By COLIN MCGINN
February 8, 2008
Utilitarianism is the philosophical doctrine according to which happiness is the sole intrinsic value -- the only thing that is good in itself. Although invented by 19th-century Britons, notably Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill, utilitarianism has some claim to be the official philosophy of the U.S.A. or, as a philosopher might have it, the "Utilitarian States of America." In America, happiness is what makes life good, and unhappiness is what makes it bad. We must therefore seize the former and avoid the latter.
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Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University, disagrees, contending that utilitarianism has it the wrong way around. The "happy types," as he calls them, are apt to be bland, superficial, static, hollow, one-sided, bovine, acquisitive, deluded and foolish. Sold on the ideal of the happy smile and the cheerful salutation, they patrol the malls in dull uniformity, zombie-like, searching for contentment and pleasure, locked inside their own dreams of a secure and unblemished world, oblivious to objective reality, cocooned in a protective layer of bemused well-being.
These are the positive thinkers, in Mr. Wilson's taxonomy, the see-no-evil optimists, the consumers and users of a world conceived instrumentally. Deep down they are hurting, like the rest of us, but the ideology of constant happiness has them in its grip. They pop pills, read self-help manuals, gorge themselves on feel-good TV and comfort food -- all to avoid the blues that are an inevitable part of the human condition.
On the opposite side, Mr. Wilson says, we have the natural sufferers, their somber faces downcast. Their traits are these: sadness, dejection, questioning, restlessness, honesty, depth, pessimism, tragedy, complexity, vitality and a grasp of reality. Confessing his own melancholic temperament, Mr. Wilson hymns the virtues of misery, invoking such fellow sad sacks as Keats, Melville, Coleridge, van Gogh, Beethoven, John Lennon, Rothko and Cary Grant (who would have guessed?).
In such figures he sees perceptiveness and creativity, nobility and elevation. Mr. Wilson's basic thesis is that, without suffering, the human soul becomes stagnant and empty. We can only reach our full potential through pain -- not a pathological kind of pain but the kind that comes from a recognition of death, decay and the bad day (or decade). We must live between the poles of sadness and joy and not try to expunge misery from our lives.
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• Read an excerpt from "Against Happiness"
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AGAINST HAPPINESS
By Eric G. Wilson
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 166 pages, $20)
Mr. Wilson makes a strong case for this anti-utilitarianism, in prose both spare and lavish. (Of Coleridge he writes: "He was hurt into these sublimities. He was axed into ecstasy.") And indeed, to deny our essential sadness in the face of a tragic world is to suppress a large part of what we are as human beings. It is to retreat into a fearful solipsism, refusing to peep out into the world beyond -- an approach to life that is all the more fatuous in that it can never succeed.
But Mr. Wilson pushes the case further: We must cherish our melancholy, he says, and absorb the insights it provides. We must let our trembling soul feel what it must feel: insecurity, finitude, shock, turbulence, anxiety and grief. In this way we will experience the true beauty of the world, with all its raging indifference. The world does not exist to give us a hedonic buzz. Life is not worth living because of all the units of pleasure it can contain but because of the opportunities for insight and transcendence it supplies.
To make his case, Mr. Wilson sticks with literary references. In "Against Happiness," philosophers hardly receive a mention. (The word "utilitarianism" never appears.) If he had broadened his scope, Mr. Wilson might have noted that philosophers have different views of the value of pleasure, even citing Mill's famous rebuke to Bentham: "Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." The point here is that ignorant enjoyment is not a particularly good thing; and wisdom and melancholy often go together. Knowledge is itself a value, to be set beside happiness -- and the two do not always coincide.
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Mill also distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, so as to avoid the bovine version of the utilitarian doctrine. Thus the happiness we derive from poetry, say, is more valuable than the kind we derive from pizza. Such considerations are off the map for Mr. Wilson; he doesn't analyze as much as rhapsodize. This approach is OK, I suppose, but some of his points might have been better expressed in prose more gray than purple.
One thing he fails to note is that sadness is not being celebrated by him, or by anyone else, as an intrinsic good, though happiness is usually regarded that way. This means that sadness has value only insofar as it leads to other states that themselves have value -- such as depth and insight. There is a crucial asymmetry: Happiness is desirable in itself, while suffering is valuable only as a means to something else.
Mr. Wilson is arguing for the instrumental value of suffering, though there are times when he hints that sadness has intrinsic value. I'd like to have seen him make an explicit distinction between the intrinsic and the instrumental and then make a more straightforward case for the intrinsic value of some types of suffering. Such an argument really would fly in the face of utilitarianism. As it is, a happiness merchant may discount Mr. Wilson's praise of sadness by claiming that current sadness can be good only when it leads to happiness down the road.
What about the stronger thesis -- that misery can still have value even when it leads to deeper misery, so long as wisdom is the outcome? A more convincing argument against happiness might defend the view that knowledge of the true condition of the universe, and of our place in it, necessarily gnaws at the heart and that such gnawing is good in itself.
Still, Mr. Wilson's case for the dark night of the soul brings a much needed corrective to today's mania for cheerfulness. One would almost say that, in its eloquent contrarianism and earnest search for meaning, "Against Happiness" lifts the spirits.
Mr. McGinn is the author of "Consciousness and Its Objects" and "Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays."
