The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [36]
In 1861 John Stuart Mill wrote: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”8 Remember this the next time someone asks why we support fine arts that do not quite support themselves. This whole pig-versus-philosopher debate is pretty hilarious, yes? The upshot is that the wise can get wiser by watching the innocent. But that doesn’t mean the wise want to switch places. What I have come to believe about all these paeans to wisdom flanked by all this despair about wisdom is this: everything has to be learned twice. In childhood we have ignorant happiness, and we must lose this happiness if we are ever to get beyond it. Repression is not the same as transcendence. Between these states of calm ignorance and calm knowing, there has to be some half-wise screaming. Some few people actually grow wise by acting wise, but most grow wise by acting foolish, by accruing a variety of experiences, by taking chances (and thus learning about chance, our constant companion), and by making errors. Voltaire’s Candide said that we should cultivate our own gardens, but he concluded this only after he was no longer the naïf his name implies. By then, he had gone on many travels, seen a fine woman return from a voyage with but one buttock, seen the great philosopher of optimism lose one extremity after another until he was a mere nub of optimism, and seen kind men do as much terrible harm as cruel ones. What if all these characters had instead stayed home, cultivating their gardens, and had kept their buttocks, limbs, and innocence? They would have remained children. Or, as so many adult children are, pigs. Spinoza quoted Ecclesiastes’ saying that whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow. But he was explicit in his opinion that, though both fools and wise people have happiness, they do not have the same happiness. As Spinoza put it, both a human and a horse have lust, but a horse lusts for a horse and a human for a human. Just so, Spinoza explained, the happiness of a drunkard is not the happiness of the wise. Knowledge and wisdom are worth it.
According to the great philosophers, your worst barrier against happiness is you, your own wrong thinking. Your four problems are these: You cannot see yourself or much about the world you live in. You are ruled by desire and emotion. You will not take your place or rise to your role. You are alternately oblivious to death and terrified of it. As such, your job is to master these four errors in yourself. If you do, you will be happy and more free to love, work, and play the way you wish you could. None of this comes easily; it has to be practiced a great deal, and it never works completely. However, there is no useful alternative to the effort. As Epicurus reminds us, “We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it.”9
The wisdom literature I have been discussing addressed itself to the question of how to live, but it is worth noticing, in closing, that the core of our lives is love and work, and these wisdom instructions also apply in these more specific realms. If you want your love and your work to be successful, actively apply yourself to knowing yourself, controlling your desires, taking what is yours, and remembering that love and work can both end abruptly—remembering to the extent that you cherish them both—and learn to let them flow. Actively applying yourself means doing something different in the service of these goals and seeking out information about what it is you need to learn. We acknowledge