The Myth of Modernity

Charles Baudouin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317575474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1950, this is a late work by Charles Baudouin, world-famous French psychologist, and takes its title from the opening chapter which examines the transformation of the myth of Progress, characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into the myth of Modernity, characteristic of the time of writing.

The author has little sympathy for a development which he regards as essentially vulgar; the myth of Progress, he says, had its aspiration and gave man reasons for reaching out for better things, but the myth of Modernity 'seems to give humanity reasons only for fleeing from itself, reasons for unhappiness, inasmuch as the man who runs away from himself is an unhappy man'.

This chapter is characteristic of those that follow – on Baudelaire, Verlaine and other literary topics; on Art and the Epoch, The Prestige of Action, Technique versus Mysticism, Opinion and Tolerance, etc. A broad humanity and a gentle irony are the characteristic features of this stimulating book, now available again to be enjoyed in its historical context.

XIV A MODERATE VIEW OF HAPPINESS

DOI: 10.4324/9781315739021-14

I

Monsieur Boutourline, that Russian character of the ancien régime whose portrait Maurice Kuès has drawn in his Initiation moscovite, is an agreeable talker and an indulgent philosopher. Other talkers fascinate their audience by the violence of their paradoxes. He holds our attention by the moderation of his opinions. But as we are living in times that deal in extremes and paroxysms, it so happens that moderation, provided we find it on the lips of a man of intellect, will itself figure as a paradox and will charm us for that very reason.

Monsieur Boutourline does not think that human beings can be very happy. We suspected as much! But how does he express himself? He tells us of his belief in a manner that has no suggestion of pessimism, nor does it incline us to pessimism. On the contrary!

“What is a happiness that one cannot attain?” asks the doctor who is conversing with our hero. And he replies:

“But, my dear fellow, where have you found that a happiness was ever attained?”

“It is true,” says the doctor, “that I have never found it in anyone, and those who say they have found it are like characters in a novel, who deceive one, and deceive themselves.”

“Happiness cannot be attained, and we do not encounter it; but the notion we have of it is indispensable to human life. If a man did not aspire to happiness he would be only half alive.”

The discussion continues, pleasantly varied by little incidents which are observed with irony under the aspect of happiness. Or are they merely sensual delights?

Finally, it is Monsieur Boutourline who figures, as always, and without pedantry, as the spokesman of the sagest wisdom_

“But it is precisely because we are not happy that we long for happiness, and believe that it will come tomorrow. If we had not this hope which of us would care to live? Our vital energy is none other than the expectation of happiness, our faith in happiness.

“Happiness … It comes into our hearts with every pulse of blood that is regenerated there and returns to the farthest extremities of our bodies with a fresh promise. Happiness is not a state; it is really a promise, renewed every moment.”

II

One day we recalled to mind an anecdote of Amiel, who, when he felt attracted by a young woman, began a kind of book-keeping by double entry, in order to determine whether her good qualities showed a credit balance over her faults, so that he might decide, mathematically, whether it would be expedient for him to marry her. Naturally, we said, he never married.

This was an attempt to apply arithmetic where it was out of place. But it is the besetting sin of speculative minds to attempt to reduce everything to a calculation, and they are constantly giving way to it. Montesquieu, in his Cahiers, alludes to a certain “balance of pleasures and pains” imagined by his contemporary M. de Maupertuis, a distinguished naturalist and geometrician, who perhaps was rather too much the geometrician in so naïvely investigating the natural history of man. The system of the “arithmetic of pleasure” was to be applied again by Bentham, who derived from it a morality rather too like a system of bookkeeping.

But while our common sense usually warns us that we must observe a sceptical prudence in approving such attempts, we should generally find it rather difficult to explain the motives of our distrust. Montesquieu, with the calm perspicacity of which he has elsewhere given us so many proofs, puts his finger on the defect of the system_

“M. de Maupertuis includes in his calculation only pleasures and pains; that is to say, all that apprizes the soul of its happiness or unhappiness. He does not include the happiness of existence and the habitual felicity which apprizes us of nothing, because it it habitual.” (p. 26).

The meaning of this criticism is that happiness is not the total of a sum of events capable of enumeration; it is a state. The events stand out against the background which is painted by this state; they colour it and accentuate it, but do not make it. It would be better to call it a disposition rather than a state. Does not happiness consist above all in a disposition to welcome it? On the whole, does not a man possess a happy nature rather than a happy destiny? At least one must conclude that his nature determines the tone of his destiny.

“In a favourable disposition,” says Montesquieu, “such accidents as wealth, honours, health and sickness increase or diminish happiness. On the contrary, in an unfavourable disposition accidents increase or diminish unhappiness.” (p.17).

III

Happiness is “a promise perpetually renewed.” the curious fact is that the formula may appear equally depressing or encouraging. All depends on the tone in which it is expressed; once again, it is the time that makes the song. If people would understand that the moral truths are in the first place poetical truths they would profit greatly.

“What is a promise perpetually renewed?” the disgruntled critic will ask. To renew it is to devalue it; it is to undermine confidence. Such renewal is good enough for pacts of friendship between States, for obligatory oaths of fidelity, and other simulacra of a political order, which are neither closely nor distantly related to the moral life, and which are very displeasing when they profane its language. A promise perpetually renewed is, when all is said, a bad joke; it is precisely like the promise of the famous barber: “Tomorrow customers are shaved gratis.” This barber, continues the gloomy critic, according to your Boutourline, might just as well have inscribed on his shopfront: “At the sign of Happiness!”

But this dismal person is prosaic. And the prosaic man, by definition, is one who understands nothing. A promise perpetually renewed may not mean very much if reduced to logical terms. But if we listen to these words with our poetical sense they mean a great deal. They recall the matutinal promise lavished upon us and indefatigably repeated, day by day, by the dawn; a promise to which we have often attempted to respond.

Happiness—bonheur—is a promise. This formula has the merit of introducing into our notion of happiness the sense of time. Or rather, of reminding us that time is included in the promise, for it is inscribed in the very structure of the word. It is inscribed otherwise than we imagine, for the generations have misconstrued die word, and the heur of bonheur comes, it seems, from augurium, which very precisely denotes a promise; while we understand it as hora, and the misconception is contained in this super-foetatory “e”. It is of no importance. In bonheur as well as in malheur we have the word heure; so, when we think of happiness, we think of a privileged moment. Thus, the common notion of happiness is not, after all, so optimistic; it admits the possibility of a momentary flowering or maturity. And when, after this, one speaks of an absolute happiness which would endure forever, is not one introducing a sort of contradiction in terms? “O Time, suspend thy flight!” But what is a time that does not fly? Let us admit that in what we say of happiness, as in what we say of time, there is a good deal of verbalism.

IV

We shall be less surprised by this if we recall what Bergson has taught us with such subtlety; that language was not created for temporal—or, as he would prefer to say—enduring things; that the misunderstandings of language give rise, in this connection, to many contradictions and spurious problems, which baffle the intelligence, and which life alone, impelled by instinct and confident in its own powers, is able to overcome, if not resolve. Now, happiness is of the temporal order. We are told that it is a promise rather than a state (a good augury!). We will say, if you prefer it: a becoming and not a thing.

Direcdy we express a mental attitude by a word we imagine that a thing corresponds to this word, for we are accustomed to seek a correspondence. This is a bad habit acquired from our first school reading-book, in which there were pretty coloured pictures of things, and a name under each picture. But this happens only in the material world. In the moral life it may happen that the word corresponds only with an attitude of the mind. Thus it is with happiness, bonheur. It is not proven that there is anything which to the challenge of this word is bound to reply: Present! As for us, expecting a thing and not finding it, we are disappointed. This is how disillusion and pessimism are born, as well as the mirages of progress which project happiness into the future. But have we not been the dupes of language? And we are wrong; for in our disappointment we reason as though where there is no thing there is nothing at all. But an attitude of the mind is perhaps more important than a thing.

We escape from this confusion if we can contrive to think of happiness not in a static but in a dynamic manner; to think of it as an aspiration and not as a fact; as a direction and not as a place; as a fine and gracious gesture by which life points out our path.

V

Now that we seem to understand why there are so many misunderstandings as soon as anyone speaks of happiness, we shall be readier to confront, without being completely baffled, the contradictory statements of various thinkers in this connection. We have enjoyed such a diverting skirmish between M. Boutour-line and the wise Alain. There is no longer any agreement between them—or so it seems at the first glance. There is no happiness, said the first, save that which is not realized, but promised and expected. The second, who would rather hold his ground than run, writes, with the sound sense of a working-man: “Happiness is not something that one runs after, but something that one possesses. Apart from this possession it is only a word.” (Quatre-vingt-un chapitres sur les passions, V, i).

Are we to oppose these opinions and lose ourselves in polemics? Rousseau has already warned us that nothing could be more foolish. And Alain himself, in the preface to his book, guides us in Rousseau’s footsteps. “I do not believe,” he says, “that any important portion of theoretical and practical philosophy is omitted from what follows, apart from polemics that teach no one anything.”

If one wishes to profit from the lessons of the sages, or merely from the teaching of human beings, one must admit that contraries have the same civic rights in the temple of Truth, where the statue of Minerva is seen, now full-face, now in profile, so that one might at first believe that there were two hostile statues, especially since both are armed. And suddenly one sees that the two images correspond. In the same chapter of Alain’s (on Happiness) I read again: “There is nothing that pleases if one receives it, and hardly anything that does not please if one makes it… A garden does not give pleasure unless one has made it. A woman does not please unless one has conquered her. Even power wearies him who has obtained it without effort.”

Here is happiness expressed in terms of action. Happiness, one may say, is not so much something that one possesses as something that one has created. (Or one may say that one truly possesses only that which one creates.) It is not a state, but an act. And so we find our way back to the dynamism, the becoming, of which the other wise man told us. The discord is resolved.

VI

OASIS

Measure life no longer

By the tally of the days.

In the heartbreaking desert,

In the caravan of the years

There is a blessed hour,

There are restful oases.

Bewail no more the fact

That in the implacable waste

The oasis is only a speck.

For the waste and the speck

Have no kinship, no place of meeting.

The living spot contains in itself

An immensity of bliss.

By virtue of a unique

Geometry, it hollows

An inner dimension,

A concentrated eternity.

There is no arid waste

But a fruitful depth.

It drinks at the very heart of the world

Where the living waters rise.

O minutes, divinely granted,

You are requital enough

For the waste of the arid years.

I will grasp life no longer

By the sum of accursed days.

VII

A water-hole is only a hole; but it contains water.

This correction of perspective is applicable to many of our judgments. We have already suspected that the “arithmetic of pleasures” by which some have attempted a numerical valuation of happiness is a delusion. Is it not so because they forget the other dimension—which, to make the image clearer, we will call the vertical dimension? A great deal of pessimism is due to forgetfulness of this other dimension—that of height and depth, the two directions for which the Latin tongue had only one word —a beautiful word—altitudo.

We are too eager to strike the balance of the happiness that life has brought us; and if we do it on one of our bad days we are very likely to find that the balance is not there, or that it is pitifully small. And if our fit of sulks is philosophical we decide that we are pessimists, and that it is life itself of which we complain. Or perhaps we expect something only from tomorrow; or from progress; from more modern conditions. (The barber’s sign!)

But what have we been doing? We have spread out the past hours, side by side, on a flat surface; and it is true that the blessed hours fill but a small space. But we have forgotten to lift our eyes, and to look down, in thought; we have ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I. From the Myth of Progress to the Myth of Modernity
• II. The Clean Sweep
• III. Angelism
• IV. Politeness
• V. Technique Versus Nature
• VI. Baudelaire and the Modern Man
• VII. Of the Prestige of Action
• VIII. Communions1
• IX. Opinion and Tolerance
• X. Humanism
• XI. Eloquence on Trial
• XII. Of Reading
• XIII. Technique Versus Mysticism
• XIV. A Moderate View of Happiness
• XV. The Paradoxes of Education
• XVI. The Gift of Childhood
• XVII. Confidence in Mankind
• XVIII. An Apology for the Unruly
• XIX. Withdrawal Into One’s Tent
• XX. Verlaine
• XXI. Art and the Epoch