He describes the happy man as “the man who…feels himself a citizen of the universe…untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life the greatest joy is to be found.” I find this to be the most idealistic depiction of happiness. By saying ‘a citizen of the universe’ he gives human beings a heighted sense of their importance in space, though any given individual on Earth is essentially dimensionless, meaning without internal volume, relative to all of space. In a parallel to geometry, humans are like points—they exist, but without dimension. Yet, humans are not dimensionless, and Russell feels an intimate attachment with all other life forms—past, present and future. I am likened to Russell’s description because he explains that one needs to arrive at moral actions spontaneously, rather than being too absorbed in the pursuit of one’s own virtue, making the only means to perform moral actions is through conscious self-denial. Seventeen-hundred years ago, it was enough to just define the route of all happiness as ‘enjoying God’, but this component of Augustine’s teachings is lost on me where as I am an avid believer in Bertrand Russell’s philosophy on
He describes the happy man as “the man who…feels himself a citizen of the universe…untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life the greatest joy is to be found.” I find this to be the most idealistic depiction of happiness. By saying ‘a citizen of the universe’ he gives human beings a heighted sense of their importance in space, though any given individual on Earth is essentially dimensionless, meaning without internal volume, relative to all of space. In a parallel to geometry, humans are like points—they exist, but without dimension. Yet, humans are not dimensionless, and Russell feels an intimate attachment with all other life forms—past, present and future. I am likened to Russell’s description because he explains that one needs to arrive at moral actions spontaneously, rather than being too absorbed in the pursuit of one’s own virtue, making the only means to perform moral actions is through conscious self-denial. Seventeen-hundred years ago, it was enough to just define the route of all happiness as ‘enjoying God’, but this component of Augustine’s teachings is lost on me where as I am an avid believer in Bertrand Russell’s philosophy on