Injuries and Happiness

"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears." -- Marcus Aurelius

At first glance this quotation may seem ridiculous. Clearly we cannot heal a broken foot by deciding the foot is fine. What meaning or use can we gather from this then? A logical first step would be to try and understand what exactly injuries are. Despite "injury" being a common word it is difficult to define. To get a grasp on it lets take the example of someone falling and bruising their leg.

This person starts off in what could be called the initial state. Then an event occurs (the fall) and they end up in an inferior state (bruised). The tricky part of this understanding of "injury," is that there is no clear way to determine what is an inferior state. All of our judgments on this seem based off imagining that the "injurious" event didn't happen, examing what the object would be like then, and deciding whether we would prefer that the event didn't happen. If we'd prefer that the event didn't happen then we call the event injurious. To this extent, injuries and our perceptions of them are the same.

We can now understand how rejecting an injury can remove it. To consider yourself injured you have to compare yourself to an imaginary version of yourself, and decide that you come up lacking. This is already sounding a little ridiculous but let us continues. To what end would we make this comparison? We cannot change the past so we must look to how being injured can change the future.

The first and simplest way is that we can learn how to act from being injured. If we examine the causes of our injury we can change our behavior so that we injure or are injured less in the future. After we have gained this knowledge, however, there is no need to maintain our injury. The second usefulness of injury is sympathy and reparations. If you can convince someone, or a judge, that their actions injured you they can be pressed for compensation. Just as above though, you can drop your injury after being compensated adequately. There are perhaps other uses for being injured but the main point remains, there is no purpose in feeling injured beyond its possible use to you.

Let us take an example of appropriate and inappropriate ways to react to the same situation then. Assume that one of your friends lied to you.

Appropriate: You use the knowledge gained from your injury and decide to not trust that friend in similar situations again. If the lie was serious enough or a repeat offense, you might break contact completely. If it was milder and they are penitent you might inform them of your expectations of them and let them know that falling short ends the friendship. In any case you decide to drop the injury when there is nothing more to be gained.

Inappropriate: You yell, scream, and drive away a friend that you enjoy over a minor lie. In this case your injury is only hurting you because you let your sense of injury grow out of proportion. Perhaps instead you reconciled with a friend but never dropped your sense of injury. Then you are still hurting yourself. If there is something worth gaining from the injury you should pursue that goal and drop the injury when you acquire it instead of letting the injury fester. If there isn't anything to gain then maintaining the injury is only driving you from your friend and negatively impacting your happiness.

To summarize, you are in control of your own temperament. Whether you forgive, forget, or bear a grudge is up to you. Any choice you make should be directed towards your own happiness though. There is no need to forgive someone who will simply hurt you again and there is no need to bear a grudge against the people you love either.

The Important Questions

There are many questions which people feel are important. A sampling of the common ones would read "Why are we here?", "Is there a God?", "Why is there evil?". These questions are considered important because we are looking for solace, for confirmation that what we are doing is reasonable and appropriate. If we found the answers to these questions we'd know how to live well.

The tragic fact is that these questions are unanswerable. The existence or non-existence of some benevolent, supernatural being, lies outside of reason and so is not theoretically determinable. The same is true of all the other questions in that vein. We can find no induspitable axioms on which to base a logical approach to these questions, nor can we empirically verify any of our guesses. Since these questions are unanswerable I say that we should stop worrying.

Instead of seeking to answer these questions we can seek the goal they sought by other means. We want to know these answers because we want to know how to live well. Thankfully the question of how to live well is perfectly answerable. If you have read Aristotle's Ethics you will know that everyone's personal goal is happiness. It is what we seek when we attempt anything. (If you disagree with that sentiment I would encourage you to read the beginning of the Ethics, and if you still disagree please post a comment, I'd be interested to hear alternatives.)

And what would make us the most happy? From Plato's Republic we have that being virtuous is so great a happiness that no amount of external pain could drive you from it, nor any amount of external pleasure lure you away. What, precisely, Plato's virtue would look like is not always clear, but he does describe it as having your mind in order. Meaning to bring your desires in line with what is good for you.

Further from the Ethics we are told that reason is that by which our virtues are good. For example we call someone who is brave to a fault reckless, and it is not a good thing to be reckless. It is our reasoning that tells us when we should fight the odds and when we should submit. Making the correct decisions in this manner is what we would call truly brave. What is emerging from these Greek philosophers then is sound advice. To be happy we should seek to understand ourselves, set goals for our benefit, and adjust our desires so that we instinctively seek those goals.

The main trick with these goals is to never forget your final goal, happiness. If you've been having trouble paying your bills and you think you'd be more happy with more money, then a natural thing to do would be to work longer hours. This would certainly help pay the bills and it could be the appropriate solution for you. On the other hand working harder may stress you out more than worrying over money ever did. That's where your reasoning should kick in and weigh the costs and the benefits of working harder and try to find the best approach.

In short the only trick to living well and being happy is to continually examine your life. Look at the things that you do, since that is all you can control, and minimize the unpleasant while maximizing the pleasant. If you always keep your goal of sustained happiness in mind you should notice a steady improvement in your life.

To end, here is a quotation from Marcus Aurelius. More than any other piece of philosophy this has influenced my own happiness and I'll discuss it more in the next post.

"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears." -- Marcus Aurelius