A Human Strategy #539: What is the value of Happiness?
539
What is the value of happiness? A philosopher’s question. But what is the cost? A very different question. The conditions that call for the greatest hopes suffocate me. The very desire for happiness is an admission that one is not in its condition. This makes a happy philosopher very different from someone with a philosophy of happiness.
There is one difference between a greater happiness consequent of an unexamined condition and a lesser consequence of the aim on happiness. Luck often gives us more happy moments and at greater intensity than our philosophy does. That is no small problem. But there is another difference between the happy achievement of understanding one’s own condition and a conclusion of happiness thrown onto consciousness precisely to mask its own sad condition.
The intelligent very often survive an unconscious subordination by exploiting their dependence upon the conceptual view. It is all quite easy because the threat of humiliation prevents awareness of a mind staged by its circumstance. This is not even a problem. It is a solution. The philosopher promotes himself by containing discussion to the conceptual view, projecting an untouchable standard, the sheer comprehension of which overcomes his suspicion of mechanical inferiority. We begin with concepts, but if we do not then think backwards ... if we do not investigate their projectors, we have no edge from which to begin, and tenability itself becomes the suicide of genius.
The seeking, the concept projection, and the machine that required them are not the same things. What is this machine’s higher function? A dominance projector. It alone sets values, without which there would have been no illusion of the comparative. To think oneself happier in the equation than power can be in its opportunity is no small compensation for the lack of an alternative. Our motive is powerful. It yields to the divine, not necessarily in proportion to the power it might actually find over itself, but to its unthought power over perception.
The dominance seeking, the concept that survives, and the duress of the subordination that required them are not the same things. It is just as impossible to be happy and seek happiness at the same time as it is to be satisfied and crave food, and so the longer the pursuit through a philosophy of happiness the greater either the incompetence of the quest or the dishonesty of its claimed achievement. At some point one must regard the whole pursuit as a series of steps to a condition, the success of which would be the loss of the desire, losing then also the goal. The cost of one’s happiness then is most likely the loss of its philosophy.