Another take on human fulfilment and happiness

There are, indeed, many ways of addressing the issue of human happiness, and even in the work of one particular thinker one encounters more than one set of concepts to do so.

In my previous posting, I looked at Martin Heidegger’s notion of the existential structure of being-human (thrownness, projection and falling) in relation to fulfilment and happiness; this time I shall make use of another set of interrelated concepts from his later work, and one that has been very influential in areas ranging from philosophy to literature, art and architecture.

I am thinking of Heidegger’s concept of the “fourfold” (Geviert), namely the inseparably connected concepts of “earth”, “sky”, “mortals” and “divinities”. Together, according to Heidegger, they comprise the indispensable terms of orientation for human beings in the world. It means that, if one or more of these are absent as “markers” to determine one’s “place” in the world, one would not be able to claim that one is living an authentically “human” life. This is why he says that, together, the four comprise a “simple oneness”. Heidegger’s explication of these may seem obscure, but on reflection, they make perfect sense, as I shall try to show.

“Earth” denotes the earth as condition of the possibility of life, including human life, but also that which withdraws resolutely from humans’ penetrating, objectifying scrutiny; in other words, that aspect of the earth which no amount of scientific analysis or experimentation could ever capture. In Heidegger’s words, it is the “serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal”.

The “sky” is the “vault” that is the matrix of “seasonal blessings” as well as “inclemency”, but it also marks the limit that reminds humans of their finitude. “Mortals” are humans whose nature is to be “capable of death”, and “divinities” are the “messengers of the godhead”, who are awaited in hope by the mortals, whether they reveal or conceal themselves.

Karsten Harries’s lucid, insightful interpretation of Heidegger’s “fourfold” (in his book The Ethical Function of Architecture) reminds one that the “earth” as the “given”, or “material transcendence”, is a “gift” uncreated by human understanding, and as such it limits the “world” or sphere of intelligibility, but further points out that what “opens” humans to “earth”, in this sense, is the body, and he urges one to remember that “… the embodied self is a caring, desiring self. To be in the presence of the earth is inevitably to be affected, moved, claimed. Earth thus … refers to the elusive affective ground without which all talk of essences, meaning, values, or divinities is ultimately groundless, merely idle talk [p 159].”

In other words, that which limits what Heidegger calls “world”, or the cultural, linguistic space of a people, is “earth” as the “ground” which affects or moves humans as affective, caring, desiring beings who express their desires, fears and projects in various ways.

In Harries’s elaboration on “sky” he reminds one that, in addition to what Heidegger says about it, it is metaphorically linked to the awareness that humans are able to surpass the “here and now”, that they are always “ahead of” or “beyond” themselves. This, says Harries, is partly what the spiritual dimension of being human entails. By way of a reminder, one can add Heidegger’s claim, in Being and Time, that humans are not merely characterised by “thrownness”, but also by “projection”, even if they further tend to be subject to “falling”. Hence, “sky” suggests the creative ability to renew or transform society and one’s cultural tradition in the face of its inherent conservatism. Therefore, what Heidegger means by “sky” may be understood as that element in one’s experience which challenges one to overcome the obstacles that stand in one’s way.

Harries rightly connects Heidegger’s “mortals” with his (Heidegger’s) earlier analysis, in Being and Time, of a human being’s resolute acceptance of his or her death as a prerequisite for an “authentic” existence. In today’s world, with its media emphasis on combating all signs of ageing, such as greying hair and wrinkles, this is a salutary reminder that every human being, no matter how hard one tries to stave off all signs of one’s human mortality, must sooner or later succumb to it. As long as one does not make peace with ageing and everything that accompanies it, one is never free to live a culturally creative life without being poisoned by what Nietzsche called “resentment against time”. Succinctly put: accepting one’s mortality liberates one for “adding one’s verse” to the ongoing drama of human society.

Heidegger’s concept of “divinities” — probably the most problematical of the “fourfold”, given the secularism of the present age — may seem to be largely irrelevant today, until one is reminded that, for Heidegger, this points to the deepest source of meaning for humans. Not, to be sure, to the god or “God” of any specific tradition, but precisely the divine as unknown, because naming it violates, for Heidegger, what is essential about “… the many-voiced ground of all meaning and value” (Harries, p 161). If this is what the word “divinities” ultimately denotes, it is the deepest source of all personal actions and cultural activities on the part of humans.

What does the “fourfold” in Heidegger’s work suggest as far as human fulfilment and happiness are concerned? Just this: the four interrelated concepts comprising it may be regarded as a touchstone (each in turn, and taken together) for what it means to lead an ultimately fulfilling human life. If one of them is absent from one’s life, or for that matter from certain cultural practices, it points to a significant shortcoming in one’s life or in that practice.

In architecture, for example, a design has to honour the “unity” of these four things, and if it does not, the building design is somehow inadequate. Buildings that do not make use of materials that register the passage of time, for instance, violate the principles of “earth” and “mortals” in so far as these emphasise the body and its mortality. Materials like an abundance of stainless steel and glass, for example, suggest a resistance against the passage of time, and an over-emphasis on “sky” (the overcoming of obstacles) — so much so that the quest for permanence denoted by materials like stainless steel is put in the place of “divinities” (the most fundamental source of meaning in human life), without the healthy balance imparted by “earth” and “mortals”.

Other architectural materials, such as red brick, wood or stone, do the opposite by stressing time, history and evanescence — in other words, their use implies an acceptance of human finitude and mortality, without necessarily relinquishing the creative challenge of “sky”. Rising to this challenge, the formal features of an architectural design (which includes the use of time-registering materials) may point to the transformation of a given tradition of architecture and, as such, to cultural innovation.

This is not only the case in architecture, of course, but in everything that humans do — that is, all human activities can be “measured” by the terms of the “fourfold”. The social world constructed in literary terms in Brett Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho does not measure up to a truly fulfilling human world — it does not “pass the test” of the “fourfold” at several levels.

The endless litany of meticulously described and listed designer clothes bought and worn by Bateman and his “friends” in the novel suggests a fundamental alienation from “earth” and what it represents; the preoccupation with the body as something akin to a smoothly functioning machine indicates a resistance to what “mortals” stands for, and while “sky” seems to be taken up affirmatively by Bateman and other characters, it is done without any regard for the creative transformation and improvement of human society — it is too ego-centred for that. In fact, the ego is put in the position of Heidegger’s “divinities”.

It is not difficult to apply this set of concepts, not merely to cultural practices such as architecture, or to the activities of fictional characters, but also to one’s own life as well as those of others. Invariably, it seems to me, one comes up with a pretty reliable indication of the extent to which fulfilment and happiness are within reach in such cases. What Heidegger seems to be suggesting with the “fourfold” is that individuals or societies that no longer remember and honour their indissoluble interconnectedness have forgotten what it means to have a fulfilling life.