Spinoza's joy

Today in Happiness we finish Frederic Lenoir's Happiness: A Philosopher's Guide. It's an answer to the SoL's charge that western academic philosophy no longer offers the kind of therapeutic balm and succor, the therapy, that inspired the Hellenistic Age. We have resources too, if you're willing to cherry-pick your western medicine: a little Stoicism here, a little Epicureanism there, a little Spinoza, a little Plato (not Prozac)...

But first, a word of appreciation for our reporters last time. That mindful moment out on the Peck Hall stoa, framed by a gentle rain, was calming. We should do that again.

Spinoza was mindful in his way. His possessions were few: books, desk, optical workshop, the four-poster bed of both his conception and his demise. Do people who retain tangible continuity with the familiar furniture of their lives, over a lifetime, find peace of mind easier to have and hold?

He wanted to free us from the "cruel illusion" of free will, in deference to the "spinozism of freedom" (as my old teacher called it) that he found in surrender to causal necessity. To be free, in these terms, is to shelve the will and find liberation in rational understanding. It's to transcend the narrow and selfish ego, to discard the sense of personal marginality and alienation, to embrace the widest possible identity in the whole.

Does that identity squeeze out particularity and individualism? Not in Lenoir's interpretation. "We must all learn to know ourselves in order to discover what makes us happy or unhappy..." 

Well, good. Great. But what if we discover that what makes us happy is the sense of ourselves as causal agents whose wills do sometimes find expression in purposive activity that makes a difference, that alters events and creates alternative futures? What if we desire that identity? Is it a bad desire?

"The role of reason then consists not in judging and reprimanding a bad desire (as morality does), but in arousing new desires, more securely established, that will bring us greater joy." Lenoir offers the example of his niece, whom he says reason instructed to desire a more serious approach to school. Reason, not will, "enabled her to do all that was necessary..." (165) Are we sure about that? I'm not.

To be happy we must "focus on energizing the forces of life: to nourish joy, love, compassion, kindness, tolerance, benevolent thoughts, self-esteem..." Sounds like a big job for reason alone.

Is "joy" a passing emotion or a "permanent feeling"? It can be both, surely. But our "essential truth" is that "joy of living" that engenders gratitude, harmony, peace, and freedom. Spinoza's way is one path, but it's not the only one. Lenoir's last words echo some of what we heard on Tuesday about finding happiness within ourselves, urging indispensable "inner labor". Agreed, but again with the proviso that inner work must eventually connect with outer exertion, must translate into engagement and not, finally, detachment.

Some questions: Can we freely choose to renounce free will? Or freely choose to affirm it? Or seek new desires? (Remember Schopenhauer's "We can do what we want, but not want what we want.") Why shouldn't we expect a pantheistic universe to yield universal rules of behavior? Can a rationalist- pantheist endorse delusional sources of happiness? 178 Was Einstein being disingenous when he affirmed "Spinoza's God"? If  "there isn't an inch of earth where God is not," does God not have a lot to answer for?
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It was on this day in 1892 that the Pledge of Allegiance was recited en masse for the first time, by more than 2 million students. It had been written just a month earlier by a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy, who published it in Youth's Companion and distributed it across the country. It was recited on this day to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas... It's the birthday of author and psychologist Robert Coles (books by this author), born in Boston, Massachusetts (1929). He's the author of more than 60 books. Coles was in the South at the dawn of the civil rights movement, planning to lead a low-key life as a child psychologist. But one day, during a visit to New Orleans in 1960, he saw a white mob surrounding a six-year-old black girl named Ruby Bridges, who was kneeling in her starched white dress in the middle of it all to pray for the mob that was attacking her. Coles decided to begin what would become his work for the next few decades, an effort to understand how children and their parents come to terms with radical change. He conducted hundreds of interviews on the effects of school desegregation, and he shaped them into the first volume of Children of Crisis (1967), a series of books for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973... He said, "We should look inward and think about the meaning of our life and its purposes, lest we do it in 20 or 30 years and it's too late." WA