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autobiography, Baruch Spinoza, Canada, Gretchen Rubin, Henry James, Martha Nussbaum, music, Plato, sports
In Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project – an attempt to learn as many ideas about happiness as possible and try them all out to see what worked – she found that the first commandment of happiness was to “Be Gretchen.” That is, even (or especially) while striving for constant self-improvement, she needed to accept her own tastes, recognize what genuinely gave her pleasure and what didn’t, rather than what she wished would give her pleasure. For example, she needed to realize that the pleasures of good food and music mostly did nothing for her, but she adored children’s literature of all kinds.
The example intrigues me because I’m the exact opposite. I’m in love with spicy international foods of all kinds, one of the most delightful and satisfying pleasures in my life (and one of the biggest reasons why I love being in New York). And music brings me a deep satisfaction – my worst days have often been brightened, even amid the traffic snarls of the Southeast Expressway, by hearing a beloved song. Children’s literature, on the other hand, does little for me – and so, I have to admit, do novels more generally. I have enjoyed a good number of novels in my day, but I don’t go out of my way for them.
The point is one I’ve had to think about whenever I read Martha Nussbaum’s work on philosophical form (in what probably remains her best known work, the first chapter of Love’s Knowledge.) Nussbaum’s argument, broadly speaking, is that literary form and style make implicit claims about what is important, in ways that can undercut themselves if we’re not careful. So Spinoza’s abstract, dispassionate universalistic rationalism, for example, is very well expressed in the geometric theorems of his Ethics. But the kind of philosophy that Nussbaum herself advocates – prioritizing particular human individuals, valuing strong emotions – is best expressed in literary forms that tell the stories of particular individuals and evoke emotions, and above all in novels. This claim made it more difficult for me to get deep into Nussbaum’s thought.
I’ve tried to engage with Nussbaum’s philosophy at some length, as in my dissertation. While reading up on her ideas I tried to read a novel she takes as exemplary, one she quotes and analyzes at length: Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. I clearly did not experience this novel the way Nussbaum did; the first phrase that came to my mind to describe the experience of reading it was “Chinese water torture.” James’s plodding Germanic sentences, combined with the novel’s slow pacing and relative lack of major events, made it an ordeal. A minor ordeal, to be sure – nothing like breaking a bone or losing a job – but not even remotely a pleasurable experience. Even philosophically, I got more out of Nussbaum’s commentary on James than I did out of James himself.
I’ve been thinking about related points in the past couple of weeks, during which I have been obsessed by the recent Canadian election and the resulting transformations in the country’s political landscape. I have several times expressed my suspicion of politics and how political concern can mess up a human life. And yet I love following politics – not even the ideas so much as the “horse race.” Since my teens I have been a “political junkie,” fascinated by seat counts and electoral systems. Am I then unhealthy?
The point here isn’t to go on about my personal likes and dislikes. Rather, it’s to raise a related question about the “Be Gretchen” idea itself. Suppose Nussbaum is right that one learns best about true philosophy from novels, but Rubin is also right that one is happiest when staying true to one’s own desires, loves, preferences. What then should someone do in my position of not particularly liking novels? Or, suppose Plato is right that the greatest of the arts is music – where does that leave Gretchen Rubin, when she doesn’t particularly care for it?
As with most philosophical questions, there probably isn’t a single, easily stated answer to be found here. This too strikes me as a matter of finding the virtuous mean between two vices – akin to the “meta-virtue” I previously discussed with respect to pessimism. To stay entirely in one’s comfort zone and never let one’s choice of pleasures be guided by those whose judgement one respects – this is a vice. It’s a sure way to remain mired in the situation described by Lorraine Besser-Jones in which virtue does not become pleasurable and pleasure does not become virtuous. At the same time, to ignore one’s own preferences and passions in the hopes of reaching an unrealistic ideal of what one should like – this too is a vice, one that sacrifices one’s happiness and likely one’s virtue as well. How does one negotiate the middle ground?
That question may need to be answered on a case-by-case basis. In each case, if one believes one should like something one doesn’t currently like, one might examine the reasons for liking that thing and see if there is an appropriate substitute. For example, Nussbaum recommends reading novels because they tell the stories of particular people, in such a way that the details of those people’s lives matter to us, and matter emotionally. But it is not only novels where one gets this exploration of character; one can find it in any medium that tells people’s stories at length and in depth. I have learned a lot about the subtleties of human personality in media as diverse as the Fox TV show King of the Hill and the teen webcomic Penny and Aggie – both of which derive their humour from richly drawn characters, people who feel real.
As for politics, I recently noted a solution that has worked for me: view it as a spectator sport, as a Sox fan does the World Series. Enjoy the excitement, but don’t get too wrapped up in the outcome. And yet that too has its pitfalls. In Canada, despite the ascendance of the Conservatives I oppose, I was elated to see the rise of the socialist NDP as the opposition, at the expense of the centrist Liberals and the separatist Bloc Québécois. In recent weeks on Facebook I was trash-talking the latter two, just as a fan of the Sox might against the Yankees – even after the election was over. An old friend implied that this might be hurtful to hear for those who now have to live under a Conservative majority government. When your health care is on the line, politics remains more than a spectator sport. Here as elsewhere, there are no easy answers.
Hi Amod,
I appreciate your point about distinguishing the content from its form. The virtual point of novels is the particular against the general, the temporal against the horizontal (i.e., systematic) dimension of philosophy. They can be achieved through every medium focusing on the temporal and particular dimensions, such as TV series, songs, poems, possibly many paintings, etc.
And a more general point could be: if you don’t *enjoy* reading novels (or the like) and are much more akin to generalisation and systematic and abstract thinking, it is ethically valuable to try to become aware of this tendency, so that you can be alert that your results might tend to be over-generalising and neglect individual sufferings (see Rorty’s stress on Lolita’s suffering, ignored by Humbert).
Good point, Elisa. I freely admit to enjoying universals far more than particulars, and I know that that can be harmful if kept unchecked. That’s one of the reasons I do think it’s worth taking the time for stories of individual people.
Amod:
The Golden Bowl was a difficult one to start with, even for the hardened James reader. He actually dictated that one which is a feat when you consider the parenthesis laden sentences. ‘Being Gretchen’ can be like ‘Being There’ the movie with Peter Sellars, complacent ignorance masquerading as wisdom. Obviously you wish to avail of the resources which are part of our culture but the deep end is not the place to learn to swim. If you like other worlds, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is excellent, so is 1984 by Orwell and A Brave New World by Huxley. The last mentioned is uncanny in its prescience.
Why not be ‘Mr.Polly’ instead for a season? (From H.G. Wells’ novel ‘Mr.Polly)
Michael, don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy some novels, and have a particular soft spot for dystopian futures – I have read all the three you mention. On the other hand, I don’t think they do much to serve the purpose that Nussbaum treats novels as having: learning about particular characters as people, the ins and outs of the details of a human life. That sort of science fiction tends to be drawn in very large strokes. Winston Smith is an Everyman, O’Brien and the Savage are more ideas than complex personalities.
Amod:
Three out of three, I have, it seems, a good sense of what you might like. Have you ever read ‘Of Human Bondage’ by Somerset Maugham? Well written and not overly literary in style, a best seller with heart. For the next time you are scrabbling in the book barrows.
Being comfortable with who you are is the key to happiness. At least the reverse is plainly true: you cannot be happy and down on yourself at the same time. Philosophy is a not a key to happiness but is rather a distraction, and a stressful one at that. That’s not to say philosophy isn’t pleasurable–it is–but it doesn’t make for happiness. That’s even more true of politics, which could be a textbook case of how clnging, greed, and aversion engender suffering. (I’m a hopeless politics junkie; the Bush years were agony). Novels and philosophy are an interesting pair. I believe Rorty also endorsed reading novels. But should you read them if you don’t enjoy them? Probably not. If you do not experience an enjoyable empathy with the characters or take pleasure in the author’s style then I don’t see how reading novels is likely to be a vehicle for insight — no pleasure, no gain. Surely it isn’t the act of reading novels per se that broadens the mind, but some imaginative leap that happens in the mind of the reader. You might try David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing….” It is a (purportedly) nonfiction essay that functions like a short story. And it’s funny. Or you might take a look at Teju Cole’s Open City, which isn’t about anything in particular except what it feels like to live in current New York. You might give Jane Austen a try. She’s a far cry from the impression you get if you know her only through Masterpiece Theatre and the like. But looking to a novel for events is bound to be disappointing because events are not what they are about.
I found Ms. Rubin’s blog and approach very superficial — all about her likes and dislikes. It is a very conventional approach to finding happiness — understanding your likes and dislikes and then trying to arrange the world to increase the quantity of what you like and decrease the quantity of what you don’t like. But I haven’t read her book and maybe she is more thoughtful there.
I would agree that knowing and being comfortable with yourself is the key to wisdom (and maybe happiness, too). But there are levels of introspection and Ms. Rubin doesn’t go very deep.
Here is a quote from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi from Zen mind, beginner’s Mind that goes deeper:
“Zazen practice is the practice in which we resume our pure way of life, beyond any gaining idea, and beyond any profit. By practice we just keep our original nature as it is. There is no need to intellectualize about what our pure original nature is, because it is beyond our intellectual understanding. And there is no need to appreciate it, because it is beyond our appreciation. So just to sit, without any idea of gain, and with the purest intention, to remain quiet as our original nature — this is our practice . . . ”
I think that Ms. Rubin in a sense is aligned with this approach when she rejects ideas about what she feels she should be in favor of what she is. She just doesn’t go very deep.
Elisa, I agree that for philosphers the point of novels is the particular against the general, but disagree that any fictional medium will serve. Nothing brings us so deeply inside other people as the novel, Shakespeare and Wagner excepted.
Rorty makes the case for the novel here:
http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2011/04/novel-by-richard-rorty.html
Thanks, Jon. I’d say I’m more on Elisa’s side than Rorty’s here, and not just because of my personal preferences. I notice that in Rorty’s piece he doesn’t give much of an argument for the claim that “the novel is the genre which gives us most help in grasping the variety of human life and the contingency of our own moral vocabulary.” He explains what novels can do in the ensuing paragraphs, but he doesn’t tell us why they teach us more than some of the other genres he lists. He tells us how novels give us a glimpse into people who seem strange and possibly repellent – but why would we not get that glimpse as much from the Iliad or the Rāmāyana? In the latter case, the animator Nina Paley originally found Sītā a repellent character, but eventually learned so much from her example that she made a movie about it.
So similarly for my example of the TV show King of the Hill, whose strength is its sustained and detailed character development. It tells the story of a conservative, relatively uneducated Texan redneck – not the kind of person I’m generally inclined to sympathize with – and shows, with wit and humour, what a good man he actually is. The multi-season run of a TV show allows the character to be expressed more than the confines of a single novel.
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Amod, hello.
There are two things I’d like to address. First, a usian novelist named Gilbert Sorrentino, speaking about fiction, said that form _is_ content. When he chose to write _Gold Fools_ only in the interrogative, that form was as much the content as what the ‘characters’ did. In a similar way, the earlier _A Frolic of His Own_ by William Gaddis, which incorporates narrative passages, court transcripts, the rhythm of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” in a description of fish in a tank, etc., also does this.
Second, my own novel, _Verbatim: A Novel_, a parliamentary satire that came out in canada in October 2010, is as much concerned with the question of governance as it is with form. The setting is a fictional canadian legislature in the 1990s, and the material is conveyed in lists of members of the fictional political parties, letters between bureaucrats, and political debates on an assortment of topics set out in dual-column format, which is what Hansard (the real-life record of what is said in legislatures in the Commonwealth) looks like. There’s no narrator, no partisan hand to guide one along, very little plot, and no interior description of characters. A reader is given enough to make sense of the action while learning how politicians can behave on the floor of a legislature, and how they pass bills; observe what topics are picked up and dropped; and so on.
The book is about how we’ve chosen to govern ourselves, yet takes no political side. A reader might find one party or another perfectly agreeable, and also be amused while being educated. My book is more about a system than about characters, but of course, the politicians are distinct by what they say. No different from any other novel, in that way, but in this case what they say is all you have to go by. Reactions tell me that people do make judgements and say things about the politicians that are very individual. It might be a book that would interest you, but hopefully Verbatim: A Novel would entertain you more than a real Hansard would. (Or the Congressional Record.)
Just a few thoughts, for what they’re worth.
regards,
Jeff Bursey
Thank you, Jeff, and welcome. I might want to push you a bit further on the extent to which form is content. When Nussbaum speaks of content, she’s thinking about the ideas being conveyed, whether by the form or otherwise; so the form of a novel conveys the importance of particular people and of emotion. Are there ideas that you think are conveyed by Gold Fools, A Frolic Of His Own or Verbatim?
Amod, hello again. This may be a longer answer than you expected, so apologies.
I think the form of a novel, in the case of writers who really care about form, is integral and conveys, as much as a character or metaphor or foreshadowing, what the book is.
In _A Frolic of His Own_, the first line speaks of the difference between justice and the law (it goes something like: Justice? In this world you have the law). The rest of the book features multiple law suits, at times simply described, at times devised, at times summed up by a judge’s opinion, and at times seen in action through transcripts of testimony. Everything in the book speaks to the law and, by implication as well as through very apparent utterances, how it establishes what we can do and are not permitted to do. (Gaddis’ novel also incorporates a play one of the characters has written.) The book’s multiple perspectives and techniques come together in the theme (justice versus the law, language and its use and meanings, taking in what a person is [legally and metaphysically], and so on). Gaddis could not have gotten his points across as originally (but this book isn’t a novelty) without throwing away, in a sense, conventional ideas of what a book looks like. The material he dealt with needed to be approached with greater imaginative powers, if you will, that bring everything in together, expressing ideas, displaying characters, and describing scenery.
In _Verbatim: A Novel_ I show, through letters and debates, what the politicians of the fictional legislature say and do, not what they think to themselves. To achieve this I wanted to use the public record, Hansard, and cast most of the book in that format. Hansard records what was said and publishes it, in print and online (the online version may have a different layout, but matches the print version in content), but the Hansard is not verbatim. If a member says “I, I, I, I, I, I think so,” it becomes: “I think so.” The words and ideas are mediated by Hansard editorial processes (sanctioned by Speakers federally and provincially, I should say) with the purpose of getting out the clearest expression possible of ideas. In my book unedited transcripts are also used, to show the disparity between what was said and what appears in the final version; or, what a person is really saying and what he or she is said to have said. The edited and unedited transcripts convey how people speak, what happens to their speech, and how an utterance can change, if only slightly.
Yet a reader has only the words on the page to judge the person speaking, and the person speaking may or may not be as articulate as first supposed, when the original is compared to the edited version. Some critics have considered the novel to be about language, and some about the political process in canada, but generally, they’ve all observed that the form is inextricably bound up with the idea ‘behind’ the book: an examination of the parliamentary system and the actions of those we select to sit in a legislature.
Short of you reading these books (and _Gold Fools_) for yourself, I think that’s the shortest answer I can give, which is not short enough, I know, and may not be proof enough. Reading Gaddis and Sorrentino should be fun; they’re not ponderous in any way. For my own book, well, I’m not the best one to say.
Thanks for your question. I hope this answers it in some way.
Jeff