Unspoken duty
In 1738, the young Mirabeau wrote a letter to his friend Vauvenargue, in which he reproached him for living as he had to, one day and not making plans to achieve happiness: “How is it, my dear, you always think, work, there are no heights that would be inaccessible to your thought, but it does not occur to you to draw up an exact plan that will lead you to what should be the only goal of our life - happiness. And Mirabeau lays out to his skeptical addressee the principles that he himself is guided by: get rid of prejudices, be cheerful and not succumb to a bad mood, follow your inclinations, taking care of their purity. You can laugh at such childishness. Mirabeau, the son of his age, who set out to create man anew and destroy the plagues of the old regime, strive for happiness in the same way as others before him sought to save the soul.
Have we really changed? Imagine today's mirabos - young men and women from all walks of life with a variety of convictions who would like to open a new era and forget about the ruins of the monstrous 20th century. They would greedily rush to defend their rights and, above all, the right to build a life at their own discretion, confident that each of them is entitled to the full measure of all blessings. "Be happy!" they heard from early childhood, because today children are raised not in order to convey to them some moral or spiritual values, but in order to increase the number of prosperous inhabitants of our planet.
Be happy! Is there a prescription more paradoxical, more terrible, for all its seeming benevolence? It is difficult to carry out such a pointless order. For how do you know if you are happy or not? Who sets the standards? Why is it absolutely necessary to be happy? And what about those who ruefully admit: I can’t do it?
In a word, such a pleasure would very soon become a heavy burden for our young people: keeping a book of their successes and failures, they would be convinced that the more persistently they pursue happiness, the more stubbornly it eludes them. Quite naturally, they would like to have a combination of all kinds of success: in business, in love, in society, in family life, and even receive complete moral satisfaction in addition. As if the process of liberation of the individual, glorified by modern civilization, should, like a diamond diadem, be crowned with happiness. But efforts to collect everything in an armful go to waste. So the coming bliss will begin to seem not as good news, but as a duty to some faceless deity, before whom one must always justify oneself. The promised miracles come unsystematically and sparingly, as if from a dropper, and this makes the expectation bitterer, the disappointment stronger. Our young people will reproach themselves for not fitting into the established norms, deviating from the rules. Mirabeau, he could still dream, make fantastic plans. Three hundred years later, the enthusiastic dreams of an enlightened aristocrat turned into a duty. Now we have every right except the right not to be happy.
There is nothing more vague than the concept of happiness; this old, shabby, false word itself is just right to be banished from the language. Since ancient times, people have only been arguing and quarreling among themselves, figuring out what happiness is. Already Blessed Augustine gives 289 different interpretations of it, about fifty treatises were written about him in the Age of Enlightenment, but we constantly project onto past times and other cultures that idea of happiness and that preoccupation with it, which are peculiar exclusively to ourselves. In the very nature of this concept there is something mysterious, something that feeds endless, contradictory judgments, it is like water that can fill any container, but there is no such container that would completely exhaust it. Happiness can be drawn from action and contemplation, from spiritual and physical comfort, from wealth and poverty, from virtue and vice. Talking about happiness, said Diderot, gives an idea only of the speaker himself. But we will be interested in something else - that passionate desire for happiness, which has obsessed Western civilization since the French and American revolutions.
Plans happy life encounter at least three paradoxes. First, as already mentioned, the concept of happiness is too vague. Secondly, as soon as happiness is achieved, it is replaced by boredom and apathy (from this point of view, the quenched, but constantly renewed thirst for happiness would be the ideal, only then can both despair and satiety be avoided). And, finally, uninterrupted happiness excludes all suffering to such an extent that it makes a person defenseless against it, if it nevertheless arises.
The first circumstance, that is, the abstractness of the concept, explains the attraction of happiness and the anxiety that accompanies it. Not only do we not have much confidence in the universally offered happiness from a ready-made kit, but we can never be sure that we are really happy. If you are wondering, then something is wrong. The cult of happiness also breeds conformism and envy, two ills of a democratic society, in other words, the pursuit of fashionable pleasures and increased attention to the chosen ones, the minions of fate.
The second, that is, concern for maintaining well-being, was established in modern, secular Europe along with the triumph of mediocrity - a phenomenon that arose at the dawn of the New Age and meant that the place of God was taken by worldly life reduced to everyday life. Mediocrity is the victory of bourgeois values: mediocrity, insipidity, vulgarity.
Finally, the focus on the exclusion of suffering leads to the opposite results: it turns out to be the core of the entire system. Modern man suffers because he does not want to suffer, just as the desire for absolute health can become a disease. Our time shows the world a strange sight: the whole society without exception professes hedonism, and at the same time, every little thing torments people and spoils their lives. Misfortune is not just a misfortune, but much worse - failed happiness.
So, by forced happiness, I understand the ideology inherent in the second half of the 20th century, which forces us to consider everything from the position of pleasantness / unpleasantness, the euphoria imposed on us, which shamefully exiles or disgustively dismisses everyone who for some reason does not experience it. There is a double obligation: on the one hand, to make your life a paradise, on the other hand, to reproach yourself if you cannot achieve this. Thus, perhaps the best achievement of mankind is perverted - the opportunity given to everyone to arrange their own destiny and improve the conditions of their existence. How did it happen that the right to happiness, the central and boldest idea of the Enlightenment, turned into a dogma, into a rigid code? That is what we are trying to trace.
There are infinitely many interpretations of the highest good, the collective consciousness connects it either with health, or with wealth, or with beauty, or with comfort, or with success - the darkness of talismans that should lure it like a bird bait. Gradually, the means are elevated to the rank of an end and one after another are recognized as untenable, since they do not provide the desired good. Victims of a deplorable misunderstanding, we, by using means that should lead us to happiness, often only move away from it. And therefore, we are often mistaken, believing that it can be demanded as something due to us, that it can be learned like some school subject, that it is bought, has a price expressed in money, that others know the right recipe for happiness and imitate them enough to snatch a portion for yourself.
Contrary to the stilted expression, repeated in every way since the time of Aristotle - although he had something else in mind - it was far from all people and it was not always natural to strive for happiness; it's a trait Western civilization, which has certain historical coordinates. In addition to happiness in the same culture, there are other values: freedom, justice, love, friendship - which can be put forward in the first place. What, besides the most general, and therefore empty words, can be said about what are the aspirations of all people on earth from the beginning of time? We have nothing against happiness we are talking not about this fragile feeling itself, but about its transformation into some kind of collective drug that everyone is obliged to take in one form or another - chemical, spiritual, psychological, informational, religious. Whereas the deepest and most sophisticated sciences and philosophical schools admit that they are powerless to guarantee the happiness of whole nations or individuals. Every time it touches us, we feel it as a kind of grace, a special grace, and not as the result of precise calculation or thoughtful behavior. And, perhaps, precisely because the dream of finding perfect Happiness with a capital letter is unrealistic, we especially appreciate the good side being: pleasure, luck, luck.
And to the young Mirabeau, I would answer like this: “I love life too much to want only happiness.”
Components of happiness
The Dalai Lama is happy and exudes happiness.
Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler.
The art of being happy.
Waking up in the morning, we can choose: to be in good mood or bad. Such a choice always exists. Lincoln said that people are capable of being as they want to be. Tell yourself: "Everything is fine, life is beautiful, I choose happiness." You can be the creator of your own happiness, make it your duty to be happy. Make a list of positive, optimistic thoughts and repeat them several times a day.
Norman Vincent Peel.
The power of positive thoughts.
In 1929, Freud published Dissatisfaction in Culture, in which he argued that happiness was impossible. On the one hand, in order to live in society, a person is forced to give up part of his desires (after all, any culture is built on the suppression of instincts), and this part is constantly increasing. On the other hand, misfortunes constantly lie in wait for him, the source of which can be nature, health, and relationships with other people. “The plan of Creation,” concludes Freud, “was not for man to be happy. What we call happiness is, in the most precise sense of the word, satisfaction, usually sudden, of some desire that has reached a high degree of intensity and, by its very nature, can only be an episodic phenomenon.
So, what seemed chimerical to the father of psychoanalysis became almost a duty only half a century later. The fact is that during this time there were two revolutions. First, capitalism has evolved from a system of production based on labor and accumulation into a system of consumption that involves spending and, moreover, wastefulness. This new principle does not reject pleasure, but, on the contrary, organically turns it on, erasing the antagonism between the economic machine and our appetites and even making them the engine of development. The main thing is that Western society, having passed the initial, authoritarian period of democracy, has lost its rigid class framework, and a person has received complete autonomy. Having become "free", he lost his choice: since there were no obstacles left on the road to Eden, he is, so to speak, "doomed" to happiness, or, to put it differently, if he is not happy, then he only has himself to blame.
In the 20th century, the idea of happiness has received a double interpretation: in democratic countries it is expressed in an insatiable thirst for all sorts of pleasures (only fifteen years separate the liberation of Auschwitz from the beginning of the consumer boom in Europe and America), while in the communist world it is dissolved in the officially prescribed prosperity. How many people have been ruined with the intention of benefiting humanity and forcibly bringing it to perfection! Having become part of the political doctrine, happiness has become a terrible weapon of mass destruction. No sacrifices, no purges of the human herd seem excessive if their goal is a bright future. The coming idyll turned into a nightmare.
However, the subject of our present reflections will not be the well-known rampant totalitarianism and not the triumph of coercion described by Orwell or the fictional Huxley (although many features of our society are reminiscent of the novels Brave New World or 1984). We will deal with another phenomenon that is characteristic of the industrial age and associated with the constant desire to live better. If before duty declared itself in the categories of law and necessary efforts, now it seems to be coquettishly flirting with us, relentlessly, like a guardian angel, follows everyone and whispers: look, do not forget to be happy! The dystopians attacked the too perfect system, in which everything is scheduled by the clock; we carry an inexorable clock within ourselves.
There is nothing more vague than the concept of happiness; this old, worn-out, false word itself is just right to be banished from the language. Since ancient times, people have only been doing what they argue and quarrel with each other, finding out what it is. Blessed Augustine already cites 289 different interpretations of it, in the Age of Enlightenment about fifty treatises were written about happiness, but we constantly project onto past times and other cultures that idea of happiness and that preoccupation with it, which are peculiar exclusively to ourselves. There is something mysterious in the very nature of this concept, something that feeds endless, contradictory judgments; like water, it is able to take the form of any vessel, but there is no such vessel that would completely contain it. Happiness can be drawn from action and contemplation, from spiritual and physical comfort, from wealth and poverty, from virtue and vice. Talking about happiness, said Diderot, gives an idea only of the speaker himself. But we will be interested in something else: that passionate desire for happiness, which has obsessed Western civilization since the French and American revolutions.
Plans for a happy life run into at least three paradoxes. First, as already mentioned, the concept of happiness is too vague. Secondly, as soon as happiness is achieved, it is replaced by boredom and apathy (from this point of view, the quenched, but constantly renewed thirst for happiness would be the ideal, only then can both despair and satiety be avoided). And, finally, endless happiness excludes all suffering to such an extent that it makes a person defenseless against it, if it nevertheless arises.
The first circumstance, that is, the abstractness of the concept, explains the attraction of happiness and the anxiety that accompanies it. Not only do we not have much confidence in the universally offered happiness from a ready-made kit, but we can never be sure that we are really happy. If you are wondering, then something is wrong. The cult of happiness also breeds conformity and envy, two ills of a democratic society, in other words, the pursuit of fashionable pleasures and increased attention to the chosen ones, the minions of fate.
The second, that is, concern for maintaining well-being, was established in modern secular Europe along with the triumph of mediocrity - a phenomenon that arose at the dawn of the New Age and meant that the place of God was taken by worldly life reduced to everyday life. Mediocrity is the victory of bourgeois values: mediocrity, insipidity, vulgarity.
Finally, the focus on the exclusion of suffering leads to the opposite results: it turns out to be the core of the entire system. Modern man suffers because he does not want to suffer, just as the desire for absolute health can become a disease. Our time shows the world a strange sight: the whole society without exception professes hedonism, and at the same time, every little thing torments people and spoils their lives. Misfortune is not just a misfortune, but much worse - a failed happiness.
So, by forced happiness, I mean the ideology inherent in the second half of the 20th century, which forces us to consider everything from the position of pleasantness / unpleasantness; euphoria imposed on us, which shamefully banishes or squeamishly dismisses everyone who for some reason does not experience it. There is a double obligation: on the one hand, to make your life a paradise, on the other hand, to reproach yourself if you cannot achieve this. Thus, perhaps the best achievement of mankind is perverted: the opportunity given to everyone to arrange their own destiny and improve the conditions of their existence. How did it happen that the right to happiness, the central and boldest idea of the Enlightenment, turned into a dogma, into a rigid code? That is what we are trying to trace.
There are infinitely many interpretations of the highest good, the collective consciousness associates it with health, then with wealth, then with beauty, then with comfort, then with success - a myriad of talismans that should lure it like a bird bait. Gradually, the means are elevated to the rank of an end and one after another are recognized as untenable, since they do not provide the desired good. Victims of a deplorable misunderstanding, we, by using means that should lead us to happiness, often only move away from it. And therefore, we are often mistaken, believing that it can be demanded as something due to us, that it can be learned like some school subject, that it is bought, has a price expressed in money, that others know the true recipe for happiness and it is enough to imitate them, to snatch a portion for yourself.
Contrary to the stilted expression, repeated in every way since the time of Aristotle - although he had something else in mind - it was far from all people and it was not always characteristic to strive for happiness; it is a feature of Western civilization that has certain historical coordinates. In addition to happiness in the same culture, there are other values: freedom, justice, love, friendship, which can come to the fore. What, besides the most general, and therefore empty words, can be said about what are the aspirations of all people on earth from the beginning of time? We have nothing against happiness, we are not talking about this fragile feeling itself, but about its transformation into some kind of collective drug that everyone must take in one form or another: chemical, spiritual, psychological, informational, religious. Whereas the deepest and most sophisticated sciences and philosophical schools admit that they are powerless to guarantee the happiness of whole nations or individuals. Every time it touches us, we feel it as a kind of grace, a special grace, and not as the result of precise calculation or thoughtful behavior. And, perhaps, precisely because the dream of finding perfect Happiness with capital letter impracticable, we especially appreciate the good sides of life: pleasure, luck, luck.
Pascal Bruckner. Eternal euphoria. Essay about forced happiness. Introduction
The French writer Pascal Bruckner (born in 1948), laureate of the Medici and Renaudeau awards, is known in Russia primarily as a novelist - his books The Divine Child and Beauty Thieves have been translated into Russian; soon there will be a translation of the novel "Bitter Moon", which served as the basis famous movie R. Polansky. Brückner's essays were hardly translated in our country. Meanwhile, Brückner's journalistic talent, who continues the traditions of European rationalism and never tires of emphasizing his connection with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, deserves no less attention. Usually, his essays, which make up, as it were, a single series, bear paradoxical titles: “The Temptation of Innocence” (published in Russian in 2003 in the journal “ Foreign literature”), “Forced Happiness”, “Poverty of Wealth” ... A through inventory of existing values, revision of myths about universal happiness, equality, wealth, free love.
Brückner's views on the modern world are distinguished above all by their common sense. Having lived for many years in America, this supporter of the humanistic Western civilization, to which he ranks both Old and New World, was able to protect itself from narrow pro- and anti-Americanism. His latest essays are "Crying white man” and “The Tyranny of Repentance” - can serve as a warning to those inhabitants of a “prosperous” Europe who tend to fetishize the “deprived” third world, indulging in self-abasement and beautiful-hearted illusions.
The book "Eternal Euphoria. An Essay on Forced Happiness” was first published in 2000 and republished later. The author tries to trace the development and perversion of the ideal of happiness inherent in European culture after the Age of Enlightenment. The essay consists of four parts. The first describes, one might say, the history of the issue, it tells how the Christian cult of suffering was replaced in the 18th century by the exhausting pursuit of earthly happiness, how gradually this happiness became something like an obligatory attribute complete person. It also shows how the desire for well-being, health, beauty, sex appeal becomes an obsession, creates depression, deprives people of their carelessness, and ultimately makes them unhappy. Second part - overview modern world in which mediocrity and vulgarity dominate. The third part deals with the "brilliance and poverty" of the bourgeoisie; the author admits that happiness is not in money, but advises not to trust too much those who shout about it the loudest. Finally, the fourth part returns to the theme of suffering: forbidden, banished from the surface of life, it explodes the realm of eternal euphoria from within. Bruckner, of course, does not give recipes, but expresses hope for the possibility of a reasonable synthesis of the thesis (the cult of suffering) and antithesis (the cult of happiness) in the form of "the art of living happily, recognizing suffering and overcoming it."
The book contains a lot of documentary materials, digressions illustrating this or that position of the author; in all seriousness chosen subject it is easy to read. In this sense, Brückner is faithful to the spirit of French classical essays, from Montaigne to Choran, which is so loved and appreciated in Russia.
Uniting the suffering
Something almost imperceptible, but perhaps decisive, has changed in our attitude towards the disease. We are just as afraid as before and strive to avoid it, but we no longer want to be delivered from it. external force, whether it be medicine or something else, but we wish, if possible, to take part in the process of recovery ourselves. Indicative in this sense is the story of AIDS. Because the long time, unable to defeat the disease, society was content with stigmatizing the sick, they - first of all, homosexuals and drug addicts - were literally forced to invent social, legal, political means to resist ostracism and contempt, to the point that they came up with their own, secular funeral rites. This is an amazing example of how vigorous activity men and women united by a common misfortune had a beneficial effect on their entire worldview. AIDS (although at first denied its existence and many believed it was just a fabrication made up to denigrate gays) not only made it obvious ancient connection sex and death. He brought face to face two worlds that had long ignored each other: the world of youth and the world of death - at the end of an age that promised, if not immortality, then at least longevity. It overturned our wildest hopes and plunged us into almost medieval horror, because in the shadow of this virus whole generations of new ones can lurk, waiting for their turn to mow us down. Most importantly, he dispelled the myth of the omnipotence of medicine, made the terrible word “incurable” sound again, which was banished from our language with shame, and instilled in people an almost forgotten fear of deadly diseases.
Because of all this, AIDS has acquired a special position, has become as much a medical problem as a political one: it turned out to be the most, dare I say, "useful" of all epidemics; the explosion of emotions and curses that she aroused made us reconsider everything: scientists - to change the direction of work, patients - to take a certain position, society - to take a different look at diseases that were previously considered shameful and not subject to publicity. Perhaps it was thanks to AIDS, this cymbal ringing, sounded in the midst of general carelessness, that the patient became an object of law (and not just a passive client of doctors), a member of society who can demand a fair trial (as was the case with infected blood), discusses on an equal footing with doctors methods of therapy, and sometimes a member of the governing board of the hospital. Now he consciously participates in all procedures, not only learns medicine through his illness, but also, by combining his own efforts with the efforts of others, helps his healing. For example, in a Swiss clinic for children with cancer, deadly cells are drawn on the board every morning, and the children repeat in chorus: “Cells, you will not kill me, I will kill you myself!” Everyone who comes with his personal tragedy into a comradely circle begins to manage his illness and help others - to share medical and legal experience with them. By accepting his fate in this way, a person ceases to be its slave and acquires dignity.
Shared suffering and the will to overcome it strongly bind people and lead to "meaningful being". Whatever form the associations of the afflicted may take, they all proceed from the same premise: all traditional philosophy and politics are unarmed in the face of misfortune and can offer the people whom it has befallen nothing but useless scientific chatter and half-dead Christianity. Instead of weeping, giving up and suffering alone, these people come together. And now, thanks to a multitude of often small, touching, and sometimes extraordinary actions, the disease takes its rightful place in human thoughts, and outside of any parties, religions and services, a new network mutual assistance.
Victims or Breakers of Barriers
When it is said that a third power, the power of victims, is emerging in our society, they mean people who refuse to take into account physical disabilities and want, despite them, to equal others in freedom and responsibility. They are not satisfied with the stigma of victims, and instead of flaunting their illness, seeking exclusive rights for themselves, they go out into Big world to be accepted as full citizens. An example of such behavior is a young French pilot who, after being chained to wheelchair, founded a movement for the right of those like her to return to the helm. These people do not want to put up with discrimination, express their dissatisfaction in legal and political forms and thus change the norm, increase the level of tolerance for everyone. Forced to fight against the indifference of the authorities, distrust of medical, including psychiatric, examinations, they must fulfill the inevitable demand: “Prove that you have suffered.” Then, and only then, will they set a judicial precedent, set an example for others, and widen the circle of officially recognized victims of harassment.
Everything has shifted: besieged by claims of patients with hemophilia, cancer, AIDS, disabled people of various kinds, now society itself is trying to adapt to this new scourge and cope with its hardships, showing both pragmatism and voluntarism. What was taken for granted yesterday is unacceptable today. We used to think that some people were unlucky, now such thoughts are declared prejudices, we can only talk about "correctable defects" (Ernst Cassirer). As everywhere in the world of wage labor, there is a struggle for dignity, for an unbiased attitude (to change the view of the disabled is the main objective Society "Teleton", in addition to raising funds to combat myopathy). Thus, seriously ill patients, victims of accidents and accidents ... struggle with segregation, with the fact that they are shunned as plague-ridden, as violators of grandeur. They fight for their place in the human community.
microrevolutions
What's the use of marching against AIDS? asks one philosopher. Does anyone advocate for it? And why then are there no marches against cancer or a heart attack? This rather reasonable remark can be answered that the purpose of such a manifestation is to gather, mobilize forces, this is a symbolic action that reminds the society that the problem concerns everyone.<...>Indeed, Act Up demonstrations, whose participants are dressed in dark clothes, carry posters in the form of leaflets confirming the diagnosis and whistle, are very similar to the processions of penitent brothers who passed through the streets of medieval cities, reminding people that death awaits everyone. Every time modern consciousness encounters the most essential, that is, death, religiosity awakens in it. Modern man is a sufferer who has rebelled against suffering, and rebellion can manifest itself in different ways: as a complaint to the Providence-State, as a claim for damages, and finally, as a battle by the forces of large or small associations. You can combine all three options, but in any case, you have to choose between the position of the victim, withdrawn into your misfortune, and participation in the struggle, which forces you to look for new solutions, instead of whining to no avail. Or go headlong into illness and endlessly chew on disgusting details, or change yourself and not pretend to be a martyr, but live freely. Perhaps our time will not be able to definitively lean towards the first or second solution. Well, the choice is ours.
However, all these micro-revolutions in no way reduce the despair of the condemned, the loneliness of the dying. It is possible to overcome certain diseases and vices, but not evil in general, it is reborn in new forms and, with devilish resourcefulness, slips away from our most perfect traps. Each time cancels the horrors of the previous one, but immediately receives its own cross. Well, at least our attitude towards suffering is becoming different, not like positivist optimism, religious dogma or sybarite stubbornness, indistinguishable from surrender. “The worst wounds in war are those who flee the battlefield” (Oscar Wilde).
Compassion is not love
Mankind has made a grand revolution by declaring sympathy, "that inborn disgust that we experience at the sight of other people's suffering" (Rousseau), a natural virtue; thanks to it, the whole world, including both people and animals, appears as a single body, every scratch on which we acutely feel. It is through the horror that causes us pain inflicted on another person or animal, our little brother, that law develops. When Rousseau writes: “Every suffering being is my neighbor,” he, of course, extends the principle of equality and solidarity to all peoples and to all living things. Thus, in the center human life It turns out not fun and joy, but suffering. And his statement can be changed: “My neighbor is only the one who suffers” (and who enjoys life, that enemy?).
Beware of the vultures who get annoyed when we are all right, and who flock to our doorstep when something is wrong and feast on our grief. Beware of all who exalt the poor, the outcast, the fallen. Their sweet speeches give away hidden contempt, in the poor they do not see people equal to themselves. An evil grimace emerges from under the mask of mercy... Only the poor are worthy of indulgence - while they are in poverty.
“If you are pitied,” said Cicero, “it means that they envy you, for whoever is saddened by your adversity can also be saddened by your luck.” Considering compassion as an effective participation in the grief of one's neighbor and a sign of the brotherhood of everything living on earth is an invention of Rousseau. It is high time to replace compassion with co-joy, co-fun, it would be better if we looked with pleasure at other people's successes, and did not pounce like watchdogs on everyone who life is better than us. This would be the true face, and not the guise of love: not false sympathy, but heartfelt affection for a person. "Delectatio in felicitate alterius", as Leibniz said, that is, the joy that we experience from the happiness of other people. It is far more generous to have fun when another is well, than to lament when he is bad.
Translation from French and introductory note by Natalia Mavlevich.
*Pascal Bruckner. L "euphorie perpetuelle. Essai sur le devoir de bonheur. Grasset, 2000. Fragments of the fourth part of Pascal Bruckner's book, which is being prepared for publication by Ivan Limbach's publishing house (St. Petersburg), are offered to the attention of OZ readers. - Note ed.
On the formal requirements for a claim, which must be accompanied by a conclusion medical expertise, clinical examination data and evidence of damage, see article: Gilles Trimaille. L "expertise medico-legale: confiscation et traduction de la douleur. In: La Douleur et le Droit. PUF, 1997. P. 498-499.
In his dissertation on the effects of post-traumatic stress, Dr. Louis Jehel, examining 56 victims of the Paris S-Bahn attack on December 3, 1996, found that women and children were the most vulnerable in such circumstances and that those who, having received also a physical injury, was hospitalized. He calls for the creation in France of a more effective system of assistance to victims of terrorist attacks.
Act Up - Association for the fight against AIDS (as well as drugs, prostitution, etc.). - Note. per.
See on this: J. F. Lae. L "Instance de la plainte. Une histoire politique et juridique de la souffrance // Descartes et Cie. 1996.
Unspoken duty
In 1738, the young Mirabeau wrote a letter to his friend Vauvenargue, in which he reproached him for living as he had to, one day and not making plans to achieve happiness: “How is it, my dear, you always think, work, there are no heights that would be inaccessible to your thought, but it does not occur to you to draw up an exact plan that will lead you to what should be the only goal of our life - happiness. And Mirabeau lays out to his skeptical addressee the principles that he himself is guided by: get rid of prejudices, be cheerful and not succumb to a bad mood, follow your inclinations, taking care of their purity. You can laugh at such childishness. Mirabeau, the son of his age, who set out to create man anew and destroy the plagues of the old regime, strive for happiness in the same way as others before him sought to save the soul.
Have we really changed? Imagine today's mirabos - young men and women from all walks of life with a variety of convictions who would like to open a new era and forget about the ruins of the monstrous 20th century. They would greedily rush to defend their rights and, above all, the right to build a life at their own discretion, confident that each of them is entitled to the full measure of all blessings. "Be happy!" - they heard from early childhood, because today children are raised not in order to convey to them certain moral or spiritual values, but in order to increase the number of prosperous inhabitants of our planet.
Be happy! Is there a prescription more paradoxical, more terrible, for all its seeming benevolence? It is difficult to carry out such a pointless order. For how do you know if you are happy or not? Who sets the standards? Why is it absolutely necessary to be happy? And what about those who ruefully admit: I can’t do it?
In a word, such a pleasure would very soon become a heavy burden for our young people: keeping a book of their successes and failures, they would be convinced that the more persistently they pursue happiness, the more stubbornly it eludes them. Quite naturally, they would like to have a combination of all sorts of successes: in business, in love, in society, in family life, and even receive complete moral satisfaction in addition. As if the process of liberation of the individual, glorified by modern civilization, should, like a diamond diadem, be crowned with happiness. But efforts to collect everything in an armful go to waste. So the coming bliss will begin to seem not as good news, but as a duty to some faceless deity, before whom one must always justify oneself. The promised miracles come unsystematically and sparingly, as if from a dropper, and this makes the expectation bitterer, the disappointment stronger. Our young people will reproach themselves for not fitting into the established norms, deviating from the rules. Mirabeau, he could still dream, make fantastic plans. Three hundred years later, the enthusiastic dreams of an enlightened aristocrat turned into a duty. Now we have every right except the right not to be happy.
There is nothing more vague than the concept of happiness; this old, shabby, false word itself is just right to be banished from the language. Since ancient times, people have only been arguing and quarreling among themselves, figuring out what happiness is. Already Blessed Augustine gives 289 different interpretations of it, about fifty treatises were written about him in the Age of Enlightenment, but we constantly project onto past times and other cultures that idea of happiness and that preoccupation with it, which are peculiar exclusively to ourselves. In the very nature of this concept there is something mysterious, something that feeds endless, contradictory judgments, it is like water that can fill any container, but there is no such container that would completely exhaust it. Happiness can be drawn from action and contemplation, from spiritual and physical comfort, from wealth and poverty, from virtue and vice. Talking about happiness, said Diderot, gives an idea only of the speaker himself. But we will be interested in something else - that passionate desire for happiness, which has obsessed Western civilization since the French and American revolutions.
Plans for a happy life run into at least three paradoxes. First, as already mentioned, the concept of happiness is too vague. Secondly, as soon as happiness is achieved, it is replaced by boredom and apathy (from this point of view, the quenched, but constantly renewed thirst for happiness would be the ideal, only then can both despair and satiety be avoided). And, finally, uninterrupted happiness excludes all suffering to such an extent that it makes a person defenseless against it, if it nevertheless arises.
The first circumstance, that is, the abstractness of the concept, explains the attraction of happiness and the anxiety that accompanies it. Not only do we not have much confidence in the universally offered happiness from a ready-made kit, but we can never be sure that we are really happy. If you are wondering, then something is wrong. The cult of happiness also breeds conformism and envy, two ills of a democratic society, in other words, the pursuit of fashionable pleasures and increased attention to the chosen ones, the minions of fate.
The second, that is, concern for maintaining well-being, was established in modern, secular Europe along with the triumph of mediocrity - a phenomenon that arose at the dawn of the New Age and meant that the place of God was taken by worldly life reduced to everyday life. Mediocrity is the victory of bourgeois values: mediocrity, insipidity, vulgarity.
Finally, the focus on the exclusion of suffering leads to the opposite results: it turns out to be the core of the entire system. Modern man suffers because he does not want to suffer, just as the desire for absolute health can become a disease. Our time shows the world a strange sight: the whole society without exception professes hedonism, and at the same time, every little thing torments people and spoils their lives. Misfortune is not just a misfortune, but much worse - failed happiness.
So, by forced happiness, I understand the ideology inherent in the second half of the 20th century, which forces us to consider everything from the position of pleasantness / unpleasantness, the euphoria imposed on us, which shamefully exiles or disgustively dismisses everyone who for some reason does not experience it. There is a double obligation: on the one hand, to make your life a paradise, on the other hand, to reproach yourself if you cannot achieve this. Thus, perhaps the best achievement of mankind is perverted - the opportunity given to everyone to arrange their own destiny and improve the conditions of their existence. How did it happen that the right to happiness, the central and boldest idea of the Enlightenment, turned into a dogma, into a rigid code? That is what we are trying to trace.
There are infinitely many interpretations of the highest good, the collective consciousness connects it either with health, or with wealth, or with beauty, or with comfort, or with success - the darkness of talismans that should lure it like a bird bait. Gradually, the means are elevated to the rank of an end and one after another are recognized as untenable, since they do not provide the desired good. Victims of a deplorable misunderstanding, we, by using means that should lead us to happiness, often only move away from it. And therefore, we are often mistaken, believing that it can be demanded as something due to us, that it can be learned like some school subject, that it is bought, has a price expressed in money, that others know the right recipe for happiness and imitate them enough to snatch a portion for yourself.
Contrary to the stilted expression, repeated in every way since the time of Aristotle - although he had something else in mind - it was far from all people and it was not always natural to strive for happiness; it is a feature of Western civilization that has certain historical coordinates. In addition to happiness in the same culture, there are other values: freedom, justice, love, friendship - which can be put forward in the first place. What, besides the most general, and therefore empty words, can be said about what are the aspirations of all people on earth from the beginning of time? We have nothing against happiness, we are not talking about this fragile feeling itself, but about its transformation into some kind of collective drug that everyone must take in one form or another - chemical, spiritual, psychological, informational, religious. Whereas the deepest and most sophisticated sciences and philosophical schools admit that they are powerless to guarantee the happiness of whole nations or individuals. Every time it touches us, we feel it as a kind of grace, a special grace, and not as the result of precise calculation or thoughtful behavior. And, perhaps, precisely because the dream of finding perfect Happiness with a capital letter is unrealistic, we especially appreciate the good aspects of life: pleasure, luck, luck.
And to the young Mirabeau, I would answer like this: “I love life too much to want only happiness.”
Components of happiness
The Dalai Lama is happy and exudes happiness.
Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler.
The art of being happy.
Waking up in the morning, we can choose to be in a good mood or in a bad mood. Such a choice always exists. Lincoln said that people are capable of being as they want to be. Tell yourself: "Everything is fine, life is beautiful, I choose happiness." You can be the creator of your own happiness, make it your duty to be happy. Make a list of positive, optimistic thoughts and repeat them several times a day.
Norman Vincent Peel.
The power of positive thoughts.
In 1929, Freud published Dissatisfaction in Culture, in which he argued that happiness was impossible. On the one hand, in order to live in society, a person is forced to give up part of his desires (after all, any culture is built on the suppression of instincts), and this part is constantly increasing. On the other hand, misfortunes constantly lie in wait for him, the source of which can be nature, health, and relationships with other people. “The plan of Creation,” concludes Freud, “was not for man to be happy. What we call happiness is, in the most precise sense of the word, satisfaction, usually sudden, of some desire that has reached a high degree of intensity and, by its very nature, can only be an episodic phenomenon.
So, what seemed chimerical to the father of psychoanalysis became almost a duty only half a century later. The fact is that during this time there were two revolutions. First, capitalism has evolved from a system of production based on labor and accumulation into a system of consumption that involves spending and, moreover, wastefulness. This new principle does not reject pleasure, but, on the contrary, organically includes it, erasing the antagonism between the economic machine and our appetites and even making them the engine of development. The main thing is that Western society, having passed the initial, authoritarian period of democracy, has lost its rigid class framework, and a person has received complete autonomy. Having become "free", he lost his choice: since there were no obstacles left on the road to Eden, he is, so to speak, "doomed" to happiness, or, to put it differently, if he is not happy, then he only has himself to blame.
In the 20th century, the idea of happiness has received a double interpretation: in democratic countries it is expressed in an insatiable thirst for all sorts of pleasures (only fifteen years separate the liberation of Auschwitz from the beginning of the consumer boom in Europe and America), while in the communist world it is dissolved in the officially prescribed prosperity. How many people have been ruined with the intention of benefiting humanity and forcibly bringing it to perfection! Having become part of the political doctrine, happiness has become a terrible weapon of mass destruction. No sacrifices, no purges of the human herd seem excessive if their goal is a bright future. The coming idyll turned into a nightmare.
However, the subject of our present reflections will not be the well-known rampant totalitarianism and not the triumph of coercion described by Orwell or the fictional Huxley (although many features of our society are reminiscent of the novels Brave New World or 1984). We will deal with another phenomenon that is characteristic of the industrial age and associated with the constant desire to live better. If before duty declared itself in the categories of law and necessary efforts, now it seems to be coquettishly flirting with us, relentlessly, like a guardian angel, follows everyone and whispers: look, do not forget to be happy! The dystopians attacked the too perfect system, in which everything is scheduled by the clock; we carry an inexorable clock within ourselves.
