“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” But what is that “happiness,” which is so precious that it is worth pursuing alongside with the other two prized possessions? According to Aristotle, it is “not pleasure but freedom from pain, what the wise man will aim at.” (Nichomachean Ethics). Yet, to suggest that in our pursuit of happiness, all we want is the absence of pain, would be inadequate and incomplete. In the words of Schopenhauer, who discusses this Aristotelian passage in the first section of his Counsels and Maxims (in Parerga and Paralipomena), “the truth of this remark turns upon the negative character of happiness, the fact that pleasure is only the negation of pain, and that pain is the positive element in life.”
(Observe that I am deliberately maintaining the ambiguity of the word positive in my comments here, one sense of it being ‘independent, unqualified,’ and the other ‘assertive, progressive,’ etc. One may argue of course that Schopenhauer uses it in the first sense, and I myself, in the second, but there seems to be more than meets the eye here. There is also a subtle connection between the two, if you will recall my argument that Goodness is positive in the first sense, while Evil is derivative, dependent on the Kantian Undinge.)
Why is the answer incomplete? Schopenhauer here is attempting to go beyond Aristotle, and substantially contradicts him, inasmuch as he is equating pleasure with the negation of pain, whereas Aristotle clearly puts them at odds: ‘not pleasure, but freedom from pain.’
However, my interest in the ‘pursuit of happiness’ cannot be equated with ‘happiness’ itself. The negative character of such a pursuit does not easily follow from what Schopenhauer calls ‘the negative character of happiness.’ The pursuit itself cannot be entirely negative, which it will be, if its object is negative. In that case, the ‘pursuit of’ turns into an ‘escape from,’ and loses its meaning. In other words, a negative pursuit is not a pursuit at all, but an escape.
Therefore, happiness cannot have a strictly negative character. It has to be properly balanced, in order to validate the pursuit. It must include at least two components, one of which, the avoidance of pain, is negative. (I cannot deny this negative facet to happiness, because I am perfectly willing to concede that a successful escape will result in happiness.) But where is the positive element of happiness, then? Not in a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” split personality, escaping from pain, but at the same time, pursuing pain, as ‘the positive element of life.’ Indeed, a positive pursuit consistent with the negativity of the escape, that is, a happiness that does not contain a basic contradiction, ought to be the answer.
Remarkably, Schopenhauer is by no means mistaken, when he asserts that “pain is the positive element in life.” While it would be sick to suggest that the pursuit of happiness can be equated with a pursuit of pain, even in the pathological case of masochism, there is a solution to the problem of the objective existence of pain, constantly interfering with our pursuit of happiness. It is to reexamine and redefine the pain, in the manner of the Stoic approach to pain, so that our positive pursuit becomes, in fact, the pursuit of the other side of the coin, that is, trying to identify the positive component in the source of our pain, thus turning our escape from the negative aspect of the source into a positive pursuit.
Ironically, the abject misery of human existence, which interferes with our pursuit of happiness to the point of killing it altogether, arises not so much from the objective pain, which I was talking about in the previous paragraph, but from the additional burden of subjective pain, which is the result of our failure to properly identify the object of our pursuit, that being a false idea of ‘happiness,’ or the inability on our part to come up with any such object. By the same token as a successful escape can result in happiness, a failed pursuit or a false pursuit results in unhappiness, to the point of total misery.
(Observe that I am deliberately maintaining the ambiguity of the word positive in my comments here, one sense of it being ‘independent, unqualified,’ and the other ‘assertive, progressive,’ etc. One may argue of course that Schopenhauer uses it in the first sense, and I myself, in the second, but there seems to be more than meets the eye here. There is also a subtle connection between the two, if you will recall my argument that Goodness is positive in the first sense, while Evil is derivative, dependent on the Kantian Undinge.)
Why is the answer incomplete? Schopenhauer here is attempting to go beyond Aristotle, and substantially contradicts him, inasmuch as he is equating pleasure with the negation of pain, whereas Aristotle clearly puts them at odds: ‘not pleasure, but freedom from pain.’
However, my interest in the ‘pursuit of happiness’ cannot be equated with ‘happiness’ itself. The negative character of such a pursuit does not easily follow from what Schopenhauer calls ‘the negative character of happiness.’ The pursuit itself cannot be entirely negative, which it will be, if its object is negative. In that case, the ‘pursuit of’ turns into an ‘escape from,’ and loses its meaning. In other words, a negative pursuit is not a pursuit at all, but an escape.
Therefore, happiness cannot have a strictly negative character. It has to be properly balanced, in order to validate the pursuit. It must include at least two components, one of which, the avoidance of pain, is negative. (I cannot deny this negative facet to happiness, because I am perfectly willing to concede that a successful escape will result in happiness.) But where is the positive element of happiness, then? Not in a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” split personality, escaping from pain, but at the same time, pursuing pain, as ‘the positive element of life.’ Indeed, a positive pursuit consistent with the negativity of the escape, that is, a happiness that does not contain a basic contradiction, ought to be the answer.
Remarkably, Schopenhauer is by no means mistaken, when he asserts that “pain is the positive element in life.” While it would be sick to suggest that the pursuit of happiness can be equated with a pursuit of pain, even in the pathological case of masochism, there is a solution to the problem of the objective existence of pain, constantly interfering with our pursuit of happiness. It is to reexamine and redefine the pain, in the manner of the Stoic approach to pain, so that our positive pursuit becomes, in fact, the pursuit of the other side of the coin, that is, trying to identify the positive component in the source of our pain, thus turning our escape from the negative aspect of the source into a positive pursuit.
Ironically, the abject misery of human existence, which interferes with our pursuit of happiness to the point of killing it altogether, arises not so much from the objective pain, which I was talking about in the previous paragraph, but from the additional burden of subjective pain, which is the result of our failure to properly identify the object of our pursuit, that being a false idea of ‘happiness,’ or the inability on our part to come up with any such object. By the same token as a successful escape can result in happiness, a failed pursuit or a false pursuit results in unhappiness, to the point of total misery.
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