Four Meditations on Happiness E-Book

Michael Hampe

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In this original and thought-provoking book philosopher Michael Hampe sets out to help us understand happiness. The right and proper path to a happy life is a topic that has been debated for millennia. There are many theories, from those of ancient philosophy to those of modern neuroscience, but can any one of them ultimately tell us how the objective of a perfectly fulfilled life might be achieved? By telling the story of two friends - the unhappy philosopher Stanley Low and the happy gardener Gabriel Kolk - alongside a presentation of four essays that examine prominent and very plausible theories of happiness, Michael Hampe illustrates that there is no easy answer to our search for unadulterated bliss. Four Meditations on Happiness is an erudite and illuminating investigation into one of mankind's most elusive quests, one that allows us to reconsider what it means to be happy.

Leseprobe

Four Meditationson Happiness

First published in Germany as Das vollkommene Leben in 2009by Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG.

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Michael Hampe, 2009

Translation © Jamie Bulloch, 2014

The moral right of Michael Hampe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Jamie Bulloch to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Further copyright information can be found on p. 243.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 9780857894038

E-book ISBN: 9780857894052

Paperback ISBN: 9780857894045

Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic Books

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A philosophical canon

For Hugo

‘Happiness is poor material… It is self-sufficient. It needs no commentary. It can roll up and go to sleep like a hedgehog.’

Carl Seelig, Wanderungen mit Robert Walser

‘Without a foundation in the conventional truth, the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.’

Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā,Chapter XXIV, 10 [trans. Jay L. Garfield]

‘… all human life is radically deficient and a failure, if only because all humans in the end die, and thus fail to live up to the imaginary standard of continuing to last at least a bit longer.’

Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics

‘It is an awful, an awesome truth that the acknowledgement of the otherness of others, of ineluctable separation, is the condition of human happiness. Indifference is the denial of this condition.’

Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words

‘In ourselves we experience a multitude in a single substance…’

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Mondadologie, Paragraph 16

‘Good luck, good luck, here comes the pit foreman,He has already lit his lamp, already lit his lampWhich shines a lightAnd leads us into the night…’

Traditional German miners’ song

Contents

1

The Calenberg Prize

2

Scientific and technological progress as a means to eliminate unhappiness

3

The happiness of peace of mind

4

Happiness is impossible, but the truth is beautiful

5

Intensity and security as requirements of happy experiences

6

Polyphony

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Four Meditationson Happiness

CHAPTER ONE

The Calenberg Prize

The giant sloth

‘Nobody gets out of here alive’ – apparently the phrase had been sprayed on a wall in Hamburg. I heard this on the radio while having breakfast one rainy Monday morning. It was after I’d made the trip from Hanover to Pattensen to go to the Calenberg Academy for the first time in eighteen months. I had the feeling that I’d already come across this line – ‘Nobody gets out of here alive’ – in a newspaper advert for an action movie about inmates on death row trying to break out from a high-security American prison; in the end the heroes do indeed get out alive. But as a slogan sprayed on a wall in a city, I found it remarkably astute. Not warlike as in the advert for the film, but wise in an amusing way. Because to all intents and purposes this graffiti – if you allow a very broad interpretation of the word ‘here’ – is always correct. Although for a while we do get from A to B on the earth’s surface, nobody gets out of this world alive.

As it is bound to come to an end for all of us – and probably dismally – we may wonder why we invest so much time and effort in changing and supposedly improving our so-called ‘circumstances’. Perhaps our desire for change and improvement is merely an attempt to rid ourselves of the anxiety created by the (at least unconscious) realization expressed publicly in this graffiti. At the heart of our quest to make everything better might be the idea that we could perhaps avoid death, too, if only we tried hard enough to improve our circumstances. Maybe the realization that death is unavoidable seldom finds its way into our ‘emotional centre’, or whatever you wish to call the thing that makes us act in such and such a way when there’s no time to think and weigh things up.

The need for change, however, varies in importance throughout our lives. Small children often want everything to be repeated. For example, they want the story that was read to them yesterday read to them again today. But with the onset of puberty – if not before – it’s a different matter. It certainly was in my case. Not long after school, in my second semester at university, I suddenly became terribly depressed at the thought that my life would keep going on in the same way. I couldn’t stand my home town, Stony Brook, any more and I’d hoped that everything would be different in Boston. Many people labour under the illusion that their life could be put ‘in order’ if they were only able to move it to the ‘right place’. But wherever we go we’re still saddled with our problems in that place and we have to cope with our own selves on a permanent basis. In my youth I, too, laboured under the illusion of the magical effects of changing location. But once in Boston I had to adopt a very strict daily and weekly rhythm to overcome the chaos and loneliness that marked the start of my studies there. I’d thought that if I made it to Boston from Stony Brook then everything would change. When I got there, however, I immediately plummeted into a nothingness.