Aesthetics, Humor, Resentment, Happiness
More propaedeutia
Related: Diabetic Anarchists and Other Puzzles.
The subject here, as perhaps with all things, is happiness.
The Buddha was born an aristocrat and given everything he wanted, but he ended up an ascetic who refused as much as he needed.
The Atlantic asks in 2009: “What Makes Us Happy?”
The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in two places: inner-city Boston in 1939 and Harvard College in 1937. It continues to this day. The study observes the “Grant men,” plucked from the 1937 student body of Harvard College for their “normalcy” and general air sturdy success. It also observes the “Glueck men,” a group of students who lived in various poorer Boston neighborhoods. The goal is to figure out what makes us happy.
But the Harvard Study does not have the glossy self-help sheen of survey statistics and daily tasks. Instead, it has cabinet files bursting with handwritten, typewritten, keyboardwritten notes careening through eighty years of lumpy, misshapen, individual lives. The man who runs the study, George Vaillant, has none of the clean oily confidence that colors the bright shelves of airport bookstores. Rather, he is a big, warm, vexed man whose father died young and whose interests in art run tragic—a letter advising new medical residents suggests they prepare for his references to The Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman, and A Doll’s House.
When you get past the grins and grimaces and five-point scales, what does make us happy? What does it mean for us to be happy? How do we know if we are happy? Can we know?
On first glance, you are the study’s exemplar. . . .
After a major accident in college, you returned to campus in a back brace, but you looked healthy. You had a kind of emotional steel, too. . . .
After the war—during which you worked on a major weapons system—and graduate school, you married, and your bond with your wife only deepened over time. . . .
Yet your file shows a quiet, but persistent, questioning about a path not taken. As a sophomore in college, you emphasized how much money you wanted to make, but also wondered whether you’d be better off in medicine. After the war, you said you were “too tense & high strung” and had less interest in money than before. At 33, you said, “If I had to do it all over again I am positive I would have gone into medicine—but it’s a little late.” At 44, you sold your business and talked about teaching high school. You regretted that (according to a study staff member’s notes) you’d “made no real contribution to humanity.” At 74, you said again that if you could do it over again, you would go into medicine. In fact, you said, your father had urged you to do it, to avoid the Army. “That annoyed me,” you said, and so you went another way.
There is something unreachable in your file. “Probably I am fooling myself,” you wrote in 1987, at age 63, “but I don’t think I would want to change anything.” How can we know if you’re fooling yourself? How can even you know? According to Dr. Vaillant’s model of adaptations, the very way we deal with reality is by distorting it—and we do this unconsciously. When we start pulling at this thread, an awfully big spool of thoughts and questions begins to unravel onto the floor.
You never seemed to pull the thread. When the study asked you to indicate “some of the fundamental beliefs, concepts, philosophy of life or articles of faith which help carry you along or tide you over rough spots,” you wrote: “Hard to answer since I am really not too introspective. However, I have an overriding sense (or philosophy) that it’s all a big nothing—or ‘chasing after wind’ as it says in Ecclesiastes & therefore, at least up to the present, nothing has caused me too much grief.” (Italics in original)
What do we even want?
[Vaillant] told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.”
What does it mean when we get want we want? How far from misery is happiness?
From the first pages of your file, you practically explode with personality. In the social worker’s office, you laughed uproariously, slapping your arm against your chair. He “seems to be thoroughly delighted with the family idiosyncrasies,” Lewise Gregory, the original staff social worker, wrote. “He has a delightful, spontaneous sense of humor … [a] bubbling, effervescent quality.” “My family considers it a great joke that I am a ‘normal boy,’” you wrote. “‘Good God!’”
. . . “I’ve answered a great many questions,” you wrote in your 1946 survey. “Now I’d like to ask you people a couple of questions. By what standards of reason are you calling people ‘adjusted’ these days? Happy? Contented? Hopeful? If people have adjusted to a society that seems hell-bent on destroying itself in the next couple of decades, just what does that prove about the people?”
. . .
You started drinking. In college, you had said you were the life of the party without alcohol. By 1948, you were drinking sherry. In 1951, you reported that you regularly took a few drinks. By 1964, you wrote, “Really tie one on about twice a week,” and you continued, “Well, I eat too much, smoke too much, drink too much liquor and coffee, get too little exercise, and I’ve got to do something about all these things. “On the other hand,” you wrote, “I’ve never been more productive, and I’m a little wary of rocking the boat right now by going on a clean living kick … I’m about as adjusted and effective as the average Fine Upstanding Neurotic can hope to be.”
After a divorce, and a move across the country, and a second marriage—you left her for a mistress who later left you—you came out of the closet. . . . “It’s important to care and to try, even tho the effects of one’s caring and trying may be absurd, futile, or so woven into the future as to be indetectable.” Asked what effect the Grant Study had on you, you wrote, “Just one more little token that I am God’s Elect. And I really don’t need any such tokens, thank you.”
. . . You said you loved The Sorrow and the Pity and that, in the movie, the sort of men the Grant Study prized fought on the side of the Nazis, “whereas the kooks and the homosexuals were all in the resistance.” You told Dr. Vaillant he should read Joseph Heller on the unrelieved tragedy of conventionally successful businessmen.
Your “mental status was paradoxical,” Dr. Vaillant wrote in his notes. You were clearly depressed, he observed, and yet full of joy and vitality. . . . [You wrote,] “I mean, I can imagine some poor bastard who’s fulfilled all your criteria for successful adaptation to life, . . . upon retirement to some aged enclave near Tampa just staring out over the ocean waiting for the next attack of chest pain, and wondering what he’s missed all his life What’s the difference between a guy who at his final conscious moments before death has a nostalgic grin on his face as if to say, ‘Boy, I sure squeezed that lemon’ and the other man who fights for every last breath in an effort to turn back time to some nagging unfinished business?”
You went on to a very productive career, and became an important figure in the gay-rights movement. You softened toward your parents and children, and made peace with your ex-wife. You took long walks. And you kept drinking.
. . .
You died at age 64, when you fell down the stairs of your apartment building. The autopsy found high levels of alcohol in your blood. (Italics in original)
I’ll start off with what I currently think about happiness, because these plain propositions I have for the time landed upon are probably the least interesting part of this post. For the rest of our time here, I will be trying to talk around this section, to feel by touch the cracks my eyes glaze over.
I generally believe that happiness is something that relies upon largely prosaic things, but we often try to hide our plain, personal sadnesses with more grand frustrations with the state of the world writ large. I believe happiness tends to ensue when we are on the path towards something valued and that happiness is not something that often comes from searching directly for it. I think happiness is a deviously slippery concept, which sometimes means pleasure, other times a general contentedness or satisfaction, yet other times an imagined sort of bliss, still yet other times a sense of overall success or good living, and so on. I think that happiness is somewhat like the sun, in that if you try to look directly at it, it will likely blind you, and in that there are good reasons people have worshipped it across time. I think that happiness is somewhat unlike the sun in that it is not more commonly found in warmer climes. I think that happiness (the kind that’s worth it, the satisfaction or eudaemonia of a well-lived life) often ensues in unexpected paths and unexpected ways that are, if not bespoke, then at least tailored to a specific instance. I also think we have much in common concerning how we get happiness. I think that our happiness has much to do with our relationships to other people and that this fact makes it yet more paradoxical and unpredictable. I think that people have been able to create a happiness of sorts in desperate and destructive places, and at times far less conducive to happiness than our own. But I also think that happiness is tied up in our material circumstances and can’t be severed therefrom, at least not without losing something important.
Back to Vaillant and the Harvard Study:
[Vaillant’s] central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.
Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin.
Perhaps what is most important for making ourselves happy is what we do when the world does not cooperate. There are important ways by which we snatch happiness from the jaws of pain, steal it from times and places which do not openly offer it.
Vaillant has his taxonomy of adaptations, basically a tier list of them. Presumably, this is based on what he thinks is most adaptive in the long run, what is most likely to make us happy. Some of these we find straightforwardly destructive—alcoholism, say. Others instead drive us to create or plan or at least keep moving in a generally functional manner.
Now, I’m not particularly interested in low-tier garbo adaptations. I want to talk about the adaptations that drive us to act and create in strange ways. Yes, we can turn pain into compassion, and that is a true alchemy. But I am more curious about those stranger magics: humor and art.
I believe I was almost finished with my senior thesis in undergrad when someone mentioned, off-hand, that aesthetics was somewhat out of style in contemporary philosophy. This didn't so much matter to me materially, as I was by no means planning to use my work as arms in the bellum omnium contra omnes of the academic labor market. Nonetheless, the news saddened me. There is something deeply important to life about the aesthetic mode and some part of understanding our aesthetic capacity goes missing if philosophers abdicate their particular position of analysis with respect to it.
Of course, philosophy is as balkanized as any other discipline, and peer-reviewed papers on aesthetics still grind their way through the old academic publishing pipeline. But what was the last great aesthetic mind in academic philosophy? When was the last time a primarily aesthetic mind strode the philosophical world?
Perhaps this simply is the place of aesthetics, always uncomfortably positioned as it must be between philosophy and the arts.
Nonetheless, as something of a lover of wisdom (a philo of soph, if you will) myself, forking over the experience of beauty to its practitioners and reviewers seems mistaken to me. Our aesthetic experience is a philosophical puzzle as much as our moral one. In this area, as in most, I think Immanuel Kant got us ~80% to the right answers. However, I’m sure there are others who (also as in most areas) would disagree with me if they put their minds to it. And I would love to hear the brilliant ways they found to do so.
A source of amusement for me always learning others’ perceptions of people. I am a bit stupid, in this respect—as in, my knowledge of other people is generally unclear. My intuitions about people I know are under-theorized and largely intuitive. I am bad at remembering names of people that I should and I forget facts about people who I deeply care about.1 Theorizing about such things—cooking up “this person is like this,” “that person does that often,” “don’t do this around them”—feels like work to me. And I’m not sure that I’m particularly good at it. I have a way of being with people that seems to work, for the most part, but I’m not very good at explaining it. I can interpret the stuffings out of a novel and its characters, but when I gather with friends, no such analysis rises to the level of thought.
My mind has a bias—a tilt—towards generalities and objects: wisps of wind and clods of clay. I don’t believe that’s better than a focus on the faces of life, those fleshy, punctured doors between worlds. Either can be bad (uncaring on the one hand, despotic on the other) or good (servicing for one, nurturing the other).
Again, I have wandered to generalities—I was saying that I enjoy learning others’ perceptions of people. Now, as one of the most important people in my life, I especially enjoy learning their perceptions of me. Not, I believe, to a pathological extent (I got that out of my system when I stopped doing theatre in college),2 but in the way unraveling a mystery for any character can be fascinating.
One morning, in my childhood home during the recent pandemic, lo! what doth mine eyes see but a manila folder with my name on it. For a moment, a mischievous boy reaches into the cookie jar. But he is gone before long, and a young man splays his contents upon the dining room table. What greeted me were the reports to my parents from my elementary school teachers—what is their little boy like, those seven hours away from home? For the better part of a year, every year, there was a third-most-important adult in my life, and unlike numbers one and two, this third wheel could comment and leave. Here, I found their words, such as they were.
I don’t mean to brag when I say they were generally hagiographic—after all, I tend, if nothing else, to be a good boy. But one note stood out to me, not only because it is an unlikely thing for a teacher to say about a young boy, but also because it was not something I had previously considered a consistent quality in myself.
It said (and I paraphrase): “[omitted] is attendant to aesthetic experiences.”
What a strange, albeit delightful, thing to hear about 8-year-old me! Attendant to aesthetic experiences! Is that what they called walking around school with my nose in a book? Is that what they called my wandering eyes and half-smiling expression? Is that what they called—whenever I wasn’t panting for just one more instructional morsel, one more chuckle at my clownishness, one more “yes?” to my tightly raised hand—a tendency to enjoy? I barely remember those years myself! How delightful are the possibilities of what perhaps was which open up with this little note! Those times I test my fellow hikers’ patience, my tendency to stare a little too long at this or that, all of it, so curiously there. What delightful continuity! What a fun fact!
This post, somewhat more than the rest, I believe is a “confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” I will attempt to make it semi-conscious, with these illustrations—sketches really—of what I have experienced of myself.
It’s something I’m trying out. Don’t worry, I abstract from my particular situation fairly quickly, as I tend to in most things. Hopefully, I do not seem unduly engrossed here in the peculiarities of my own navel. I believe it is for beneficial effect. Aesthetics and humor get much of their force from their particularity. And, after all, some do say the universal is in the particular, and vice versa.
Towards the end of Portnoy’s Complaint, our bedeviled titular discontent recounts his trip to Israel. As an American Jew in the 1960s, he is constantly on the outside, both desperately desirous of the “goyische” American culture and hating it for repudiating him. But a land of Jews! What magic! To someone in 1960s Newark, someone whose social circle is pockmarked with forearm tattoos and filled with lopsided family trees, it is difficult to comprehend. The whole book has been about his neurotic, perverted, turbulent dalliances with non-Jewish women, and this is his chance to have the fundamental tension in his heart resolved! He will be in this land and of it! Everyone, Jewish—like him!
The joke is that he immediately becomes impotent.
And they’re not like him.3 He is nervous, insecure, spitting out jokes like a dog nipping at air. Everyone he meets is confident, assured, and army green serious. They’re normal and forthright. Why wouldn’t they be? It’s their country, after all.
This unbothered nation of Jews. Where were the twists, the turns, the whinings and the castigations?
Israel wasn’t always the Israel of Netanyahu and the sword. Even after the dispossession of the Palestinians, Israel—for diaspora, even very liberal diaspora, Jews—was the Israel of kibbutzim and the Six-Day War. It was socialist, peaceful, defensive Israel. The surefooted Israelis had not yet walked sure feet into settlements nor had they yet surely footed thousands of bombs onto thousands of Palestinians. And Portnoy desperately wanted these sure feet to work out the kinks in his knotty, knotty psyche.
He meets Naomi (meaning “pleasantness”)—a tall, healthy, morally sound woman of the egalitarian socialist kibbutzim, a woman sound because the system of her life is sound. So unlike America, split as it is across so many faults of race, religion, class, gender, politics, . . .. He feels ambivalent about her, but the simple sureness of her feet pulls him in. They get into a fight, and a line from this fight has stuck in my craw ever since I read it:
“Mr. Portnoy,” she said, raising her knapsack from the floor, “you are nothing but a self-hating Jew.”
“Ah, but Naomi, maybe that’s the best kind.”
What? The best kind? This misery and perverted love? This boiling hate bursting out of this tight, tight lid of restraint? These flashes of sick moralizing and sicker humor and even sicker romantic relationships? And yet, how much more drawn am I to Portnoy’s personal, human, desperate attempt at goodness than the confident thudding leather contentedness of a combat boot march? How much more beauty is in his straining than her pleasantness? How much more human is his laugh than her grim, unwrinkled smile?
I’ve always liked how it looks after it rains. The trees slightly drooping and the walls all a slightly denser shade. Everything looks newly born yet sturdier than before.
For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed a bright gray sky, the sun trying to push its way through a blanketing mist. I like a foggy day, the mystique of forests fading to gray. I like fall and winter, nature’s explosion of color and the blank austerity of snows and sticks.
I went to southern California and after a few days the blue sky weighed on me. It was blank and untextured, a blue screen laid upon the horizon. The smooth-leaved succulents and pebbly dirt looked dry and dusty. I felt parched. My skin felt warm and my face earned a gentle bronze. The ocean pushed and pulled the sand, lapping at a dry, dry beach. People love southern California. I can see why. It’s all the weather we like, all the time.
I am something of a sadist. No, not like that—it’s not anything illicit or puerile or comedic, or perhaps even all that interesting.
Let me bring myself to my natural terrain, the general: I think all literarily-inclined people are, or at least should be, sadists in a way. The grand, beautiful, fascinating expressions of humanity are all deeply cruel: they conjure characters, caress them, and then crack them apart to get at the good juicy bits inside.
Roger Ebert had it right: “it’s not what a movie is about; it’s how it is about it.” However, for the “it” to be revealed, the characters must pay their pound of flesh.
An innocent man could not reveal the humanity of guilty, guilty Raskolnikov. A graceful one could not forge Ahab’s grand mission out of the blank white sea. A free one could not plead liberty like beaten-down and defeated Winston Smith. The tragedy, the pain, the suffering is delicious, delicious, delicious!
Some people make an analytical mistake here: they see the cruelty and the sadness and they imagine that what we find beautiful is sadness and cruelty. This is incorrect: the cruelty is simply what allows for something else to be revealed, what allows the thing in question to be tested. A particle on its own is all well and good, but to discover something, you must smash it to bits.
What to do with this tendency, this ability, this god-given magic of making bread out of flesh?
As I find myself more drawn to viewing pain in an aesthetic light, I find myself calmer in the face of pain. I am not sure if or how this is causal, but nonetheless I have recently come to believe that my heart has hardened somewhat over the last few years.
I have two theories on the matter to consider. The first, which I have mentioned before, is On the Marble Cliffs. Its ethos is a sort of “aestheticism as resilience,” a way to keep functioning in the face of suffering, and perhaps even make light from it.4
The other is less positive.
In The Holdovers, widely-disliked grumpy prep school history teacher Paul (played by Paul Giamatti) is given the charge of several “holdovers” who don’t go home for winter break (i.e. Christmas). The only other adult around is one of the cooks, a black woman named Mary Lamb (very subtle) whose son recently died in Vietnam (a Lamb to the slaughter, one might say; Mary’s little Lamb, one might say as well). The two sit down together to chat for the first time, and Giamatti’s character makes a comment about his satisfaction with his hardassery concerning these prissy private school kids.
Mary, for her part, counsels kindness (video):
Mary: So, how are the boys?
Paul: [pleased] Broken, in body and spirit.
Mary: Okay, well, it is the holidays, so go easy on them.
Paul: Oh please, they’ve had it easy their whole lives.
Mary: You don’t know that. Did you?
[Paul looks away]
Mary: Besides, everybody should be with their people on Christmas.
It does not seem a coincidence to me that harshness and discipline is, traditionally, an ethic of aristocrats. Private schools and their teachers are about as close as one can get to aristocracy in America. Peasants were not concerned with any possibility of decadence for themselves, but such ‘fat’ was the fundamental insecurity of the aristocratic class.
There are a lot of ways you could try to explain this, psychologically: sublimated guilt over unearned privilege; the centrality of status games in the absence of material productivity and in the presence of close social ties; attempts to please one’s parents (extending up the line eventually to one’s warrior ancestors); etc. I have no idea if any of those explanations are valuable—pyschological speculation often feels more parlor game than investigation, a “stick with two ends,” as Dostoevsky’s skeptical defense counsel describes it in Brothers Karamazov.
However, it does remind me of something I read once but can’t place (it may have been a review of Bourdieau) about class differences in taste: individuals in higher classes tended to call images like the bark of a tree beautiful, while those in lower classes tended to call images like a baptism in a cathedral beautiful; tragedy is commonly understood to be a high-class preoccupation, and kitsch a low-class one.
Perhaps, then class distinctions in art are based on what tends to be lacking in the lives of the individuals within such a class. Tragedy allows the experience of sadness, while being able to keep a distance; it allows an expression of a vital emotion within a controlled environment. Certainly, someone whose life has been racked with pain can find solace in tragedies, but they might often find more alluring a particularly grand expression of the justice and success they lack. One function of art is a practiced, careful expression of an experience we otherwise might not receive.5
Under this reading, the resilience aesthetics brings is the ability to ignore others’ sadness because of your exquisite empathy towards people you made up, or the pleasure you find in its expression. Perhaps I got it backwards, before: perhaps, as I got more hardhearted, I found more expression of my sympathy in the aesthetic.
So we return to a question: what is the difference between practice and distraction? Largely, it’s what you do with it. Would it be better if an aristocracy had no inkling for tragedy? No desire for discipline? Or do those very representations allow aristocrats to have some connection, however tenuous, with the daily toil of those less lucky in their birth?
The Buddha was born an aristocrat surrounded by pleasure. Everything available to the wealthy and powerful of old was given to him. The distance of desire between himself and the world was minimized. But he eventually wanted to scale the walls of the pleasure palace, and he arrived upon the pain of others. With no stories to tell, all he could do when faced with pain was try to help.
Surely we all hate ourselves at least a little bit? Surely we want to die at least a little bit? Want at least a little bit of us to die? Some piece of us we want to change out of, say goodbye to, kill? Surely there is some daylight between who we are and who we ought to be? Surely our highest ideals do not match perfectly our daily guesswork. Surely there is something we live towards. Surely this, whatever we are, isn’t “it.”
If you’re not trying to die a little bit, why are you living?
I am almost compulsively irreverent. For all my love of sublime and sacred things, my mind churns with jokes and play. Sometimes I just send my friends a sentence:
“Taking your husband’s name to own the libs.”
“Flavor-blasted communion wafers.”
“RIP Alexander Hamilton you would’ve loved Substack.”
“Atticus Binch. Is this anything?”
I don’t know how funny any of these are. But I like jokes. Almost compulsively.
One of my favorite artifacts of the internet is the Wikipedia page on Jewish Humor:
Two Rabbis argued late into the night about the existence of God, and, using strong arguments from the scriptures, ended up indisputably disproving His existence. The next day, one Rabbi was surprised to see the other walking into the shul for morning services.
"I thought we had agreed there was no God," he said.
"Yes, what does that have to do with it?" replied the other.
Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. "Herr Altmann," said his secretary, "I notice you're reading Der Stürmer! I can't understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?"
"On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we're on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know – it makes me feel a whole lot better!"
During the days of oppression and poverty of the Russian shtetls, one village had a rumor going around: a Christian girl was found murdered near their village. Fearing a pogrom, they gathered at the synagogue. Suddenly, the rabbi came running up, and cried, "Wonderful news! The murdered girl was Jewish!"
A Jewish man lies on his deathbed, surrounded by his children. "Ah," he says, "I can smell your mother's brisket – how I would love to taste it one last time before I die." So one of his sons hurries down to the kitchen, but he returns empty-handed.
"Sorry, papa. She says it's for the shiva (mourning period)."
I deeply enjoy the earnest, black-and-white, diligently-cited encyclopedia of the internet sturdily explaining these playful twists on desparation. The humor here is often dark, dealing with some troubling facet of Jewish experience by looking at it sideways.
For Immanuel Kant, beauty is about the manner of expression, not the thing expressed. When an idea is expressed in a particular manner, one which we are captured by, which ‘fits’ with our mind in some fashion, then we feel it is beautiful. Something is beautiful where there is some matching between our mind and the thing’s expression of an idea, some particularly good fit between the two.
Humor, similarly, is about the way something is expressed. But rather than fitting with our mind, there is some turn or subversion.
Humor is oftentimes used for deflection and bonding. By making a joke about our discomfort, we can frame the discomfort as an expectation and then play with and subvert that expectation.
This process can deflect from the discomfort itself by giving us some control over that discomfort. Sometimes, it might even provide us something to hope for or imagine on the other side of that discomfort. It is a way of claiming victory over the discomfort: the discomfort is not all-powerful; it is silly, able to be joked with and subverted.
Also, by framing that discomfort as an assumption, the people who find it funny also understand that everyone else laughing understands the joke with them. “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom—he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold” (E.B. White). The preaching has its own uses, but it is the joke that reveals between two people that they both already know the same thing, the same discomfort, the same assumption.
Humor is not merely a tool of the oppressed. We know both the chuckling, sardonic oppressed and their sneering, snickering bullies. The bullies often use humor for the same reasons. As long as they are not too far gone, it is extraordinarily difficult to look unflinching into the face of another and spit. You need something to distract you from the face—hate, difference, justice, or comedy. The bully laughs because they know this isn’t how people are supposed to interact—the assumptions of a peaceful society have been subverted. And the bully looks around to make sure that all the other bullies understand the joke and agree that it is a joke.
There is a philosophy of humor, where various philosophers attempt to say what the fundamental nature of a joke is. The oldest sources (Plato, Hobbes, Descartes) tend to argue that humor is an expression of superiority or cruelty, but this mode of explanation has been out of style for some time now, I believe. My bet is on some narrowed version of expectation subversion.
We have various concepts in our minds that extend out in different directions. Much humor seems to come from the natural implicatures of these concepts—the usual evidence of the general idea being pushed in one of its many possible directions—being suddenly subverted. Until the end of the communication, words and concepts are in a sort of superposition betwen their various meanings. As we read or hear more, we get a better sense of the probability field, until the punchline snaps us out of where we thought the concept was going to end up.
This definition is likely overbroad, but what is curious about humor understood generally as a species of subversion is that humor becomes parasitic on expectations. It requires steady expectations to play off of. But if jokes erode those expectations, or the expectations are not shared, then the jokes are gone too.
I love jokes. I love the play of them. I like that when you get people to laugh you get a clear expression of their enjoyment—helpful for someone who used to be quite a bit anxious. I like that jokes are about words and concepts. I like the little ways I can read the table-setting of your mind and pull the cloth in exactly the right way to leave everything just a little bit wavering, but one level closer to the ground. I like how you can make a joke, and then I can make a branch of that joke, and then you a twig, and I a leaf, and before you know it we’re laughing in the inverted shade of a conceptual anomaly.
But sometimes I wonder at the sincere and straight-laced. How incredible! To simply grab the world as it stands and talk about it. Or not talk about it! To say simply true things! It’s mind-boggling to me and at times I stare in awe of them. Their seriousness, their frankness. As much as I am touched by the perverse, I find something admirable about this as well.
There is something about humor and its play that tends to strip away pretension and boundaries. It can leave its subject bare for the understanding but also bare of importance.
Humor and beauty have many purposes, but one thing they do is they are something to do when you can’t get what you want. They are adaptations to circumstances that don’t allow you to do anything else.6
We all need to broker our own psychological bargains. We all have our own parliament of impulses, each member looking for pork to bring home. Our impulses make their little regulations and appropriations, back room deals and grand compromises.
Perhaps one way of describing, directionally at least, the bargain I have struck recently is to feel less sympathy and more guilt, and to assuage that guilt by attempting to act ‘better,’ in some way, than those more sympathetic than myself: I will justify my personal hardness by my efficacy. I will care less about animal cruelty and eat vegetarian. I will feel less guilt passing the panhandler on the drive back from my grocery store and donate more to food banks. I will worry less about the climate and drive an electric vehicle. These sorts of things. Perhaps this style of thinking is visible in some of my arguments on this blog. I am unsure what this shift in my mental appropriations may portend, whether it is better, or whether I am even describing it correctly.
I am certainly disconcerted by this change. I deeply admire the instinctual, genuine, personal care with which many people I know approach suffering of magnitude great and small. If it ever strikes me as rote or overwrought, then at those moments I am disappointed in my cynicism. I knew someone who would keep granola bars in her car so whenever she passed by someone asking for food or money, she had something on-hand for the person in front of her. I think that’s wonderful. I have thought that is wonderful ever since I heard she did it. And yet why don’t I have granola bars in my car? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll buy some next time I’m at the market.
The point is, this is a psychological bargain. Separately, it is a philosophical assertion, a way of life which must justify itself. Goodness, the source of that justification, is an object of our desire as well, and makes its own demands. The weight we place on those demands and how we interpret them are parts of the bargain as well.
My senior thesis was on the relationship between aesthetics and morality. Specifically, I puzzled over a claim by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment: beauty, he says, is the symbol of the (morally) good. Such a startling claim about the fundamental relationship between two branches of philosophy, and he dashes it off in about three pages. What does it mean for beauty to be the “symbol” of the morally good? Why is it “the” symbol of the morally good? How is this different from the previously-discussed relationship of the sublime (the other aesthetic feeling in Kant’s system) to the morally good?
Because I don’t plan on expanding this post by approximately 80 or so additional pages, I won’t fully recapitulate my arguments here.
Beauty, for Kant, was disinterested—it was pleasure in the mere appearance of something, without a care for any actual advantage it might serve to us, and a pleasure we instinctively believe we share with all others. Morality, similarly, is something we aim to love and desire although it may contain no special advantage for us, and it is something we instinctively believe we share with all others. Our appreciation for beauty, which is plainly pleasurable, provides us with a model for our appreciation of morality, which is not always.
Sublimity, for Kant, was a fascination with our own capacities and vocations. The dynamical sublime (which was the type related to morality), confronted us with something incredibly dangerous. However, at the same time as we understood the power of the thing in front of us, we also—in his theory—naturally considered our own capacity to ignore that power if we felt it was necessary. What sort of necessity? Moral necessity, the only sort of necessity which could ever send someone running towards a forest fire or into a tornado. Sublimity reminds us that nothing can take away our freedom—merely our lives. It reminds us that we can always choose the good, and through the awe we feel in it, it reminds us of the respect we feel towards the moral law even when it requires sacrifice.
For all the unease I feel towards my aestheticism, I do believe in it. I believe that appreciation for beauty and awe pulls me away from the grubby status-monster in my lower intestine. I believe that love of the aesthetic makes me less serious about the petty ups and downs of careers and reputations. And I believe that my taste for pained characters and high ideals gives me both solace and direction.
For all the admiration I have towards the sincere of the world, I do believe in humor. I believe that an appreciation of the humorous in life can puncture the big swell of hot air that is always threatening to release from one side of my intestinal tract or the other. I believe that the skill of being funny allows me to connect with people in joyful ways. And I believe that my instinct for what’s funny allows me to take the pains and indignities and surprises of life in stride.
The uneasiness I feel is the uneasiness of overdetermination and giftedness: yes, I feel somewhat insulated from my petty interests, but is that because of my personal virtue or my personal situation? I have more reason than most to feel confident in my material security. In too many ways to count, I have reason to be absurdly, obscenely grateful. This is not a boast, but an inquest: who am I to fiddle with a flower and pretend it virtue? who am I to crack a joke and call it wisdom? Perhaps my distaste for the Romantics is that I could be one of them! I desperately, desperately do not want to be dilettantish, and yet.
And yet! Pain, poverty, and suffering are perpetual pieces of our common inheritance, and for at least as long as we have written there have been those who care more about the good than the pleasant, and for whom the beautiful has been a blessing and an instruction. If anything, we have lessened, in our time, the hold these grieving ghosts have got over us. Does their continued existence mean I should forego my consolations?
I can’t help every homeless person in my town. I can’t feed every hungry mouth in my state. I can’t stop every animal from being tortured in my country. I can’t stop every war in my world. I can’t stop globe from warming. So what do I do?
When the Buddha walked outside his walled pleasure and saw suffering. He immediately tried to help. But he couldn’t: if he tried to help the sick, he would just get sick himself; if he tried to help the old, he would just get older. He couldn’t help and he knew no jokes or stories—how could he? he had no desires which required them—so he had nothing to do. Then he saw an ascetic. He saw someone who did not suffer from lack but instead chose it. He saw someone who endorsed the suffering, who found a way to desire even that.
The movie Vengeance considers: what are the ways we make records of ourselves? what is the importance of the records? do we care about people or the record they have made? what is the nature of revenge?
The movie is set in rural Texas, land that remembers the Alamo and each of the six flags it has worn. The main character is from New York City, land of opportunity, new beginnings, and endless choices. But the main character is a writer, someone who creates records. He explores the rural town, recording the family of a woman who recently died, who believe she was murdered. And they want vengeance.
Evolutionary psychologists can give their explanations of revenge as a prospective deterrent, but the experience of revenge is not prospective. Revenge is action for the sake of something lost, not so it can be regained but simply because it was lost. When we seek revenge, do we do it for the person we lost, or for their record, and for what might have been? At one point in the movie, a character says they are afraid of ghosts because they might be real, and another responds that what is truly scary about ghosts is that they aren’t real, but we think they should be. We can feel the piece of someone—the record—they have left in us, and we look out, and we don’t find it. When you lose, someone, what is worse: the fact that they’re gone, or the fact that you sometimes forget that they are?
Yet without those records, those pieces of the past we still keep with us, what sort of thing is life? A life without any regrets, without constant, never-ending regret, is one without possibility and without the connection between moments that a life requires. A life without regrets would just be a wandering through some days.
So what do we do with these records? How do we turn loss into something else? How do the dead things in our life become new? Our whole life is a work of translation between past and future. We are pocked with past lives, past deaths, past loves, and past losses. What do we do about it?
Striking, no? That we will live and die over something that does not exist? But, of course, all that we do is for things that don’t exist—things that will or did or might someday exist, but do not right now and right here.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s primary addition to the philosophical lexicon was his concept of ressentiment. When humans’ natural will to power was frustrated, he believed they might turn to what he saw as the unhealthy consolations of ressentiment. Rather than try to better themselves or create something new, they would simply hate that which wronged them and revel in their own misery. They would enjoy the fact that they suffered because it showed that they were good and their perpetrators were evil. And so they sipped, sickly, from the venomous cup which allowed them to die quietly.
Resentment, as we use it today, only refers to negative resentment. Etymologically, though, ressentiment is simply re-sentiment: a feeling which recurs. It is not idly that I bring up the word’s etymology—Nietzsche was a philologist by training, and I would hope he was attuned to the history of his primary addition to the philosophical lexicon. When Nietzsche says that ressentiment can be intoxicating or deadening, he is not only talking about licking our wounds, but also about our fond remembrances. He is talking about our attachment to the past—our ability to bring up something which no longer exists and care about it.
It seems that Nietzsche wanted to distinguish ressentiment, which allowed people to live without creating and acting, from the aesthetic creation of values. I find this definition of ressentiment somewhat gerrymandered. Even in his own genealogical account of ressentiment, Nietzsche believed it could be intoxicating, but he also thought that the moment we became resentful was also the moment we became interesting—the big blond brutes of his philosophical state of nature were less neurotic, but also far less compelling. Nietzsche’s blonde brutes didn’t build much of note. But the twitchy, neurotic, self-flagellators built cities! gods! art!
Our feelings recur not only when we brood and ruminate, but also when we embark and execute grand projects. The feeling of a promise returns to you when you are tempted to break it; the feeling of a project’s beginning touches your hands while you finish it; the feeling of all your life bears down on you, asking “how will I be worth it?” Completion does not create value without a sense of the start, just as a symphony does not make beauty without each of its movements.
Nietzsche was concerned with creating values, not dissecting them—after all, when you dissect something, it generally dies. Nietzsche was concerned about the ways that our ability to live in the past would allow us to not build a future. However, I think he should have recognized that it is also that ability to live with the past which makes us singular; it is that which allows us to build and create, which can make us do crazy, foolish, incredible things. It is only by our connection through time that we can take on our great projects and fulfill our grand promises, as he so dearly wanted us to do.
I am not aware of a philosophical giant more aesthetic in temperament than Friedrich Nietzsche. I think he was searching for a synthesis of the vital life of his blond brutes and the ressentiment-fueled idiosyncrasies of his modern Europeans. I think he was drawn to the aesthetic because it resembles such a synthesis: cruelty refashioned into affirmation. Blood fashioned into wine.
The aesthetic allows us to handle our unworthy desires and sufferings, and turn them into something better. It was, he might have thought, a way to redeem suffering, one with grander pretensions than chuckling commiseration and with more room for life than moralized self-denial.
Perhaps art is such a fertile ground for new ideas and values because beauty, as Kant argues, simply is the fitting expression of ideas. Ideas bubble up from our experiences. Especially new ideas. New ideas take time to fully and clearly articulate, and do not come packaged with the abstract terminology they eventually accrue. But when such an idea—a set of experiences you didn’t yet have a word for or even hadn’t yet identified as a particular thing—is expressed beautifully, that’s magic.
When you cannot rely on familiarity with the idea, all the value of an expression of the idea must come from its beauty. The expression must snake its way into your head, not through any well-trod paths but through the interstices you have yet to stitch together.
One way of understanding distaste for didacticism in art might be that didacticism allows for familiarity with an idea to substitute, ersatz-like, for its beautiful expression. Once an idea is well-known, it is not that it cannot be expressed beautifully, but that there is the opportunity for reliance on the well-known nature of the idea to lend credence to the expression. We appreciate something we believe being told back to us with less concern with the way it is told. In this way, the familiarity of the idea allows for a lower quality of its expression. This is an advantage of necessity for new ideas and values in the realm of aesthetics.
Suffering is deeply isolating. It tends to focus the mind on our own little pinprick of existence, our personal pocket of destitution. It sharpens the distinction between us and the world, drawing a line between our desires and what is real. It sharpens the distinction between us and other people, stretching a chasm between our mind and another’s. Suffering making words feel pliant and useless, makes us feel as though all of existence is against us. We cry out, knowing the words sound naive and dumb: “Why me? Why this? Why now? Why are you doing this to me now?”
Nietzsche did not like ascetics. He railed against those who shrunk away from their desires and from life. They would rather suffer in peace and wait to die than act and create and consume and live. He wanted a grand sort of magnanimity. He wanted a large heart untouched by resentment grasping at the world and striving to create and grow.
But what if asceticism is the very grandest act of magnanimity towards the world? Nietzsche himself says Buddhism “giv[es] reality the right” with its silence on sin and focus on suffering. What if asceticism is an attempt to accept and love suffering, that most unacceptable and unlovely thing?
And yet, and yet. Are we to give up so easily our war on suffering? As an American, I am not comfortable withdrawing from any wars! How are we to withdraw from the ring with some dignified expression? The most beautiful, funny, epic products of human striving, everything that touches your soul and your gut and everything in between: these were all just a lark? a mistake on the way to sitting cross-legged on a wooden floor? Are we to leave our miraculous victories on the bloody, bloody mat? Am I to say Catch-22 was a mistake? Funny, beautiful, sublime, epic Catch-22?
The Buddha, when faced with the suffering of others, turned away from his own pleasure and embraced suffering. Through his wanderings, he found enlightenment: a release from conditioned existence. This was a release from ignorance, desire, reincarnation, and suffering. It was a release from the world. It was a release from limits.
Now, consider that I might be butchering the Buddhism here, but also: what makes us happy?
We distinguish between straightforward happiness and the adaptations that reality requires of us. We define a primary source of happiness and distinguish it from perverse ways of getting pleasure. But why do we take material advantage to be primary? What makes our material advantage primary and our altruism, humor, and aesthetics secondary? What makes reception fundamental and creation perverse?
We assume the natural thing is advantage, that happiness from our material betterment is the foundation upon which all our other happinesses are built. We say the reason we build these other happinesses is that the world does not give us enough material betterment to satisfy us.
However, “material betterment” is also a theory, a generalization that we backsolve from our experience of pleasure. Furthermore, “material betterment” begs a certain question: what is better? And before you say some evolutionary mumbo-jumbo, remember that evolution wants our genes to propagate, but we invented condoms and adoption. The question remains: why define genes as primary and adoption secondary? I have never seen my genes before, but I have seen a loving adopted family.
A story without a citation.
When England colonized India and sent its idealistic, cavalier young men East to administer the empire, one practice they confronted was sati, female widows’ self-immolation after the death of their husbands. Eventually, sati would be outlawed, but before that time. . .
There was one particular story of a British colonial desperately pleading with a woman not to kill herself. At first, perhaps, he argued about the sanctity of all human life (a Christian and, in this case, quite ironic tack), but eventually he argued that she just didn’t know how much pain she would be in. In response, the woman supposedly requested he open his lighter and proceeded to stare at him unflinching as her finger burned above his Sheffield Steel fire. He allowed her to proceed.
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote that you sometimes cannot tell if someone was happy until long after they have died. Of course, he wrote no such thing—he was writing in ancient Greek. but he is translated as saying roughly that. The term traditionally translated as happiness was “eudaemonia.” The prefix “eu-” meaning “good,” and “daemon” meaning something like spirit. Now, we usually translate it as “flourishing” or something of that sort.
But consider someone who works their whole life to begin a grand, generation-spanning project. Or someone who starts what they hope to be a decade-long marriage. Are they happy? Are they flourishing? Are they in good spirits? Can we even know right now? What if some latent or future knot going to recontextualize all the strands of life that came before it?
Say the builder’s project is used for devastating ends, or abandoned as the folly of the dead. Say the spouse uncovers infidelity, or one day looks back and believes it was all a sham. Does that make them less happy? Does it make their past less happy? To what extent is happiness veneer, and to what extent is it substance? To what extent is it momentary and to what extent is it historical, narrativistic?
Of course, the history doesn’t exist—we’re imagining it (remembering it, constructing it, retelling it). And we are imagining it from the present, which does exist, and which does give us either pleasure or pain. What is happiness: the feeling that comes back, or the feeling that exists right now?
George Vaillant at Harvard tells us that the single most important predictor of long-term well-being is the quality of our relationships with others. Not exactly the “One Neat Trick” we might have been hoping for, or a novel and groundbreaking idea, but I suppose it is at least new confirmation of an old cliché.
One way of looking at a relationship with another person is as destroying an inherent limit of our experience. Relationships with other people allow us to break out of our own mind. We can extend ourselves beyond our own mind. We can feel another’s successes and failures, help or harm them, or trade ideas with them. We are able to create and express ourselves. We can build shared assumptions and make jokes.
Another way of looking at a relationship with another person is as creating new limits on our experiences. Relationships require rules and promises: they extend over a period of time, requiring you to hold to your past deeds and also to at least intend to constrain your future ones. Relationships accrue value over time, as the moments within them build upon one another, events recontextualize the whole and are themselves recontextualized later on, and our old feelings come back. Mixing present and past both constrains our present and gives it new dimensions.
What makes us happy? On the one hand, we strain at limits: we want to extend ourselves into the past, into the future, into other people’s minds, into our imagination. On the other hand, all of our extensions require some conditions of their own to give them structure and extension: we rely on our feelings that come back, or our aesthetic values, or our shared assumptions. Some deny the conditions and attempt to receive something unconditioned and limitless—for instance, the Buddha. Or Heidegger.
I think if you take the sort of pleasure-palace materially pleasing happiness to be fundamental and primary, then you probably end up with that goal: become happy by searching for Being qua Being. Accept suffering. Forget yourself and all the feelings which threaten to come back. Retreat from the fickle, strange, perverse world and all its disappointments and imaginings.
I’m not sure that the Being-searchers don’t have it right. They might. But when I ponder a beautiful painting, or laugh at my friend’s joke, it doesn’t feel secondary to me. And when I look back, it doesn’t look secondary to me. It feels, and looks, like happiness.
In what sense, then, do I claim to care about them? Likely I mean this: I enjoy their presence, I want deeply to remain close to them, I admire them in various ways, and I feel special obligations towards them. I would hopefully come to their aid in the unfortunate circumstance where my small contribution were needed. But I do not well-remember the various sagas of their lives.
In my defense, I barely remember those of my own.
Joking (mostly).
Similar themes come up in his book Operation Shylock, which is more focused on Israel and which I reviewed at length here.
Note, perhaps, the resonances with Christian focuses on redemptive suffering and Christ as inventor of the parable.
I think something similar could probably be said, roughly, in terms of social ethoses. E.g. aristocracy aims for discipline because aristocrats feel a lack of discipline in their lives (of course all such ethics and needs and insecurities have pathological outgrowths and yada yada yada, but in the main, I think this is directionally correct).
An aside: artists and comics have these adaptations honed to a tee. Yet they seem to have a higher misery quotient than normal. Is that true (it could be a sort of bias in what we are exposed to)? If so, why? There could be many reasons, and it is important to not reason from a price change: it could be that a total specialization in these adaptations creates misery, or that without such adaptations the artists and comics would be even worse off, or the life of an artist or comic creates misery for separate reasons (such as the pressures of celebrity).