Never give way to melancholy. Nothing encroaches more. I fight against it vigorously. One great remedy is, to take short views of life. Are you happy now ? Are you likely to remain so till tomorrow or next month, or next year ? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery which may never come at all, or you may never live to see ? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and many of them shadows of your own making.

Sydney Smith

“Nothing is worth more than this day. You cannot relive yesterday. Tomorrow is still beyond your reach.” -Goethe

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=E_K3DvRtnPQ]

See also here for video of Pippin discussing Henry James and moral life with Richard Rorty and others.

Marcel Proust

Alexander García Düttmann

The name of a place can promise happiness, Adorno says in this section (“Meditations on Metaphysics”, Negative Dialectics) after appealing to Proust. For the promise to be kept, for happiness to come into existence, all that would seem to be required is a visit to the actual place. And yet when, attracted by the force inherent in the promise of happiness, one arrives at the place in question, one finds that happiness withdraws as if it were a rainbow. What has allowed then for an experience here is precisely the difference between the name and the named. Adorno does not wish to denounce the anticipation of the imagination as an illusion, just as he does not wish to reduce the experience to the discovery of an empirical truth. This is why he insists on the fact that the withdrawal of happiness at the point where one would expect to be happy does not amount to a disappointment. Rather, one realizes that, having arrived at the place itself by following the trail laid out by the name, one has been brought too close to the promised happiness for it to be experienced as such. Happiness, then, lies neither in the image emanating from the name nor in the reality of the place named, but in the space and in the time stretched out between the image and reality. It springs from seeing something from the inside. However, insofar as the inside is just the other side of the outside, it only appears truly when removed from the thing. What Adorno gives here is the exact definition of the idea, even if he does not employ the philosophical term. In his “Short Commentaries,” he characterizes Proust as a “Platonist” who dismissed opinion. Could one summarize Adorno’s argument by asserting that happiness is linked to the disclosure of the idea? That happiness is to be found residing in neither the name nor the named may only be understood once one has undergone the experience of searching for it in the place or the reality towards which the name points. Happiness, in other words, would depend entirely on whether one reaches a limit at which a second life could begin; one that is not the imaginary life of the promise and yet does not merge with real life in the conventional sense. It is as if the fulfillment of the promise of happiness consisted in the preservation of its form instead of the actualization of its content, or as if keeping the promise meant returning to it so as to render the form a part of the content. Adorno speaks here of a “metaphysical experience,” and not of experience in general, because he wants to highlight the distance that separates happiness from both a matter of fact and a state of mind. Metaphysics interpreted in this manner has something to do with one’s own comportment towards life, with a pursuit of happiness and the yielding of an insight that manifests itself in the form of a lack of disappointment. It thereby acquires a moral or ethical dimension. By protecting each other from dumbness and madness—from the necessity of the literal and the vacuity of the figurative, from the ontological “there is” and the psychological “as if”—the name and the named bestow happiness with the reality of a second life. What Adorno ultimately suggests is that the named is too real to be real in any morally relevant fashion while the name, on the contrary, is never real enough. Does Proust not write, in the last volume of the Recherche, that it is always the attachment to an object owned that provokes the death of the owner? In the wake of Adorno’s reading of Proust, one could claim that happiness is not an object to be owned, that it does not have the form of a real thing, and that in becoming attached to it one runs the danger of turning it into something that could be appropriated. …(more)

To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness one had as a child at play  (Nietzsche)

Mahler’s 4th Symphony is  a piece of music I’ve long associated with the longing for a better world. That world is usually thought of the happy unalienated one of the child, as imagined by the adult (“childhood” is a state for the adult, not the child). A happy world. A longing that the past – the happy absorption of  oneself at play, for instance – should come again. But it cannot really come again: it only returns in dreams, in illusions  and in art. But art – this art, anyway, does more than that. I think it challenges our present by giving us a glimpse of something different and better, reminding of something we already know. This  world could be a happy one, and not just in dreams.

So much of this music could be taken as a mere escape into  a false innocence. The symphony’s last movement for instance, is supposed to be a child’s vision of heaven – with ‘naive’ lyrics that are awkward, even embarrassing for the ‘sophisticated’ adult. But the  listener is supposed to abandon irony and knowingness, and as in a dream, experience a kind of release into that simple sensibility. But of course we wake from dreams; what kind of world do we wake into?

A radically unjust one, of course. For all we know this we need to keep recalling it: it’s a place in which most people are denied the fullest life they could have, where a minority live in material comfort – one in which, to take just one example among so many that one could cite – half the world live on $2.50 per day. Even the globally rich minority (chances are, if you can read this, you are one of them) are divided into radically unequal classes, possessive, competitive consumer-workers.This is what we grow up as adults into, what we get used to, and accept as the only world that is possible.

To dream one’s life away amid such conditions would be intolerable: it would signal a willingness that one’s return to childhood can be bought at the price of the broken lives of real children. This is the case against art-as-escape: the lotus leaf, the drug or substitute religion: an opium of the people.

Ernst Bloch

But if art can release imaginative energies that are potentially uncontainable by the commodified, administered world of capitalist “realism”,then perhaps all art , even the most commercial and ephemeral,  has in it the promise of something better and different. If that is so, it is surely even more true of Mahler’s supreme art. Ernst Bloch, whose ideas about art and utopia ran along these lines, proposed a thing he called vor-schein, ‘anticipatory illumination’ – the gleam of hope in the dark present. By all means enjoy that gleam, but don’t fail to notice the contrast with the surrounding darkness. The experience of  happiness in art can maybe make us less accomodating to the false promises of the commodity world of waking life. If art does this, then it is a nobler thing than an opiate. It’s become a sign.

Mahler’s art here, in delivering us to the ‘simple’ is actually very complex, and if we listen with any attentiveness, we shall surely sense that even happiness, even joy, can be complex. More: there is a kind satisfaction open to the adult and denied to the child. Do I really want to be a child again? no: I want this evocation by the adult Mahler, an experience possible in music (the art that moves in time). It’s an art that has the power to help us face our lives as adults, in a world of injustice  that must be changed, by us, now.

Gustav Mahler, with daughter

Samuel Butler -Self Portrait

Always eat grapes downwards–that is, always eat the best grape first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last. If you eat the other way, you will not have a good grape in the lot. Besides, you will be tempting Providence to kill you before you come to the best.

This is why autumn seems better than spring: in the autumn we are eating our days downwards, in the spring each day still seems ‘very bad.’ People should live on this principle more than they do, but they do live on it a good deal; from the age of, say, fifty we eat our days downwards.

Samuel Butler (1832-1902)

Continuing our series of discussions about the nature of happiness, here is a contribution from a philosopher. I’d say the happiness he describes here is only one of the varieties (and I don’t agree that the type described below was  Aristotle’s only idea about what happiness is – but it certainly gets my vote).

What is happiness? How does one get a grip on this most elusive, intractable and perhaps unanswerable of questions?

I teach philosophy for a living, so let me begin with a philosophical answer. For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view. Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder.

But is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? Might there not be something in it? I am reminded of the following extraordinary passage from Rousseau’s final book and his third (count them — he still beats Obama 3-to-2) autobiography, “Reveries of a Solitary Walker”:

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. (emphases mine)

This is as close to a description of happiness as I can imagine. Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchâtel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Île Saint Pierre, where he used to enjoy going for exploratory walks when the weather was fine and he could indulge in the great passion of his last years: botany. He would walk with a copy of Linneaus under his arm, happily identifying plants in areas of the deserted island that he had divided for this purpose into small squares.

Read more  here: Happy Like God – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com.

 -Simon Critchley

Fat chance. But here’s a small way towards helping you to value what you have got, and avoiding going all toxic about what you haven’t: counterfactualising downwards.

Counterfactual: the way things might have been. As in: counterfactual history (e.g. if Hitler had invaded Britain, if Margaret Thatcher had stepped in front of a bus in 1978 etc).

When we imagine how our lives could have been better (that job, that salary, if only he/she had fancied me, why don’t I have a better car -or why do the bad guys not step under buses? etc..) we are counterfactualising upwards .

But when we think how much worse things could have been we go the other way. And let’s face it, for most of us in the developed world things could have been much worse. For a start, just being in the developed world makes most of us part of the global super rich anyway. But think closer to home: haven’t you been lucky? This is not an invitation to smugness: a lot is joyfulness and gratitude, you miserable so-and-so? luck, isn’t it? Go on, be honest. 

So counterfactualise downwards, friends. Believe me, it’s good for mental health.

Of course, the pitfall to avoid now is sour grapes (‘Since I’m not going to get it, I never wanted that nice thing, anyway..), but that’s another story, and maybe another post.