Finally got my computer back. Fortunately, Roger has obliged me by not posting for a while on the Happiness vs. Sagacity topic. (Or rather, what he’s posted has been off on the mythology tangent, which I haven’t really taken a look at yet.) So I can post my previously prepared remarks largely unaltered. Here goes.
As I see it, Roger’s doing two things:
- Offering a description of, and a critique of, the contemporary ideology of happiness.
- Providing a historical account of how we got here. This account
- Begins with the Enlightenment revival of Epicurus, runs through the rivalry between Danton and Robespierre, in the French Revolution, and in between in involves a lot of obscure sayings and doings in Parisian salons and garrets that I don’t really follow.
And - Is to be construed as mythic, in the sense that myths provide “the ideal roles and persons that symbolize a human life through time.”
- Begins with the Enlightenment revival of Epicurus, runs through the rivalry between Danton and Robespierre, in the French Revolution, and in between in involves a lot of obscure sayings and doings in Parisian salons and garrets that I don’t really follow.
This summary doesn’t include everything: Roger also has a riff going on about a contrast between the path of the sage and the path of the fool, and there’s some stuff about the positional economy that I don’t quite get. This’ll do for starters, though.
Seems to me that the core of Theme I is contained in the following passages from the June 18 post:
The pursuit of unhappiness emerges pretty quickly, and not just in fringe cultures. The sullenness of adolescence, the mid-life crises of middle age, the goth music grad student culture, these aren’t accidents. Affluence allows for what you might call different climates of temperament. Unhappiness is the purest response to the very idea that happiness is the ultimate parameter by which to judge one’s life and one’s society. If the enlightenment notion of the “pursuit of happiness” has any value, it is in the idea of the pursuit itself — an object that is desirable because it promises happiness is valued because its pursuit is correlated with unhappiness. The test or contest is encoded in the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
I myself don’t agree that happiness is in the pursuit - I think that is a contingent matter, but often unhappiness is in the pursuit. My point is that the unhappiness is often what one desires, precisely, in that pursuit - or rather, one desires a number of things, one has a number of temperamental modes, and using happiness as the term to designate them all is ultimately misleading.
Let’s try to figure this out (in slightly altered order):
one desires a number of things, one has a number of temperamental modes, and using happiness as the term to designate them all is ultimately misleading.
In my comments to this post, I expressed a bias in favor of an Aristotelian view of happiness, which is, in part, what Roger is opposing here. But I see his point, and so, for the present discussion, let’s take it as given that “happiness” means “subjective wellbeing.” And I wouldn’t use the term “temperament” in quite this sense, but no big deal there. Anyway, this statement is offered as a gloss on the preceding sentence:
My point is that the unhappiness is often what one desires, precisely, in that pursuit.
What, exactly, unhappiness under the present conception? In his article in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy (the one we all joined the Book-of-the-Month Club to get) Richard Brandt says the following:
The following proposal for a definition of “happy” may be suggested. There are two components of being happy. The first is dispositional: in order to be happy it is necessary that one like . . . those parts of one’s total life pattern and circumstances that one thinks are important. To say that one likes them is in part to say . . . that one does not wish them to be substantially different, and that they measure up, at least roughly, to the life ideal that one had hoped to attain: but it also implies, to some degree at least, a favorable attitude. . . .
The second component is the occurrence (or nonoccurrence) of certain feelings or emotions. Happiness is sometimes said to be a species of joy in regard to one’s total situation. This goes too far . . . . But if a man is happy, he will not be subject (except briefly . . .) to gloom, anxiety, restlessness, depression, discouragement, and shame, for these feelings will not occur if he likes the total pattern of his life insofar as the parts he deems important are concerned. But are no positive feelings required? It seems we would not call a man happy if he did not frequently feel joy or enthusiasm or enjoy what he was doing or experiencing. Exactly how much of this there must be one cannot definitely say. It is clear, however, that one could not like the total pattern of one’s life unless some of these things occurred.
Based on this definition, we can say that being unhappy involves one or more of the following things:
- One dislikes one’s total life pattern and circumstances, and wishes that they were substantially different.
- One experiences prolonged bouts of gloom, anxiety, restless, etc.
- One does not experience a sufficient amount of joy and enthusiasm (as measured by some yet-to-be-specified normative standard)
(Of course, there may be causal relationships between these aspects of unhappiness.)
What, then, is Roger’s point when he says that “unhappiness is often what one desires”? As regards (1), it seems to me simply incoherent to say that one desires a state that one wishes were substantially different from what it is. The point must be, then, that we desire states in which we will experience gloom, anxiety, and all those nasty things, and/or we desire states which are suboptimal in terms of joy and enthusiasm. Moreover, I take Roger to be saying that we desire those states because they have these characteristics; that is; it’s the depression, the joylessness, etc, that we desire in them. (I take this to be the thrust of the word “precisely” in Roger’s claim.) It seems to me that a great deal more would need to be done to make this claim plausible.
Let’s move on, looking for light.
Unhappiness is the purest response to the very idea that happiness is the ultimate parameter by which to judge one’s life and one’s society.
I’m afraid I don’t get it. What is meant by a “pure response” to an idea? Is the point that the hegemony of a particular ideal of happiness makes some of us feel worse?
I’m reminded here of Notes from Underground. The U.M. is overwhelmed by the sense that the 19th century Glass Palace ideal of happiness leaves him out — and that deliberately making himself even more miserable is a necessary form of resistance and self-affirmation. Is that what’s going on here?
An object that is desirable because it promises happiness is valued because its pursuit is correlated with unhappiness. The test or contest is encoded in the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
What’s the difference between being “œdesirable” and being “valued”, such that claim made in the first sentence makes any sense? What’s the “test or contest”, and what’s the sense of “encodedness” here?
Roger offers us some contemporary examples of what he means by “the pursuit of unhappiness”:
The sullenness of adolescence, the mid-life crises of middle age, the goth music grad student culture, these aren’t accidents.
I’m fortunate enough never to have met any members of the “goth music grad student subculture”, but I don’t see why they warrant being classified separately from “sullen adolescents.” Adolescence is a state of mind, not a chronological category.
And midlife crises? Seems to me that the stereotypical MLC is a frantic last grasp at the pursuit of happiness, not its opposite. If a MLC was really about wallowing in unhappiness, you’d see . . . I dunno, maybe a lot middle-aged guys publishing zines full of bad poetry instead of buying Porsches and screwing their secretaries.
(For what it’s worth, this seems to me to be the only sort of midlife crisis worth having.)
Another obscure clue to the Gathmanian doctrine comes in the June 4 post:
The pursuit of happiness has distorted the civilizing metric that really counts, which is of the quality of one’s unhappiness.
I think I understand what it means to talk about “the quality of one’s unhappiness.” And I think I understand what it means to say that that’s what “really counts.” (Sounds like the kind of thing Kierkegaard would say.) But how is this a “civilizing metric”? Is “civilization” meant ironically here? That is, is being civilized a good thing or a bad thing?
Roger elaborates on this theme by turning to economics:
Only after a certain level of material comfort is achieved does the question of doing without that comfort take on a deliberate cast. To break the spell of that collection of habits that went into primitive accumulation requires having reached a point at which one can turn around – a point at which inversion is possible.
What’s the “primitive accumulation” referred to here? Early European capitalism? Or the first agricultural communities that produced surpluses? The first cities? The first empires?
The possibility of doing without is manifestly not solely a product of industrial and postindustrial affluence. To suppose that it is reflects a major misunderstanding: that the history of humankind is a largely unbroken progression from abject deprivation to greater and greater material affluence. To cite just one counterexample, there is substantial reason to believe that the Indian peasantry, under both the Moguls and the British Raj, were a great deal worse off than were their ancestors during the time of the Buddha.
That’s enough for now.
Comments 7
Alan, excellent reply. I have few preliminary thoughts.
a. adolescence really is used literally about teenagers - I’ve only heard people refer to twentysomes as adolescents metaphorically. So I think you can break it out as a distinct cultural category.
b. This definition of unhappiness is fine in the abstract - “One dislikes one’s total life pattern and circumstances, and wishes that they were substantially different” - but the question is, what counts as a wish? I would look to activities. If, say, our sub-goth band twenty something engages in activities that he or she knows a., have made him or her sad/unhappy/bored before, and b., about which there is no reason to suppose a different outcome - then even if, while doing this stuff, we hear our subgoth wish for different circumstances, I think we can ask about the function of that wish. It, too, can be part of the recurring pattern of willed unhappy activity. Nostalgia, the desire to travel, the wish for a different lifestyle can easily be ways to make oneself unhappy, and can be chosen for just that reason. I take a song that I heard when I was, say, breaking up with x. And I play it over again not so that I can sing along and tap dance to it, but to impress upon myself a gloomy mood. In other words, the criterion for deciding about happiness here can’t be such that the behavior of the agents is explained by means of dickering with the definition of happiness - which is what I often think philosophers do. You are really happy doing x, because I have defined happiness to mean that the thing that all people desire, and your doing x means that you desired to do x, etc. To my mind, what counts is the mood of the agent and the work of the agent. Does the agent work to put him/herself in situations that aren’t happy, for instance?
Of course, here we come upon the problem that happiness and unhappiness aren’t symmetric - unhappiness contains a lot more mood descriptions. Boredom, for instance. So I’d really have to spell out unhappiness a little bit more.
However, there is more to say about this even putting the unhappiness issue aside. If happiness is mood based, then it is difficult to see how the same word is supposed to signify the disposition that you highlight. To my mind, that I might be satisfied with my life, or my month, or whatever, does not mean I was happy during it. This assumes that we would regret unhappiness, or view it as a flaw - and I’m not sure how to reconcile that with the fact that we might say, well, I needed to be unhappy at such and such a time. In other words, I’d put a wedge between satisfaction - the feeling that I “like” the parts of my life at a certain time - and the feeling of happiness. I often feel that there is a certain philosophical anxiety to, in a sense, cheat on behalf of happiness. Because of the Aristotelian tradition, for instance, we want it to be the case that the happy man is the epitome. But I really can’t make sense of how Aristotle uses happiness, and I think definitional cheating about happiness is part of the happiness triumphant culture that I’m opposing.
Posted 13 Jul 2007 at 5:02 pm ¶c. Primitive accumulation. I’m using this not in the strictly Marxy sense, but in the sense that there is a left over amount to meet one’s life needs in whatever form of economics one is living in - from hunter gatherer to post industrial symbol pusher - so that there is extra productive time - time that is not devoted to either current needs or to future needs for which one is saving up. It is primitive in relation to one’s life needs, nothing more.
ps - let me make clearer my problem with the dispositional notion of happiness. Let’s suppose that there is an object that tends to get red - say the fruit of a plant. I could say that the fruit is disposed to get red, and I’d have no problem with that. But if I said that the disposition itself was red, I would have a problem with that. I’d find it incoherent. Similarly, if I am a happy a lot, I might be disposed to be happy, but my disposition itself isn’t happy. I think a lot of confusion has come into philosophy from this mix up.
Posted 13 Jul 2007 at 5:13 pm ¶A couple of thoughts:
“I take a song that I heard when I was, say, breaking up with x. And I play it over again not so that I can sing along and tap dance to it, but to impress upon myself a gloomy mood.”
I don’t think I’ve ever done such a thing, and I can’t imagine doing so. (And believe me, if there’s one thing I know about it’s listening to melancholy tunes when bummed out.) The nostalgia that arises on hearing the song is because it made you feel better at the time of the breakup, and on on rehearing it, one recaptures some of that pleasure. In fact, it’s a lot better the second time around, because: having attained a certain distance from the situation alleviates the pain, but you can still experience all of the antidotal pleasure.
“If, say, our sub-goth band twenty something engages in activities that he or she knows a., have made him or her sad/unhappy/bored before, and b., about which there is no reason to suppose a different outcome - then even if, while doing this stuff, we hear our subgoth wish for different circumstances, I think we can ask about the function of that wish. It, too, can be part of the recurring pattern of willed unhappy activity. Nostalgia, the desire to travel, the wish for a different lifestyle can easily be ways to make oneself unhappy, and can be chosen for just that reason.”
I’d say the same thing applies here. If someone keeps returning to the same activities, they must be deriving some sort of pleasure — a second-order pleasure, perhaps, which arises from being conscious of the first-order pain in a certain way.
“If happiness is mood based, then it is difficult to see how the same word is supposed to signify the disposition that you highlight.. . . if I am a happy a lot, I might be disposed to be happy, but my disposition itself isn’t happy. I think a lot of confusion has come into philosophy from this mix up.”
I don’t see what the problem is. Lots of words get used equivocally. You are correct, though, that the view that happiness is predicated of one’s disposition would be incoherent, if anyone held such a view. I don’t think anyone does, though. The word is being used in two different senses: happy2 =DEF:disposed to be happy1.
Posted 28 Jul 2007 at 3:32 pm ¶Well, Alan, I think this remark sums up our cross-purposes, when you say of the goth example: “I’d say the same thing applies here. If someone keeps returning to the same activities, they must be deriving some sort of pleasure.” If pleasure is considered the apriori motive for any repeated action, then one could make your case. However, I think this is a case made not out of the facts of the living world, but out of a philsophical definition. I could, in the same way, say that sadness, as psychologists see it, is a phase of withdrawal from social contact. (see, for instance, David Karp’s Speaking of Sadness: “Affective disorders represent a unique category of illnesses since social withdrawal is both a consequence of the condition and one of its chief defining characteristics. To dramatize the point, those suffering from, say, cancer might very well find social interaction difficult, but it is not the difficulty of itneractin that privides a clue to cancer’s presence. Social withdrawal is not a relevant observation for diagnosing cancer. In contrast, social withdrawal is a central observation in diagnosing depressing since the inability to remain socially connected is a chief consequence of the illness.” (26) Even though Karp is speaking of extreme withdrawal, I could still say that the withdrawals in the instances of sadness seeking are enactments of the sadness situation, regardless of your self - report.
But in both cases, we wouldn’t be getting very far. We’d simply be trying to rule the world with definitions, a vicious philosophical habit. If I turn up sadness seeking behaviors from literature or testimony, you could just say that really, these people were all seeking pleasure, because pleasure is defined as what we seek.
My own feeling is that I could accept that idea of pleasure-seeking as being part of sadness, since I see no reason self-canceling opposition between sadness and pleasure. In fact, a taste for melancholy is one of the old classic Galenic types. And I would revamp that psychology of temperament on social psychological grounds.
As for your point about the equivocal use of the word happy, you seem to be saying that even if it is ambiguous, many worlds are ambiguous. Which could well be true. But there are situations in which an ambiguous word might be useful, and one’s where it might not. A traffic sign saying ‘cease’, for instance, instead of stop would be ambiguous and injurious. I’m making a case for this being so about the use of the term happiness.
Posted 30 Jul 2007 at 11:26 pm ¶First, I have a lot of trouble with the quotation from Karp. He sounds confused to me.
– Social withdrawal is not a characteristic of all affective disorders, but only some of them. People in manic states are often extremely gregarious.
– I’d argue that in an ontological sense, social withdrawal is not a defining characteristic of a depressive disorder. In recent years it’s become a chief diagnostic criterion, because of the need for intersubjectively observable, “objective”, behavioral criteria. But social withdrawal is a sign of an interior state, which can just as well exist in the absence of the external sign.
And I’d say that the withdrawal of the cancer patient and the withdrawal of the depressed person is a difference of degree, not of kind.
But on to the main issue:
I think that here we need to distinguish between different cases. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that there’s a nonsexual form of masochism. (In fact, I think the term is almost always defined as a sexual phenomenon.) But let’s suppose that there are cases of people who seem to desire and pursue the sensation of physical pain for its own sake, not because they find it sexually arousing. All the evidence we have indicates that they have the same physical sensations as “normals” do when they are, say, burned, beaten or stabbed. They suffer the same tissue damage. Brain scans reveal that the same areas of the brain are involved in the perception of pain as with “normals”; those areas are just wired up to the motivational system differently.
If this were a genuine phenomenon, I’m frankly not sure what I would say about it. It would present a major challenge both to my common-sense understanding of the world (and I think to everybody’s), and to philosophical theorizing.
But the phenomena you cite as examples of “the pursuit of unhappiness” — adolescent sullenness, midlife crises, morose-sounding music, delayed gratification in the pursuit of economic success and status — are emphatically not of this nature. When I say that there must be something pleasurable in them, I’m not relying on a behavioral definition of “pleasure.” I am, rather, relying on introspection about what goes on in me when I engage in similar activities. There is a component of such experiences that is pleasurable, and that component is phenomenologically distinct from the dysphoric components of the same experiences.
Posted 01 Aug 2007 at 10:21 pm ¶Alan, this is an interesting discussion – and good for me, as I am planning on proposing an essay to a journal on the genesis and cultural meaning of the positive and negative classification of feelings.
Anyway, I can understand your objection to Karp. On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to me to be making too many odd assumptions. That people “stay in” after they are sad is a pretty common social phenomenon. On the other hand, sometimes people go out to shake off the blues. My major point is that one could easily define sadness so as to get the behaviors you want clustering around sadness.
More interesting to me is your case, because it leads to the problem of talking about emotions along one dimension only – pleasure and pain. I have a post up about Wundt’s three dimensional model. In psychology – and of course I’d take all psychological theory with a grain of salt – Wundt’s model is most often reduced to two dimensions, one of valence (pleasure –pain) and one of arousal or intensity. Lisa F. Barrett identifies the arousal dimension with bodily activation. “Valence is a subjective feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness; arousal is a subjective state of feeling activated or non-activated.” (Discrete Emotions or Dimensions? The Role of Valence Focus and Arousal Focus, 1998) And she adds a functional notion, focus, as the emphasis between one and the other dimension is negotiated by the subject. I don’t see the need to imagine masochism to imagine activities with an ‘arousal focus’ that might usually have a high degree of unpleasantness. Going to horror movies, extreme sports, ghost stories, roller coasters – I think the culture is full of these activities. Now, I suppose you could make the case that really, arousal should be reduced to pleasure. I’d dispute it – I don’t think thrill and pleasure are the same. But I’d have to see how you make that case. Assuming you grant the separation, and that thrill seeking operates, or can, to direct us to objects which, given the hedonic dimension alone, we are averse to, this doesn’t mean that I’ve constructed passages of life that aren’t defined by an aspiration to ‘positive’ emotional states, but I have carved out exceptions to the rule.
Now, you and I bring radically different intuitions to the cases, here – as per your reading of listening to music that reminds you of a lover with whom you’ve broken up in comparison to mine. What is odd to me is that you don’t seem to recognize my self description as plausible in relationship to me. Actually, it is so plausible that it has moved me to doubt the social psychology of happiness. But anyway, the thing to do would be to find testimony to the same kind of description I have – a person who, undergoing an act that makes him or her sad, then repeats the act and self reports as wanting to be made sad again. Would that satisfy you? Or are you going by some rule by which you simply decide that these reports are somehow deceptive?
Posted 02 Aug 2007 at 6:46 pm ¶“More interesting to me is your case..”
Posted 02 Aug 2007 at 6:47 pm ¶I mean the masochism case you present.
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