luck, 10-12, 477. See also tragedy of, 1-15
chance and fortune and transcendence, 14, 267
as a modern faith, 12, 202, 243, 248, types of, 49-50
251-52,265-67,311,346-47, illusory, 7. See also illusions and
353, 423-24, 428, 463 deceptions
as obligation, 12 "imaginary" vs. "real," 264
and pleasure. See pleasure natural vs. supernatural, 149
in popular culture, xii perfects, imperfect, 128, 137,
power to find, 12 139, 186
and Protestantism, 170-75, 186, political, 186
470 simple vs. entire, 41 1-12
pursuit of, 176, 188, 250, 461-62. as unattainable on earth, 103, 128
See also Locke; longing; words for, 2-3, 11, 128. See also
motivation (s); Path to Riches asher; felicitas
and Happiness; pleasu re in other languages, 11
principle; trivial pursuits writings on
vs. achieving happiness, 201 late 17th-century, 190-96
American history and, 331-33. 18th-century, 200-202, 204, 205
See also Declaration of 20th-century, 471-72
Independence Happiness Machine, The (La Met trie),
failure in the, 103 225-28. See also Mettrie
536 Index
"happiness studies," 467-70, 475-76 Hobart, Noah, 321-22

Happy Days (Beckett), 462-63 Hobbes, Thomas, 184, 185, 302,
happy ending(s), 192,248 320
"happy few," 12,50,52 Holderlin, Friedrich, 277, 286
happy islands, motif of, 233-45 Holocaust, 456-59, 462
Happy Isles, 235 Holy Spirit, 87, 88
Happy Life, The (Augustine), 99- Homer, 3, 10
101, 104 homosexuality, 33
"harm principle," 349-50 honor, 5-6
harmony, 369-70 hope, happiness of, 93-107, 138
living in, 54-55 Horace, 70-74, 192-94, 221, 357
heaven, 136, 162, 176, 197, 199, 265 House of the Secession, 306-7
and earth, middle way between, hubris, 14
122-33 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 197, 199
hedonic calculus. See felicific human depravity, 140-41, 146
calculus; utilitarianism human nature. See Darwin; nature,
hedonic treadmill, 422, 444, 460, 461 and return to the natural
hedonism, 58, 232-33, 257, 338, humanists, 142, 149-53, 163, 164.
357, 364, 445. See also pleasure; See also Pico della Mirandola;
selfishness Renaissance
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Hume, David, 327-29, 348, 474
273, 367-73, 398 humor, 472-73. See also satyr plays
on history and happiness, xi, 370 humors, bodily, 159, 160, 276
Marx on, 392 Hutcheson, Francis, 212, 213, 325-27
"unhappy consciousness," 367- Huxley, Aldous, 451-53
73, 398
Heine, Heinrich, 274-75, 279-81, Icarians. See Nauvoo
425, 432 idealist philosophy, 285-86. See also
Hellenistic period, 53, 58 Kant
Helvetius, Claude-Adrien, 199, 216 ignorance, 250
Hennequin, Philippe-August, 254, 260 as cause of unhappiness, 215
Hercules, 59-61 illusions and deceptions, 7, 202,
heritability of happiness, 475-76. 256, 299, 328-30, 360-61, 391,
See also Darwin 429. See also disillusionment;
hero free will, as delusion
classical, 105-6 imagination, 287
tragic, 455. See also tragedy(ies)/ innocence, fall from. See Fall
tragoidia Innocent III, Pope, 140, 143, 146
Herodotus, 1-3, 7-10, 19-20, 335 Isaiah, 80
The History, 1-10,20 Isidore of Seville, 114
Herrick, Robert, 194 Israel, 78-81
Hie Habitat Felicitas ("Here dwells
happiness"), 67 Jacobins, 254-55, 257, 258, 261-63,
history, solving the riddle of, 388-98 266, 267, 381. See also Lequinio
History, The (Herodotus), 1-10, 20 James, William, xiii
Index 537
Jefferson, Thomas, 13, 314-20, 330- Klein, Franz, 295-96

32 Klimt, Gustav, 307-10
Jesus Christ, 82-87, 94, 102, 121, Komos, 29
131,177,323,384 Kouroi, 26-7, 156
crucifixion of, 94
eucharist and, 114 la Mettrie. See Mettrie, Julien
Marx 390
on, Offray de la
Nietzsche on, 430-31, 433 labor, 402-05, 470. See also

passion of, 122,279,281 communism
promise of, 77 division of, 393, 394, 404
second coming of, 86 ladder, metaphor of, 123-26, 131, 145
suffering and, 76-77, 82, 83, 85, Lancret, Nicolas, 207
93-95 Leonardo da Vinci, 158, 159
view of himself, 406 Leopardi, Giacomo, 276-77
Jews, xii, xiii, 75, 77, 94, 123, 126, Lequinio, Joseph-Marie, 253-67
133, 310. See also Judaism Levellers, 176
"John, the Scott," 107 Levi, Primo, 456-59
John the Evangelist, Saint, 118-19 L 'Homme machine. See Happiness Machine
Johnson, B., 354 liberalism. See also liberty
Johnson, Samuel, 201, 245-48, 250, classical, 310-11, 324-28, 342-
320 43. See also Locke
Jones, Howard Mumford, xiv, 332 343
goal of,
Jonson, Ben, 194 Millian, 349-50
journey, 105-6, 176-77. See also liberation, 351. See also self-
asher; journey development and self-
to the end, 133-39 realization

Journey of the Mind to God "libertarianism," 349, 352
(Bonaventure), 120-21 liberty, 324, 343, 350-53. See also
joy, 165, 173, 297. See also pleasure Brave New World; freedom;
conceptions of, 284, 285 liberalism
odes to, 284-94 life
"joy of sex," 462 craft of, 43-44

Judaism, 77-85, 92, 94, 138, 400 purpose/goal of, 43-45
Judeo-Christian, xiv, xvi, 12, 246 life expectancy, 466
justice, happiness equated with, 39, and property," 317-19
"life, liberty,
381 Lisbon earthquake (1755), 210-11

Locke, John, 178-88, 199, 204, 206,
Kant, Immanuel, xi, 60, 201, 208, 221,228,316-17,319-21,324,
250-52,285,300,418-19 325,327,328,410,450
Keats, John, 277, 281-84, 292-94 on Christianity, 182-85
Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 399 and Epicurus, 181
Kempis, Thomas a, 141-42 life history and overview, 175,
Kepler, Johannes, 144 177-88
kingdom of God. See apocalyptic on pleasure, 181
predictions; promised land on tabula rasa, 179-80, 285
538 Index
Locke, John {continued) Marx, Karl, 386, 388-98, 403-404, 470

on uneasiness, 180, 185, 237, 335 on alienation and labor, 392-395
writings definition of happiness, 389
Essay Concerning Human family life, 389
Understanding, 178-80, 183, "religious" aspects of thought,
185 391-2, 395-98
The Reasonableness of Christianity, and Rousseau, 395
182-83 on true emancipation, 395
Two Treatises of Government, writings
178-79, 186 Communist Manifesto, 397
logos, 54, 59 "Contributions to the Critique
longing, 100. See also happiness, of Hegel's Philosophy of
pursuit of Right," 392
erotic, 112, 119. See also Eros; "Economico-Philosophical
sexuality Manuscripts," 392
temple of, 306-11 German Ideology, 396
"longing for happiness," 307-9 "Reflections of a Young Man on
Lord. See God the Choice of a Profession,"
Lotario dei Segni (Innocent III), 389
140-42 Mason, George, 318
love, 35, 291-92 material wealth. See money and
possessing the object of one's, 151 happiness
luck, 3, 10-12, 25, 54. See also Matisse, Henri, 439
fortune; chance Matthew, Gospel according to Saint,
Lucretius, 53, 56, 150, 193, 224, 391 17,82,94
Lucullus, C. Licinius, 69 Mayer-Lamartiniere, Constance, 292
Lucullus, L. Licinius, 69 McGovern, George, 471
Luke, Gospel according to Saint, Medici, Cosimo I, 155
82-83 Medici, Lorenzo de, 143, 193
Luther, Martin, 105, 110, 164-74, melancholy, 158-61, 172-74. See also
177,239,282 faith, crisis of
Lykken, David, 475-77 odes 274-84
to,
strange, 331-43
Madison, James, 318 Melanchthon, Philip, 173
Maffei, Celso, 163 Mettrie, Julien Offray de la, 223-33,
makarios (blessed), 3, 68, 77, 80, 82, 325, 408-9
85. See also eudaimonia Enlightened outcry against, 222-23
Malthus, T.R., 452 and Epicurus, 228-229
Maimonides, 126 on pleasure, 228
Mammonism, 364, 365 writings
Manetti, Gianozzo, 152 Anti- Seneca, or Discourse on
Mark, Gospel according to Saint, 86 Happiness, 228
marriage, 171 L Histoire naturelle de fame, 224
martyrs and martyrdom, 95, 96. See UHomme machine {Man Machine),
also Jesus Christ 225-27
Index 539
Little Man with a Long Pole, 223 MoxonJ., 198

School of Sensual Pleasure, 228 music, 294, 305. See also Beethoven
System of Epicurus, 228 Musset, Alfred de, 278
Middle Ages, 116, 120, 121-22, mystical bliss, 115, 122-23, 291-93.
133-36, 141-42, 145, 149 See also heaven, and earth;
Mignard, Gerard Audranand, 191 Romanticism
Mill, John Stuart, 344-53, 409, 470, mystical return, 107-22
471 mythological heroes, 59-60. See also
vs. Bentham, 349, 350 gods
"harm principle," 349-50
liberty and happiness, 349-53 Napoleon Bonaparte, 271-74
life history, 345-47 natural disasters, 210-11
on pursuit of wealth and natural felicity. See felicitas naturalis
happiness, 357 natural rights. See happiness, right to
Tocqueville and, 343-45, 352, 353 natural selection. See Darwin
writings nature, 395. See also animals;
Autobiography, 345-50 paganism; pantheism
"Bentham," 348, 349 control over, 204-6, 208, 211-12
On Liberty, 349-52 creation and, 106
"The Subjection of Women," 351 and return to the natural, 72-73,
Utilitarianism, 349 237-42. See also happy
Milton, John, 194, 195 islands
Misery of the Human Condition, The Nauvoo, Illinois
(Lotario), 140-42, 145 Icarian settlement in, 373-84
MonaLisa, 158-59,464 needs. See desire(s)
money and happiness, 206-8, 257, Neoplatonism, 98, 100, 104, 112,
357, 468, 469-70 116, 123,128,147,149,151,162
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 408 New Jerusalem, 81, 86, 177, 386
Montanists, 87 New vs. Old World, 333-36, 373
moods, 159 Newton, Isaac, 179, 182
moral sense and moral agency, 326, Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 269,
412-14, 418-19. See also social 297,424-40,441,447,449,
instinct 453, 470
morality, 183, 237-38, 251. See also background and life history, 425-27
utilitarianism; virtue(s) on Christ and Christianity, 430-33
Morandi, Benedetto, 152 "English happiness," 430-31
More, Thomas, 163-64, 386 eternal recurrence, 434
Moreau, Gustave, 396 on happiness and the last men, 439
Morland, George, 336 and Schopenhauer, 425-26, 428
Mormons. See Nauvoo, Illinois, on Socrates, 429-30
Icarian settlement in "we have discovered happiness,"
Morris, William, 404 437
motivation (s), 181, 251, 442-43. See writings
also happiness, pursuit of Birth of Tragedy, 426-27
movement, 78-79, 98, 147, 148 Ecce Homo, 433
540 Index
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm passion, 272

writings {continued) passion of Christ, 122, 279, 281
Gay Science, 435 Path to Riches and Happiness, The
Genealogy of Morality, 435 (Franklin), 312-13
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 424—25, Paul, Saint, 76, 83, 93, 128, 162,
428 168, 369
peace, 210. See also war
olbios (blessed), 3, 68 Pelagianism, 102, 110
Old Testament, 77-81 Pelagius, 102
optimism, 294, 302, 429 perception and reality, 300. See also
Orazio Gentieschi, 154 illusions and deceptions
original sin, 102-3, 142, 146, 150, perfection, 102, 131, 142, 148-49,
180 240. See also under happiness,
Orwell, George, 381, 401, 453 types of
Othello (Shakespeare), 4 Pericles, 22-23
318
Otis, James, Perpetua, Saint Vibia, 75, 85-97
Owen, Robert, 375-77, 380-81, perpetual felicity, 93, 135-36, 138
383, 386, 387 Pestre, Abbe, 200
Ozouf, Mona, 264 Peter, Saint, 117
Phalanx, 377, 378
paganism, 74-76, 110, 150, 209. See Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni,
also City of God Against the 142-50, 407
Pagans; Felicitas, cult of; "pig happiness," 349, 353, 409
pantheism Pilate, Pontius, 433
Augustine on, 74-75, 101-4 pilgrimages, 78, 96, 133-36
pain, 52, 55. See also melancholy; Pilgrim's Guide, 135, 136
suffering Pinax, 61-62
Darwin on, 422. See also Darwin Pinker, Steven, 422
as evil,283 Plantin, Christophe, 193
maximizing happiness vs. Plato, 25-26,40,41, 112, 150
minimizing, 209-10 vs. 45
Aristotle, 41,
as source of motivation, 181-82 Augustine and, 104, 150
transformation through. See under on democracy, 38-40
Romanticism dialogues. See also Socrates
Paley, William, 204 Alcibiades, 38
pantheism, 286. See also paganism Protagoras, 32
Papety, Dominique Louis, 378 Republic, 34-36, 39, 381
paradise, 80-81, 96, 102-3, 138, Symposium, 26, 29-33, 35-38,
197-99. See also eternal 59, 60, 144
paradise; Garden of Eden; Eros and, 31-35, 68, 112
Utopia on form, 45
"paradise on earth," 210 Prodicus and, 59, 60
parousia (second coming of Christ), 86 Platonism, 104. See also
Pascal, Blaise, 230, 239, 244 Neoplatonism; Plato
Index 541
pleasure, 47, 54-56, 66, 68, 161-63, Protestant sects, 1 76. See also
194,209-10,219,228,229,232, Calvinism; Luther;
358. See also joy; specific topics Reformation
vs. happiness, 25, 55, 235-37, prudence, 56, 155, 229
245, 257, 263-65, 364 Prud'hon, Pierre-Paul, 277
happiness equated with, 232 Psalms, 77-78
pain and, 301-2 Pseudo-Dionysus, 112, 115, 118,
as source of motivation, 181-82 120, 162
"pleasure gardens," 199, 202 psychologists and happiness, 477.
pleasure principle, 443, 451. See also See also Freud
happiness, pursuit of psychology, laws of, 179, 180
Plotinus, 100 "public felicity," 214-15. See also
Plutarch, 68, 407-8 Felicitas Publica
Pochet, A. 203, 262
P., Purcell, Henry, 192
Poe, Edgar Allen, 399 purification, 304
"political happiness," 186 "pursuit of happiness." See
politics, 20-21. See also specific topics happiness
Politics (Aristotle), 48-49
"politics of happiness," 471 Quincey, Thomas de, 293
polygethes, 26
Pombal, Marquis of, 211 Raleigh, Walter, 198
Pompeii, 66 Ranters, 176
Pontius Pilate, 433 Raphael, 40-42, 50, 51, 149
"poor man's son," case of, 329 Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 246-
Pope, Alexander, 200, 363 47,250
Porphyry, 100 Rauschenberg, Robert, 474
possession by alien force, 15 reality principle, 443
predestination, 105, 110-11, 172. reason, 44, 45, 49, 56, 229-30
See also fate Kant on, 250-52
prejudice, as only real barrier to Redon, Odilon, 367
pleasure, 232 Reformation, 137, 169-70, 173. See
President's Council on Bioethics, also Calvin; Luther
478 Renaissance, 142-164, 193
pride, 14, 288, 450. See also egotism "Renaissance spirit," 148
Priestley, Joseph, 249 renunciation, 90, 446. See also
primary process, 443 asceticism
Prodicus, 59, 60 of desire, 58, 303-4
promised land, 78-81, 83, 93, 322. research on happiness, 467-70, 475-
See also apocalyptic predictions 76
America as, 331 Restoration literature, 190-96
property, acquisition and ownership Revelation, Book of, 86
317-20
of, Richter, Jean-Paul, 275, 280
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of rights, 217
Capitalism, The (Weber), 355-59 Ripa, Cesare, 153, 154
542 Index
Robespierre, Maximilien, 253, 262 Satan, and suffering, 173-75

Romanticism, 273, 274, 347 Saturus, 90-94
art, music, and, 297, 310. See also art satyr plays, 27-29
and Enlightenment, 282-84, 289- Schiller, Friedrich, 277, 279, 283, 294
90,310-11 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 297-306,
joy and, 284-95 368, 425-26
pain and, 279-84 appreciation of Christianity, 303
and religion, 280-82, 290 and Buddha/Buddhism, 298, 303
Rome. See City of God Against the influence of, 306
Pagans; felicitas life history, 297-98
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 233-45, 250, "road to salvation," 303-305

252, 263, 267, 273, 288, 297, "will-to-life,"299-302, 304
334,361,371,381,395,470 World as Will and Representation,
French Revolutionary esteem for, 298-99
257-58 "worst of all possible worlds," 303
influence of, 276 Schorske, Carl, 307
on islands, 233-35 science (and technology 7
), 205-6,
paradox of progress, 237-38, 241, 211-12,214,360,362,435,467
279 second coming of Christ, 86
on pleasure, 236-37 self-development and self-
religious longing of, 244 realization, 353, 435-38

writings self-exploration and search for the
Confessions, 239 self, 239
Discourse on Arts and Sciences, self-interest. See also capitalist ethic
237-38 doctrine of, 338
Discourse on the Origins and and the greater good, 330-31,
Foundations of Inequality 338, 419-20
Among Men, 238, 240-41 self-love, 242, 288-89, 338
Emile, 240-41 self-sacrifice. See sacrifice
Reveries of a Solitary Walker, selfishness, 325, 326. See also
233-235, 239 hedonism
Social Contract, 24\-4?> Semonides of Amorgos, 10
Rubens, Peter Paul, 187 Seneca, 52, 55, 57, 59, 150, 151
Runge, Philipp Otto, 291 Severus, Septimus, 75, 76
sexuality, 28, 29, 33, 37, 66-68, 232,
324
sacrifice, 259, 260, 264, 265, 301,447
Sade, Marquis de, 232-33, 265 divinity and, 1 12, 119. See also Eros
sadness, 14, 107, 121, 165, 173, 195, Shakespeare, William, 4, 11, 192
236, 296, 416, 438, 464. See also Shellev. Mary Wollstonecraft, 294
melancholy; "sickness of the age" Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 277, 278, 299
Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Leon de, "sickness of the age" {maladie du
262, 263, 267 siecle), 215-19, 366
Saint-Simon, Henride, 376-79, 382- Sidney, .Algernon, 323
86 Silenus, 27-28
Salutati, Coluccio, 151-52 Simeon Stylites, Saint, 113-14
Index 543
sin, 109-11, 131-32, 140-41, 172. See Hegel on, 372

also good and evil; original sin human efforts to eradicate, 283
as pure unhappiness, 166 Jesus on, 76-77, 82, 83, 85, 93-95
smile, Greek, 27 as means to the art of
smiles and smiling, 155-58, 464 contentment, 190
"smiley face," 463-4 redemption through, 76-77
Smith, Adam, 327-30, 325, 357, world, 275
360-61,394-95,467 superstition, 56, 209, 215, 216
social instinct, Darwin on, 416-20 "survival of the happiest," 421. See
socialism, 430. See also capitalism; also Darwin
communism; Utopian socialism symposia, 29-32, 38, 99-100
and socialists
societal happiness. See collective tabula rasa, 179-80,285
happiness Tate, Nahum, 192
Socrates, 32, 36-40, 59-62, 461 Taylor, Charles, 170
as corrupter of youth, 39 technology. See science (and
on Eros and desire, 34-37 technology)
and history of happiness, 24—25 Tellegen, Auke, 475-77
Nietzsche's critique of, 429-30 Tellus, 5-6
Solon, 1,2,4,5,7,21 telos, 5.0, 250, 473-74
Sophists and Sophism, 59, 60 Tempier, Stephen, 132
Sophocles, 8-9, 26, 441 Temple of Happiness, 201, 203
soul, 40-50. See also Mettrie temptation, 102. See also greed
Soviet Encyclopedia, 388 "terrestrial paradise," 383
Spain, reconquest of Muslim, 133-35 theodicy, 372, 423
Stalin, Joseph, 402, 403 theriophily, 407
Stendhal, 309 time, 80, 81
Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 213 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 269, 333-44,
Stirner, Max, 395-96 350-53, 355, 357, 358, 359,
Stoics and Stoicism, 53-59, 94, 103, 360, 475
150, 209, 228, 233, 262, 323, 329 on American religion, 338-341
Strabo, 63 on despotism, 342
Strindberg, August, 295-97 "futile pursuit of . . . complete
subjective well-being, xiii, 466-69, 470 335
felicity,"
suffering, 52, 103, 205-6, 281-83, New vs. Old World, 333-36
304. See also melancholy; pain; on pleasure, 336-38, 341
unhappiness; specific topics on self-interest, 338
avoidance of, 83 "strange melancholy," 337
being happy in spite of, 94 toleration, 187, 208-9
Christianity and, 76-77, 83, 138, "tragedy of happiness," 422, 444,
172-75,281 455, 460
Darwin on, 421-22. See also tragedy (\cs) /tragoidia, 7-10, 14-15,
Darwin 20,26-28,426-27. See also
freedom from, 458 Beckett; Greek literature;
Freud on, 444-45, 448-49 natural disasters; Shakespeare
544 Index
tragic hero, 455 Virgil, 70, 73, 192-93

"tragic" vision of life, 105 virtue(s), 43-49, 55, 60, 62, 64, 132,
truth 229-3 1 See also
. specific topics
contemplation of, 129-30, 151 vs. happiness, 60, 330

happiness and, 56, 229-30 of plain living, 71-72
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 206 pleasure and, 326
Twain, Mark, 274 Rousseau on, 242-44
as sole constituent of happiness,
unhappiness. See also melancholy; 55
pain; suffering theological, 131, 162-63
causes of, 259, 448-49 volition. See also fate; free will; luck
guilt and sorrow over not being happiness as attainable through,
happy, 250, 473 36,37
right to, 451 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de,
"unhappy consciousness," history 199,202,210,211,223,231,
and the. See Hegel 250, 265, 303
union with God, 119-20. See also
mystical return Wagner, Richard, 309-10, 426-27
Unitarianism, 323 Waitingfor Godot (Beckett), 455-56
urbanization, 206 war, 175, 177, 214. See also
utilitarianism, 212-14, 217-21, 230, Napoleon
233, 249, 251. See also Watson, William, 312
Bentham; collective happiness, wealth. See money and happiness
working toward; Mill Weber, Max, 354-60, 405, 470
criticism of, 364—5 Weltschmerz, 275
Darwin and, 419 Western culture and happiness, xii-
Utilitarianism (Mill), 349 xiv
utility, principle of, 212, 218-19, Whately, Richard, xvi
345. See also utilitarianism Whitman, Walt, 288-89
Utopia, 80-81, 163-64, 271, 386. See Winstanley, Gerrard, 176
also Brave New World; Nauvoo wisdom, 36
Utopian socialism and socialists, women, subjection and liberation of,
379-88, 397 351

and Enlightenment, 381 Wordsworth, William, 271, 277-78,
Marx's criticism of, 386 281,290-91,347
and religion, 383-86 Wycherley, William, 195
Valla, Lorenzo, 152, 160-62 Xenophanes, 30

vanity. See egotism; pride
Vasari, Giorgio, 155, 158, 159 Youngbauer, Edmund, 339
Verri, Pietro, 216
Vico, Giambattista, 212 Zeno, 50-55, 57-59
violence, 29 life history and overview, 52
continuedfrom front flap)
"smiley face," McMahon follows this great

pursuit through to the present day, showing
how our modern search for happiness
continues to generate new forms of pleasure,
but also, paradoxically, new forms of pain.
In the tradition of books by Peter Gay and
Simon Schama, Happiness is a major work that
draws on a multitude of sources, including art
and architecture, poetry and scripture, music
and theology, and literature and myth, to
offer a sweeping intellectual history of man's
most elusive yet coveted goal.
DARRIN M. McMAHON was educated

at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale
CO University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1997.
He is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment:

The French Counter-Enlightenment and the
Making of Modernity. A former visiting faculty
member at Columbia, Yale, and NYU, McMahon
is currently a professor at Florida State Univer-
sity. He has written over twenty articles on
European and American history for such
publications as The Wall Street Journal, The
Boston Globe, and Daedalus.
Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods
Jacket artwork: The Longing for Happiness Finds Satisfaction in Art

(detail from the Beethoven frieze, 1902) by Gustav Klimt.
Oesterreichische GaJerie, Vienna, Austria. Courtesy of Art Resource, NY.
Author photograph by Robin Holland
ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

an r it
-" m of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Disc I) j ted by Publishers Group West

www.groveatl an tic.com
PRINTED IN THE USA 0106

PRAISE FOR
HAPPINESS
A debonair account of Western philosophical speculation
At^^ '
through the prism of its classical starting point: What constitutes
^ >
^^ I the well-lived life and how are we to find it? Happiness is a
thoughtful work on a subject of enduring significance, which

v**** modern philosophers have imprudently abandoned to the scribblings of
charlatans and mountebanks. Darrin McMahon is a talented young historian who

wears his learning lightly; he writes with grace, wit, and just the right blend of
intellectual sympathy and moral skepticism. His book deserves a wide audience."
— TONY JUDT,
author of Postwar: A History ofEurope Since 1945; director of the Remarque Institute,
New York University; and Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies, NYU
"From the famous encounter between Solon and Croesus to Freud's dark
reflections on the fate of those whose lives are driven from the deeper reaches,
Darrin McMahon takes his readers on a journey of intellectual, cultural, and

philosophical delights. Hegel instructed us to find happiness only on the blank
pages of history. Would that he had access to this truly estimable work."
— DANIEL N. ROBINSON,
Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown University,
and member of the philosophy faculty, Oxford
'In this eminently readable work, McMahon looks back through two thousand years of
thought, searching for evidence of how our contemporary obsession [with happiness]
came to be. From the tragic plays of ancient Greece to the inflammatory rhetoric of
Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, McMahon delves
deeply into the rich trove of texts that elucidate and confirm the development of
Western notions of this elusive ideal. Throughout McMahon leads the reader with
strong, clear thinking, laying out his ideas with grace, both challenging and entertaining
us in equal measure." —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
ISBN 0-fl?113-flflb-7
52750
9 780871»138866

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T oday, human beings tend to think of

Yet it's only within the past two hundred years

culture, and thought. In ancient Greek tragedy,

should —be happy in this life as a matter of

(continued on back flap)

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter- Enlightenment

Connolly Branch Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without

permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who

Every effort was made to secure permissions for photographs and

Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Atlantic Monthly Press

Distributed by Publishers Group West

Introduction: The Tragedy of Happiness i

Part One: The Making of a Modern Faith

A Modern Rite 253

Part Two: Spreading the Word

6 Liberalism and Its Discontents 312

7 Building Happy Worlds 363

Conclusion: Happy Ending 454

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's

One may observed

German philosopher Georg Wilhelm

There have been times in cultivating this project — in which hours

tum and be done with it. My history of happiness, it seemed at such

"the concept of happiness is such an indeterminate one that even

nitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills." 2 It is

disconcerting for any author to be forced to admit the difficulty

pearing as soon as we catch a glimpse?

of the subject itself. As Sigmund Freud recognized nearly a century

ago, "happiness ... is something essentially subjective." He went on

certain situations — of a galley-slave in antiquity, of a peasant during

the Thirty Years' War, of a victim of the Holy Inquisition, of a Jew

I found it impossible to leave the problem at that. For happiness — its

promise, its expectation, its allure —was everywhere around me. In

temporary the American philosopher William James, that "how to gain,

Hegel and Freud notwithstanding, happiness can be treated histori-

struggles and pursuits of the peasants, slaves, and apostates mentioned

nineteenth-century bourgeois and twentieth-century workers, conser-

tions of this history to consider, a fact that social scientists in recent

years have begun to explore, devoting considerable effort to attempts

to measure the comparative happiness or "subjective well-being" of

sonal interest and professional expertise I have concentrated my his-

expect, to achieve it — varies dramatically across cultures and over

pied a particularly prominent place in the Western intellectual tradi-

tory of mankind, but also a history of ethical, philosophic, and religious

initially, should be an intellectual history, a history of conceptions of

these have evolved in different ethical, philosophical, religious, and, I

assuredly, many things), happiness in the West has functioned above

exercised a powerful hold on the Western imagination. Given, as Freud

see, have been dramatic — so much so that the "happiness" of yester-

Born in the ancient world of classical Greece, shaped profoundly by

is clear, can properly be understood without consideration of this

Replete with struggles and disappointments, disillusion and despair,

But by defending what is, in effect, a return in this instance to a

quite traditional form of intellectual history, I do not mean to suggest