Running with the Pack

by Mark Rowlands

  The most important of the forms, and the most real, Plato argued, is the form of the good — ‘The Good’. All good things — acts, rules, people, institutions and so on — count as good because they resemble or participate in The Good. The goodness of all these things is, therefore, dependent goodness. They are good to the extent they stand in the appropriate relation to something outside of them — The Good. But The Good is goodness itself, good in itself. In short, according to Plato, everything has a form. These forms belong to a non-physical realm of supra-sensible things, and in this realm they make up a pyramid of ascending reality. At the apex of this pyramid is the form of the good — the most real and most valuable thing there is.

  I believe very little of this. A non-physical world of essences organized into a pyramid of ascending reality and worth: I take these claims about as seriously as I take claims about the gods of Olympus or the God of Genesis. Philosophy is a rather strange discipline where being, at least arguably, the greatest is compatible with being wrong about almost everything — and I think Plato was wrong about almost everything. Sometimes, when we discover something, an idea that we intuitively, instinctively, sense is very important indeed, we tend to lose the run of ourselves, and dress it up in metaphysical clothing that is overly extravagant and more than a little disingenuous. Religion — whether of the Olympian or Judaeo-Christian variety — is perhaps the most obvious example of this. But Plato was by no means immune to this basic human tendency. In all these cases, religious or metaphysical, what is important is not what the doctrine says, but what it shows: something important and true that is to be found crawling out diffidently from between the lines of untruth.

  The Good of Plato is goodness-in-itself. Stripped of its metaphysical excesses, The Good of Plato is that which is valuable for its own sake, rather than for the sake of anything else. In other words, The Good of Plato is intrinsic value. There is no world of forms — at least I strongly suspect there is not. But there is intrinsic value. It is found in this world, not some other one; found in our lives and the things we do in those lives. In this life, it is only worth loving The Good — understood not as some otherworldly form, but as things that are intrinsically valuable. Instruments — things that are good only for the sake of something else that they might bring you — they are life’s trivialities. You might want them, covet them, you might need them desperately; but you should not love them because they are not worthy of love. The love of money is the root of all evil, the Bible tells us. Or in some, more plausible, translations: the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. In this, I think the Bible is absolutely correct. But this is merely a restricted version of a more general truth: love is an appropriate relation to bear to things that are intrinsically valuable. To treat things that are not intrinsically valuable as if they were intrinsically valuable — that is the root of all kinds of evil: evil lives, evil social and political systems and, often, evil people. Only intrinsically valuable things are worth loving. One of life’s most important tasks is to surround oneself with things that are worth loving — and to be able to distinguish these from things that are not.

  Then there is, the perhaps apocryphal, Pheidippides. According to Herodotus, Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta — a distance of 152 miles — to request help when the invading Persian army landed at the beach at Marathon. Other accounts, their origins and veracity unclear, claim that, following the battle, Pheidippides ran twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens with news of the Greek victory. This, reportedly, was as much as he could take: he died immediately after uttering the words, ‘We conquer!’ Whether Pheidippides was a real person or not, he became associated with the origin of the race we now know, for obvious reasons, as the marathon.

  For Pheidippides his run was something that presumably had only instrumental value. Some general presumably said to him: ‘Pheidippides: off you go to Athens, and be quick about it. What do you mean, horse?’ He was running for the sake of something else — to spare himself whatever consequences there were for disobeying orders or occasioning a commanding officer’s displeasure. When someone starts running, or takes it up after a long absence, it might well have everything to do with consequences. Certainly, that’s how it was with me, although I suppose the largely lupine-based consequences were a little idiosyncratic. My life of running as an adult, therefore, had instrumental origins.

  However, no matter what instrumental reasons one has for doing it, running has a non-instrumental essence — a form — and this has a tendency to slowly reassert itself. At least, that is what it did to me. When I started running with Brenin, I was a poorly paid assistant professor of philosophy and I could not afford a bike. Running was the cheapest solution available to a pressing need: to dissuade Brenin from eating all my things. However, as life proceeded and my salary crept slowly upwards, eventually I could afford one. Indeed, a few years later, when I had moved to Ireland, I bought a rather nice mountain bike. But I used this only when injury prevented me running with my, by then, markedly expanding canine pack. By this point, running had me: the essence of running — what I came to think of as the heartbeat of the run — had established its control over me. As the pack grew old and weakened, their destructive atrocities diminished, I invented new instrumental reasons — little mythologies is really what they were — to explain to myself what I was doing. I run, I told myself, because of the clarity of thought it induces. But I now realize the truth: I was done for. Despite my inventions and protestations, less and less was I running to keep a pack of canines chilled, less and less was I running for the quality of cognition that came with it. And more and more I was running simply to run.

  Sometimes I like to imagine Pheidippides undergoing a similar transformation. The long run of Pheidippides slowly leaves its instrumental origins behind; step by step, breath by breath, Pheidippides becomes drawn into the beating heart of his run. Does he make bargains with himself? Just get me to the crossroads at Mycenae, and then you can walk for a while. Does Pheidippides become the duplicitous master, the maker of promises meant to be broken? Does Pheidippides thereby learn to spend time with his mind and so, perhaps, as Cicero would later claim, learn how to die? Does he then journey deeper into the run’s beating heart? Do thoughts that come from nowhere dance for Pheidippides the way they dance for me? Does he travel deeply enough into the run’s heartbeat that he eventually comes to understand that he is beyond the authority of reasons? These are the experiences of the run’s beating heart. These are experiences of The Good. They are experiences of intrinsic value — one of the ways in which intrinsic value can show itself in a human life.

  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 o
f 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 ca
nnot 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.