(no subject)
this sort of thing had been kind of vexing me since about mid-march.
i'm not sure whether to be happy or depressed that i've come to the same conclusion as "the philosophers of old." on the one hand, it makes me feel like a relative intellect...but on the other, it feels like a waste of time to make any philosophical enquiry at all if it's already been made.
i don't know. But Nietzsche's sarcastic point was surely that those who aim at being happy - as he claimed the English utilitarian philosophers did - invariably get it wrong. Their project was doomed to depressing failure. We can only become happy as a by-product of something else (and then the question for Nietzsche became: is happiness a worthwhile by product, or is aiming at it symptomatic of a degraded culture?). Indeed, Richard Layard in his book recognises that this sceptical view about happiness has a long heritage, extending from Socrates to the Dalai Lama, but he does so only in a footnote on page 235. Layard, though, does rightly recognise that the greatest of those English philosophers of happiness, John Stuart Mill, himself argued, in Utilitarianism, that happiness is valuable but vexingly, not achieved by trying.
and here's the whole text.
ps: if anyone's reading this and backtracking, my old one's a gentle slant
i'm not sure whether to be happy or depressed that i've come to the same conclusion as "the philosophers of old." on the one hand, it makes me feel like a relative intellect...but on the other, it feels like a waste of time to make any philosophical enquiry at all if it's already been made.
i don't know. But Nietzsche's sarcastic point was surely that those who aim at being happy - as he claimed the English utilitarian philosophers did - invariably get it wrong. Their project was doomed to depressing failure. We can only become happy as a by-product of something else (and then the question for Nietzsche became: is happiness a worthwhile by product, or is aiming at it symptomatic of a degraded culture?). Indeed, Richard Layard in his book recognises that this sceptical view about happiness has a long heritage, extending from Socrates to the Dalai Lama, but he does so only in a footnote on page 235. Layard, though, does rightly recognise that the greatest of those English philosophers of happiness, John Stuart Mill, himself argued, in Utilitarianism, that happiness is valuable but vexingly, not achieved by trying.
and here's the whole text.
ps: if anyone's reading this and backtracking, my old one's a gentle slant