For many eighteenth-century thinkers, happiness was a
revolutionary new idea filled with the promise of the
Enlightenment. However, Vivasvan Soni argues that the period fails
to establish the importance of happiness as a guiding idea for
human practice, generating our modern sentimental idea of
happiness. Mourning Happiness shows how the eighteenth century's
very obsession with happiness culminates in the political
obsolescence of the idea.
Soni explains that this puzzling phenomenon can only be
comprehended by studying a structural transformation of the idea of
happiness at the level of narrative form. Happiness is stripped of
its ethical and political content, Soni demonstrates, when its
intimate relation to narrative is destroyed. This occurs,
paradoxically, in some of the most characteristic narratives of the
period: eighteenth-century novels including Pamela, The Vicar of
Wakefield, and Julie; the pervasive sentimentalism of the time;
Kant's ethics; and the political thought of Rousseau and
Jefferson.
For Soni, the classical Greek idea of happiness epitomized by
Solon's proverb "Call no man happy until he is dead" opens the way
to imagining a properly secular conception of happiness, one that
respects human finitude and mortality. By analyzing the story of
Solon's encounter with Croesus, Attic funeral orations, Greek
tragedy, and Aristotle's ethics, Soni explains what it means to
think, rather than feel, a happiness available for public judgment,
rooted in narrative, unimaginable without a relationship to
community, and irreducible to an emotional state. Such an ideal,
Soni concludes, would allow for a radical reenvisioning of a
politics that takes happiness seriously and responds to our highest
aspirations rather than merely keeping our basest motivations in
check."
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