happiness so far

I need to take a breather and survey the progress of my happiness thesis so far. Since starting on this project last June, I’ve floated certain approaches, had that feeling of brio about certain ideas that crashed and burned, and have had to chisel here and chisel there. And I’ve driven down many dead ends – the deadliest of which has been trying to make sense of the various psychologies of the emotions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Down these mean streets others have walked before me, each ending up with the distinct feeling of being separated from the main, lost among fathomless assumptions and philosophical anthropologies. William James, in the Principles of Psychology, wrote:

“The result of all this flux is that the merely descriptive literature of the emotions is one of the most tedious parts of psychology. And not only is it tedious, but you feel that its subdivisions are to a great extent either fictitious or unimportant, and that its pretences to accuracy are a sham. But unfortunately there is little psychological writing about the emotions which is not merely descriptive. As emotions are described in novels, they interest us, for we are made to share them. We have grown acquainted with the concrete objects and emergencies which call them forth, and any knowing touch of introspection which may grace the page meets with a quick and feeling response. Confessedly literary works of aphoristic philosophy also flash lights into our emotional life, and give us a fitful delight. But as far as "scientific psychology" of the emotions goes, I may have been surfeited by too much reading of classic works on the subject, but I should as lief read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on a New Hampshire farm as toil through them again. They give one nowhere a central point of view, or a deductive or generative principle. They distinguish and refine and specify in infinitum without ever getting on to another logical level. Whereas the beauty of all truly scientific work [p. 449] is to get to ever deeper levels. Is there no way out from this level of individual description in the case of the emotions?”

James is right about the lack of a central point of view. It is striking: there’s no central organizing principle from which a taxonomy could be deduced. A science that has not advanced to the point of taxonomical agreement is, indeed, a desert.

Twentieth century psychology has advance by, as it were, imposing a taxonomy from the outside in. Instead of a central point of view, there is something like a social contract among psychologists, who have produced their categories by committee. The result is a discipline that has found, at one time or another, almost every human behavior sick, or not sick; that has agreed to certain lawlike regularities – for instance, the ‘law’ that all human beings seek to maximize pleasure – compounded ad hoc out of amalgams of skewed cases; that employs mathematical seeming terms, like ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ to describe the ‘valence’ of emotions, which really derive from the conjunction of old folk psychology of sympathetic magic and the romantic science of trances, animal magnetism, analogies and universal fluids current at the turn of the nineteenth century, which have proved to be truly useless for putting emotions into a natural kinds ordering. In the twentieth century, without a doubt, success has come most often from chemistry and neurology. We might not understand why the chemistry of the brain produces the effects it does, but we often set up pretty reliable correspondences between effects and chemistry. That this is not a deep explanation, a causal one, is not necessarily a disbarring thing – Newton, after all, explicitly warned his readers against thinking that he was providing an explanation of gravity, he was simply describing its laws. For an explanation, all he could do was refer us to God.

Well, poking through psychology has shown me how much we still live in a shaman ruled society, in which ritual words are taken for wonders. Otherwise, my problem on this front is still to come up with a good explanation of how psychology, in the period of the Great Transformation, succeeded in spreading new emotional customs.

A happier path has been opened up through the reading of novels, essays, diaries and the like. There is an objection to this method: these writings, it is said, reflect the elite culture. The self interpretations of the peasant farmer or a Parisian seamstress are simply not going to emerge in a text-based research project about the emotions. To put it another way: the writers give us a false totality.

Now, I’m not in agreement with the dippy post-Marxist historians who think we can safely junk the class concept. But the compulsion to fit the writers into a reflection metaphoric, to see them functioning solely as apologists for a given system of privileges of class, race, gender, etc., simply ignores the historic reality of how the intellectual system operated. There’s a certain social science dumbness about the intellectual imagination – about the trajectory of the the writer, philosophe, poet, diary writer, doctor, alchemist, etc in the class structured system, even in the early modern era. These people often fall in the intermediate group – in a group defined by transactions between different classes, ethnicities, and genders. While it is true that the high bourgeoisie and the aristocrats are well represented among the writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the interesting thing is how many of these writers don’t come from an elite background. And often, when they do, they come slightly damaged – like Samuel Johnson’s friend, Richard Savage. This intermediate group formed one of the channels between all groups – this flashes out best when in stories of scandal, as for instance in the famous ‘Affair of Poisons’, when various noblemen and women in Louis XIV’s court got caught up in a police dragnet that came in the wake of the Marquise de Brinvilliers trial – the Marquise was convicted of poisoning her father, her brothers, and assorted others who got in her way. The police records of the subsequent investigation, which have been exhaustively combed by social scientists, reveal extensive if limited literacy among artisans and working class Parisians. Literacy is perhaps too small a word – I mean, lifestyles that are inflected by reading. The third life (the life after that of sleeping and waking) was already present at the grassroots in 1680.

So I would defend the scope of the testimony of the imagination. Since it is part of my thesis that the changes wrought in the positional market by the transformation from a feudal to a mercantile/capitalist system globally impacted our emotional norms, I rather need that testimony to have scope.

If we grant a class structure in which the classes were not opaque one to another, then I think what we have, from the writer’s position, is this: three themes of resistance to the oncoming happiness culture can be spotted in the 19th century. There was the resistance of the pessimists, which located itself, at least by sympathy, in the aristocratic sphere, and wove the aristocratic ideology while the class itself was dying; there was the resistance from the revolutionary writers, who, again at least by sympathy, located themselves in the popular level; and there was the resistance on the margins of bourgeois life, even by those who were the great ideologists of liberalism, like Mill and Tocqueville. I think this latter form of resistance flows into psychoanalysis at the beginning of the 20th century.

I am still at the hunch level on another aspect of this project: the idea of the hedonic fallacy. The hedonic fallacy projects an affectual state onto a subject that can’t “feel” it - be it a social arrangement or material circumstances. If one of Pavlov’s dogs could speak, he would probably define a bell as a thing that salivates when it makes a certain noise. This projection is very much tied to the utilitarian justification for capitalism – although it is important to remember that utilitarianism of a kind also migrated into socialist thought, and has played a decisive role there, for instance in the productivist regime instituted by Stalin.

So this is where I stand so far. Any suggestions at this point would be helpful!

Meanwhile, Dr. Jeep plays on...