March   2023

The two days conference was rich in contributions and its speakers covered a wide range of philosophical perspectives on happiness, including Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Arendt, Benjamin, Adorno, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Badiou and Agamben. Some of the themes that were explored examined links between happiness, freedom and the meaningful life; the temporalities and spatialities of happiness [and unhappiness]; the transition between happiness as a theoretical knowledge and contemplation to its current entanglements with biopolitical discourses and practices; the social and political embededness of happiness, as well as its relation with politics; juxtapositions between public  happiness and happiness in uniqueness and singularity and finally connections between happiness, love and memory. A recurrent theme in almost all contributions was the idea of happiness as a process, rather than an end. 

As always I was taken by Spinoza’s simple and pure approach in the fourth part of the Ethics:‘happiness consists in man’s being able to preserve his being’ (EIV, P18 Schol) but also by Benjamin’s poetic ruminations on happiness as the eternal passing: ‘the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness’. (2006, 306)

But before rushing to the different ‘impressions’ of science and the arts, let us go back to the creation process she goes on to suggest, the moment when the human mind expresses itself through imagining an idea and gathering forces towards its attainment:

By observing the way in which the human mind proceeds, we will see that it always acts according to a constant method; and, after following the different eras of the composition, it will become evident that the highest literature, like the discoveries with which science is enriched, have been inspired by a feeling of order and proportion which is the regulator of all intellectual movement. (20)

Happiness springs at the moment when the idea which will drive the creation of a work of art or a mathematical treatise first emerges, but it also follows the whole process and is being infused in the ‘feeling of order and proportion’—a repetitive beat in the overall rhythm of the intellectual movement: ‘For his part, the mathematician [le géomètre] pays close attention to the happy idea that directs his research. All the forces of his intelligence will be employed in unfolding the chain of truths contained in this first truth; and nowhere else will the unity of composition be so sensitive’. ( 84, emphasis added)

Germain’s ruminations on happiness, as a recurrent feeling in unravelling ‘the chain of truths’ in the creative process, are in consonance with another French mathematician and philosopher, who preceded her in seventeenth century France: Émilie du Châtelet and her popular essay Discourse on Happiness, which was also published posthumously in 1779, when Germain was three years old. While configuring a relational notion for happiness, ‘our happiness will always depend on others’ (1861, 20), du Châtelet nevertheless observes that ‘the less our happiness depends on others the easier it is for us to be happy.’ (20) In thus walking the thin line between dependence and independence, du Châtelet suggests that ‘for this reason of independence, the love of study is, of all the passions, the one that contributes the most to our happiness’. (20)

Having been neglected for long, Germain’s and du Châtelet’s philosophical work has become the object of an emerging and burgeoning body of literature, as my project has already shown. But while some connections have been drawn between the two women in the history of science and mathematics in France, particularly in relation to how they were used and abused in discourses around women’s education (see Boucard 2020), their philosophical writings have not been discussed in their interrelation. Moreover, Germain’s Œuvres Philosophiques have not been translated in English, despite their importance in the nineteenth-century European history of ideas, which was highlighted and praised by eminent philosophers of her times, like Auguste Comte. (1864, 415)