Bertrand Russell
Pre-reading
Bertrand Russell (May1872-February1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, essayist, social critic and political activist. He is considered one of the main founders of modern analytic philosophy; he is held to be one of the 20th century’s premier logicians. In addition, his popular writings on a wide variety of topics in both the humanities and the natural sciences have benefited generations of general readers. In 1950 he was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”. His major works include The Principles of Mathematics,History of Western Philosophy,The Conquest of Happiness, to name just a few.
In the preface to the booklet The Conquest of Happiness, published in 1930, Russell says, “No profound philosophy or deep erudition will be found... All that I claim for the recipes offered to the reader is that they are such as are confirmed by my own experience and observation, and they have increased my own happiness whenever I have acted in accordance with them.”
The Happy Man is the last chapter of The Conquest of Happiness.
Prompts for Your Reading
1.According to the author, happiness depends on external and internal aspects. Which aspect is the focus of the essay?
2.What is the main cause of unhappiness when external circumstances are not definitely unfavorable?
3.How can a man achieve happiness? Why does the author mention prison in Paragraph 1?
4.What does “live objectively” mean?
5.How do you understand Russell’s interpretation of self-denial?
6.In what ways is a hedonist different from a moralist regarding the issue of happiness?
7.What is Russell’s interpretation of love?
8.Russell supports his argument on the recipe for happiness by illustration (giving examples) and comparison and contrast. Locate them and explain how effective they are.
[1] Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with the part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view that so far as this part is concerned, the recipe for happiness is a very simple one. It is thought by many, among whom I think we must include Mr. Krutch1, whom we considered in an earlier chapter, that happiness is impossible without a creed of a more or less religious kind. It is thought by many who are themselves unhappy that their sorrows have complicated and highly intellectualized sources. I do not believe that such things are genuine causes of either happiness or unhappiness; I think they are only symptoms. The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round. Certain things are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are simple things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and the respect of one’s own herd. To some people parenthood is also essential. Where these things are lacking, only the exceptional man can achieve happiness, but where they are enjoyed, or can be obtained by well-directed effort, the man who is still unhappy is suffering from some psychological maladjustment which, if it is very grave, may need the services of a psychiatrist, but can in ordinary cases be cured by the patient himself, provided he sets about the matter in the right way. Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man should be able to achieve happiness, provided that his passions and interests are directed outward, not inward. It should be our endeavor, therefore, both in education and in attempts to adjust ourselves to the world, to aim at avoiding self-centered passions and at acquiring those affections and those interests which will prevent our thoughts from dwelling perpetually upon ourselves. It is not the nature of most men to be happy in a prison, and the passions which shut us up in ourselves constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons. Among such passions some of the commonest are fear, envy, the sense of sin, selfpity and self-admiration. In all these our desires are centered upon ourselves: there is no genuine interest in the outer world, but only a concern lest it should in some way injure us or fail to feed our ego. Fear is the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so anxious to wrap themselves round in a warm garment of myth2. But the thorns tear the warm garment and the cold blasts penetrate through the rents, and the man who has become accustomed to its warmth suffers far more from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from the first. Moreover, those who deceive themselves generally know at bottom that they are doing so, and live in a state of apprehension lest some untoward event should force unwelcome realizations upon them.
[2] One of the great drawbacks to self-centered passions is that they afford so little variety in life. The man who loves only himself cannot, it is true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion. The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.
[3] The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections, and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recipient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it. But it is useless to attempt to give it as a calculation, in the way in which one might lend money at interest, for a calculated affection is not genuine and is not felt to be so by the recipient.
[4] What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is encased in self? So long as he continues to think about the causes of his unhappiness, he continues to be self-centered and therefore does not get outside the vicious circle; if he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine interests, not by simulated interests adopted merely as a medicine. Although this difficulty is real, there is nevertheless much that he can do if he has rightly diagnosed his trouble. If, for example, his trouble is due to a sense of sin, conscious or unconscious, he can first persuade his conscious mind that he has no reason to feel sinful, and then proceed, by the kind of technique that we have considered in earlier chapters, to plant this rational conviction in his unconscious mind, concerning himself meanwhile with some more or less neutral activity. If he succeeds in dispelling the sense of sin, it is probable that genuinely objective interests will arise spontaneously. If his trouble is self-pity, he can deal with it in the same manner after first persuading himself that there is nothing extraordinarily unfortunate in his circumstances. If fear is his trouble, let him practice exercises designed to give courage. Courage in war has been recognized from time immemorial as an important virtue, and a great part of the training of boys and young men has been devoted to producing a type of character capable of fearlessness in battle. But moral courage and intellectual courage have been much less studied; they also, however, have their technique. Admit to yourself every day at least one painful truth; you will find this quite as useful as the Boy Scout’s3 daily kind of action. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and intelligence. Exercises of this sort prolonged through several years will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.
[5] What the objective interests are to be that will arise in you when you have overcome the disease of self-absorption must be left to the spontaneous workings of your nature and of external circumstances. Do not say to yourself in advance, “I should be happy if I could become absorbed in stamp-collecting”, and thereupon set to work to collect stamps, for it may well happen that you will fail altogether to find stamp-collecting interesting. Only what genuinely interests you can be of any use to you, but you may be pretty sure that genuine objective interests will grow up as soon as you have learnt not to be immersed in self.
[6] The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life. Professional moralists4 have made too much of self-denial, and in so doing have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Conscious self-denial leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed; in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose. What is needed is not self-denial, but that kind of direction of interest outward which will lead spontaneously and naturally to the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of his own virtue could only perform by means of conscious self-denial. I have written in this book as a hedonist5, that is to say, as one who regards happiness as the good, but the acts to be recommended from the point of view of the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be recommended by the sane moralist. The moralist, however, is too apt, though this is not, of course, universally true, to stress the act rather than the state of mind. The effects of an act upon the agent will be widely different, according to his state of mind at the moment. If you see a child drowning and save it as the result of a direct impulse to bring help, you will emerge none the worse morally. If, on the other hand, you say to yourself, “It is the part of virtue to succor the helpless, and I wish to be a virtuous man, therefore I must save this child,” you will be an even worse man afterwards than you were before. What applies in this extreme case applies in many other instances that are less obvious.
[7] There is another difference, somewhat more subtle, between the attitude towards life that I have been recommending and that which is recommended by the traditional moralists. The traditional moralist, for example, will say that love should be unselfish. In a certain sense he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point, but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one’s own happiness is bound up in its success. If a man were to invite a lady to marry him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities of self-abnegation, I think it may be doubted whether she would be altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests a man comes to feel himself part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision. All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is disintegration within the self through lack of coordination between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society where the two are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.
Notes
1.Mr. Krutch: Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), American writer, critic and naturalist. Throughout his life he wrote 35 books altogether, including Edgar Allan Poe: A study in Genius (1926), The Modern Temper (1929), two critical biographies, Samuel J ohnson (1944),Henry David Thoreau (1948), and his autobiography, More Lives Than One (1962). In The Modern Temper, a work critical of science and technology, he says, “Ours is a lost cause and there is no place for us in the natural universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human. We should rather die as men than live as animals.” This is referred to by Russell in Chapter II of The Conquest of Happiness, saying that “For modern Americans the point of view that I wish to consider has been set forth by Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch in a book called The Modern Temper.”
2.myth: a well-known story which was made up in the past to explain natural events or to justify religious beliefs or social customs. In metaphorical use, it refers to anything nonexistent, fictitious or unnatural.
3.Boy Scout: a member of a worldwide organization of young men and boys, founded in England in 1908, for developing character, citizenship, and personal fitness qualities. Its slogan is to “Do a Good Turn Daily”. Its motto is to “Be Prepared”.童子军
4.professional moralist: a moralist is someone who has strong ideas about right and wrong behavior, and who tries to make other people behave according to these ideas. A professional moralist, derogatorily, is one who depends on moral preaching and criticism for livelihood or even fame and fortune.
5.hedonist: a hedonist is someone who believes that having pleasure is the most important thing in life. Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that pleasure is the primary or most important intrinsic good.
Questions for Further Thinking
1.Russell disagrees with the idea that happiness is impossible without a creed of a more or less religious kind. To what extent do you agree or disagree with it?
2.As the recipe for happiness, Russell suggests that we should avoid self-centered passions. Do you think his recipe is all-inclusive? Why or why not? If not, what else do you think might also be a good one?
3.“The man who receives affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it.” This paradoxical statement echoes the idea given by many other writers? Can you name any of them?
4.Besides courage in war, Russell mentions moral courage and intellectual courage. How would you define the two? Please give examples to illustrate your understanding.
5.The author distinguishes genuine interests from simulated ones. In your opinion, how can you find or hit upon your genuine interests?
6.Analogy（类比）is a comparison in which an idea or a thing is compared to another thing that is quite different from it. It aims at explaining that idea or thing by comparing it to something familiar. Metaphors and similes are tools used to draw an analogy. Therefore, analogy is more extensive and elaborate than either a simile or a metaphor. It is more of a logical argument. Can you find any analogy in the essay?
After-reading Assignment
Oral Work
1.Happiness is a long-standing theme in Western thought. Historically many philosophers, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, have attempted to define happiness. Do research work, find at least three philosophical views of happiness, and focus on similarities and differences of their views. Then give a 5-minute presentation on it to the class.
2.Russell begins the essay by saying “Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself”. Discuss with your classmates in groups what constitutes “external circumstances”. Then present your points to the class.
3.Different religions have different views on happiness. Make a study of Buddhism, Judaism and Catholicism on the issue of happiness. Share your findings with your classmates, giving your personal comments on those views as well.
4.Russell says he has written this book as a hedonist, whose view is in contrast to a moralist’s. Do research as to in what aspects the two disagree with each other and report your findings to the class.
Written Work
1.Russell thinks that either integration or disintegration of man within the self, and between the self and society determines whether a person is happy or unhappy. This can be interpreted in four aspects as follows: one can be happy because of integration within himself; one can be happy for his unity with society; one may be unhappy for lack of coordination within himself; one may be unhappy because of separation from society. Choose one among the four as your point of view, and write an essay of 400 words to elaborate on the point of your choice. You may revise the wording of your thesis statement. You should provide two to three points with examples to support your view.
2.Russell claims that “The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.” Do you agree or disagree? Choose a position, and make a written outline of your supporting points with further illustrations.
3.Search the internet for quotations on happiness by philosophers or writers, and choose one that you like best. Write a 300-word essay on it, giving your interpretations and comments.
4.Some people think that happiness is mainly dependent on material wealth, while others believe that happiness is chiefly derived from spiritual richness. What is your view? Write a 400-word essay to extend your view.