ARE YOU HAPPY -- PRELUDE TO A PLANNED PIECE

ARE YOU HAPPY?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 24, 2011

PRELUDE TO A PLANNED PIECE:

This is s prelude to what will be coming up in the next week or so when Dr. Fisher finally gets his study back in order after pruning it of books no longer germane to where he is or where he is going. . 

The Peripatetic Philosopher discusses a number of authors on their take on happiness, essentially disagreeing with them all, as he sees happiness as only engagement, not an end or anything tangible or palpable of what is popularly known as happiness.  Happiness is not a thing.  It is a state.  It is not something dependent on someone else but the character and construction of our own internal world and our relationship to that state and that world.  Stay tuned.

JRF

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EARLY RESPONSE TO THIS PRELUDE:

You are right on the money with regard to happiness.  Thank you.  I have believed that for quite some time now but have never put it quite that eloquently.

DR. FISHER COMMENTS:

In this explanatory age, which explains everything, which often amounts to an inability to understand anything, we find this noticeably true in sensitive areas of our lives, such as happiness. 

No surprise, people so captivated by these explanations are looking for happiness in all the wrong places, and for all the wrong reasons.  

A series of authors who are keen practitioners of this explanatory model will be discussed subsequently, including an icon of our Western cultural heritage.  The authors included are:

CANDIDE or OPTIMISM BY Voltaire

SMILE OR DIE by Barbara Ehrenreich

PERPETUAL EUPHORIA by Pascal Bruckner

SEVEN PLEASURES ON ORDINARY HAPPINESS by Willard Spiegelman

FLOW by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS by Daniel Gilbert

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS by Darrin McMahan

MY HAPPY DAYS IN HELL by Gyorgy Faludy

HAPPINESS LESSONS FROM NEW SCIENCE by Richard Layard

THE SADDEST KING by Chris Warmell

LAUGHTER: NOTES ON PASSION by Anca Parvulescu

EXPLORING HAPPINESS FROM ARISTOTLE TO BRAIN SCIENCE

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NOTE: To caution my readers, this is neither a long nor definitive work but a collection of comments on the works of these devoted souls who set out to discover for us what they were unable to find for themselves, the key to happiness.  Why so?

Once you try to define happiness, you lose it.  It is as simple as that.  Still, it will be fun to play with the idea.     

The chairman of my dissertation committee for my Ph.D. wrote this note to me:  “For Jim, who really appreciates my perpetually perplexing paradoxes, affectionately, Kant Nimbark, July 19, 1977.”  If anyone is the blame for me seeing inside nonsense that we take to be scholarship, it is this paradoxical academic.

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