the unhappy truth
The distinctive habit of the pseudo-intellectual: the extraction from a personal emotional morass of a thesis, a complex condemnation of the state, civilization, history, species. No sooner am I seriously depressed than I start to suspect that society is hollow, catastrophically false, terminally flawed. […]
It is not that something is wrong with the world; it is that much is wrong with me. And at the core of most philosophy, political thought, and cultural rhetoric is the simple problem of the individual’s unhappiness.
This is a brilliant assessment, stated with all of the beautiful force of a Nietzschean aphorism. And like that miserable old German’s aphorisms, it need not be entirely accurate for it to be enlightening.
How much of our philosophical and cultural inheritance has been produced out of broken hearts and mental illness, lonliness and frustration? A great deal, I am happy to report. The development of Western philosophy has been carried along in large part by healthy doses of pessimism and neuroses.
Like most sentient beings, I am prone to bouts of depression whose origins are by no means solely biological. The outside world affects me, as I do it. And given that all is certainly not well with the cosmos, it is perhaps fair to say that ‘much is wrong with me because there is much that is wrong with the world’.
We must not be too quick to dismiss our individual unhappiness as something that is peculiar to us and us only. We must be open to the idea that our unhapiness is symptomatic of a more general social fact from which we can extrapolate some sort of contemporary malaise.
It is obviously dangerous to become overly self-indulgent or uncritical of our own emotions, yet at the same time I think that for better or for worse, our emotionally subjective experience of the world is worthy of a voice. The best of what has been thought and said is notable for the effortlessness with which it slides from the personal to the public.
There is no more truth to be found in joy than there is in unhapiness.
