I was interested in Augustine’s discussion of happiness in On Free Choice of the Will. I will examine two statements in particular that Augustine made in relation to happiness.
1. “The happy life…is man’s proper and primary good” (81-82). Frankly, I was surprised to see an early Christian theologian place a great emphasis on happiness. Christianity is founded on martyrdom, and holds the next life to be much more important than this one. Shortly before Augustine’s time, Christians were regularly persecuted and sometimes thrown to lions; their lives were anything buy happy. A sign of a good Christian was praising Jesus/God as one was about to be murdered for believing in them, having faith that although this life was terrible, the faithful would be rewarded in the next. Augustine, however, states that a happy life is man’s primary good, a notion that may have seemed alien to those whom had been martyred. Now of course (according to Augustine) one cannot live a happy life if one is concerned only with this world, wisdom and happiness come from being in touch with something greater (like numbers!), however happiness is now no longer confined only to the afterlife. I imagine that this shift in outlook was made possible by Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.
2. “we all wish to be happy, so it is agreed that we all wish to be wise, since on one without wisdom is happy” (58). I think this statement is flat-out incorrect. People may wish to be happy, but I don’t believe that wisdom is seen as being a necessary part of that, or that the unwise are necessarily unhappy (see Voltaire’s short story “The Good Brahmin”). Though I don’t like this phrase at all, there is a significant amount of truth to ‘Ignorance is Bliss’. I think that Augustine’s assumption that everyone seeks to be wise is a case of him believing that people want to be what they should be (or rather, what he thinks they should be). Augustine’s knowledge of the Forms has brought him happiness, but it is a leap to claim that people are looking for something they haven’t discovered. I realize that Augustine’s work is dogmatic in nature (‘I believe so that I may understand’), but to claim that everyone seeks to be wise is a very hard statement to justify empirically; and, in the spirit of Plato, Augustine does not attempt to.
I will definitely agree with your rejection of Augustine's statement "we all wish to be happy, so it is agreed that we all wish to be wise, since no one without wisdom is happy" (58). These two ideas: that we all wish to be happy and that we all wish to be wise don't seem to follow from one another in any sort of logical manner. However, I am wondering if the phrase "Ignorance is Bliss" is something I could agree with either. It would seem that perhaps Augustine is right to say that someone without wisdom is not truly happy, but this requires some interpretation. With respect to human psychology (and putting aside the issue of what happiness actually is) it is often argued that a person cannot be truly happy unless he has command of his emotions and is able to reflect upon why he feels the emotions he does. And if a person's emotions are less a result of his environment and more so a direct result of his choosing to feel the emotions he does, then, it does seem right to say that one would require a certain amount of wisdom to be happy. (Not to mention a lot of self-discipline). However, Augustine's claims that ALL men seek to be happy or that they seek to be wise is something else to grapple with. I mean, at the risk of sounding like a woman, who knows what ANY man, let alone all men, wants anyway?
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