Customer Reviews

The Morality of Happiness

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You'd think a book with this title would have something to offer the earnest student and general reader. You might even hope that the author would bring to light the array of secrets to a happy life, known and taught by the great sages of antiquity. And you might, as I did, imagine that this hope was vaguely confirmed by the introductory chapter. But, alas, no. Annas is more professor and scholar than inspired teacher. She understands her subject to be so many ancient ethical theories, intellectual systems, with their strengths and weaknesses, their logical coherence or lack of it, etc. etc. --all to be argued about in implicit comparison to modern moral philosophies discussed only in universities. In other words, she fails to convey the practical spirit and inner life of the ancient thinkers she presents. She fails to grasp the real superiority of ancient wisdom to modern in the quest for happiness.

Take her chapter on the Stoics - rather thin, in light of the immense influence of Stoicism on Western culture and social thought. Annas does bring forward some useful citations from Arius and Diogenes, which give us some insight into early Stoicism. But her chapter gets entirely, yes entirely, bogged down in the purely theoretical preoccupation about what "natural" means in Stoic doctrines - especially the problem of how their ethics relates to ideas about Cosmic Nature. Hence she reads two of Stoicism's finest (and most popular) writers extremely poorly: Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Annas completely misses their originality and usefulness for real life! She appears actually to prefer Kant's bloodless formalist system, otherwise parasitic on Stoic thought. Only someone with academic blinders is capable of such a presentation. (Don't moral philosophy professors have to read Nietzsche on the dangerous banality of historical scholarship?) But saying that would not be quite fair to academics. For there are several, truly inspired discussions of the Stoics by other professors in print: Pierre Hadot, A. F. Bonhoeffer, Ludwig Edelstein. Ah, but none of their work appears in Annas' hefty bibliography of secondary sources. Too invigorating perhaps?

So this book seems to have the narrow utility of preparing its readers for extended (usually tedious) quarrels in the universities. It's for people who want to engage in historically informed, theoretical disputes about happiness, rather than for those who want to learn something practical from the ancients about how to live life happily.