Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment by Brian Michael Norton (review)

Brian Michael Norton argues that over the course of the eighteenth century, the concept of happiness became “disarticulated from that of the summum bonum” (5), as modern theories of the good life moved “the problem of happiness inward, psychologizing it” (6). In response to this change in definitions of happiness, the novel, with its emphasis on “observing minutely,” emerged as a “useful form of ethical thinking,” dramatizing the search by ordinary individuals for personal fulfillment. “By studying fiction’s participation in eighteenth-century inquiries after happiness,” its author says, “this book views the novel as a vital, if often overlooked, contribution to Enlightenment ethics” (11).

For Aristotle, the concept of Eudaimonia meant that “living well and doing well” was the “same thing as happiness” (4). Eudaimonist ethics, especially as the theory had been elaborated by the Stoics, tended to draw a “rigorous distinction between the internal workings of the mind and external reality, between what is ‘up to us’ and what is beyond our control.” This “Stoic imperturbability” was predicated on the idea that “only that which is in our power,” which comes from within, “can fundamentally affect our well-being” (29). According to Norton, Tristram Shandy offers a challenge to this theory as we watch poor Phutatorious trying to determine how he should respond to the hot chestnut that has accidentally fallen into his breeches. The intensity of sensation as the heat advances “into the regions of pain” exposes the shortcomings of “the ideal of imperturbability,” suggesting that “there is something wrong with the psychology on which this ideal of self-sufficiency is based” (35).

The relationship between happiness and virtue, first posed by the Eudaimonist Stoics, is “omnipresent” in Rameau’s Nephew, in which “Diderot tries to reconcile his affinity for subjectivist ideas of happiness with his firm commitment to virtue” (58). Rameau is a “thorough hedonist” (53), but, as he discovers, his system of happiness fails even according to its own terms. What we find in Rameau’s Nephew is a reframing of the question whether happiness is possible without virtue, seeking its solution “not in the abstract, but within the consciousness and experience of the individuals it depicts” (63).

For Rousseau, being happy requires more than simply following nature: “Every individual must follow his or her own nature” (70). Rousseau is “adamant that we should be happy … [that] happiness remains ‘l’objet de la vie humaine.’” But because our lives unfold “within a wider ethical community,” Rousseau argues, “we are answerable for how our actions affect these others” (72). Here the conflict is not between duty and obligation, but is a much more “unsettling conflict between ‘opposite duties’” (74). Rather than “reconciling nature and society,” as Rousseau does in Emile, in Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise (1761) he insists on their utter opposition. Even in the most corrupt of societies, Rousseau argues, “there are cases when justice requires us to disregard the natural impulses of our hearts and bow to the obligations of social duty” (82).

This question of the relationship between happiness and social duty is central to the fourth novel discussed here, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. To imagine happiness “outside of human relationships is for Godwin to imagine a form of happiness that is somehow inhuman” (100). According to Norton, it is as though, in writing the novel, Godwin came to realize “that the autonomous subject of the Stoic-Socratic tradition was inimical to his own ethical and political project” (101). Indeed, as Caleb confesses, “I had learned by bitter experience by how many links society had a hold upon me, and how closely the snares of despotism beset me” (qtd. in Norton, 105).

Unlike Godwin, who argues that the individual has “a duty to work for the general good,” Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) follows Epicurus, telling us that “happiness is the only true end of existence” (qtd...