Work and Happiness in Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and in Thomas Carlyle

I have already discussed Carlyle’s thoughts on happiness (here), and his stance that the pursuit of same was self-defeating. Instead, he advocated the diligent performance of work as the central activity of a fulfilling human life. Slavoj Žižek is a more recent thinker who has rejected the relevance of happiness to humanity (I discussed that here). A further dismissal of the concept comes in Sigmund Freud’s late work, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), a long essay or short book, covering 106 pages in the Penguin Great Ideas series copy I will be referring to. It is a fascinating and wide-ranging book, not concerned with developing the “science” (as Freud considered it) of psychoanalysis like many of his previous works, but in looking at life in modern civilization in its totality. His psychoanalytic theories enter on occasion, but his thought ranges more widely and speculatively – more sage-like – than ever before.

Dr. Freud with a cigar, but maybe not just a cigar.

Early on, Freud offers his thoughts on happiness. Like Carlyle, he completely dismisses the idea of happiness being a valid or attainable goal for a human being:

One is inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ has no place in the plan of
‘creation’. What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden) satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature, it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces a feeling of lukewarm contentment; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself. Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. (16-17)

We are, much more often, unhappy, and Freud sees three primary sources of unhappiness:

Suffering threatens us from three sides: from our own body, which, being doomed to decay and dissolution, cannot even dispense with pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which can unleash overwhelming, implacable, destructive forces against us; and finally from our relations with others. The suffering that arises from this last source perhaps causes us more pain than any other. (17)

This is bad news. We cannot avoid our own body, we can only very imperfectly and temporarily block out the external world, and as for our relations to others, to do without them is for most still more painful than to endure them. Under that pressure, our “pleasure principal” does and must transmute into the “reality principle”. Under this new principal, we less and less seek positive pleasure, because the fruitlessness of that search leads only to further agony; we merely try to avoid suffering. How do we avoid suffering? By sublimating our urges which cannot safely be indulged in a civilized society. Civilization is, essentially, renunciation:

[I]t is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up on renunciation, how much it presupposes the non-satisfaction – by suppression, repression or some other means – of powerful instincts. Such ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large sphere of interpersonal relations. (44)

We make this renunciation acceptable to ourselves by sublimation:

[S]ublimation of the drives plays a part in this. We achieve most if we can sufficiently heighten the pleasure derived from mental and intellectual work. Fate can then do little to harm us. This kind of satisfaction – the artist’s joy in creating, in fashioning forth the products of his imagination, or the scientist’s in solving problems and discovering truths – has a special quality which it will undoubtedly be possible one day to characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say, figuratively, that they seem to us ‘finer and higher’, but their intensity is restrained when compared with that which results from the sating of crude, primary drives: they do not convulse our physical being. The weakness of this method, however, lies in the fact that it cannot be employed universally, as it is accessible only to the few. is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people. It presupposes special aptitudes and gifts which are not exactly common, not common enough to be effective. (21)

According to Freud, then, we cannot be actively and consistently happy, but we can sublimate our desires in our work – at least if we have rewarding work such as that of the artist or scientist – and that is the best we can hope for. Note that Freud, nominally a scientist, puts the artist on the same level; indeed his first example is the artist rather than the scientist. Freud himself was more of an artist and less of a scientist than he was conscious of, and his admiration for artists helped provide the art that is in his writings and makes them so compelling. But here, his dismissal of happiness and endorsement of work is very reminiscent of an important emphasis in the work of Carlyle. The latter sage, too, was keen to overturn the happiness principle of the utilitarians, and replace it with a dedication to work as the central goal of human existence, and for fundamentally similar reasons:

Thomas Carlyle, reflecting on the illusory nature of happiness.

It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, That he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,–it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: ‘not of the slightest consequence’ whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard labour and rust! But our work,–behold that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains;–for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us forevermore!

Past and Present, Bk. II, Ch. IV

[O]nly this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. (SR, II, 7, “The Everlasting No”)

[…]

Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack HAPPY? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two: for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no less: God’s infinite Universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like that of Ophiuchus: speak not of them; to the infinite Shoeblack they are as nothing. No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. —Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.  (SR, II, 9, “The Everlasting Yea”)

Carlyle, like Freud, knew that happiness was at best fleeting. That which in the short term brings happiness soon turns into a source of dissatisfaction for Carlyle’s rhetorical Shoeblack and, to a less dramatic extent, for all of us. Work completed diligently and unselfconsciously is the cure for unhappiness. The problem is, one has to be unconscious of it to truly experience it. The conscious fixation on happiness was, Carlyle felt, one of the great illnesses of the Victorian age, always tending to turn into a consciousness of its absence.

If so, it is one that has gone unremedied until the present, despite the admonitions of Carlyle, Freud, Žižek and others. We have codified and theorised happiness to the point of having an annual World Happiness Report, Ministries of Happiness and a Journal of Happiness Studies. Truly now with such a wealth of resources and research, we have no excuse not to be happy, and, knowing that, we can only feel deep anxiety about the difficulty we find in attaining that desirable state of mind.

The Gospel of Work in Carlyle and in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

A central concern of Thomas Carlyle’s and one that was widely pondered by subsequent Victorian writers was the existential importance of work. Without work, or the right kind of work, life was hellish, productive of morbid introspection and paralytic inaction. Carlyle’s first commandment, pronounced in Sartor Resartus (1831-32; Bk. II, Ch VII) and Past and Present (1843; Bk. III, Ch. XI) was: “Know what thou canst work at”. It was a riff on Socrates’ “Know thyself” but it had very different implications. Socrates’ injunction was about thought; Carlyle’s was about action. Carlyle was of a generation for whom thought, reflection, introspection and self-consciousness – all of which had been taken to hitherto unknown extremes by writers and poets of the Romantic school in the late 17th and early 18th century – were decidedly double-edged swords.

Carlyle reacted against Romantic doctrine by declaring that “the sign of health is Unconsciousness” and that “[t]he healthy know not of their health, but only the sick (“Characteristics“, 1831). If one’s psyche was healthy, then, one just did not think about it or reflect on it. One did not know it; it just was. How did one escape self-consciousness, the disease of the Romantic temperament? Through work: “Man is sent hither not to question, but to work” (“Characteristics”). Therein lay the key to contentment and feeling at one with nature and one’s surroundings.

It was an influential notion, sometimes known as the “Gospel of Work“, and several notable Victorian novelists, such as Eliot and Dickens, reflected substantially on its implications. In the work of Joseph Conrad, too, the importance of work to one’s life experience is central. Marlow, the narrator of most of Heart of Darkness (1899), is particularly preoccupied with this. The experience he recounts in HoD is substantially about what it means to be a worker, to be devoted with one’s work, to face disillusionment about the goal of that work and how to respond to that disillusionment.

When Marlow contracts the job of captain of a ship which is assigned to sail up the Congo river, he is relieved, but struck also by the discourse surrounding the job he is to do:

It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. 

Heart of Darkness, Ch. 1

Marlow identifies that there is something quasi-religious in the discourse: “emissary of light”, “apostle”. This recalls the “Gospel of Work” and the capitalisation of “Workers” also suggests the famously erratic capitalisation habits of Carlyle, who does capitalise “Work” and “Workers” at times in Past and Present. Marlow is somewhat skeptical of the whole thing, disassociating himself from such language.

His skepticism is confirmed when he lands in Africa and one of his first experiences is the famous grove of death scene. A few pages later he returns to a contemplation of the nature of the “work”:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

HoD, Ch. I

Here “The work!” appears as a single sentence fragment, the exclamation mark serving to contrast the reality – slavery and slow, brutal death – with the sanctified talk Marlow had been subjected to earlier. The Gospel of Work is so divorced from reality as to be both tragic and ridiculous.

As the story progresses, however, it is by no means so simple. Marlow cannot quite dismiss the notion of work as the essence of life. He tries to articulate his position:

I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

HoD, Ch. I

It is a rather delicate distinction. Marlow does not like work but he likes what is in the work. Without work, one sees only mere show and cannot tell what it really means. Work, then is the way to true knowledge and is the way to find yourself. This, in fact, has brought us very close to Carlyle’s position again, wherein work is the central activity for a properly developed self.

Even having seen what he has seen of the imperial work in the Congo, Marlow is still attached to the notion of work. He retains an optimism about work as embodied by the Great Man, Kurtz. The first section of the story ends with the observation:

I was curious to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there.

HoD, Ch. I

That illustrates the difference between Kurtz and the functionaries of the rubber company Marlow meets. The latter believe in money; Kurtz believes in the civilizing mission. Kurtz’s work is for the betterment of humanity. When confronted with what is actually going on in the Congo, so different from the talk in Europe, Kurtz is too honest to go along with it and descends into a mostly undescribed madness. Marlow is less idealistic than Kurtz, though, and throughout keeps his head. How does Marlow stay sane in that atmosphere of horror? It is simple: through attendance to his work.

I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day’s steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckiIy.

HoD, Ch. II

Work, then, keeps away “the inner truth”, and for Marlow that is a good thing. At the end of the story, Marlow returns to Kurtz’s Intended, and tells her the same lies he was told before he went to the Congo. His take on the Gospel of Work, then, is a) it is a cover for exploitation and greed which does not reflect the real world; and b) it is a necessary fiction to keep at bay the horror of the imperial mission and preserve the illusion of a beautiful world. Marlow goes along with the rhetoric of he Gospel of Work and becomes a liar. Conrad evidently put a good deal of himself into Marlow, but it would not be fair to say he goes along with Marlow’s dishonesty. If he did, he would never have described the grove of death or the other horrific realities he had experienced in the Congo.

Žižek, Carlyle and Happiness

One of the concepts that Slavoj Žižek has frequently debunked is “happiness”. In a webchat from the Guardian from 2014, for example, he is asked if happiness is still an important idea, and replies:

Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. We all remember Gordon Gekko, the role played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street. What he says, breakfast is for wimps, or if you need a friend buy yourself a dog, I think we should say something similar about happiness. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.

Zizek citing Gordon Gekko from Wall Street to back up his point is deeply ironic, highlighting the tensions in Žižek’s supposed communist ideals, but his questioning of happiness is worth reflecting on. It’s not something we reflect on spontaneously: we assume that happiness is, by definition, that towards which we should and do strive. Žižek is rather Nietzschean here, however, in his prioritization of the notion of struggle and in his allusion to masters and slaves. Or perhaps we might say he is rather Carlylean here, for Carlyle pre-empted Nietzsche in this area.

Let us consider, for a moment, Carlyle on happiness. Fortunately, Past and Present (1843) has a chapter called “Happy” which provides a convenient subject of analysis. He opens the chapter with the assertion that “All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble”. Work is, of course, for Carlyle the greatest good, and it is against this that the nebulous notion of happiness has to contend.

Does not the whole wretchedness, the whole Atheism as I call it, of
man's ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that
unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: The pretension to be what he calls
'happy'? Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his
head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and
divine laws ought to be 'happy.' His wishes, the pitifulest
whipster's, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifulest
whipster's, are to flow on in ever-gentle current of enjoyment,
impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be
happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people
clamour, Why have we not found pleasant things?

This passage admittedly solidifies some of Carlyle’s flaws. He introduces the concept of “wretchedness” and then, bewilderingly, announces that he calls it “Atheism”. Arbitrary and subjective re-definition of words is a common feature of Carlyle’s prose – one of the most annoying of its features, indeed. He appears to give no weight to received definitions: Atheism has a definition; why is he giving it another one that has nothing to do with it? He doesn’t say. He doesn’t actually defend his position. He does state it quite baldly, though, and that is useful, if only to enable disagreement and dismissal.

Then we get into Carlyle’s abusive rhetoric that can, in certain moods, be quite fun to read. The “pitifulest whipster” of this extract is the seeker after happiness. This character has a consciousness of something, but it is an idealistic notion, not one with any material foundation, conceivable but not attainable: thus consciousness of the concept is productive of the very opposite. Carlyle, as he made clear in the classic early essay “Characteristics”, hates self-consciousness, so a concept that focuses us on the pursuit of our own happiness is not likely to please him. The concept of happiness produces self-consciousness, self-consciousness produces misery. Working, on the other hand, protects against self-consciousness, and thus against misery.

It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, That he cannot
work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the
day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the
night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our
happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished; vanished, clean
gone; a thing that has been: 'not of the slightest consequence'
whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of
Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with
Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack
with hard labour and rust! But our work,--behold that is not
abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the
want of it remains;--for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and
that is now the sole question with us forevermore!

Happiness is only allowable, then, as a function of work. And the worker cannot recognize himself as happy, for if he becomes conscious of it, that’s where his problems begin. Still less is happiness applicable to the superior persons, the “masters” as Žižek might say. Rather than happiness, then, we have two options: to prioritize the element of struggle in our existence, to always ensure that we are struggling against ourselves and the world; or to lose ourselves in work. The first is Žižek’s remedy, and it demands self-consciousness; the second is Carlyle’s, and it forbids it. By the time one has gotten far enough to actually reading 19th-century politico-moral reformers like Carlyle, one is already mired in consciousness of the plight of this world and of oneself. Forgetting oneself is out of the question. But we can still use Carlyle to question those parts of ourselves that we can’t eradicate. Maybe, even by reading him, we are keeping open a space for the possible radical transformation of the self in a post-self-conscious age. That’s something that even Žižek could get behind.