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By Root 1243 0

family; religious literature suggests that people find happiness in devotion to God; much of women’s literature suggests that people pursue happiness through nurturing children and others; men’s literature suggests finding happiness through competence and competition; children’s literature suggests that happiness is to be found in imagining things. Koheleth, Epicurus, and Spinoza tell us to have a good time—that it is part of our job to enjoy pleasure and to create joy. “Eat, drink, and be merry,” wrote Koheleth. Spinoza asks the great heroes of self-denial, “Why is it more seemly to extinguish hunger and thirst than to drive away melancholy?” The Buddha, Epicurus, Augustine, and Petrarch tell us it’s okay to shun politics and even live outside normal human society, yet we get the opposite message from Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr., who all tell us to try to help our fellows, even if it is dangerous. Bertrand Russell said that he found the happiness of parenthood greater than any other he had experienced.4 Artists speak about the ecstasy of creation, the passion hidden in the image of a painter “lost in his work.” Modern “positive psychology” emphasizes dedication to labor that is satisfying in the moment. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience of 1990 argued persuasively that people are happiest when engaged in tasks that they get “lost” in, where time just flows: the talented cellist, creating her own bliss. These high-level questions about what we should do with life come to no agreement; all the philosophers have tastes of their own. Yet—what luck—philosophers generally agree on our four core ideas that underlie all that variety, the ideas you have to master in order to do anything else.

1

Know Yourself

Know yourself. This is the key to all philosophy, the center of all wisdom, the one thing that decides if you are the actor in a tragedy or a comedy. This chapter points out three major interpretations of this singular injunction. The first is the Socratic, and it has to do with knowing what you believe. The second is Freudian and has to do with knowing who you are. The third is lonely and has to do with training yourself to take your intellect as your own companion.

In the Apology, Plato has Socrates explain that the only happiness is figuring out what real virtue is, and enacting it. People who behave badly may seem happy, but they are not, no matter how rich they get, and people who act with virtue are certain to come into happiness and, very likely, come into money as well. As he put it: “I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private.” Coming to know yourself and re-creating how you experience the world is a more efficient way to get comfortable than directly altering the world.

An angry person on the subway scowls and pushes, other people scowl and push in response, and quarrels ensue; a smiling person offers seats, takes inconveniences with patience, offers to share cabs, and has merry encounters. The angry person has no idea how much his or her anger colors the way other people act. A sunny disposition is no guarantee they won’t steal your wallet, but some of what we don’t really know about ourselves gets bounced back from the world and radically conditions how we see things. The Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living is so commonplace that we forget how harsh it is. Vicious even. Think of all the good, sweet fools you know! Isn’t it possible to be a decent, gentle, productive person without a jot of philosophy or self-examination? The Socratic answer is resolutely no; the examination of oneself and one’s manner of living is the only good life and only cause of happiness. The happiness thus achieved cannot be stolen