"Happiness is More Like Knowledge Than Like Belief."

As much as motivational speakers would like to convince us, we cannot wish ourselves happy. The "power of positive thinking" only goes so far in the face of reality. In the New York Times Opinion pages, Professor David Sosa examines what makes happiness the experience we so crave, in the article "The Spoils of Happiness." This article, beyond being incredibly compelling, also shows application of several concepts we have discussed previously in this course. Most notable among these is the application of Harris's move of 'forwarding' and Fahnstock and Secor's stasis construction.
It is evident that Sosa will be forwarding and engaging with another text from the outset of this article; he opens with a passage from Robert Nozick. This passage offers a dystopian view of happiness- contrived and controlled by machines so that we are 'plugged in' to happiness at all times. Sosa offers an extension of this passage, simplifying the hypothesis offered by Nozick: "Happiness is not a state of mind." This is an extension of what was offered originally, and thus follows Harris in his view of forwarding, wherein a

"writer forwards a text by taking words, images or ideas from it and putting them to use in new contexts... you test the strength of its insights and the range and flexibility its phrasings. You rewrite it through reusing some of its key concepts."

Sosa does this through his (previously stated) thesis concerning happiness, and by moving the discussion of Nozick's "plugged-in" thought experiment to real world applications; he simplifies it into scenarios with easy decisions to those more difficult. By doing this, Sosa offers a more compelling case of what happiness might be, if not simple experiences or an easily defined mindset. This extends it to his own point of the article: That happiness is not something we can control, and it takes "intellectual courage" to accept this stark reality.

In addition, Sosa operates in a lower stasis to begin with, before ultimately jumping to a higher stasis. Sosa begins by purportedly asking simply "what is happiness" before moving onto a higher stasis of precedence and analogous situations: would choosing to be artificially happy ('plugged in') be a decision as easy as whether to save a pencil or a group of people from a fire? Would one want to be happy- ecstatic- in the way a drug addict is frenzied and ecstatic while high? The reader has hopefully been led to answer these questions easily- that of course, happiness that is contrived is not really happiness, nor something seen as desirable. This ultimately passes value judgments on the worth of happiness.

David Sosa asks the reader to examine themselves and their world, asking us to look at what we consider happiness and the value we place upon the concept. He shows that happiness is not something always mutable, and gives reasons for why this might be better than being on a constant cloud of cheerfulness.