On Unhappy Philosophers

[Nobody] can live a happy life [beate], or even a tolerable [tolerabiliter] one life, without the study of wisdom; you know also that a happy life is reached when our wisdom is brought to completion, but that life is at least tolerable even when our wisdom is only inchoate [inchoata].--Seneca, Letter 16.

It is imprudent to go around telling people that they are unhappy. Yet, sometimes it is the right thing to do. To this day I remain grateful to a college friend, Angela Finney, who told me at the end of a long talk at a party, "You know, Eric, one is allowed to be happy in romance; and you are not happy now in yours." It was a revelation to me. Yet, these things do not always end well: in a moment of Dutch frankness, I once told a high school friend that she seemed unhappy with her fiancee--she told me to walk the walk or shut up. I had not foreseen that response; our friendship was never the same again, alas.

If I am irritated, telling me that I am angry, tends to annoy. I recall once being very frustrated by an encounter with scientology proselytizers who told me that I was unhappy; at the time, I was a teenager, and undoubtedly not quite at ease with myself. Even so, I thought, 'who are they to tell me...'  

Few professional philosophers would be willing to defend any of Seneca's claims above. Least of all would we be willing to defend the idea that without philosophy a tolerable life is impossible. It would be implausible for us to do so because there is considerable evidence that professional philosophy deforms our reactive attitudes (recall here and here), and given the routine meanness and bullying we tolerate (recall here and here), it stands to reason there is quite a bit of unhappiness among victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. So, we are in a bad position to lecture anybody else. Of course, these facts do not undermine Seneca's claims because professional philosophy is so far removed from what he has in mind that he might even cite these facts as evidence for his position.

But even if we focus on the joyful aspects of contemporary philosophy, our democratic anti-elitist sensibility would make most of us recoil from suggesting to non-philosophers that they cannot be happy without philosophy. We accept the idea that individuals can pursue their own happiness or life-plans on political grounds (even if we allow a few nudges for less articulate others).

More modestly, even being somebody else's disciple often strikes us as a way of not being authentically happy. In his letter, Seneca (the author) acknowledges this point, when he addresses the unhappiness and impatience which his purported correspondent, Lucilius, had (apparently) expressed.

Yet, whatever philosophy fully amounts to for Seneca -- and in this letter he disassociates it from certain metaphysical issues (i.e., whether the system of necessity, the Epicurean system of chance, or a providential account of nature is true)* --, philosophy includes developing the disposition to have desires in proportion to one's means. This cultivation is also intellectual because our immoderate desires follow from ways of thought that [are (by definition) non-philosophical and] partake in error. As Seneca puts it, "the false has no limits" [error immensus est.] So, grasping the true is -- as Spinoza taught -- co-extensive with controlling one's appetites.

Now, given that our political economies as much as our universities encourage (as Rousseau warned) to dream beyond our means, few of us will be enduring-ly happy by Seneca's lights whatever our adopted lifestyle. If a prophet were to preach 'Seneca's gospel,' she might well be able to create a successful youtube franchise around it (and, thus, undermine her very credibility), but we would not let her teach our undergraduates.

But let's suppose that Seneca is right about the fundamentals here, then it is tempting to think that the only rational response to Seneca is, if one doesn't shrug, inner withdrawal. Yet, perhaps, a true friend of mankind -- a philosopher -- might meet the challenge of thinking an alternative political economy such that we could all be encouraged to trust ourselves and mould our souls toward a healthier, even happier path. And, perhaps, on the sixth day of her labors, she would imagine a way to configure professional philosophy such that we become a community of intellectual friends rather than hunters for prestige, status, and bourgeois comforts.

 

*Note I am not claiming that Seneca rejects metaphysics.

Comments

[Ruth Groff]

I love that: pleonexia as a property of the false, and not just the reverse.

[Mark Anderson]

If you are right that professional philosophers are "hunters for prestige, status, and bourgeois comforts," then I repeat my refrain: professional philosophers are not philosophers. Some philosophers happen to make a living by teaching, but it can't be irrelevant that the majority of those caught up in the various problems of contemporary "philosophy" would identify themselves, or be identified by their peers, as "professional" philosophers.