The Time without Happiness

Now here’s a book that thinks you don’t even know whether you’re happy. The next time someone asks “Are you happy?”—inauspicious question that this is, prelude to a long talk and a probably sleepless night—the only proper answer you can give will be: “I don’t know,” or, better, “It’s not for me to say.” The problem, for Vivasvan Soni, is not epistemological; it is not that Soni has identified some new skeptical barrier that would prevent us from accurately identifying our own emotions. You don’t know whether you’re angry, you don’t know whether you’re contrite, etc. The issue is that happiness correctly understood is not, in fact, an emotion, not even a complex one, nor indeed any kind of inner state, and Mourning Happiness is the story of how we ever came to suppose that it was. But then this book is not just a history; it is an exorbitant labor of philosophical retrieval, proposing that we return to another, all-but-vanished conception of happiness, which Soni anchors in the command, issued by the semi-mythical Athenian statesman Solon, that we “call no man happy until he is dead.” What this would mean is at least threefold. First, it would mean that happiness requires a difficult judgment; happiness will not wash over me, and I will never read it in the faces of others. Even following our current uses of the word, we accept that a person might be puzzled about her own happiness—unsure whether she is happy—whereas we would not expect her to be unsure, across even moderate durations, whether she is, say, in pain. Second, it would mean that this judgment will have to be spoken by others in my absence, since I will be dead, and that my fellows will thereby take responsibility for my life, for its course and its success. “Was he happy?” will inevitably, when spoken in grief, mean “Did we do everything we could to make him happy?” Third and most important: it means that you can tell whether someone was happy only if you take into consideration his entire life; to say that a person was happy is to say that, by some criterion unspecified, he lived his life well, and that life (or fortune, or fate, or God) did not at any point punish him irreparably. Moreover, if a person’s whole life is at issue, then there is no time of which you can say that his happiness did not matter. But then equally there is no month of which you can say that his happiness briefly ran high. Perfect moments do not enter into it. The day your first child is born will be important, of course, but no more than the reputedly routine Tuesday that precedes it. Soni’s most fundamental contention is that “happiness” used to be ordinary language’s one utopian term, broadcasting, even in everyday speech, the implacable idea that people deserve to lead good lives, and not just sometimes. The question, then, would have to be how we have ended up, by way of the very same word, with such a meagerness, a mere feeling, which you sometimes experience but mostly do not—joy tempered with content, a seasoned gaiety, a composite pleasure, a reward for having endured long stretches of boredom and nausea, a treat: the weekend.

The good news, for some, will be that Soni is an eighteenth centuryist, and that Mourning Happiness is not just another happiness book, not the inescapable extension into its chosen field of one of academia’s more fashionable topics. For Soni’s is far and away the most brilliant reformulation, in recent years, of the question of happiness, the one book with reference to which all the other professors of happiness—the neo-Aristotelians, the SWB psychologists, sundry other late-model eudaemonologists—will have to adjust their positions. Nor has Soni merely trawled the eighteenth century in order to identify where its thinking about...