Pursuits Of Happiness Research Articles

Applying Epicurean Philosophy to Managing Modern Pursuits of Happiness and Life Satisfection – An Analytical Perspective

Applying Epicurean Philosophy to Managing Modern Pursuits of Happiness and Life Satisfection – An Analytical Perspective

Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals

Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals

Stranger Citizens: Migrant Influence and National Power in the Early American Republic

Even for established early modern nation-states, the question of citizenship, the rights it confers, and the rights of resident aliens and migrants were subjective political sticky wickets. For a new nation, congealed from the Atlantic mélange of the British Empire, the issue was still more mucky. Add to that the universal and global nature of America's natural rights' revolutionary philosophy, the emergent American republican identity that thrust new political duties and expectations upon average men (usually white), and the new nation's need for open trade and an expanding labor force, and the issue clouded even further. John McNelis O'Keefe candidly touts the relevancy of this study given the policies of the previous administration, but it is just as relevant for the prior 240 years. In a republic such as the United States, the rights and duties of citizens, residents, and migrants are paramount yet evolving concerns in which the powerless contest with the powerful for the control of vital resources—among them their lives, liberty, and their pursuits of happiness.

Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested

Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested

Digital agriculture killjoy: Happy objects and cruel quests for the good life

AbstractThis article brings together phenomena not often connected in the rural studies cannon to show an underlying relationality connecting digital agriculture, conceptions of the good life and pursuits of happiness. Drawing from the scholarship of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, Agriculture 4.0 technologies are described as ‘cruel’ happiness pointers. These platforms are shown to direct actors towards happiness while potentially accelerating the very conditions that produced the problems they are promising to solve. Highlighting conceptions of the good life that are fluid, contested and multiple, which have connections to sayings and doings associated with these platforms, the analysis makes visible norms and values animating the so‐called digital revolution. At the same time, the article interrogates what these changing affective politics means for the future of farming and farm‐based identities, at least in Western countries. The data analysed, from individuals who had adopted smart farming applications in the US, were collected from focus groups and personal interviews, the latter conducted pre (2019) and post coronavirus (COVID‐19) outbreak (2020 and 2021).

The Philadelphia Story

Contra Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness, I argue that in The Philadelphia Story Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) squanders her opportunity for a fully mature relationship when she rejects Mike Connor (Jimmy Stewart) to remarry her former husband, C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant). Critics of Cavell’s analysis of this film have generally accepted that at their remarriage Tracy and Dexter are perfect for each other, but disagree about which of the men in her life is responsible for her education and maturation. I argue, instead, that to become the intelligent, erotic, fully mature woman she can be, Tracy should have married Mike. To defend my view, I look at details in The Philadelphia Story that have not been widely noted (e.g. the wordless prologue and costuming) and offer a different interpretation of some other details that have been noticed. On my analysis, at the end of the movie, faced with the prospect of true autonomy, Tracy becomes so frightened that she abandons her agency and retreats to the stability and protection that her former husband represents.

Marriage as Madness

Aside from being one of the best books ever written on film, Stanley Cavell’s 1979 masterpiece Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage is surely also one of the best investigations we have into the institution of marriage. Here as elsewhere, Cavell has multiple targets in his sights. Along with mapping out a new subgenre within the screwball comedy and moving the then-newly christened discipline of film studies forward, his aims are also philosophical (searching for the ways in which these films “disquiet the foundations of our lives”), sociological (searching for cultural connections between the two waves of feminism), and matrimonial. Cavell is trying to discover what makes marriages work, and under what conditions a married pair might be able to find the “thirst for remarriage” that he takes as its essential element. Moving well beyond accounting for filmic portrayals of the married state, Pursuits is a virtuosic exploration of marriage itself, with countless insights to offer.

Values of lifelong learners and their pursuits of happiness and whole-person wellness

Objectives: In this study, we explored the lived experiences of older adults engaged in lifelong learning programs using the Orientations to Happiness (OTH) framework.Methods: Semi-structured interviews employing a phenomenological approach were conducted with Midwestern older adults (aged 65 years and older) who participated in lifelong learning programs. Interviews were transcribed and collaboratively coded using pattern coding.Results: Six themes were identified that described the values expressed by participants: 1) need for novelty, 2) generativity, 3) spirituality, 4) hedonism, 5) active lifestyle, and 6) family. We created a novel diagram representing the intersectionality of the three OTH components (e.g.meaning, engagement, and pleasure) and explored how the six themes fit within our diagram. In doing so, we elucidated various OTH intersections that highlight a variety of happiness-promoting pathways that lifelong learning programs offer older adults.Discussion: Results suggest that these values and experiences can play an important role in maintaining an engaged lifestyle and providing opportunities for achieving and maintaining happiness and whole-person wellness.

In Pursuit of 'Pursuits of Happiness'

A year after the publication in 1969 of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell observes in the elegant Preface he wrote for the 2001 edition, the effect on him, as he put it, “of putting the book behind me, or perhaps I should say, of having it to stand behind, freed me for I suppose the most productive, or palpably so, nine months of my life, in which I recast the salvageable and necessary material of my Ph.D. dissertation as the opening three parts of what would become The Claim of Reason and completed small books on film (The World Viewed) and Thoreau (The Senses of Walden). I consider those small books to form a trio with Must We Mean What We Say?, different paths leading from the same desire for philosophy.” If those three books form a trio, I take the fourth part of The Claim of Reason, completed in 1978, and Pursuits of Happiness, which in 1978 he was already writing, to form a duo—not, I would say, different paths leading from the same desire for philosophy, but from the trio’s achievement of philosophy.

Kant’s Quasi‐Eudaimonism

AbstractIn contrast to eudaimonism, Kant argues that moral reasoning and prudential reasoning are two distinct uses of practical reason, each with its own standard for good action. Despite Kant’s commitment to the ineradicable potential for fundamental conflict between these types of practical reasoning, I argue that once we shift to consideration of a developmental narrative of these faculties, we see that virtuous moral reasoning is able to substantively influence prudential reasoning, while prudential reason should be responsive to such influence. Further, Kant indicates the integration of virtue as a commitment concerning practical priorities, and so too what should and should not agree with the agent, is beneficial for prudential reasoning by prudential reasoning’s own standards. Although Kant’s ethical system breaks from eudaimonism in significant ways, it retains the eudaimonist claim that virtuously‐informed pursuits of happiness are not only better for virtue, but also better for happiness.

Successfully Striving for Happiness: Socially Engaged Pursuits Predict Increases in Life Satisfaction

Happiness is considered a highly desirable attribute, but whether or not individuals can actively steer their lives toward greater well-being is an open empirical question. In this study, respondents from a representative German sample reported, in text format, ideas for how they could improve their life satisfaction. We investigated which of these ideas predicted changes in life satisfaction 1 year later. Active pursuits per se—as opposed to statements about external circumstances or fortune—were not associated with changes in life satisfaction (n = 1,178). However, in line with our preregistered hypothesis, among individuals who described active pursuits (n = 582), those who described social ideas (e.g., spending more time with friends and family) ended up being more satisfied, and this effect was partly mediated by increased socializing. Our results demonstrate that not all pursuits of happiness are equally successful and corroborate the great importance of social relationships for human well-being.

Words for a conversation: speech, doubt and faith in the films of Eric Rohmer and Mia Hansen-Løve

Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness (1981) and Contesting Tears (1996) are landmark studies that established the centrality of women’s experience in mid-twentieth century Hollywood’s imaginary and posed, against a backdrop of increasing sexual equality following women’s suffrage, deep ethical questions of recognition and non-recognition, desire and freedom, within the traditional American heterosexual couple. Cavell identified conversation as central to these films’ attempts to grapple with shifting forms of private intimacy and their relation to broader changes in the public sphere. In this article, the author demonstrates that Eric Rohmer and Mia Hansen-Løve deploy the Cavellian techniques of everyday language brought to vivid life within a naturalistic mise-en-scène to explore heterosexual coupling culture within changing French gender norms and roles. This allows their films to explore a specifically feminine subjectivity, bringing to the fore questions of self-reliance and doubt in a society which allows women legal and social freedom but still subjects them to patriarchal expectations. The article thus sheds light on why Rohmer and Hansen-Løve’s cinema makes such use of dialogue, its connection to a sympathetic interest in female becoming, and traces a new New Wave inheritance outside of Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism.

Stanley Cavell on the Magic of the Movies

In order to explain Cavell's account of what makes movies so magical, this article will offer a chronological survey of his major writings on film, beginning with the first edition of The World Viewed (1971), where he poses an intriguing theoretical hypothesis about what distinguishes the movies from the other major art forms. The survey will continue by considering the expanded edition of The World Viewed (1979), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1984), and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1997), and will conclude with an analysis of Cavell's discussion of Emersonian perfectionism in Cities of Words (2005). Throughout, I show how the specific film interpretations he proposes serve as archetypal examples of crucial features of his philosophy. Cavell's general thesis, I take it, is that films can pose particularly satisfying responses to the skepticism we all harbour about our most deeply held values. In a nutshell, the movies are magical because they tell us myths that allow us to see our lives as worth living, helping to restore our faith in the wellsprings of human value: romantic love, individual autonomy, nonconformity, and the search for self-improvement.

Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

William Rothman is one of the great close readers of film, and he pioneered techniques of meticulous, exhaustive and astonishing frame-by-frame analysis in his 1982 book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. For Rothman, what sets these films apart is that Hitchcock's images always think. While any juxtaposition of images cannot help but produce meaning, in a Hitchcock film there are no chance encounters between images. There are no mere accidents of formulaic editing, as the studio-era sometimes produced, nor, as in the case of experimentalists like Andy Warhol, does the camera ever simply run as a way of not thinking. Rothman argues that Hitchcock's films are different because every frame is related to and constitutes the whole of what Hitchcock, as auteur, is thinking. Indeed, The Murderous Gaze might be summed up as a lesson in how to recognize Hitchcock's filmic thought. In his new book, Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Rothman again performs virtuoso acts of close viewing Hitchcock's films, and he both develops and substantially revises his conclusions from The Murderous Gaze. Following the work of Stanley Cavell's classic 1981 book on comedies of the 1930s, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Rothman now wants to see Hitchcock's films, particularly his later films, in the very terms that Cavell applied to the new and decidedly American vision of self-invention we find in It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) or His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940). For Cavell, these films were different because the obstacle to marriage was not an external conflict of social class but internal to characters who had to overcome their own limits and reinvent themselves as worthy partners for each other. For Cavell, these films were examples of Emerson's moral perfectionism, and they were profound affirmations of an American optimism. However, they are also comedies, in the strictest sense, about and ending in marriage. Rothman's attempt to interpret Hitchcock in these terms is problematic, as he well knows. To begin with, Hitchcock's subject is not marriage but murder, and while few of his films are strictly tragedies, they are all characterized by a kind of European pessimism. Indeed, Hitchcock's reception has always characterized him as a kind of lapsed Catholic who believes in original sin by way of UFA studios and German expressionism. In a significant way, Rothman's new book reads against many of the commonplaces of Hitchcock's long reception.

Moral Perfectionism and Cavell's Romantic Turn

The first book of Stanley Cavell’s that I read is the only book that I ardently wished I had written, The Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Why this book, and not some high impact, world-historical book like Heidegger’s Being and Time or Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations? Well, there are a number of reasons, some of them personal and some of them, well, Cavellian. Most immediately, the book explained to me why I so much enjoyed watching again and again over the course of more than three decades the films which are the objects of Cavell’s interpretations — why, in short, watching these films made me so happy, why they filled me with goofy delight, always ringing a smile to my face, a smile not unlike that smile of Cary Grant’s (from Holiday) reproduced in the pages of The Pursuits of Happiness.

Austen’s Persuasion and the Comedy of Remarriage

The paper reads Jane Austen’s Persuasion in light of Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage , focusing on three main links between Cavell’s analysis of seven Hollywood films and Persuasion : the concept of remarriage itself, the social agenda and the cultural/feminist vision. In addition to applying the Cavellian idea of remarriage as “a reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness” to the renewed romance between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, the paper borrows the term “co-creation” from the business world and, associating it with the idea of the “analytic third” in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, defines Anne's and Wentworth's evolving rediscovery of each other as a “knowing again” or a co-creation, assisted by the novel’s temporality, in which the fictional present consists of a mutual evolving relationship intertwined with the events of the past, which must be faced and worked through. In Persuasion , the newly created mutuality between Anne and Wentworth also signals social change in which the old, stagnant aristocratic way of life must give way to the energy of the middle class, here represented by the navy. For Cavell, the comedies of remarriage reflect a hidden agenda of culture in which the previous generation’s feminist gains are worked through in the private sphere. The paper claims that Persuasion , and more specifically its heroine, Anne Elliott, also reflect a phase in the struggle of gender equality in which the radical feminist notions go “underground” and are worked through in the private domain, to serve as building blocks for the public feminist struggle of the late nineteenth century.

How Movies Think: Cavell on Film as a Medium of Art

Stanley Cavell’s writing about movies, from the more theoretical and general The World Viewed (1971) to the later works on specific genres (Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears), has a unifying theme: some movies as (successful) art investigate conditions of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience in medium-specific ways. This claim is explained and defended by explicating the details of the medium-specificity of the moving photographic image (and its history of uses) and by focusing on Michael Verhoeven’s film The Nasty Girl (1990). Though the very ideas of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience naturally prompt some suspicion in a commercialized, pluralistic society, our responses to some movies show that we continue to aspire to a life that embodies them.

The Kids Are All Right, the Pursuits of Happiness, and the Spaces Between

The Kids Are All Right (US, 2010) is Lisa Cholodenko's most commercial film to date and has been the most divisive in its reception. Pitched as a film of and for the times, the film has been celebrated for its portrayal of a lesbian family unit and taken to task for its homonormativity. In this article, the author argues that analyzing both the various kinds of crossovers that The Kids Are All Right engages at a thematic level and the form of crossover that the film itself undertakes in its perceived intervention into American film culture provides a way of understanding the film's polarized reception. The author argues that the film occupies an in-between space as a result of its movements between different genres, audiences, and agendas. Reading The Kids Are All Right in relation to Cholodenko's previous films, the author examines how it tracks, explores, and is marked by the spaces between different sexual, social, and cinematic worlds and the movements or cross-overs between those worlds.

‘Immediate consciousness’ and the American open road: Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Although it has most often been viewed as a work of philosophy, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) is, more accurately, a travel narrative that takes readers on a journey by motorcycle across the northern plains of the USA. The book earned enormous success in the marketplace and remains a compelling exploration of the divisiveness that permeated American culture in the 1960s and early 1970s. Pirsig, in recounting his journey, offers a vision of wholeness evidenced by the narrator's evolving awareness of the intertwined relationships between seemingly intractable cultural conflict and personal pursuits of happiness. This essay explores how Pirsig responds to the social challenges of his day and his own demons by tapping into the popular history of the motorcycle, a paradoxical machine that has served as both a symbol of subversion and an ideal machine for experiencing the mythical dreams of the American open road.

The Pursuit Of Happiness In American Mind And In Javanese Thought

society has a concept of happiness and has a way to pursue it. This essay tries to bring out some of these concepts and its pursuits as seen in two different societies, namely American and Javanese. The discussion is more of a vision on the theme rather than a comparative study. The essay falls into two sections: the first describes some important facts about American pursuits of happiness and the second discusses the pursuit of happiness in one small part of the Javanese thoughts or Kejawen, namely Soerjomentaram’s philosophy of Ngelmu Beja.