Running with the Pack (25 page)

According to Plato, The Good belongs to, is indeed the pinnacle of, another realm of existence — the world of forms. Our access to The Good is, accordingly, an intellectual one. Only the mind, with its capacity for abstract reason, could allow us insight into the forms. It is traditional, in both philosophy and religion, to think of oneself as tied to another world, whether spiritual or metaphysical, by the mind. The mind is only partly of this world; it straddles both. But there are no other worlds. There is no heaven to which the mind goes when we die, and there is no world of forms to which the mind can travel while we are alive. Intrinsic value resides in this world, the only world there is. And our access to it is through the body as much as the mind.

This, then, is the connection between the gods, philosophers
and athletes of Athens. The gods tell us that play is an essential component of the best life a human can live, something that makes life ‘worth the trouble'. From the philosophers we learn that the most important thing in life is to love The Good: to love intrinsic value wherever we can find it in life. And by running in the footsteps of Pheidippides we learn that running is play and therefore intrinsically valuable — The Good showing itself in human life. Running is, it goes without saying, not the only game: the Greeks themselves invented and played many. In all of these games we find intrinsic value — what is Good in life can show itself through all of them. When running is finally taken from me, I will have to find other games to play. But running is an old game, one of the oldest and simplest there is. As such, it is one of the oldest and simplest manifestations of The Good in human activity. Running is the embodied apprehension of intrinsic value in life. This is the meaning of running. This is what running really is.

According to Schiller, the gods of Olympus would be free not only of the ‘seriousness and toil which furrow the cheeks of mortals', but also of the ‘futile pleasure that smoothes the empty face'. Toil and pleasure, in Schiller's view, are deeply connected. Pleasure has value in a person's life as a diversion or distraction from the toil that furrows their cheeks. So, far from being its antithesis, the value of pleasure essentially depends on toil. For example, one may decide to mark one's return home from a day of seriousness and toil by paying a visit to the drinks cabinet — ‘something to take the edge off'. One may then sit down to watch a well-crafted sitcom. Both of these might be sources of pleasure. But the pleasure they induce is a function of their ability to distract or divert
from the aims, duties and cares of everyday life. This is the pleasure that smoothes the empty face; it caresses only the surface of the soul and leaves no lasting impression.

There are clues to this connection between pleasure and distraction in the etymology of the closely associated word ‘fun'. We do things ‘for fun'. ‘Fun' denotes an amusement, but also carries the connotation of a diversion. Before the early 1700s, the word was used primarily not as a noun but as a verb that meant to cheat or to hoax, and probably came from the Anglo-Saxon
fonnen
, to befool. The corresponding noun form, therefore, denoted a cheat or trick. Pleasure is a trick or hoax in the sense that its function is to distract us from just how much of life has become dominated by instrumental value. The value we place on pleasure is thus a symptom of how much our lives have become outposts of our work — of activities we do only for the sake of something else. Pleasure is most important in a life that is deficient in intrinsic value. Pleasure is the great hoax — the befooling — of the modern age.

However, also characteristic of this age is a certain way of understanding happiness. Happiness is typically thought of either as a form of pleasure or, at least as importantly, akin to pleasure. Both happiness and pleasure are conceptualized as feelings: warm, pleasant, enjoyable feelings of some sort. There may be subtle differences between happiness and pleasure: perhaps, for example, the feeling of happiness is more stable, less transient, than pleasure. Perhaps it is, in some sense that is difficult to pin down, ‘deeper' or ‘more meaningful'. But any difference between the two will be a difference in the type or quality of feelings. This is what is known as the ‘hedonic' conception of happiness, and is contrasted with the ‘eudaimonic' account of happiness favoured in earlier times. The ancient Greeks did not think of
happiness as a feeling at all: for them happiness was ‘wellbeing', living in accordance with the virtues — moral, intellectual and athletic — characteristic of humanity. Happiness, for them, was a way of being rather than a way of feeling. The hedonic conception of happiness was championed by Jeremy Bentham, the father of the moral theory known as ‘utilitarianism', and has dominated our assumptions about happiness ever since. While different people have different ideas about how to produce happiness, or increase the amount of happiness in society, the idea that happiness is a pleasant feeling of some sort now goes largely unquestioned. When Richard Layard, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the LSE, and influential adviser on social policy to more than one British government, tells us that happiness is ‘feeling good, enjoying life, and wanting the feeling to be maintained', and when Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar claims that happiness is ‘the overall experience of pleasure and meaning', they are both expressing a view that is entirely orthodox.

So if pleasure is the great hoax of the modern age, and if the distinction between pleasure and happiness is a tenuous one at best, then it might seem I am committed to saying the same thing about happiness. This conclusion, however, would be premature. The problem with the hedonic conception of happiness is not that it is wrong about happiness, but that it is only half right. The hedonic view thinks of happiness as one thing — a feeling of some sort. But the concept of happiness is fundamentally ambiguous. Happiness is not one thing: it is two — and these things are very different. When understood as akin to pleasure, the same charge of trick or hoax can obviously be levelled at happiness. But this is not the only way of understanding happiness.

It is common to think of happiness as intrinsically valuable — something that we want for its own sake and not for anything else. More than common, the claim that happiness is intrinsically valuable is almost universally accepted, among philosophers at least. At first glance, this may seem plausible. We might want money because we think it will buy us happiness. But what do we think happiness will buy us? We want happiness just because we want to be happy — for no other reason. This is where the points or purposes stop. Therefore, happiness must be intrinsically valuable. I suspect, however, that if we think of happiness as pleasure, then happiness is no such thing. Understood as pleasure, we want happiness for the sake of something else: we want it in order to be distracted from the domination of our lives by work — the interminable instrumental round of doing one thing only for the sake of something else. As pleasure, happiness presented itself as the place where the points and purposes of life stop. But, in fact, it turns out to be no such thing. When understood as pleasure, happiness is the sitcom of the human soul.

Zeus — although presumably unfamiliar with the idea of a sitcom — understood this. Zeus insisted on the game, even though his playing resulted in the delay and, on occasion, the absence of feelings of pleasure. We can think of happiness as pleasure if we like but, if we do, we should also be willing to acknowledge that happiness may not be particularly important — not the sort of thing that makes life ‘worth the trouble'. Anyone who has played a game with any conviction, and thinks for even a second about what is involved in this, will understand that the game is not, and never will be, about pleasure. I can say, with confidence, that the run of 26.2 miles I have just completed had nothing to do with pleasure. In fact, I can safely say that it was deeply unpleasant, especially
during the second 13.1. Nor was there afterwards any compensating warm glow of satisfaction that accompanies a job well done, something that would wash away the unpleasantness. I do remember a vague, difficult-to-pin-down, post-race sense of perplexity — a kind of ‘Well, what now?' sensation — but from an experiential standpoint that was about it. Nevertheless, I would not be similarly confident in the claim that, both when running and after the race was over, I was not happy. On the contrary, I suspect I was deeply, inordinately, even disgustingly, happy. If this is correct, then it seems I am forced to conclude that not all happiness is pleasure. Sometimes happiness does not even involve pleasure.

During the race, when I understood for the first time the unbridgeable gap between reasons and actions, and so understood that all the reasons in the world had no authority over me, I was tempted, a temptation I was ultimately unable to refuse, to say that I ran in joy. Schlick also distinguished pleasure from what he referred to as ‘joy'. But labelling something does neither of us any good unless we can say what this label means. And if there is any distinction at all between pleasure and joy, it is one that the modern age has rendered almost invisible. When someone talks of ‘enjoying' something, they often mean nothing more than they find it pleasurable — ‘fun'. This is an age of feelings. It has to be so — feelings are distractions from a life dominated by work. And so, we have come to think, what can joy be other than an especially heightened feeling of pleasure — pleasure deepened and intensified? But what I have called my joy went hand in hand with a rather brutal form of experiential unpleasantness. So in what sense, and with what justification, can I call this experience ‘joy'?

Joy is the other form of happiness — the variety of happiness that cannot be understood as pleasure. As pleasure, happiness
is defined by the way it feels. But this is not true of happiness as joy. I said I experienced joy when I ran in the gap between reasons and actions. But Sartre described the same experience as ‘anguish'. The fact that terms with such different experiential connotations can be used to refer to the same experience shows that this joy cannot be captured by the way it feels. Joy can feel like many things. Feelings can accompany joy, but they do not define it or make it what it is. The joy I encounter when I run with thoughts that come from nowhere is, in terms of the feelings that accompany it, quite different from the joy I encountered later on today's run, when I understood that all the reasons I had, or could ever have, had no authority over me. Nevertheless, these are both forms that joy can take. In its essence, joy is not a feeling or even constellation of feelings. Joy is a form of recognition.

The more our lives are dominated by the instrumental, the more we will value pleasure. The function of joy is quite different. Joy can assume many experiential forms. There is the joy of focus, the experience of being completely immersed in what one is doing. There is the joy of dedication, the experience of being dedicated to the deed and not the outcome, the activity and not the goal. There is the joy of enduring, the experience of playing the game as hard as you can play it, of giving everything you have to the game and leaving nothing in the tank, no matter the experiential toll this exacts. There is the joy of defiance, wild and fierce: no, you will not break me, not here, not today. Joy is found in the heartbeat of the run, whatever form this takes. But, ultimately, all of these come to the same thing. Joy is the experience — the recognition — of intrinsic value in life. Joy is the recognition of the things in life that possess value in themselves — the things that are valuable for their own sake:
the things in life that are worthy of love. Pleasure distracts us from what does not have intrinsic value. Joy is the recognition of what does. Pleasure is a way of feeling. But joy is a way of seeing. Joy is something that pleasure is not and can never be. It is the recognition of the places in life where all the points and purposes stop.

Most of us will leave this life in the same way we entered it: scared, confused and alone. But when we came into this world we were met with loving arms and soothing words. On the way out of it, we will be met by nothing. The life of every living thing follows these general contours, and to this extent life is sad and deeply unfortunate. But with humans, it is something else. I used to worry about what the future had in store for me, and this, I suppose, is bad enough. But I know that this is what life has in store for my children also, and that is far worse. Sometimes, as Wittgenstein once remarked, the most difficult things to see in life are the most obvious, and they are the most difficult to see precisely because they are the most obvious. This now seems obvious to me. I can do nothing of any great significance to protect my children from life and this evil place to which I have brought them. To be sure, I can help out a little when their lives are going well, when they are growing, burgeoning and their encounters with intrinsic value in their lives crowd most thickly. But when the going gets tough, I'll be out of here like the worst deadbeat dad. In a few short decades — and that is assuming I have a few decades left in me — I shall abandon them to face their gradual disappearance without me. But can I live on in their memories, and provide for them a powerful example of how to live in this malignant place and how to face their gradual disappearance? Perhaps, but unfortunately the
memories we make when we are young are sickly children. My sons have no need of memories yet — why would they? And by the time they do, I shall no longer be around to be remembered. As Milan Kundera once remarked, before being forgotten we are transformed into kitsch. The memories that remain of me will be caricatures, vague suggestions or themes where a man used to be. For we humans, understanding our fate is part of our fate. And because of this the fate of those we love becomes part of our fate. This means that our lives are more than sad or unfortunate: they are tragic. Tragedy is born when misfortune and understanding meet: when one not only suffers and dies but at the same time understands that this suffering and death is irrevocable.