Deleuze's Argument On The Nature Of Happiness

If you asked somewhat what matters most in life, many would likely answer that it is happiness. I might have inclined to answer similarly, but what if happiness by itself isn’t quite enough? Perhaps, beyond happiness, a meaningful engagement with one’s life provides more richness and fulfillment. Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy engages the questions of how one might live and what components make up a meaningful life. Deleuze examines the nature of identities with his discussion of the virtual field of difference, the ‘double edged sword’ of habits, and a morality that embraces change and difference through the concept of ‘active forgetting.’ At the center of this philosophy is an embrace of the chaos, complexity, and difference in the world …show more content…
Deleuze’s active and reactive morality manifests itself from his paradox of eternal recurrence, which postulates that the universe has no beginning. The repetition that exists in the interminable universe is seemingly cyclical, but it is in fact centered on chaos and difference. A reactive morality, much like the negative component of habit, involves obdurately clinging to one’s expectations, ideals, or perceptions of the way the world ought to be. The man who lives by a reactive morality is a man of ‘resentment,’ who falsely attributes blame of the negative aspects of his life to some cause. This man “must turn misfortune into something mediocre, he must recriminate and distribute blame: look at his inclination to play down the value of causes, to make misfortune ‘someone's fault.’” This morality is categorized by an ‘inability to forget’ one’s perceptions and predilections by searching for and identifying cause; however doing so rejects eternal recurrence by paralleling the notion that the universe has an origin, or a cause. Active morality, rather than feeling its reactions, acts its reactions through active forgetting of specious causes. While to be reactive would be to deny the difference behind repetition, to be active would be to deny the denial and accept the difference and complexity in the world. This engages one with the present moment and keeps one from becoming a creature of habit or a person of