Matrix and Philosophy, The (Popular Culture and Philosophy) by Irwin Editor William

Author:Irwin, Editor,William [Irwin, Editor,William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2003-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

In approaching the notion of “happiness,” I have from the start one particular sense of the term in mind, namely that in which we can speak of a person as generally “happy,” as happy over the long term. Happiness, in the sense I am discussing it, is not a mood. Things such as bliss, ecstasy, joy, may perhaps be referred to legitimately by our word “happiness,” but I am interested in discussing this other sense of the term. Though Mouse may be happy spending time with the woman in red, this happiness is fleeting. It is not the kind of happiness that is most important in either the movie or in Plato’s simile of the cave.

Almost everyone seems naturally to associate long-range happiness with contentment. The notions have something in common, especially when one focuses on the feelings involved. Both seem describable as resting points, as lacking disturbance and anxiety, as exhibiting calmness and peacefulness. The contented person is not plagued by unsatisfiable passions; his abilities and his passions have reached an equilibrium, rather as the ancient Stoics recommended. The contented person has what he wants, he has enough of the things one ordinarily desires, and is satisfied with that. He does not need to induce a false reality by indulging in “engine-cleaning moonshine” as Cypher does. But one commonly understood meaning of contentment seems severed from a characteristic I have associated with happiness, namely the long term.

And even if one were content over the long haul, there is a more important way in which contentment is distinguished from happiness; and that is the tendency of contentment to reduce itself to a state of mind, one severed from an appraisal of the objective facts. Contentment and unreflectiveness are natural allies. The content are, so to speak, tranquillized. I have in mind the figure of the contented slave; someone resigned to the limitations of life, someone for whom the link between the subjective feeling and an assessment of the worthiness of his life is broken. I could just as well adduce the example of the happy tyrant to the same effect. Or the example of the well-bred human battery cell portrayed in The Matrix. Such a life has often been compared to the life of the beasts, not without reason; my dog, for example, can certainly be happy in the sense of content. When you are asleep, you are not happy, however peaceful you may be. You are just unconscious.

However much a person’s subjective state of mind is tranquil, there must be a fact of the matter relative to which it can be evaluated. This is a controversial thesis, as Cypher shows: he wants out of reality, back to the Matrix, in order to be happy. He wants to be free from reality. He embodies the question mark about the relationship between contentment (the purely subjective sense of well-being) and happiness (which is supposed to be tied to a knowledge of reality). His answer is clear: contentment in a life of illusion is true happiness.

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