Happiness and the Good Life
Herbert Marks
Comparative Literature
Meets with CMLT-C 200 What is happiness? How should we define a good life? The question of how one should live is at the center of a long tradition of practical philosophy. In the West, the principal approaches were sketched out by the ancient Greeks, who first distinguished between such concepts as “pleasure,” “happiness,” and “goodness,” and charted the possible relations between them. Less systematic but more nuanced than philosophy, literary texts often revolve around the same questions, but they tend to focus more on personal choices and the particular circumstances under which they are made. Starting with the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who defined true happiness as freedom from anxiety and pain, and the biblical book of Ecclesiastes (“eat, drink, and be merry”), this course will take up three imaginative writers whose reflections on how to live were inseparable from their reflections on writing itself: Montaigne, who responded to the civil wars of sixteenth-century France by inventing the literary “essay”; Thoreau, who withdrew to the isolation of Walden Pond in an effort to live “authentically”; and Henry James, who represented the conflict between new-world virtue and old-world pleasures through the eyes of a fictional alter ego in his late novel The Ambassadors. All three, in their different ways, espoused an ideal of personal integrity--of fidelity to one’s own nature—which they defended against the pressures of conformity and self-interest.
Catalog Information: HON-H 233 GREAT AUTHORS, COMPOSERS, AND ARTISTS