a sein of the times

My eyeballs are aching and my brain is about to close down, but I have finished proof-reading the third chapter of the Heidegger translation. I still don't understand most of it, but I'm pretty sure it is now punctuated properly. I am now starting to get those odd thoughts that pop up in your mind like unwanted windows. "What would Heidegger make of Chinese, which has no equivalent of the verb 'to be'?"* "Is 'dasein' like 'da bomb'?"


* Yes, I know there's "shi", but that's not the same - it's just an equative verb, and nothing you can get Teutonically metaphysical about.

It's official - I'm a miserable git

I recently read an interview with Martin Seligman (happiness researcher and head of the APA) in which put forward the idea that happiness has three components. The first and most obvious is having pleasant experiences. The second, he terms eudaimonia, though he uses this word rather loosely compared to Aristotle: for Seligman, eudaimonia is simply the exercise of your characteristic skills. He gives a nice example of a lizard that was pining and refusing food until seeing a copy of a newspaper which had been placed over a ham sandwich - it jumped up, shredded the newspaper and ate the sandwich. The final component, according to Seligman, is meaning, which he defines as a sense of being connected to something greater than oneself. Interestingly, unlike many advocates of meaningful existence, he sees this as morally neutral: a suicide bomber has a meaningful life (albeit rather a short one).

All this struck me as fairly close to my own opinions, so I wandered over to Seligman's website authentichappiness.org and took several of the battery of happiness tests there (those familiar with the literature will recognise most of them). In just about all of them I scored somewhere in the bottom third - not clinically depressed, but seriously pissed off with life. When it comes to melancholia, it looks like I might be a good room-mate for John Dowland.

Now if Seligman's theory of happiness is correct, this shouldn't happen. I have a reasonable number of pleasant experiences in my day-to-day existence. I also have a lifestyle in which I exercise my characteristic skills: teaching, writing, diddling with computers, and so on. Meaning was one of the few things I scored fairly high on. So why do I come out as such a sourpuss?