The front end of contemporary culture – the part of culture that establishes our ethos or ethics – is a great celebration of personal autonomy and the freedom to choose. This is the glossy, well-known, advertised face of our ethos, which is usually just taken for granted in political and ethical discussions. Like any ethos it reveals some truths and hides others, and so it deserves more than an unqualified up-or-down judgment of its value. But the back end of our ethos, or the fine print on the total autonomy contract, is something for which the contemporary world has no name but which can be called ahappiness. Contemporary persons are not happy or unhappy, they are simply ahappy. Happiness is not taken in earnest or afforded a place in any serious discussion. The word still exists for us, but a sufficient knowledge of the existence of such happiness can be found simply by asking someone if they have it, say, in a phone survey. For St. Thomas, such a phone survey would have been a piece of raucously absurdist theater – it would have been no different than compiling murder statistics by calling up people and asking them if they were murderers. But in the sense of happiness that can’t be grasped by phone surveys we are ahappy.
One immediate objection to all this is that happiness is itself an inadequate word for St. Thomas’s beatitudo or Aristotle’e eudaimonia. This is true but derivative. We haven’t lost the concept for lack of a word: both the concept and the word were lost by a denial of a reality. This denial was not made at the beginning – no one would have willingly killed off such a wonderful thing – it was killed off accidentally, while we weren’t looking, or at worst in a tragic decision that we are still convinced was tragic but for the best. We’ve been in forgetfulness of it ever since.
Just Thomism 
thenyssan said,
August 15, 2010 at 8:47 am
Fantastic. And where you say “front end” and “fine print” of the contract, I think I might push a little harder and say “obverse” and “reverse.” It’s almost misleading to say that one causes the other. It certainly seems that ahappiness follows radical autonomy, but really you can’t have one without the other. It’s the same thing seen from two perspectives.
Here’s a whimsy at the level of language to illustrate (I’m not sure it proves anything but it amuses me):
“It makes me happy” is a violation of radical autonomy. Vice versa: “Nobody makes me do anything!” is a refusal to be made happy.
skholiast said,
August 15, 2010 at 11:13 am
I take it you are familiar with MacIntyre’s critique of post-Enlightenment ethics, in which he also argues that we’ve lost the sense of what ancient ethical vocabulary means. He might even say that we have a word for happiness, but even if the word was itself “eudaemonia,” it would not mean what Aristotle meant by it–we’ve tricked ourselves out of the experience. So my real question to you would be– if we “killed off” the concept/experience at some point in the past, whendo you think this was?
James Chastek said,
August 15, 2010 at 11:57 am
Honestly, I just don’t know. I haven’t been around very long and haven’t lived in many places. I do know that for my whole life of doing philosophy, a discussion of happiness was never taken seriously, and my experience with most people who speak about ethics is that they seem incapable of taking it seriously. People are still very moved by God, and they still find great meaning in him, but happiness is dead. Even very convinced Aristotelians and Thomists have the hardest time seeing happiness as real and foundational – as Servais Pinkaers and John Lamont point out, Catholic ethics has oblivious and forgetful of happiness for a very long time. I choose the word “forgetfulness”, of course, to echo Heidegger; the forgetfulness of happiness is the ethical parallel to the metaphysical forgetfulness of being.
Full disclosure, I’ve never read a single word of MccIntyre – not even a random article, book jacket, or block quote in someone else’s writing. I just never got around to it. I don’t’ study much ethics anyway because I’m bad at it and I have a terrible tone-deafness to ethical thought. So to your question: while it is superfluous to point out that no one fugure or date will be an absolute turning point, my basic conviction is that the modern world is just shorthand for speaking about the Protestant world, and that in the judgment of history this age will be called the Protestant age (“Modern” is incoherent, since anyone who has ever lived has been modern). What we now call post – modern is is really just post protestantism, and the death of the modern world is largely a recognition that (mainline) protestantism is now just a lesbian in a miter giving a sermon to empty pews. NTTAWWT! (All) Protestantism is now capable of equally celebrating both sodomy and the papacy, which is to say that it’s deader than Nixon and it ain’t coming back. I miss a great deal about it – it was really tolerant, quite good at being a national religion, it founded my country, it promoted the classics (see the original curricula of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.) it did a great deal to promote liberty and freedom, and it produced some statesmen who are safely immortal. There are some other parts about it that I am giddy to see die – its absolute division of nature and grace, its denigration of nature, its tendency to reduce everything to one order of either God or free will, either reason or revelation, etc. There is also, of course, its congenital antipathy to Scholasticism (yes yes, I know there were Protestant scholastics, and that even now ther are many better at it than I will ever be; and it goes without saying that this is not a judgment on any particular protestant). Nonetheless, the reality of ahappiness – at least in the West and especially in the English speaking world – is, IMO, going to be in large part a commentary or footnote to protestant doctrine.
Mike said,
August 15, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Could you expand on the “denigration of nature”? I intuit a connection with Francis Bacon and “The Masculine Birth of Time” and hence with Science-with-a-capital-S re-imagined as goal-oriented toward human domination of nature; but it isn’t coming clear quite yet. I’m trying to draft an essay titled “The Autumn of the Modern Ages” and this is a side of it I hadn’t thought of.
James Chastek said,
August 15, 2010 at 5:32 pm
The book to read is Charles Morerod’s “Protestantism and Ecumenism”, which does a very good job at showing that the central concern of the Reformation thinkers, and one of the only concerns to characterize it from beginning to end, was the problem of concurrent causality. If God does something, how can man do it also? If God acts, how can nature act also? When put in these terms, one has to choose between God or nature, and for any religion the choice is obvious. The immediate consequence of this is skepticism about priesthood and sacraments, but the idea is very hard to contain. The logic of this position is what worked itself out over the course of the protestant period. I don’t say that it is the only cause – but I see religion as the dominant force in culture, so much so that the irreligious still function within it.
AT said,
August 16, 2010 at 3:34 am
“both the concept and the word were lost by a denial of a reality.” – leaving us with areality.