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WorkÉmilie du Châtelet

Discourse on Happiness

Unpublished in her lifetime: a case for keeping one's passions and illusions, and for study as the pleasure that depends on no one else.

by Émilie du Châtelet35 passages held

  • French, the original language
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Original title
Discours sur le bonheur
First published
(aged 40)
Original language
French

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Overview

Thirty years after Émilie du Châtelet died, a publishing society at Bouillon printed a short essay of hers on happiness in a miscellany of 1779. She had written it in the mid-1740s, and its argument runs against the moralists of her day, who told people to master their passions if they wanted to be happy. She holds the opposite: happiness comes from passions that are satisfied, and from the illusions that make most pleasures possible, so reason should choose which passions to feed rather than strip the varnish off things. She is writing, she says, only for people of settled fortune, and her advice is practical. Be healthy, shed prejudice, and keep tastes for when the passions fade. Waste no time on regret. Be virtuous, because no one can be both vicious and happy; in her reading, that is all the preachers and Juvenal, the Roman satirist, mean when they say virtue must be loved for its own sake. Then the essay turns to her own life. Gambling, she admits, has consoled her for not being rich. She ranks the love of study above every other passion because it makes happiness depend on oneself alone, and she argues that it matters more to women than to men, since women are shut out of every other road to glory, from war to government. She describes ten happy years with a man she does not name, and how she loved for two once his love had cooled. The last pages advise a woman how to end an affair: stay one degree colder than the lover, and break cleanly. A Paris collection of 1796 reprinted it as Réflexions sur le bonheur. In 1961 the literary scholar Robert Mauzi published a critical edition under the title Discours sur le bonheur, and in 1999 a German translation appeared in Berlin together with her letters to Saint-Lambert, the poet who was her last lover.

Key concepts

How is an illusion different from an error in the Discourse on Happiness?

An error is believing something false, and the essay calls it always harmful, worst of all in matters of conduct. An illusion shows things not as they are but as they must be to give us pleasant feelings, the way the illusions of optics adjust what we see to our nature. At the theatre it lets characters long dead speak in verse. It cannot be manufactured, only kept, by not going behind the scenes.

What is the difference between a passion and a taste in the essay?

Both are sources of pleasure, and a taste is the lesser of the two. Happiness comes only from passions or tastes that are satisfied, and not everyone is lucky enough to have passions, so where they are lacking one makes do with tastes. The plan for a life follows: use the passions while they last, then replace them with tastes. The resources of old age are gambling, study, good food and the esteem of others.

Why must a happy person be virtuous, according to the Discourse?

Because no one can be both vicious and happy. Virtue here means whatever contributes to the happiness of society, and so to our own, since we belong to it. The vices in question are those no law punishes, such as falseness, slander and ingratitude. Conscience never lets them pass, and the contempt of decent people is a punishment harsher than any judge's because it lasts and leaves no hope.

How does the essay separate prejudices from the proprieties?

A prejudice is an opinion received without examination, because it would not survive one, and the essay wants every prejudice shed, superstition above all. The proprieties are the conventions of decent behaviour, which vary with rank, age and circumstance. They have only a conventional truth, yet that is enough: a well-born person never departs from them, and observing them exactly counts as a virtue.

Who is happiest, by the essay's definition?

The person who least desires to change their condition. Nature gives desires only step by step, so an infantry captain longs to be a colonel and is not unhappy at not commanding armies. Reflection should strengthen that natural sobriety: desire only what can be had without too much trouble, love what one has, and improve it. Its enemy is restlessness, a disease of the species that spoils every enjoyment.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Feed the passions, keep the varnish

Must a person tame their desires to be happy, or choose which ones to feed? And is an illusion an error to be cured, or the varnish on most of life's pleasures?

Against the moralists who say that happiness means repressing the passions, du Châtelet holds that only satisfied passions and tastes make anyone happy. Reason's job is bookkeeping, not suppression: a glutton who buys a dinner with a fit of gout has simply calculated badly. Illusion is not error, because it shows things as they must be to please us, as at the puppet show or the opera, and the whole art is not to go behind the scenes to look at the machinery. Health, freedom from prejudice and virtue complete the list, since no one can be both vicious and happy.

  • happiness
  • passion
  • illusion
  • pleasure
  • desire
  • reason
  • virtue
  • conscience
  • vice
  • health
  • bias
  • regret
  • death
  • self-mastery
  • self-regulation
  • practical ethics

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A happiness that depends on no one

Which passion leaves a person's happiness least in other people's hands? The essay's answer is study, and it matters most to the half of humanity shut out of every other road to glory.

Ambition is barred not because it lacks pleasures but because it makes happiness hang on others more than any other passion does, and the less a happiness depends on others, the surer it is. Study is the reverse: a pleasure always within reach and a refuge against misfortune. It also holds the love of glory, which du Châtelet calls an illusion worth keeping, since the hope of being spoken of after death enriches the present. Women, excluded by their condition from war, government and negotiation, have no other glory left. Her own case follows: gambling, a modest fortune, and the pleasure of wanting little.

  • study
  • glory
  • ambition
  • gender and education
  • self-cultivation
  • contentment
  • aging
  • time
  • pleasure
  • happiness

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Love, the passion that hands happiness away

The passion that can make a person happiest is the one that puts their happiness wholly in someone else's keeping. Can a tender heart love without being ruined by it?

Love may be the only passion that makes us want to live, du Châtelet writes, and a love equal, mutual and lasting on both sides is so rare that the divinity itself would be jealous of it. Then she turns to her own life: ten happy years with a man she does not name, a cooling she was slow to notice, a time of loving for two, and a slow passage into friendship and study. The advice that follows is hard-headed. Know the other's character before yielding, never chase a cooling heart, stay one degree colder than the lover, and when it is over, break cleanly.

  • love
  • happiness
  • illusion
  • desire
  • fear
  • aging
  • prudence
  • self-regulation
  • reason

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Within this work

passages held
35
distinct concepts
74
by passages held, corpus-wide
#706

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “happiness” and “pleasure”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 17 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
happinesspleasure6
happinesslove5
happinessvirtue5
happinessstudy4
happinessillusion3
happinesspassion3
lovepassion2
passionpleasure2
illusionlove1
illusionpleasure1
illusionvirtue1
lovepleasure1
lovestudy1
pleasurestudy1
studyvirtue1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1738 Dissertation on the Nature and Propagation of Fire (Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu)

    Written for the Académie des sciences' prize of 1738 and printed by the Académie in 1739, then revised for a separate Paris edition in 1744.

     FR
  2. 1741 Réponse à la lettre de M. de Mairan sur la question des forces vives

    A sequel to her Institutions de physique (1740): Mairan's attack was on that book, and this public letter defends its case for living forces.

     FR
  3. 1746 Discourse on Happiness (Discours sur le bonheur) you are here FR
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