Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Happiness is a glowing review, 2 May 2006
Richard Schoch's remarkable book claims to reveal the historical secrets of happiness and does just that, although the messages are challenging ones to hear and accept. Amidst all the beautiful and learned anecdotes in the book, Mr Schoch seems to makes at least three essential points about the nature of happiness.
The first of these points seems to be that happiness is only one half of a binary experience. More simply, the people who seek the experience we call "happiness" usually do so only because they are having the experience we call "unhappiness". In other words, the people who have found happiness have started on their search as a result of misfortune; usually personal and typically deep enough to drive these people to find change either inside or outside themselves. Just as we cannot know the meaning of day without night, we cannot know the meaning of happiness without despair.
The second point is that historically the people who have found happiness have done so only through enormous effort and personal sacrifice. These people have dedicated their lives to finding the meaning of happiness and have earned the right to be happy only through self-confrontation and self-knowledge. In fact, Mr Schoch refers to the experience of happiness as our "life's project", one which we move in and out of on a regular basis rather than one which we experience as a constant.
The third point is that the experience of happiness is different for each person. According to the examples Mr Schoch gives, everyone who has found happiness has done so on his or her own terms. As a non-believer in the cult of happiness, this point is where all arguments about the nature of happiness begin to fail for me. If happiness is relative and subjective, then the only measurement of happiness I have is my memory of my previous experience and my current self-knowledge, both of which are intangible and unreliable.
Despite the fact that the existence of happiness is as much a matter of belief for me as the existence of god, Mr Schoch's arguments make for thought-provoking reading. The book covers several schools of classical thought as well as the five major world religions, providing a fascinating overview of the history of thinking about happiness.
Ironically, what emerges for me from this overview is that our preoccupation with despair and happiness seems to be a result of living together in an organised way. Civilisation seems to have made us aware enough of "unhappiness" to make us want to look for alternative states of being. At the same time, civilisation has given us enough leisure time to occupy ourselves with this dubious pursuit.
Mr Schoch's book seems to make two fundamental assumptions. The first of these is that "happiness" exists. The second is that "happiness" is something we can obtain, although the author does point out that happiness usually emerges from other activities, such as self-mastery. Despite the fact that I accept neither of these assumptions, Mr Schoch's clear arguments allowed me to clarify my own interpretation of the meaning of well-being.
Clearly, the author believes in happiness; and clearly, he believes that the pursuit of happiness is a worthy one. In fact, the careful objectivity of the writing barely manages to disguise Mr Schoch's passion for his subject and his deep drive to take the historical secrets of happiness to his readers.
Without doubt, sharing the secrets of happiness with the rest of us makes Mr Schoch very happy indeed. The result is a beautiful book, one which offers the rare satisfaction of reading a knowledgeable, well-presented argument. The message that we are responsible for our own happiness might seem austere. However, the writer has balanced that austerity with an extraordinary ability to empathise with other people's perspectives on the meaning of happiness.
I agree with almost nothing in Mr Schoch's controversial book; nevertheless, reading his work was an enormous pleasure. As a result, I cannot help feeling that in terms of the author's own happiness-versus-pleasure debate, pleasure seems to have won hands down.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A bit of a Schoch, 18 May 2009
I really should have found something out about this author before I bought the book, but it was one of those spur of the moment buys. Richard Schoch is an academic, being professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London, where he is also director of the Graduate School in Humanities and Social Sciences. Apart from his academic life he has little experience of the world, the blurb of his profile says; that he managed development projects in Morocco and Tunisia; it does not say what those projects were or how long they lasted.
So here we have someone with little experience of life putting himself forward as a guru for happiness.
How does he make up for this lack of personal experience; quite simply by regurgitating a lot of text from old sources. There are brief guides to Utilitarianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and so on. There are likewise brief guides on religious philosophers Thomas Aquinas, Ghazali, Gautama etc. All of this is interspersed with some homespun wisdom, where the early influence of a Jesuit education shines through his text.
Quite honestly all the information contained in the book is easily found on Wikipedia.
Schoch may have received an indulgence from the Pope for his sins but I am afraid he gets a zero rating from me because he is someone who has yet to find out what life is really about.
Not worth buying, if you must read it borrow a copy.
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