Satisfaction

LISTEN. Today in Happiness we consider "life satisfaction" and Daniel Haybron's assertion that To be satisfied does not mean you think your life is going well for you...

If you've spent the bulk of your life imprisoned, and declare upon eventual release that you were and are happy, does that bode ill for happiness as a worthy object for a life's quest? Or does it just speak well of the temperament of the ex-con who persevered so heroically?

Plato's cave-dwellers in Book VII of the Republic must have thought themselves happily ensconced in their subterranean prison, else they'd not so have resented their enlightened peer's attempt to shine a light on their situation. Happiness surely does not supersede delusion. 

Wittgenstein's dying words, "Tell them I had a wonderful life," belie his morose reputation. So did old Schopenhauer's Scrooge-like visage. But maybe happiness can take the form, for some, of delight in adversity and mental anguish and deep pessimism, after all. 

Or maybe they need to join Philosophers Anonymous, and acknowledge their impotence to alter a power larger than themselves. But what would that power be? Temperament? Genetics? Fate?

Or maybe not. Maybe Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer and the cavers and the ex-con knew satisfaction, but not happiness.  I'd like to think so, and I think a lot of us would. We'd like to think our respective pursuits of happiness won't just satisfy but ultimately will uplift, transport, and redeem us. 

Ultimately. For now, though, day by day, how do we measure our satisfaction and judge its contribution to our ultimate happiness? After all, we're "just born, and there you are. So it's hard to know where to set the bar for a 'good enough' life." 

I say set the aspirational bar high, but be prepared to appreciate and celebrate close to the ground.  A low and mean life would have to be pretty low and mean to be flatly unsatisfactory. It can still be lacking, disappointing, wounding, depleting, whatever, but still satisfy in ways oblivion obviously cannot. "It sure beats being dead."

It does, doesn't it? Sophocles in Oedipus Rex -- “...count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last” -- was chronically unhappy, no fit role model for us. Right?

If you don't know you're pain-free, you might as well not be. If you're happy and you know it, that deserves some applause. But if you think, with Schopenhauer, that the hunt for happiness gives rise to deluded hope and dissatisfaction, well, good luck. And don't worry, the end is always near.

Better ancestors

LISTEN. We turn to Aristotle today in CoPhi, I'm also thinking a lot this morning about my upcoming MALA classes on educating good citizens. The Stagirite has things to say about that. He 

disparages oligarchs, who suppose that justice requires preferential claims for the rich, but also democrats, who contend that the state must boost liberty across all citizens irrespective of merit. The best polis has neither function: its goal is to enhance human flourishing, an end to which liberty is at best instrumental, and not something to be pursued for its own sake. (SEP)

My MALA focus will be first on John Dewey, whose commitment to democracy also sought an equilibrium between personal liberty and communal well-being. Like Aristotle, Dewey also thought we are political animals. We are social beings with an inherent civic duty to respect and collaborate effectively with our peers in addressing matters of common concern.  

And like Aristotle, Dewey placed great emphasis on human flourishing as something far more profound and lasting than fleeting pleasures, more than a feeling. It's a state of being, the ongoing project of a lifetime coordinate with the lives of our fellow citizens, an effort to live virtuously in a community dedicated to virtue. Being a good citizen, in these terms, involves the pursuit of personal liberty and well-being no more or less urgently than that of the entire polis.

Being a good citizen also, maybe especially, involves being a good ancestor. "The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?'" So said the great humanist and medical researcher Jonas Salk, without whose vaccine countless lives would have been lost and countless others would never have begun. 

In our time, life is threatened by disease, ignorance, dishonesty, and consumerist disregard for the long-term environmental consequences of our "lifestyles." It's threatened, at bottom, by a failure to see ourselves as individuals inseparable from not only our immediate community but from the larger historical human community. 

“In an incredibly short period of time we have endangered a world that took billions of years to evolve. We are just a tiny link in the great chain of living organisms, so who are we to put it all in jeopardy with our ecological blindness and deadly technologies? Don’t we have an obligation, a responsibility, to our planetary future and the generations of humans and other species to come?” ― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World

Dewey put it this way: 

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” A Common Faith

That notion of community as continuous, prior and larger and posterior to our personal selves, is crucial to good ancestry. Our "heritage of values" is a sacred trust, and potentially our greatest gift to the next generations. If we neglect it, the next generations will curse our dereliction as bad citizens and bad ancestors. If we neglect it too long and too selfishly, the long-term flourishing--if not the very existence--of the next generations will be imperiled. If we treasure it, our lives and theirs may flourish. 

Aristotle had the germ of that notion of community, but it took his followers millennia finally to appreciate our Deweyan responsibility to expand it to include all citizens and all persons. So to be good and virtuous citizens, concerned not only to flourish in our own right but to ensure all others the same opportunity, it's not enough to be good ancestors. We have to be better ones.

"Life is good"

LISTEN. So said the Amazonian Piraha people, according to Daniel Everett, before it became a popular marketing slogan.

Happiness (the class) begins for real today with Daniel Haybron's Very Short Introduction, which includes that epigramatic reference to the Pirahas and then tells us that Socrates - so often exalted as a paradigmatically happy man, right up until the hemlock kicked in, in his 70th year - "didn't miss out on a thing." Well, he missed out on his 71st. Life might have been better, certainly longer.

Was Socrates happier than the average college student? "You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss," with minimal obligations and maximal opportunities to ruminate, socialize, and party, but apparently that would be wrong. How many of them are living the examined life? Ignorance is perhaps not bliss, after all? But what about enlightened Socratic ignorance? Either way, American students are apparently less happy than we thought.

Panama is most blissful, evidently. Or was. More recent results point elsewhere. Denmark? Iceland? (I think I recall Eric Weiner's Geography of Bliss giving them high marks.)

One way to chart our happiness index is to ask what's on your bucket list. Another: what's not on your deathbed list of things you just have to do one more time. Maybe not "another peck at the mobile phone, or one more trip to the mall." Maybe you won't wish you'd bought more crap.

"What sort of life ultimately benefits a person," wondered Aristotle. What, not shopping or iPhoning? How many of us can even imagine how bizarre those activities would seem to an old Greek philosopher?

A young Intro student yesterday told me it was his impression that philosophy was mostly about pondering and pontificating on our feelings. But Haybron quickly withdraws feeling theories from the field, in favor of "life satisfaction." But don't confuse that with "subjective well-being," a catch-all of psychologism he says we must confuse with our real quarry.

Has there really never been a better time to be alive? I wouldn't have said the first decade of this millennium was the best ever, but it depends on the yardstick. Steven Pinker's Better Angels makes the case for our good luck.

Many indigenous peoples say the only thing they envy about the western industrial lifestyle is healthcare (and we know how fraught that is). William James told his friend Schiller to "keep your health, your splendid health - it's worth all the truths in the firmament." Hard not to agree, especially after a bout with serious illness. If you've not experienced that, by the time you reach "a certain age," you're even luckier than most.

Haybron says "we need a theory - a definition - of happiness." Do we? What do you mean, we? We philosophers? We authors? We moderns? We shoppers and social media fanatics? Why can't we be happily undefined and atheoretical? Presumably because the absence of a good theoretical framework leaves us in the wrong "state of mind."

Happiness is a state of mind, for sure, but it's even more a state of experience and expectation. No?

8.31.17

"I'll be hanging in a classroom one day..."

On Opening Day in Happiness class Tuesday I referenced Opening Day in 2019, and Woody Allen's film Manhattan. Here's what I posted the next day, back then. Other side of COVID seems like more than just two years ago, doesn't it?

Originally published Aug. 30, 2019:

LISTEN. A  student introduced himself yesterday, in Philosophy of Happiness, as "the oldest guy in the room." Sometimes, when people say that, they mean they're 3d year students, twenty or so. This guy really was of my generation, even a little older. A "me generation" product of the 1970s, he called himself, before going on to credit Woody Allen with drawing him to philosophy.

I can't count how many times, over the years, I've referenced scenes and lines from Annie Hall, Manhattan, Sleeper, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Midnight in Paris, et al,  to blank stares of non-recognition. Those who've heard of Woody at all know him simply as one more old guy accused of sexual misconduct, with a sordid intra-family twist.

I can't defend Woody's morals, and of the worst accusations fervently hope he's not guilty as charged. I do know that, like our "non-traditional" classmate, Woody's film work was a big positive influence in my life.

The Woody scenes from Manhattan we referenced in class:

An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves cos it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about... the universe. Let's... Well, it has to be optimistic. Well, all right, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile. Like what?

OK... for me... 

Ooh, I would say Groucho Marx, to name one thing. And Willie Mays. And... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And... Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues. Swedish movies, naturally. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra. Those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne. The crabs at Sam Wo's. Tracy's face...

You know, someday we're gonna be like him. And he was probably one of the beautiful people, dancing and playing tennis. And now look. This is what happens to us. You know, it's important to have some kind of personal integrity. I'll be hanging in a classroom one day and I wanna make sure when I thin out that I'm... well thought of...

Plato's Socrates

LISTEN. I was saying in class yesterday that my preferred approach to class prep these days is to rise early and try to come up with something fresh and novel to say about the philosopher(s) du jour.  So, what's new with Socrates and Plato?

Well, according to Xenephon, Plato's Socrates is "pure rationality" whereas the real Socrates was a dispenser of practical "how to live" advice.

Those who know Socrates mainly through the writings of Plato – Xenophon’s near-exact contemporary – will find Xenophon’s Socrates something of a surprise. Plato’s Socrates claims to know nothing, and flamboyantly refutes the knowledge claims of others. In the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, however, Socrates actually answers philosophical questions, dispenses practical life advice, provides arguments proving the existence of benevolent gods, converses as if peer-to-peer with a courtesan, and even proposes a domestic economy scheme whereby indigent female relatives can become productive through the establishment of a textile business at home. Socrates’ conversation, according to Xenophon, ‘was ever of human things’. This engaged, intensely practical, human Socrates can be refreshing to encounter. Anyone who has felt discomfort at how the opponents of Plato’s Socrates suffer relentless public refutations and reductions to absurdity can take some comfort in Xenophon’s Socrates who ‘tries to cure the perplexities of his friends’.

Trying to cure the perplexities of your friends, forever conversing "of human things," and generally just trying to ameliorate the human condition through an antiquarian version of talk therapy sounds exactly like what we should expect of a philosopher who claims to know nothing of things in the heavens and under the ground. 

Humility and humanity go together well. The real mystery is why a Platonically hyper-rationalized Socrates ever had any credibility among scholars at all. We're accustomed to saying that Plato's our only credible source on Socrates, and to dismissing Xenophon without a hearing. Bertrand Russell called him stupid. But we're more likely to inch closer to the historical Socrates by triangulating our vision and consulting other sources. It would be stupid not to.

Happiness

LISTEN. It's the first day of class in the latest iteration of Philosophy of Happiness. 

Last time this course convened was Fall 2019, pre-COVID. Our emphasis that semester was on Stoics and Epicureans, and "graceful life" philosophies generally. Good thing, with lockdown looming unseen just over our horizon we would all soon come to need more stoic perseverance and epicurean delight in the simple/domestic goods of life than we could then have easily imagined.

Before the month was out we'd all been introduced to "the oldest guy in the room," my future collaborator, who for once wasn't me. He declared an appreciation of the ouvre of Woody Allen, which -- in spite of everything -- I continue to share. Isaac in Manhattan makes a list of the things that make life worth living. We could also call it a Happy List. We should all make our lists, and then actively pursue and celebrate their various items.

This semester, we'll look again at stoics and epicureans. I will again profess a preference for the latter, though I find much to admire in the former. We'll also notice the convergence of attitude and approach the stoics share with Buddhists, when we read More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age. But "on the question of speaking" we'll challenge the call for silence. We're here to have a series of conversations, though not on "vulgar topics"...

“On the question of speaking, Stoics and Buddhists are at one. In Epictetus’ words: ‘Be mostly silent, or speak merely when necessary, and in few words. We may enter sparingly into conversation sometimes, when the occasion calls for it; but not about any of the common subjects, such as gladiators, or horse races, or athletic champions, or food, or drink – the vulgar topics of conversation; and especially not about individuals, either to blame, or praise, or make comparisons.”

We're also going to spend time with the great seminal essayist Montaigne, through the instructive mediation of his biographer Sarah Bakewell in How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. He knew a trick or two.

“The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience - but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.”

And, at the enlightened suggestion of my collaborator, we're going to spend more time than has been customary in this course with my favorite philosopher William James. We'll look at John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life, and we'll pair his chapters with essays by his subject. My own interest in happiness as a philosophical subject is coevally rooted with my longstanding fascination with James, who said

"If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure."

He also knew that endurance is often liable to interruption and derailment. But his good news is that the music of life can always recommence, even for "melacholy metaphysicians" like (on occasion) himself.

And, in a moment of transcendently happy defiance of life's inexorable  finitude, he wrote to the pessimistic historian Henry Adams:

Though the ULTIMATE state of the universe may be its extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the PENULTIMATE state might be a happy and virtuous consciousness... In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer."

And then, within just a few weeks, James was gone. But he still inspires many of us to make the most of our penultimate opportunities. One of those is PHIL 3160. See you this afternoon.

Opening Day

LISTEN. Here we go, our first proper Opening Day since January 2020 and first class in an actual classroom in almost eighteen months. 

Not quite proper, since we'll be masked and worried about variant strains. Hope we're not setting ourselves up for another round of lock-down. For today at least, let's assume not. But let's not be reckless.

So the commute is back. Can't say I'm thrilled about that, but the road trip to Alabama to meet my old pals and take in a minor league baseball game Saturday night was a good road test and a nice transition. (A Trash Panda, btw, is an angel-in-training.)

I have two sections of Honors Intro ("CoPhi") today, and another tomorrow. Happiness too. Live and in person. Hope it's like riding a bike (which I'm not yet supposed to do, per surgeons' instructions--that'll make traversing campus expeditiously between consecutive classes a bit of a challenge, but with ambulatory competence now restored by said surgeons I'm ready).

To study philosophy is to learn to die, said Montaigne (following Socrates and the Stoics and others) in one of his gloomier-sounding essays. But of course that's just the flip-side of learning to live. The passing of one of our great musicians, Tom T. Hall, reminds us that the end of a good life is always occasion to celebrate  the privilege and opportunity of living. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born," as Richard Dawkins so aptly said.

I always look for some light way of conveying a serious philosophical point or two on opening day. This time I think I'll bring Data and his daughter into our opening conversation. Philosophy begins in wonder, whether you're a carbon-based biological life form or a reflective positronic AI trying to puzzle out your purpose.

I'll also wonder aloud with them what our purpose is: what's the point of human school?

A smartly written recent essay proclaims that "universities are not for producing better citizens…they are not for producing happier human beings.” But I say we can try. We certainly need better and happier citizens.

Our main mission though, surely, remains the purveying of that old Enlightenment ideal we talked about this summer: Sapere aude, as Kant put it. Learn to think (not just opine, not just feel) for yourself, as I prefer to put it.

The best way to learn that lesson, since thinking for yourself is not the same as thinking by yourself, is through amicable collaboration. CoPhilosophizing is my shorthand for that. And William James's. "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'..."

I think we'll find it much easier to be a collaborative plurality in the classroom than we did in those little Zoom rectangles.

Rationality--the book, the course, the sentiment

 The natural sequel to Enlightenment Now, the course and the book, is Rationality. The book is due next month, the MALA course (I've just been assured) next summer. 

Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help you understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? These are the goals of Rationality, Steven Pinker’s follow-up to Enlightenment Now. In the 21st century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding—and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing? Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are an irrational species — cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and discovered the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains that we think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning our best thinkers have discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book—until now. Rationality also explores its opposite: how the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology by individuals can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Collective rationality depends on norms that are explicitly designed to promote objectivity and truth. Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire, and empower. stevenpinker.com

Mrs. Pinker, aka Rebecca Goldstein, offers a short reading list (including her husband's last book) of the best books on reason and its limitations. Maybe we'll want to look at some Hume, or even George Eliot.

It being my course, of course, we'll also look at "The Sentiment of Rationality."

When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness,—this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it,—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational.

Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up the theoretic way... Wm James, SR (1896)

"Perfect fluency" sets the bar high, I generally settle for modestly confident fallibility when I think my thinking is right. Does rationality in fact come down, moment to moment, to a feeling of present sufficiency? I have a feeling Pinker won't think so. It'll be fun to think about over the next several months, and to talk about with MALA students next summer.

==

Postscript: And the New Yorker article -- "Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational?" The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be...

Enlightenment, now or never

Our summer course meets for the last time tonight. I’ve tried to convey an urgency about this historical moment. The demand for reason and rationality in our affairs, as a last-ditch existential lifeboat, may be not quite so dire as “now or never” implies. But it might be. That’s my last word on this topic, for now: we live on the edge of possibility, our destiny hangs in the balance. We dare not err on the side of less reason and more irrationality. Sapere aude. Please!

I do want to mention a couple of things, in parting. Unfortunately, the big storm the other night knocked out our internet and cable. I’m drafting this on my little Bluetooth mini-keyboard, quite a useful phone accessory but not easy to edit or insert links with. So bear with me, I’ll finish the final edit after the cable guy shows up—probably in the middle of class, that’s the window AT&T offered. And unless I can motivate myself to go into the office, I’ll be zooming with the class this time via phone, from my rustic Little House out back. (“Rustic” may be a questionable euphemism but I’m sticking to it.)

First, I hope we’ve all been impressed by our respective authors (especially Susan Neiman and Steven Pinker) with the importance of persevering through these challenging and in many ways benighted times. A large part of their message, as I receive it, is that the gap between our personal ideals and the less-than-ideal world we find ourselves inhabiting will not be quickly closed. Nevertheless, we must persevere. I like the earthy way Garrison Keillor puts the point, in terms of “equanimity”:

Equanimity is what most Midwesterners feel they’re born with, a stoical composure in the face of rapid change and insult and injury, but it isn’t a feeling nor exactly a virtue so much as a realization that things happen, change occurs, people come and go, and we float along taking it all in but are not shaken. It’s a day-to-day proposition. Some people turn to yoga, some to Buddhism, some find it in morning prayer. My dear wife finds it in her daily walk. Sometimes I find it in writing, although in writing to you about equanimity, I feel anxious that I may be leading you down the wrong path, so I’ll tell you about the man who walked into the bar with his hands full of dog turds and said, “Look what I almost stepped in.” GK

In other words, let us watch our step. But let’s not stop moving forward.

Next I’d like to acknowledge some of what we’re stepping around in our own backyard.

Margaret Renkl: “Tennessee, where I live, just passed a law banning any discussion of race that might cause a student ‘discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress.’”

That’s some deep dog-hockey alright. Besides teaching the truth about our distressing racial history we’re going to have to teach the truth about our distressing, unenlightened lawmakers too.

Finally, we were talking last week about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, and the reason (logic)/feeling (emotion) dynamic their interactions embodied. An enlightened human starship captain of the 24th century is going to have to draw on every dimension and expression of a more progressive humanity.

So, a recent announcement that the Trek universe (as represented by 21st century entertainment streaming services) is about to expand caught my attention. “Anything goes, as long as it can fit into the ‘Star Trek’ ethos of inspiration, optimism and the general idea that humankind is good.” 

Good, but that’s just a bit off. The Trek ethos does not baldly assert an easy optimism about the goodness of future humanity. It simply explores the possibility. As always, it falls not to the next but to the present generation to try and engage, and to make it so.