Period 11 Blog #7

Your comment post should be at least 280 words this week due Thursday by 11:59 pm and you will be responsible for responding (respectfully) to one of your classmates in at least a one paragraph reply entries by Sunday at 11:59 pm.

Have you ever faced a challenge in your life? Did you overcome it? What was the whole experience like? What did you feel during and after your struggle?

In “Is a Life Without Struggle Worth Living?” Adam Etinson writes:

In the autumn of 1826, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill suffered a nervous breakdown — a “crisis” in his “mental history,” as he called it.

Since the age of 15, Mill had been caught firmly under the intellectual spell of his father’s close friend, Have you ever faced a challenge in your life? Did you overcome it? What was the whole experience like? What did you feel during and after your struggle?

In “Is a Life Without Struggle Worth Living?” Adam Etinson writes:

In the autumn of 1826, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill suffered a nervous breakdown — a “crisis” in his “mental history,” as he called it.

Since the age of 15, Mill had been caught firmly under the intellectual spell of his father’s close friend, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was a proponent of the principle of utility — the idea that all human action should aim to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. And Mill devoted much of his youthful energies to the advancement of this principle: by founding the Utilitarian Society (a fringe group of fewer than 10 members), publishing articles in popular reviews and editing Bentham’s laborious manuscripts.

Utilitarianism, Mill thought, called for various social reforms: improvements in gender relations, working wages, the greater protection of free speech and a substantial broadening of the British electorate (including women’s suffrage).

There was much work to be done, but Mill was accustomed to hard work. As a child, his father placed him on a highly regimented home schooling regime. Between the ages of 8 and 12, he read all of Herodotus, Homer, Xenophon, six Platonic dialogues (in Greek), Virgil and Ovid (in Latin), and kept on reading with increasing intensity, as well as learning physics, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics, while tutoring his younger sisters. Holidays were not permitted, “lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired.”

Not surprisingly, one of the more commonly accepted explanations of Mill’s breakdown at the age of 20, is that it was caused by cumulative mental exhaustion. But Mill himself understood it differently. In his autobiography, he wrote:

I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to: unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent… In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

In the wake of this episode, Mill slipped into a six-month-long depression.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

— In your opinion, is struggle essential to happiness? Have you ever experienced happiness from struggle in your own life?

— Mr. Etinson writes, “Some part of us prefers to struggle or quest after an ideal, rather than attain it.” Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?

— From where do you draw happiness? From striving toward some future goal? From peaceful moments of quiet contemplation? From anything else?

— Mill suggests that all human beings are capable of finding joy in peace and normalcy. Do you think this is true? If so, how do you think people can learn to enjoy the quieter moments of life? If not, why not?

-If so, how do you think people can learn to enjoy the quieter moments of life? If not, why not??