[This transcript was generated by AI, so while I’ve checked it over, it may contain small errors.]
REBECCA
Hi, I’m Rebecca Lowe, and welcome to Working Definition — the new philosophy podcast in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts, with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.
Today, I’m joined by Henry Oliver. Henry’s a writer and a literary critic. He’s the author of Second Act, an excellent book about late bloomers. He runs the popular Substack, The Common Reader. And he’s a research fellow and emerging scholar at the Mercatus Center, which means we’re colleagues. He’s also one of my favourite people to talk with.
So I’m delighted — I’d even say I’m happy — that he’s here with me today. And yes, we’re going to be talking about happiness. Thanks for joining me, Henry.
HENRY
Thank you for having me. I’m obviously delighted to be here. [laughter]
REBECCA
So we’ve already made our first distinction — delight / happy. What makes you happy, Henry Oliver?
HENRY
I like reading books, hanging out with my kids, having philosophical conversations like this. [laughter] I’m quite easy to please.
REBECCA
Is there some kind of unequivocal example of something that makes you happy? So by this I guess I mean every time you experience this thing it makes you happy, and every time it’s fully happiness that you’re experiencing.
HENRY
I don’t think such things exist because I would say that happiness is quite context dependent.
But I think there are things that are very close to what you’re describing. So listening to Mozart, eating chocolate, things like that, very rarely fail to work. But if you’re in the middle of a profound grief, or a major bureaucratic annoyance, and someone comes in and starts playing Mozart while you’re filling in a form, I don’t think it can — I don’t think it — you see what I mean? It can’t sort of nullify the pre-existing effect of the bad thing.
So that’s my general view of happiness.
REBECCA
That’s very interesting. So one distinction I think is quite useful when thinking about happiness is some kind of temporary state of mind, some kind of overwhelming positive feeling. And a more, kind of, happiness as a disposition — or some people think of it as happiness across your lifetime, over a long period of time.
Being generally happy, we might call the second of those things.
HENRY
Exactly.
REBECCA
So, I think I would probably be willing to say something like, when I eat the chocolate bar — when I do feel that state of mind, that happiness — I think maybe I can feel that pretty fully. Even if I am in otherwise a state of grief, or maybe I’ve broken my leg and I’m in a lot of pain.
Does that match what you’re saying? Or do you still think it’s the case that you can’t be happy if there’s bad stuff going on?
HENRY
I think there are overwhelmingly difficult or bad emotions. And that they are overwhelming, and it’s very hard to counteract them with small things like that.
REBECCA
So you don’t think happiness can be overwhelming?
HENRY
I think happiness can be overwhelming.
REBECCA
Yep.
HENRY
All I’m saying is, you know, Mozart makes me happy. But the idea that Mozart makes me happy every time, in a reliable way, has to be countered with the fact that if I’ve just stubbed my toe, it won’t work.
REBECCA
Okay, so we’re making a distinction, I think, here then between the state of mind that is happiness, which could be some overwhelming feeling, and the things that make us happy. And I think the thing you’re not willing to go and commit to — which I asked you — is for an example of happiness, some particular thing about which, let’s say, you’re unequivocally happy. So it could be the case that you could have this overwhelming state of positive state of mind of happiness, even in a bad time.
HENRY
Yes.
REBECCA
But Mozart isn’t going to be the thing that could always do that, for instance.
HENRY
No, if we’re going to say hold other things equal, yes Mozart, chocolate. I think the list actually is fairly obvious for most people. Hanging out with my kids, seeing my wife. I think these things are just — seeing a wonderful tree in autumn when the sunlight is at the right angle. You know, great art. I think everyone knows in a way...
REBECCA
Yes.
HENRY
That to me is not the relevant question as it were.
REBECCA
That’s very interesting. So I think an early distinction I’d like to make is something like — there’s a question about what happiness is. And I think we’re coming down, at least in terms of the state of mind sense of happiness, about some kind of overwhelmingly positive feeling. We don’t know always when it occurs, or the conditions in which it obtains. Then the second question is something like, what makes you happy?
Those are different questions, right?
HENRY
Yes, yes.
REBECCA
Because to ask what makes you happy, you have to have some idea of what happiness is.
HENRY
Exactly.
REBECCA
I think it presupposes —
HENRY
Exactly.
REBECCA
You were happy to…[laughter] I’m going to keep saying this! That was actually unintentional, which makes me happy in itself [laughter]
HENRY
We’re discovering so much happiness just by doing it! [laughter]
REBECCA
You were happy to give me an example — several examples — straight up, of things that generally do make you attain this state of happiness. So that’s what the state of happiness is, or what happiness is.
Second, what are the things that make you happy?
There’s a third question, which we’ll get on to in a moment, about why happiness is important, whether happiness is good. Whether it is a good, as the philosophers sometimes say. We even talk about bads. I find this funny. [laughter]
And then the fourth one is something like — we are in America, after all — we’re two English people in America — there’s this idea of pursuing happiness. Is that something you should do? If so, how do you do it?
So I think those are four broad questions. We don’t have to answer all of them, but having some sense of them being different is…
HENRY
Oh, no, we can answer all of them! Let’s be ambitious! Ambition makes you happy, right?
REBECCA
Okay! So in that case, let’s try and bank a kind of starting working definition for the main question at hand. In this podcast, we think about these contested philosophical concepts, and today we’re talking about happiness.
So in terms of what happiness is, I’m happy, I think, initially to say something like, there’s a difference between the state of mind, the disposition, and maybe the bigger sense of happiness you might want to accord to someone over a lifetime.
But if we start on that state of mind sense — and I think that’s important, because I don’t think the other ideas make any sense without it. I don’t think you’d be generally happy, unless you have some of these moments of state of mind happiness. Is that true? Do you think these other senses trade on it? Similarly, I don’t think you can pursue happiness unless that involves the state of mind sense of happiness.
Am I going too far?
HENRY
I don’t know. There is an idea in psychology, which is not a discipline I think we should be over-reliant on.
REBECCA
Totally agree.
HENRY
But there is an idea that you can — if you’re at work, you can be very happy with the inherent qualities of your job. You like the actual, you know, whatever it is you’re typing, or saying, or researching, or building — you enjoy it. You love laying bricks. You love writing arguments. While simultaneously being very unhappy with the conditions. You know, you don’t like your manager, the pension is no good, the company culture kind of sucks, like, whatever.
And so you can have this weird thing — I think we’ve all worked with someone like this — where you are quite a grumpy person, you’re frequently saying that’s no good, I don’t like that. But you are still highly motivated. You work very hard. You get a lot done. And in some sense you are happy in the doing of the work, even while you’re simultaneously unhappy.
And this is what always gives me pause, is that ability to be both. And then
you’re forced to say, well, it’s happy in a kind of way. [laughter]
REBECCA
I think I’m asking a micro version of that. I agree with what you’re saying, and I think that’s important, and it is an interesting thing about happiness. But I think what I’m saying is could you have any of that sense of general happiness — bearing in mind that it might conflict with some other feelings that you have — if you don’t have some of these just pure moments of the overwhelming state of mind of happiness?
HENRY
I assume that those people do have some of those moments. But it’s not at all clear to me that they have them at work, or in a way that’s related to the happy thing.
REBECCA
So would it be funny, then, to say that you’re happy about something if it never gives rise to these states of mind? That seems to me odd.
HENRY
It does seem odd, but also we’re happy to say it all the time, right? It doesn’t present a problem in everyday language.
REBECCA
Okay, so just as a starter — because as you know, the joke of this podcast is we’re philosophers coming up with a product. [laughter] This is funny because we’re not generally known to be productive. But to bank a starting working definition, we could say something like, happiness is an overwhelmingly positive state of mind.
We don’t have to both agree with that, but is that a starting point?
HENRY
I would remove the word overwhelming…
REBECCA
But then, positive, I mean —
HENRY
I think happiness is a gradient, and it can be overwhelming, or it can be really quite muted.
REBECCA
Okay, that’s very interesting. Because I do think there are these — somebody might want to say — thinner ideas of happiness, where it’s more like contentment or peace. If you look back to Epicurus, I think there’s also this idea of happiness as an absence of the bad things.
HENRY
You’re happy doing this podcast right now.
REBECCA
I feel very happy!
HENRY
But you’re not overwhelmed by it.
REBECCA
I think if I were to separate out the happiness from the other things like contentment, I do think that the happiness bit is quite an overwhelming sense. I’m not sure — I agree with the gradient, I think — but for instance, if we go to that super-thin idea of just happiness is the absence of bad things. So I’m not in pain, I’m not disturbed in some mental sense…
HENRY
It’s almost neutral.
REBECCA
Yeah, it’s almost neutral. You see, I’m going to have a problem with that, because I do think that if I have a broken leg, I could still feel happiness. If you come and give me my favourite chocolate bar while I have the broken leg and I’m in a load of pain, I still think it would make sense for me to say it makes me happy.
HENRY
Yes, I think that too. I just don’t think it’s a reliable or guaranteed thing. That’s my reservation. So you came to my office to say, are you ready to do this podcast? [laughter] And we had some chocolate.
REBECCA
I did give you chocolate.
HENRY
That was great, right? That chocolate worked.
REBECCA
I saw the look on your face, Henry Oliver!
HENRY
It works every time.
REBECCA
You liked that chocolate.
HENRY
But if you’d come in and I’d been like, let me just finish writing this email, and I’d eaten the chocolate while writing the email, I just don’t think it would have worked in the same way because I’d have been too in the email. I didn’t want to do the email.
REBECCA
But then that’s the distinction again about what it is that makes us happy. It’s not what is the sense of happiness...
HENRY
Happiness is so easily mingled with unhappiness. That’s why it’s hard to define.
REBECCA
Let’s think a little more, then, about what this feeling is. So, some people probably just want to say it’s the same as pleasure.
HENRY
Yeah.
REBECCA
I think I’m broadly happy — partly because I do want happiness to have some
quite distinct place within the sets of states of mind. I think I’d have a concern if it overlapped too much with contentment. I think contentment often will overlap with, maybe even contribute to happiness. But I think I could be happy in a state of great anticipation.
I was excited about doing our podcast. I’m excited about the opportunity I face next week. I don’t think that’s very peaceful. I think that anticipation is playing a role in my happiness here. So I don’t think I want to say, for instance, that happiness is an overwhelmingly peaceful state of mind. Or indeed that peacefulness is a synonym with happiness. I want to be able to make distinctions, I think, between these things.
HENRY
It seems well recognised to me that there is a particular form of happiness that comes from being at peace.
REBECCA
Interesting.
HENRY
It is not a form of happiness that I am pursuing, or that I necessarily put a lot of stock in. But an awful lot of people regard that as the happy state to which they are aiming, or to which they wish they could aim at, or whatever.
REBECCA
Yes.
HENRY
So maybe you could make a formal distinction. But it doesn’t, to me, seem to accord with what people want or what they do.
REBECCA
That’s very interesting. Again, I do think this comes back slightly to what the things are that make us happy. And there’s going to be different things for each of us.
Somebody who’s more, for whatever reasons, they desire peace more than someone else — maybe somebody living in a turbulent nation. Peacefulness might necessarily be, or peacefulness might be a necessary component of any moment in which they feel happy. Although I still am going to want to say that they’re still going to have this more anticipatory sense of feeling happy…
HENRY
Yeah, I’m surprised. I think anticipation is a big part of happiness. Samuel Johnson basically thought that anticipation was all you were going to get. You weren’t going to get the actual happiness.
REBECCA
So you never get there.
HENRY
Happiness is just looking forward to things. [laughter] You just have to learn to live with that.
REBECCA
Some people do feel happy looking forward to things, though.
HENRY
Oh, I think probably most of us do. But again, it is surprising how happy some people are to not have a lot to look forward to, and to sort of dwell in their peace.
REBECCA
Yes.
HENRY
And to me, they don’t seem unhappy all the time. They don’t necessarily seem fulfilled. They don’t always seem to be living full, flourishing lives. But it’s very hard for me to say, no, no, they are unhappy people.
REBECCA
So you mentioned fulfilment. I think another interesting question — sometimes people think that happiness is quite a thin notion, it’s just about pleasure seeking, or desire satisfaction, something like that...
HENRY
I mean, to go back on the pleasure point, I think that’s just shunting the problem. What’s pleasure?
REBECCA
Yeah, I agree. I think that’s right.
That said, I think when people say something like, no, happiness must be bigger than that, it must be fulfillment, I think they’re answering a different question. I don’t think they’re answering necessarily ‘what is happiness?’. I think they’re answering ‘why is it important?’.
Because some people want to say happiness is the same as pleasure and that’s the central component of a good life. Some people even want to build moral theories from this. Other people want to say, no, that should not be the central feature of the good life. It needs to be something more like fulfillment. It needs to be something more like living in line with the good ends of being a human being. And now we’re getting on to this Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia.
HENRY
Yeah. I mean, I think this is an important part of happiness. And I think the problem is that philosophers have been — I’m not saying they’ve done a bad job as such, but they’ve tried very hard to think separately about what we’ve been calling psychological happiness, and this fulfilment happiness. And I just don’t think you can. And then you run into the trouble of how difficult it is to deal with such a mingled,
messy concept.
REBECCA
I think one thing I’d just be happy to do is separate out happiness and fulfilment. And I’d say when Aristotle talks about happiness or eudaimonia, he’s talking about this thicker sense of fulfilment. That to me seems like a more important — maybe even central component of a good life.
Whereas happiness qua pleasure, that seems to me like a distinct thing. I think it’s important. I feel like it’s necessary to a good life. But I’m just not going to afford it anywhere near the central component role that I think something like this bigger sense of fulfilment should play.
HENRY
So we are saying that the man who’s happy in his work, but not at his work, maybe is fulfilled even if he’s not happy.
REBECCA
Sure.
HENRY
And we’re happy with the idea that fulfilment is what matters.
REBECCA
I think fulfilment — I’m not even sure I’m willing to say fulfilment is the only thing that matters…
HENRY
No, no, no, but in the fulfilment / happiness division.
REBECCA
That’s right. I think so. So I think I’d probably want to say something like happiness qua pleasure — that psychological state — seems to be necessary to a good life. I think if nobody has ever experienced that…
HENRY
That’s right, yes.
REBECCA
…then they’re just not, they’re missing out on something central to being a human. They’re missing out on something that I think is good. But I certainly don’t want to say it’s sufficient to a good life. I mean, if you were happy all of the time, there’d be something wrong with that, because there are some moments when you shouldn’t be happy. And also there are some other feelings that you should experience.
HENRY
Yes, and I do think a lot of people optimise for happiness, as it were, in a way that I think is — I’m not going to say immoral. But certainly some kind of intellectual mistake or emotional mistake to optimise for happiness.
REBECCA
I think optimising for anything, to my mind, is a problem.
HENRY
Sure, I’m just using that as shorthand.
REBECCA
But you’re right, many consequentialist theories, in which what it is to do the right thing, or the right state of affairs, they take conception of the good — and utilitarians in particular take some pleasure-based notion of happiness — and they think, look, we can evaluate states of affairs or evaluate actions, and determine if they’re
right, if they maximise that narrow sense of happiness.
That seems to me — I’ve talked about this on this podcast, and in my Substack, many times — it seems to be crazy. [laughter] I don’t think we necessarily have to cash all this out again, but...
HENRY
Well, this is why I like Mill.
REBECCA
Yeah.
HENRY
My reading of Mill is that he — some people say he tried not to be a utilitarian, but he always was. My reading of Mill is that what he was really saying was, look, cultivating a noble character is the ultimate way to be utilitarian.
REBECCA
Right.
HENRY
And there are such things as higher pleasures. There is such thing as Aristotelian fulfilment. And the real utilitarianism is to take all of that into account, and have this expansive, flourishing notion of life. And that is how you will maximise your pleasure.
Now, you might say, well, it’s a bit of a fudge and he’s just jamming everything together and trying to dodge the problem. But I think that’s life.
REBECCA
I still think though…
HENRY
Life is a real fudge. And he kind of came up with the right answer, which is, yeah, you should try and be in a happy state of mind as much as possible. With the massive caveat that the way to do that is to often take the unhappy route, and do the fulfilling thing.
REBECCA
I still think the problem for me is going to be if this is contributing to, or if this is the substance of the moral theory, in the sense of evaluating things for whether they’re right or wrong, I think it’s going to miss the point. I think maximising even a thicker notion of happiness or fulfilment is going to lead to some problems.
So, for instance, it’s not going to take people’s reasons into account sufficiently. It’s going to focus just on outcomes. I think outcomes — consequences — are clearly important within morality. But they can’t be the only important thing, unless you’re willing to trade away people’s lives, people’s rights, all of these other notions that are important just beyond some aggregative sense of happiness.
You know, counting up your happiness, my happiness. Jamming it together. Taking it away from us, individually. It’s not only going to permit some horrible things, it’s going to require some horrible things. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t think that a fuller sense of happiness plays an important part in a good life.
And I think you can see that in Mill. I think Mill does a great job of coming to some excellent answers about all kinds of things, in spite of this utilitarianism which was indoctrinated in him since when he was a little child.
HENRY
I think utilitarianism has something very important and true to offer us, and Mill understood that, and was trying to ameliorate it with other theories and other insights. Whether or not he reached a fully coherent form of utilitarianism that modern utilitarians can agree on, to me, is just thoroughly beside the point. [laughter]
Of all the philosophers who’ve written about happiness, he comes, I think, closest to telling you what you should do in a way that probably is going to work pretty well.
REBECCA
You see, I’m just not going to agree with you on that. I also don’t think Mill or Bentham are really telling us that utilitarianism is a guide for life.
HENRY
No, and Mill’s quite clear about that.
REBECCA
Yeah, I mean, there’s also this hilarious bit in Bentham where he sets out this six-part set of directions for applying utilitarianism. You’ve got to assess the fecundity of the pleasure against the deprivation of the pain. [laughter] And you have to do this about 70,000 different ways. And he ends up by saying, look, I’m not even expecting the judges to do this.
HENRY
No, no, no.
REBECCA
It’s not a guide for life. It’s a post-hoc evaluative mechanism.
HENRY
But Mill makes it a guide for life by basically just throwing all of that out. And he sort of says in one line — somebody says, obviously, you don’t actually have to sit down and work this out. That would be insane. What you need to do is cultivate a spirit that’s capable of achieving this. So he’s kind of a half utilitarian, half romantic. And that, to me, seems like a great trade-off.
REBECCA
I mean, so I just hold this pretty hardcore view that you can’t pick and mix moral theories.
HENRY
That’s insane!
REBECCA
I’m with Stuart Hampshire on this. I think it’s not a pick and mix matter. You can’t be a little bit of a utilitarian. You can apply some consequentialist reasoning, but it’s a totalising moral theory, Henry! It’s a way of evaluating what’s right and wrong.
And maximising anything is not going to — it’s just going to lead to some horrible outcomes, which is bad for the consequentialist. And it’s going to miss out some important facts that we should take into account when we do evaluate things, like people’s reasons for actions. And the fact that we’re not just some blob, where you can count up our happiness over us…
HENRY
Sure, sure, sure.
REBECCA
You have to take us into account as separate persons.
HENRY
I just think, you know, we’re talking about two different things. What’s the philosophical theory of happiness? And what is it that you will be doing in your life? And on the second one, you will just pick and mix from different philosophies and that’s fine and there’s no avoiding it. And you’ll be a consequentialist about, you know,
economic calculations.
I knew someone once, and she was a vegan two weeks and a vegetarian two weeks, and she would swap like that. On the basis that she just couldn’t not have a latte sometimes or whatever.
REBECCA
Then I just don’t think she’s — this is the thing — I think these are totalising moral theories. I don’t think you can...
HENRY
But she was living in a much better way. She was happier with her, you know. I mean, God knows how many...
REBECCA
Again, consequences are important — It doesn’t make you a consequentialist!
HENRY
No, no, but I’m just saying sometimes she thought a bit like a consequentialist. Sometimes she thought a bit like something else. She didn’t have a theory. She would have rolled her eyes at everything we’re saying.
REBECCA
So then we’re talking about — so I do agree with you that then we’re talking about something different. And one of my problems, indeed, with consequentialist moral theories, and many other moral theories — so Kantian moral theories, too — is I just think they try to give a cookie cutter, a scientistic way, of approaching morality. And it’s really hard because doing moral stuff is really, really difficult. [laughter]
Anybody who thinks that you can just outsource it to some kind of calculation, I think is not only getting it wrong, I think they’re also making this mistake of over-delegating. And it’s bad for us, because one of the things we can do, and we should do, as human beings, is reason. Probably brings us back to Aristotle again…
HENRY
We can reason. And I’m obviously not against the use of reason. But I think that our reasoning is done as a sort of practice exercise. And when we’re actually faced with things, you know, and you have to make a decision... [laughter]
REBECCA
You need some kind of heuristic.
HENRY
Yes. And you can then look back at the decision, and say, I need to do some reasoning about what I did there, and try and improve your heuristic. And this is basically what Mill’s saying — is just cultivate a better spirit, cultivate a nobility. Improve yourself as much as you can across as many dimensions as possible. And then you will — you simply will be a better utilitarian, when you have to sort of make those choices. But you can’t actually, when confronted with a choice here and now. It’s very rare that you get the opportunity to really reason about it.
REBECCA
So I think another reason I have a problem with putting happiness at the centre of some kind of moral theory, or overweighting happiness in a moral sense, is you can be happy about bad things.
HENRY
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think most people are, right?
REBECCA
Yeah, this seems to me problematic. I think it’s particularly problematic if the kind of state of mind that we started talking about is, in all instances, you being happy about something. So I think usually when we’re happy, we’re happy about something. I think this is a little different from the kinds of — some of the other kinds of good things, where the feeling is like directed at something.
So if, say, for instance, I’m friends with you, my state of friendship is directed at you. It’s very reciprocal, but it’s directed. Similarly, I don’t know, say, I love my cat. Sadly, I don’t have a cat. [laughter] But if I had a cat, I would love the cat. The love would be kind of directed at the cat.
I think when I’m happy about something, it has some kind of directionality — like it’s kind of causal — it’s the chocolate bar that’s making me happy. But it’s not like I’m happying at the chocolate bar!
HENRY
No, no, no, exactly.
REBECCA
So, it seems to me quite problematic that the chocolate bar is playing this really central, quite causal, role. But if that was a bad thing. Say that the thing that made me happy was torturing people. Say that the thing that made me happy was bullying people. It seems to me quite problematic to say that happiness has this important moral place, when the bad things are causing me to be happy.
HENRY
Well, and also, I mean, for me, a much more pertinent example is going to the zoo.
REBECCA
Yeah. Yes, great.
HENRY
I think zoos are probably so immoral that they ought not to be legal. I don’t quite...
REBECCA
I agree.
HENRY
I don’t fully know what I think on that.
REBECCA
I think so. I think I hold that view.
HENRY
But obviously, most of the people in the zoo are happy. Or a lot of the...
REBECCA
That’s right.
HENRY
These days, I suspect, people have much more mixed feelings. But it’s not clear that you can be unhappy about something obviously morally wrong.
REBECCA
And actually, if we think of other examples of entertainment — so we think about bear baiting, we think about gladiatorial combat, horrific examples when zoos included humans at one point.
HENRY
Well, you know, they would go to the mental hospital at Bedlam, and they would laugh at the inmates and poke them. And they thought this was a wonderful day out.
REBECCA
So I think one way — I wrote a piece about this recently — if I was trying really really hard to find a sense in which happiness was objectively valuable, it seems to me very very problematic that we could be happy about bad things. But I think if there was some kind of sense of just general happiness — feeling happiness as a state of mind, when it didn’t have to be about something — then I would have less of a problem with that.
Do you think you can ever just be generally happy?
HENRY
Not happy about anything?
REBECCA
Yeah. So, I mean, Aristotle says something like we find pleasure in things. We are happy when we seek the other virtues. But he wants to say happiness can be happy in itself. Does that extend to saying you can just feel that kind of general happiness you might have across your life? Can you have the general happiness in the moment — in the, just the particular state of mind?
I’d like to think I could, and I think it might solve some of these moral problems. But I struggle to get there.
HENRY
Yeah. I mean, one of the first things I said was that I think happiness is very contextual.
REBECCA
Yeah.
HENRY
And I think — no, I think probably it’s very hard to actually get there. This is, in a way, what you’re asking is, like, is Buddhism true?
REBECCA
Wow, that’s a big extrapolation! [laughter]
HENRY
Can you, like, clear your mind, and just reach that peace, contentment, happiness?
REBECCA
Just be happy.
HENRY
It’s not about anything. It’s not in anything. It’s a just a pure —
REBECCA
And also, I want to go further than the peace and the contentment. I want to have this overwhelmingly positive state.
HENRY
Exactly — you’re asking a much bigger question!
REBECCA
That’s right. It seems to me quite hard.
HENRY
And I think, I shouldn’t say this, I think Buddhism’s a lie — I don’t think that’s really possible —
REBECCA
To have that state?
HENRY
Yes, I think a very very small number of people can get there. I think the whole thing is just — but the Buddhism, as we have been interpreting it, in the West —
REBECCA
Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know enough about Buddhism —
HENRY
I’m not saying the actual Buddhists. But what we do here —
REBECCA
That particular notion. That seems to me —
HENRY
It’s all nonsense.
REBECCA
I think that’s right. I’m not entirely convinced that’s a good way to live your life, anyway, because I think you should attend to stuff.
HENRY
Exactly.
REBECCA
So the reason why I think it wouldn’t be good just to be happy all the time is because there are bad things happening in the world. And we should know about them, and we should be concerned about them.
HENRY
I just think if you’re happy, you’re happy because of something to do with the conditions that you’re in.
REBECCA
I think that’s generally —
HENRY
Even if that is purely contained within your own mind, and you’re, I don’t know, let’s say you’re in a sensory deprivation chamber. So it isn’t possible to attribute it to the feeling of the sun on your skin, or any kind of other stimulus. It’s just, no, no, something purely in your mind is making you happy. I think that’s still quite contextual and it’s still very contingent. I don’t really know what it would mean for an emotion to be detached from its source.
REBECCA
Thinking about this kind of psychological sense, another thing that strikes me that’s quite unusual about happiness is that I don’t think you can be mistakenly happy.
So if, for instance, somebody achieves something, and they don’t realise that they have. Say your kid — you go home today, and your kids are both very smart —
say one of them has just accidentally solved this really important mathematical problem. Having met your kids, I could well imagine one of them might have done. [laughter] And you might say, hey, what a great achievement. And they’ll be like, well, it made me happy, and I felt some sense of fulfilment. But they didn’t have any idea that it was an achievement.
So, I think you can be in a state of achievement — that’s a weird way of putting it — without knowing about it.
HENRY
Sure.
REBECCA
But happiness — I think every time you’re happy, you know you’re happy. I don’t really think it makes any sense to say, you know, your kid is doing something, and you’re like, you’re happy! And he’s like, oh my goodness, I’m happy! That seems to me quite odd, unless he’s actually feeling happy. Whereas, I don’t think you have to know that you’ve achieved. I don’t think you have to be aware of achievement to achieve.
So happiness seems more contingent, then, on your awareness of your feelings.
HENRY
I suppose mistakes of language aside, that might be true. Because obviously children do often say things that they don’t mean, because they don’t know what the word is.
REBECCA
Sure. But if we’re taking the word away — we’re just thinking about the concept.
HENRY
I do think, though, that might be true in the short term. I do think a lot of people talk about their past lives, and say, I thought I was happy, and then I realised that I wasn’t. So, they’ll often say this about when they’ve had a breakup, or a divorce, or left the
job or something.
REBECCA
I still think it’s true to say that they were happy, because I think if you feel happy, you’re happy. The thing I think I’d say is that maybe they look back, and they think that thing shouldn’t have made me happy, which seems to be different.
HENRY
I think there’s a confounding in what they’re saying of happiness and fulfilment.
REBECCA
Right.
HENRY
For sure.
REBECCA
So one thing I’d make a distinction between those things — I think you could think that you’re fulfilled by something, but people might say you’re not really fulfilled. So somebody might say, you know, I’m fulfilled by counting the blades of grass. And you might want to say, I’m not sure you understand what fulfilment is!
HENRY
That means you haven’t listened to Mozart yet. [laughter] Yes, exactly. Yes.
REBECCA
Or if they said that they were fulfilled by torturing the cats. I think again, you might just think that again, it’s some kind of ‘misfire’ happening. Whereas, I think I’m happy to go as far as saying that feeling happy is both necessary and sufficient to being happy. So when I feel happy, I’m happy. And I can’t be happy unless I feel happy.
HENRY
So, no, I think I disagree with this.
REBECCA
It’s a big claim, I know!
HENRY
Well, if it’s possible to think that you are fulfilled, but then to go on to have a new set of experiences that make you realise that, okay, now I’m fulfilled.
REBECCA
Or just not to understand what fulfilment means, which is a slightly different thing.
HENRY
But normally you’ll discover that by going on to a new set of experiences, and saying, oh, gosh, that was nothing. This is what I really meant. I think the same thing must be true of many other emotional states, including happiness.
REBECCA
So I think this is, for me, a distinction between happiness and fulfilment. Because I think in the instance where the person is torturing the cats, and they claim they’re fulfilled… Now, you could just say, no Rebecca, you’ve got a misunderstanding about what fulfilment is. I just want to say I think fulfilment has to track the good in some sense.
HENRY
But this matches…
REBECCA
I don’t think that with happiness.
HENRY
But we talked earlier about how it’s a gradient. And I think what I’m saying is...
REBECCA
Being a gradient doesn’t mean it needs to include all things, though.
HENRY
No, but I think what I’m saying is once you start moving up the gradient or experiencing different parts of it, you can then look back and say, well, that wasn’t really happiness. This is happiness, that wasn’t. Maybe this is taking a very subjective view of things. But I think probably something like that is possible.
REBECCA
Okay, I think we may differ slightly on this one, which is totally fine!
Just going back to our original aim of what happiness is, do you have a kind of competing answer, if the kid in the street comes up to you and says, hey, Henry, what’s happiness? So one answer we had is something like this overwhelming — or not overwhelming! — positive state of mind, which seems like to me a good starting point.
HENRY
Hobbes says — he talks about a sudden invasion of glory.
REBECCA
Nice. That seems pretty similar to what we’re talking about.
HENRY
That’s very similar. And there’s a literary critic called Helen Gardner who stole that phrase from him, and said, when I read Dickens, I get a sudden invasion of glory.
REBECCA
Sounds to me pretty overwhelming!
HENRY
That’s the happiness of reading literature. It is, but you know — and I know exactly what she means about Dickens.
REBECCA
Yep.
HENRY
But you can then read the next chapter, and have — you know, Dickens actually does all the types of happiness. You can feel jolly...
REBECCA
Jolly! [laughter]
HENRY
You can feel amused. You can feel contented. You can feel like this is running along very smoothly. You can have a sort of wicked, vicious happiness. [laughter] You know what I mean? And actually, so I think there’s this great difficulty with it. And to the child, it’s a bit to me like trying to define love.
REBECCA
Yes.
HENRY
You can say lots of things that sound very noble and sound very good. And which you do in fact believe, and want to hold yourself to, and want to hold other people to. And say that love is a kind of paying attention, love is about taking care of a person, love is all these different things. But honestly, love is what it feels like to love. Happiness is what it feels like to be happy.
It’s a terrible definition, but isn’t that as good as we can do?
REBECCA
So when I was thinking about happiness in comparison to some of these other good things, like achievement and fulfilment, the one I came to the conclusion that, to me, it seems like happiness is the closest, is love, for this reason.
So even if you just compare love and friendship. I think if you think you’re friends with somebody, but it turns out they’ve been really nasty behind your back — they’ve been totally acting against your interests — I think it would probably be fair to say that that’s not actually friendship.
HENRY
Correct.
REBECCA
Whereas, I think if you love someone who is bad for you, who’s a bad person — or you love doing something that’s bad — I think you can still say that love obtains.
HENRY
Yes, yes, yes.
REBECCA
So I do think this, again, is coming back to this kind of inner knowledge, or this subjective experience, playing such a big role. I think, I don’t want to go as far as this, but I think you could make a good argument that maybe happiness is a type of love.
HENRY
Oh, I’m fully persuaded of that. And I think love has got many many different forms. Iris Murdoch’s very good on this question. It’s very hard to wrangle her into any sort of acceptable philosophy to the philosophers. But to the rest of us, it’s easy enough to get along with.
REBECCA
I love her novels. I don’t get anywhere with her philosophy. I have to say the bits of the novels I don’t like…
HENRY
Are the philosophical bits! [laughter]
REBECCA
So I think The Sea, The Sea is one of my top five novels of all time. But the bit about the sea monster, oh my goodness, the philosophising. I hate that bit!
HENRY
I would call the sea monster passage — I think there’s a very distinctively Murdochian mode. [laughter] I love doing that! Pretending to be a real lit — it’s Murdochian!
REBECCA
The look on your face when you said that as well!
HENRY
You have to self-ironise.
REBECCA
It’s Henry qua literary critic. [laughter]
HENRY
You can’t just do that in all seriousness. But she’s very good at mingling the philosophical, the psychological, and the literary ways of trying to fathom those problems. And I think the Sea Monster passage is like that. And she’s very intently, very consciously saying, I’m not really being a philosopher. I’m being a bad philosopher about this. [laughter]
And there is a constant strain through her books where she’ll put a Freudian, or a therapist or someone of that nature, and a philosopher, and then maybe like a little mystic person, and then an artist. And the book is saying, which of these people can help you?
And she’ll pretty clearly say, you know, the therapist, absolutely, they’re right about a few things, but forget it they will ruin your life. The philosopher, this is an emotional landmine, just don’t even touch it, you know. [laughter] And then she’ll go on to the artist, and say maybe they can do something for you.
And I think the sea monster passage is like, so what you don’t like about it, she doesn’t want you to like that.
REBECCA
From memory, I don’t think she’s using the sea monster to give us an example of a philosopher. I feel she’s suddenly like, all right, I’ve done this 300 pages of great novelistic skill, I’m going to jam in some explicit philosophising! That’s what — I just don’t think it’s good philosophising.
HENRY
But that’s what I’m saying.
REBECCA
Wrecks that part of the novel for me!
HENRY
She’s trying to mingle it with other ways of doing it.
REBECCA
I think you’re being very kind!
HENRY
I think it’s very highly accomplished when she does those things. [laughter] And it’s what makes her distinctive as a novelist. And it pervades the non-philosophical and philosophical parts of the work.
REBECCA
Well, in terms of happiness, I can tell you I wasn’t very happy at that bit. [laughter] I was particularly annoyed because I really found that novel addictive reading.
HENRY
Oh, yeah. Well, okay, but how do you feel about the idea, this is all very basic, but the sea is his unconscious mind.
REBECCA
Oh, wow.
HENRY
And his problem is that he’s living on the edge of his unconscious. [laughter] And he’s really unable to understand that that’s what he’s doing. He’s unable to fathom that he has any unconscious desires that are propelling him forward. These are the demons that she instigates at the end. And the sea monster is the kind of the bursting out of whatever these deep driving forces are.
And she’s sort of saying in a way, you can kind of philosophise that, but you can’t really. And that’s the way things are. And it’s a bit of Freud. And it’s a bit of this. And you just have to muddle through.
REBECCA
It’s maybe 20 years since I’ve read it. But if I could give one more attempt, I think, at making my case. I think the bit of that novel that sticks in my mind the most, actually, is the bit with the chair, the empty room. Looking through and seeing the chair, and having this sense of dread at what this chair might represent.
HENRY
Oh, yes, yes.
REBECCA
This seems to me like a deeper, more skillful kind of psychological writing — and more philosophical writing, I might even go as far as to say — than the much more explicit, hey, here’s a sea monster, so I’m going to bring in some of this! Maybe that’s unfair.
But I think that when I like philosophy in novels, I like it when it’s subtle. When it’s not, hey, I’m now going to give you a bit. So actually, Knausgaard — we’ve talked about this, I know we have very different views about this — the sections I don’t like are those little essays on the philosophy of time or something.
HENRY
Absolutely dismal.
REBECCA
I hate that. And I’m obsessed with the philosophy of time, but I hate those bits. Whereas I love the rest of that first book. I’ve only read the first one.
HENRY
Are there any novelists who do good philosophy?
REBECCA
So actually, a novelist you and I both like — who I know we’re both in this state of great anticipation because her next book is coming out. [laughter]
HENRY
Oh, yeah.
REBECCA
So, Solvej Balle. So the third book of her — at least in the English translation —
HENRY
The time traveler —
REBECCA
The time travel books. The On the Calculation of Volume books. The third one’s coming out. In fact, you messaged me just the other day to say, hey, Rebecca —
HENRY
Eight days!
REBECCA
Eight days time! [laughter] So we’re both looking forward to this. I think that that is both excellent literary fiction in a technical sense, and I think it’s great philosophy. I think it’s brought back this over, what I think until then was probably this overdone problem, this idea of the Groundhog Day idea.
I think it’s a brilliant but non-explicit discussion of the container theory of time. This idea about whether time is independent. I think that’s fantastic. And I think it’s better for not being, like — she doesn’t make the character suddenly go off and give a little lecture. Or just come out of the kind of novel, and give us a little paragraph explainer. Instead, it kind of, it imbues the novel. The novel instantiates it.
HENRY
Do you ever like it when a novelist is explicitly philosophical or lecturing?
REBECCA
Very rarely.
HENRY
George Eliot? Tolstoy?
REBECCA
I think they do good philosophy. I think someone like J.M. Coetzee does good philosophy. But I like it most when it’s less explicit.
HENRY
But he’s probably the best.
REBECCA
So there’s the Paul Auster book Baumgartner, which was quite philosophical. I really hated this one page where the character gives us the precis of his philosophical essay. I just thought it was really bad. But maybe that’s just because I didn’t think it was good philosophy, as opposed to thinking that was a good way of doing philosophy.
HENRY
Mmm-hmm. So Coetzee, that’s all we’ve got. [laughter] The rest of them should stop.
REBECCA
So actually, okay, there’s a great example. The Lives of Animals, which is his short little novella.
HENRY
Oh I haven’t read that one.
REBECCA
Oh, it’s awesome. About why we shouldn’t eat animals. And it’s very explicit. It’s about a lecturer who’s going to give a lecture about why we shouldn’t eat animals. [laughter] I think it is one of the most compelling bits of moral philosophy I’ve read recently. And it’s also fantastic writing. And yes, that does break that kind of explicit barrier.
HENRY
Stoppard?
REBECCA
I like Stoppard. I think Stoppard’s overwritten. I find the bits, again, which are overly ‘I’m doing some philosophy now’, annoying.
HENRY
Even in Arcadia?
REBECCA
I love Arcadia, but yes.
HENRY
Really? I think Arcadia is a pretty good example of not overdoing it.
REBECCA
I don’t know. Let’s finish by thinking about comic novels, okay? So you and I talked a little about Kingsley Amis recently. Is this a good example of happiness as an art object? Is that going too far?
HENRY
Happiness as an art object!
REBECCA
Yeah, I mean, that sounds to me like the kind of thing a literary critic would say! I would not say that as a philosopher.
HENRY
I would never say that. Maybe I’m not a good literary critic. [laughter] I would hate to use the phrase art object, for one thing.
REBECCA
Oh, you see, I use ‘art object’ all the time. This goes back to when I studied aesthetics.
HENRY
Exactly, exactly. A big mistake, a huge mistake!
REBECCA
Yeah, I mean, there’s very little good 20th-century aesthetics, anyway! [laughter] But I do have this hangover, in that I say the word ‘art object’ quite often, and people look at me like I’m a crazy person. It’s a bit like when I say other philosophical things. One of my friends once introduced me to someone as, this is my friend Rebecca, who starts sentences ‘it is the case that’. [laughter] I get the same look for ‘art object’.
HENRY
I mean, Amis — it’s interesting to think about what does he think makes someone happy.
REBECCA
Great point.
HENRY
Because he is quite a conflicted writer. He loves drinking. [laughter] He loves having an affair. He loves running around making fun of people. He quite likes music, but I don’t know that he writes as intently — it’s surprising to think this — he does write very well about music. And in The Anti-Death League, I think it is, C.P.E. Bach.
He writes very well about it there. I might be getting that novel wrong.
REBECCA
Oh, man, I haven’t read that one in a long time. As you know, I think there are only two good Kingsley Amis novels: Lucky Jim, Take a Girl Like You. Take a Girl Like You is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. You need to read it.
HENRY
I’ll read it. I don’t doubt you.
REBECCA
Lucky Jim is one of the funniest novels ever written.
HENRY
The Old Devils is a much better book.
REBECCA
It’s okay.
HENRY
Much better book. And The Old Devils is really about happiness.
REBECCA
I’ll reread it.
HENRY
Lucky Jim is a novel that evades the question of what it is that makes you happy.
REBECCA
But there are some bits — that bit where he goes to the Neddies house and sings the madrigals. [laughter]
HENRY
No, it’s very funny and it makes us happy. But in a way, Kingsley Amis was putting aside important questions in that book, in order to be rude about people for comic value. Now, that’s totally fine —
REBECCA
I think this actually matches quite well with my, I’m very happy to start off thinking of happiness as this thin, kind of morally neutral, psychological state of mind. [laughter] That scene makes me very happy. Maybe it shouldn’t because, yes, you pointed out to me the other day about how you think it’s less funny because you think he’s being nasty to people —
HENRY
And so I think that The Diary of a Nobody —
REBECCA
Oh yeah, that’s right, that’s — we were comparing it with that! You thought that even more of that. Which I think, again, is — that maybe the only novel I think is funnier than Lucky Jim. Possibly Our Man in Havana.
HENRY
My view of this book is it is very funny. It is particularly funny to English people, because it’s about all the weird snobbisms.
REBECCA
I should just clarify — this is The Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith.
HENRY
That’s right. It’s Edwardian. It’s just more than 100 years old now. But the way in which the main character is mocked by the narrator is now very socially unacceptable. And I don’t think — you can begin the novel by laughing — but I don’t think you can any longer end the novel without feeling a little bit uncomfortable that this poor man is basically being mocked for being lower-middle class.
And that is because our standards of social realism have changed. Because it’s been 100 years, so different things apply.
REBECCA
But then maybe finding things —
HENRY
Whereas Kingsley Amis we can still laugh at, because we still somewhat live in those social parameters, but we’re getting away from them. And as we do, I think more and more we’ll look at Lucky Jim and say, well, it’s actually mean to be that kind of a snob. And while it’s funny, it feels a bit like going to the zoo.
REBECCA
But don’t you think then, in some sense, finding things funny has this quite big overlap with being happy about things? Because we can find things funny that are bad, that are nasty. Subversiveness plays quite an important role.
HENRY
All the time, yeah.
REBECCA
And similarly, we can be happy about bad things. Therefore, in a descriptive sense,
we can say that’s what being happy consists in, or that’s what it’s like, or that’s the kind of thing we get…
HENRY
And this is a big debate in the last few years —
REBECCA
…without jumping into this moral…! And this should caution us against using these kinds of things, affording them too big of a role in our moral theories, or in our sense of the good.
HENRY
Well, okay, what do you think about jokes? Because there’s a huge cultural debate. It’s probably over now. But the last, say, 10 years: oh, you can’t say anything anymore! You know, we used to make mother-in-law jokes! We used to make these jokes! [laughter] Everyone was mean to everyone else! It was all just a bit of fun! Whereas we now say, you know —
REBECCA
Yeah.
HENRY
Actually, some things aren’t funny. It’s really uncomfortable.
REBECCA
But there’s a distinction between saying we shouldn’t find that funny, and finding it funny. I agree that over time, the more we think, oh I really shouldn’t find that funny, the less we probably will find it funny.
HENRY
I think some jokes have become very unfunny to a large number of people.
REBECCA
But I think it’s quite hard — in the same way as I think you can’t mistakenly be happy, you can’t suppress happiness if you feel it, it’s very hard to reason yourself out of feeling happy. I think similarly, it’s quite hard to — if you find something funny, you find it funny! And yes, then over time, when you realise, oh, I really shouldn’t have found it funny. But if I’m finding something funny, I’m finding it funny.
HENRY
Let me give you a good example. I saw a clip of a stand-up comedian. I have no idea who it was. Just a clip, I have no idea. And he was making a joke about what jobs people do. And he pointed to this woman in the audience. He said, what do you do?
And she said, oh, I’m the head —
REBECCA
I’m going to have to try really hard not to laugh now, otherwise I’m going to come across as — [laughter]
HENRY
Yeah, you are! No, no, it’s fine, it’s actually fine. And she said, I’m the head of diversity, equity and inclusion at a company — you can’t make fun of that, can you? [laughter] And of course, he was like, you know, he sort of paused. And then he said, I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’re a white woman. And the audience just completely fell about with laughter. [laughter] And it was very funny.
REBECCA
I think the actually funny bit there is her saying you can’t make fun of that!
HENRY
Exactly, right. And then he finds a way to make fun of it. And I think that shows you —
REBECCA
His joke is less funny!
HENRY
The audience loved it.
REBECCA
It would have been funnier if he’d said something else, because that was the obvious thing. Whereas her — that’s genius.
HENRY
It was.
REBECCA
Was it totally deadpan? Was she trying to be funny?
HENRY
It was a little snarky, but she was trying to be funny. But it shows you the great conflict, right? Both lines were felt to be funny. His joke was probably felt to be — it got a much bigger laugh — funny, because of the immediate context. But over time, you look at that joke more and more, and you say, you know, the fact that we were joking about that subject is just weird.
REBECCA
Similarly, the more you understand about animals, the less likely you’re going to be happy at the zoo.
HENRY
Exactly, exactly.
REBECCA
I think that’s right. But again, there’s a distinction between you’re actually feeling happy therefore you’re happy, and you shouldn’t be happy about this thing and your awareness of that means that, over time, your happiness about it is going to —
So I think, I anyway am happy to end this at least on having made some work towards a kind of quite thin psychological notion. Some kind of state of mind, where you’re experiencing pleasure. And that is at least some sense in which we say, ‘I’m happy’.
HENRY
I’m happy with the happiness is a form of love definition.
REBECCA
I like that one too. I’m not sure, I don’t think I want to go as far as to say it’s a form of love. But I want to think about that more. I certainly think it’s the other kind of basic good I would think of these things as being — I do think of love as a basic good,
I think, in my sense of it being irreducibly and objectively good.
HENRY
Yes, yes.
REBECCA
I’m not going to want to go as far as that with happiness, because of this problem about being happy about bad things. But I think if you, for instance, could be just generally happy —
HENRY
I like the happiness is love definition because it excludes the comedy and the zoos and other things. It helps us to narrow down.
REBECCA
Although we’ve also accepted, though, that you can love bad people and you can love doing bad things.
HENRY
That’s true, that’s true.
REBECCA
So I think they both share this problem. Anyway, Henry, I’m very happy that you’ve been on my podcast!
HENRY
This was fun!
REBECCA
This was fun. So thank you so much.
HENRY
Thank you for having me.
