If it becomes an object, no longer spontaneous, it is no longer happiness. You can't think about happiness, you cannot intend it, cannot reify and reconstruct happiness.
Happiness has sometimes lately become an object, a specific object. I had a bag of dulce con leche muffins inside my pannier and as I rode I thought of them and how that night I would zip up warmly inside my sleeping bag and eat all the dulce con leche muffins. The muffins were small, 2 bites to a muffin, and wrapped individually in little plastic baggies. I liked how they would be a little warm from being inside my pannier in the hot sun. When I did eat the muffins that night they were for me a moment of intense happiness.
I do not think this is what you mean by happiness becoming an object, however.
This is exactly what I had in mind and in fact I was going to just say that happiness means "about two bites to a muffin." For a journeying bicyclist, a muffin, especially a muffin unknown to the catalog of items in one's panniers, is the object of happiness. How miserable one feels when it is then gone and the monotony and agony of the road ensues.
It is unfortunate that the philosophers and psychologists have encouraged an understanding of happiness that places it in the mind--a mental phenomena. But there are no mental objects. They have granted such expansive powers and authority to consciousness that they have forgotten the body and the world it lives in.
Happiness is an object, a specific object, one that can be touched by a man's hand. It is only because unhappy men are fearful to change their physical circumstances (fear of social stigma, loss of security, etc) that they go around saying they need to transcend their way to happiness, or do some other complicated mental act to find it.
You can not unwrite it or undo it either.
ReplyDeleteHappiness has sometimes lately become an object, a specific object. I had a bag of dulce con leche muffins inside my pannier and as I rode I thought of them and how that night I would zip up warmly inside my sleeping bag and eat all the dulce con leche muffins. The muffins were small, 2 bites to a muffin, and wrapped individually in little plastic baggies. I liked how they would be a little warm from being inside my pannier in the hot sun. When I did eat the muffins that night they were for me a moment of intense happiness.
ReplyDeleteI do not think this is what you mean by happiness becoming an object, however.
This is exactly what I had in mind and in fact I was going to just say that happiness means "about two bites to a muffin." For a journeying bicyclist, a muffin, especially a muffin unknown to the catalog of items in one's panniers, is the object of happiness. How miserable one feels when it is then gone and the monotony and agony of the road ensues.
ReplyDeleteIt is unfortunate that the philosophers and psychologists have encouraged an understanding of happiness that places it in the mind--a mental phenomena. But there are no mental objects. They have granted such expansive powers and authority to consciousness that they have forgotten the body and the world it lives in.
ReplyDeleteHappiness is an object, a specific object, one that can be touched by a man's hand. It is only because unhappy men are fearful to change their physical circumstances (fear of social stigma, loss of security, etc) that they go around saying they need to transcend their way to happiness, or do some other complicated mental act to find it.
But there are no mental objects.
There are only muffins.
A boisterous laugh and something clicking.
ReplyDelete