A Dialogue on Contentment and Freedom

It started with a quote from Socrates, which said- "He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have." The following are the responses that ensued.

Chinmayee: I disagree.

Shamik: I think a consumer generation would find it hard to agree with this (and this is not to sound patronizing. It applies to me too). But one must understand the difference between the sort of discontent that propels one towards progress and the other that is a discontented disposition. A blurring of this distinction might be the root of the disagreement.

Chinmayee: I can understand if you are talking about pure consumerism. You possess thing X and you want thing Y also. There Socrates is right. But if thing Y happens to be an ideal or an unrealized potential then certainly State Y will make me happier than State X

Suppose I have a great poetic genius within me which is locked because of say reasons a,b,c. I will never be happy till that genius is unlocked and a state in which it is neccesarily better than one in which it isn’t.

Shamik: The thing is, only if one cherishes something that one can know what they have to look forward to, otherwise you are on a wild goose chase towards an abstract ideal and because its nature is such, you cannot know that you will be content with it or not. The point is to cherish and be content with the little that one has, and our own natural imperfections, the imperfect nature of this contentment and our will to not remain in one place will propel us forward.

Moreover, if one moves discontentedly towards unrealized ideals and prioritizes them more than everything else, one will not only be blind towards what they have in front of them and leave out the charm of the process, but also by overvaluing the ideal by hyping it, would never be content, precisely because there is no possible situation that will match up to the hype. And this is not only a caution about hyping the value of everything, but also to make us realize that that in the long run, even though life has to offer us a lot, it can only give us this much, and whatever little it gives is to be worth it. The rest is illusion and like a bubble, it will burst.

Nebu: But suppose a slave wishes for freedom. Would you say that he would be dis-contented once he's been freed? I don't think so.

Shamik: Nebu, I might have explained a bit of that above. Also, if a slave has not seen somethings to be content about in his slavery, as in the open fields etc., then the slave cannot possibly know what is cherishable when he is free. The slave would then be escaping to a vacuum of freedom. (Same goes for the poetic genius)

But one as to see the condition of the slave as not an absolute condition of slavery, as in that they have nothing to be content about, but the slave too preserves his autonomy in a certain sense and his will towards autonomy even during slavehood, during which he sees and is contented with things that are worth cherishing. Socrates' caution is towards a disposition and worldview of discontent. His assumption would be that we are creatures of habit, and if we form habits of discontent, then those habits will not leave us even when the 'ideal' conditions for contentment would arise.

Chinmayee: But you are assuming too much naivete on part of a person. I’ll tell you why. Building on your slave example you must understand that freedom in itself is a desirable state. Now the slave may be a fool who say- drinks away his freedom or commits a murder and ends up in jail. So yes- he may not be happier but the state is more desirable and has the potential to confer greater happiness because it can allow a greater, deeper realization of human faculties.

 Shamik:  I don't see how the example leads to the conclusion that freedom is in itself a desirable state...my argument is that freedom would be a desirable state only if there are things that you actively cherish in whatever state you are in. So freedom becomes a requisite to their maximal realization.

Also, one might pity the slave in his condition of freedom when he is squandering it away in drink even while one is accepting the condition of freedom as a better one. So we must come up with a more refined idea of freedom.

 Chinmayee: But if you are human, then freedom of the mind is always desirable because you can use it to attain a better state POTENTIALLY. You may not attain it but it gives you the 'freedom' to do so, the opportunity if you will.

Nebu: I do agree with the bit about different sorts of discontentment. But I disagree with your slave response...and I'd like to supplement what Chinmayee said with a more concrete example. 

Anyone who's had to break his/her back for some Overlord, is sure to appreciate freedom from said bonds. Also if wanting more in life is counter-productive, then the entire concept of dreams/dreaming of a better anything is put to shame! What say?

Shamik:  Nebu, I still don't see how your response to the slave question is incompatible with what I'm saying...you seem to understand freedom in absolute terms and so does Chinmayee, which is indeed important if we are to understand the idea of freedom in any sense, including the sense that one has to understand freedom in degrees. 

As a counter to my argument, Chinmayee said that "human freedom of the mind is always desirable because you can use it to attain a better state POTENTIALLY. You may not attain it but it gives you the 'freedom' to do so, the opportunity if you will." But if a prerequisite to understanding any other sense of freedom is indeed the absolute condition of freedom, which is what makes freedom desirable and that is the concept that enables us to judge a particular condition as a condition of slavery, other senses of freedom follow from that. And then again, what I am saying is compatible with what you're saying.

So freedom is secondarily conceived in terms of degrees and not in absolute conditions because, as I have already mentioned, even in the condition of slavery, a certain degree of human autonomy is retained that enables the slave to look forward to freedom even while he has things worth cherishing in even that state. This is precisely because of the freedom he possesses, even if it is extremely limited.

The reason why you guys seem to have a problem with my idea is because the concept of freedom and dreams/dreaming is seen in absolute terms, which is in itself important, but they have to be brought down to time and place and context. Contentment, if it is to be seen as an important experience in determining what we want, even in ideal conditions of freedom, has to be situated in concrete experience, in the here and now, and not in some abstract realm of unrealized or unrealizable abstractions and dreams. Because, true freedom is not possible, just as it is impossible for an ideal square or triangle to exist, since reality by its very nature blots out its ideality. 

Or to put it in a slightly more technical way but for clarity. Freedom in absolute terms is logically prior to any other conception of freedom, because this is a concept we have to understand before we understand any other sense. But as to how we arrived at the concept in the first place was to abstract it from our everyday notions of freedom in which we live out our freedoms and experience our moments of contentment.

So the point is, that is we are to live in time, and we do live in time, we have to give priority in our experiences to notions of freedom situated in time, while at the same time using the abstract notion as a yardstick to judge where we are. But one must not forget that the abstract must be tempered by the concrete, simply because even though the abstract is a comfortable place to live in without the frictions we experience in the everyday, the multitude of experience is the source of what we cherish.

And yes, contentment too is not a permanent state because of the nature of this hell of flux we inhabit.

Chinmayee: Well yes, I see this point that a 'slave' must at least appreciate things like- food and drink- which are avaliable to him even in his enslaved state. Freedom for him would be that plus something else...so he must appreciate the bare minimum he has

But consider another state- say a starving man who hasn't eaten for days. Now if you give him a piece of bread, it seems quite likely to me that he would find this situation better than the previous one...that he would be MORE contented

Also consider a micro-state...say a slave has been chained for an entire day in a corner. Food and drink have been placed before him- but are just out of his reach. Now suppose in the next instant, a kind man enters the room and places those items within his reach. Again, is it too much to say that he would be happy in this situation- and would have found nothing to appreciate in the old one?

Socrates is generalizing. What he says may be, (and perhaps is) true for many sitations, but there are exceptions possible- circumstances that take all the joy out of a moment. If they are removed, that joy would be restored... 

Shamik: Again Chinmayee, I doubt if the case of more contentment is incompatible with what I’m saying. Again if there are degrees of freedom, there can be degrees of contentment. As for each of them finding something, I’ll try to make a case for them trying to find something at least minimal. 

Let's see what might happen if I stretch Socrates' sense of 'content' a bit more for the sake of argument, in accordance with some of what I've said before. Now I know I'm treading on very delicate ground as I haven't experienced this kind of suffering before. But since the Stoic philosopher Epictetus who was also a slave had, there have been precedents, so I will proceed albeit cautiously.

One assumption Chinmayee makes is that the sort of contentment that has to come has to do with the possession of things, and even I have talked about 'things' worth cherishing. But I have also mentioned that the source of contentment is the possession of autonomy as such, in whatever degree possible. And if the person is alive, in whatever limited circumstance, this autonomy seems to be ever present since it represents the possibility of freedom and the ability to hope.

The thought that I seem to be getting at is that maybe contentment does not need to be seen in terms of possession and satisfaction, but is intricately linked up with hoping and being enlivened by the hope of retaining one’s humanity. But it’s not only that. The imperfect and transient nature of our contentment points to the idea of accepting its finitude, and as Nissim Ezekiel put it, to “bear your restlessness with grace.” So at each moment, our contentments are defined by these constraints, especially of grace covering up for the eternally non-absolute nature of it.

 Now how does it fit into the picture of the starving man and the cornered slave? Well I find it horribly difficult to say it without sounding smug, but I’ll try to say it. One can in these moments pine and pine and scream and shout or remain calm and strengthen themselves by the sense inner self sufficiency had by the sort of person who in a boat of starving people maintains their calm and offers each one hope. And that perhaps is the minimal sort of contentment that one can find even in these situations.