Exploring Happiness by Bok Sissela
Author:Bok, Sissela [Bok, Sissela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-08-24T00:00:00+00:00
The French Jesuit priest and world-renowned scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin exhibited just that insatiable curiosity, that imagination, capacious memory, and vivid humor. He traveled the world, taking part in paleontological excavations including those that led to the finding of Peking Man, lecturing and writing on science and on the evolution of human beings and of the cosmos, dealing as best he could with Church officials who forbade him to publish his writings during his lifetime. In so doing, he reflected, like Browne, on the nature of happiness and on how temperament and experience influence how it is perceived.* In a 1943 lecture, “On Happiness,” Teilhard pointed to the ancient phrase “De vita beata” (On the happy life), asking what in fact would make for such a life.27 He posited three attitudes to life and happiness for which we all have the germs within ourselves: the tired, constricted view, at its extreme resembling Schopenhauer’s pessimism but more often simply seeking the tranquility that comes from cutting back on needs, feelings, and desires; the approach of the hedonist or pleasure-seeker, enjoying each moment and each thing for their own sake; and the enthusiast’s conception of living as an ascent and a discovery, for whom the happy man is one “who, without any direct search for happiness, inevitably finds joy as an added bonus in the act of forging ahead and attaining the fullness and finality of his own self.”28
Members of this third group, Teilhard suggested, share his own zest for life in all its complexity – zest he defined elsewhere as “that spiritual disposition, at once intellectual and effective, in virtue of which life, the world, and action seem to us, on the whole, luminous – interesting – appetizing.”29 The feeling and development of such zest are to some extent, he believed, our own responsibility. We need to cultivate ourselves, bringing more order and unity into our ideas, feelings, and behavior, become capable of uniting with others and of love in all its forms, and attach our lives to something larger than ourselves. Among the individuals whom Teilhard mentioned as partaking of the happiness that zest brings were explorers in the Arctic and the Antarctic such as Nansen and Shackleton, aviator pioneers who conquered the air, and scientists, such as “the two Curies – the husband and wife who found happiness in embarking on a venture, the discovery of radium, in which they realized that to lose their life was to gain it.”30 To be happy, Teilhard held, we must seek to add one stitch, no matter how small it be, to the magnificent tapestry of life.
Even persons of such exceptional zest and enjoyment of their life’s work as Browne and Teilhard knew times of disappointment or despair. Neurophysiologist Felicia Huppert, seeing positive mental health as combining subjective well-being and realizing or developing one’s potential, points out that zest and other positive feelings are not by themselves sufficient for this purpose. Such feelings may be transitory, as when induced by drugs,
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