The Pursuit of Happiness reviewed by an Alzheimer's patient

I received a long article on The Pursuit of Happiness.


I editorialized it here on google Doc.  I do this to make it easier to read.
I add comments in purple to give my perspective as an Alzheimer's patient.

Pursuit of Happiness by David Wootton  link

The original article here. link

Excerpts where I make my comments in purple.

1-Jefferson meant, I think, that we have a right to certain preconditions that will allow us to pursue happiness:

 freedom of speech, so we can speak our minds and learn from others; 

a career open to talents, so our efforts may be rewarded;

 freedom of worship, so we may find our way to heaven; 

and a free market, so we can pursue prosperity.

I find it interesting that Mayor Pete has freedoms as a main theme of his campaign.

2- This problem is particularly acute in our modern consumer economy, in which political institutions, the economic system, and popular culture are all now primarily dedicated to the pursuit of happiness.

 This has had the perverse effect of creating a world of frustration and disappointment in which so many discover that happiness is beyond their grasp. 

The economy fails to deliver for the majority but urges everyone to spend beyond their means.

 We engage in “retail therapy,” spending for the momentary gratification of acquisition.

Like gambling, shopping gives a temporary release of dopamine giving a short high to the brain.

3- The self becomes what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “the ghost in the machine,”

 the machine being our anatomical existence.

 Locke invented the modern philosophical problem of personal identity by arguing that memories make us who we are. 

If I woke up tomorrow in a different body, I would still be me if my memories were intact; but if I woke up in this body but with no memories, then I would no longer be the same person. 

The fate of an Alzheimer’s patient.

4- 

Implicit in the idea of subjective happiness is the idea that you ought to be able to perceive the difference between success and failure.

 If happiness is subjective, our claims to be happy or unhappy must be infallible. 

But if I look over my life, what I see is that sometimes I am happy, at other times not.

 A happy life must be one in which pleasure and satisfaction outweigh pain and dissatisfaction.

 It must be possible to measure pleasure and pain in order to establish whether one outweighs the other.

Is it impossible for an Alzheimers patient who forgot who he is, to know if he is happy or not? 

Apparently, end stage patients listen to music with earphones and feel pleasure. 

5-  The metaphor to which early modern thinkers revert is that of the account book: just as the bottom line of the ledger shows profit or loss, so we ought to be able to tell if we have experienced more pleasure or pain.

Many people measure whether the bottom line shows if they did more good than harm.

6- We associate the idea of a felicific or hedonic calculus with Jeremy Bentham, but a hundred years earlier the French philosopher Pierre Bayle was arguing that in every life pain outweighs pleasure. (Think of the intense pain of a toothache in the days before painkillers, and compare it with the modest pleasure of a good meal or a sunny day.) If pain outweighs pleasure, then life is not worth living. 

A heavyweight boxing champion was asked why he hit his head against the wall.

He replied, “because it feels so good when I stop.” 

7- Bayle thought that no one, given the choice, would live their life over again.

Had Bayle never experienced love or had a child?

8-  When Voltaire wrote a little essay on happiness, his text was marred by references to pain and suffering, to dogs being vivisected.

 He couldn’t forget his own suffering or that of others—even, perhaps especially, when his subject was everything delightful.

In some ways loss of memory in Alzheimers patients is a blessing.

9-  This new subjectivity tackled the central problem exposed by the religious divisions of Europe: If theologians could not agree on salvation, what form of knowledge could be trusted? The Reformation led directly to skepticism, and to a new word from the ancient Greek: atheism. In this new world, unbelief was possible. 

Pleasure was the one thing whose importance nobody could deny.

There is no denying that Alzheimer’s patient have the ability to experience pleasure. 

10-  Of course, we have trouble grasping that death is the end. In one of his most transparently irreligious moments, Montaigne quotes Lucretius on how we persist in imagining that something of us will survive our own demise. 

But we can safely dismiss such fantasies.

 Living happily, feeling happy, was for Montaigne the true purpose of life. 

This is also the goal of an Alzheimer’s patient. Have fun.

Are end stage Alzheimers patient capable of committing sin?

11- We now can see that a society devoted to self-gratification may, in the end, destroy the conditions of its own existence.

The world will  end inevitably. Unknown what the cause will be.  

I don’t think I found the words “Love” and “Hope” in this article. 

So many brilliant people miss what is self-evident.