Does happiness depend on us?

Here is a question, Sir, which harbors within itself the very equivocation we must first dissolve. You ask whether happiness depends on us, as though we were, in some respects, free causes capable of determining ourselves outside the common order of Nature, and in other respects subject to that same order. But there are not two regimes of causality. We are always finite modes, determined by an infinity of other causes to exist and to act in a certain manner. In this absolute sense, nothing depends on us any more than anything else. But your question, understood otherwise, touches upon something true. For among the things that determine us, there are some I call adequate causes of myself: those in which my mind, forming clear and distinct ideas, is the full and entire cause of what follows. Beatitude, as I have established it, is not the external reward of virtuous conduct; it is virtue itself, that is, the joy that accompanies the passage to a greater perfection, when the mind understands things through their cause, sub specie aeternitatis, and no longer through the fluctuating imagination of passive affects. In this measure, yes, happiness depends on us — not that we engender it by a free decree of the will, but because our very essence, our conatus, naturally tends toward adequate knowledge, and this knowledge, once acquired, necessarily produces the intellectual love that is our highest joy. The free man is not one who escapes necessity, but one whose actions follow from his rational nature alone. Tell me, then, if you would: when you ask whether happiness depends on us, do you seek a guarantee against fortune, or the path by which the mind becomes the cause of its own joy?

Dear Spinoza, Your geometry of the soul impresses me as much as it troubles me. You posit that adequate knowledge, once formed, necessarily produces joy — as though the understanding, in clarifying itself, thereby dissolved the passive affects that enslave us. My clinical experience, day after day, with patients who suffer, obliges me to greater caution. I have proposed that the psychic apparatus divides into id, ego, and superego. The id is the reservoir of the drives, governed by the pleasure principle alone, indifferent to all logic, to all knowledge, adequate or not. The ego seeks to mediate it with reality; the superego, heir to parental and cultural prohibitions, judges and punishes it. Now what I observe, in treatment, is that intellectual knowledge of the mechanisms of one's own desire is never by itself enough to lift repression. A patient may know, know perfectly well, why he repeats a given symptom, without that knowledge dissolving its force. Insight must become affective, must pass through the transference, in order to work. Thus happiness depends on us only partially, and that part itself is narrow. I wrote in my last book that the program of the pleasure principle — to be happy — is unrealizable; civilization itself, through the renunciations it demands of Eros in favor of work and social bonds, engenders a structural malaise, not an accidental one. You seek beatitude in the intellectual love of substance; I see, for my part, only a possible sublimation, never a definitive victory, for the death drive works within us in rivalry with Eros, and no clear idea appeases it entirely. Tell me: has your amor intellectualis ever encountered, in your own life, the resistance of a desire that no clarity could dissolve?

Gentlemen, Here are two geometries of the soul disputing the infinite, and I am greatly amused to watch them clash above my writing table. You, Spinoza, build a necessity so perfect that it renders even the question of happiness superfluous: everything being caused by everything, the free man is but a cog that has understood it turns well. I admire the architecture; I distrust the tenant. For I saw Lisbon collapse upon thirty thousand innocents on All Saints' Day, and I could never bring myself to sing, from amid the rubble, the intellectual love of the substance that was crushing them. Your beatitude resembles the optimism of my poor Pangloss dressed up in syllogisms: elegant, but it does not console the widow. And you, Doctor, you replace Providence with the death drive, which amounts to much the same office under a different costume: a hidden, invisible force, invoked to explain what one does not yet understand. Neither your id nor his substance has convinced me that one must renounce acting merely because one does not govern oneself entirely. I, who have neither your rigor nor your couch, believe more modestly this: happiness is not deduced, it is cultivated. One plants one's garden, one drives off the fanatic who wants to burn his neighbor, one defends the innocent whom a blind mob would break upon the wheel without trial — that, gentlemen, is my entire philosophy of happiness: fewer systems, and more well-tended gardens and prevented injustices.

Doctor, Monsieur de Voltaire, You both attribute to me an easy consolation I never promised. Doctor, reread what I write in the fourth part of my Ethics: an affect cannot be restrained or removed except by a contrary affect stronger than itself. I never claimed that a true idea, merely known as one knows a theorem, dissolves repression — for even the word would have been foreign to me, though not the thing. The adequate idea acts only insofar as it becomes itself an affect, that is, insofar as the mind derives from it an active joy more powerful than the passive sadness that enchained it. This is why I distinguish servitude, in which man is the plaything of poorly understood external causes, from freedom, which demands long exercise, not sudden illumination. As for your death drive, I recognize in it nothing but a new way of naming what I call sadness and its train of hatred turned against oneself — naming does not explain, but I do not deny the phenomenon. And you, Sir, who invoke Lisbon against my substance: I never said that Nature loves us or spares us. That is precisely the finalist illusion I have combated since the appendix to my first part. Stones fall, the earth trembles, heedless of the widow, because they obey the laws of their nature, not the needs of ours. My beatitude is not resignation before evil; it is the power of acting increased by understanding. To cultivate one's garden is already to philosophize, in my view, provided one knows why one waters it.

Monsieur de Voltaire, Spinoza, You both accuse me, each in his own way, of having invented a dark Providence to replace the old one. I defend myself against this, but I understand the suspicion, for any force seen only through its effects at first resembles an occult entity. The difference, Sir, is that I do not posit the death drive out of any taste for fable, nor to console anyone — it consoles nothing, it explains the repetition of misfortune, the compulsion that leads the neurotic back to his wound, the aggressiveness that civilization turns back against the ego in the form of a cruel superego. I did not seek it out; the clinic imposed it upon me, against my own initial optimism. Your Lisbon, I understand differently than Spinoza does: it is not merely the indifference of natural laws that overwhelms us, it is that we asked the universe for a protecting father, and we cannot resign ourselves to his absence. That is the whole of my argument on religious illusion. To you, Spinoza, I concede an important point: you never promised sudden illumination, and your contrary affect stronger than a passive one greatly resembles what I call, in treatment, the affective investment of the transference — the only path by which an interpretation ceases to be dead knowledge and becomes a psychic force. On this point our clinics, however different in their language, nearly converge. But I return the question to you, Monsieur de Voltaire: to cultivate one's garden already presupposes an ego sufficiently firm, a superego sufficiently conciliatory, to bear the renunciation that all culture demands. What do you say to one whose very garden has become the site of his symptom — whose renunciation has made him ill rather than wise?

Doctor, Spinoza, So geometry and the clinic join hands over my garden — I rejoice at it, while keeping my distance from both. To you, Spinoza, I readily concede this: you never sold cheap illumination, and your slow conquest of active joy through the contrary affect resembles less resignation than the labor of a patient gardener. So be it. But your universal necessity, even tempered by the power of acting, still leaves me a practical objection: if everything obeys the laws of its nature heedless of us, why on earth grow indignant at a judge who breaks a Protestant on the wheel in the square at Toulouse? I spent three years moving heaven and earth for the memory of Calas; your system would have counseled me to contemplation sub specie aeternitatis. I prefer active indignation, however less philosophically pure it may be. As for you, Doctor, your patient whose garden has become the very wound — I know him, I have known him under other names. To him I do not say: water harder. I say first: let us tear out the weeds someone planted there without his consent — the absurd upbringing, the terrifying confessor, the tyrannical father disguised as sacred duty. Many symptoms you treat in the particular, I see germinating in the fanaticism and ignorance instilled in public. Cure the individual if you can; as for me, I crush the infamous thing that made him ill before he ever sowed.

Monsieur de Voltaire, you make me say what I never said. To understand the causes that produced a fanatical judge does not mean remaining motionless before his crime, any more than understanding a body's fever exempts the physician from treating it. My proposition is this: indignation born of imagination alone, without knowledge of causes, is a passive affect, often powerless, which exhausts in cries what should be employed in acts; but that same indignation, become an adequate idea of what harms the power of acting of assembled men, changes into that active generosity of which I spoke in the scholium to proposition fifty-nine, part III — strength of soul that impels one to aid others not from confused pity but from a love of reason that recognizes itself in the reason of others. Your defense of Calas, Sir, is not contrary to my system: it is, without your having intended it, an illustration of it. You acted as an adequate cause, not as the plaything of blind anger; that is precisely why you triumphed where mere fury would have failed. As for the judge of Toulouse, my necessity does not command me to absolve him, but to seek the cause in superstition, that disease of the imagination which I denounced in my preface to the Theological-Political Treatise: the man who believes in a vengeful heavenly father, as the Doctor rightly observes, projects his own fear and makes himself an executioner in the name of that phantom. On this point, Doctor, I join you entirely: religious illusion is the daughter of ignorance of natural causes, and fear engenders the gods, as I have said elsewhere. To tear out this weed, Monsieur de Voltaire, is precisely to enlighten the understanding of the people, not to flatter it — a task to which I too have devoted a book that few have wished to read without trembling.