读罗素：幸福与对自由的贪婪

Reading Russell: Happiness and the Greed for Freedom

> By Colin Huang · 2016-03-24 · [Original link](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAwNjc1ODg4NA==&mid=404945439&idx=1&sn=42edbcf59bcce2e30a4c8040ebb0142d) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

The education I received growing up always wanted me to learn from the advanced and resolve to be a useful person. So, thinking back now, my thinking about role models in life, life goals, and even the meaning of life all started very early.

From junior middle school on, I imagined becoming a scientist, a politician, an entrepreneur and the like. I read biographies and thought about who I most wanted to become. Then I started really liking reading some philosophy books, thinking about questions like "I think, therefore I am". In short, it feels like from the time I learned to read, I've been constantly setting goals for myself, and then looking for optimized paths to reach those goals and what I understood as life's big goal.

Not until much later, after I'd already been running a company for several years, did I begin to realize that reaching goals and happiness aren't necessarily the same thing. My thinking about, understanding of and exploration of happiness came very late.

At first, I read Ben Shahar's "Happier" [Translator's note: the original gives the Chinese title 《幸福的方法》, "The Method of Happiness"; the author is Tal Ben-Shahar, written in the original as 本.沙哈尔], which is said to be a very famous course at Harvard. It had some effect on me in the short term, but not a very lasting one. On this topic I went through a good while of mulling it over and some not-easy practice, and I felt I slowly began to understand a bit.

Then I read Russell's 《幸福之路》 ("The Road to Happiness"); translated literally from the English name it should probably be called 《征服幸福》 (The conquest of Happiness). This book isn't thick, but it explains things thoroughly, all in plain and approachable sentences. It has already said everything I'd thought about this topic, and it seems the problems of happiness that different occupations and classes met a hundred years ago are not one bit different from today. In Charlie Munger's classic answer, it's "I have nothing to add".

So why do I still want to go on writing? Mainly two points: first, I want to make, from memory, an "excerpt" of the book's content, for myself to review later, or to compare with when I reread this book. Second, I want to write a little about the comparison I see between Russell's practice in his own life and his own theory of happiness, because this is something Russell's own book basically can't cover. These two points are also what make up the title of this piece.

I. Russell's "happiness"

After reading "The Conquest of Happiness", my own summary is roughly the following few sentences:

A) Have the courage to face common sense, use common sense to make rational judgments, and use rational intention to guide your own actions.

B) Shift your interest in achieving an infinitely perfect self into interest in external objective things.

C) Know how to give up on things that can't be changed and can't be conquered.

Here the first sentence is the core, because the latter two are actually the natural results of practicing the first. For the first sentence, the two key words are "reason" and "common sense". Below, please bear with me as I very unrigorously "excerpt", from the book and from my embellished memory, some interpretations of these two words.

Common sense (常识 common sense)

People are very, very tiny existences in the universe, and the time of a human life is incomparably short; what we can do and can change is extremely limited. This should be the background we are always clear about.

A person's thinking and ideas depend to a great extent on his origins, the education he received when young, and his current interests and role. So when judging an authority's view, or judging a commonly held worldly opinion, or a parent's expectation, you should know his background and look at it together with his background, interests and role. On the basis of combining these background facts, what's needed is often only common sense to judge; what's needed more is not wisdom but whether, facing the facts, you still have the courage to pursue reason. (Common sense is actually obvious and very easy to understand, but our various inherited prejudices and the prejudices caused by personal interest blind us and make us turn a blind eye to this common sense. Isn't this very much like what the Buddhist scriptures say?)

Different regions and different circles of people have different values. What's non-mainstream in one place may well be mainstream in another. In the eyes of Russell in Britain at the time, America's mainstream values were competing on wealth. And when Britain had an aristocratic class, what the aristocratic class competed on more was non-wealth things, such as art.

> "The most regrettable of ordinary human traits is envy, because the envious person does not seek joy from what he himself has, but seeks pain from what other people have."

Envy is the main driving force for things tending toward fairness between different classes, nations and sexes. At the same time, hoping to obtain that kind of fairness through envy will also be the worst kind of fairness. It cuts down the joy of the fortunate rather than increasing the joy of the unfortunate. [Translator's note: in the original, the quotation above and these two sentences are a single paragraph; the quotation is set apart here as a quote block.]

> "One trait of human nature is always being more willing to give love to people who don't much need love, just as banks are more willing to lend money to people who don't much need money."

> "Your motives are not always as unselfish as you think"

> "Don't overestimate your own worth"

> "Don't expect others to value you as much as you do"

> "All unhappiness is caused by some kind of split or inconsistency. When the conscious and the unconscious are not in harmony, a split in the self results. When one cannot connect oneself with society through objective interests and the power of love, an inconsistency between the two results."

Reason

> "Arousing emotion is not what reason should do, although part of reason's role is to find ways to prevent emotions that would endanger well-being".

At the same time,

> "reason does not wish to reduce any burning emotion. When a rational person feels all or part of these emotions, he is glad that he can feel them, and does not restrain them". [Translator's note: the original writes 在干到了, apparently a slip for 在感到了, "feels", and 是 for 时, "when"; translated by the evident sense. In the original, "At the same time," and this quotation are one paragraph.]

II. The greed for freedom

Russell himself said, "My whole life has always been governed by the following three passions: the irrepressible search for truth; irrepressible sympathy for the suffering of mankind; and the irrepressible pursuit of love" [Translator's note: the original writes 一下三种, apparently a slip for 以下三种, "the following three"]. These irrepressible pursuits of his not only gave us works like Principia Mathematica (《数学原理》), which had an enormous influence on mathematics and philosophy, but also gave us the "varied and significant" works that won the Nobel Prize in Literature, of which "The Conquest of Happiness" is one.

At the same time, these irrepressible pursuits of his also brought him four marriages. What I haven't quite figured out is that his four marriages and his "overly open" behavior at the time must also have brought pain to some people. This pain should also act back on him in turn. That should be unfavorable to joy, or happiness, shouldn't it? Can these three irrepressibles also be understood as a greed for freedom?

Russell himself says in the section "On Effort and Resignation" (《论努力与放弃》) of "The Conquest of Happiness", "The doctrine of the golden mean is a dull doctrine, but many things can prove that it is indeed the truth". So, should the pursuit of knowledge and of freedom also involve some giving up? For example, giving up the endless inquiry into whether God exists, and simply firmly believing he exists: would that be happier? If one could willingly give up part of one's freedom, and firmly believe that being in one country, one place, and with one person is good, would that be happier?

Of course, Russell's long life also, to some extent, makes me question whether my speculation about his life lacks a sufficient factual basis. After all, I find it hard to believe that a very unhappy person, or a person extremely self-indulgent all his life, could live to ninety-eight.

Copyright: © LookMinds. Our own edited text and translation, not a substitute for the original; rights in the original belong to the author and the platform. Please see the original link.