Abstract
This chapter recognizes two conceptions of happiness. One is the ancient conception of a rational and virtuous existence. The other is the conventional understanding of feeling good/pleasure. I begin by noting that when we identify what makes us conventionally happy we often try to recreate the feeling. The converse assertion from Chrysippus is that living in accordance with nature engenders Stoic happiness of its own accord. Chrysippus conceives of happiness as the ultimate and common good. This is comparable with Martineau’s research which also positions happiness as the ultimate and essential human end. A tension emerges in that for Martineau happiness has a social source (structures of morals/manners). Contrarily for Chrysippus the source of happiness is God’s pantheistic presence in the universe. By re-reading Martineau’s position via Chrysippean insights, I ask if God is the social structure though for Martineau. This incorporates Martineau’s belief that happiness has a divinely universal orientation toward a virtuous life. From this insight, I describe Martineau’s understanding of happiness as more consistent with Stoic rationality/virtue than with the conventional form of feeling good/pleasure. In noting what is collective about Stoic happiness for Chrysippus, I likewise identify intersections between his position and Martineau’s sociological lens.
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Notes
- 1.
Seneca’s application of negative visualization is apparent in “Consolation to Marcia.” Here Seneca writes to a woman stricken with grief for three years since the death of her son. Seneca’s advice concerns not only how to manage her current emotions but also how she can avoid grief in the future by anticipating the events that cause it (Seneca 2015b, 38–69). This is a specific example of the more general advice Seneca elsewhere offers to “hope for the best but prepare yourself for the worst” (Seneca 2015a, 24, 12).
- 2.
See Epicurus’ physics which holds that the world is the product of chance/accidental, atomic collisions (Epicurus 2005, 1–28). Sextus Empiricus later observes in Against the Physicists that the Epicurean characterization of worldly phenomena as accidental even applies to time. For Epicurus parts of time such as night, or a particular hour, no longer remain when other parts of time do. Sextus thus argues that for Epicurean time if “its parts in this way do not exist, nor can it exist itself. But let’s say there is day, and night hours do exist. Then, since these things are time, and Epicurus says that time is an accident of them, then time itself will, according to Epicurus, be an accident of itself” (Sextus Empiricus 2012, 2.C, 244).
- 3.
For what a “supervened” state means regarding earlier reviewed notions of Stoic pantheism, see Levine (1994, 123).
- 4.
For orthodox readings of this Stoic God-Nature equation, see Lapidge (1978, 163–164) or McDonough (2009, 109–110). George van Kooten offers the broader summation that what this refers to for the Stoics is that “physics is in the end interchangeable with theology” (Van Kooten 2003, 17). I explore contemporary concerns about the ramifications of pantheism for modern science in the “Physical Conditions” section of this book.
- 5.
Commentators regularly identify Martineau as the first formal female sociologist. Kathy Stolley observes numerous such characterizations of Martineau as the “Mother of sociology” (Stolley 2005, 15). Not only did Martineau’s work address gender from a newly female voice, but she also analyzed the interaction of gender and disability. Martineau’s deafness and other physical ailments for Mary Jo Deegan position Martineau’s work uniquely as representing “a woman’s standpoint and as a person with a disability” (Deegan 2003, 58). Martineau notably also introduces the social theory of Auguste Comte to the English-speaking world via her translation in The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (Comte 2009 (1853)).
- 6.
On this point also see Martineau’s Household Education (1849) in which she laments the conditions of women’s education and associated socialized rules and feelings.
- 7.
This concerns Bergson’s distinction between extensive and intensive magnitudes. Extensive magnitudes are for Bergson measurable and comparable, whereas intensive magnitudes are not (Bergson 1960 (1889), 3). In Chap. 3, we discussed this distinction regarding time. For this chapter’s concerns about emotion we can note how for Bergson intensive states, which he describes as “inner experiences” including “joy or sorrow” (7), have no measurable or comparable units. A stronger or weaker “intensive experience” of happiness appears to match spatial/extensive magnitudes. There are however no quantifiable units of happiness with which to measure it (3). We should therefore appreciate such intensive states as having progressively differing qualities but not as having simultaneously and mutually comparable quantities. Because intensive states reproduce each other, they are indiscernible and cannot be treated “as things which are set side by side” (8–9).
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Johncock, W. (2020). How Individual Is Happiness? Chrysippus and Harriet Martineau on the Universal End. In: Stoic Philosophy and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43153-2_14
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