Foreword.
Happiness is within our grasp. I know that, as I am the happiest person in the universe, I think, and I have not even explored half of the possibilities of these seven principles yet. I also know some people around me who feel exactly the same, probably without even realizing what the principles of happiness are. But I also know that the majority of people around me are unhappy, frustrated and miserable.
This is a series of seven articles on
the pursuit of happiness which will make your life abundantly
happy, and as an added benefit, also abundantly free.
There are no rules for happiness and I
am sceptical when someone publishes a book with so many rules to live by. If
you really like to live by rules, give up your free will totally and live by
those rules or by the counsel of others, which will make your life totally
miserable.
In these articles I will navigate you
through the complexities of life, by giving you basic and firm stepping stones
to step on through the path of life.
The path of life can be likened to an
ocean which can drown you, which may hurt you by flinging you against the rocks,
and which may sometimes tear your life apart.
If you do not believe me, look at the
television crime channels where lovers and spouses kill each other for almost nothing
other than for making the wrong choices in their pursuit of happiness.
There was a time at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, up to the start of WW1, when the Pursuit of Happiness was the lifestyle and main activity of people in Europe, until the war ripped that apart when one shot rang out in Sarajevo. It takes one emotional shot in our lives to turn it upside down and start a war in our emotions.
Part 1 –
Goodbye Convention and Compromise
I do not say that you must shun the 'wise' counsel of others. They will be affronted if you do not follow the 'good' advice they give you, while their lives are in tatters.
It may even be prudent for you to solicit
as much advice from as many people as you can; from friends and family or
whoever. The more people you ask for advice the better choice you will make.
Let us say you have received advice
from about twenty people and you have made a proper list of all these. Now you know what not to choose, as all that advice is useless, because ninety
percent of that is driven by convention and compromise. The problem is that you
do not know which of those are not tainted. The few which you receive from people who are non-conventional, like freaks or artists, are of no use.
So, now you are free to decide on any of
the remaining options, not tainted by convention and compromise.
If we look at our lives, we will see
that it is full of convention and compromise, mostly to please someone else, to
prevent conflict, to be the nice guy, to give someone the benefit of the doubt,
or not to affront or upset someone or the apple cart. This is the stuff grief and regret are made
of.
We were born free and with free will,
and we seldom use it. Compromise limits our free will and our choices which would
have steered us towards happiness, as a compromise is never as good as our conscience
or our care.
A compromise flowing from many proposals,
ideas, precedents or moral grounds, is the worst of any of those it compromises.
All the ideas which led to the compromise are better, on their own, as the
compromise.
Convention and compromise degenerate our free will, our quality of life and our future. It makes a lesser person of ourselves.
The people who complain that they do not have free will are those who have compromised
their lives beyond redemption or rehabilitation and who shift the blame to determinism - a word used by atheists and agnostics to absolve them from any responsibility.
The process of choice is so well
explained by the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartré. Those not interested in
the details of his philosophy may skip the italicized section. This exttract is
from ‘Socrates to Sartré’ by T.Z. Lavine (my comments are in parenthesis):
Sartré says that my freedom as a
conscious being enters my own existence. Conscious is totally free, undetermined,
and thus spontaneous. Since I am totally free, my past does not determine what
I am now. Between myself and my past I have put a gap, nothingness. I am free
from my past.
This new situation requires that I
make a new choice, a choice that is totally free, and wholly unpredictable as
to its consequences.
Every time I am confronted by whatever
temptation, I discover that I am free, that yesterday’s resolutions do not
determine what I do now when I must choose again now. Will I or will I not
stick to my resolution not to drink, take drugs, smoke or overeat? This is
freedom of conscious being which we all painfully discover.
Just as my past does not determine
what I am now, so what I am now does not determine my future. Since I am
totally free, my future actions are not determined by my choice to become for
example a writer. What I will actually do at a future moment of uncertainty
about my writing career will be a totally free action on my part, a new choice,
and wholly unpredictable.
And so I begin to understand what it
is to be totally free and I experience this as anguish. I feel anguish in
discovering that my freedom destroys and nihilates the determining force of my
past decisions and of my pledge for the future.
Sartré argues that my contingent
circumstances, or facts of my life, may be biologically, psychologically, socially
and economically determined, but as a conscious being. I choose the meaning
they have for me.
As a free, active consciousness, I
transform this contingent circumstances by my choice of meanings and
possibilities, by my projects, into my situation. By situation Sartré means an
organization of the world of my own making; the world as it is for me, by the
meaning I choose to give to the facts of my life and by the projects I choose
for my future. I cannot then say the conditions under which I have lived have made
me so.
And so, in fierce opposition to the
view that the facts of the world make a man an alcoholic or drug addict, Sartré
argues that an alcoholic lives in a world of his own making, by the meaning he
has chosen to give to his life and by choosing to live it as an alcoholic.
Sartré also discloses that there is an
even greater depth to my freedom as conscious being. I have discovered that, as
a totally free conscious being, I alone am responsible for the meaning of the
situation in which I live; I alone give meaning to my world.
But, what meaning shall I give to my world?
From what sources can I draw meaning? I raise such questions, not when I am
engaged in accomplishing the seemingly useful routine of daily activities, but
when I reflect upon my activities. Then I see that there is no source of absolute
truth which I can longer turn to, to provide meaning for my life.
(I do not agree with Sartré herein, that I now
have lost all moral, rational or spiritual bases for my choices and that I
am now morally bankrupt, now that I have chosen to be free or shunned
convention and compromise. This aspect is considered in much detail in a later
part of this heptalogy)
What has Sartré done? He has flung me
from freedom to anguish. I am indeed free, but my freedom is a dreadful
freedom. I alone choose and I alone am responsible for everything I am, I do or I think, but I did not choose to be free. As conscious being I am condemned to be
free.
But if we seek to escape, as we all do,
from freedom and responsibility, Sartré calls that bad faith. Bad faith is an
attempt to escape from my freedom by pretending that human affairs are
unavoidable or necessary, as is the casual order of things. We flee from dread,
but bad faith is self-deception; it is a lie we tell to ourselves; it is a lie
in the soul. We are not casually necessitated things; we are totally free conscious
beings, but endlessly we escape from this painful truth about ourselves by many
forms of bad faith. (Winston
Churchill once said: Sometimes we stumble over the truth and then we hurry on
as if nothing happened)
To illustrate this Sartré takes the
example of a waiter in a café:
His movements are a little too
precise, too rapid, he bends forward a little too eagerly, he is a little too
solicitous for the customer’s order. He has escaped from his freedom as a
conscious being into acting a part, playing a social role, as if his essence is
to be this perfect mechanism, the perfect waiter. But he is in bad faith. He
has no essence; it is not his essence to be a waiter. He has consciously chosen
to be a waiter. But he cannot be a waiter any more than an inkwell is an
inkwell. He has escaped from his freedom as a person into becoming a mechanism
from which he will gain social approval for the perfection of the performance
of his role. This type of bad faith consists in the pretense of being
identified with a role. (We
are all waiters in a certain sense, each of us playing a different role on this
stage we call life – at least the majority of us. In fact, the baroque period was known as a time when the Catholic church used the world as a stage to play its opulent and grandiose plays on.)
Sartré also claims that bad faith and inauthenticity
involve us in alienation. To live in the self-deception of bad faith, to live
in the inauthenticity of being untrue to human conscious being, is to live in
alienation of oneself, to be estranged from one’s freedom as conscious being
and to regard oneself as a thing compelled by circumstance.
Sartré makes a devastating use of “the
spirit of seriousness” to attack all those human types who accept the ordinary conventional morality of their own time as if this morality were an eternal,
absolute and necessary truth of the universe. The truth of the matter is that
their conventional morality is temporal, relative and contingent – it is
morality linked to a particular time, it is relative to their own type of society,
and it is the contingent outcome rather than the necessary outcome of a variety
of social and historical circumstances. If they had found themselves in another
type of society, their “absolute” moral truths would have been different.
Suppose then that we do not wish to
live like filthy swine, wallowing in the sticky mud of conventional morality,
suppose we wish to avoid bad faith, inauthenticity, self-alienation, the spirit
of seriousness - what then is morally right action which does not fall into any
of these traps?
We are acting morally when we abandon all
self-deception and make our moral choice with the recognition that we are free
conscious beings in choosing and responsible for what we choose.
What shall we choose? What values guide us in our actions? On the basis of what principles, what ideals, what norms or standards do we choose? (I will also address this in a later part)
My advice here is that you only choose
what you care for; what you are passionate about and that should not be money,
fame, drugs or other such delectable things.
In such cases where we think we have to make a decision or vote on a matter relating to something which I do not care about, we should join the band of fence-sitters in a domain which is called the middle ground. Do not make a choice if you do not have to or abstain from voting. If you do choose or vote in these circumstances, you will taint your integrity, being also blamed for voting for something which produced chaos.
Fence-sitting can be such a joy,
advantage and excuse. I have written about it in this article which you might
want to read:
https://pkodendaal.blogspot.com/2014/04/covering-middle-ground-rehashed.html
You also might want to read my article
on meaning here:
https://pkodendaal.blogspot.com/2012/07/philosophy-part-12-giving-meaning-to-it.html
In Part 2, I will address 'The joy of forgiving and forgetting'.
Enjoyed reading this and looking forward to part 2!
ReplyDelete