Friedrich Georg Jünger reflects on happiness, misfortune, and the uncertain gifts of chance. Moving from Tyche and Fortuna to superstition, love, and the story of Cupid and Psyche, he distinguishes having good fortune from being happy. Through Plato and Horace, he considers desire, moderation, and the possibility of a happiness grounded in rhythm, openness, and freedom.
Friedrich Georg Jünger — 1 recording in the archive.
Anyone reflecting on happiness and misfortune can be compared to a child sitting on the shore, trying to empty the sea with a spoon. What he scoops out with his spoon will not suffice. Our thinking does not free us from what we think about. We cannot anticipate our future or make ourselves safe against what approaches us: neither against chance events nor against fate. Security itself can be deceptive. What Hecate says to the witches in Macbeth holds true. For, as you know, security has always been mankind's greatest enemy. So it was and so it is, because it blinds us to approaching disaster and misfortune. Is it the same with good and bad fortune and their alternation? Is one person's owl, as the proverb says, another person's nightingale? In other words, is what chance or fate bestows on one person taken away from another? Often it is. The goods of fortune change hands. Yet there are goods taken from no one, which cannot be taken away by anyone else either. They belong among the reliable and lasting things, if constancy and permanence may be spoken of in life's brevity. Everyone not only thinks about happiness and misfortune, but experiences their power through acting and suffering. Even those who wish to arm the inner person against both are no exception. When philosophers try to reassure people, recommend equanimity, and offer remedies for strength and consolation, all this already presupposes happiness and misfortune. When they seek to make a person unshakable and unfeeling, both are already present. Yet everyone first thinks of his own lot: what has been allotted to him and what is withheld. He compares it with the lot of others. Since their lots differ, their thoughts differ too. What one person calls happiness leaves another cold. The same applies to misfortune. Victors and the defeated differ in their views of it. Since minds are so varied, and thoughts not only differ but change and turn into their opposites, there is no science of happiness and misfortune. If that is so, where can advice be found? Should someone seeking a path turn to the poets who have devised tragedy and comedy, which deal with nothing other than human happiness and misfortune? Or should he turn to the white ravens: those rare masters whom posterity reveres as the wisest? Both may serve him, but the choice is left to…