Random quote
What if one person or some oligarchy or indeed a democracy, were possessed of a soul that hungers for pleasures and passions, and needs to be filled with these, a soul that resists nothing, and is assailed by unending, insatiate evil diseases? Well, if something of this sort, having trampled all over the laws, rules a city or some individual, then, there is no way to save it.

An Athenian, in Plato (c. 427-347 BC), Laws, Book 4, 714a 

The flow of happiness

Lately, someone asked me what I think happiness is. I had forgotten that once I had written a blog about it, but essentially my answer was the same as what I had written there, although from a different perspective. Therefore I think it is worth writing about it again, instead of simply referring to that old blog.
I assume that many people see happiness as a state. As a positive subjective feeling that is as if time stops but that nonetheless feels lasting eternally. Or also as having something very pleasant. Being together with your love or having enough money for a good life are examples of these forms of happiness. Happiness can then be seen as a goal, something you can strive for, and following Aristotle and others it is the highest goal in life and also a goal with an end in itself. Other goals are intermediate goals to becoming happy, even though often we don’t see it that way.
It is not so that I want to reject this view on happiness. We set goals and once we have achieved them, we feel happy; maybe even happier than before. Nevertheless, I think that in essence happiness is something different and that these cases are actually special moments of happiness like the stills from a film. Following Alfred Schütz (1899-1959), one of the founders of the interpretive approach in sociology, I think that we must see life not as a series of connected moments, that linked together make up life, but it is just the other way round: Life is a stream of activities that is continuously monitored by an actor and that is only interrupted by this actor for moments of reflection, when there is a need to do so. As Giddens says it somewhere (p.82), paraphrasing Schütz’s idea: “[O]nly in rare circumstances does a person have a clear-cut ‘end’ in mind which organizes his energies unequivocally in one direction … One’s life-activity does not consist in strung-out series of discrete purposes and projects, but in a continuing stream of purposive activity in interaction with others and with the world of nature.” Following this view, I see life as a stream of activities that you perform automatically, without thinking and often even unconsciously. Occasionally the stream is interrupted by moments of thinking, reflection, and looking back, when the stream stagnates, i.e. when problems arise that require a solution or when something happens that you want to give attention to for one reason or another. Such moments don’t need to be special, but they can also be “insignificant” like the question what to eat today.
What does this mean for the idea of happiness? Assuming that the view of life as a stream of activities is correct, happiness then is the feeling that the stream of life streams in a satisfying and pleasant way. Or rather, happiness doesn’t refer to the stream of life as such but to the flow of the stream. It is the steadily, smoothly and continuously going on of the stream. Following the stream of life unconsciously and without feeling the need to give it special attention gives a sense of happiness. Inattentively? Continuously? Sometimes it pops up in our mind that the stream is flowing, not because the stream stagnates but for positive reasons. Sometimes there are moments in the stream of life we wants to pay special attention to, like the feeling of being together with our love or having enough money for a good life; moments of happiness.

Random quote
Clogs – “floppies,” slippers – are made so that one can slip them on one’s feet without using the hands. They are monuments to the hatred of bending over.

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) 

Humean causation

One of the most important contributions of David Hume (1711-1776) to philosophy is his view on causation. In several respects it is controversial and much has been said about it. Despite all criticisms it contains some essential elements of the idea of causation that you find back in almost any discussion about it, if not that they are present in the background. Therefore it’s worth giving here Hume’s view. I’ll base myself mainly on his essay “Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion”. (first published in 1748) A deeper explanation can be found in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748).
However, let me start with the lemma on Hume in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In section 2.2 it says that “Hume takes there to be three components to our idea of causation: first, spatial contiguity, second, priority in time of cause before effect, and most importantly, the necessary connection between cause and effect.” However, this summary of Hume’s idea of causation omits what is, to my mind, Hume’s most important and also most essential aspect of causation: That “all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions”, and that consequently the idea of causation, so of cause and effect, exists only in the mind: We don’t know anything about what happens in reality: “[W]e are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard-ball is attended with motion in the second. … [T]he power or force, which actuates the whole machine, is entirely concealed from us…” We can never know anything about the power that connects a cause and an effect. If we think that there is such a connection, it’s only based on our experience of how one event constantly follows another, but we cannot know what a cause and effect “binds … together and makes them inseparable.” We don’t understand the connection but we only see a conjunction of objects.
Until now we discussed only connections between individual events. In fact, experiencing a connection between individual cases is not enough to speak of a causal connection, how certain and accurate this connection may seem to us. We can only suppose a causal relationship to be present if it always exists, i.e. if “one particular species of event has always, in all instances, been conjoined with another.” There must be a constant conjunction of two events. However, even then, not much changes, “except only, that after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe, that it will exist.” Also a constant conjunction is nothing but a feeling, an experience, a “customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant”, and it “is the sentiment or impression, from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing farther is in the case.” In short (my words), a causal connection exists only in the mind and says nothing about what really happens. It makes foretelling the existence of one from the appearance of the other easy, indeed. However, “[w]hen we say … that one object is connected with another, we mean only, that they have acquired a connexion in our thought, and give rise to this inference, by which they become proofs of each other’s existence.”
Therefore, so Hume, “we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed. The appearance of a cause always conveys the mind, by a customary transition, to the idea of the effect. Of this also we have experience. We may, therefore, suitably to this experience, form another definition of cause; and call it, an object followed by another, and whose appearance always conveys the thought to that other.” However, we have no idea what such a connection involves.
In his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding Hume mentions contiguity in time and space as a requirement for a connection of ideas. This should exclude the idea of remote causation. This gives us the three elements of causation as contiguity, priority in time of cause before effect, and necessary connection. However, so Hume, “[e]very idea is copied from some preceding impression or sentiment; and where we cannot find any impression, we may be certain that there is no idea.” When the vase falls to the ground just at the moment that the crow caws, it is only in our mind that the latter causes the former (or the other way round).

Random quote
A young tree, which over-tops and destroys its parent, stands in all the same relations with Nero, when he murdered Agrippina; and if morality consisted merely in relations, would, no doubt, be equally criminal.

David Hume (1711-1776)