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Aristotle, Homer, Martha Nussbaum, Neil Sinhababu, New York City, Pali suttas, Penelope Trunk, Socrates, utilitarianism
Blogger Penelope Trunk describes herself as having Asperger’s Syndrome. Her obsessive Aspergian interest seems to be in the nature of her own life – which makes her a dedicated follower of Socrates’s maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. So while her blog is supposedly about career advice, it often winds up being highly philosophical. Recently, she’s said a fair bit about one of the most enduring philosophical questions: happiness.
Aristotle tells us everyone agrees the purpose of life is eudaimonia. It was once the standard to translate this term as “happiness.” This translation has started to fall out of favour, to be replaced by “flourishing” – and rightly so. For it’s pretty clear that whatever eudaimonia is – and I think Aristotle deliberately makes it hard to pin down – it is not what we usually understand by “happiness.”
Consider: near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of human life; we just don’t agree what constitutes it. But if this eudaimonia were happiness, how would we explain someone like Trunk, who has spent a great deal of time thinking about happiness – only to reject it? “I don’t want to be happy,” she says. “I want idle time to let my mind wander because the unhappy result is so interesting.”
Trunk identifies happiness with contentment, in a move similar to the utilitarians who identified it with pleasure. Now it’s true that many will say pleasure or contentment is not real happiness, that true happiness consists of something larger than that state of mind – but I suspect that they primarily do this because they are wedded to older and mostly extinct uses of “happiness,” ones that survive mostly in translations of Aristotle. Etymologically, “happy” used to mean something like “fortunate” or “blessed.” But outside of a few idioms (“a happy coincidence”), we rarely use the term this way in English anymore. Rather, happiness is about contentment or pleasure, a pleasant, enjoyable, perhaps peaceful state of mind. And for Trunk, that’s not good enough.
Trunk’s rejection of mere happiness is far from a truism. It’s not only the utilitarians (such as Neil Sinhababu) who defend happiness in this sense – a view we could reasonably call hedonism. The ancient Epicureans practised a “sophisticated” hedonism, in which we should find the happiness that comes with freedom from mental disturbance. Such a hedonism is arguably quite Buddhist as well: while the early Buddhist texts are often cagey about what exactly nibbāna implies, what descriptions there are sound a lot like Epicurean ataraxia. Tranquility. Peace. Freedom from disturbance. Above all, an end to suffering. This sounds a lot more like happiness.
But is this really the best goal to pursue? At least, is it the only goal worth pursuing? I am finding myself increasingly persuaded by Trunk’s position. We’ll have plenty of time for freedom from disturbance once we’re dead. Life gives us a shot at something more.
What is that “something more”? Trunk often contrasts the happy life with the interesting life. This point comes out in her posts about New York, which I’ve discussed before: life in rural Wisconsin is happy, but it’s not interesting. Life in New York is interesting, but it isn’t happy. But maybe that’s okay. Martha Nussbaum makes a similar point in “Transcending humanity,” the last chapter of her Love’s Knowledge: when the nymph Calypso offers Odysseus a chance to live with her in immortal bliss, we hope he turns it down, for we would lose the rest of the story. To be sure, a truly interesting life is often something we would only wish on somebody else, especially somebody fictional. One thinks of the apocryphal “Chinese curse”: “May you live in interesting times.” The reason this phrase is popular (and attributed, probably falsely, to the Chinese) is the idea that being interesting may be a curse, even though it’s something we often want. And while it’s true that often, on reflection, things get interesting in a way that on reflection we don’t want, that’s not necessarily the case.
The idea of this “curse” suggests that if we really thought about it, we’d realize that being happy is more important than being interesting. But is that necessarily true? Trunk doesn’t think so, at least for herself. Some of us, at least, would willingly accept a life that’s more exciting in exchange for its being less happy. Imagining myself in my eighties or nineties – knowing my death would come before too long – I would like to be able to look back on a life that’s been full and interesting, not merely happy. (It’s relevant here that for Aristotle, eudaimonia is an activity, as contentment and pleasure are not.)
Beyond Trunk’s post, there’s a point I tried to make to make to Neil Sinhababu: it seems there must be something good about truth in its own right; it’s basically self-contradictory to think otherwise. What follows from the goodness of truth, again, is harder to establish, but it’s another aim that seems like, in some cases at least, it’s worth pursuing at the expense of happiness.
The tougher question is what we do to decide or arbitrate among these competing ends: truth, interest, happiness. I suspect the question can’t really be decided in the general case; one must learn what’s more important in particular cases, and learn that through experience as one learns any other skills. I think this is a very Aristotelian answer, and it’s one reason I begin to see the vagueness in Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia as an asset rather than a flaw.
Welcome back in the blogsphere, Amod!
I’m sorry to re-start my commentator history with a stupid question, but why don’t you take into account the Stoical concept of happiness as the satisfaction produced by the accomplishment of one’s duty? That would not contradict the idea of having an interesting life. On the contrary, responding to the challenges of such a life would result in one’s being satisfied with oneself and/or happy.
Hi Elisa – I believe Stoic “happiness” is eudaimonia, just as it is in Aristotle, and I suspect “happiness” works even less well as a translation of eudaimonia in their case than in his. Stoic eudaimonia seems to be reducible to virtue, not to the sort of pleasant mental state that is implied by the contemporary English “happiness.”
(I am not an expert in Stoic text, but I would rather point to eupatheia as a result of being apathos, free from [negative] passions).
I agree with you, the stoic happiness is not “pleasure” insofar as its being agreeable is only a by-product of its consisting of virtue.
I was just trying to suggest that it ought not be the case that happiness is irrelevant. If you only want to address a sub-set of happiness, why not asking whether “pleasure is the purpose of life?”
Well, my understanding of the Stoics’ eudaimonia is that it really isn’t the satisfaction produced by virtue – that’s more like what the Epicureans believe. Rather, for the Stoics, eudaimonia is the virtuous life itself. And again, if one were to use the English term “happiness” to mean “a state characterized by virtue,” that would be a strange sense of the word indeed, one that would never be used outside of translations from the Greeks. “Happiness” as such, if it is to connect to contemporary usage at all, must be some sort of pleasant mental state: pleasure, contentment, satisfaction (though probably in a much longer-term sense than what “pleasure” alone connotes).
Welcome back, Amod! I don’t know where you find these great websites — but I enjoyed reading Ms. Trunk’s post. I think her farmer boyfriend has his hands full.
Like you, I am sympathetic to Ms. Trunk’s pursuit of truth over happiness. However, it is easier to have this view in theory than in practice. I expect it would be difficult if you were involved in a car accident that rendered you paralyzed to have the equanimity to view your situation as “interesting”. I think Ms. Trunk is addressing a more superficial inclination toward finding happiness in theistic religions. I also don’t view theistic religions that have a genuine path quality as being necessarily comfortable or easy — but the Jehovah’s witnesses may not fall in that category.
It is quite a distortion to argue that Buddhist concept of nirvana is hedonism (appreciating that you aren’t necessarily arguing that). A more accurate view might be nirvana as freedom or liberation (from habits and attachments — particularly habits of passion, aggression and ignorance). In that way, the Buddhist approach may be quite close to what is discussed here as the Stoic view — although I don’t know much about that.
Well, I think there is at least a hedonistic component to nirvana – negative hedonism, one might call it. The Four Noble Truths strongly imply that nirvana is the absence of duḥkha, which implies some sort of unpleasant, unhappy state of mind (though it can have multiple causes and sources, from the gross to the subtle).
I don’t think Penelope Trunk’s position is primarily about theistic religions – even though one of the first things one may notice about evangelical Christians is how happy they are. She’s written a fair bit about the psychological research on happiness and how to achieve it, with little mention of theism.
Pleasure can be an obstacle on the Buddhist path. Attachment to pleasurable mental states is generally thought to be a more subtle and difficult problem than overcoming aversion to suffering. In both cases, the attachment is the problem — not the experience.
Since hedonism has the affirmative goal of maximizing pleasure, it doesn’t accurately refect the Buddhist view.
Something closer to the Buddhist view would be that intrinsic nature is free of suffering — suffering is created by attachment, aversion and ignorance. This is reflected in that the third noble truth (cessation of suffering) comes before the fourth noble truth (the eightfold path). So cessation of suffering is more of a by-product of the search for truth (understanding the cause of suffering) than a goal in itself. And the Buddhist path is more an effort to see clearly than to create a particular state of mind.
“can” does not imply “is”. So, just because pleasure can be an obstacle does not imply that it is.
It is a mistake to cling to the third “noble” falsehood. Some forms of suffering cannot cease. The Buddha himself is a good example.
If suffering has causes, and obviously it does, this does not imply or support the claim that all suffering can be overcome since some causes of suffering may be beyond our control. So, the second common truth does not support the third “noble” falsehood.
I agree — “can” does not imply “is”.
Your view is one that Thill expressed in an earlier thread. The Buddhist concept of dukkha is sense of internal dissatisfaction, unease, or existential anxiety. It is not having a toothache. Dukkha is the experience that an investment banker has when he buys his third house in Vail, but has a lingering sense that he still hasn’t “made it” and a worry that his trophy wife may leave him. Or it could be the experience on your deathbed of fear and the sense that you have wasted your life. Those are just examples.
But I think that you aren’t really interested in discussing the topic — because you have already made up your mind.
No, Jim, trust me. I am interested in pursuing the discussion albeit by way of an attempted negation of your assumptions.
Have you considered why “sense of internal dissatisfaction, unease, or existential anxiety” all take flight in the face of a toothache? Test this for yourself by postponing a visit to the dentist if you have a cavity! LOL
No, Jim, trust me. I am interested in pursuing the discussion albeit by way of an attempted negation of your assumptions.
Have you considered why “sense of internal dissatisfaction, unease, or existential anxiety” all take flight in the face of a toothache? Test this for yourself by postponing a visit to the dentist if you have a cavity! LOL
Could “Dukkha” also take the form of realizing that one has not attained “enlightenment”? Could the desire for enlightenment engender its own form of “Dukkha”? Could the attempt to follow the eightfold path bring about certain forms of “Dukkha”?
If the answer is affirmative, and I think that would be plausible, then Buddhism cannot, and, therefore, has not, solved the “problem of Dukkha”.
Well, Nietzsche got it right when he made these remarks alluding to the Buddha and the first “noble truth”
in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (in “Of the Preachers of Death”):
“There are the consumptives of the soul….
They encounter an invalid or an old man or a corpse, and straightaway they say “Life is refuted!”
But only they are refuted, they and their eye that sees only one aspect of existence.”
I say “negative hedonism” because Buddhism is clearly not about maximizing pleasure as such; but it is, to a significant extent at least, about minimizing something which seems nearly opposite to pleasure, dukkha. The problem with pleasurable mental states – at least, pre-nirvana pleasurable mental states – is that they end and therefore turn out to be unsatisfactory (thus even sukha is dukkha.) The goal is still a state free of suffering and dissatisfaction. To call that “hedonism” full stop is certainly misleading, but there are important affinities.
I don’t think the placing of the noble truths indicates that freedom from suffering is a mere byproduct of the path. Rather, it’s that the first three truths are the reason and the motivation to get on the path in the first place. No point in talking about the path itself to one who doesn’t understand its purpose.
I’ll just also note a twitch I get when someone mentions “intrinsic nature” in the context of Buddhism – there are a few later traditions that start to emphasize this, especially in East Asia, but it certainly wasn’t part of the Buddha’s teaching. Every early record we have of the Buddha’s teaching agrees he emphatically denied there was any such thing.
“Hedonism” still doesn’t seem right to me in connection with Buddhism — but the thoughtful way you qualify the concept is helpful in understanding your view.
Intrinsic nature or buddha nature is a difficult subject — and one that I am not very well qualified to speak to. So, your twitch is probably a good instinct.
The concepts of buddhanature and bodhicitta are stressed more in the Mahayana, as you know. I am not sure that in a culture passed down through practice lineages and realization rather than texts, that the scholarly approach of dating teachings is the route to authenticity. Certainly, texts such as Maitraya’s Uttaratantra Shastra provide scholars with material to work with.
Good to see you back online, Amod. This is just a side observation, and hardly gets to the depths of your post (or Trunk’s), but thinking of the happy/interesting pair, I am reminded of Alphonso Lingis’ reversal of Socrates: The unlived life is not worth examining. It’s a little bit on the clever side perhaps (as well as –I think– risking being a little too much of our current zeitgeist), but just like Socrates’ own maxim (if maxim it was, for him), it points to an important truth.
It also occurs to me that there is another Greek word besides eudaimonia that often translates to “happiness”, to wit, makarios — but the more traditional translation of this is “blessed.” (A not unproblematic term in itself!)
Last– the fact that there is “more” to life than happiness is, I think, indicated in the fact that we have a moral intuition which recoils from the notion of being kept ignorantly happy (say, in the Matrix). I’m not claiming that this intuition justifies itself, but surely it points to a genuine moral question.
That was Alphonso Lingis, was it? Damn – I used to say that when I was a teenager, and I was hoping I had made it up. :) Not sure how much it bears on the present topic, but it’s vital for a lot of others. I mean, surely that’s Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel in a nutshell – and probably the most significant criticism of Hegel one can make.
Re the latter “intuition”: yes, this is also important. I think of Korsgaard’s work (which I spoke of previously on the “myth of egoism,” deconstructing the idea that there is something more natural about privileging self than others. I think it would apply equally to a “myth of hedonism”: we start with all sorts of motivations other than happiness per se, and there isn’t really a reason to automatically privilege it.
Amod, you have done it again! A post which does not leave us nonplussed but stimulates thought!
Trunk’s false opposition between happiness and the interesting stems from her narrow view of happiness: happiness is contentment, akin probably to the state of a grazing cow or sheep!
I can understand how such a view of happiness could arise in a culture in which there is rampant recourse to tranquilizers or sedatives to deal with anxiety! Tranquilizers or sedatives do produce a temporary state of quiescence, freedom from disturbance, or….happiness!
Happiness is contentment. Contentment is a passive state. Engagement with the interesting, by contrast, calls for a dynamic condition. Hence, contentment excludes engagement with the interesting. Therefore, happiness excludes engagement with the interesting.
But if we reject the first premise and view happiness in light of one of its literally radiant features, viz., joy or delight (captured I think by the Sanskrit term “Ananda”), then there is no opposition between happiness and engagement with the interesting. this gay form of happiness characterized by an overflow of joy or delight, of Ananda, can thrive on engagement with the challenging, the arduous, the interesting.
I think that just before he died Wittgenstein had a “moment” of this form of Ananda or happiness which can arise at the end of an arduous process of engagement with difficulties and challenges and transfigure in its light all the sufferings which were but its own birth pangs.
As Norman Malcolm recalled and commented in his Memoir of Wittgenstein:
“Before losing consciousness he said to Mrs. Bevan “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life!”. By “them” he undoubtedly meant his close friends. When I think of his profound pessimism, the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in which he drove his intellect, his need for love together with the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet, at the end he himself exclaimed that it had been “wonderful”! To me, this seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance.”
Perhaps, Nietzsche, who had a profound insight into how some forms of voluntary sufferings or ordeals are but birth pangs of a higher form of happiness or joy, would have found W’s last words neither mysterious nor strange.
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