I just read The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson for my later 18th century Brit lit class. It is a philosophical novel about a young prince, raised in the Happy Valley (where every pleasure is available and every need met), who is unsatisfied and breaks out to go into the world and decide what kind of life brings happiness.
A few themes of the book:
1. There is not one "choice of life." We make choices every moment that determine the course of our lives. We can't make"the one" choice that will lead us to a life of happiness or a life of misery.
2. There is no one life that leads to happiness, either. We find happiness along the way in all kinds of lives. There is no perfect kind of life (solitary or social, leader or follower, country or city).
3. Virtue does not guarantee happiness. Here is a quote from Rasselas that I love: "All that virtue can afford is quietness of conscience, a steady prospect of a happier state."
This last theme is particularly relevant to Objectivists because our virtues are our tools for living in a way that will help us be happy. Without practicing the virtues, we cannot possibly be happy. But I believe that Dr. Johnson is right that living virtuously does not guarantee happiness either. We can be completely productive, and the government can shut us down. We can be excellent parents and devoted lovers, and our families could still die. Tragedies that are not within our control can affect our happiness. "All that virtue can afford" is the knowledge that our unhappiness is not because of our own folly or evasion or laziness. We can know that we tried our very best, and though that sounds like small comfort, I actually think that it is quite a lot of comfort to know that you lived your life virtuously and experienced all the happiness that your circumstances made possible, that you didn't miss a moment of joy that you could have had.
By the way, this doesn't mean that happiness is rare or hard to get. I think that (great tragedy aside) life is full to bursting with opportunities to love, to achieve, to learn, and to do right, and all these things often lead to happiness. But the equation is not as simple as it is sometimes supposed to be: Live virtuously = be happy. Our lives factor in accident, tragedy, other people's schemes, our temperaments, and the political and social climate of the world we live in.
Living virtuously is necessary but not sufficient for happiness.
9 comments:
Hi,
Interesting article. Guess you read this about Johnson in the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203440104574404611121988406-lMyQjAxMDA5MDEwMTExNDEyWj.html
Cheers, Ed Cline
Interesting article. I had not read it, and I appreciate you linking to it for me. I didn't agree with lots of the things they said about Johnson. He was not so unmixed a believer in capitalism as the article seems to say. He did love the idea of people engaged in productive work, but he was completely negative about the credit system, not just its manifestation in his time, but the idea of credit in general. He was certainly very religious and very altruistic.
I also thought the writer of the article misread Rasselas. Johnson's portrayal of the young striving prince Rasselas is very ironic, and his conclusion is that happiness cannot be won by striving for greatness, but that we cannot be happy in idleness either. Johnson seems to place happiness in friendship (if he thinks we can find it at all, which I believe is debatable), not in working towards greatness. He portrays the great as well as the small as unhappy in the world. I thought this piece was a bit too cheerful in its reading of Rasselas.
I think your post is spot on regarding the relationship between virtue and happiness. I enjoyed reading it.
-Jason
Kelly: Yes, the author of the article did misread Johnson. He was an unrepentant Tory, a committed altruist, and no friend of the American colonials (or of the revolutionaries). I read much of his ouvre and in Sparrowhawk, in which he appears as a minor character (in Books 2 and 5), I could quote him only twice). I read sections of Rasselas but didn't have the patience to finish the whole novel.
One thing I did appreciate almost without reservation was his literary criticism. He was one of the original and most forceful advocates of what was to become the "Romantic" school of literature. In his "Preface to Shakespeare," he hails the Bard for having flouted the Unities and Classicism in his plays. Hugo in the next century echoed his argument in his "On Shakespeare."
Ed
Did you read any of his periodical essays - The Rambler and The Idler? They were wonderful, very much like his literary criticism in tone and style. They are very short pieces too, making them really easy to get at.
Kelly: Yes, I read as much as I could of The Rambler and The Idler, but not all his articles, simply because I had a mountain of other 18th century literature to read and survey while researching Sparrowhawk. I actually enjoyed reading his literary criticism -- not expecting to -- though at the moment I don't recall a word of it. The result of that survey was a fictive novel, written by an outlaw/smuggler, that captured the 18th century style but was a premonition of the Romantic novel: "Hypberborea, or the adventurs of Drury Trantham, shipwreckd merchant in in the unexplored Northern Regions." Many readers were so taken by Redmagne, the author and with the novel, that they searched Amazon Books for it! And when I informed them that it is a fictive work, they asked me to write it!
Ed
Maybe you should write it, when you are finished with your series. Here's a plan: When you are as rich and famous as J.K. Rowling and people are clamoring for more, you can publish Hyperborea, just like she published Beedle the Bard! :)
It's a pleasure to talk to someone about Johnson. I am reading lots of his works in a later 18th century Brit lit class this semester. I am enjoying him very very much, but he isn't so commonly read anymore.
Kelly: Incidentally, speaking of Johnson, I cite him in my latest Rule of Reason commentary: The Perilous Ambiguities in the Constitution."
Ed
Speaking of Johnson, found this interesting article:
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-09/Johnson.html
Ed
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