Abstract

In this paper I contrast the classical and the modern formulations of the link between reason and happiness. The most important variables in the two cases are first, the status of poetry, and second, the importance of the paradigm of mathematics. The relation between poetic and mathematical thinking is already ambiguous in Plato. The claim in the dialogues that happiness depends upon the life of reason does not appear to be substantiated by the actual description of rational cognition when this is understood in the light of the mathematical paradigm in separation from its poetical counterpart. I then consider the fate of this separation in the conception of rationality typical of the founders of the modern age, and in particular of the 18th and 19th centuries. The tendency by philosophers to associate the life of reason with happiness diminishes as rationalism is associated ever more closely with mathematics. Hence the rising tide of uneasiness and sadness among the best spirits of the 19th and 20th centuries. I close with a suggestion for the reconciliation of reason and happiness through the articulation of the link between reason and goodness