Category Archives: History of Emotions

Let me not injure the felicity of others…

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Let me not injure the felicity of others,’ says Sir Thomas Browne in a suppressed passage of the Religio Medici,

Portrait of Sir Thomas Browne

“I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me.” - Sir Thomas Browne 1642

But not all is quite as it seems. Sir Thomas Browne, as quoted in this TED Talk on Happiness , suffered from melancholia, and his words should not be taken too literally.

His writing is characterised by wit and subtle humour, as can be seen more clearly later in the book when he asserts that he ‘could lose an arm without a tear, and with few groans be quartered into pieces.‘

There are many things in this book, so he tells us, ‘delivered rhetorically, many expressions therein merely tropical,… and therefore also many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.‘

It seems as if we should be careful when we interpret how people describe their inner most feelings, in print perhaps even more so than in confidence. However, even if the quote is not quite sincere, the point Dan Glibert is making in his talk is that happiness is relative, and that we have within us the ability to “manufacture happiness”. In the talk, he provides evidence that this synthetic happiness is no different in quality from real, or what we might call natural happiness.

Interestingly, it turns out that freedom — the ability to make up your mind and change your mind is “the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose, to change and make up your mind — is the enemy of synthetic happiness.” Dan goes through some psychological experiments that back his assertion here up. He somes up nicely:

The lesson I want to leave you with from these data is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.

Spinoza

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Spinoza classified emotions into the following:

  1. Desire is the essence of man insofar as it is conceived as determined to any action by any one of its modifications.
  2. Joy is man’s passage from a less to a greater perfection.
  3. Sorrow is man’s passage from a greater to a less perfection.
  4. Love is joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause.
  5. Hatred is sorrow with the accompanying idea of an external cause.
  6. Hope is a joy not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.
  7. Fear is a sorrow not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.
  8. Confidence is a joy arising from the idea of a past or future object from which cause for doubting is removed.
  9. Despair is sorrow arising from the idea of a past or future object from which cause for doubting is removed.
  10. Gladness is joy with the accompanying idea of something past which, unhoped for, has happened.
  11. Remorse is sorrow with the accompanying idea of something past which, unhoped for, has happened.
  12. Favor is love toward those who have benefited others.
  13. Indignation is hatred toward those who have injured others.
  14. Overestimation consists of thinking too highly of another person in consequence of our love for him.
  15. Contempt consists in thinking too little of another person in consequence of our hatred for him.
  16. Envy is hatred in so far as it affects a man so that he is sad at the good fortune of another person and is glad when any evil happens to him.
  17. Compassion is love in so far as it affects a man so that he is glad at the prosperity  of another person and is sad when any evil happens to him.
  18. Self-satisfaction is the joy which is produced by contemplating ourselves and our own power of action.
  19. Humility is the sorrow which is produced by contemplating our impotence or helplessness.
  20. Pride is thinking too much of ourselves, through self-love.
  21. Despondency is thinking too little of ourselves through sorrow.
  22. Self-exaltation is joy with the accompanying idea of some action which we imagine people praise.
  23. Shame is sorrow with the accompanying idea of some action which we imagine people blame.
  24. Benevolence is the desire to do good to those whom we pity.
  25. Anger is the desire by which we are impelled, through hatred, to injure those whom we hate.

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