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Posted: 28 Nov 2022

Taken: 28 Nov 2022

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"History is not the soil in which happiness grows" ~ Hegel

"History is not the soil in which happiness grows" ~ Hegel

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . Hegel, in the early nineteenth century, gave us, “History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history. There are certain moments of satisfaction in the history of the world, but this satisfaction is not to be equated with happiness.” This dismissal of happiness as a natural state to which civilizations might reasonably aspire initiates modern cynicism. To our ears, it seems almost obvious, but in its time it was a heretical position of gloom: the truth is that we are born into misery and will miserably go on, and that those who understand misery and live intimately with it are the ones who best know history past and future. And yet glum Hegel states elsewhere that to give in to despair is to be lost. ~ Page 316

Among philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard is depression’s poster boy. Free of Hegel’s commitment to resisting despair, Kierkegaard followed every truth to its logical final point, striving to eschew compromise. He took curious comfort from his pain because he believed in its honesty and reality. “My sorrow is my castle,” he wrote. “In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I loved my melancholy.” It is as though Kierkegaard believed that happiness would enfeeble him. Incapable of loving the people around him, he truned to faith as an expression of something so remote as to be beyond despair. “Here I stand,” he wrote, “like an archer whose bow is stretched to the uttermost limit and who is asked to shoot at a target five paces ahead of him. This I cannot do, says the archer, but put the target two or three hundred paces further away and you will see!” While earlier philosopher and poets had spoken of the melancholic man, Kierkegaard saw mankind as melancholic. “What is rare,” he wrote, “is not that someone should be in despair; no, what is rare is great rarity, is that on should truly not be in despair.” Page 316

The Noonday Demon
21 months ago. Edited 21 months ago.

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