How to Be Happy #37: Up Your Felicific Quotient
The Conversation‘s Sara Pons-Sanz thinks one way to be happy is to dredge up and start using certain long-defunct words. Specifically, she names five “life-affirming” terms we should revive: adamate, autometry, biophilia, collachramate, and mesology. The one of interest here is mesology (I’ll leave you to check out the others on your own.)
Mesology, Sara recounts, was used in scientific texts around the end of the 19th century. The term appears earlier, however, around 1830 in the writings of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In the annoying shranking [making one feel small due to the enormity of their achievements] manner of many historical figures, Bentham supposedly was reading avidly and studying Latin at the age of four (well, doesn’t everyone?). His many pursuits included philosophy, economics, and theoretical jurisprudence.
Anyway, Bentham either coined or absconded with the word mesology, which he defined, according to Pons-Sanz, as “the scientific enquiry or branch of logic that deals with the means of achieving happiness.” His admirable (if shrankistic) goal was to establish “how social institutions could help as many people as possible to achieve happiness.” Jeremy, or JB, developed what he called “felicific calculus,” a method (unusable, sadly) for calculating amounts of happiness.
Okay, we’re going to plunge into the felicific woods a little here. Bentham’s calculus comprised an algorithm to calculate “the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to induce.” JB, as an ethical hedonist, believed “the moral rightness or wrongness of an action to be a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it produced.” His formula contained several variables, among them intensity and duration. He gives detailed, if incomprehensible instructions on how to apply the calculus.
Fortunately, Jeremy knew that most people reading these instructions would soon have their eyes glaze over and end up staring at QVC and drooling (which likely happens often, anyway). Knowing that, he wrote the following “mnemonic doggerel” to make the process easier to remember:
Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure–
Such marks in pleasure and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be they end:
If it be public, wide let them extend
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few.
Words to live–and be happy–by.
Image: English philosopher and economist Jeremy Bentham’s preserved skeleton in his own clothes, dubbed his “auto-icon,” and surmounted by a wax head, at University College London. Really. But that’s another story.* Public domain.
*Okay, okay, here’s the scoop. According to Britannica, “After Bentham’s death, in accordance with his directions, his body was dissected in the presence of his friends. The skeleton was then reconstructed, supplied with a wax head to replace the original (which had been mummified), dressed in Bentham’s own clothes and set upright in a glass-fronted case. Both this effigy and the head are preserved in University College London.” Well, there’s a new twist on end-of-life planning. JB is on display on the ground floor of UCL’s Student Center, where he remains a “source of curiosity and perplexity to visitors.” This may have to go on my bucket list.
