Utopia, health, and happiness.
Utopia, health, and happiness.
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乌托邦、健康、幸福。
DOI:
10.1016/s0140-6736(16)30532-3
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发表时间:
2016
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Withington P
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Withington P
Ralph Robinson in the 1550s, and remained absent in new editions of his translation in the 17th century. But when Gilbert Burnet made his new translation in 1684,“happiness” appears no less than 19 times. For 18th-century readers, Utopia as a discussion about what makes an ideal society was also a book about “happiness”; this was most definitely not the case for readers before 1684. Explaining this change requires looking at the more general history of the word happiness. When Robinson made his translations of Utopia in the 1550s, happiness was a fairly rare English word with a restricted set of meanings. It derived from the Old Norse noun “hap”, meaning luck or fortune, and was in all likelihood coined in the mid-15th century (Geoffrey Chaucer did not know it, for example). For writers of Robinson’s generation the semantics of “happiness” were largely informed by this provenance: happiness indicated the quality and state of fortune or the circumstances and phenomena that exemplified such a condition. As Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s The Courtier (1561) put it:” For since ill is contrary to good, and good to ill, it is (in a manner) necessary by contrary and a certain counterpoise the one should…… Who knows not that there should be no Justice in the world, were it not for wrongs? No stoutness of courage, were there not fainthearted? Nor continence, were there not incontinency? Nor health, were there not sickness? Nor truth, were there not lies? Nor happiness, were there not mischances?” Between the 1550s and the 1680s, however, the word accumulated a range of meanings that enabled Burnet to use it promiscuously—even paradigmatically—in his “modern” translation of More’s Latin text. First, happiness became the favoured way to render “felicitas” in English, rendering the English word “felicity”—the usual way to describe worldly contentment in the 15th century—all but obsolete. As a result, ideas and sensations previously understood as felicitous were now described as happiness. Second, while medieval writers talked in terms of “bliss” and “blessedness” to describe their relationship with God, their descendants increasingly spoke in terms of spiritual and everlasting happiness. Third, happiness also became the preferred term to translate classical ideas of eudaimonia and summum bonum: on the one hand, the realisation and fulfilment of perfect and “natural” selfhood; on the other hand, the overarching ideal—or “sovereign good”—upon which the good life, the good person, and the good afterlife is based. It is possible to imagine the new word “happiness”, therefore, as a kind of linguistic glacier, slowly moving along the face of the earth accumulating concepts and connotations as it went. The landscape left behind amounted to the most significant transition of all: the transformation of happiness from the product of hap and fortune to the outcome of art and deliberation. This was a conceptual shift that the Utopias of the 1550s and 1680s beautifully capture. Important in this respect is that Utopians were a people who embodied reason and control: over themselves, over each other, and over their environment. For Robinson in the 1550s, More’s imaginary society would have signified the antithesis of happiness, which was a term still rooted in ideas of luck and happenstance. Utopia represented the deliberate triumph of man over capricious fortune: Utopians would never have heard of the term. Burnet, by contrast, inherited a different sense of happiness. In the brave new world of modern English, happiness had become a state or condition to be deliberately pursued, calculated, and measured rather than left to the outcome of …