Alain on Happiness (ISBN 0810108208)

alain....commonsensical, unflustered, elegant, and right.:
this is a lovely book by a french philosopher that rather dryly points out how we introduce misery into our lives while carefully skirting possible joys. His advice is remarkably simple and easy to implement.

Alain is the nom de plume of the French philosopher Émil Chartier,:
who lived from 1868 until 1951. Alain was a high school (lycée) philosophy teacher in Paris for most of his life, at the famous lycée Henri IV. Among his students were Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Maurois and André Malraux. Most of his students simply called him l'Homme, or "the man." He was, arguably, the most influential philosopher in France during the first half of the twentieth century. Alain wrote in a form that he called the "propos," which can be translated as a talk or conversation. He began writing these propos as two-page articles for the newspaper Dépêche de Rouen and later for his own journal, Libres Propos. He wrote more than five thousand of them or an average of one every two and and a half days over a period of 33 years. In 1928, 93 of these propos, which dealt with the general theme of happiness, were gathered into one volume called Propos sur le Bonheur which has been translated for this book as, Alain on Happiness. Alain's style is lapidary and dense. He made it a practice never to modify or rewrite what he had once written down. He said "The final barrier (the last of two blank pages) approached as other ideas began to appear; they were repressed; but, and I don't know how, they succeeded in filling out the principal idea... The result was a kind of poetry and strength." Since he wrote the essays as articles that would appear the following day in the newspaper, there was no time to make corrections. He said, "The material crowds in, and it has to line up, and pass through, and be quick. That is my acrobatic stunt, as well as I can describe it; I have succeeded perhaps one time in six, which is a lot ..." This concision of expression sometimes puts a considerable burden on the reader. It is often necessary to meditate for several minutes and longer on paragraphs of a single essay before they become clear. But the reward is great and it isn't too much to say that most readers will read his books many times to distill their wisdom and practical, good sense. Alain's philosophy is his own, of course, but he was deeply influenced by Plato, Descartes and Spinoza. He said "We must start with Descartes and lead his beautiful doctrine all the way to Spinoza. It is the method for not falling into scholasticism and for waking up the human being in the reader." To give a good idea of this highly recommend book, it is probably best to cite a few passages: It should be noted that imagination cannot create anything; it is action that invents. True politeness consists in feeling what one ought to feel. Roman Rolland suggests that it is rare to find a happily married couple and that this is natural. Thinking is a kind of game that is not always healthy. That is why the great Rousseau wrote: "the man who meditates is a depraved animal." Sometimes we read that men seek pleasure; but that is not at all apparent; it seems, rather, that they seek hardships and that they like hardships. For happiness is essentially poetry, and poetry means action; we can scarcely appreciate a happiness that just comes our way; we want to have made it. Fundamentally, the only thing we like is power. By the monsters that he sought out and destroyed, Hercules proved his power in his own eyes. But as soon as he fell in love, he realized that he was enslaved and understood the power of pleasure; all men are like that ; and that is why pleasure makes them sad. The police commissioner is, to my mind, the happiest of men. Why? Because he is always engaged in action, always in new and unforeseen situations. The sign of real progress in any activity is the pleasure derived from it. Thus one realizes that work is the only pleasurable thing, and the only thing that really satisfies us. It is hardship that is good, as Diogenes would say; the mind, however, does not easily accept this paradox; it must work it out and, once again, the hardship involved in pondering it is what gives pleasure.