> 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.
The point isn't that it's so much better to sit around and wear all black and smoke cloves. Rather it's that if "happiness" is defined in universal, quantitative terms the way capitalist society tends to define it (e.g. as "contentment" or "an abundance of pleasure units") this promotes impotence and servility: "Who cares if you have no power or dignity at work, what matters is that you're happy!" This is the point of a lot of Oprah-esque pop therapy: "no, you don't have the right to political power but you have a god-given right to happiness!"
> 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.
Absolutely. Nietzsche was certainly in favor of self-flourishing. What's good for you, though, isn't always going to make you happy and/or content. For example, some people might be less content if they give up their religious superstitions, even if doing so is essential to certain kinds of intellectual development. A life well-lived is not necessarily a happy life (although it certainly can be -- it probably often is).
-WD