Heidegger and Happiness
Dwelling on Fitting and Being by Matthew King, a book review.
Happiness isn’t a central theme in Heidegger, but Matthew King uses a Heideggerian framework to shed light on what he calls deep happiness. The book was a lot harder than I expected. I was somewhat allured by its short length, but the book is tall and very dense.
The author argues that happiness is related to our need to fit into being. To be happy, or deeply happy, is to dwell in our fitting together with being. This seems overly abstract, and hard to wrap your head around if you’re not familiar with Heidegger. In one sense, it is and requires a decent understanding of Heidegger’s thought. In fact, one could say that the book covers mostly Heidegger in general, rather than his main view on happiness. This is because his view while incredibly simple, will not click unless you’re thinking in Heideggerian terms. However, one can also argue that isn’t abstract at all, and if anything it is trying to remove the abstraction that our modern Western thinking has imposed on being.
To understand what he means, he goes to the foundation of Heidegger’s thought, which challenges a lot of assumptions and frameworks that we inherent in Western philosophy. For example, that being happens to us. It is conceptualizing it as an experience that is inherently not reciprocal, and not as human-centered as we typically think of it.
What it means to fit is explored in-depth, and its metaphorical implications are more complicated than one might initially conceive. The fitting aspect is particularly important. He traces the root of the English word “happiness”, which has ties with fitness in its etymology.
I really enjoyed that Matthew gave a personal perspective on this work which really enriched my understanding of what he was trying to present. He describes a couple of experiences he had that he would consider deep happiness and explains them in the Heideggerian framework he built throughout the book. One related to poetry, and another one to a painting. These experiences aren’t by themselves “impressive”, nor could you understand what they mean without the author’s context. But after reading the book I did get a sense of what he was trying to communicate. This really drove the point for me of how a conceptual shift is needed for these ideas to be properly understood.
He does try to give an introduction and explore the concepts needed, but it is nevertheless a hard task. I had already studied Heidegger a little bit, and there was still much I didn’t understand. Something that would have helped is having more translated terms. Heidegger uses a lot of words that are hard to translate, and therefore most words aren’t translated, and their German and Greece forms are used to try to encapsulate their meaning better. While this is useful and understandable, nevertheless makes it much harder to read. Especially with Greek, the author sometimes didn’t explain what the terms meant.
Worse of all, Greek words were used in the Greek alphabet, where they could have been easily translated. It’s the same word, but at least I’m capable of holding it in memory. If it’s in Greek, then to me it’s just a collection of symbols that I can’t possibly remember what they are a few pages later. While some can easily be guessed, for example, εὐδαιμονία meaning eudaimonia, others are impossible, such as θεορία (theoria).
In some parts of the book, there were Greek words in every other sentence which made it incredibly dense. I was really annoyed that there wasn’t a glossary…. except there is. To my utter dismay, there was indeed a glossary at the end of the book. I just somehow missed it when initially looking for it, and it was never mentioned, I assumed there wasn’t one. I found out after finishing the book.
After completion, while I found many interesting parts, I have to confess I was somewhat disappointed. It was much harder than expected, and sometimes it was a bit tedious. For example, the endless nuance of translation. Most problematically, it seemed to me that the author never explored the topic in as much detail or directness as I hoped. I almost regretted reading it and thought it wasn’t worth the effort.
However, while I was re-reading my notes later and writing this review, I started to think about it differently. I took a lot more notes than I usually do, which is a bit off for a book that wasn’t even worth reading. While some parts were a bit hard to get through, such as ideas related to translation, some of them were what I found the most interesting as well.
In retrospect, it was a hard read but worth it. Even if I didn’t understand much of it, some parts that I did were incredibly illuminating. Furthermore, his articulation of Heidegger by itself was worth it for me to revisit these ideas, even without their association with happiness. I always got the feeling that Heidegger had incredible parallels with eastern philosophy and mysticism and reading this book only furthered that impression even though it does not state it explicitly.
Some topics are just by their very nature obscure and complex, which makes them hard to grasp. But likewise, the payoff you get from them is proportional to their difficulty. If you have an interest in Heidegger and are curious about how that integrates with happiness, this book is for you.
However, be mindful that is a hard read, and while the author tries to give a rough background of Heidegger first, it is nowhere near enough. So if you have never read anything from him, this book will be close to incomprehensible.
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