Milinda’s Questions

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:

1. Offering a description of, and a critique of, the contemporary ideology of happiness.
2. Providing a historical account of how we got here. This account
   1. 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
   2. Is to be construed as mythic, in the sense that myths provide “the ideal roles and persons that symbolize a human life through time.”

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.