Description
Heidegger and Happiness offers an original interpretation of Heidegger’s later thought, within the context of his philosophy as a whole, to develop a new conception of human happiness.
The book redeems the essential content of the Greek notion of eudaimonia and transcends recent debates concerning the ‘objectivity’ or ‘subjectivity’ of happiness. The author shows that Heidegger’s thinking of being is far from arcane and abstract, and is crucially important in understanding the deepest sources of human well-being. An etymological examination of the word ‘happiness’ frees the word from the constraints of utilitarian ways of thinking, which suggest that ‘happiness’ is only peripherally related to eudaimonia.
King demonstrates that a sense of fittingness is essential both to ‘happiness’ and to eudaimonia, and shows how deep happiness, conceived as dwelling in our fitting-together with being, can serve as a ‘grounding attunement’ for the thinking of being.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Introduction
Why Heidegger and happiness?
The later Heidegger’s two senses of being
Fitting and dwelling Heidegger’s schemes of affective states
Being and Time: Befindlichkeit and Stimmung
Nietzsche I: Affekt, Leidenschaft, and Gefühl
What is Philosophy?: Stimmung vs. Affekt or Gefühl
Chapter One: Ε?δαιμον?α and Happiness
Δα?μων and ε?δαιμον?α
Ε?δαιμον?α and fittingness in Plato’s Republic Modern happiness
Chapter Two: The Happening of Being
Turning from temporality to Ereignis Language, ‘the other language’, and etymology
‘Happiness’ and fittingness
Later Heideggerian phenomenology ‘The Tuft of Flowers’
Chapter Three: The Fitting-Together of Human Being and Being Wonder
The essence of human beings
The gathered four, the divinities, and the holy
‘Babette’s Feast’
‘Voice of Fire’
Fitting together with the being of others
Chapter Four: The History of Being
Overview of Heidegger’s history of being
Seinsvergessenheit, Ge-Stell, and ‘the last men’
Up the creek from Ge-Stell to φ?σις
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Author(s)
Matthew King,
Matthew King teaches Philosophy at York University, Canada.