Conference, Philosophy of Ethics: 26/27-29 May 2011

"Better to be an unhappy man than a happy pig". Was Mill right?

Epistola CXCVII [1]

Ludvig Holberg

  (“Imagined Happiness is real Happiness”) [2]

Dear brother,

I sense in your latest communication that you still persevere in your old impatience and dissatisfaction, which I so often have endeavored to challenge. You complain about your fate and kind of galls about your fellow citizens' wealth and about several splendors and good things that they have acquired and over which they daily enjoy themselves. I have often told you that most splendors only are in imagination. He who has a joyous mind possesses all the splendors he appears to be wanting. One, on the contrary, who naturally inclines toward dissatisfaction has want of all those splendors, which he appears to possess. Imagine yourself happy, then you also are so: Imagine that you belong to the first or second class in the order of rank and precedence, then you are just as pleased as the one who really has such a position therein; yes even more; since most people having barely attained one level of honor anxiously and desirously seek a higher one: Fancy yourself that all who tip their hats in the street do so in order to show you respect, then you enjoy in some ways the same solemnity as the great chancellor. Fancy yourself that no one is as beautiful as your wife, then you are as happy as your neighbor, who got that face for which he ferreted about for so long, but which now appears to him an everyday face; since experience shows that when the first glow passes in a marriage, the beautiful face no longer emit forceful beams in the eyes of the husband. Fancy yourself that the city's public paths and parks are laid-out for your sake, since they are always available to you, it is then the same as if they belong to you. Fancy finally yourself that when you hunt flies, you are on perforce a hunt. I have tried both kinds of exercises and find that by a little help from the imagination it comes to one and the same, [3] especially when the hunt follows the plan I have devised and which I shall explain on some other occasion. [4] You will undoubtedly regard all this as foolery and hold my entire catechisation for jest: I do not at all proffer it as serious, but still contend that it can offer some occasion for philosophical considerations.

I remain etc.

[1] Published in 1748, by F.J. Billeskov Jansen, from whose edition (København 1954) this was translated by Lars Aagaard-Mogensen .

[2] Holberg's piece was titled as this by F.J. Billeskov Jansen .

[3] Holberg argued ( Epistola No. 107 and 506b) that imagined diseases are real diseases; however, in Moralske Fabler No. 170 he added: “one – although of low rank – can fancy oneself to be in a high position, but a hungry man cannot fancy himself satisfied”.

[4]Which Holberg did in Epistola CCV.

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