Introduction
So far, the happy sage has elicited an understanding smile from his audience, or at most approval mixed with pity. Meanwhile, as Eastern philosophy teaches us, the feeling of happiness is the highest kind of initiation into unhappiness, into suffering, which can only be tamed with a contemptuous smile. We also have a glimpse of this true school of positive thinking, which patches up the open wounds of despair, in Camus’ attitude of the haughty laughing Sisyphus or in Kohelet’s hedonistic quest. Not to mention Plato, Spinoza or Voltaire. ‘It’s worth a laugh’ – this colloquial statement contains a great deal of wisdom from painful experience, sprinkled with a pinch of cynical disinclination. The ca-tegory of joy itself synonymously replicates this attitude, perhaps more affirmatively, with less nihilistic thinking behind it.