Mudita and Invidia

There is a section in the middle of Spinoza's Ethics, in which he runs through the list of human emotions, which he sees as compounded entirely out of three primary "affects": joy, sadness, and desire. Modern emotional psychologists would of course expand that list to five (if Inside/Out is to be trusted), but Spinoza seems not far off; and he is able to provide a quasi-persuasive, if unromantic, account of how every more complicated emotion in our repertoire might be boiled down to one of these three elements. Love, for instance (in Spinoza's telling) is the emotion we feel when our power of acting expands and we attach this sensation to another person; hate, that which we experience when it is constricted or restrained, and we attribute that to another. 

Moral sentiments therefore, in Spinoza's telling, come about through a kind of extension of these same feelings by analogy to other creatures who are like ourselves. If someone to whom we can relate has constraints placed upon their power to act, we feel sadness on their behalf, because we can recognize their similarity to ourselves and thus analogize their plight to our own condition. This, says Spinoza, is what we mean when we speak of the emotion of "pity." Next, he turns to the analogous situation respecting joy. Presumably, if we feel sadness at the misfortune of some other being like ourselves, by the same logic we feel joy at contemplating their happiness. Yet, Spinoza notes, "By what name we should call the joy which arises from another's good I do not know." (Curley trans.)

Indeed, I didn't know either. Western languages don't seem to have a name for it... perhaps because it is so rare. Even as it would appear to follow as ineluctably as pity from the logical assumptions above, it does not manifest itself very often in human affairs. But don't worry: Spinoza's moral psychology has a means of accounting for this fact as well. Because he recognizes that, even as we experience moral emotions from contemplating the analogy between ourselves and others, and thus are happy to see other beings be gratified in a way we should like to be ourselves, we also live in a world of perceived scarcity. And when the scarcity is on our minds, then we see the gratification of others as a direct threat to our own power of acting. And so it comes about that—sayeth Spinoza—"men are by nature envious."

This, then, would be the proposed explanation for why happiness at the good fortune of others has never yet received a name in our languages—at least not one that Spinoza could discover in his Latin—whereas we have abundant ways of describing its opposite. There is of course the ever-popular Schadenfreude, which no longer needs to be italicized, so thoroughly has it been adopted into the English language as a thing we know too well. And even if we are not considering German imports, our own English term "gloating" would seem to convey something similar. We have names enough for this sentiment because it is as common among us as its moral opposite is rare. As the narrator of Martin Amis's Money puts it: "Mm, it's so nice when one of your peers goes down."

All is not lost, however. A friend of mine was telling me that, in fact, classical Sanskrit supplies exactly the term Spinoza was hunting for: Mudita. Joy in the happiness of others, in the well-being and good fortune of others. It is encouraging to think that this most moral and most desirable emotion must have occurred often enough in human life somewhere that at least one society decided to give it a name. Besides, seldom as we may experience this emotion, without some admixture of envy, its existence would seem nonetheless—as we said above—to be implied in the same logical progression that Spinoza used to argue for the existence of pity, envy, ambition, and other more easily-recognized sentiments. 

My friend had a somewhat self-interested reason for raising the topic. He was hoping that I might be induced to experience Mudita on his behalf, in light of his successes—specifically, in this case, the fact that he had co-authored a book that was published with the Oxford University Press. 

And, indeed, I might be induced so to do. I can strive to cultivate Mudita as a spiritual practice, and can recognize that it is a nobler and more worthy emotion to feel than the Invidia that might otherwise be my default state when faced with this news. But it occurs to me that the human psyche—or at least, my own—encounters at least two stumbling blocks to achieving this state of altruistic joy. They present themselves to my mind in the form of two fears. First: what if he doesn't deserve this success? Second, and far worse: what if he does? Both fears have, as we will see below, their exemplars in the literature of literary rivalry and ambition, and these shall help us examine and, if possible, dispel them. 

One feels, after all, that perhaps one can reconcile oneself to a world where people are justly rewarded according to their merits. Thus, if my friend put the work in to get his book published in the high-prestige academic press of a world-class university, and the work was of sufficiently high quality that this was the only appropriate place for it to appear in print, then perhaps the world is in fact a fair and decent place. Justice was served, and one should be glad for it. 

But suppose that someone did not put the work in, and the book was not good enough.... In that case, the world is terribly unjust, and one's own merits and superiority are plainly going unrecognized, and virtue is not being rewarded, and cheaters are prospering, which is plainly intolerable. This is what happens in Martin Amis's The Information, say, where the successful friend really is the worse writer. 

But suppose now that we revert to our original hypothetical. The book was published because it was meritorious; its author feted because they are deserving. In that case, one should be pleased, right? Except, this is where the second fear kicks in. Because if one is to acknowledge that the rival succeeded because of his superior skill, then one must acknowledge that oneself failed because of one's own inferior skill. Which is an even more appalling realization than to contemplate the possibility that the world is a place of fundamental injustice. This is the situation in, say, Thomas Bernhard's The Loser, where the character Wertheimer actually is the slightly worse pianist, and the evident superiority of Glenn Gould's genius is what destroys him. It doesn't make him any happier, that is to say, to discover that Gould is meritorious than to find that he is a fraud. 

Perhaps the best, then, would be to simply regard the success of another as a random stroke of fate—a Spinozan necessity, if you will, that could not have been otherwise, and is a product of blind nature, and obeys rules neither of justice nor injustice, and is totally unrelated to merit and to the lack of merit alike. This the human psyche might find somewhat easier to bear.

Faulkner implies as much in a passage in Absalom, Absalom! In a flashback, he depicts the young Thomas Sutpen approaching the door of a large and fancy house, hoping to be let inside in order to share some news he has been tasked with reporting. Yet instead of being welcomed into the front parlor, he is told that a ruffian and hillbilly such as himself is only permitted to enter by the side door. 

What Sutpen finds so intolerable about this, in Faulkner's telling, is not the mere comparison between the good fortune of his neighbor and his own poverty; but the neighbor's assumption that his stroke of blind luck made him more deserving. Faulkner writes, of Sutpen's inner state: He no more envied the man [who owned the big house] than he would have envied a mountain man who happened to own a fine rifle. He would have coveted the rifle, but he would himself have supported and confirmed the owner’s pride and pleasure in its ownership because he could not have conceived of the owner taking such crass advantage of the luck which gave the rifle to him rather than to another as to say to other men: Because I own this rifle, my arms and legs and blood and bones are superior to yours[.]

In other words, the child Sutpen was perfectly ready to experience Mudita, on behalf of the house's owner. He was perfectly ready to extend Mudita to the wealthy neighbor. All he asked in return was that the neighbor not use his own good fortune as an excuse to denigrate him, to assume his inferiority, to take "crass advantage"—to wield it, in short, as a weapon to wound Sutpen. This, it seems to me, is what we all fear, when we fall short of the ideal state of Mudita, when we clutch at our Invidia and our Schadenfreude and our gloating. This is why we find it so hard to experience genuine joy at the good fortune of others. We fear that they are using that stroke of luck as a basis to form a notion of their own superiority. Not that that is even what really bothers us.... it is more the thought that they might be using it to form a notion of our relative inferiority. And finally, and worst of all, that they might be right. 

Which means that the ultimate secret to experiencing true Mudita—that most noble and most moral of emotions—is the acceptance of oneself. If one is no longer afraid of acknowledging the possibility of one's inferiority in some domain, because one likes oneself regardless, then it will be no great struggle to appreciate and welcome the successes of others. And by the same token, Invidia is not really about other people at all. Schadenfreude is not about others. Gloating is not about others. They too are reflections of our self conception. If one has not yet accepted oneself, one can only preserve a sense of self by seeing others fail. One is like the man Spinoza dubs the "despondent man," who glories in the downfall of others because he has lost all necessary and legitimate esteem in himself. If one has accepted oneself, by contrast, one is able to cheer them on without fearing the spectacle will threaten one's core of selfhood. 

Love of self is then the root of all Mudita, and perhaps of all moral and altruistic feeling more broadly. Or, as RuPaul would put it: If you can't love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love someone else?

Can I get an amen?