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Download: A Brief History of Happiness
The history of happiness is no ordinary history, and the subject is by no means ordinary either. The idea of happiness points us to an all-inclusive assessment of a person’s condition. It makes a claim, at least, to take into account all considerations about what’s desirable and worthwhile. The history of happiness might thus claim to be relevant to everything concerning human, or even other, beings. On both sides, the concept and the history, there seem to be no boundaries within which to work. On various grounds, some contours and limits are called for. The contours should come from the problem that the concept raises. It attempts and purports to include, as I’ve just said, everything that’s desirable and worthwhile for humans. As the history of happiness shows, however, this totality isn’t easy to grasp. The various aims – and enjoyments, desires, judgments about
what’s worthwhile, etc. – all of which the notion of happiness is taken to include, seem often to con?ict with each other. They seem to con-?ict with each other in such a way that they can’t all be surveyed and evaluated together. Accordingly there might be no non-arbitrary way of constructing a coherent concept out of them. The concept of happiness may simply be the expression of a ?rm but unrealizable hope for some kind of coherence of aims (see Chapter 7). A history of happiness as it appears in western philosophy, which is what this book will cover, should contain descriptions of important attempts to ful?ll this hope, by somehow harmonizing these elements or systematizing them. Many of these attempts are attached to the word “happiness,” and to fairly near equivalents in English
and other languages, such as “well-being” and the Greek eudaimonia. Trying to include all of the topics that have been thought relevant to happiness, or all of the people who have said signi?cant things about it, would make impossible the task of a history of happiness, especially a brief one. A great deal has to be left out. I’ve selected the material to include by its relevance to the philosophical issues surrounding happiness that seem to me most important and interesting. Still, enough is excluded to occupy a much larger book than this one.
Alessandro Manzoni,
The Betrothed
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