Fortune, Felicity and Happiness in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

OH happiness! our being’s end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate’er thy name: That something still which prompts th’ eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die … Fix’d to no spot is happiness sincere, ’Tis no where to be found, or ev’ry where: ’Tis never to be bought, but always free, And fled from monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee. … Some place the bliss in action, some in ease, Those call it pleasure, and contentment these … Who thus define it, say they more or less Than this, that happiness is happiness? …Alexander Pope’s lines from the Essay on Man (1734) suggest the richness, diversity and overwhelming, transgressive nature of the concept of happiness. In the above quotation, happiness seems to be curiously self-evident and inconclusive at the same time. It is the central motivation for any action or non-action, all-pervasive, omnipresent and elusive. The obviousness with which Pope uses the word ‘happiness’ for so many different states of existence (material wealth, flourishing, bliss, the good life, the common good) is, however, the result of a long process of semantic change that is convincingly described by Phil Withington: being ‘derived from the Old Norse noun hap, meaning luck or fortune’, the word ‘happiness’ was, according to Withington’s findings, first used by William Caxton in his translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s French History of Troy. The addition of the English suffix ‘ness’ to the adjective ‘happy’ denotes ‘the quality and state of hap (i.e. fortune) or the circumstances and phenomena that exemplified such a condition’. The word changed its meaning from denoting good luck and favourable external (providential) conditions to signifying ‘the active pursuit of virtue and the common good’. Happiness became an umbrella term referring to a ‘commonplace mixture of physical well-being and psychological content’, to the individual and collective desire for and pursuit of ‘public improvement’, autonomy, liberty, ‘consumer self-interest and national aggrandisement’.