Happiness and fulfilment

My previous posting elicited a number of responses that, directly or indirectly, questioned the meaning of human happiness and fulfilment. At the outset of a discussion of these one has to admit, as the song goes, that “happiness is … different things to different people”, but far from resolving the issue via an affirmation of unmitigated relativism — claiming that the requirements for happiness is so divergent among people that it is futile to look for a common factor — one can, of course, uncover structural features that all instances of individual happiness and fulfilment must necessarily share.

One also has to face the paradox, noted by British philosopher John Stuart Mill in the 19th century, that happiness is something that will elude one for as long as one pursues it directly — it is no use trying desperately to be happy; rather, one has to find out what activity it is that gives one satisfaction or fulfilment, and happiness will follow as a kind of by-product.

In other words, Mill grasped the elusive truth about happiness, that it is like a kind of “glow” that emanates from certain actions, activities or pursuits, but as soon as one focuses directly on it, it evaporates. One should learn, as psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan points out, to “take up one’s desire”.

Several registers are available to express this common “structure” of the phenomenon of (as opposed to the specific “objects” or objectives involved in an individual’s quest for) happiness and/or fulfilment. Among them, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger seems to me most promising (although psychoanalytic theory may be as suitable) for this purpose. Because the concepts he invented are technically quite difficult, I shall try to make them as accessible as possible. But don’t be put off by his terminology — it refers to things that all humans experience, as I shall try to show.

In Heidegger’s early masterwork Being and Time (1927), he outlines what he calls the fundamental tripartite ontological structure of human beings (what he calls Dasein), namely thrownness (the fact that, initially, we unavoidably find ourselves in a certain given situation that is not of our own making), projection (our ability to be our own project, or to map a unique life path for ourselves) and falling (the tendency to sink back into an often suffocating, conventional, traditional or perhaps fashionable way of doing things).

In ordinary language this means that, whatever one may come to believe about one’s origins (for example, that God created us, or that we are the products of an immensely long evolutionary process), to begin with we just find ourselves here, on Earth, in a specific place at a specific time, and we must somehow make sense of our lives. This is what “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) means — we are “thrown” into the world.

Secondly, every individual human being has the capacity to decide what to do with his or her life under these circumstances into which one has been “thrown” — this is what Heidegger means by “projection” (Entwurf) — whether human beings have been born into abject poverty, or with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths, we all have the capacity to do something with the cards that we have been dealt, no matter how good or bad a hand it is.

There are many examples that illustrate what Heidegger means here. It amounts to saying that human being is essentially a striving, and that to be a fulfilled individual, one has to actualise, minimally, one’s ability to strive, to overcome whatever confronts one as obstacles or challenges, even if there is no guarantee that one will always succeed. Think of those people who were born poor, or handicapped in some or other way, and managed to rise above the conditions into which they were “thrown” by the capacity to “project” for themselves a future different from (even if it was paradoxically rooted in) the conditions under which they were born.

However, the inverse is also true — there are many people whose conditions of birth could not have been more auspicious or favourable, and yet they have ended up failing miserably to make the most of those conditions in constructing fulfilling lives for themselves. But the fundamental, “structural” truth is that, whether the specifics of one’s “thrownness” were or are favourable or unfavourable, all human beings have the capacity either to overcome these (or at least to try) or to allow them to suffocate them into a kind of paralysis, where they blame the circumstances of their birth for their lack of fulfilment or unhappiness.

The third member of Heidegger’s three fundamental structural principles for understanding what makes humans into what they are, namely “falling” (Gefallenheit), is a very sober affirmation that, whatever one’s capacity to “project” a unique personal path or future career for oneself, one always tends to “fall” back into the conventional societal structures and customs, or fashionable collective habits that comprise one’s social, political and economic situation.

As far as happiness and fulfilment are concerned, this is in a certain sense the most problematic of the three things identified by Heidegger, because of the so-called “tyranny of the status quo”. Why? Isn’t it true that, whenever one’s own inclinations seem to take one in a direction that really tempts one with promises of fulfilment, and one realises (perhaps painfully) that if one were to pursue them one would run the risk of alienating one’s friends and colleagues, one tends to abandon such an “unconventional” course of action? Most of the time, as Heidegger reminds us, we are subject to the dictates of the society in which we live, and more often than not, we submit to these, at the cost, perhaps, of our personal happiness and fulfilment.

So, where is the lesson, in all of this, for happiness and fulfilment? It lies in the realisation, usually only discovered through sometimes painful experience, that to be truly happy one has to learn how to “balance” or negotiate “thrownness”, “projection” and “falling” in one’s own life. These principles apply to every human being, but their specific “content” (for want of a better word) differs from one person to the other.

As for myself, I believe that I have been able to find fulfilment and happiness (sometimes they are not identical) in having discovered, mercifully early in my life, what my “desire” is — in other words, what “project” promises the greatest fulfilment for myself, and I have pursued it since then. This has not always been easy, because my choice (to put philosophy into practice in my life, and not merely to “teach” it) has often led me into conflict with individuals who have tried to impose conventional practices and behaviour on me.

I believe that this is where happiness becomes a real possibility, but is just as easily lost: one has to learn the art of negotiating the twisting path of one’s own “project” in such a way that, although one unavoidably has to respect conventional morality most of the time, one also manages to actualise one’s very own “project” in the spaces available for doing so.

I have stressed that for most of the time one has to respect convention, otherwise one could not live in a society with other people. But for personal happiness and fulfilment, one also has to find ways to bring to fruition what is unique or singular about one’s life. And if this leads one into conflict with others, one often has gather together courage to make sacrifices such as being ostracised by one’s former friends or colleagues.

Think of the way Dr Beyers Naude was ostracised by his former “community” when he courageously took a stand against apartheid, or recall how Che Guevara sacrificed the “easy” middle-class life of a medical doctor to be able to fight on behalf of the exploited poor in South America. Or how Nelson Mandela and others sacrificed their conventional freedom — thus gaining a greater moral freedom — for the sake of democratic freedom for all South Africans.

But it is not only, or necessarily, the case that one’s “project” may lead one into conflict with the upholders of certain unjust or unjustifiable “conventional” practices, such as apartheid. It is often the case that it leads to something highly inventive or unusual, such as when Einstein, instead of pursuing the conventional avenues of physics research of his time, embarked on an imaginative, lateral project that resulted in his famous theories of special and general relativity.

Similarly the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure set aside the old, referential model of language, where words have meaning because they refer to things, and formulated his famous structural(-ist) theory of language as a system of signs where meaning is internal to the system — a theory that proved to be revolutionary as far as our understanding of language is concerned.

Mary Wollstonecraft, again, set out to defend the rights of women long before the era of the suffragettes, in this way pointing forward to a time when most people would, at last, start realising that what she was fighting for — the rights of women — was indeed something worth defending.

There are many other examples of the same kind of thing; in every such case the person involved refused to be held captive by the conventional way of doing things, and inaugurated something radically new. In the process, I believe, they gained a fulfilment that they would not otherwise have had.

Of course, when I speak of pursuing one’s personal “project” for fulfilment, I am assuming that this project does not conflict with the ultimate well-being of humanity — one could hardly approve of a personal “project” such as a unique “career” in serial killing (recall Ted Bundy and others). No matter how singular one’s choice of fulfilment may be, it cannot conflict with convention to the point of undermining the very existence of society. If anything, it should be predicated on the possibility that it may actually improve not only one’s own life, but also the lives of others, directly or indirectly.

I suppose it is noticeable that I have not said anything about material wealth so far. The reason for this is simply that, as I stressed in my previous posting, although everyone needs a certain minimum of material means to be able to live a life with a reasonable “quality”, it is certainly not necessary to make the accumulation of material wealth the overriding concern of one’s striving. Nor does one have to be as wealthy as an oil sheikh to be happy.

Provided one is not destitute, happiness and fulfilment are within one’s reach as long as one is capable of bringing Heidegger’s three principles — thrownness, projection and falling — into a healthy constellation. This is not as easily done as said, however, given the immense limitations placed on one’s unique personal “project” by both the circumstances of one’s situation (“thrownness”), and the pressure exerted on one by what is regarded as conventionally desirable, fashionable or politically correct (“falling”).