Money can't buy happiness. What it can buy are the conditions without which happiness is impossible.
Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.
Category: Happiness
Our Pyrrhonian Predicament
It is widely admitted that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the human condition. One aspect of our wretched state is recognized and addressed by the Pyrrhonists: we want certain knowledge but it eludes us. And so we must content ourselves with belief. But beliefs are in conflict and this conflict causes suffering which ranges from mental turmoil to physical violence.
Ours is a two-fold misery. We lack what we want and need, knowledge. We must make do with a substitute that engenders bitter controversy, belief.
Skeptic solution? Live belieflessly, adoxastos! But that is no solution at all, or so say I.
For details, see the following meatier entries:
Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude
Happy Thanksgiving to all my Stateside readers.
The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.
Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur or clinical depression cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.
Leftists will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a leftist and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.
Even the existence of leftists is something to be grateful for. They mark out paths not to be trodden. And their foibles provide plenty of blog fodder. For example, there is the curious phenomenon of hypocrisy-in-reverse.
Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?
This weekend I had the pleasure of a visit from Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion. We discussed a number of topics at table and on trail including imago dei, the nature of forgiveness, the role of Platonism in Christianity, and death and afterlife. His position on the latter topic I would characterize as 'Life 2.0,' the essentials of which I set forth below in a slightly revised version of an entry from 2013. I see Dale as a sort of spiritual materialist whereas he probably sees me as a kind of gnostic or Platonizer whose conception of the afterlife is so hopelessly abstract as to be devoid of any human meaning. I recently wrote in Soteriology for Brutes?
. . . the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, but I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.
On our long ramble over desert trails on Saturday morning, Dale eloquently defended his view, one I respect while respectfully rejecting. I have no illusions about dissuading him from it any more than I expect ever to get him to see that God cannot be a being among beings, a topic we have vigorously discussed on several occasions, see here, for example. Agreement here as elsewhere is out of reach, and perhaps not even reasonably pursued; mutual clarification of differences, however, is well within reach, and worth pursuing. That is my aim below.
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As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.
That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, as I am sure Dale Tuggy does not, they think of it as a prolongation of the concerns of this life including the petty ones. They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:
. . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)
A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unlike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next. This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.
At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation. Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit? Why would you suddenly love there what you don't love here?
In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.
Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.
Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?
Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than adolescent concerns, you would not get through to them. For what they need are not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it: it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.
In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books; we read trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons; we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is 'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or collective.
These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them, then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)
Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said, it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine initiative and our cooperation with it.
It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage. Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.
And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,' the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable to entertain the hope of eternal life.
But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0 and is something like the visio beata of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'? Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise. But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view. You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude. You want, finally, to be happy.
Would the happy vision be boring? Well, when you were in love, was it boring? When your love was requited, was it boring? Was it not bliss? Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless. We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite. Why then should participation in it be boring? Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos. Were you bored in those moments? Quite the opposite. You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.
What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below. God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls. So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same. If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."
Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness
Here, at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical
I address the question of why conservatives are happier than liberals.
The Mid-Life Crisis and the Happiness Curve: Life is Better After Fifty
Here:
The mid-life crisis is a cliché: balding, paunchy man in red sports car, frantically trying to convince himself that women still find him attractive. Implicit in the word “crisis” is a sudden change. You wake up some day in your forties to realize that you are no longer young. The resulting angst—it’s all straight downhill to death from here—nudges people to do crazy things.
The truth is more complex, writes Jonathan Rauch in his new book, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50. Across cultures and demographics, people’s life satisfaction declines in their forties. It is rarely a crisis, though; it’s more of a malaise. But then a funny thing happens around age 50. Mood bottoms out and begins to climb. Indeed, people in their sixties and seventies report themselves as being far happier than they ever imagined they’d be.
This has been my experience almost exactly. My mid-life 'crisis' — the going term but not particularly happy, pun intended – began when I was 41 and was in full flood for five years. But then at age 49 I entered into the happiest period of my life, a period still going strong as I approach 68 and a half.
Related: A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis, wherein I cite an excellent essay by Kieran Setiya and tell my story.
Two Measures of Personal Success
One measure of success is how far you've gotten, and the other is how far you've come.
The second is the better measure.
On the occasions when you feel you haven't gotten very far in life, tell yourself, "But look where you started from, and what you had to work with, and the obstacles you had to overcome."
Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness
It turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals. But why?
Conservative explanation. Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness. More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.
Liberal explanation. Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world. They are oblivious to inequality. And when they do see it,they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss. Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.
As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.
Do we conservatives, ostrich-like, ignore injustice? The answer depends on what one takes justice to be. The liberal tendency is to see justice as fairness, and to understand fairness in terms of material equality, equality of wealth and equality of power. A just society for a liberal, then, is one in which material inequality is either eliminated or severely mitigated. Along these lines the prominent political philosopher John Rawls puts forth his famous Difference Principle the gist of which is that social and economic inequalities in a society are justified only if they benefit the worst off, i.e., only if the worst off are better of than they would have been without the inequality.
But why should my having more than you be considered unjust unless it benefits you? Of course, my having more than you will typically benefit you. "A rising tide lifts all boats."
My roof was leaking in two places. Now I could have done an amateur patch job myself: roofing ain't rocket science. But I decided to have the entire house professionally re-roofed with all that that entails in terms of new flashing, etc. My ability to afford such an expensive job gave support to a local company and all its jobbers, not to mention the crew of workers who had employment for a week. And having extra dough, I laid $60 in tips on the workers. I could give a hundred examples of how my having more than certain others benefited those others.
When's the last time a poor man made a loan to a friend, or a contribution to a charity? How many poor people give people jobs? And of course people like me who are modestly well-off due to hard work and the practice of the old virtues have been benefited in innumerable ways by people who are wealthy. Think of those who have endowed art museums and university chairs.
But suppose, contrary to fact, that my having more did not benefit others. Why should that affect the justice of my having more? If I work harder, longer, and smarter than you, and practice the old-fashioned virtues that liberals mock even when they themselves owe their success to them, then it is a good bet that I will end up with more than you. Unless I engage in force or fraud I am entitled to what I earn or what I inherit or what falls out of the sky into my lap. Take my intelligence and my good genes. Do I deserve them? No, but I have a right to them. I have a right to them and right to what I acquire by their use.
I grant that a certain amount of luck is ingredient in every success. But I have a right to my good luck even though I don't deserve it. Of course, liberals often 'see' luck where there is no luck at all but hard work and the exercise of conservative virtues. Hence the conservative saying, "The harder I work the luckier I become." The point is that what the liberal misconstrues as luck is really not luck at all but effort. Should we help life's unlucky? I should think so. But not if the helping is really a harming, a making of the recipients of charity weaker and more dependent.
Liberals consider it legitimate for the state to use its coercive powers to promote material equality by taking from the highly productive and giving to the unproductive and less productive. This cannot work in the long run. The well-off will resist being ripped off by government functionaries who line their own pockets and feather their nests with perquisites purchased at taxpayer expense. Many will expatriate. Government, it is clear, is too often a hustle like any hustle rigged by those who benefit from it for their own benefit. Government needn't be a hustle, but too often it is, which is why vigilance on the part of the citizenry is necessary to keep it in check.
The value of liberty trumps that of material equality. This is a key difference between conservative and libertarian on the one side and leftist on the other. Naturally I believe in formal equality, equality of treatment, treating like cases in a like manner, not discriminating on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as race, sex, or creed.
Of course, it depends on the creed. If you are a radical Muslim out to impose sharia and subvert our way of life, and act upon your beliefs, then you ought to be deported, or jailed, or executed, depending on the nature of your actions. You should never have been let in in the first place. After all, toleration, though a good thing, has limits, and if you do not see that it has limits then you are hopelessly foolish. In a word, you are a liberal.
For more on toleration and its limits see my aptly titled Toleration category.
The Wise Live by the Probable, not the Possible
The worldly wise live by the probable and not by the merely possible. It is possible that you will reform the person you want to marry. But it is not probable.
Don't imagine that you can change a person in any significant way. What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out. People don't change. They are what they are. The few exceptions prove the rule. The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities. "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12)
It is foolish to gamble with your happiness. We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose. So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that you will change her. You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.
The principle applies not only to marriage but across the board.
Don’t Spoil Your Success
You may spoil your success if you compare it with someone else's. Beware of comparison. Not all comparison is invidious, but the potential for envy is there. Invidia is the Latin for 'envy.' An invidious comparison, then, is one that elicits envy. One can avoid envy by avoiding comparison. To feel diminished in one's sense of self-worth by the accomplishments of another is the mark of a loser.
One ought to celebrate the accomplishments of others since in many cases they redound to one's own benefit.
If you cannot be satisfied with who you are and what you have, you will never be content. And if you are never content, then never happy. There is more to happiness than contentment, but the latter is an ingredient in the former.
A Peace Worth Wanting? Problems with Pyrrhonian Ataraxia: Passivity and Porcinity
The Pyrrhonians see clearly that part of our misery in this life is due to our inability to attain certain knowledge. Wanting certainty, but unable to secure it, we are thrown back upon conflicting beliefs that inflame passions. The heat of the passions seems to vary inversely with the rational unprovability of the beliefs that stoke them. The Pyrrhonians try to find happiness in the midst of this misery. We are to suspend judgment (belief) and thereby attain peace of mind. Theirs is not a theoretical but a therapeutic conception of philosophy. The Skeptic therapy diagnoses our illness as belief and prescribes the purgation of belief as the cure. Martha C. Nussbaum (The Therapy of Desire, Princeton UP, 1994, 284-285) puts it well:
In short, says the Skeptic, Epicurus is correct that the central human disease is a disease of belief. But he is wrong to feel that the solution lies in doing away with some beliefs and clinging all the more firmly to others. The disease is not one of false belief; belief itself is the illness — belief as a commitment, a source of concern, care, and vulnerability.
. . . Greek Skepticism, attaching itself to the medical analogy, commends this diagnosis and proposes a radical cure: the purgation of all cognitive commitment, all belief, from human life.The Skeptic, "being a lover of his fellow human beings, wishes to heal by argument, insofar as he can, the conceit and the rashness of dogmatic people" (PH 3.280).
We note the radicality of both the diagnosis and the cure. Since belief as such makes us ill, the cure must lie in the purgation of all beliefs including, I assume, any beliefs instrumental in effecting the cure. Just as a good laxative flushes itself out along with everything else, doxastic purgation supposedly relieves us of all doxastic impactation, including the beliefs underpinning the therapeutic procedures. You might say that the aperient effect of epoche is to restore us to mundane regularity.
I reject the Skeptic Way, its destination, and its 'laxatives.' I agree that we are ill, all of us, and that that part of our misery in this life is due to our inability to attain what we desire and feel is our birthright, namely, certain knowledge, in particular, certain knowledge of ultimates. But I reject both the diagnosis and the cure. The problem is not belief as such, and the solution is not purgation of belief.
Pyrrhonism is rife with problems. Here is one about the value of ataraxia. It is a value, but how high a value?
The Passivity of Ataraxia
The notion that ataraxia (mental tranquillity, peace of soul, freedom from disturbance) is either essential to happiness or the whole of happiness is a paltry and passive conception of happiness. The peace of the Pyrrhonian is not the "peace that surpasses all understanding" (Phillipians 4:7), but a peace predicated upon not understanding — and not caring any more about understanding. Could that be a peace worth wanting?
The Skeptic who, true to his name, begins with inquiry abandons inquiry when he finds that nothing can be known with certainty. But rather than have recourse to uncertain belief, the Skeptic concludes that the problem is belief itself. Rather than go forward on uncertain beliefs, he essays to go forward belieflessly. Inquiry, he maintains, issues in the psychological state of aporia (being at a loss) when it is seen that competing beliefs cancel each other out. The resulting evidential equipoise issues in epoche (withdrawal of assent) and then supposedly in ataraxia.
Now mental tranquillity is a high value, and no one who takes philosophy seriously can not want to possess more of it. But the Skeptic's brand of tranquillity cannot be the highest value, and perhaps not much of a value at all. The happy life cannot be anything so passive as the life of ataraxia. We need a more virile conception of happiness, and we find it in Aristotle. For the Stagirite, happiness (eudaimonia) is an activity (ergon) of the soul (psyche) in accordance with virtue (arete) over an entire life. (Cf. Nicomachean Ethics.) His is an active conception of the good life even though the highest virtues are the intellectual and contemplative virtues. The highest life is the bios theoretikos, the vita contemplativa. Though contemplative, it necessarily involves the activity of inquiry into the truth, an activity that skepticism, whether Pyrrhonian or Academic, denigrates.
The Porcinity of Ataraxia
Disillusioned with the search for truth, our Skeptic advocates re-entry into the everyday. Unfortunately, there is something not only passive, but also porcine about the Skeptic's resting in ataraxia. Nussbaum again:
Animal examples play an important part in Skepticism, illustrating the natural creature's freedom from disturbance,and the ease with which this is attained if we only can, in Pyrrho's words, "altogether divest ourselves of the human being" (DL 9.66). The instinctive behavior of a pig, calmly removing its hunger during a storm that fills humans with anxiety, exemplifies for the Skeptic the natural orientation we all have to free ourselves from immediate pain. It also shows that this is easily done, if we divest ourselves of the beliefs and commitments that generate other complex pains and anxieties. Pointing to that pig, Pyrrho said "that the wise man should live in just such and undisturbed condition" (DL 9.66).
How is that for a porcine view of the summum bonum? I am put in mind of this well-known passage from John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, Chapter II:
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 know only their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
Is the Skeptic Committed to Ataraxia's being a Value?
The Skeptic aspires to live belieflessly, adoxastos. He aims to live beyond all commitments, or at least beyond all commitments that transcend present impressions. (It is a nice question, one best left for later, whether our Skeptic can, consistently with his entire approach, cop to a commitment to something as Chisholmianly noncommital as his here and now being-appeared-to-sweetly when, for example, he eats honey. Does he not here and and now accept, affirm, believe that he is being-appeared-to-sweetly when he consumes honey? Sticking to impressions, he does not accept, affirm, believe that the honey IS sweet, but 'surely' he must accept, affirm, believe that he IS (in reality) presently being appeared-to-sweetly. No?)
Setting aside for now our parenthetical worry, what about the commitment to the pursuit of ataraxia? He who treads the Skeptic Path is committed to the value of ataraxia, and this value-commitment obviously transcends his present impressions. It is the organizing principle behind his therapeutic procedures and his entire way of life. It is what his quasi-medicinal treatments are for. Ataraxia is the goal, the 'final cause' of the therapy. So here we have yet another doxastic-axiological commitment that is part and parcel of the Skeptic Way. We see once a again that a life without commitment is impossible.
Nussbaum considers how a Skeptic might respond:
I think he would now answer that yes, after all, an orientation to ataraxia is very fundamental in his procedures. But the orientation to ataraxia is not a belief, or a value-commitment. It has the status of a natural inclination. Naturally, without belief or teaching, we move to free ourselves from burdens and disturbances. Ataraxia does not need to become a dogmatic commitment, because it is already a natural animal impulse . . . Just as the dog moves to take a thorn out of its paw, so we naturally move to get rid of our pains and impediments: not intensely or with any committed attachment but because that's just the way we go. (305)
This quotation is right before the pig passage quoted above. Nussbaum does not endorse the response she puts in the mouth of the Skeptic, and she very skillfully presents the difficulty. The Skeptic, whether he aims to be consistent or not, must adopt a Skeptical attitude toward ataraxia "if he is to avoid disturbance and attain ataraxia." (Nussbaum, 301) He cannot be committed to ataraxia or any of the procedures that supposedly lead to it without running the risk of disturbance.
I would add that our Skeptic cannot even be committed to the possibility of ataraxia. The pursuit of ataraxia enjoins a suspension of judgment as to its possibility or impossibility. For any claim that humans are capable of ataraxia is a claim that goes beyond the impressions of the present moment, a claim that can give rise to dispute and disturbance. But it is even worse that this. It occurs to me that our Skeptic cannot even grant that he or anyone has ever experienced ataraxia in the past since this claim too would go beyond the impressions of the present moment.
Suppose you went to this doctor for treatment. You ask him how successful his procedures are. "How many, doc, have experienced relief after a course of your purgatives and aperients?" The good doctor will not commit himself. He has no 'track record' he will stand by. No point, then, is asking about the prognosis.
How then can the Skeptic save himself from incoherence? It seems he must reduce the human being to an animal that simply follows its natural instincts and inclinations. Divesting himself of his humanity, he must sink to the level of the animal as Pyrrho recommends. Indeed, he must stop acting and merely respond to stimuli. Human action has beliefs as inputs, and human action is for reasons. But all of this is out if we are to avoid all doxastic and axiological commitments.
We now clearly see that the Skeptic Way is a dead end. We want the human good, happiness. But we are given a load of rhetoric that implies that there is no specifically human good and that we must regress to the level of animals.
But even this recommendation bristles with paradox. For it too is a commitment to a course of action that transcends the moment when action is impossible for a critter that merely responds instinctually to environmental stimuli.
To Emil Cioran I would say: safety is overrated.
Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy?
Martin P. Seligman explains. Seligman! Now there's an aptronym for you. Selig is German for happy, blessed, blissful, although it can also mean late (verstorben) and tipsy (betrunken). So Seligman is the happy man or happy one. Nomen est omen?
Give some careful thought to what you name your kid. 'Chastity' may have an anti-aptronymic effect. As for anti-aptronyms, I was introduced a while back to a hulking biker who rejoiced under the name of 'Tiny.' A student of mine's name for me was 'Smiley' to underscore my serious-as-cancer demeanor.
Ambition Beyond Ability
He who is ambitious beyond his abilities courts unhappiness.
Worldly Success: How Much is Enough?
You have enough worldly success if it enables you to advance the project of self-realization on the important fronts including the moral, the intellectual, and the spiritual. The vita contemplativa cannot be well lived by the grindingly poor, the sick, the politically and socially oppressed, the sorely afflicted and tormented. Boethius wrote his Consolations of Philosophy in prison, but you are not Boethius.
You have too much worldly success when it becomes a snare and a burden and a distraction.
We need some social acceptance and human contact, but fame is worse than obscurity. Reflect for a moment on the character of those who enjoy fame and the character of those whose fickle regard confers it.
We need a modicum of worldly wherewithal to live well, but more is not better. Only the terminally deluded could believe, as the saying goes, that "You can't be too thin or too rich." You could be anorexic or like unto the New Testament camel who couldn't pass through the eye of a needle.
We need health, but not hypertrophy.
We need power, but not the power over others that corrupts, but the power over oneself that does not.
A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis
Kieran Setiya, The Midlife Crisis. An outstanding essay. What exactly is a midlife crisis?
In the form that will concern us, then, the midlife crisis is an apparent absence of meaning or significance in life that allows for the continued presence of reasons to act. Although it is often inspired by the acknowledgement of mortality, the crisis can occur in other ways. It may be enough to prompt the midlife crisis that you see in your future, at best, only more of the achievements and projects that make up your past. Your life will differ only in quantity from the life you have already lived, a mere accumulation of deeds.
A weblog as I envisage it is a form of writing that is midway between the unpublished privacy of the personal journal and the publicity of an article published in a professional journal. The blogs that interest me the most are thus those that include some of the self-reference of a Facebook page absent the full-bore, and boring, narcissism that characterizes most of them while retaining, in the main, an objective trans-personal focus. This by way of justifying some talk of myself.
Setiya's characterization of the midlife crisis fits my case almost exactly. My crisis lasted a long four years, starting at age 41. In the fifth year, a year's worth of travel and teaching and study in Turkey pulled me out of it. Three years later, at age 49, I embarked upon the happiest period of my entire life, a period which continues into the present. And the decline of physical powers consequent upon aging does not prevail against my sense of well-being. Looking back on the difficult crisis years, I ask myself: What was that all about?
"It may be enough to prompt the midlife crisis that you see in your future, at best, only more of the achievements and projects that make up your past." Exactly. That was the trigger for me, that and the action I took at 41.
Hired right out of graduate school at 28, I was awarded tenure at 34. Until tenure, life for an academic can be an emotional roller-coaster. It's up and down with the prospect of up or out, and if out, then most likely out for the count. Tenure brings a measure of peace. I settled in and enjoyed the job security. But then the worm began to gnaw. What now? More of the same? Will I spend the rest of my life in this boring midwest venue among these limited colleagues, decent people most of them, but academic functionaries more than real philosophers? Teaching intro and logic, logic and intro to the bored and boring? What starts out an exciting challenge can turn into a living death. It is truly awful to have to teach philosophy to a class of 35 only five of whom have a clue as to the purposes of a university and a scintilla of intellectual eros. It is like trying to feed the unhungry. (Cf. John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, a book overpaid administrators ought to be hit upside the head with and then forced to memorize.)
And then there was the rising tide of political correctness that in those days was only about half as bad as it has become. Why anyone with a conservative bent and a real love of the life of the mind would embark upon the quixotic quest for an academic post in the humanities in the current culturally Marxist climate is beyond me. You might get really lucky, find a job, and get tenure. But to what avail? You wanted to live the life of the mind in a university, not have to keep your mouth shut and your head down in a leftist seminary. No free man wants to spend his life in dissimulation.
Philosophy is different things to different people. For me it is a spiritual quest. Try to explain that to the average hyperprofessionalized and overspecialized academic hustler. The quest demands isolation from academic careerists and busybodies. It demands time for spiritual practices such as meditation. And so at age 41, having spent two years in a visiting associate professorship at a better school, I abandoned the tenured position at my home institution to live the life of the independent philosopher.
It was a bold move, foolish in the eyes of the world. "What about your career?" I was asked. The bold move triggered my midlife crisis and led me into the desert for a good long period of purgation. I have emerged from it a better man.
So if any of you are in the midst of a midlife crisis, view it as a sort of purgatory on earth. Perhaps you need to be purged of vain ambitions and unrealistic expectations. Make the most of it and you may emerge from it better than when you went in. Don't try to escape it by doing something rash like running off to Las Vegas with a floozie. Endure it and profit from it. If you must buy a motorcycle, do as a colleague of mine did: he rode it through his midlife crisis and then had the good sense to sell it.
Related: The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis. A good Atlantic article on happiness and the U-curve.