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• W237579326 abstract "But that complete happiness is a contemplative activity will appear from the following consideration as well. We assume the gods to be above all beings blessed and happy; but what sort of actions must we assign to them? ... If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still everyone supposes that they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative, therefore that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness. (1) ********** ANIMAL HAPPINESS, HUMAN HAPPINESS AND INHUMAN JOY We all know, from Nietzsche, about animal happiness. Think of the cow grazing in the field, no thought of today, no thought of tomorrow. (2) This is a life of the pure present, unmediated by the desire and disease of consciousness. Human happiness, by contrast, is tied inextricably to narrative, to a sense of one's life as a whole and to the subordination of pleasure and animality to self-definition. Happiness, from Aristotle's definition of the human as a being who recognises his potential to give form to himself, to contemporary self-help manuals that stress the creation of goals and ongoing projects, has always been tied to meaning. While animal happiness is self-present and within itself, human happiness is achieved only by relating any now or present to the sense of one's ongoing and self-maintaining life. Happiness is the meaning of life, because only a life lived with meaning can be happy; and only a happy life--a life where pleasures are not simply lived but are lived as one's own and as self-defining--can be meaningful. There is a remarkable consensus throughout the philosophical, psychological and literary tradition that human happiness is meaningful, and that meaning--or the capacity of a human life to perceive the world in ordered form--is what allows the organism to maintain itself. The clearest distinction between the animal and the human, along with its sophisticated complication, is offered by Henri Bergson. Animal instinct acts and maintains itself according to the being it is given; instinct maximises efficiency, so that the organism can perpetuate its present condition. Human intelligence, by contrast, creates and invents a form of being, such as technology, which requires more expenditure of energy and will also alter just what human being is. The animal and the human both emerge from the tendency towards movement undertaken in order to maintain life, but they diverge in their modes of movement: the animal remaining within its own organism's potential, the human giving itself new potential. (3) On the one hand, Bergson's analysis reinforces the binary between human happiness achieved through self-creation and animal quiescence achieved through consumption. On the other hand, by pointing to the imbrication of the animal and the human, Bergson also points out that our usual image of the human as achieving happiness through order and meaning is still all too close to the animal's instinctive efficiency. Bergson therefore indicates another possibility, beyond the human's proximity to the energy-conserving animal: joy. (4) Nietzsche, too, imagined a joy beyond our organic and life-preserving being. His Untimely Meditations posited initial animal stupidity as an illusory beatitude; truly joyful becoming is achieved neither by returning to a state before time and meaning, nor by mastering the meaning of one's life through monumental and meticulous narration. Instead there can only be a joyfulness in active forgetting. Nietzsche's imagined happy cow was already an all too human myth of a life imagined as beyond all striving, liberated from the burdens of a human life subjected to promise, norms and commitments. …" @default.
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• W237579326 date "2007-12-22" @default.
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• W237579326 title "Narrative Happiness and the Meaning of Life" @default.
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