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Monday 4 November 2013

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Secret To Happiness Quotes Biography

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Happiness, though of obsessive interest to us all, has been debased. In his timely book, Richard Schoch puts this down to our identification of happiness with a mere pleasurable sensation and our assumption that it is an entitlement rather than an achievement.

It is appropriate that Jeremy Bentham, who defined good as pleasure, and proposed political arrangements that would guarantee it to everyone, is dispatched early on. For though appearing late on the historical stage, he is, with his crude "felicific" calculus and so-called "pig philosophy", part of the problem rather than the solution. His naive optimism founders - like that of Epicurus, who "stored up pleasures against rainy days" - on the fact of suffering and the recognition that, as moral beings, our happiness is not just about "feeling good but being good". What is required, says Schoch, is "big fish thinking" about the quality of our lives as a whole.

The scene is set for an exploration of how happiness may be gained through the acceptance or transcendence of suffering, taking us from Hinduism and Buddhism through Stoicism and Islamic mysticism, into the Judeo-Christian tradition. Along the way we learn that resourcefulness and social skills are also invaluable. These traditions throw up knotty problems that have long taxed philosophers. Is it not a Stoic "confidence trick" to suggest that suffering is not suffering if we accept it as such? Surely a self-surrender is unconvincing if it is the culmination of a spiritual journey undertaken only in order to secure our own personal happiness? Schoch does not resolve these puzzles, but has a creditable stab at them.

He is less successful in organising his rich material. He dissipates some of its force by considering so many similar traditions: either Hinduism or Buddhism would have been enough, and do we need Christian and Islamic mysticism? Of course each tradition is a new opportunity for vivid pen portraits and anecdotes. Who could fail to admire the canniness of the Buddhist nun who, reliant on strangers for food, knows the best places to conduct "her rounds" or be awed by Aquinas's mystical vision causing him to fall "thunderously" silent? But this proliferation of detail obscures the larger picture. Sensitive perhaps to this, Schoch suggests that eastern and western traditions are distinguishable by their attitude to "worldliness": the former stresses "living with dexterity and skill", the latter "complying with externally imposed rules". This is not strictly correct, and belies his own descriptions. For he shows that the Stoics, who were westerners, and included a working Roman emperor and Nero's tutor, Seneca, were as concerned as Hindus and Buddhists with living successfully in the world. His suggestion that the east stresses "what I must do as opposed to what I must believe", while for the west it is the other way round, fares no better. Buddhists seek knowledge while the New Testament Gospels emphasise action. A more cogent distinction is, I suggest, that between those (Stoics, Hindus and Buddhists) who hold that happiness is achievable by an individual's own efforts and those (St Augustine and the Judeo-Christian writers) for whom it is bestowed by God's grace.

But then is it sensible to seek clues to happiness within the Judeo-Christian tradition at all? Aquinas, the Catholic philosopher and saint, spoke of "blessedness", not happiness: a state which, if ever properly ours, will only be so in the next world. Since that world exists outside space and time, such blessedness cannot be modelled on anything in this life. We also assume - perhaps this is our Stoic inheritance - that no suffering or humiliation is too much, provided we remember that, though our body may be broken, our soul is inviolate. But the great Judeo-Christian writers have a profundity that allows no such reassurance. Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, discussing Job, reserves the term "affliction" for that suffering which is a "killer of the soul", "eating it away and injecting into it the poison of inertia". It is affliction that these writers see exemplified in Christ on the cross, uniting him, shockingly, with "the Musselmanner", those broken individuals shuffling around the Nazi concentration camps, for whom even Stoic acceptance was impossible.

Ironically, since it sits awkwardly with the quest for happiness here and now, Schoch's own discussion of Job is engrossing. His pace quickens, his heart seems to beat faster and he suddenly soars. If the odd trite remark smacked earlier of the self-help manuals he deplores, this last chapter provides ample evidence that his book is considerably more than that.

Kevin Rushby also reminds us that paradise has both earthly and other-worldly forms. Central to Paradise is the contrast between peaceable and destructive ways of reaching it. These paths exist side by side in western and eastern cultures. The ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, and the Islamic poet Omar Khayyam, with his "quatrains of verse and quadratic equations", sought paradise "gently". Apocalyptic crusaders, such as Richard, Coeur de Lion and the 11th-century forerunners of the Taliban, the Assassins, sought it through war. It is salutary to learn how much Islamic fundamentalism owes to the Judeo-Christian tradition of salvation through Armageddon, itself having roots in Persian Zoroastrianism. Intriguing, too, is the story of Columbus, "the curious and obsessive mariner", who mistook South America for the Garden of Eden because of its talking parrots and, believing that all animals could speak before the Fall, had an interpreter on hand to translate.

Rushby traces an illuminating continuity from medieval collectors of sacred relics, through Tradescant and his cabinet of curiosities, to 21st-century museum curators. I remain unconvinced - unless the phrase is so capacious as to be meaningless - that the same longing for paradise motivated not just these men, but the great 19th-century philanthropists and scientists. I am equally dubious that it explains the popularity of today's health gurus, interior designers and cosmetic surgeons. The impressive accumulation of historical detail and interludes of fine travel writing do not, unfortunately, add up to an argument.