331 Engages Daniel Nettle

Daniel Nettle

In Friday’s class (August 19), we discussed questions provoked by several passages from Daniel Nettle’s Introduction to Happiness. Among these:

1. “. . . Jefferson’s rights one [life] and two [liberty] may open the stable door, but only number three—the pursuit of happiness—is going to make it go anywhere” (ix). The question: Should happiness be the motor that drives us?

2. “If maximizing happiness is the point of individual lives, then the point of systems of government and economy should be to maximize our collective or aggregate happiness” (ix). The question: If government is in the happiness business, is that its sole purpose or does it have other responsibilities?

Aristippus

3. “The Greek philosopher Aristippus argued in the fourth century B.C. that the goal of life is to maximize the totality of one’s pleasures” (ix). The question: Do people endlessly seek happiness in all that they do?

4. “[Level two happiness] concerns not so much feelings, as judgments about the balance of feelings” (x). The question: How much does perspective affect the balance of feelings?

“[W]e intuitively feel that there is something called happiness, something unitary but not trivial, concrete enough to strive for yet broad enough to be worth striving for” (xi). The question: Is a life spent seeking happiness actually a happy life?

“In addition to the three levels of the ordinary meaning of happiness, some scholars have used the term simply to mean the attainment of whatever it is that people want” (xi). The question: To what extent is happiness derived from what one has already attained and to what extent is it derived from what one strives to have?

Other questions:
To what extent can happiness be derived through one’s association with others? How happy can one be trying to make others happy?

Is “fulfilling your potential” (eudaimonia) ever a realistic goal, given that we only have one life to live?

How does one measure whether or not someone is living up to his or her potential (eudaimonia)? Whose perspective should be trusted? The individual whose potential is being measured? Or those looking on from the outside?