The irrationality of unhappiness and the paradox of despair

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 101, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 167-196

  Buss, Sarah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF IOWA   (United States)

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EID: 60949655178     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2004101424     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. In this article I am thus not interested in what Stephen Darwall calls "self-concern": "self-concern...is only incidentally egocentric - its object being, unlike that of attitudes de se, the individual one is, rather than oneself as such...self-concern [is] an instance, in one's own case, of an attitude one can have in principle toward any individual, a concern that the moral point of view is thought to express equally toward everyone" - "Self-interest and Self-concern," Social Philosophy and Policy, XIV, 1 (Winter 1997): 158-78, here p. 160.
2. "Who," Pascal asks, "is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no men ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes. But anyone is inconsolable at having none" - Pensees, W.F. Trotter, trans., in Pascal's Pensees and The Provincial Letters (New York: Random House, 1941), #409, p. 130. The possibility at issue here refers to what there is any likelihood that we, or anyone else, could do. It does not refer to what is conceptually possible. For more on this point, see pp. 184-86 and note 24 of this article.
3. For one interesting relevant discussion, see Edward Dolnick, "Deafness as Culture," The Atlantic Monthly (September 1993): 37-51. According to many in the deaf community, Dolnick reports, "deafness is not a disability. Instead, many deaf people now proclaim they are a subculture like any other. They are simply a linguistic minority (speaking American Sign Language) and are no more in need of a cure for their condition than are Haitians or Hispanics.... So strong is the feeling of cultural solidarity that many deaf parents cheer on discovering that their baby is deaf" (pp. 37-38).
4. For another interesting discussion of the human tendency to adjust one's sense of normalcy (one's self-conception), see Wilfrid Sheed, In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 9-54. "Polio," Sheed says, "caused me to lose something quite irreplacable, something I would have sworn I couldn't live without" (p. 13). But despite having feared that "I'd go crazy if I got polio and had to give up baseball, and of course football - and walking" (p. 26), he discovered that "the speed of mental adjustment can be quite uncanny" (p. 19) - that "you get used to things incredibly quickly, and are ransacking the horizon for new pleasures almost before the old ones are out the door" (p. 46). "If," Sheed confesses, "you'd told me just six months before that the height of happiness would soon consist of leaning on a pair of crutches and inhaling deeply, I'd have woken up screaming" (p. 34). But "once you are used to your new condition, your imagination becomes free once again to rest or amuse itself; you stop scanning the skies for miracles, and life returns to an agreeably small scale of operations" (p. 49). Like other polio victims he met, Sheed never thought of himself as "handicapped."
5. Recendy, both economists and psychologists have been very interested in the capacity human beings have to "adapt" to conditions they thought would be incompatible with their happiness. As economist George Loewenstein explains, "when any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary." In other words, we naturally adjust our conception of what counts as ordinary-for-us. See Jon Gertner, "The Futile Pursuit of Happiness," The New York Times Magazine (September 7, 2003): 44-47, 86, 90, especially p. 47.
6. "The law of reason which requires us to seek for this unity is a necessary law, since without it we should have no reason at all, and without reason no coherent employment of the understanding, and in the absence of this no sufficient criterion of empirical truth. In order, therefore, to secure an empirical criterion we have no option save to presuppose the systematic unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary" - Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, trans. (New York: St. Martin's, 1965), A651/B679, p. 538.
7. "It is in the view of reason, in the field of its theoretical employment, no less necessary to assume that everyone has ground to hope for happiness in the measure in which he has rendered himself by his conduct worthy of it..." - Critique of Pure Reason, A809/B837, p. 638.
8. In discussing the Highest Good, Paul Guyer calls attention to this basic feature which, according to Kant, every human ideal must have if it is to play a role in our choices: "Kant's position seems to be that while assurance that the noncontradictoriness of an end would be all that is needed from a theoretical point of view to make a course of action aimed at that end rational, human psychology is such that in fact it needs a greater incentive, a positive reason to believe its end is realizable" - "From a Practical Point of View: Kant's Conception of a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason," in Kant on Freedom, Lato, and Happiness (New York: Cambridge, 2000), pp. 333-71, here p. 364.
9. Allen Wood puts the situation very nicely: "Just as the dialectic of pure theoretical reason produces an illusion which 'unceasingly mocks and torments' us in our pursuit of knowledge, so the pursuit of the ideal of pure practical reason will lead us necessarily into the troubled waters of illusion also, where we will be threatened with the unattainability of an ideal which we ourselves cannot establish, but with which we cannot cease to concern ourselves without forsaking the rationality which is proper to our own nature" - Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1970), p. 98.
10. As Harry Frankfurt explains, a person "guides himself by reference to [his ideals]" - "On the Necessity of Ideals," in Necessity, Volition, and Love (New York: Cambridge, 1999), pp. 108-16, here p. 111. My point here is closely related to a familiar point about desires. As Alfred Mele explains, "If I am convinced that I cannot travel faster than the speed of light, or change the past, or defeat the current heavyweight champion of the world in a fair fight, then although I might wish that I could do these things, I do not desire to do them. Achieving the represented objects of action-desires is doxastically open for the agent: if she does not explicitly believe that she can A, at least she is not convinced that she cannot A.
11. Any desire to A ('A' being an action variable), by its very nature, inclines the agent, in some measure, to A intentionally, or to try to A, or to try to put herself in a position to A. This is part of what it is to be an action-desire" - "Motivational Strength," Noûs, XXXII, 1 (1998): 22-36, here 25. My point is that not only are our "action- desires" sensitive to our beliefs about what is possible, but that insofar as our ideals are not mere wishes, but actually guide our action-desires, they are under pressure to conform to our expectations. It is not (as I will soon have occasion to stress) that they cannot possibly defy our expectations, but that insofar as they do so, we have an incoherent/conflicted self-conception.
12. Alternatively, we could imagine her as an instance of a common phenomenon to which Sheed calls our attention: "The physical decrepitude of old age seems to bother people surprisingly little. When they were young, the old-timers around here must have dreaded the thought of someday looking the way they do now, all scales and wattles, but when it comes, it must seem like the only way to look" - In Love with Daylight, p. 239.
13. Again, this is Kant's point about regulative ideals. As Susan Neiman explains, "The positing of an end is equivalent to a demand for its realization, and ideas of reason simply are ends" - The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford, 1994), p. 69. "Regulative principles...[are] simultaneously ideas of and motives for the realization of, a certain possiblity" (p. 89).
14. In analyzing hope, J.P. Day succinctly expresses the conventional wisdom on the subject: "A cannot despair that P at the same time as he hopes that P..." - "Hope," American Philosophical Quarterly, VI (April 1969): 89-102, here p. 94.
15. Derek Parfit declares: "Grief isn't irrational simply because it brings unhappiness. To the claim 'Your sorrow is fruidess,' Hume replied, 'very true, and for that very reason I am sorry'" - Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford, 1984), p. 169. "We may," Parfit writes, "object to a world in which our loved ones are taken away, but if they are taken away, we do not want to fail to experience the fact, to register it as an evil." I hope it is clear that my agreement with Parfit is far greater than my disagreement. On my account, unhappiness is not irrational because it is fruitless. Rather, it is irrational because it includes the belief in the fruitlessness of hoping that things will be different. What is more, the irrationality at the heart of unhappiness is only a reason to avoid it. As I have stressed, there are often other, even better, reasons to be unhappy.
16. An ideal generally combines several valued things into one. Accordingly, it is rare that we must abandon an ideal entirely in order to avoid irrationality. As Little has reminded me, we can usually revise our ideals in such a way that aspects of the old remain in the new. Thus, the would-be dancer might strive to become a choreographer; the wheelchair-bound man who had been training to race the mile might strive to become the world's fastest paraplegic. Recently, some philosophers have suggested that we cannot betray our deepest values and ideals without destroying ourselves. Thus, according to Frankfurt, "Agamemnon at Aulis is destroyed by an inescapable conflict between two equally defining elements in his own nature: his love for his daughter and his love for the army he commands.... When he is forced to sacrifice one of these, he is thereby forced to betray himself. Rarely, if ever, do tragedies of this sort have sequels. Since the volitional unity of the tragic hero has been irreparably ruptured, there is a sense in which the person he had been no longer exists" - "Autonomy, Necessity, and Love," in his Necessity, Volition, and Love, pp. 129-41, here p. 139, n. 8. Similarly, Christine Korsgaard argues that "to violate [the conceptions of yourself that are most important to you] is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are.
17. That is, it is to no longer be able to think of yourself under the description under which you value yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. It is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead" - The Sources of Normativity (New York: Cambridge, 1996), p. 102.
18. I think David Velleman is right to criticize such claims as obsuring the distinction between a person's self-conception and her identity (her "self") - between self-betrayal and suicide - see his "Identification and Identity," in Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, eds., Contours of Agency (Cambridge: MIT, 2002), pp. 97-100. A severe blow to one's self-conception may be worse than death, but it is not the same thing: one can suffer such blows without ceasing to exist. (Think, for example, of what happens to Lord Jim at the beginning of Conrad's novel - and of how he, the same Lord Jim, responds to having done what he knows that he - Lord Jim-would never do, and so could not possibly have done.)
19. An appreciation of the fact that we can survive profound changes in our self-conception should warn us against mistaking the contingent, though very real, limitations on our possibilities for conceptual limitations that we could not, even in principle, exceed without ceasing to be. In other words, though a person's good clearly depends on who and what she is, it is conceptually possible for a person to change so much that her good changes too. Indeed, for all we have reason to believe about the conditions of personal identity, a person could persist as a member of another species; and so, for all we know, she could, in principle, acquire the features that would make flying an essential component of her good. Aristotle is right when he reminds us that "no one [who is rational] chooses to possess the whole world if he has first to become someone else...; he wishes for this only on condition of being whatever he is" - Nicomachean Ethics, W.D. Ross, trans., in The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon, ed. (New York: Random House, 1941), 1166A19, p. 1081.
20. But it does not follow, as Nussbaum suggests in commenting on this passage, that what could possibly be a good for us is limited by our imagination. Even if a life "was so remote from mine that I could not imagine in it a person whom I could accept as identical with myself" - "Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundation of Ethics," in J.E.J. Altham and Ross Harrison, eds., World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (New York: Cambridge, 1995), pp. 86-131, here p. 91 - it might nonetheless be a life I could live. If this possibility exceeds the limits of my imagination, then it is not relevant to my ideals, and so, as Korsgaard and Frankfurt remind us, it cannot constrain my choices; it is nothing I must, or can, be "true to" in deciding what to do. We can concede all this, however, while at the same time acknowledging that I could, conceivably, acquire ideals in the future which would require such a great self-transformation that I cannot now imagine surviving it.
21. The account offered here sheds light on a basic feature of happiness to which Charles Larmore calls our attention in a recent article: "We are never in a position to grasp in advance the full character of our good, even in its broad outline. As a result, our happiness includes not just the anticipated good we achieve, but also the unexpected good which happens to us" - "The Idea of a Life Plan," Social Philosophy and Policy, XVI, 1 (Winter 1999): 96-112, here p. 103.
22. Someone who is profoundly depressed might seem to fit this description: she is too depressed to hope for anything because she is too depressed to care about anything. In most cases of serious clinical depression, however, the person is in such great pain that she desperately hopes the pain will go away. This motive for suicide is distinct from the "anti-motive" of having nothing to live for, though clearly, the latter is a source of the former; and the power of the former reinforces the latter. Following the next paragraph in the text, I call attention to how extremely difficult it is for us to reduce the intensity of certain basic forms of suffering by simply picking new targets for our hope. Because hopeless despair is affectless despair, it is easy not to notice that one is in this condition. For a powerful description of this numb state of self-alienation, consider the following poem by Emily Dickinson: "There is a pain - so utter - / It swallows substance up - / Then covers the Abyss with Trance - / So Memory can step/ Around - across - upon it - / As one within a Swoon - / Goes safely - where an open eye/ Would drop Him-Bone by Bone," from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1979), Volume II, p. 460.
23. Spinoza, Rousseau, and many others have tried to impress upon us how much our happiness depends on our ability to recognize and accept what we cannot change. This article can be read, in large part, as an exploration of this Stoic insight, and an attempt to show that the connection between refusing to accept what is necessary and being unhappy is a more intimate connection than that between cause and effect. It is interesting to compare my remarks about resignation with the following comment by Allan Bloom: "Irony flourishes on the disproportion between the way things are and the way they should be while accepting the necessity of this disproportion. It is a classical style because the ancients did not expect that reality could become rational...moderation, rather than being the expression of a timid or easygoing soul, was for them the expression of one who has overcome hope and therefore indignation.... In short, irony seems to presuppose the distinction between theory and practice..." - Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 193.
24. According to Darwall, "practical reason includes no intrinsic requirement that we care either about others or about ourselves, since rational agency seems possible without even the capacity to care about a person, oneself or another, for that person's sake" - "Self-interest and Self-concern," pp. 169-70. I am inclined to disagree. My point, however, is that even if Darwall is correct, reason in its theoretical capacity does support (at least one form of) our self-concern.
25. "Contractualism and Utilitarianism," in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (New York: Cambridge, 1982), pp. 103-28, here p. 119.