Rational Philosophy

I’m not happy today. I don’t know why. But perhaps this is a good place to begin in thinking about the philosophy of happiness. I was going to write about the philosophy of depression, but that seemed too, well, depressing.

Arthur Schopenhauer (by all accounts, generally not a happy man) had this to say on the subject: “Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.” Goethe expresses a similar idea, but more gently: “Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.”

Happiness of course is a mental construct or concept that we use to describe a set of complex feelings, and this concept forms part of a spectrum that spans all degrees of happiness and unhappiness. As Carl Yung put it: “The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

John Belushi said more or less the same thing as Jung — “I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time” — but he pushes back toward the pertinent question of happiness as something that may have a purpose.

The study of happiness has received a lot of attention recently. But, as with most matters of psychological interest, those doing the questioning tend to be psychologists. One such study from a few years ago brings focus to the eternally false expectation that things will make us happy; returning to Goethe, we like to chase the ball of happiness, but when we catch up to it, we kick it off again. 

(I had a striking example of this in my personal life just last week. When we were expecting our first child three years ago, my wife and I discovered that we both carry a gene mutation for cystic fibrosis. When we became pregnant again over the summer, we therefore knew that there was a one in four chance that the baby would have cystic fibrosis. The worry about this consumed us. Yet last week when the tests showed that the baby would be fine, the all-pervasive happiness of the relief was quite short-lived. Here I am again, already depressed about something else.)

The problem with the study of happiness from a psychological perspective is that it tends to reveal more about the symptoms of happiness than it does about the purpose of happiness. To understand that purpose, we need to consider the concept from first principles.

Back to Schopenhauer. His definition of happiness as freedom from pain is compelling, because it is neat. “[Pain] is the positive element of life,” he says. A thought we can happily unpack to mean that pain compells us to do things that help us survive.

This is certainly part of the puzzle. We evolved pain receptors to help us refrain from doing things that would damage the living organism. And psychological (emotional) pain is simply an extension of the same phenomenon. To the extent that we can anticipate painful situations we tend to try to avoid them.

But it is surely not the whole answer. What Schopenhauer sought to exises from our analysis by referring all of happiness back to pain, was the potential for a positive purpose for happiness.

Camus evoked the concept of harmony to describe happiness: “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

As life evolved, the more successful organisms would have been those that were able to effectively balance the functions within the living organism itself and between the organism and the outside world. Every evolutionary step or change succeeds or fails according to whether it brings about a more advantageous balance for the organism. This tendency toward balance reveals itself in all kinds of ways — the physical form of the organism (the giraffe’s long neck balanced with the height from the ground of its food), and the internal functioning of the organism (the short life span of the fruit fly, for instance, which allows it to mutate and adapt rapidly).

In human beings, the mental function takes this process of tending toward balance to a new place. Our mental functions, our processing of impulses and conscious decision making, tends to improve our ability to survive if it helps us to achieve balance. Happiness, however fleeting, is the evolutionary reward for achieving harmony and balance — a good meal, a pleasant experience, making love — all of these things produce the chemical reponse that we call happiness so that we will tend to want to do them again. Happiness is evolution’s form of positive feedback.

Why then have so many great minds decided that happiness is merely pain waiting to happen? Bertrand Russell perhaps can shed some light on this: “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

 

 

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