The Forking Monster

Continuing the present investigation, we can see from the previous post that there is a two-headed monster lying upon our path to happiness. This monster, or simply fork in the road, points to a need for a delicate balance between purposefulness and satisfaction. (Keep in mind that I am doing metaphysics here. I do not point to "reality" as such, but rather to a framework where my reality might fulfill my expectations.) We want to avoid the simple hedonistic variation of happiness because of its ungrounded nature. Similarly, we want to avoid the the negative consequence of choosing a purpose that has us blindly and happily pursuing some or other form of general mischief.

One important thing to note about the nature of this investigation is that it is before the fact. Here, I am not building a structure of justification, as one might upon looking back in hindsight. Justification in this sense is completely unimportant. For, what good does justification do to change the way we look at a life that was undeniably unhappy? As long as we are still able to be honest with ourselves, such a task becomes trivial and possibly self-negating. In fact, the affirming component of justification for this investigation lies somewhere in the future. What else would justify it but that it makes me happy? For these precepts to be useful, they must be applied forward. Therefore, whenever some good comes of this investigation, it is already looking forward and is informed by the past. It is not some way of looking at the past in a new light.

With that note, where can we find the proper framework for looking at and weighing our hedonistic happiness, our purposes, and the ways they are intertwined? Should it be a framework that speaks to both aspects in the same language? If so, how can we come to what must be a form of common denominator?

In order to provide this framework, I will need to extract some useful work from the philosophical tradition, especially from Wittgenstein. I want to be perspicuous here, and so I shall attempt to show the nature of the framework from the top, down. I want least of all to build up some system by slowly calling upon and manipulating some reservoir of "intuitions". An important sense that I want to bring out is that the common denominator is not even systemic in nature. But, to begin, I want to share a vision of how to talk about language.

Many philosophers of language have endorsed and furthered a process of examining language that has produced a peculiar and detrimental practice of utilizing thought experiments. To be exceedingly brief, the experiments often utilize fantastical circumstances in order to inform about the extremes of lingual meaning. The idea is for them to "cage in" a word, so to speak, by delimiting the boundaries of sense quite literally. The problem is that the normal mechanisms for establishing meaning do not resemble fantastical thought experiments. Further, the practice of drawing lines so important to common theories of meaning in the philosophy of language is, in fact, inimical to the process of language evolution. To paint an analogy, it would be to assume that if we could take a slice in prehistoric time and analyze it enough, we would have achieved the essence of knowledge or understanding that holds true today. Our language would simply follow from what we knew then logically, instead of from the essentially stochastic nature of evolution that we now endorse in science.

This is very much in the tradition of Platonic ideas. According to that tradition, meaning in language is some variation of a mind reaching into an eternal space of concepts and attaching them to some representation in the world. Against this, I take the Wittgensteinian route of tracing the meanings in language across to human behaviors and practices. In short, meaning is entirely cultural. We must carefully remember also that culture is entirely human. (Here, I make no claim or reference to animal culture, I make no important differentiation between humans and animals, and I leave this point untouched as entirely irrelevant to the present discussion.)

Wittgenstein took the utmost cautions when investigating language. Here I am only investigating happiness. However, my initial investigation was very un-Wittgensteinian in that I entirely ignored the grammar of the word happiness. I completely ignored the ways we already use the world and all the different types of importance it can take on. You might say that I simply borrowed the word as a pretty good stand-in for what I am actually seeking. I defined what I am seeking in the earlier posts as quite specific. Remember that I am not showing a revealing light upon the happiness we already carried before this investigation. I am revealing a way to make decisions at this point in my life whose importance most nearly looks like achieving or being happy.

The common denominator is, following my care stated above, somewhere in the acts and uses, practices and cultures of human beings. In the next post I will look more carefully at the host of acts and practices that fall closest to those I would need in creating my framework. Stay tuned.

The Structure of Happiness

From the previous post, I tried to show how the meaning of happiness is distinct from the concept of satisfaction. It might be beneficial to get a little more formal with the terms that I am using. The word satisfaction shares the Latin root satis with the word satiation, which means sufficient. Here, the answer to the question for whom or for what is not entirely clear. Colloquially, satisfaction can be a sufficiency for any number of objects. We can construct an artificial distinction between two types of satisfied things; those that are under control and those that are not. For example, an itch is something for which scratching is sufficient, but the satisfaction is clearly not for an object under one's control. Of course, I can control it by scratching, but I cannot control whether or not I feel itchy. Therefore, when I scratch myself in an itchy spot, I am satisfying an urge or desire that it outside my control. (It is important to note that my distinction plays into a mind/body mythological duality. For common purposes, it might be more apt to simply state that scratching is my control over the itchy feeling. But the artificial distinction helps to characterize an important part I want to highlight about satisfaction.)

With the previous example, we can now see a difference between satisfaction with regard to the projects we set forth and those that are foisted upon us. An itch might be characterized as something forced upon us; we can only choose whether or not to satisfy it. A project we set out to accomplish, even though much of it might be inherited in a very important sense, does not fall under our simple framework vis-a-vis itching. Both the doing and the finishing of projects are thought of as involving one or another manner of satisfaction. Perhaps a project demands the consideration of an itch; its presence may demand that you see it to completion or vow to give it up. But often we find that projects can simply languish or fade away, either to be taken up later or forgotten altogether.

Here, we can see that what counts as satisfaction can depend upon the nature of the project. We can derive all of the relevant satisfaction from simply doing within the project. In fact, we could create a project whose purpose was to be satisfied while doing irrespective of an end point or culmination. In contrast, we may set ourselves a goal that brings satisfaction independent of the means. (This may be a contentious point. I am half-inclined to argue that such an entirely independent distinction may undercut its own framework of justification.) What we see is that the same word, satisfaction, can be used correctly to describe many different cases of sufficiency. The concept itself does not indicate the nature of the question to whom or to what. So, in asking the question, what should I do, navigating the potentially difficult paths of satisfaction could lead to interesting difficulties. I will outline two of them below.

First, however, I will try to show how the structure of happiness is importantly inherent in the structure of satisfaction that I outlined above. To me, the satisfaction in the doing itself is constitutive of happiness. Apart from that distinction, it must also be contained within a project that separates it from the types of simple satisfactions granted upon scratching an itch. Therefore, we have a goal or purpose as an important factor in its presence but as inessential in its content. Happiness becomes a way of doing or being in satisfaction that is importantly aware of itself through one or another goal.

The nature of happiness that I outlined above creates problems that both derive from and are illustrative of its structure. In the case of the project whose purpose is to derive a certain satisfaction in doing, the goal of the project is a reflection on the doing. Doing what? This goal is problematic and leads to what I will describe as the hedonistic variation of happiness. Without a proper starting point that informs and structures the doing, the prescribed acts themselves become a product of something like intuition. This may not be altogether bad if one believes that intuition is somehow informed or itself justified. But the problem with intuition is that it is plastic, perhaps by definition. (Wouldn't we have derived principles from mere intuition if they were, in fact, as fixed and definable as rules?) As the degree of happiness in such a reflexively-oriented purpose changes, it is impossible to tell what manner of change (in what direction?) might constitute a return to the happier doing by any metric that is not itself merely "intuitive". Therefore, the nature of the doing in such a structure could only define happiness in terms of what intuitively feels happy, which is clearly a system that tends toward the merely satisfying. On those terms, one could never know when she is passing from a fulfilling happiness to purely hedonistic revelry. In fact, being overly-sated is a direct result of such a reflexive structure.

Now, it is clear that happiness has a structure, although it is clearly not a thing or object. In aiming for it, I inadvertently aim to miss it. However, when I bring the focus of a goal upon the structure to provide a clarifying metric for happiness in doing, I encounter another problem. The structure of a project that would bring the distinct satisfaction of happiness keeps its goal as present but non-essential. The non-essentiallity of the goal leaves room for missing the happiness in choosing the goal. (My goal cannot be defined by its reference to making me happy, as that case is identical to the hedonistic variation of happiness.) It also leaves room for happily furthering some or other deplorable purpose. This dual-horned possibility in approaching the meaningful variation of happiness is the reason behind the present investigation.

I will investigate these two paths and how they are impacting me now in future posts.

Revisiting Satisfaction and Happiness

As outlined earlier, I am stuck in an ethical debate that is somewhat abstract. Specifically, I am trying to analyze and come clear on which major criteria I should set for myself between satisfaction and happiness. I noted before that part of the problem in the debate could lie in the fact that happiness is so difficult for me to define - even on a personal level! Aside from holding dear some notion of happiness that I might share, I cannot even dig within myself to separate what might be considered happiness from mere satisfaction. But before I get too deeply into discussion of both factors, I first wish to point out what seems to me an important difference between the two notions - that difference that spurned my thinking in the first place!

During so many endless hours of physical exertion that was cycling training, I could not help but feel the excitement and joy that my training was constructed to obtain. I approached the sport from the ground up, taking a moment of informed inspiration to construct a plan, an edifice, whose topmost point would allow me to reach my lofty goals. Now, on any given day, my training called for any manner of difficult to insane amounts of training as a matter of course. But each day it was as if the entire structure, the whole plan - anywhere I touched it - became as grand a feeling as the endpoint it was set forth to achieve. What I found was a distinct happiness - that suffering could not serve to taint the purpose or goal with the chords of laziness.

Here was clearly a beast not akin to satisfaction. Nothing about the brief satisfaction of an end to the temporary suffering could actually motivate me to step on my bike the next day. Whatever it was that drove me so intensely toward my purpose, its form was something very different from satisfaction. Perhaps it was satisfying to be riding. But that conflicts heavily with something I took as a principle of my plan - I was simply not doing enough unless I had breached the bounds of comfort. Though there was certainly satisfaction in the act, my plan would hardly have been successful if not for every moment it could push me beyond my limits.

I am chasing something here, and what I've come to call it is happiness. Perhaps there is a better word (insanity?) to define the nature of that feeling, of that enabling ability. Whatever it is, I can already see that it should play a leading role in my life. I only hope to define it better through the coming posts and to continue teasing out the parts that define it. Upon completion, I hope to see how I can then take this chiseled notion and apply it to my own direction.

What to do? (reprise)

As I begin to contemplate the type of trajectory to take through my life, I am always confronted with what at first seems to be a superficial consideration. I am currently wrestling with whether or not to use money as a point of departure for my decisions. Alas, after some thinking and consideration, it occurs to be that there is a fundamental difference between at least two ways of looking at it. Do I want to be happy, or do I rather wish to be satisfied? Without an easily intelligible framework for tackling happiness, the types of justifications I wrestle with often bounce back into the realm of satisfaction or monetary compensation. I cannot even define what it is that might be considered the object of my happiness – indeed, staking my happiness upon an object seems to me the foremost incorrect way to go about it.

The problem revolves much around my personality. I am utterly astonished at the breadth of possible vocations, hobbies, acts, sports, and so on that have contributed something I could only refer to as hedonistic happiness. In some ways I have certainly felt a deeper happiness, but unfortunately, there is no common denominator among those rare occurrences. Perhaps I should look to a specific example, say, one of leadership. There have been experiences in my life where the success of my leadership has registered incredible highs. I cannot quantify (dare I use so brusque a word?) the relationship of such an experience to either my own selfish fulfillment or some altruistic good. In fact, I only roughly discern that there is a loophole through which my capacity to be selfish might have slipped. I would call upon altruism as justification, but it appears fuzzy. Therefore, at this point I might simply count such an experience against myself.

I am certainly deep within some manner of ethical debate. Before I can adequately root through the breadth I spoke of earlier, I must convince myself that I see it rightly. In other words, to pick and choose the right vocation requires that my criteria for selection are not themselves questionable. And thus, the distinction among perhaps the foremost of those criteria of satisfaction and happiness is of paramount importance.

So what are the terms of this debate?