Happiness Literature

1. An idea as seemingly clear and bright as the idea of happiness requires interested persons to turn to the vast body of material that has been printed and published on the subject. We do not mean that we only have access to “whatever happiness is” through what has already been written and printed, because of course, there are many written documents that have little or nothing to do with happiness. Furthermore, plenty of real references to happiness clearly exist, which are not necessarily written or printed, and therefore are not part of the set of writings on the matter.

If we use the term “happiness literature” to refer to the set of printed materials –such as articles, press reports, newspaper columns, expressions about happiness, package inserts for tranquilizers and stimulants, advertisements, songs, films, badges and all kinds of labels– we will call the unwritten set of facts, experiences and doctrines about happiness “unrecorded happiness”. This distinction between, on the one hand, a “literature of happiness” and, on the other, a “non-literary, unrecorded happiness” lays out before us an interesting paradox relating to the literature of happiness. Namely, that the opposition between what is narrated and what is lived is an artificial opposition, because what is written about happiness is also a way of life.

Consequently, there would be room for a critical approach to happiness itself, about which so much is written and spoken: an approach according to which happiness would not be something very different from the concepts found in happiness literature itself. This would lead us to ponder whether the class “happiness” might be, in itself, an empty class.

2. We shall therefore refer to all printed materials relating to happiness as “happiness literature”. This collection of printed materials is the result of an operation that groups them together by distinguishing them from many others – written or unwritten, happiness-themed or not. “Happiness literature” is thus a totalizing concept. However, this label encourages two types of differentiative operations, relating to the clarification and the differentiation of the concept respectively. On the one hand, we have an operation geared towards clarifying, differentiating between “happiness literature” and other groupings, literary or not. On the other hand, we have an operation geared towards defining the various segments, or classes, that make up “happiness literature”.

Following in the line of clarity, happiness literature would stand in opposition to things that are not happiness “literature”, without prejudicing the fact that, in turn, these sets of materials have to do with “happiness”. Happiness literature would have to do with the written (alphabetical) language around happiness. From this perspective, the idea of happiness would be first and foremost a “literary figure”.

Following in the line of differentiation, the aim is to classify the parts of the whole (“happiness literature”), which can prevent us from falling into confused and amorphous notions of the term. Consequently, it is necessary to find a relevant criterion that allows us to establish such a classification.

There are criteria that must be rejected, such as the criterion of language – because, in the end, it ends up referring us to an idea of happiness conceived independently of the effective languages, and of the relations of cononymy between the various idiomatic meanings of happiness. This implies a univocal and therefore rigged idea of happiness.

There are criteria that distinguish between theoretical happiness literature and “self-help” happiness literature, but it is in any case, a distinction that is not very useful for establishing dichotomies.

There is also the criterion of the profession of the author (doctor, psychiatrist, sociologist, historian) – however, it is a deception, because happiness literature elicits a constellation of “ideas” that always end up spilling out of professional categorial fields.

3. Thus, from the position of philosophical materialism, we will lean towards a criterion that we label “architectural criterion”. It is an objective criterion that does not intend to enter into assumptions of valuation (logic, aesthetics, ethics), and meets the conditions of classificatory differentiation.

It is a criterion that, on the other hand, has an “etic” scope, but at the same time is able to compile the “emic” components of happiness literature. This criterion seeks a classification of happiness literature that involves the specific “lines of construction” for the different components that are part of the reference set. From the point of view of this architectural criterion, we can classify happiness literature in two large groups.

In the first place, the writings in which the principle or foundation is taken as a criterion, whether in a represented or exercised form.

Secondly, writings in which no such principle or foundation is present, explicitly or implicitly. The foundation from which the architectural criterion that we are going to take into account emerges is the “happiness principle”.

According to this principle, and bearing in mind the criteria of presence or absence of the same, as well as the typology of this presence, we obtain four classes of “happiness literature”: