On Wed Nov 28, Miles Jackson wrote:
> And all of this assumes that the psychological state of happiness is the
> paradigm of the good life. I have to agree with Nietzsche that this is
> slave morality through and through.
You've lost me here. Are you saying there's something wrong with preferring feeling happy to feeling sad, pissed, depressed or bored?
And what on earth does this have to do with slave morality? Slave morality celebrates impotence as goodness and misery as penance. It's the barbarians and the Uebermenschen who practice die froehliche Wissenschaft and celebrate exuberance.
Happiness surveys are basically surveys of self-perceptions of mood and are doomed to be pretty superficial, because while all emotions are interesting, the interesting stuff is almost always personal and rarely sum-upable in an unpoetic yes/no box tick.
But there is much more to the concept of happiness than what shows up on those surveys. The right to the pursuit to the happiness is part of the American creed, written into one of our holy documents. And the happiness they were originally talking about was the 18th century concept, which was a renaissance of Aristotle's notion of eudaemonia, which is probably more accurately translated into contemporary terms as "self-development" or "self-flourishing." And this is definately something the left is for. The idea that everyone has the right to it is probably one of our defining convictions, one of the things that makes our concept of morality fundamentally different from that of the fundamentalists and not only just as American but more American.
The idea of denouncing the desire for happiness as somehow demeaning, servile and submissive just seems beyond parody. What's next? Denouncing love?
What a bunch of sourpusses we are. No wonder we're dying out.
Michael