Jamie Hall

COLI 211

Professor Rowan Tepper

Response #3

Happiness is an idea and feeling that is difficult to define, identify, and understand. Prior to reading Blumenberg I thought that it was an

idea that was easy to pin down. Unfortunately, that is not so.

What I got from the reading was that Blumenberg believes that there is no exact definition or source of happiness, and

what it is changes from person to person. I believe that this ties a lot into what Blumenberg speaks about, in that

most things are not static, and are instead always changing.

The idea that “If Care Is Objective, Happiness Must Be Subjective”, sums up this section perfectly. My happiness is subjective to

various things, and those things are not necessarily what may make someone else happy. I may be happy one day, but that feeling

is subjective to other events and occurences that I encounter in that same day. I can be happy in the morning because I had a great breakfast, yet

that happiness could be gone by the afternoon if I find that I haven't done well on an exam.

An idea that really stood out to me was the prohibition of happiness. I feel that as humans, we prohibit ourselves from being happy often

if what makes us happy does not conform to the standard idea of what happiness should be. Blumenberg clearly feels that there is no standard

of happiness, yet in a sense I disagree because I feel that we are often inundated with ideas of what is and what is not supposed to make us happy.

Puppies rolling in grass is supposed to make us happy, but lions chasing down gazelles shouldn't, and while neither of these things make every single

person happy or unhappy, if we do not appear to conform to what is supposed to make us happy, we know that we will be marginalized, and looked

at as the "other". This idea leads into a whole lot of other larger ones, such as why we feel the need to conform so strongly that we would

prohibit ourselves from happiness.

I greatly preferred this reading to our previous book because it generated in me a greater desire to really think about what Blumenberg is implying.

Beyond just what he is saying, it made me really think about what happiness is, something that most people probably wouldn't think about on a daily basis,

and that made me happy.