Happiness Read online

  If happiness is to be expected in this world, too, and if, as the Greek philosophers said, there was something beyond luck, or chance, or the gods that we ourselves could do to achieve it, what was it? The answers came in profusion from an entirely new generation of philosophers who had not been brought up in a monolithic world of either Greek gods or Christian absolutism.

  chapter 30

  Happiness and Choice

  In a world more and more plagued by war and poverty, oppression and civil uproar, approaches to the question of happiness began to emerge that ranged far and wide of what had been basic presumptions for over 1,500 years. The pessimist philosophers of the nineteenth century, for instance, did not challenge the definition or the terms of happiness; instead, they challenged the very notion that happiness in such a world could be possible at all.

  Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosophers prominent for their bold repudiation of the theology of Christian happiness, were, nevertheless, not alone in their concerns. The great musician Richard Wagner, the logician Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the playwright Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, in the face of pogroms and holocausts, shared their views that life was a barren place, full of misery, promising nothing. “There is no doubt,” Schopenhauer wrote, “that life is given us not to be enjoyed but to be overcome, to be got over.” And again, “We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”

  Suddenly, in the wake of the confusions and conflicts of the age, philosophy became a centrifuge of depression. It spewed out on every side. Happiness, once the province of another world no longer guaranteed, was now nowhere at all.

  Happiness, for Schopenhauer, was concerned, at best, with the absence of pain. The lot of humanity was nothing more than dissatisfaction in this life with no sense of self-reward here and no hope of life to come. To keep those things at bay, he counseled the avoidance of boredom through the unceasing pursuit of pleasure until, finally, life with all its burdens would be over. Most of all, he advised that we keep our expectations of life low in order to avoid the pain of disappointment in what cannot possibly satisfy.

  With thinking like this, all sense of personal boundaries dissolves. There are no limits to anything. We can do what we want, go where we please, take what we desire until we are saturated with pleasure and smothered by an engorgement with things that do not last. The very definition of what it is to be human, let alone happy, collapses into the insatiable desire for “moreness.” Happiness in the Aristotelian sense, in the Christian sense, of “living well and doing well” disappears into the consumption of the worthless for the sake of nothing.

  A kind of modern hedonism rises again in us. Life becomes one big party meant to dull the pain of living and diminish its roar in our ears. “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” thinking becomes again the national anthem of a people who have long ago forgotten the virtues that got them where they are now. Eventually, such a society declines. What else is there to do once a people barters its inner strength and moral character for overindulgence and purposeless lives except to allow the cloying oil of spiritual dissipation to drown them in their own warped philosophy of life?

  On the personal level, learning to resist a tide of wanton pleasure takes a philosophy of life made of more serious stuff, more considered reflection. Now, the need to distinguish happiness from pleasure becomes more than the game-playing of dreamy philosophers. It becomes the very nub of life. Now the philosophical choices happiness demands become real, become imperative, become paramount.

  In fact, the nature of happiness becomes a modern preoccupation, just as once it had been a Greek one.

  In the face of philosophers who linked happiness to virtue and goodness, Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, saw no place for what the philosophers of other eras, both Christian and Greek, called happiness. Instead of finding happiness in virtue, Nietzsche linked happiness to power and the overcoming of resistance. Nietzsche was Adolf Hitler’s philosopher of choice.

  It was not contentment or serenity or virtue that Nietzsche sought. The pinnacle of life for Nietzsche was the elimination of the weak and the development of the arts as a barrier between the bathos and the beauty of life. The Christian virtue pity he saw as more harmful to humanity than any vice.

  For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, we are the unruled rulers of our universe of the self. Nietzsche says of it, “You look up when you want to be exalted; I look down because I am exalted.” It is a philosophy of life that eschews the traditions and visions, philosophy and ethics of the past for the sake of the self. Nietzsche goes on, “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”

  Overwhelmed by the sense of sin and guilt, the religion of past eras had only propelled the world into the even worse degradation of the human race. This in turn brought the wild need to break out of such a limited view of life. Now neither sin nor guilt could control the boundless desires of a world too long held in the chains of ruthless authorities. The very notion of happiness as the tranquility of virtue had disintegrated in mid-air.

  The problem is that, having left little to aspire to other than power and the arts, Nietzsche leaves the world without any reason to aspire to either. If power is our only form of happiness, then, determined to make gods of ourselves, we can leave in our wake nothing but destruction and the desire for more. It is an endless excursion into struggle and defeat, with only temporary victories bought at the price of the very happiness we seek.

  We become militaristic nations, litigious people, an authoritarian society, a pugilistic culture. Brought to choose between being Athens or Sparta, we choose Sparta and spend all our resources on a security, a power, a rigid resistance that weakens us internally and, eventually, drowns us in the detritus of war-making externally. We heap up bombs in barns rather than wheat. We arm the population from young children to old grandmothers. We spend more money as a people on destruction than we do on human development. And while we think of nothing but security, ironically, we become less and less strong. Our infrastructure crumbles, the arts meant to enrich our souls disappear, our social services and sciences and educational systems sink slowly and surely into decay. We become weaker and weaker, the cause of our own decline.

  No doubt about it, pessimism leaves us with nothing for which to live and even less to desire. Except, perhaps, desire itself. Which is exactly what makes it an item of intense philosophical concern.

  Schopenhauer says that happiness is impossible because it depends on the satisfaction of our desires and “a permanent absence of pain.” It depends, then, on pleasure, on what the Greeks called hedonism or the sheer pursuit of sensual satisfaction. But, he goes on, the problem is that, having satisfied one desire, we then need another one to take its place. Enter the shopaholic, the chocoholic, the alcoholic, the sex addict, each and all of whom find that the inability to satisfy their desires is the very root of their unhappiness.

  Our desires, good as they may be, as we satisfy them simply dig us deeper and deeper into the pit of our need for sensual gratification, until our pleasures give us pain, or until we become bored with them once we get them, use them, and then discard them. At which point, we begin the process all over again until, in the end, it becomes a discouraging circle, the dizzying result of which is deep-down soul sickness.

  It works like this: one drink becomes two becomes three becomes four becomes senselessness. Or we buy the dress and the purse to go with it. Then we need another sweater to go with the dress. Then we’re unhappy without the matching hat. Then we wake up one morning aware that even in us there lurks an Imelda Marcos and her 3,000 pairs of shoes.

  We become like children who cry for months for a set of Legos and then frustrated by the complexity of the system or overjoyed by the ease of it, become bored and, with nothing more to desire, begin to cry again.

  In later years, the child
in us calls them: the car, the bigger car, the boat, the condo, the hot tub, the gold jewelry.

  Nietzsche, on the other hand, also says that life is about desire, but not a desire for things, for “determinate objects.” Nietzsche says that at base the human being desires power, the ability to subdue resistance to the human will. Whatever we want, he argues, we want not for itself so much as for the power to get it. The will, he says, needs something to resist. Its pleasure, its happiness, comes from being able to impose our will on others to get what we desire, whatever the nature of those desires.

  But that kind of “happiness” only puts us in contention with the rest of life forever. It is a position of eternal resistance in the name of “self-development.” It can only put us at odds with anyone who stands between us and the will to control the rest of the world. “Happiness” here is rooted in perpetual struggle, certainly not the kind of self-containment that frees the self from captivity to the self or rests in serenity satisfied with the world as it is.

  Schopenhauer says we need things to be happy; Nietzsche says we need power to be happy. At the end of the day, both positions court despair. Schopenhauer’s because “the pursuit of happiness” is really the endless pursuit of the satisfying substances that simply do not exist. Nietzsche’s because a “pursuit of happiness” that requires power necessarily means “the pursuit of enemies,” which is itself frustrating.

  Neither pursuit is permanently happy, nor is it meant to be. Instead, both states are temporary, both situations are frustrating — but not because wanting something is necessarily wrong. It is simply that the pleasure that comes from each kind of wanting must of necessity disappear. Eventually we will lose power; sooner or later we will run out of things that make us happy. This kind of “happiness” is bound, in the end, to leave us unhappy. The things we see will lose their power to satisfy us forever. The search for the feeling of power that comes with the overcoming of resistance must of necessity fail as it succeeds. Once we have overcome all resistance, what will make us happy then?

  It is a great irony, a great paradox, this continual pursuit of what must necessarily not satisfy in the end. But for that very reason, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche make some serious points for us to consider as we set our own compass through time: life, we need to realize, is either more than things and power or it is worth little or nothing at all. If we put our stock in either, if we truly believe that what cannot satisfy us permanently can really satisfy us at all, no wonder we become, with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, so pessimistic.

  chapter 31

  Happiness and Human Rights

  Ideas are interesting things: they grow more like ground pine than like trees. For years they seem to grow only by the inch. Then, all of a sudden, they stretch out roots underground until with fast-growing tentacles they cover an entire acre of land. Then, before you know it, what you never even caught sight of at the outset of its growing is everywhere.

  The idea of happiness has been like that, too, along with other things we now take for granted but that were at best polarizing ideas at their outset. Like marriages based on romantic love. Or the separation of church and state. Or the elimination of slavery. Or the end of the flat-earth theory, which ruined a good many maps for a good long time.

  Happiness kind of snuck up on the human race after centuries of preparation for it. The very institution that had inveighed against it for so long — the church — finally rediscovered, in addition to the promise of heaven as a reward for having lived a good life, the glory of creation and the proclamation of the Beatitudes, Jesus’ ground rules for the happy life. More than that, with this whole new way of preaching Christianity itself came the embrace of the Greek philosophers and their long-term concern for the relationship between happiness and virtue by the greatest theologians of the church, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. As a result, the acceptance of both Christian stoicism and Christian Epicureanism — asceticism and pleasure — sprang up side by side everywhere.

  By the eighteenth century, more essays were written on happiness than on any other philosophical subject. No wonder, then, that the Enlightenment philosophers with their valorization of human reason as the only legitimate grounds for authority would lead the way to a critical scrutiny of all traditional institutions, customs, and morals.

  Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” unleashed a firestorm of independent thinking. “Enlightenment,” he wrote, “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity due to a lack of courage to use one’s reason, insight, and wisdom.” The motto of the Enlightenment, Kant insisted, is sapere aude, dare to know.

  Suddenly, the old intellectual blinders fell off, institutional answers became suspect in the face of individual inquiry, and people took up the serious subject of how to live again.

  And in the course of this kind of general review of the human condition and the institutions that shaped it, happiness itself became a universal expectation. It seeped into the social system, into churches, into marriages, into politics. It was a flowering of freedom and individualism, of authority as servant rather than as potentate. It was a new moment in the history of the world.

  The English philosopher John Locke, in his 1689 “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” had already talked about what has become one of the most famous public phrases in history, “the pursuit of happiness.” He wrote, “The highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.” It is an insight that became a goal of Western democracy. More than that, it became a measure and hallmark of modern life, a universal objective of modern polity, and a characteristic of contemporary civilization.

  It also became a distinguishing crossover point between happiness as fantasy and happiness as real.

  When Thomas Jefferson, in 1776, assumed the phrase as his own in the Declaration of Independence from England by the new United States of America, he made a strong philosophical point with a very minor grammatical alteration. Where Locke had written about “life, liberty and property,” Jefferson, in the spirit of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on human rights, wrote that citizens had the right to “life, liberty . . . and the pursuit of happiness.”

  Jefferson’s statement bears serious reflection: “property” — security and wealth — is not of the essence of life. It is “happiness” that the human being is about. But, note well: the alteration is a profound one. Though we have the right to the pursuit of happiness, we are not guaranteed that we will find it, nor is anyone else required to see that we get it.

  There are no promises made here, no false claims — only the notion that happiness is a goal worthy of a life. It is a gift and a guide, a direction and a destination that mark the human as human.

  At the moment of Jefferson’s publication of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness,” happiness ceased to be a philosophical exercise of the intellectual elites. Instead, it was thrust into the center of the public arena in a way that had never existed in any political body before. The pursuit of happiness became a public project, an obligation of government, a measure of political success.

  It was an earth-shattering statement in an era still in the process of trying to figure out what to do with “the divine right of kings” and monarchies awash in authoritarianism and devoid of personal freedom.

  More than that, happiness had now become the lifelong project of every woman, man, and child alive and yet to be born. People stepped outside the shadow of oppressive social controls into the light of the dawn they had created for themselves.

  The whole social system turned upside down. The idea that had been simmering around the edges of religion and philosophy for hundreds of years burst into the public domain. Utilitarianism, the new philosophical movement that argued that governments themselves had the obligation to pass only those laws which, in the words of its founder Jeremy Bentham, “guaranteed the greatest amount of happines
s for the greatest number of people,” became a measure for every dimension of life.

  “The pursuit of happiness” as well as order, public security, and freedom became a measure of a government’s own authenticity and effectiveness. The ideals of utilitarianism sprang up everywhere in every field — and, in fact, are with us still.

  The idea of happiness changed education, changed government, changed work, changed the notion of what it was to be a person. Now, in ways never dreamed of in the past, happiness became what Aristotle had always said it was, “the end and purpose of the project of life.”

  But there is a sting in the tail. The central question of the enterprise is not, is happiness important? The central question is, what kind of happiness are we talking about? Would an addict and a Zen master define happiness the same way? If not, whose pursuit of happiness will we assure? What pursuit of happiness will we ourselves commit to in our own lifetime? And why? Whose right to the pursuit of happiness will we take away? And on what grounds?

  The answer to those questions changes the way we see life. It defines what we consider moral and legal and civilized and cultured. These are not questions fit only for philosophy books. No, the way we answer these questions will become the ground of every institution of which we are a member. And it is at the heart of utilitarianism.