The illusion that happiness is an illusion
Happiness is so much more than "feeling good" and modern science butchers that, too.
This is a the third piece following two previous articles about immoralism. You can read them here:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.
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Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
The epigraph here describes a well-known thought experiment, popularized by the philosopher Robert Nozick, called the "Experience Machine".
For several years I asked Nozick's question to rooms full of bright young undergrads. Would they consider going in for the Experience Machine if given the chance? I'd get the occasional hand-raise — and I gave points for honesty — but for the most part they mistrusted the whole idea.
It's hard to blame them. What seems at a glance like an obvious "yes" becomes chilling and sinister when you spend a second to think it through.
Nor should you refrain because of the few moments of distress between the moment you've decided and the moment you're plugged. What's a few moments of distress compared to a lifetime of bliss (if that's what you choose), and why feel any distress at all if your decision is the best one?
Like the Lotus Eaters met by wily Odysseus on his extended vacation detour, the Experience Machine creates a "high" so powerful that no mortal will can resist it.
The twist in the tale is that no one experiencing it could so much as want to end it. To call for will-power supposes that one wills it. The robbery of volition is one reason why the scenario intuitively repels us.
Nozick's pointing out a powerful truth about our ideas of pleasure and happiness.
The hedonistic climate of our late-stage Western culture values pleasure above all else. Pleasure just is happiness.
If that were so, the Experience Machine would be a no-brainer. Yet almost everyone recoils from it with a horror that they often find difficult to put into words. These reactions suggest that there are indeed things that matter beyond how things feel from the inside.
I want to pick up from last week's thread on immoralism from a different angle. In part 1, we talked about possibly the oldest argument against morals and how Plato responded to that. In part 2, we covered some modern-day confusions with our ideas of ethics and morals.
This week, we're going to have a look at happiness and how it relates to our sense of meaning and purpose in life.
I want to start with another piece from my new friend the psychologist:
Whatever it is you’re doing, your goal is to be happy. Right?
Wrong. You don’t want to be happy. Nobody wants to be happy. The idea that any of us are pursuing happiness, that it’s our most fundamental goal in life, is bullshit. It’s contradicted by almost everything we do.
Famous Frenchman Blaise Pascal remarked in his Pensees that not even the king, with all his mighty stature and inexhaustible pleasures, can stand to sit alone with himself.
The blissful rest that we say we want leaves us restless for a new adventure, any adventure, as long as it diverts our thoughts from our own wretchedness.
Only after you get to breaking your back digging ditches, hoping to forget yourself, do you remember the sweet rest on the other side of your labors.
You could take it from Pascal's all-too-accurate insight that we don't act for what brings us happiness. We're too busy hating ourselves and running away from it to enjoy anything.
But that doesn't answer the real question. Is the king never happy?
Pascal goes on to tell us that the king can be perfectly satisfied leaving behind real miseries to occupy himself a day of hunting, and perfectly miserable while at home with every pleasure.
If Pascal is on to something, happiness involves more than momentary feeling-good. Happiness is not about being in a state of pleasure, but more to do with what happens on the way there.
There's one reason the Experience Machine rings so hollow. The concept of happiness points to an idea of achievement beyond the bare feelings inside us.
Happiness is a target that we aim for and pursue.
I once dubbed this the Christmas Morning Effect. Kids can spend weeks or months with their hearts set on a Christmas gift. Unwrapping the new toy that morning often enough becomes the anti-climax. By New Year's Day, the object of desire sits forgotten in the closet.
Common sense tells us that we want the object of the chase. Soon as we get it, we lose interest. As interesting and powerful an observation as this is, it's no argument against happiness.
What about the enjoyment of the pursuit? What about a whole lifetime full of fulfilling pursuits?
Our friend tells us that happiness qua pleasure is not our primary motivation. I agree with him, though not because I agree with his larger point. I disagree that happiness is states of pleasure.
To “want” something is to learn how to get it and take it when it’s available. But you don’t learn how to get happiness. You repeatedly do things that make you miserable. Happiness is available for the taking—just savor the moment or appreciate what you have—but you never take it. So in what sense do you really “want” happiness?
I’m going to spare you the boring in-depth technical analysis of desire. Let it suffice that this word “want” comes in many more subtle shades than this blunt palette. Wanting does have a connection to action, but there’s more going on here. That’s for another time.
One risk of writing in the second person is that you fail to convince the reader, should your predictions miss the target.
I have, as a matter of fact, spent a great deal of my life learning how to get to happiness and avoid the misery-causing parts. I haven't succeeded at that, but I don't suspect any mortal human ever can. It involves more than binging Tony Robbins videos, turns out.
Back to the question. For starters, a life of nothing but savoring and appreciating would quickly become a life with nothing else in it. There lies one of the deep-rooted troubles with world-renouncing doctrines like Stoicism. To flourish, a human life needs more than good intentions and inner peace. You sit around and meditate all day, you starve or freeze or get eaten by wolves.
In a roundabout way, that is his point: we don't do these things, we aren't motivated by them, and the idea that we are is a puffed-up lie we tell ourselves to virtue-signal to the audience.
Shoot, I'll give him that one, too. I'm enough of a Nietzsche stan to find this more than believable.
Let me throw a counter-proposal on the table.
You could as well argue that a life aimed at happiness would have to avoid the temptations of pleasure-seeking. A happy life would not be a life full of the most pleasures and enjoyments, but one that balanced them against other motivations.
The keen reader will recall that this argument for the virtue of self-mastery was one of Socrates's replies to the immoralist Callicles (see part 1).
What is happiness then? There's an easy answer and an impossible answer. Let's start with easy.
Aristotle used the word eudaimonia, often translated as "happiness", for the ultimate end of the human life. The translation isn't too helpful since modern readers already assume that happiness means experiencing pleasure.
The more accurate word is "flourishing", which gets closer to the mark. Flourishing is how we talk about a plant in healthy soil with plenty of water and sunlight. A happy human life is much like this, with human-appropriate goods.
If you want to get esoteric, the etymology of the Greek adjective eu- and the noun daimon suggest a translation closer to "good spirit". Make of that what you will.
Aristotle intended a meaning along the lines of "doing well as a human life goes". While that can mean a lot of things, in Aristotle it's best understood as the absence of defects, much as a healthy person is not ill.
There's no single way for a life to be happy, though there are many ways for it to be unhappy. That’s the impossible answer.
We aim for happiness the way an artist aims to create a body of work. Tolkien's known best for the four books he published during his lifetime, whereas pulp writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block have hundreds of novels and short stories to their name. Neither did this better or worse; within the bounds of the goal, the difference is simply different.
Speaking of which:
“But David,” you say, “what if human beings want deeper forms of happiness, like eudaimonia or self-actualization?”
Yea, that’s bullshit again. It’s not like being mad at our loved ones, ignoring good news about humanity’s progress, working ourselves to death, beating ourselves up, spending time with assholes, sleepwalking through life, and never appreciating what we have is all part of our master plan to achieve self-actualization.
When dandelions blossom, a single flower can send hundreds of seeds sailing off into the wind. Nearly all of them will die before germinating. Therefore, dandelions are extinct.
What's that? You say that's a bad comparison?
You're right, it's awful.
The average dandelion seed is dead. Most dandelion seeds never become adult dandelions. Yet there's a new crop of dandelions every single year.
Looks like nature doesn't care about your math.
Those good souls caught in the icy grip of empiricism have a hard time distinguishing between what's observable — which gets you “average” and “most” and other quantities — from what's supposed to happen when things go as they should.
The many wasted dandelion seeds are part of the ordinary course of life for that species. The adult dandelion flower is the outcome of that life-process when it happens as it should.
You don't judge the ideal by the failures. That's why they're failures.
Happiness for us is like the dandelion seeds that win.
Sometimes the way there isn't all sunshine and happy songs. One of the places I’m most fulfilled is under a heavy barbell, which is nobody’s idea of “pleasure”.
I read a lot of biographies. What you notice is that even a happy life is full of struggles, challenges, frustrations, failures, miseries, and even horrible tragedies.
I don’t know that they would trade those messy lives for boring, safe monotony in a corporate cubicle with a home in the suburbs.
Aristotle nailed this (again) when he wrote that a life can only be judged happy after its ending. You have to look over the whole thing from its conclusion backwards, take in its full shape and weight, in order to know if it was satisfying.
Aristotle's take is quite possibly the only serious alternative we have to the stripped-down austerity of the materialist world-picture.
Today's neurotic scientists, meanwhile, try to locate happiness by doing math with the feel-good units. The Experience Machine already shows us why this is a mistake. Happiness is not determined "from the bottom up" by states of pleasure inside us, but "from the top down" by its full contour.
We want sex. We want to be sexy. We want tasty yum yums for our face-holes. We want to establish dominance, or we want to display submission.
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These are the sorts of things we want—the things that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. Not happiness.
If you really wanted to spread your genes, you'd be out there hustling. Instead you do things that repel women, like writing boring Substacks about philosophy. Why aren't you out scoring with babes right now if natural selection is the only game in town?
I don't think you really want to spread your genes.
Alright, alright, I’ll cut the snark:
He's right as far as this goes. We do have powerful biological motivations that push us towards sex, status, food, avoiding pain, and so forth.
If happiness is nothing but occurrent experiences of pleasure, then it's hard to find any higher purpose to it or connect it to those biological drives and behaviors.
The question remains: Is this all there is?
Many people act on these motives most of the time. But observation of the facts doesn't by itself tell us how things go when they go as they should.
A proper materialist is rolling his eyes right now, but I assure you I am rolling mine back with thrice the intensity. Medical science and biology happily speak of proper life-cycles and disorders and dysfunctions. Things go badly in an organism when they deviate from the norm for that kind of organism. Teleology is baked into the pie with living beings.
I'll repeat here the argument I've set out in the past two issues, which I can sum up in a single sentence:
The line between the "is" and the "ought" is fantasy.
What looks like an objective stance towards "just the facts" is already cooking with heavy-duty value-judgments about what is best and worthy (and what is not).
If we all are living under a systematic illusion about our own motivations, then we ought to learn this and change our behaviors accordingly. Your life goes better when you act free of these self-deceptions. And so on.
The ethical and metaphysical angle is unavoidable.
Now, if it's all about reproduction and survival, none of that value-talk makes one difference. As we saw last week, the highest values tell us that there are no values. It makes no difference if you change or don’t.
Here’s a practical consequence.
Being the bigger nerd and accepting your stupid monkey-nature doesn't help you have more kids. Plummeting birth rates in the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations show that, as we get smarter, civilized, and domesticated, we're having less children.
Facing up to the truth looks like a short path to eliminating yourself from the gene pool. Maybe you should rethink this approach.
You may think I'm arguing this as a firm believer in the transcendent values of the Unseen world. Not so. I write this well aware of the ugly, brutish, self-absorbed, deceitful, and generally nasty side of human nature.
There is a reason that my profile picture is Schopenhauer.
I write in defense of meaning and morality because I can't honestly ignore the arguments I've set out here. The materialism I once believed cannot answer these questions to my satisfaction.
There is more going on than particles of matter banging around. We do know and experience more what than The Science shows us. Plato and Aristotle are not wrong because they are out of fashion among the self-appointed smart people.
Nasty brutes we may be, there's immense potential for more within us. We'll never touch it if we insist that we're only a clever species of dumb apes.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
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