Summary: What did Thomas Jefferson really mean by “the pursuit of happiness”? In this conversation, Adam Potkay reveals how 18th-century understandings of happiness differed profoundly from our modern self-help versions. Drawing on classical sources from Plato to Cicero, Jefferson and his contemporaries saw happiness not merely as subjective satisfaction but rather as an objective evaluation of a life well-lived — one centered on virtue, good conscience, and communal bonds. Potkay traces three competing threads in Jefferson’s thought: classical eudaimonism emphasizing tranquility and virtue, Lockean subjective pursuit and acquisition, and sentimental moral philosophy stressing sympathetic community. The Declaration’s original draft reveals Jefferson’s balancing of head and heart, reason and sentiment — dichotomies that defined Enlightenment thinking about human flourishing. Potkay also distinguishes happiness from joy, exploring why “public happiness” became the Enlightenment’s defining contribution to political thought.
Note: The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and accuracy.
Garrett Brown: Welcome to Humane Pursuits. My name is Garrett Brown, and I’m a research fellow in the humanities at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a host of this program. I’m honored to have Adam Potkay as my guest on today’s program. Adam Potkay is the William R. Kenan Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he has taught since 1990. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, Washington University–St. Louis, Columbia University, and at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He holds degrees from Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and Rutgers University.
His books include The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume and The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, both published by Cornell University Press. His 2007 book, The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism, published by Cambridge, won the prestigious Harry Levin Prize, awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association for best book in literary criticism and history. He has published scholarly articles and more popular essays in a wide variety of journals, from Eighteenth-Century Studies and Studies in Early Modern Philosophy to Philosophy Now and Raritan Quarterly. His most recent book is Hope: A Literary History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.
Adam Potkay, welcome to the program.
Adam Potkay: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
Brown: Humane Pursuits hopes to range the gamut of ideas that animate and sustain a classically liberal democracy. And on the cusp of the 250th anniversary of the American founding and the Declaration of Independence, it seemed right and good to ask, what did Thomas Jefferson mean exactly by the phrase, “the pursuit of happiness”?
I wanted to start there because I suspect that we’re not well situated to understand the term. Happiness has been the subject of hundreds of self-help books, which equate it with pleasure or self-satisfaction. It’s now usually meant in a highly individualistic sense. How was the concept used in the 18th century before Jefferson set pen to paper? When I resolved to tackle this subject, your book on happiness in the work of David Hume and Samuel Johnson sprang to mind. Is that the best place to begin? Or do we need to go further back?
Potkay: That is a fine place to begin. Thank you, Garrett.
Happiness Before Jefferson
Let me start by saying that, in that book, one of the things I wanted to argue is that for all their differences, mainly over questions of religion, Samuel Johnson — lexicographer Johnson, Christian humanist Johnson — and David Hume — historian, philosopher, man of letters, economist—shared a great wealth of knowledge that I term “Ciceronian humanism,” but that just means ancient Greek philosophy as it was filtered to them by Cicero. They knew Greek sources. They both read Greek, but they knew Latin the way we read English, partly because of an educational system that they shared with Thomas Jefferson, who is their junior by about 30 years. But Jefferson advocated throughout his career for all classes, all grammar schools, and universities to be based in Greek and Latin learning.
This will take us back, via that, to Greco-Roman philosophy, from Plato to the Stoics to the Epicureans. Here’s the main legacy about thinking of happiness in classical terms, it’s thinking about the objective qualities of happiness. And one of the things that I’ve argued in Passion for Happiness and elsewhere is that happiness, even in modern English, doesn’t refer only to a feeling or a subjective state. It’s not just statistical studies based on self-reporting, as you say, subjective satisfaction; but happiness has a sense of referring to the evaluation of a life. It involves a judgment about what kind of life is most worth living.
Happiness is subject, in short, to public evaluation. This may seem counterintuitive at first, but as I tell students, always, it’s possible or even common to know someone who thinks he’s happy but to claim to know better. One needs only the proper intonation to render ironic the phrase, “Adam thinks he’s happy” (but he’s not).
Here’s another thought experiment just to continue that, that I’ve used with students to suggest that they retain some vestigial sense of happiness as a communal evaluation, as a more or less objective evaluation of a life. On a crowded street you walk by a drunk or drug-addled man sitting on the sidewalk who, despite his filth, tattered clothing, missing teeth, general disorientation, has a certain euphoric gleam in his eye. Does it seem ironic or not to say, “There’s a happy man”? The degree to which this judgment seems false or ironic is the degree to which we retain a notion of happiness that is not equivalent to a subjective state or just feeling good.
If there’s a happy man doesn’t seem a false judgment right away, consider what extra knowledge about this person might bring to pass. You could see that this was once a brilliant literature professor who, by going off anti-psychotic medication, has been reduced to this dire present condition. Would this story cause you to revise your opinion of a man and his alleged happiness? If it would, and I think it would for most of us, it’s because the concept of happiness still encompasses more than experiences or inferences about mental states or dispositions.
The case of the apparently elated addict suggests three things. First, that happiness can be evaluated from a third person or communal perspective. We can make judgments about the happiness of others. Two, that judgments about happiness are best made within a narrative, a story, a whole life frame of reference. And third, and finally, that the judgment of happiness is, at heart, an ethical one. And this is all rooted in ancient eudaimonism, Greek philosophical ideas about the good life, the flourishing life.
Brown: I was curious to know, is that rooted specifically in Aristotle, or does it come filtered through other people? Because I think that concept is in the Nicomachean Ethics. But was it filtered for Jefferson, whether or not he would’ve had access to Aristotle directly? How did the idea resurface in the 18th century, both in England and in the colonies?
Potkay: My guess is that Jefferson did not read Aristotle directly, or maybe a little, but actually a lot of this is already in Plato, who’s the first person that gives us what the Stoics develop — that the only good, the only real happiness is virtuous activity and everything else is irrelevant.
The Stoics boast that one can be happy even on the rack — that is, the torture instrument that is tearing your limbs out. But the general notion that virtue is key to happiness, if not exclusively so, is not only in Aristotle but passes down to Cicero, Seneca, Latin models that Jefferson read for breakfast. This is what they know very well.
Brown: And those also seem to be the same sources for David Hume, especially in his famous essays, his four essays on the different philosophical tempers.
Potkay: . . . including “The Stoic” and “The Epicurean.”
I wanted to read something from Notes on the State of Virginia when Jefferson is talking about education and he proposes public education for Virginia. This is a proposition that never worked out, where there would be free, very elementary, school—reading, writing, and arithmetic—for three years, and then some promising scholars needing fellowships could go on to grammar schools, where they would learn mainly Greek and Latin. And then if they were very good, they would go on to the school I teach at in Virginia, the only college in Virginia at the time, the College of William and Mary, and become scholars by reading more Greek and Latin and philosophy, astronomy, higher math, and probably some architecture, too, in Jefferson’s frame of reference.
But in the Notes on the State of Virginia, he says the greatest thing about education, this whole education system is that it would teach people to work out “their own greatest happiness, by showing them that happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chances place them.”
That virtuous activity can exist even in poverty, even when one is out of fortune in other men’s eyes, but is always the result of a good conscience. And then this is the part where Aristotle and the Stoics differed; Jefferson adds good health. That’s Aristotle. Amidst that, it helps to have some money in good health. It helps not to be on the rack.
So here’s Jefferson: “Happiness is the result of good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.”
There is an early definition of happiness according to ancient models in Jefferson.
Brown: And that’s in Notes on the State of Virginia.
Potkay: Yes. Jefferson writes it in 1781, the bulk of it.
Brown: So that seems as if he’s picking up on Aristotle’s themes, even if he hasn’t received it directly from Aristotle.
Potkay: Exactly, well said.
Romanticism and Happiness
Brown: There are a lot of shifts going on in the 18th century in terms of rhetoric of moral philosophy, and some of that you document in your book, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume. And there is this shift from a classical understanding of eloquence to a newer social ideology characterized by passions, by decorum, by manners, and private sensibility, which then we see in full-fledged form in Romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century. Can you comment on how that is affecting the dominance of happiness in this time period?
Potkay: Yes. This is a large theme, and this is only one of several changes. This sentimental notion, that there is a sensus communis where we intuitively understand the just and the right, is based on sentiment and feeling as well as, or in addition to, reason, the importance of sympathy, sympathetic sharing. Community is very important to Jefferson.
One of the main nodes that spreads this around the world, really around the world, is Lawrence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy [1759–67] and A Sentimental Journey [1768], which are huge hits in France [and] as far away as Russia. (Tolstoy is translating Sterne a hundred years later.) And Jefferson partakes of this idiom extensively, including in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Having started that document with self-evident truths and appeals to the head, he ends with lines that the Congress cut, much to his dismay, with a large sentimental thing about the aching affections, the pain, the broken hearts, that we have because our brethren in England have been so rude to us, “and now we must seek our own public happiness,” as Jefferson writes, “the road to glory & happiness is open to us too.”
He brings this up all the time, and also in a document I do want to get to in his famous letter to Maria Cosway, one of his dear acquaintances from his Paris years, he writes her, hoping she may come to Monticello, and has a whole dialogue of the head and heart. And there, the head, including classical philosophy, gives way to the heart, which is pure sentimental moral philosophy of a more modern variety.
Brown: Some of these changes go hand in hand with a shift in human nature. If we think about the turbulent 16th and 17th centuries, it seems as if a more skeptical attitude toward human nature, maybe represented by [Blaise] Pascal or La Rochefoucauld, and a lot more skepticism about self-interest, gives way to a period of more favorable feeling and maybe a sense that man is actually good. This is certainly in the work of Henry Fielding and Tom Jones and some of his other novels. But is this also part of the shift we see in literature and rhetoric?
Potkay: It is a shift we see in the literature and rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, like his Parisian acquaintances, [the Marquis de] Chastellux and [the Marquis of] Condorcet say, believed not only in human goodness, but in human perfectibility through good constitutions, through political models. He believed in this strongly. He was, in a sense, an 18th-century optimist about human nature, as you suggest.
And, in fact, he was criticized in the U.S. for believing in the French experiment after many other people did. Even after many of his friends from his Paris years, the 1780s, were executed or died during the French Revolution, he still thought this was perhaps an inevitable sacrifice. They were martyrs to liberty and humanity, which he thought would break through. And he thought that France was the greatest place for the extension of the American republic experiment precisely because, as he put it over and over, the French were such a polite and sociable people. They were so kind to strangers. They were such good people. And this could be a new world brought into being through France.
Brown: Which is astonishing in some ways because the French Revolution, for many people at the time, did represent a break with the old regime in a way that the United States breaking off from England did not.
Potkay: Yes, and Jefferson is one of the few people to approve of that. It’s during this time, the early years of the Revolution, that Jefferson is writing to Madison that we can’t be in bondage to the past. Every generation must create things for itself. “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” It does not belong to the dead. Madison never agreed with him on this, and Jefferson approved of the French Revolution through its bloodiest periods and was only disillusioned by the rise of Napoleon and, finally, the emperorship of Napoleon, pretty late in the day.
Brown: That’s shocking, especially since many of his contemporaries did not agree with those sentiments and could clearly see that it represented something far more radical and disruptive to social hierarchies.
Potkay: It’s even more shocking because the very French philosophes that became his friends in Paris were among those who were executed or committed suicide, including the aforementioned Chastellux and Condorcet.
The Heart and the Head
Brown: Let’s return to the two examples that you wanted to raise, relative to this idea of Jefferson’s conception of happiness.
Potkay: Okay, let me start with Jefferson’s famous letter to Maria Cosway from [October] 1786, one of his acquaintances from Paris, whom he writes to when she has left Paris. He invites her to Monticello. And this is the famous dialogue of head and heart. And Jefferson says to her, “my head leans one way, the heart the other,” and here the heart, sentimental moral philosophy will win.
The head represents ancient Epicureanism, ancient Stoicism, to a moderated degree. And in these ancient philosophies, the greatest good, the greatest happiness as well, is tranquility, undisturbedness of mind. It is something that virtue gives you, in the Epicurean mold — virtue is the only good to the Stoic — but the result is apatheia, apathy, the absence of strong deranging passions, for the Stoic, and tranquility, a pleasure that is the absence of pain, for the Epicurean. Those models of classical philosophy are what the head spouts in Jefferson’s great letter.
So the heart is unhappy that Maria Cosway is gone and the affection for friends leads to pain in their absence. The head says this is why the heart is bad. This is why we need detachment, the philosophic tranquility, that ancient philosophy will bring us. Here’s where we need utility. But the heart responds: Attachments, even though they bring pain, are the main source of our happiness, because happiness lies with me, the heart. Head replies that even friends can be a great pain, and one doesn’t want to invest in friends too much. One shouldn’t be too disturbed by their separation. It, too, is a passing thing. It is a moment of chance outside the virtuous, rational activity that defines one.
[Head] The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset. Pleasure is always before us; but misfortune is at our side: while running after that, this arrests us. The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness. . . .
{Heart] Let the gloomy Monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives, which you have been vaunting in such elevated terms.
—Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1786
This is what the head says, sounding like Stoic Epicurean mixed: “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. . . . The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness. . . . Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others.”
And that’s how the head ends. But the heart gets the last word in what is, after all, a semi love letter. And the heart says, “What more sublime delight than to mingle tears with one whom the hand of heaven had smitten!” Sentimental sympathetic response. “The world abounds indeed with misery: to lighten it’s burthen we must divide it with one another.” And how great are these pleasures of sympathy? “Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked . . . on the head. They are rooted, the heart says in Jefferson, “in feelings of sympathy, of benevolence,” sentiment. So the heart gets the last word in this particular dialogue.
The other text that I wanted to bring up before the Declaration is a later letter that he writes to his long-term secretary and confidant, William Short, in 1819 from Monticello, when Jefferson is already in his 70s. And he responds, “I too,” he says to his friend, “am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine doctrines . . . of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy, which Greece & Rome have left us.”
The only person we need to supplement Epicurean philosophy is Jesus, who teaches us to love others and to be charitable toward others as well as ourselves. But this is, of course, the Jesus of Jefferson’s famous, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, who is an ethical teacher with all the gospel’s miracles and the resurrection cut out.
So he ends his letter to Short with a précis of Epicurean philosophy and why it is the best philosophy. It is the soundest philosophy that makes us equally indifferent to hope and to fear. We hope for nothing extraordinary. We fear nothing, including death. This is perfect composure. “Cease to hope and cease to fear” is a quotation from Seneca, a Latin philosopher that, in this letter, Jefferson cites and approves.
The Happiness of the Declaration
Brown: Is this Jefferson really removed from the context of the Revolution? I think at the time of the Revolution we see him engaging with the other founding fathers, particularly James Madison, in a specific legal tradition, and I think of him as being very much within a kind of rationalist, enlightenment thinking, which prioritized the institutions and the legal framework for setting up the new nation.
So, is this a later phase of Jefferson, where he’s not as attuned to the institutional arrangements of the new nation? Or is it a through line in his thought from the beginning?
Potkay: That is an excellent question, Garrett, and fortunately I have a tentative answer. I believe that even in the Declaration, we find both—to use the later terms—the head and the heart, and what you’re talking about, the natural jurisprudential tradition that Jefferson studied at William and Mary with William Small and George Wythe, does set up a dispassionate, disinterested audience toward the modern project of universally valid human rights, starting with self-evident truths. These are all in William Duncan’s Elements of Logic, this compendious book that Jefferson studied at William and Mary as an undergraduate.
The Declaration starts with this dispassionate intellectual approach:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
So here we open with this syllogism, which is precisely what you’re talking about. But note — and it’s easy to forget this because this is precisely what Congress cuts out between the submission in late June of the original Declaration and what Congress approves after cutting an awful lot — here is toward the end, all stricken by Congress, which is this heartfelt complaint about how the British brethren are breaking American hearts.
Listen to this, too:
At this very time too they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade & deluge us in blood. These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren. We must to endeavor to forget our former love for them.
That is sentimental philosophy. We must forget our former love. And, since they will have it, he says, “the road to glory & happiness is open to us too.” And in this sense, happiness is definitely not individual. It is la félicité publique; it’s public happiness. It’s the happiness of a free and well-constituted nation and glory, too. And this happiness and glory is open to us, but there is the heart speaking at the end of this. Congress did not approve of the heart in this way, did not approve of this part of the eloquence, to get back to that term, this part of the rhetoric, and cut it, to Jefferson’s great dismay.
Brown: I think it’s worth mentioning that Thomas Jefferson, in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, is reaching for concepts that are near at hand, including George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was adopted on June 12, 1776, where he says that “All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which . . . they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
So it’s clear that there’s a larger discourse of happiness going on at the time that many of the founders are citing and pulling into these founding documents.
Potkay: And George Mason is drawing too, as well as on classical sources, on some famous passages by the 17th-century philosopher John Locke. Because John Locke is the one that has the famous line that among our inalienable rights are those to life, liberty, and property [in his Two Treatises of Government, 1689]. And thus, there was a long discussion in Jefferson scholarship, to what degree is the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of property. And to some degree that liberal notion and acquisitive notion is probably part of the penumbra of what Jefferson is getting at. But I think more crucial to him is our classical models, and classical models of philosophic happiness and also sentimental models of effective happiness within communities, communities here torn asunder by England’s ill treatment of its colonists.
About Locke, let me say one other thing. Locke is the person that gives us the phrase, the pursuit of happiness. It’s a common enough phrase and must have occurred earlier, but it’s key to Locke and this particular discussion. Locke concurs with his predecessor, [Thomas] Hobbes [in Leviathan, 1651], that happiness is something that one pursues. It is largely subjective. One acquires something one sought and finds some satisfaction. When one is no longer satisfied with it, one pursues something else. It’s a hedonistic model of happiness. It’s a subjective model of happiness that also, obviously, continues into current understandings of happiness as self-satisfaction.
It even feeds into our current psychological model of the hedonic treadmill: One seeks new things, one gets them, one goes back to a baseline, one continues to look for them. And Hobbes is the one that announces that. But here is Locke, more important to our 18th-century authors. Locke says, “Whoever is content is happy, but as soon as any new uneasiness comes in, happiness is disturbed, and we are set afresh on work in the further pursuit of happiness.” And he says — this is An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1689] — “we seek the making or increase of our happiness.”
So that quotation that you brought up for Mason is part of a classic liberal and jurisprudential scheme that Locke is very key in.
Different Threads of Meaning
Brown: So the threads of meaning that you’re referencing here are actually much more related to the way that we reference happiness today. It does seem though, at times, there’s a rival conception of happiness that is both moral and collective in the sense that virtue and happiness go together. But it’s very much within an understanding of private happiness and public happiness being in one accord. Is that right? Are we seeing separate strands, or separate definitions, of happiness operating within these thinkers?
Potkay: Yes, there, there are at least three strands. There is the classic conception of happiness as the good life, the virtuous life, the life that every individual, every rational individual should try to attain. And it brings psychological tranquility along with it.
There is the notion of happiness as pursuit, avidity for possession, ongoing activity, subjective, private happiness in a sort of Lockean tradition. And for a long time, just to give a little history of the way we’ve read Jefferson’s Declaration in the earlier parts of the 20th century, it was the Lockean strand that readers [and] scholars emphasized in Jefferson.
To pay a very good reader his due, it was Garry Wills in Inventing America that said, no, the Lockean strand is there, but it’s really subordinate to that sentimental moral philosophy that you brought up earlier. And he traces that back to the jurisprudential tradition and also to the third Earl of Shaftesbury and his Characteristics, and that notion of the greatest happiness is in sharing sentiments with others, enjoyment and participation in community, essential to happiness. And that notion of communal happiness, again, is also emphasized in other discourses in the 18th century of public happiness. There are many works, not by Shaftesbury, the only on public happiness, what this means, [but also Francis] Hutcheson on public happiness, the happiness of the community overall as a social and political entity. And it’s this latter sense of happiness that Jefferson wants to emphasize. It depends so much on constitutions.
Just briefly to go back to Jefferson in Paris, he believes that, once the French have a good constitution of the type that [the Marquis de] Lafayette was trying to produce, they too could be a happy nation. And he was blind to many of the other sort of rivalries, intentions, and proletarian uprisings that were happening in Paris at the time because he so believed in public happiness being dependent on the good constitution.
The Height of Happiness
Brown: In preparation for this conversation, I was curious to know what the Google Ngram Viewer would reveal about the fate of happiness in later periods. And it was quite striking to me that after about 1820, there are steep declines in its appearance in the corpus captured by the Ngram Viewer. I set the range between 1600 and 2000, and really the term declines to a low level between 1850 and really the end of the 20th century, until we see the term reappearing in the corpus captured by this online tool.
What happened to happiness? Is there a way to explain why, at its height, it no longer seemed to attract the interest or preoccupation that it did with the founding generation?
Potkay: In some of my work, I have argued that happiness comes into the English language in the age of Shakespeare. It becomes important as basically a translation of classical eudaimonism. [Shakespeare’s Lucentio, in The Taming of the Shrew, invokes the term pedantically: to “that part of philosophy / Will I apply that treats of happiness / By virtue specially to be achieved.”] So it is invested from its English origins with a sense of that classical philosophic model.
And thus, as that classic philosophic model wanes in the course of the 19th century, with broader ideals of public education, education in native languages, and not just Greek and Latin, I think that is part of why it declines, and it continues to decline because happiness still has that Greco-Roman resonance to it, even among people that aren’t aware of it.
So I think those two are key. I think it declines along with neoclassicism and the Greek and Latin education that Jefferson always thought was crucial, even when he thought teaching Old English was a good idea too at UVA.
Happiness vs. Joy
Brown: Moving away from talking about happiness exclusively, you’ve written a phenomenal book on the concept of joy. How is joy differentiated from happiness, and how should we think about the differences between them?
Potkay: Here’s the fundamental difference I think, between happiness and joy. In ordinary language, happiness refers either to a mental disposition, the happy person, or an ethical evaluation: “There’s a happy man.” While joy refers either to a mental disposition — “Garrett is a joyous person” — or a transient mental state, the state of joy: “I felt great joy.” It’s a responsive state or disposition, often defined by the kind of stimulus — one has spiritual joy [or] leaving-for-London joy.
But one of the interesting things about joy, if you wanted to track its use, I think that it’s has always been an important spiritual term, especially but not only within Christianity, and remains so. Joy is a term of religion in a way that happiness is not really. Christianity being the religion I know best. Joy, as John Locke defines it — getting back to Locke — is, “a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good.”
But, in Christian terms, joy pertains chiefly to the latter cause, the assured approaching possession of a good. And that good is in Luke’s account of the nativity, the birth of the Messiah. As the angel of Luke tells the shepherds, “I bring you good news of a great joy.” So the religious resonances of joy are high. And my guess is when joy is used, it’s used a lot around Christmas time, along with hope. It’s often used in English today as a religious term.
Brown: In your book you provide a nice contrast. You say,
Happiness is a technology of the self, a fashioning and indemnification that elevates inner integrity, constancy, and wisdom over external mutability, loss, and death. Joy, by contrast, is an expansion and at least partial loss of self. As we shall see, at joy’s limit — or at the point where it passes over into the distinctive experience of ecstasy — it involves self-severance, an annihilation of the senses and the crystallization of consciousness as radical otherness.
That’s a doozy of a sentence.
Potkay: Well, thank you for bringing it up. The happiness that I’m talking about there is the happiness that Jefferson talks about from the head in his philosophic moments of indemnifying the self from loss, from seeing clearly that certain affections can’t last over time, to not be too disturbed at the passing of things, and joy as a letting go.
I was at a conference [on joy] run by Joanna Cook, a convener in the anthropology department at UC London a couple of summers ago. And the audience in general commented greatly on this notion of joy as letting go, letting go of intention, tragedy, pain, even this life. And I remember some people in the audience talking about joy as—this is a tricky phrase — slipping upward or slipping into God. So they are very different this way. I stand by that antimony I was drawing there.
Brown: The last quote I wanted to call attention to was also delightful. You write:
The distinction between happiness and joy, however fuzzy it may sometimes seem in our ordinary speech, has not entirely been effaced by time. Derek Walcott’s recent essay on the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski demonstrates the distinction clearly: ‘I once asked him,’ Walcott writes, ‘if he believed in happiness . . . and he said that he does not believe in Happiness, but he does believe in Joy. Happiness is for the Declaration of Independence, a political condition, but also for the ending of movies. Joy, by contrast, is an illumination, as in Blake and Wordsworth and Rilke, a benediction, a visitation. In the twentieth century, it required nothing less than a belief in angels.
Potkay: Because those are the angels of Luke’s gospel who say to the shepherds, “Behold, I bring you good news of a great joy.” It is an illumination. It’s that illumination, whether it is religious, secularized, or semi-secularized, as it is in Blake, Wordsworth, and Rilke of that quotation. I’m so glad you brought that up, Garrett, because it is a wonderful quotation from Zagajewski.
Brown: It also underscores what you go on to say:
“Public happiness,” understood as the material and social wellbeing of the aggregate of individuals in a community, is perhaps the Enlightenment’s chief contribution to the history of ideas. Public happiness replaces the medieval and Renaissance (and ultimately Platonic) ideal of political happiness as hierarchical civic order under a wise and just Prince.
The contrast between the two is quite striking.
Potkay: Well said. Well said.
Brown: Thank you, Professor Potkay, for taking time today to talk about the definition of happiness in the 18th century, its use in the Declaration of Independence, and also the distinction between happiness and joy.
I recommend your book to our listeners, The Story of Joy, and again, I just thank you very much for joining the program.
Potkay: Thank you very much, Garrett, for having me. It was a great pleasure talking with you, and I wish you great success with Humane Pursuits.
