Category: Thought

Mara van der Lugt’s Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering

The words “pessimism” and “depression” are not, in fact, the same. They share some things – like the double “s” in the middle – but not everything. Philosophical pessimism is still more different from depression than its everyday own-brand pessimistic cousin, the one that we normally talk about when we use the word. Mara van der Lugt’s book, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering, provides a fascinating exploration of the origins of philosophical pessimism and its development throughout the early modern period, ending with Schopenhauer himself. She shows that serious engagement with pessimism and earthly suffering was born out of a seriousengagement with theodicy – the discipline of trying to work out how a perfectly powerful, good, and knowledgeable God could create such a miserable sod as yours truly.

Ranging through optimists as well as pessimists, she shows how the latter especially are driven by “a deep and widely shared concern over how to speak truthfully, meaningfully, and compassionately about human (and sometimes even animal suffering)”. Where the two groups differ fundamentally is in their perspective, with the optimists adopting a “cosmic” or large-scale perspective, and the pessimists adopting a microscopic but not unimportant one that is the human heart – the “creaturely” point of view.

For van der Lugt, pessimism is not fundamentally a question about the future – whether things will get better, or whether we have no reason to believe that will be the case. She argues compellingly that such questions of the future arose out of considering the present, which she calls “value pessimism” to distinguish it from “future orientated” pessimism. This type of pessimism is not about deciding whether life is worth living, but about weighing it up – are we faced with more unhappiness than happiness in our time upon the earth?

Throughout, she demonstrates that pessimism “does not want to be a philosophy of despair”, and certainly needn’t be. Instead, she argues that it is capable at its best of giving “due weight to the suffering of others” in a way that optimism rarely does. “At its best, it is a philosophy of fragility, sensitivity, compassion, and consolation; at its worst, it is callous in its own way and ruins us for joy by telling us that it is impossible.” Although the thinkers we read about stretch from Pierre Bayle in the 17th century to Schopenhauer in the 19th, the philosophy that emerges is one that is strikingly modern in its attitudes and wholly relevant in its approach.

I cannot pretend to summarise wholly van der Lugt’s book. Nor would I want to, for it really is entertaining and well written. Nor could I, because there is a chapter on Kant that went down in my brain about as well as the last time I attempted to read him. But I will share what I found interesting.

Questions of pessimism grew out of the problem of evil. The classic formulation by Epicurus is as follows: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is God able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?

Here we are, we God-fearers, perplexed. At least many people have been, for many hundreds of years. Originally, the major issue was “natural” or “physical” evils. The Earthquake of Lisbon in the 18th century killed a great many people and could not really be explained in any satisfying way. Individual suffering was easier to deal with. Augustine divided the world’s ills into sin and the punishment for it. Any pain we suffered was the punishment for something or other. This too didn’t always leave people feeling satisfied, as far as explanations go. And in fact, his dictum that “under a just God no one can be miserable unless they deserve to be” seems these days rather to provide an argument that God was unjust – not what the old saint had in mind.

Individual suffering is a problem though, and van der Lugt’s book traces the intricacies of explanations and counter explanations for what the significance and meaning of that suffering might be. Pierre Bayle, for example, was the first thinker to consider mental suffering as just as important as bodily suffering. Voltaire, Hume, and Rousseau are the major names, although there are some lesser-known ones too, such as William Warburton and Malebranche. As the years go by we see God retreat, and various methods attempt to weigh good and evil on the scales.

Perhaps the most interesting trend is the expansion of the idea of what evil is, or at least of what kind of suffering is problematic. Two points stand out. The first is the suffering of animals, which Schopenhauer famously cared about. The second is the appreciation for the way that your disposition (or, today, brain chemistry) may leave you inclined towards suffering, no matter how good your life may be on paper. Whereas once it was just harm, like being hurt physically, and then it was mental hurt, now even the increased capacity for mental hurt becomes a problem for a just and kind God.

Though Schopenhauer makes a good go of it, arguments for pessimism tend not to be hugely rigorous – they go from personal experience backwards, no matter how many times we may toss around such highfaluting language as the “will” and its striving. Too often is it the case that an argument can simply be dispelled by saying “but you are looking at this wrong”. A friend comes to you and says the world is dark and evil; you tell him to go outside and smell the wet grass and all will be well. Neither of you is wrong. Everyone’s intuitions as to the world’s deeper state come from the soul, and it is locked to others, perhaps keylessly. Compendiums of suffering can only confirm what we already think. Horror shocks, but it rarely convinces. We can always withdraw to our own perspective and disarm it if that is our inclination.

Perhaps that is why the best arguments for pessimism are unsystematic, unphilosophical even – they are literary, artistic. We cannot trust that we see the same real world as everyone else. This goes for its essential goodness just as much as it goes for what colour green actually is. But with a work of art, its creator has much more scope to control the perspective we are given upon the “world”. We cannot draw back and approach matters differently because our access to them comes only one word at a time, from a fixed view. Some of us spend the most blessed days of our lives interpreting art, but these interpretations are limited by the material. We can argue that the raw beauty of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction is redemptive, but we cannot argue that his work is optimistic or cheery.

Fiction pessimism, as with any argument about the world, suffocates alternate impulses so that as we collapse on our beds, the book tumbling out of our hands, we realise the only valid way of looking at things. (Bakhtin would argue that there are certain kaleidoscopic authorial exceptions, but even he would agree with me that they are the exceptions to the rule). Luckily, the world disproves the argument soon enough once we get back to it. We always return to whatever we want to see, to our own perspective. But because the best arguments for pessimism in philosophy still tend to be based on appeals to experience, we may as well go for that approach which seems to be best at transferring experience to its full intensity. Which, we may hate to admit it, probably isn’t a monograph.  

There are very few books on pessimism being published in the academic world. As a philosophy, it suffers from an overreliance on what we see and experience for ourselves and the conclusions we draw as individuals. The only other book I have come across was Joshua Foa Dienstag’s Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, published in 2006. Funnily enough, Dienstag’s book and van der Lugt’s have very little overlap in thinkers, with Dienstag’s focus being on later writers like Unamuno, Nietzsche, Freud and Cioran. Moreover, amusingly, they both disagree about Rousseau – with Dienstag calling him the founder of pessimism, and van der Lugt calling him an optimist! Both of them agree, however, that pessimism can be a source of strength. I recall from my own, alas, all-too-brief study of Schopenhauer how much beauty, consolation, and compassion I found in his work.

And actually, the comparative absence of attention being paid to this topic and some of these thinkers is itself, in a way, a good thing. Discovery is always tainted by the feeling you are stepping onto a terra that is very much cognita. Whereas when we sense that we are striking out alone, there is a truly wonderful intimacy – allow me to link to my translation of Baratinsky’s short poem on the topic. (Speaking of which, Baratinsky is often compared to the great Italian poet-pessimist Leopardi, for those of you interested in exploring pessimism’s poetic and literary manifestations further). This intimacy is important because it loosens the nuts of the soul and makes us more receptive, and receptivity is precisely what we need for arguments that encourage us to be more compassionate.

Vander Lugt finishes her book with a short but wonderful chapter considering the potential value of pessimism now. Its approach to compassion, to seeing everyone upon the world as suffering in some sense, broadens our horizons in a way that is not constrained by earthly concerns such as culture, race, or the other identifiers. This care-driven approach is also relevant when we regard the suffering of animals as important, which Schopenhauer did, and the suffering of future generations. In this sense, pessimism is anti-individualistic and conservative in the best of ways.

Van der Lugt also brings up our culture’s occasionally mindless promotion of mindfulness as one area where pessimism can provide an alternative view of things. If we say that happiness is up to us, we are also saying that our unhappiness is up to us. This “overburdening of the will” leaves us feeling guilty when we aren’t happy, which only makes us more miserable. The pessimist view that some of us are simply not lucky with our constitutions and unable to be as happy as the rest says that we aren’t fully to blame for being unhappy and shouldn’t beat ourselves up about it. This is more likely to be what a sad person wants to hear than that it’s their fault they’re miserable.

And speaking of which, if it’s up to us to sort out our happiness, why should we care about others who suffer to begin with? After all, they are failing to make the right choices, to be mindful and meditate for ten minutes before breakfast or what-have-you. Thus mindfulness, rather than being a positive happy-making approach, can sometimes distance us from others and make us still more depressed. At least when it’s not mediated by an awareness that some problems are not always in our heads, and that sometimes sadness is a legitimate response to the things life throws at us. But sadness, we probably should agree, cannot be a mode of life. We need tools to return to the world, and serious pessimism of the sort van der Lugt describes can be just as effective as in this as mindfulness, and indeed can successfully coexist alongside it.

This all seems to me to be reasonable. As always seems to happen, the truth seems rather boringly to be one of compromise. We are partly responsible for our happiness, but not entirely. This world is full of misery, but not entirely. We must be more caring – this alone is always true. Still, pessimism, and by extension van der Lugt’s book, is valuable precisely because it provides a counterweight to the more optimistic approach that is culturally dominant among us. That her writing is lucid and a pleasure to read is a bonus for which we should all be grateful.  

Famine and Affluence; Fathers and Children

The idea of this piece is to compare the radicalism Turgenev portrays in Fathers and Sons with Peter Singer’s ideas about charity as discussed in his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. The comparison is in some sense arbitrary, but I hope to use it to make the claim that what Singer suggests – essentially, that we in the developed world ought to give a large part of our income away to aid those less fortunate than ourselves – is not particularly radical at all, while Bazarov’s “nihilism”, the demand to “deny” everything, to take nothing on faith, remains a call that most of us would struggle to answer.

I am writing this piece in part for myself. The conclusion, that we probably ought to listen to Singer and give a non-trivial amount of our income away to charity, appears to me to be manifestly correct. But at the same time, I am not doing it and do not see myself doing it in the near future. I cannot argue against him – I am not a philosopher and my ability to reason my way out of abstract arguments is limited. But perhaps by throwing down onto the page what I think about him I may find a handhold by which I may begin to pull myself out of the prison cell of my own guilt at my failure not to act.

I will leave you to judge. First, we will summarise Singer, then we’ll go through Turgenev, and finally, we will attempt to bash the two of them together.

Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Peter Singer’s essay was written in 1971, during the Bangladeshi War of Independence. A large part of that country’s population was living and dying in terrible conditions caused by the war. Rich nations were sending aid, but Singer notes that the aid was not substantial. Britain sent little over 5% of the amount it had then spent on developing the Concorde airplane, while Australia’s contribution amounted to less than a twelfth of the cost of the Sydney opera house. Singer denies neither the value of culture nor rapid intercontinental air travel, but he notes that we would probably consider human life more valuable than either of those things. At least in theory.

Singer does not only criticise the response of states. He notes that people have failed too – “people have not given large sum to relief funds; they have not written to their parliamentary representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing the refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs.” While there were exceptions, the average citizen’s response was inaction. And the scale of the famine and its coverage in the media meant that inaction could not have been from ignorance.

Singer argues that such inaction is unjustified. His argument in the short essay, which can be read here, is that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He gives the famous example of a drowning child:

“If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”

If we agree with the principle about preventing bad things from happening, distance should be of no importance, nor should whether we alone can help or whether many can – either way, we should do something. In centuries past, I would scarce have known about suffering on a different continent, let alone how to avert it. But – and Singer is writing in 1971, recalling – “instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation.” We may say that we are better able to judge who needs the help when we help those closest to us, such as the local homeless. But even this is a somewhat leaky defence. Experts are able to assess the effectiveness of charities, providing reassurance that our money would be put to good use. We do not need to judge, and in fact, we probably lack the tools to judge as effectively as someone whose work has had them spend years honing their judgement.

What this means is that our excuses are inadequate. This leads Singer on to his next point, namely that we have an idea of charity that is wrong. Western societies think of charity as something extra, rather than as a duty. (Whereas it is one of Islam’s five pillars). Because it is something extra, we do not expect people to do it, though we may praise them if they do. However, if we spend our money on fast cars instead of helping those who are literally dying in ways that could be prevented by that same money, we are – according to the premises of Singer’s argument – in some sense guilty. We should give and take action, and we should condemn those who do neither. Giving is not “supererogatory” – it is not something above and beyond goodness, but a constituent component of goodness itself.

That human beings are selfish is not really a good reason not to accept the argument. That nobody else gives is also not a good reason – that is merely a form of cowardice.

And so, Singer draws his rather simple conclusion: “a great change in our way of life is required.” He presents a strong and a weak version of his argument. The former: that we should “prevent bad things from happening unless in doing so we would be sacrificing something of comparable moral significance”, and the latter: “We should prevent bad occurrences unless, to do so, we had to sacrifice something morally significant.” To use an example that has been beaten to death already, the loss of a cup of coffee at one’s local chain is certainly not “something morally significant”. But one could put that money to a good cause and achieve thereby something that truly is morally significant. You know, malaria nets or whatever the charitable flavour-of-the-week is.

In a couple of places, Singer has suggested that giving 5% of our income is a reasonable starting point for answering the question of how much we should give. This is all part of the big Effective Altruism movement and is not worth us fussing over now. For the purposes of this piece, we can summarise Singer’s argument as being that we ought to give more and sacrifice things that do not really matter in comparison with what that money could achieve.

Fathers and Children

Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in 1862. Russia had suffered a crushing defeat in the Crimean War, with the result that the Empire was taking a long look at itself. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, but with terms that left them still very much shackled to their old masters. Localised revolts caused by peasants who could not read and had been too optimistic in their interpretation of the Tsar’s proclamation were punished with the usual state-sanctioned murder. At the same time, angry with the government’s unwillingness to take further steps to advance Russia into at least the 18th century, young men – and women – became increasingly radicalised. In the same year that the serfs were emancipated the Land and Liberty League was founded, whose most famous act was the murder of the chief of police. Tsar Alexander II himself, who had started his reign with such reforming vigour and then very quickly forgotten all about it, would be blown to pieces a few years after that.

This is all after the novel’s publication, but the best literature tends to identify nascent themes of an age before they become generally apparent, and Fathers and Sons is no exception. It dramatizes a shift in the idea of progressive politics between the older generation, particularly in the figure of Pavel Kirsanov, and the younger, in the figure of Bazarov. The book’s original epigraph gives an idea of the shift we are dealing with:

“Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: “You had content but no force.” Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: “And you have force but no content” – From a contemporary conversation

The older generation in real life had such illustrious figures as Alexander Herzen, whom I’ve written about previously, but it managed to achieve precious little in practice. The new generation was impatient and wanted change now. The anarchist Bakunin (famous phrase, “a destructive urge is also a creative one”) was the most famous member of the older generation to “cross-over”. The young people themselves do not provide many heroic examples. The first one who comes to mind is Sergei Nechaev, who is the model for Pyotr Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s Demons, having murdered an innocent man for the sake of trying to improve his revolutionary cell’s cohesion (it did not work).

Pavel Kirsanov, like Dmitry Rudin in Turgenev’s earlier novel of that name, was something of a revolutionary in his youth – both of them fought at the barricades in a France witnessing a revolution. Such action is, funnily enough, reactionary, or at least reactive. They joined a revolution, rather than trying to foment it. The narodniki (this later generation) actually went around the peasants, attempting to stir them into revolt. In practice, the peasants were just as conservative as the Tsars, and most attempts at getting them to revolt failed. Alexander Etkind has noted that the young revolutionaries often followed a particular pattern – “fascination with texts led to fascination with sects; disillusionment with sects led to violence”. Young men from seminaries saw Russia’s long tradition of religious dissent as being the secret to organising political dissent, not realising that the sects simply wanted to be left alone. Disillusioned, they turned to violence.

Within the novel, Bazarov enacts “going to the people”, as it was later called, in miniature. He speaks to the peasants on the Kirsanov estate, where much of the story takes place. But when he actually tries to discuss politics with them, they are bemused and think of him “as a kind of holy fool”. Still, Bazarov’s failure as a revolutionary is not the reason that he has become one of the most well-known characters in Russian literature. Instead, it is his passionately held beliefs that are responsible. He declares that we must deny “everything”. Whereas the other characters are wet and wishy-washy sops who like poetry and music, Bazarov’s language early in the novel is declarative, clear, and forceful.

And what does he suggest, apart from denial? Well, that’s the problem. “We clear the ground”, he says – the most important thing is to destroy. Everything that exists must be subjected to rational criticism as if it is a theory in a book, and if its foundations are unstable, it must be toppled. Religion, the Empire itself – these are things that at that time could certainly have done with a healthy dose of criticism. But Bazarov offers nothing in their place, only the promise that rationality will sort everything out.

Bazarov’s forceful character is in its way inspiring. But that same character disintegrates over the course of Turgenev’s novel. Bazarov falls apart when he falls in love. After all his declarative sentences suddenly it’s all mush with him. And then he dies. Turgenev, who was accused by both conservatives and progressives for his novel, ultimately considered himself a rather boring moderate. “I am, and have always been, a “gradualist”, an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense, a man expecting reform only from above.” This quote comes from a letter written to a newspaper, but even so, it’s hard to find much in Turgenev’s writing that contradicts it. He dislikes everything that diminishes human life, whether it be authoritarian or radical. But he admires the radicals of the new generation all the same.

Fathers and Sons ends with Bazarov buried and two weddings having taken place. The first of these is between Bazarov’s friend Arkady and Katya, the sister of the woman Bazarov falls in love with; the second is between Arkady’s father and his mistress, a peasant girl. There are few events better reflective of compromise and cohesion than a wedding. Whereas Bazarov’s love for an interesting woman fails, Arkady’s love for a boring girl who gives him an heir is more successful. At the same time, the ending suggests a certain amount of progress, for the second marriage shows that rigid social hierarchies do need to be adjusted from time to time. 

Comparison

We may consider both Singer and Bazarov to present radical ideas, but there is a great difference of degree. Singer asks us to reconsider our idea of duty, whereas Bazarov demands the complete reconfiguration of societies’ fundaments. Although there is an honest desire to improve the lot of the peasant in Bazarov’s views, or at least in the views he is supposed to represent, there is also something horrible. I can’t remember now who said it, and it may be that nobody knows, but one of the nihilists (Pisarev?) once said that a cobbler was worth more than Pushkin. This is blatantly false – it assumes an unbelievably limited view of human nature, one where art has no place. A cobbler is practically valuable, but Pushkin has had a far greater impact than even the best cobbler – he reaches to the soul.

When we go around destroying things, we soon discover that it’s much easier to break than to build. We might agree that religion is generally bad, and most would agree that an Empire is not the best political structure. But we are unlikely to agree about what to replace them with, and Russia’s experience has been that every time they break something, filled with hope, they have replaced it with something worse. Turgenev’s gradualism, as with any gradualism, is something of a cop-out. Martin Luther King Jr’s comments that the greatest enemy of black emancipation is the white moderate are pertinent here. Moderation all-too-easily becomes inaction. And many of the issues people face do cry out for action, not twiddling our thumbs.  

Emotionless Bazarov leads a life that can hardly be called rich. Those emotions that he does have are very much linked to the very structures that he would like to critique – family, love, and so on. I do not think that we cannot love without society, but it would certainly be different, and perhaps not nearly as nice. Perhaps that’s why I found the ending to E.M. Forster’s Maurice so unsatisfying. In that novel, the main character ends up in a relationship with a lower-class man with whom he has nothing in common except their shared homosexuality. This is not a healthy base for a relationship; instead, society needs to be changed so that they can experience full lives within it.

Singer does not say that we need to change society. Or rather, he does not demand the destruction of our values in the same way that Bazarov does. Instead, he asks merely that we readjust our idea of charity and give a little more away. Society, and indeed the world, would be very different if we all started giving to good causes. But our values would not be much changed, though we would almost certainly be better people for it. Bazarov’s ideas retain their radicalism today because they reflect a fundamental impatience to improve things. There are many problems with modern society that I think are in need of urgent redress – wealth inequality, various societal divisions, global warming, mental health, political and institutional distrust, etc etc – but I am not entirely convinced that we are capable of solving them as quickly as their severity demands. Probably we’d make things worse.

Taken over time, everyone giving to charities that actually work to improve people’s lives would actually improve people’s lives. Richer, happier people would build better institutions and feel more engaged in their societies, solving a whole host of problems. Engaging in charitable work will build social cohesion within developed countries too, and deal with some of our own many and varied problems. In short, in a boring way, Singer’s view can be considered gradualist. Our own world is arguably getting better already (I mean discounting climate change and growing wealth inequality, generally we are becoming richer and better educated worldwide). Redistributionist charitable giving (because any giving is redistributional, after all) will only speed things up.

And yet I know that there are Bazarovs among us. One of the main criticisms of Singer’s work is that it reinforces existing systems, rather than proposing new ones. In this view the reason we are all depressed and in unequal circumstances on a burning planet is because our current economic paradigm (capitalism) has brought us to this, and unless we change things up, it will continue to do so. Giving money away doesn’t help this. I am not sure how far I can agree with this view. I like to blame capitalism for everything as much as the next person, but it’s hard to deny the concrete good that charitable giving can achieve. Ideally, we should probably both aim to change the system while supporting people within it.

I myself have an instinctive preference towards local solutions, but it’s hard to defend this view without saying I care more about the people around me than those further away. If we work to engage with the local community, we build strong structures of the sort that can’t quite be quantified – things like trust. We make places better to live in for ourselves and others. And if everyone acted like this, we would all be happier. This is essentially what someone like Wendell Berry is all about. But the difficulty I see with this is that we cannot focus on the local issues without being aware of the global ones. Global news and global charities mean that Pandora’s box has been opened – now we humans have considerably more power, and alas, more responsibility. Too much, in fact, which is why we have failed, and Peter Singer and others yell at us.

Conclusion

Which brings us to the problem. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” doesn’t really ask that much of us, but it asks more of us than we are probably willing to do. It does not ask us to give up all luxuries (at least the weak form of the argument, which is already asking enough), it still allows us art and music and friendship and fun. But it would deny us much that we have grown used to and think we cannot live without.

A society where we all give, even a little, is clearly a better and more moral society than one where we do not. It is a more responsible one too. We can argue that giving doesn’t work because it doesn’t correctly deal with pernicious systems, or that a local approach is better – but there is one way that we cannot, I think, argue. We cannot say that doing nothing is morally alright. One can try, of course. But it seems that we must, if we are to go to sleep guiltlessly, act.

The things that make life worth living – our friends, our families, our communities, our learning, our experiencing this rich and wondrous world – are not lost by giving. If anything, the loss of excess luxuries, of things we can go without, would only strengthen them all. With fewer distractions we would have a better, more direct, appreciation for friends and partners, have more time for communities and art. It is not a great ask, but at the same time, it is almost impossible. For I am a selfish one: I want to save and invest, I think already about my own descendants, about my own future. I think about all this even though I know I will have a roof over my head whatever happens, whereas the same cannot be said of those who today go to sleep hungry.

I want grand, heroic, solutions – if blowing up a pipeline or two would save the world, I’d be there planting the C4. But I don’t even appear capable of the unflashy and easy solution right in front of me – siphoning off a little of my large-enough pay check.

The world is a mess, but it is our mess, and I am desperately fond of it really. But it can be better. And Singer’s piece offers a clear guide on how to make it so. I cannot despise it for that. We must have things to hope for, and ways of making that hope come to pass.

And perhaps I should be fairer to myself too. All told, I have received my salary twice, and given the job has required me to move abroad, my getting-started expenses have been quite high. Perhaps it’s too early to say whether I will fail to do Singer proud. Time will tell, and one day this blog will shiftily or proudly display the answer.

As for you, readers, how do you sleep at night? Do you give, do you volunteer? If not, what can you say to undermine Singer’s argument?

John Stuart Mill: Thinker and Human

I have taught English for several years now to a boy with cerebral palsy. He is about eighteen and he does not get out much. His English is excellent, and he is intelligent, but after several years I am tired out and really do not know what else to teach him. Still, one of the good things that has come from this pairing has been that I have been given an excuse to read authors that I would not otherwise have done. Carlyle is one such author. Another is John Stuart Mill, the noted 19th century British philosopher. We read Utilitarianism and On Liberty some time ago and now we are reading Mill’s Autobiography. In Aileen Kelly’s Herzen Mill was mentioned as one of Herzen’s favourite discoveries, and he was also praised highly by Bertrand Russell (Mill’s godson for a brief year!) – another thinker I was reading recently.

Nevertheless, I had little desire to read Mill, on account of the fact that liberalism is relatively boring. People should be free to do what they want so long as they don’t hurt others – very well. Society can be a pain – indeed it can. Increasing the general happiness is important – really, I had no idea. But Mill is a more complicated thinker than these pithy statements make him out to be, and in particular I found his Autobiography very interesting. For those readers who haven’t seen the point of Mill, I propose to provide a few things I enjoyed in these three works.

On Liberty

The purpose of Mill’s essay is to work out the limits to the power that can legitimately be exercised over the individual by society and government. The tyranny of the “will of the people” is something that Mill faced in his personal life, carrying on an intense friendship with a married woman which created great difficulties for him. The majority or the group that can get others to accept it as the majority will doubtless lead to oppressing the minority, so checks and balances must be created. But where, and of what sort?

The argument, as summarised by Mill, is as follows: “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. … In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

How, on the basis of this argument, can we have a good society? Firstly, by a free press. Secondly, by having as many opinions as possible. This latter suggestion I particularly liked. Mill argues that if the dissenter from popular opinion is wrong, they learn the truth by speaking out. Meanwhile, those who are correct come to appreciate the truth more. And often both sides may share some truth. “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” so either way we must always listen to others. Unfortunately, Mill’s views presuppose that arguments are made in good faith, and that people are willing to change their views if proven wrong. I believe the experience of a global pandemic seems to suggest that some people are unwilling to accept alternative viewpoints, whatever the strength of their foundations. (This is a dig at those against vaccinations, not those sceptical of them.)

If we live in fear, we will not speak out. This ultimately destroys independent thought, and the general development of a given community. At the same time, we must all work to “understand the grounds of one’s own opinions”. A free debate cannot proceed unless both sides know their foundations. A view without known foundations cannot be harmed through argument, but it can be terribly harmful.

Happiness is having the freedom to act according to one’s inner light. It consists in being spontaneous – the very thing society tends not to tolerate. Society, often internalised, leads to a “despotism of custom”. Contrary to the suggestion of coldness and rigidity, Mill’s idea of flourishing here is very freeform – “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

Liberty ends when harm begins. If we harm others the law must be ready. But if we harm only ourselves, we have only ourselves to blame. The punishment for this is simply a bad reputation, and your friends turning away from you. Once we are adults, we are responsible for our decisions. Nobody can force us to change, or to act in a different way. A big government is unnecessary for Mill because it tends to make of us small people. In the field of human affairs, the government should less prohibit, than act as a guide. A sugar tax, rather than a sugar ban – for example – would be what Mill would propose.

Mill’s essay is marked by a certain gloom. He sees the development of society as leading to a general personal decline into slavish similarity. Communication, commerce, and technological advances have all brought people more in touch with one another, but at the same time they all have reduced the differentiation of the individual. Public opinion, growing ever stronger and more similar, becomes less willing to tolerate dissenting views. Finally, “mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it”. Liberty is lost when homogeneity means nobody has any use for it.

Mill’s piece remains useful today firstly as a reminder of the value of listening to others and understanding the basis of our own opinions, and secondly by arguing for the minimal intrusion of others onto the freedom of the individual. “That the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself”, is a challenging statement that we may not agree with. But it is useful to hear, to turn over in our minds. If for no other reasons that it makes us think upon our own answer to the question of the relationship between society and the individual.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is about right and wrong. The philosophical idea was first put down by Jeremy Bentham, a friend of Mill’s father, in the form of “the greatest-happiness principle”. An action is good if it increases the general happiness, and bad if it doesn’t. This raised some issues, such as whether happy idiots are better-off than less happy intelligent people. It was also a rather cold doctrine, seemingly devaluing the arts in favour of more coarse pleasures such as eating and carousing. These are issues that Mill seeks to address in his essay.

Mill begins by noting that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure”. Happiness is desirable as an end, but that does not mean that simple pleasures are the most valuable. He suggests that we are capable of comparing pleasures, and in this way determining which of a given two is better. Having listened to some Mozart and eaten a burger I can decide for myself which I prefer. Now, many people may choose the burger (including, possibly, me). But Mill does not despair at this possibility, instead he draws a distinction between happiness and contentedness.

Contented people are generally stupider, meaning they require less pleasures and less complex pleasures. Intelligent people are more demanding of their pleasures, and also have a desire for more complex ones. Since we know the difference, we can say that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. But the fool or the pig cannot agree – and nor could we expect them to.

Just as in On Liberty, here too Mill is concerned with the kind of world that allows for human flourishing. In this essay Mill argues that we need sufficient time to develop our tastes for pleasure, otherwise we will lose them. In a mediocre, unfree society, there will be mediocre and boring pleasures and a lower sort of happiness predominating. The present age, for Mill, with its poor education and dreadful social arrangements, does not let us be as happy as we could be, or develop as much as we could.

Education is particularly important for Mill. In On Liberty, he identified it as the period of a person’s life where we can form people’s tastes before they become entirely responsible for themselves. In Utilitarianism, Mill sees education as playing a key role in helping us to harmonise our idea of our own happiness with the general happiness. Through education we can shape our consciences to be more utilitarian, so that we come to see the interests of others as being more equal to our own interests.

Utilitarianism is really annoying because it’s hard to argue against it for a layman like myself. In its modern form, such as propounded by Peter Singer, it’s thoroughly miserable-making. Can I justify having any money at all when I could give it to the poor and make their lives considerably happier? Singer’s Effective Altruism really appears, when thought through, to be the least we can do, and yet it is more than most of us do. Mill and Singer are not the same person, and Mill’s piece is simpler and less demanding.

At the same time, Utilitarianism does still suffer a little from a belief in human rationality. I remember thinking of Dostoevsky while I read it – a man whose writings time and again demonstrate that people can choose suffering over happiness. Mill might argue that Dostoevsky’s characters are made happy by being miserable, and I’m sure many depressed people would concur with the statement that in despair there can often be something sweet.

Thinking about it now, however, I’m not sure a Dostoevskian objection really holds up – what Dostoevsky is fundamentally after is affirming a sense of human dignity, in other words saying that I’m not a pig but a human being. Taking away our dignity by taking away our responsibility for our actions, as do the great systems (including utilitarianism) that his characters rail against, ultimately deprives us of the foundation of our happiness – our freedom. In other words, we can be against utilitarianism while still fitting very snugly into a utilitarian conception of human ends and means. The fact that such a thought would probably bring The Underground Man to suicide does not devalue it – it just suggests we shouldn’t tell him!

Autobiography – The Childhood

Mill’s Autobiography is another interesting text that throws light upon the concerns of the other two essays, both by answering some of our criticisms about them, and by explaining the character of the man who wrote them. John Stuart Mill was an extraordinary character. At the age of 3 he was learning Greek, at the age of 8 he had taught himself Latin. He was writing and being published in the leading newspapers of the day while still a teenager. And the fact that we are reading him today indicates that all this education led to the creation of a formidable thinker, as well as just a precocious child.

Mill’s purpose in the Autobiography is to leave “some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable.” Under his father’s watchful eye, Mill learned everything under the sun. Pushed relentlessly, he learned that “a pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.” Yet at the same time, the text is riddled with tensions. Mill was allowed no holidays; he had no friends. He felt bitter about being unlike other children, had trouble dressing himself and tying knots. Worse than that, “Mine was not an education of love but of fear.” These thoughts are hidden from sight, exorcised from the text by Mill’s wife and then later by his stepdaughter. His father alternates between awe-inspiring intellectual power and terrible coldness. The result of such an influence was that for a long time Mill lacked confidence and the ability to think for himself.

Mill’s mother does not receive a mention. I had thought perhaps she had died in childbirth, but apparently Mill was the eldest of nine children (they too are barely mentioned). Mill apparently found no warmth in his mother capable of making up for his father’s coolness. And so, stunted by this childhood, Mill developed, learning a great deal, but feeling very little – he considers himself at this time a mere “reasoning machine” – until he reached the age of twenty and had a great and terrible crisis.  

Autobiography – The Crisis

From his birth Mill had been raised to be a reformer of the world, and he had believed wholeheartedly in that goal. “My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object”. Yet one day Mill asks himself whether he’d be happy if he achieved this goal, and he realised that he would not. Finding the end unrewarding, Mill can no longer see any value in the means and pursuing it. Though he continued to write, the light had gone out inside him. He felt desperately lonely, and could confide in no-one, least of all his father. He realised that his analytical abilities had done him just as much harm as good, because they had ruined his ability to feel. They were “a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues”.

Mill escaped from his despair, which was psychological as much as intellectual, through the help of art – he read Wordsworth for the first time. This led him to appreciate that “the internal culture” of an individual is more important than he’d realised. Happiness can lie not just in improving the world, but in art too. Indeed, Mill came to realise that happiness couldn’t be what we strive after – in something vaguely reminiscent of Wittgenstein, he noticed that whenever we asked ourselves if we were happy, we ceased being so. In other words, the resolution to our problems is a dissolution of them. In pursuing another worthwhile goal, Mill thought, “you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning”. Suddenly utilitarianism does not seem so restrictive after all.

Autobiography – Harriet

Mrs Harriet Taylor, who later became Mill’s wife, was a married woman when they met in his early twenties. But in spite of this the two struck up an extremely intense and rewarding, and apparently platonic, friendship that lasted until her death in 1858. This friendship was “the honour and chief blessing of my existence” and Mill’s praise for his wife is extraordinary for the intensity of the feeling that it conveys. For Mill, Harriet was essential in making him the mature writer we associate with him. Where he had come to his conclusions about life through cold analysis and study, Harriet had come to the same conclusions through her feelings and empathy. Together, they created works like On Liberty and Utilitarianism, combining both approaches to the problems at hand.

Father’s Death, Political Career

Mill’s Autobiography is primarily a record of the first twenty-five or so years of his life, when all the major developments in his thought are taking place. The rest of his life is simply a long chapter at the end. Of this, aside from the records of what he wrote, the most interesting thing is Mill’s description of his brief stint as an MP.

Mill was put forward by some friends to be MP for Westminster. He refused to do any campaigning except at the end, and he also wrote a public letter in which he declared he would not fight for local interests. Nevertheless, he was elected. In Parliament he had a more direct effect on the affairs of state which he had attempted to alter from afar through newspapers and journals, but his radicalism – however normal it seems to us today – did him no favours. He fought for the Irish, for the colonies – in short, he was true to his views. All of these, sadly, were minority views. After the conservatives found themselves under threat, they themselves campaigned more seriously in the next election and Mill was thrown out. He had been an MP for all of three years.

Concluding Remarks

Mill’s Autobiography was written, at least in part, with the goal also of thanking those in whose debt he was for his development. It is at times tedious to read all these names, most of whom are well-forgotten these days. The prose is also rather stodgy. And yet, in spite of all that, I’m rather glad I read it. Mill’s book is not one of those tell-all gossipy biographies, but instead it serves a far more important purpose. It justifies his other works by answering for the man behind them. It shows that his ideas came not just from the cool reasoning of a man behind his desk, but also from the warm-heartedness and appreciation for internal development that it took a crisis and deep friendship to create. It also provides a clear example of how utilitarian ideas can be compatible with a well-lived, ultimately passionate, life. Meanwhile, Mill’s political work shows how committed he was to the ideas of On Liberty.

In sum, Mill’s Autobiography enriches his other works by showing that he had worked and lived enough to write them from a wealth of experience alongside the rational calculation we might expect. I am very glad I read all three.