It’s nice to hang out with smart people.

One of the beauties of living in a university town and being part of the academic community is that I have access to events intended to cater to the academic, namely the guest lecture series. Tonight I attended a lecture in the humanities division series given by a philosophy professor from one of Canada’s largest universities who is in fact an alumnus of the institution where I work, having graduated quite some time ago. He has a rather unfortunate last name which I daren’t post here, as he would be quite identifiable. But the talk he gave tonight was an examination of “happiness” in Plato, Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, with some of his own thoughts at the end.

The Greeks basically believed that only the gods could experience true happiness. I can’t remember what the Hebrews believed, and the early Christians were more into suffering in this life to attain “blessedness”, which would translate into happiness in the next.

Listening to his lecture, I came up with a few ideas of my own, in that happiness, or rather a state of contentment, is reward enough in itself, and does not necessarily warrant the gift of an afterlife of happiness. When one is truly content (we had some trouble with the actual word “happiness”), one tends to become complacent, whereas if one suffers, one strives to better one’s situation. I don’t know if I’m making any sense here. It doesn’t help that I don’t actually believe any of this, it was just my way of interpreting the Christian view of suffering being desirable.

Anyway, the visiting professor summed it all up at the end by stating that his own view of what constitutes happiness is love, giving and receiving, and this is something I wholly endorse. I actually wrote about this many years ago in this entry. It’s nice to know that there are people out there who agree with me, having reached the same conclusion independently.

There was a wine and cheese reception afterwards and I met Little Princess who had been giving an observatory tour to a group of rowdy private school kids. They had good viewing tonight, the sky was clear and it was a nice temperature. I got to chat with the visitor as well as several of my colleagues in the religion, philosophy and classics departments. It was a very pleasant evening.

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