Preface
The other day, I had a great conversation with someone, who followed up with an email sharing a chat he had with Gemini about the 'hard problem of consciousness' in philosophy, which inspired me to send him an article I had written. The original piece was in Chinese, so I asked Gemini to translate it into English in the style of E. B. White. It did a remarkably elegant job, requiring just a couple of minor tweaks to the phrasing.
I often find myself—and I suspect I am not alone in this—acting the part of a shrewd shopkeeper, keeping a mental ledger of my own contentment. The modern mind, it seems, has a peculiar habit of treating the soul as a sort of corner store, forever taking inventory. We look over the shelves of our lives, trying to arrive at a tidy sum. Over here is the price the world has pinned on us (let us call it P): our titles, our fame, our assets, the applause of the crowd. Over there is the value we assign to ourselves (call it V): our cultivation, our honor, our sense of duty and calling. We add them up, P plus V, hoping the arithmetic will yield some reliable index of happiness.
Consider trying to purchase a little joy using what Mr. Kant called "understanding" (Verstand). This particular faculty of the mind insists that everything must have a cause, a price tag, and a consequence. In this busy marketplace of determinism, if I am pleased by fetching a good price, it must be because of some external stimulus—I have played by the rules of the trade and met a demand. Yet, the moment we accept the price tag, we become prisoners of cause and effect. A man has to understand the practical workings of the world to survive it, naturally, or he will end up getting the short end of the stick. But understanding the world does not, as a rule, make a man happy; more often than not, the clearer he sees the bars of his own cage, the more acutely he feels the confinement.
Alternatively, we might let "reason" (Vernunft) take the wheel, breaking the chains of causality to seek out an "intrinsic value"—something unconditional, requiring no further explanation. This is a teleology led by free will. Kant warns us, however, that if a purpose is something we have to evaluate, it runs the risk of falling into the category of "the good" (das Gute), and for Kant, "the good" is still tangled up with personal interests. What's more, this intrinsic value I so proudly claim for myself is easily swayed. It is nudged by the behavior of the crowd and manipulated by ambitious men painting grand visions, entirely without my noticing. When a man's intrinsic value shatters, he usually turns right around and chases the market price with twice the madness.
In short, calculating an index of happiness is a fool's arithmetic, and more complicated formulas fare no better. Kant would likely agree: so long as happiness is reduced to an equation, it remains either a captive of cause and effect or a puppet of purpose. You feel happy because the market priced you high, or because you think highly of yourself. The moment the market slumps or your self-esteem wavers, the whole ledger of happiness spills into the red.
* * * * * * * *
To escape this prison of the understanding and the swindle of reason, I have tried my hand at various methods of breaking out. I have been lucky enough, in these jailbreaks, to experience moments of pure joy. It feels rather like the ebbing of a tide: the worries that usually crowd the mind suddenly recede into the distance, leaving behind a long, quiet stretch of white sand. For a long time, I didn't think much about where this joy came from. Only recently did it dawn on me that this unadulterated happiness—the kind that requires no anxious peering into a mirror to check one's reflection—arises entirely from brief, useless, and aimless collisions with the universe, whether in its grandest expanses or its tiniest particulars.
That severe Prussian, Kant, also troubled himself over how to build a bridge between the natural world of cause and effect and the spiritual world of the will, hoping to ease the friction between rigid causality and wayward desire. In his monumental Critique of Judgment, he wrote that he found this bridge in the appreciation of the "beautiful" and the "sublime." His successors, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, felt much the same. I tend to think this bridge can be found in every corner our senses can reach. When I look up at a shaft of golden light piercing a dark cloud, trace the winding curve of the coastline, or breathe in the smell of the woods in early spring, my senses aren't trying to parse out the ingredients (which is the business of the understanding), nor are they trying to own the thing (which is the business of desire). In that fleeting moment, the marketplace in the mind simply closes for the day.
It is exactly because the shop is closed that we are free to attend the banquet. The universe is a somewhat indifferent but exceedingly generous host. It lays out the vast and the microscopic, the stiff and the yielding dances of geometry, the endless gradations of color, the infinite vibrations of sound, spreading them all before us to take as we please. It is a one-way feast. The joy in it is pure precisely because there is no obligation to tip the waiter. I don't have to pay for the pleasure, nor do I have to make any promises in return.
We are always a little afraid of this aimlessness; we are convinced that joy must be a reward. But the universe cares nothing for what is deserved or undeserved. It merely presents itself, leaving us to do the gathering. We have grown so accustomed to the transaction, so used to the logic of "because" and "therefore," that we have forgotten our most primitive right—the right of the hunter-gatherer who lives at the mercy of the elements. Really, happiness is more like a wild berry meant to be picked on a whim. It happens in those quiet intervals when we temporarily suspend our need to figure out what the world is good for.
* * * * * * * *
I am not, my friends, suggesting we drop everything and go live on dew and wind. The economic life of a community requires the exchange of labor and goods—that is how prices are born in the first place, rooted in our mutual dependence. When community life scales up into something called civilization, the fate of the individual and the group become tightly bound together, and it becomes necessary to set goals, to rally our will, to marshal our resources. The historical evidence for P and V speaks for itself. Still, a nation requires three classes of people to watch over the common folk engaged in the business of getting and spending: the warriors, to secure and defend the resources; the philosophers, to point the way and foster cooperation; and the poets—often overlooked—to bring the people a little joy. Without the poets, wouldn't we just be living in Sparta?
The same is true of the individual. At different stages of life, or even within the span of a single Tuesday, we take turns playing the warrior, the philosopher, and the poet. Without the warrior, it is hard to stay alive. Without the philosopher, what is the point of staying alive at all? And without the poet, we would never know pure joy, and life would be little more than a chain of hard, wearying chores. The philosopher gives his lectures in the morning; the warrior fights under the midday sun; and the poet, just before bedtime, leads us into the realm of beauty, helping us to rest and slip into sleep. Is the poet not important? You tell me: is getting a good night's sleep important, or isn't it?
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