I ended my last
posting by mentioning my quest for equanimity. At my age, I seek that quality above all others. So it was a revelation to me not very long ago to find that my quest is blessed by no less a document than the
Declaration of Independence, through its listing of the Pursuit of Happiness
among our three unalienable rights.
Of course, different people pursue happiness in different ways. But I'd like to make a case that the Declaration's principal author, Thomas Jefferson, believed happiness can't be achieved without equanimity, and equanimity is itself part of happiness.
It
had always seemed to me that the Pursuit of Happiness in the Declaration was
not of a piece with the other two unalienable rights, Life and Liberty, which
have more gravitas. Happiness
struck me as rather hedonistic; but that is likely a product of our own times,
where happiness does smack of self-indulgence. For all it matters now, Jefferson might very well have used Locke's original triad of rights--Life, Liberty and Property--since the
pell-mell, self-indulgent acquisition of property seems to be a large part of
our society's concept of happiness.
Given
the Puritanical background of many of the Colonies, it is quite clear that
the Founding Fathers could not have had hedonism in mind when they signed the
Declaration. For many of them I
think the pursuit of happiness meant striving to reach one's full potential,
and perhaps happiness meant reaching that potential. However, I was drawn into a more precise examination of what
Jefferson intended by a passage in Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, which was the subject of a previous posting. In it Greenblatt asserts that the
pursuit of happiness entered the Declaration by way of Jefferson's reading of
the Roman philosopher/poet Lucretius.
I thus decided to backtrack to antiquity and then move forward so as to
survey what happiness signified for some noted philosophers throughout the ages.
As
one would expect, discussion of happiness has a long history in
philosophy. In the fourth century
BCE Aristotle declared it to be the central goal of human life, as did the
somewhat younger Epicurus. About two centuries later Lucretius' epic poem
taught Epicurus' philosophy to the Romans. When that poem was rediscovered in
the fifteenth century it greatly influenced Renaissance writers, including the
sixteenth-century Montaigne, whose Essays were widely read. In the seventeenth-century Locke, also drawing on the
ancients, considered the pursuit of happiness as "the highest perfection
of intellectual nature" (notwithstanding his leaving it out of his own
triad of rights).
This
brief history aside, what did happiness mean to these thinkers?
Although Epicurus' philosophy is now misconstrued by its association
with the word "epicure," a synonym for "gourmet," none of
them equated happiness with self-indulgence. On the contrary, they equated
happiness with the Greek concept of eudaimonia,
or human flourishing, attainment of which required first a state of ataraxia, or equanimity. For Epicurus, equanimity itself was happiness.
At
the end of this two-millennium chain of thought stood Jefferson, a devotee of
Locke, an avid reader of Lucretius (he had eight copies in four languages), and
a self-avowed Epicurean. I am
persuaded by my survey that happiness meant to Jefferson just what it did to
the thinkers I've cited. He must have believed, with them, that its pursuit
requires equanimity, and that equanimity is part of it.
Then
the question is, how does one achieve equanimity? Equanimity means tranquility, and everyone's path to
tranquility is different. For
Epicurus, it meant surrounding himself with disciples and friends in
philosophical discourse, all of them withdrawing from the hurly-burly and
fruitless ambitions of the world.
Most others, including myself in my younger days, seek it in a more
worldly setting. But I like to
think that in my latter days I can follow a model set by Montaigne and
Jefferson. In their later lives they found equanimity and happiness in the sanctuaries of
their estates, Chateau de Montaigne and Monticello.
On
his estate, Montaigne had a tower especially set aside for contemplation and
writing, the "room at the back of the shop" that he advised everybody
to have. On its wall was inscribed in Latin
In the year of
Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February,
anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of
the court and of public enjoyments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of
the learned Virgins [Muses], where in calm and freedom from all cares he will
spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates
permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat, and he has
consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.
It is in this tower, which he
considered a "solitarium," that he wrote his Essays. And in
his essay "On Solitude" he gives very good advice: "Retire into
yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there."
As I said, I like to think I can follow the model set by Montaigne and Jefferson. My latter-day quest for equanimity and happiness therefore is centered in my own "room at the back of the shop," of which this
blog is now a part.