The problem of joy

This post takes up a theme from C.S. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy. The title sounds a bit like it comes from an inspirational quote, but it disguises a psychologically and philosophically rich work. Lewis uses “joy” as a technical term. It means something like rapture, a happy longing to touch something noble or beautiful. It has an epistemic quality to it as well as a visceral one: it is the sensation of seeing and appreciating the true nature of something wonderful, and of wanting, therefore, to be in its presence. In this way, joy has something in common with respect, or love: it is a feeling of desire commanded by a felt worthiness of the desired thing. And it feels good.

Lewis starts off experiencing joy as a precocious country boy reading stories about Norse gods and other heroes. The awesomeness of these mythic figures is enough to fill the young Lewis with rapturous appreciation. Then, in early adolescence, Lewis experiences a kind of fall. As he grows into himself, his social position, and his intellect, he loses track of joy. Lewis desperately tries to coax joy back to himself by reading classical literature, taking long walks in the morning fog, and engaging in other poetic activities. None of this works. 

Reflecting on his adolescent struggle, Lewis writes:

You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made “realizations” the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by “maistry” [mastery, craftsmanship]. 

That is, as a boy Lewis had unwittingly turned away from God by trying to produce in himself the feeling of being with God, or of contrition, or some other religious feeling, instead of directly seeking God Himself. Lewis realizes that he made the same mistake in his pursuit of joy once he conceptualized his adolescent lament in terms of missing an experience, of sadness at the fact that “the ‘old thrill’ was becoming rarer and rarer.” He goes on:

For by that complaint I smuggled in the assumption that what I wanted was a “thrill,” a state of my own mind. And there lies the deadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else–whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard–does the “thrill” arise. It is a byproduct. Its very existence presupposes that you desire not it but something other and outer. (168)

Lewis uses strong, moralistic language to describe this phenomenon, speaking of his teenage “vulgarization” of joy and of his feeble attempts to “ensnare” it. This sounds a bit dramatic, and may be based to some extent on the connection Lewis draws between this “vicious subjectivism” and religious malpractice. But I do think there is a really interesting psychological observation here. Like the teenage Lewis, I often find myself seeking feelings of engagement or passion even more than the things I hope will inspire those feelings. Because it involves a focus on one’s own experience, this could be called a kind of self-centeredness, though it’s not clearly immoral. What’s more immediately apparent is that falling into this kind of self-referential pattern is bad for our happiness, because it thwarts our ability to be fully occupied by our dealings with the world around us.

Like Lewis, I am happiest when I am fully engaged in something outside myself: a project, a person, beauty, a game. These can be thought of as ways of getting into what psychologists call flow: a kind of deep, immersive engagement that takes you away from the ordinary drumbeat of self-consciousness. It is a happy experience, and many people think it is a vital part of the good life. Joy is a kind of flow, defined in this broad way. In joy we are not thinking about our own mental life, but about something outside ourselves that we recognize as good or beautiful.

But as Lewis implies, if joy is being fully enraptured by the goodness or beauty of something in the world, a desire to feel this joy cannot co-exist at the same time with joy, as such a mental state points inward, and not out toward the world. This kind of self-focus, therefore, has to be kept away from joy: if it sneaks in to the head-space of the world-be enraptured, it draws the gaze inside, and therefore stunts joy in its cradle. This, then, is why we are only ever surprised by joy: to invoke another banal-sounding aphorism, we find it just when we’re not looking for it.

So the very desire to cultivate the experience of joyful engagement, then, can be counterproductive for finding it. However, even when I recognize this, I cannot help but desire this experience. How could I not? It is a happy experience, and my happiness seems to me undeniably good. Normally, when we know something is good, we want it and we pursue it. And when we are pursuing something, we tend to monitor whether or not we have it, consciously or unconsciously. But because joy requires full focus on the outside world, this monitoring of the inside world is inconsistent with it. Therefore, we have to forget about our aim in this case before we can fully achieve it, an unnatural and difficult thing to do when we truly value something. Forgetting about an end is not our normal response to recognizing it as good. So there is a problem of joy: our natural response to the manifest goodness of joy makes it more difficult to achieve.

Someone might think “well, if wanting joy is what gets in the way of achieving it, the prescription is simple: do not want joy.” But there is a deep problem with this strategy. In effect it asks us to deny the goodness of our own happy states of mind. Otherwise, our noses will naturally be drawn toward the scent. This makes it a kind of self-deception, and self-deception is always hard, because it requires us to act for reasons we must at the same time conceal from our awareness. We must deny the goodness of joy because we recognize it as good; the denial is, after all, a strategy for pursuing it. So this option is very difficult, not to mention epistemically suspect.

This seems to leave us in a bit of a bind.

Let’s try taking a step back.

Though the problem of joy may be a vexing personal problem, it is, in the scheme of things, simply not very important. The reason is that my own subjective experience is, in the scheme of things, simply not very important. This is more than a helpful reminder to keep things in perspective in this context. It also points the way toward something like a “solution” to the problem of joy. Though we cannot and should not not deny the value of flow states like joy, we should come to realize that there are things of far greater importance available to our attention–if not the sublimity of the gods of Asgard (or of a true God), then important projects and states of the world. And when we realize this fully, this should draw our attention out, toward those projects and realities. The value of the outside world swamps the importance of our own feelings of engagement, not because the feelings of engagement are not good, but because they are less important than other things. 

Joy, recall, is like respect. It is a sense of beholding something worth honoring. It is the feeling of being commanded to attention by the value of something. This often involves not attending, or attending less, to other valuable things. The problem of joy may then largely dissolves once we realize and really appreciate the greater relative significance of the world around us, because this realization draws our attention away from our interior lives.

An interesting dynamic emerges here. I have not suggested a solution to the problem of joy per se. However, appreciating the smallness of the problem compared to the importance of other things–if we can put that appreciation into practice–all but dissolves it. The problem is in this way sustained in part by too much preoccupation with it.

This diagnosis of the problem reveals that Lewis’ condemnatory language around seeking in vain for joy may be somewhat appropriate after all, even if we aren’t very impressed by its religious cast. My vicious subjectivism represents a moral vice insofar as it is a symptom of failing to fully grasp that the world of my experience is much less important than the world outside it. At least, it seems to be a symptom of my powers of attention failing to fully respond to grasping that reality. Even if we have reason to give some extra weight to our own well-being, if our engagement with the outside world is only rarely undiluted by self-awareness, such that we find joy very hard to find, we are likely giving it more weight than it deserves.

This post was originally published on my old blog, wheatwheatwheat, on January 3, 2019.