We all want to be happy, we want our children to be happy, and there are countless books advising us how to achieve happiness. But is this really what we should be aiming for?
It is not surprising, in other words, that happiness has always had rather a mixed reception. No one in their right minds we might think, especially now, would be promoting unhappiness; and yet the promotion, the preferring of happiness – the assumption of a right to happiness – brings with it a lot of things we might not like. And the desire for happiness may reveal things about ourselves that we like even less. "A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy," the anthropologist Marshall Sahlinswrote
Our relation to happiness often betrays an unconscious desire for disillusionment. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. And this is what makes wishing so interesting; because wishing is always too knowing. When we wish we are too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want. The belief that we can arrange our happiness – as though happiness were akin to justice, which we can work towards – may be to misrecognise the very thing that concerns us.
Happiness is something essentially subjective; in the sense of being not only personal but idiosyncratic). We can be surprised by what makes us happy, and it will not necessarily be something that makes other people happy. This has significant consequences not least in the area of our lives that is sometimes conducive to happiness, sexuality.
Second, bad things can make us happy – and by bad things I mean things consensually agreed to be unacceptable. It clearly makes some people happy to live in a world without Jews, or homosexuals, or immigrants, and so on. There are also what we might call genuinely bad things, like seriously harming people and other animals, that g
Cruelty can make people happy. And we might then want to think about what problem, or rather problems, happiness is deemed to be the solution to. It is not, for example, incidental to our predicament that so many of our pleasures are, or are felt to be, forbidden (this is what Freud's account of the Oedipus complex is a way of thinking about). So put briefly – as every child and therefore every adult knows – being bad can make you happy. Happiness is subjective, it takes many forms, and one of its forms is immorality.
And this makes happiness as a social or communal pursuit complicated. We have only to imagine what it would be for someone to propose that we had a right to sexual satisfaction to imagine both how we might contrive this and what terrible things might be done in its name.
Unhappiness can, after all, among many other things, be the registration of injustice or loss. At its best, a culture committed to the pursuit of happiness might be committed, say, to the diminishing of injus
What if ihe individual really loves and gets pleasure from, the immorality of pleasures and the lure of transgression
Yet To pursue pleasure is to be pursued by punishment. There is no one more moralistic, more coercive, than a hedonist.
For one is hounded by the ferocity of inner morality
Happiness depends on the distance between who we are and who we should be according to the dictates of our internalised morality. We are mostly unhappy because we are rarely as we should be. When the internal authorities are so implacable and sadistic — over-severe, abusive, humiliating, for one is hounded by the ferocity of inner morality
It is not surprising, in other words, that happiness has always had rather a mixed reception. No one in their right minds we might think, especially now, would be promoting unhappiness; and yet the promotion, the preferring of happiness – the assumption of a right to happiness – brings with it a lot of things we might not like. And the desire for happiness may reveal things about ourselves that we like even less. "A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy," the anthropologist Marshall Sahlinswrote
Our relation to happiness often betrays an unconscious desire for disillusionment. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. And this is what makes wishing so interesting; because wishing is always too knowing. When we wish we are too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want. The belief that we can arrange our happiness – as though happiness were akin to justice, which we can work towards – may be to misrecognise the very thing that concerns us.
Happiness is something essentially subjective; in the sense of being not only personal but idiosyncratic). We can be surprised by what makes us happy, and it will not necessarily be something that makes other people happy. This has significant consequences not least in the area of our lives that is sometimes conducive to happiness, sexuality.
Second, bad things can make us happy – and by bad things I mean things consensually agreed to be unacceptable. It clearly makes some people happy to live in a world without Jews, or homosexuals, or immigrants, and so on. There are also what we might call genuinely bad things, like seriously harming people and other animals, that g
Cruelty can make people happy. And we might then want to think about what problem, or rather problems, happiness is deemed to be the solution to. It is not, for example, incidental to our predicament that so many of our pleasures are, or are felt to be, forbidden (this is what Freud's account of the Oedipus complex is a way of thinking about). So put briefly – as every child and therefore every adult knows – being bad can make you happy. Happiness is subjective, it takes many forms, and one of its forms is immorality.
And this makes happiness as a social or communal pursuit complicated. We have only to imagine what it would be for someone to propose that we had a right to sexual satisfaction to imagine both how we might contrive this and what terrible things might be done in its name.
Unhappiness can, after all, among many other things, be the registration of injustice or loss. At its best, a culture committed to the pursuit of happiness might be committed, say, to the diminishing of injus
What if ihe individual really loves and gets pleasure from, the immorality of pleasures and the lure of transgression
Yet To pursue pleasure is to be pursued by punishment. There is no one more moralistic, more coercive, than a hedonist.
For one is hounded by the ferocity of inner morality
Happiness depends on the distance between who we are and who we should be according to the dictates of our internalised morality. We are mostly unhappy because we are rarely as we should be. When the internal authorities are so implacable and sadistic — over-severe, abusive, humiliating, for one is hounded by the ferocity of inner morality
No comments:
Post a Comment