Happiness is a recurrent topic in the blogosphere, not least at Troppo where several of us have  posted about it more than once. There’s even a strand of economics that focuses on studying happiness.

In part that’s why it struck me as a bit strange that Australian writer David Malouf appears to have written an entire essay on the subject for The Monthly without engaging with the economics literature on happiness, or for that matter philosophical discourse about it. Nevertheless Malouf seems to have reached by intuitive and literary means a conclusion fairly similar to the economists: money doesn’t buy happiness, or at least not as much or for as long as some may have hoped and imagined. We tend to revert to a mean that’s significantly less than constant ecstasy. As Malouf observes:

We do complain, of course, but our complaints are trivial, mostly ritual. Our politicians lack vision, interest rates are too high, the pace of modern living is too hectic; the young have no sense of duty, family values are in decline. The good life, it seems, is not enough. We have nothing to complain of, we are “happy enough”; but we are not quite happy. We are still, somehow, unsatisfied, and this dissatisfaction, however vaguely conceived, is deeply felt.

If pressed, our friends or neighbours will probably tell us that what they are suffering from is “stress”; a sense, again vaguely conceived, that in the world about them, as they feel it and as it touches their lives, all is not well. They do not, in the end, feel secure or safe.

We know too much about the world these days, Malouf thinks, and that results in our substituting wider foci of unease and anxiety that we wouldn’t even have perceived let alone had time to worry about when life was an unrelenting struggle for subsistence.

No doubt Malouf is right as far as he goes, but these aren’t new thoughts or even especially profound ones.  I reckon it’s hard to go past what Immanuel Kant had to say about happiness about 250 years ago:

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This post began as a response to Julia Thornton’s brief comment on a previous post in which I outed myself as a fan of the philosopher Hegel, directing me to a site where Hegelians roamed free. It’s an interesting thing what we make of what we learn at uni – and to some extent maintain beyond it with a bit of reading. Outside one’s field, one can’t take too deep an interest in a particular area – or it’s practically very hard. So what does one take into life outside the field one might follow? An ossified set of propositions from some old codger. Well perhaps. For me anyway, I can say that my study of Hegel helped shape a few important things about my intellectual orientation to things.

I doubt it really changed me (for good or ill, these things are largely temperamental I suspect) but it gave me a bit of a vocabulary to express some things. And as I said in the comment to Julia, ”the thing is, I’m not a Hegelian. I’m not an anything much.”

I think Hegel is the most amazing, eye-opening philosopher I’ve ever come across, and I think of his ideas a lot, but I don’t think they create a program for anything much – or at least not for me. My own idea of philosophy is that it’s a kind of ‘rhetoric of epistemology’. If, as is likely that means nothing to you I’ll try to explain – though who knows how I’ll go, it’s quite tricky to explain.

Since we don’t have a clue what makes up the world, or how we should think, the thing I love about Hegel is that he reinvents the world in a fabulously rich way. I divide philosophy and those who discuss philosophy into two camps. The first lot fancy themselves as devilishly commonsensical and they’re forever lecturing us that if only we could jolly well sort ourselves out, then we couldcure the world of all known diseases march down the road to truth, principally by eliminating error.

Logical Positivism was in this tradition. And, in reinventing ‘Hume’s fork’ – in saying that something was either falsifiable or meaningless metaphysics – they didn’t quite account for the fact that this linchpin of their system, their criterion of meaningfulness itself was unfalsifiable and therefore (presumably) meaningless. To me Logical Positivism is the philosophical equivalent of the Titanic – the unsinkable ship, sinking on its maiden voyage. Richard Dawkins is the amateur philosopher in this mould, blissfully unaware of his own capacious ignorance of the very topic on which he writes whole books. I call this philosophy as ‘metaphysics by default’. The practitioners do metaphysics but are unaware of the fact, thinking it’s commonsense. In this sense they are actively unphilosophical, but blissfully unaware of it trooping on through the undergrowth, pith helmets firmly strapped to their chins.

In this world of thought categories like ‘matter’ or (though this is a bit out of fashion) ‘mind’ lurk either explicitly acknowledged or implicitly fundamental categories on which thought gets built. But no-one has got the foggiest clue what ‘matter’ or ‘mind’ really is. (Paradoxically they’ve got a pretty good idea of what ‘mind’ is because they experience it from the inside, but they can’t escape the subjectivity of that experience. As for matter, well even as a scientific endeavour the more we look into it the futher it recedes from us as intelligible. It gets curiouser and curiouser.)

My own personal conclusion from this is, as I’ve suggested on this blog before, is that if we go looking for foundations for our thought, we end up in fictions. It’s best we acknowledge that and since they’re fictive, we get the opportunity to make up fertile fictions – fictions which will help us think in a fruitful way rather than just lead us to rehearse what seems obvious to our senses (but which is in fact the quite arbitrary artefact of our intuitions as beings which inhabit a largely ‘Newtoninan’ world between galactic and atomic scales.) Continue reading →