The past couple of weeks have seen me somewhat preoccupied, in my contemplative moods, with ‘felicity’.
“Felicity, felicity – how shall I say it – is quaffed out of a golden cup in every latitude: the flavor is with you – with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.”1
Felicity as meant, I believe, by Conrad relates to pragmatism, (A definition of ‘felicity’ at Dictionary.com is, ‘a skillful faculty’. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/felicity ) More specifically felicity is less encompassing a set of associated outcomes, whereas pragmatism seems more encompassing the same set of associated outcomes. ‘Felicity’ touches more upon an aspect of ability or motivation, whereas pragmatism touches more upon an aspect of results. Whether felicity is impulsive, deliberative, conscious, subconscious, etc., I am not sure. Felicity does seem, in part, to precede success while pragmatism seems to be consequent to outcomes.
Felicity as competency becomes mistakenly and often arrogantly conceived as universal in its particulars rather than local. The associated values underlying the particulars are also thought universal. Thus felicity is adopted and applied as general rather than particular, mistakenly so.
It seems to me, felicity is assessed as much as it is defined.
In the case of Jim of ‘Lord Jim’©, Jim moves from an nonfeliciotous romanticism toward something more felicitous and necessarily less romantic. This implies a, seemingly, indisputable separateness between felicity and nonfelicitous . However, one can traverse from nonfelicitous to felicitous – at least as represented by Jim. Can one traverse in the opposite direction from felicitous to nonfelicitous? Well, upon Jim and Marlowe’s latter meeting, the romantic seemed reengendered within Jim. At Jim’s reengendered romanticism, Jim might be said to have traversed from felicitous to nonfelicitous but really it seems he never fully exited the romantic, nonfelicitous. Thus the reverse traversal seems less one of crossing a threshold and more one of romanticism coming out of dormancy. So the concepts are not only traversable from felicity to nonfelicity and vise versa but this traversing is as easy as passing through an open doorway rather than as difficult as. . . oh I don’t know . . . climbing out of a deep hole.
Another aspect is nonfelicity’s nonfelicitousness, its less than skillful faculty. Jim’s romanticism or bovarysme is averred as maladjusted or muddled yet there doesn’t seem any argument that romanticism has virtue or rectitude. This implies felicititous worth as being oppositional to virtuous worth. Yet felicity, in its pragmatism, is not only an admired goal or trait but is also well-adopted – in whichever of its local particulars – throughout the world. (I am not addressing the conception of felicity as misapplied because a set of felicitous particulars are deemed universal, rather I’m simply addressing local felicity as being well adopted.) Does this suggest felicitous worth ousted virtuous worth? I don’t know.
So that’s where we stand at the moment. This blog will be in the black next year if not . . .
“Yes sir, your question.”
“Is this some kind of dissertation satisfying the requirements of an online university as opposed to satisfying the requirements of a brick and mortar university?”
It’s obvious to me that he is asking – rather evasively and esoterically – for the spelling of the day which follows ‘Twosday’. I proceed to spell out – each letter at a time – the spelling of ‘Whensday’.
Also, felicity seems more than merely expedient in its being an escape from the nonfelicitous.
1 Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad, ©1993 Wordsworth Editions Limited, Ware, Hertfordshire, England, pg. 110
Mind Askew 