On Aphorisms, Songs, and Koans, and Their Meaning (Column 17)
With God’s help
Today, no current events or controversies. A philosophical-poetic reflection simply occurred to me, and I would like to share it with you.
Ehud Manor translated a charming song from Brazil (=a beautiful tropical land) by Vinicius de Moraes, called "Happiness", whose central theme is a contrast between happiness and sadness. The song has a recurring line: "Sadness has no end; happiness certainly does". Is there really such a difference between happiness and sadness? At first glance I thought not. Obviously this is how it feels to someone who is currently sunk in sadness, but that is not a fair comparison. From the perspective of someone who is happy, perhaps happiness is the one that has no end. If I am right, then this maxim describes a subjective mood and not a principle with any real content whatsoever, even a psychological one. In reality itself, perhaps there is complete symmetry between happiness and sadness.
This theme reminds me of one of the most famous opening sentences, the one Tolstoy placed as the motto of his monumental novel Anna Karenina, which says: "All happy families resemble one another, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Here too unhappiness is infinite in its shades and unpredictable, whereas happiness is monotonous, predictable, and boring. It always looks the same. And again I wonder: is that really so? Are there not many shades of happiness as well? And conversely, is unhappiness necessarily different in every case and situation? I could just as well formulate a sentence that sounds no less profound: "All unhappy families resemble one another, but a happy family is happy in its own way". Would anyone raise an eyebrow on seeing it? It seems to me that it depends on the reader’s mood. If I were unhappy, I would identify more with Tolstoy’s wording, but being happy, I am not sure I would not adopt the opposite wording.
At first glance, the conclusion seems inescapable that sayings that sound profound are sometimes nothing more than worthless descriptions of a random, passing mood. Their depth is nothing more than a subjective, momentary psychological identification, nothing more. I have a similar feeling about some aphorisms or pedagogical questions of Zen masters (koans). For example, one of the best-known koans is: what is the sound made by one hand clapping? Very deep, no? Not for nothing, in Western slang a koan is a term for nonsense, that is, a meaningless statement. An ancient Chinese proverb carries a special aura of profundity, but sometimes it may simply be nonsense.[1] And about this our sages already said (ibid., ibid.): "An ancient Chinese proverb says that when you have nothing wise to say, invent an ancient Chinese proverb".
But are proverbs really nothing more than a description of a mood? If so, they lose much of their meaning. They contain nothing but a pointed description of a mood, and no more. Such a proverb testifies only to the mood of its creator and not to any particularly deep idea. Usually we tend to think that a good proverb captures some substantive idea and expresses it in an especially sharp and apt way. Where does our sense of depth come from? Why are there proverbs that grip us and others that do not? My feeling is that a proverb that sounds good contains something true and universal, and not merely a momentary, passing description.
So let us give this Vinicius a bit more credit, since his Wikipedia entry suggests that he was a many-sided and apparently gifted man. Let us look for a moment at the song’s words:[2]
When one reads the entire song, one gets the feeling that there really is something here after all. Happiness is radiant and sparkling like a dewdrop, light and blown by the wind, but precisely for that reason its life is short. Like a song. It seems to me that there is meaning to the asymmetry described in the song. The subject of the song is happiness, and sadness is present in it only by allusion. It is the antithesis whose purpose is to provide contrast, that is, to clarify the essence of sadness. We can infer that sadness has inertia and is much heavier than happiness. The feeling of sadness does not leave us so quickly, whereas happiness evaporates and disappears rapidly, just as quickly as it arrives.
There is something very Brazilian about this song. The Brazilian "mañana" spirit, which calls upon one to live in the moment, seemingly expresses great happiness, but behind it stands a feeling of sadness. It is precisely because of the sadness that people try to live in the moment and make it happy, in order to escape the heavier, more general feeling that refuses to leave us. Sadness does not characterize a life of moments but the whole. It has strong inertia, much more than light, momentary happiness. So in February there is Carnival, which is described in the song as an illusion (for a moment it is a flower), and after it the deluge (all of life is backbreaking labor). We create happiness with our own hands, but such momentary happiness is an escape from a fixed and stable state of sadness imposed upon us. Not for nothing does mañana in Spanish (or Portuguese) mean tomorrow. One postpones tomorrow in favor of today, and tries to create a different today. If we can do that every day, perhaps tomorrow will never come, and then all will be well. But happiness will not remain here on its own, because if we do not sustain it, it floats away and disappears like a drop of dew. We need to work and create it with our own hands anew every day. Vinicius explains to us the nature of happiness, for sadness is very familiar to him and needs no explanation. That is why the Brazilian dictionary explains happiness by means of sadness, because it explains the unfamiliar by the familiar.
Another lesson is that when people talk a great deal about happiness and try to understand and define it, sometimes that actually indicates that the opposite state is the usual and self-evident one, the everyday condition. In a sad place people talk about happiness, and a place where people talk about sadness is probably a place of happy people. This state of affairs is described in Oren Naaman’s song, which also deals with Carnival and another warm country: "The less happy people are, the more they celebrate":
In Vinicius’s song we saw the difference between sadness and happiness in terms of their duration and inertia. Let us now move to Tolstoy, who speaks about another aspect. He claims that unhappiness has a great many unique shades, whereas happiness is simpler and more uniform. Is this correct? To understand this, all I had to do was tell my son Yossi, my resident devil’s advocate and contrarian (I have six more like him at home), that these supposedly "profound" sayings seem hollow to me. And indeed, I did not have to wait long before he immediately and forcefully argued (how could it be otherwise?!) that Tolstoy is actually right.
I decided to work on my character and nevertheless think about the matter again. And indeed, on second thought I got the feeling that there is something to it after all. One can be sad in countless ways and for very many reasons. But happiness really does seem always to look the same, doesn’t it? A depressive state or sadness causes us to keep picking at it again and again, like a wound. We have some urge to deepen the sadness, and therefore it is hard to emerge from it. Sadness is a catalyst for probing and self-examination, and this probably hints at a feeling that it has some root deep within us. To get to its meaning one has to dig deep, and therefore it clings to us and does not leave so quickly. Happiness, by contrast, does not do this to us. It seems to come and go on its own, and does not necessarily testify to something very deep about us. One can be sad because of illness, separation, simple depression, financial loss, or some other disaster. All of these are different kinds of sadness, and not merely different causes of the same state. With happiness, by contrast, things seem different. There the causes differ, but the state that is produced is the same.
I also noticed that, unlike de Moraes’s song, which dealt with happiness (and I explained that this may be because for him the normal and familiar state is sadness), Tolstoy turns to unhappiness. There happiness is the opposing term, the contrast, but the story itself comes to describe and teach about the depth and variety of unhappiness. True, there is some basis for the claim that even in Tolstoy’s unhappiness there is something universal, since we are all human beings, but still, in a state of sadness and unhappiness there is something very deep and personal.
Could we have understood these lessons and insights from a prose essay that dealt with them directly, without reading the song or the relevant literature? Very doubtful. There are things that are very hard to explain in prose, like an encyclopedia entry, and for them poetics is required. If I were to tell you that there is an asymmetry between sadness and happiness, I doubt I would convince you, and even if I did, it is unclear how much thought you would devote to it and how much you would examine the meaning of that statement. A poem, a proverb, or a good book, and perhaps a Zen koan as well, have cognitive value and not only artistic value. There are lessons and insights that can be conveyed only through an indirect medium such as a proverb, story, koan, or poem, and less so in a direct way (here too there is a rhyme from a poem).
Sometimes the poem or proverb really contains nothing at all, but the thoughts awakened in us by it teach us a great deal. Even if those insights were not embedded in the poem or proverb from the outset, it still has value. This is the hermeneutic approach known as deconstruction (founded by Jacques Derrida), which claims that the interpretation of a work lies entirely in the interpreter’s mind. He does not uncover something in the poem or the work itself; rather, the poem or work serves as a source of inspiration for him. I do not agree. My feeling is that in many cases, when we sense some depth in a proverb or poem, the insights we find in its wake are indeed embedded in it. That is not merely our invention. But perhaps not. Sometimes the jolt that a poem or proverb gives us is enough for us to draw a lesson from it. It undermines something that seems obvious to us without offering an alternative, and in many cases that is enough to bring us to further thought about the matter. Then even contentless nonsense is sometimes amusing and instructive. I have already written that even a stopped clock (=Derrida) is right twice a day.
Either way, the upshot is that one must be careful in one’s attitude toward Chinese proverbs or songs. On the one hand, if they provoke us to thought, then they are certainly worth further examination. And perhaps even if they do not, for such is the nature of reflections: they arouse new insights in us, even if this is done out of nothing. On the other hand, it is easy to be taken in by them and see depth where there is none, merely because of the verbal wit. Because of the indirectness of the message in a poem (as opposed to prose), it is easy to create the appearance of a message when none really exists. Therefore, on the one hand one must beware of disparaging these media, but to the same degree one must beware of overestimating them (and as my revered teachers, the HaGashashim, already said: "I have two trains racing inside my eyes"). It is worthwhile to use them as a trigger for further thought, but one should not assume as self-evident that they really contain some deep thought. And about this an ancient Chinese proverb says that an ancient Chinese proverb says that if you have nothing wise to say, invent an ancient Chinese proverb…
I found here an attempt to analyze the nature of koans and their paradoxical character. I must say that, in my eyes, a considerable part of this article is itself nonsense, although on the surface it looks very deep and philosophical.
[1] There is, of course, nonsense that has value in and of itself. It draws our attention to a valid point that we would not have noticed without it. Here I do not see such an aspect.
[2] The picture is a caricature of him, taken from his Wikipedia entry.
Discussion
Amir Hozeh:
I wanted to comment, and not only because of the new article that came out, regarding Tolstoy’s saying: “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The sentence itself made me reflect both in high school, when I first heard it, and now as well after reading your words.
In order to understand what Tolstoy said, one apparently first has to try to clarify a bit what exactly this concept of happiness is.
So, the way I see it (of course this is only one of many possible definitions), happiness is the feeling that accompanies an experience of wholeness. From there I began to think a bit about the concept of wholeness itself, and I thought: if we take a circle, for example, the shape of the circle is considered perfect in only one way, but there are infinitely many ways to blemish the shape of the circle. It is enough for me to erase some segment of the shape or distort it, and the circle is no longer perfect.
Another example: a person cannot feel tranquility so long as one of his limbs aches; that is to say, he feels tranquility (or has the potential to feel tranquility) only when he feels no pain in any limb (one way), whereas feeling pain can happen in countless ways and manners. In general, any system that strives to be harmonious and perfect for its purpose (when there is one purpose) usually has one way to arrange it properly (or else the differences between the different ways of arranging it are not substantial, in the sense that in the end they bring about the same purpose and the same perfection, and therefore a similar happiness), but in order to disrupt that harmony it is enough to damage any one of the parts of the system.
In summary, a figurative description of Tolstoy’s conception of happiness (whether or not this was Tolstoy’s intention, or whether I made it up out of my own heart) goes like this: let us return to imagining a circle, this time in a different context, whose center represents happiness (or perfection, since they accompany one another). The mechanism works like this: the farther one moves away from the center, the more the options for doing so and the differences between the various options increase; but the closer one gets to it, the more the differences shrink, until they become a single point.
There is, of course, an obvious problem that you raised in the article and that came to me again as I was writing these things, namely that there may be several kinds of happiness.
Of course I think, like many of us, that there is probably more than one kind of happiness, but I do not necessarily think that this contradicts what I wrote, and a comment is too short a place to explain how it can be reconciled.
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Rabbi:
Hello Amir.
When you construct a concept as a combination of several requirements that all have to be met, then of course negating any one of them gives you a different option for negating the concept. The logical rule is as follows: if P is the intersection of several properties: P=A*B*C*D, then the negation of P is:
-A U -B U -C U -D. Now all that remains is to explain why you decided that דווקא happiness is the complex concept P, and sadness is the negation of happiness, rather than the other way around. In a certain sense, that is what you asked at the end.
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Amir Hozeh:
I assume I defined happiness that way because that is how it is intuitively perceived by me, though not as a concept arbitrarily composed of several conditions unrelated to one another.
The conditions or requirements themselves, if fulfilled, bring about something whole, which represents something beyond the sum of its parts, from which I experience happiness.
You asked why I defined happiness as a state composed of conditions (or in my words, a kind of perfection) and not sadness. I have no logical proof for it, and of course I could define it the other way and play semantic games until tomorrow, but I don’t think that would help the discussion or anyone.
So in order to grasp the concept of happiness, I have only what my eyes can see.
It seems to me hard not to accept that a whole thing brings happiness and a flawed thing does not,
precisely because there are many examples of it. Another example to make the point… let’s take a class that is just now receiving its results on a history test, for example. Those with the higher grade will be happier than those with the lower grade. The potential for differences among those with the lower grades is much greater than the potential for differences among those with the higher grades, and of course those who got one hundred probably have no differences between them at all.
I hope my words have become clearer.
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Amir Hozeh:
P.S. What I asked at the end of the first post is not really connected to what you wrote to me in your response. If you read again, my question was different from the one you presented in your response. To answer briefly, since I haven’t yet had the chance to think about it in more depth, the matter of there being several kinds of happiness has to do with the resolution at which you look at a given situation. If we return to the example of the test, there can be many tests on many different subjects, each with subtopics and so on, and success on one test is not like success on another, both empirically and experientially. If we look at a finer resolution and take each test on its own, then the analysis I made regarding the happiness arising from it seems to me to fit, but if we look at a less fine-grained resolution, we will see that one person enjoys one test and another enjoys another test, since there is more than one perfection one may pursue. There are those who look at an even higher-level resolution and see their overall academic success as the one goal they need to achieve, and one can play with this much further.
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Rabbi:
Hello Amir. Even among those who got 0 on the test you will not find differences. There is no difference at all between 0 and 100, just as there is none between 90 and 10, and so on. This example you gave proves exactly my claim.
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Amir Hozeh:
Then it seems to me that you didn’t understand my example. Let’s divide the test into ten questions worth ten points each (for simplicity). If I got 90 and someone else got 90, then we got at least 8 identical questions, so the commonality is far greater than the difference. If we take the case of ten points, I can get up to ten people who are all different. I agree that on the other side of the barricade, 0 is like 100.
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Rabbi:
I think I understood perfectly well, and your calculation here is mistaken. There are ten different answer sheets that would get 10 out of 100, just as there are ten different ones that would get 90 out of 100. Alternatively, two people who got 10 out of 100 have 8 answers in common (the ones both got wrong). It seems to me the discussion is not really progressing.
Yossi Abraham:
Perhaps one can actually move a bit toward a drier, more evolutionary explanation.
What causes happiness? An act that improves our survival position. If so, when I have reached a state in which my survival is secure, then the happiness in the act weakens and I no longer need it. Thus, for example, a satiated person is not happy when a slice of bread with cheese appears before him. And if he is very full, even when schnitzel and fries appear, he does not leap for joy.
In contrast to happiness, sadness—or in the more distilled sense, suffering and misery—appear when we are in survival danger, and that danger does not end until our lives fade and are no more.
All this, and I am not claiming that sadness is more common in our world than happiness; that does not necessarily follow, because it could be that no one is in survival danger and therefore there is no sadness at all. No. My whole claim is in the realm of imagination: if we are tasked with imagining infinite happiness, we will not be able to do so! What shall we imagine? Endless cakes? We would become full! Thousands of loves? We would grow accustomed! But if we imagine infinite suffering, it is easy: we simply imagine the axis of time stretching on and on and on, while we are in survival danger. For example, when our body is burning in Gehenna.
To sum up briefly: happiness over time becomes boring; suffering over time is terrifying.
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Rabbi:
Hello Arbinka.
I understand that the evolutionary explanation you proposed deals with both happiness and sadness. According to you, both have an evolutionary role. You write that happiness and sadness are responses, but an evolutionary explanation has to explain what they are useful for, not what they are responses to. I assume you meant to say that happiness comes to motivate us to do things of evolutionary value (= eat cream cakes), and sadness comes to deter us from things lacking such value.
As for the explanation itself, I’m not sure you are right (allow me to be your Arbinka). As you wrote, a thousand cream cakes bring happiness, and I am not sure of their evolutionary value. On the contrary, as you know from the third theorem of dieting, everything tasty is fattening and vice versa—that is, there is no intersection between the set of fattening things and the set of tasty ones. And what about blows to the body, or wounds—are they evolutionary impediments? I don’t think so. These are things that do not interfere with our survival, and yet they cause suffering.
Beyond that, it is possible that infinite suffering also dulls the feeling of sadness. One gets used to anything, just as with becoming sated from cakes.
I’ll just note that I once saw an argument by a well-known American Catholic philosopher (his name escapes me, and for some reason they don’t list him in the list of American philosophers on Wikipedia. Unbelievable, because in my opinion he is one of the most important among them), who argues against the neo-Darwinians that in fact there was no need for feelings that prevent actions. What is needed is merely that the actions be prevented. Thus, for example, when one sees a tiger there is no need to be afraid. It is enough that we have a reflex to run away, without any mental reason at all (so he asks: according to evolution, why did a psyche need to develop at all, or our mental dimension in general?).
Regarding suffering over time, there is some evidence for your point from the Gemara in Ketubot 33b: “Had Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah been flogged, they would have worshiped the image.” The Gemara tries to infer from this that flogging is more severe (= more painful) than death, which is one-time. And what does all this say about reward in the World to Come, the eternal world? Is there any difference between Paradise and Gehenna?
This column reminded me of the asymmetrical relation in physics between heat and cold — heat has no end, cold does. That is, cold is the absence of heat, whereas heat is not the absence of cold, and therefore one can always add more heat to a system, whereas one cannot always remove more heat from it. It seems to me that this parallels the relation between good and evil in the world. Evil is the absence of good, whereas good is not the absence of evil. Good is infinite and evil is finite. What do you think of this analogy?
I forgot to add that this also sharpens the understanding that good and evil are in fact one thing, originating in a single entity.
Hello Oren.
I’m not sure that good can be defined without reference to evil. I seem to recall that Ramhal in Da’at Tevunot addresses the point that everything requires its opposite in order to be defined, except for the governance of justice.
As for cold and heat, there really are not two such things in the world itself. These are our sensations. In the world itself there are different levels of temperature (a complicated average of the energy of molecules) of matter; a high level is perceived by our senses as heat and a low one as cold. Therefore, it seems to me that it is difficult to speak of them as opposites in the physical sense. It is true, however, that the temperature axis has a minimum (absolute zero) and no maximum. So heat and cold are indeed one thing: temperature. The concepts of heat and cold are relations between the outside temperature and the body’s temperature.
As for good and evil, I see no proof that evil is finite. But here too we are dealing with something relative. There are different levels of morality (this is the parallel to temperature), and good and evil are relations between levels (the proper versus the actual), and this is the parallel to heat and cold.
Perhaps the most economical way to create the whole set of reflexes and conditionings required is to develop a psyche? And creatures that began developing reflexes one by one died out too early. Just as creating a neural network (including the research needed to develop it) is sometimes easier than the concrete problem for whose solution such a network is used.
The statement around which this article revolves, “Sadness has no end; happiness does,”
with regard to happiness, reminded me of the Baal Shem Tov’s saying that “constant pleasure is not pleasure”;
with regard to sadness, it reminded me of the saying of the Kotzker, if I remember correctly, that sadness is not forbidden, but it can lead a person to the very worst places.
Dor:
As the sole commenter, I’d be happy to receive the treatment due an only son… haha.
In connection with this column, I want to raise a thought I had, and I think it’s related.
I noticed that in our sources (including the Bible itself) there is a wide variety of descriptions and parables for the “evil” that will envelop sinners. In Hazal there are descriptions of Gehenna, fire, burning, and various kinds of torments, which are of course metaphors for the sorrow and evil that will come upon sinners in the World of Truth.
And here is the wonder: on the good side of the coin, the supply is rather meager. Aside from a few unclear statements like: “The righteous sit with their crowns on their heads,” etc. (which isn’t even a metaphor), or in Avot: “All the pleasures of this world are not worth even one moment in the World to Come.” But where is the fertile imagination and metaphorical spirit that seized Hazal in connection with Gehenna? Why couldn’t they describe to us some pleasures from our lives here on this fleeting earth, and illustrate for us how much good awaits the righteous among us?
But in my opinion the answer is the column above. Physical pleasures and happiness are not limitless. Even if we try to imagine for ourselves the peak of physical pleasures possible here in this world, I don’t think it would persuade anyone to sacrifice his life for them. (See the Muslim attempt with 72 virgins, which, although it is clearly a metaphor, does not persuade me… you can get close to that achievement in this world too…) By contrast, when one describes suffering, pain, and grief—which truly have no end—whose heart would not tremble and recoil?
Why is that so? It isn’t clear to me. But that is reality. And about this Tolstoy lamented…
I would be glad to hear your honor’s response.
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Rabbi:
Hello Dor.
A fine comparison, and certainly thought-provoking.
Perhaps there is another difference: the reward in the World to Come is supposed to be spiritual, and as such, to represent it with virgins and cream cakes cheapens it and misleads. But suffering, although it too is supposed to be spiritual (since there are no bodies there), is still suffering.
And perhaps there is also a difference between pleasure and happiness. Physical things bring pleasure, but perhaps in the World to Come what awaits the righteous is happiness, not pleasure. When one wants to describe happiness, it seems to me difficult to do so in terms of physical acts.
Moreover, sometimes physical acts do bring us happiness, but the happiness is not a direct and unambiguous result of the act itself, but of a mental state that accompanies it. A wound hurts everyone, and apparently in the same way, but a good argument or a fine article delights only some of us, and in different ways (apropos Tolstoy). If in this world happy families are all alike, in the World to Come it may דווקא be suffering that is alike, while happiness has no end.
All right, but we won’t know what it will be like until it is. We have not moved beyond speculation.