The pursuit of Happiness and the Well-Demoned Life.

~by David Aiken~

We live in a time subjugated by ‘Hallmark Cards’ pseudo- or pop-philosophy, and wir Philosophen, as Nietzsche would have said, “we philosophers,” should definitely be engaged in the quest of examining, eternally and recurrently, the various aspects of this our present maudlin Zeitgeist. The Days of our Lives are being interpreted for us through a lens of sugarcoated fancies. And through our rose-tinted sentimentalist glasses we perceive a world-of-men thoroughly, but implausibly, saturated with saccharine notions of joy & happiness, love & marriage, and ever ready to hum along with the nanny, “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens…”

            Then, when we finally stride across the threshold of simple-minded belief to enter into the torrential onslaught of Real-Life, we seem startled to find ourselves roaming around the quagmires of an intellectual Wasteland. And slowly, ever-so-painfully-slowly, we realize that we are also troubled by another disturbing ditty that has begun haunting our footsteps, and which sounds strangely familiar, like something Bilbo Baggins might have softly hummed upon leaving his beloved Shire:

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

Now it may well be that Life is like a box of chocolates, as Mrs. Gump one day informed her naïve young son, Forrest; one could just never know what one was going to get. But surely Life seems much more like an exchange with a Cheshire Cat—ONE DAY Alice finds herself wandering around on an Adventure in Wonderland, and so many people seem to her a bit daft… but then she meets a puss from Cheshire that, maybe by way of wanting to comfort her, explains that in fact everyone is mad, to which Alice responds:

But I don't want to go among mad people"(...)
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

The conversation goes downhill from there, of course, when, as Alice politely asks for directions: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" the Cat laconically responds:

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to" (…).
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Which brings us right the way ‘round to our meander in the intellectual Wastelands of the world-of-men, and to our question about whether Happiness is really the syrupy kind of subjective past-time suggested by the countless voices of our Zeitgeist. Is Happiness a value or a virtue? Is it a goal to be pursued? Is it even desirable to be happy? Opinions abound.

            But just to problematize the question un tantinet reductively, let us consider whether Hitler, Time Magazine’s 1939 Man of the Year, was a happy camper as he was planning and then setting into motion the new Reich’s takeover of the knowable universe. Now just the idea of a Happy Hitler is generally enough to induce a pukefest in the normal John Q. Citizen of the democratic variety. Yet the answer to our question is undoubtedly “yes,” upon appropriate study and reflection, even though most of us prefer to believe that Hitler was one sick f&%# and that he definitely could not have been happy—not really!

So, just intuitively and just maybe it might perhaps begin to dawn on us that Happiness, which at first blush might be thought to be a value in and of itself, probably is not; and that we should take the time to rethink its position on our virtue/value list!

The point to our little excursion into our crazed social imagination is to suggest that, despite its quasi-unassailable status as an Iconic Idea in the popular view, Happiness per se has no universal definition or value upon which we all might conveniently agree. It is both obvious and inescapable that one man’s happiness can easily be another man’s misery. Indeed, this is precisely the philosophical rub.

The text that serves as the primary springboard for our reflection is from the second section of the Declaration of Independence (adopted July 4, 1776), in which Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) posits the following: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

First, though, is it even possible for us Moderns to reconstruct with any precision what the early American philosophe was thinking when he penned the Declarative and Independently minded expression, ‘the pursuit of Happiness’? Well, in addition to the infinite number and variety of pop-philosophical cultural opinions on the question of Happiness, there are also at least three reasoned schools of scholarly opinion on the question of what ideas were informing the 3^rd U.S. President as he penned these famous and, for us Moderns, famously woolly words. As always, though, scholarly debate is worth just about what you would pay to go hear it, and there is a voice for every viewpoint—the good, the bad, and the lame.

One good opinion, which I happen to favor personally, concerns Jefferson, the philosopher of Epicurean or Stoic thought. Stoicism teaches that personal happiness is integrally allied to self-control or self-governance (cf. Jefferson, vol. XV, 219ff. of the 1903 Library Edition). Jefferson writes in especially enthusiastic terms of Stoic Thinking as it was handed down in the writings of Epictetus, and even considered doing a new translation, “for [Epictetus] has never been tolerably translated into English.” A point on which he and I are in copious agreement.

On Epicurus and Stoic moral thinking, Jefferson sets forth the following formulaic definitions (XV, 223ff): Happiness = the aim of life; Virtue = the foundation of happiness; Utility = the test of virtue; Pleasure = active and Indolent; and Indolence = the absence of pain. By Indolence, it is clear from the context that Jefferson is referring both to the idea of body indolence, from the Latin indolentia, which is to be free from bodily pain, as well as to the Stoic notion of ataraxia, or the tranquility of mind that characterizes someone who is free from worry and distress.

The influence of Stoic philosophy was widespread among early American philosophes, and clearly also informed the thinking of the roughly contemporary American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), which is evident in his famous essay, Self Reliance. This well-documented and pervasive Stoic connection, of course, would seem strongly to suggest that Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness” should best be construed as a personal philosophical attitude of Independence of Mind toward the world-of-men.

Very predictably, however, there is also a second scholarly school of thought on this question—that it is rather the English Enlightenment philosopher and empiricist, John Locke (1632-1704), who informs both Emerson’s as well as Jefferson’s thinking, and that Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness” is best understood in terms of Enlightenment empiricism imported from England. This is a plausible consideration, and is indeed representative of the mainstream scholarly opinion—that the Jeffersonian “pursuit of Happiness” derives from Locke’s political philosophy and is best interpreted in that light.

To be sure, this is certainly a scholarly opinion; although it is arguably feeble. In each of Jefferson’s references to Locke (cf. Jefferson, vols. VIII, 31; XI, 222; XV, 266; and XVI, 19) he speaks, almost nonchalantly, about Locke the materialist; and while he makes specific references to Locke’s writings, categorizing Locke as ‘the man to read’, Jefferson’s enthusiasm on the subject is certainly, well, stoically restrained. This stands in stark contrast to the glowing and vigorous recommendations he gives for the Stoic philosophers, praising both specific thinkers as well as the moral tradition.

What one can find perhaps most persuasive in the argument for a Lockean influence on Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness” is, first, that Jefferson clearly says that Locke is the go-to philosopher for wonderful ideas on materialism, which interests Jefferson as an alternative philosophical framing to the normative Christian worldview.

Even more interesting as an unstated argument, however, is Jefferson’s reliance upon Lockian language-music in his creation of the Declaration of Independence. Locke defines property as a person's "life, liberty, and estate." That is a catchy bit of writing from Mr. Locke, rhythmically speaking; and Jefferson’s writing is in no wise inferior when he writes concerning certain unalienable Rights, among which "are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet it also seems almost gratuitous to point out that, although it is obvious that Jefferson liked and borrowed the rhythm of Locke’s phrasing, he nevertheless disagreed with the idea of the phrase, thus changing Locke’s English “and estate,” to the American “pursuit of Happiness.”

There is at least one other mainstream scholarly opinion on the question of how to interpret Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness,” which is advanced by the historian Garry Wills; but this opinion seems to limp a little too much through the arcane and recherché to be persuasive in the context of this reflection.

§ Wind-up. Additional philosophical support for the interpretation that the “pursuit of Happiness” is best understood as a personal philosophical attitude of Independence of Mind, might also come from Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia—what Heraclitus might have translated as the well-demoned or well-daimoned life. Let it be said, however, that while there are certainly traces of Aristotle in Jefferson’s writings, relevant to politics, republics, and materialism, there is no indication that he was in any way inspired by the Stagirite’s Virtue Ethic.

For the General Record, though, and because we are reflecting on the question of Happiness as an Idea, it was Aristotle’s contention that we should actually thrive in our lives. Even more, though, according to Aristotle this eudaimoniac-thriving, which we Moderns generally translate as happiness, is in fact the ultimate purpose of human existence. Aristotle’s eudaimonia is linguistically reminiscent of the Socratic Daimon; and we must remember that it is Socrates who gave moral direction both to that philosopher and to Stoic thought in general.

So, even beyond Jefferson’s Declarative Announcement in its favor, there are many philosophical reasons for why Happiness or Thriving or Independence of Mind should come to occupy a prominent place in our hearts and thoughts as a Philosophical Value. Nevertheless, once the foundations of right thinking (read: Philosophy) give way to populist fancies, definitions for ideas such as Happiness become much fuzzier, and we Moderns are left with questions, such as: What does happiness mean to you?, which do not necessarily lead us to meaningful answers, because they also lead us to the admission that Hitler was undoubtedly as happy as a Nazi clam. Any answer to this type of fuzzy question is, philosophically speaking, a castle built on sand.

So, is there more to life than being happy? There are indeed some scientists out there “who are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness”; and others who suggest in the same vein that trying too hard to be happy in fact makes us unhappy. Philosophically, however, it might be argued that such an understanding, and therefore research grounded in that understanding, is fatally flawed by Science’s fundamental mis-understanding about the essentially philosophical (read: non-empirical) nature of the question. But then again, just like all the rest of us, scientists are also subject to “zeitgeistic” opinions and attitudes about happiness, and to the sweepingly sugarcoated, saccharine-fueled sentimentalism that continually seeks to supersede the hard work of Informed Thinking.

To answer this question in kind: For us Moderns, at least in the U.S., who have been nurtured directly or indirectly on the Jeffersonian notion of We the People, is it possible for us to conceive as meaningful, philosophically speaking, an individual life where Thriving, either in body or in mind, is dislocated from the individual life? Or is it possible, philosophically speaking, to conceive of as meaningful a personal life where the individual is called to yield up his Independence of Mind, or where his I of M is trained out of him through tutelage in an impoverished educational system? Would this not be tantamount to an unintentional Abolition of the Cogito, which Heidegger actually intentionally argues for in Being and Time? But this implies the disintegration of the Enlightenment Individual, which must inevitably leave us, both as individuals and as a people, vulnerable to every possible form of totalitarian regime?

In and through his Enlightenment writings Jefferson crafted a philosophical Model of the Reasoning Man, into whose hands he put the reins of Political Power. And the only real burden he placed on this Reasoning Man is that he should be educated, in the sense that he should be informed about Things of State. Because there is nothing more appalling to Reason than to put power over the lives of ‘We the People’ into the hands of those who choose a path of willful ignorance and self-service.

Is there more to life than being happy? If, by happiness, one means to affirm the Individual as Self-governing Thinking-Thing moving toward the Virtue of reason, then, no, there can be nothing greater in life. Following in a long line of earlier and like-minded Stoic philosophers, Jefferson invites us to welcome and embrace Happiness as a Virtuous Habit of the well-demoned Mind, so that we might be faithful in working to secure for ourselves, and then perhaps for the world, those certain unalienable Rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of this Happiness.

(Original essay reprised and reworked from Phrontisterion, June 2013)

Further Phrontisterion reading on Stoicism:

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/p/epictetus-handbooklinks.html