Happy Unhappiness (and Other Stratified Contradictions)

Abstract

Stratified properties such as ‘happy unhappiness’, ‘ungrounded ground’, ‘fortunate misfortune’, and evidently ‘true falsity’ may generate dialetheias (true contradictions). The aim of the article is to show that if this is the case, then we will have a special, conjunctive, kind of dialetheia: a true state description of the form ‘Fa and not Fa’ (for some property F and object a), wherein the two conjuncts, separately taken, are to be held untrue. The particular focus of the article is on happy unhappiness: people suffering from (or enjoying) happy unhappiness (if there is some situation or state of mind of this kind) cannot be truly said ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’, but we can say they are both. In the first section three cases of conjunctive stratification are presented; in the second section the logic of stratified contradictions is explored. The last section focuses on eudemonistic ascriptions: stated that a is happy to be unhappy (or unhappy to be happy), should we say a is happy? unhappy? both? neither?

Stratified contradictions are released by properties such as ‘fortunate misfortune’, ‘immodest modesty’, ‘happy unhappiness’, ‘ungrounded ground’. In the research about paradoxes contradictory stratifications have been studied in terms of ‘diagonalization’ (Simmons, 1993, 2018; Smullyan, 1994); ‘indefinite extensibility’ (Dummett, 1993: 454; Williamson, 1998; Cook, 2007); ‘typological ambiguity’ (Russell & Whitehead, 1910-13: 130); ‘closure’ (Tarski, 1933, 1944), etc.¹ Most often, stratifications involve semantic properties, typically, ‘truth’ or ‘denotation’. However, they may enter plausible descriptions of states of affairs that are not semantic, as do not directly regard truth or meaning.²

The focus of the analysis here proposed is on the special stratification which we may call ‘happy unhappiness’ (or unhappy happiness). In the dialetheic account of paradoxes, stratified properties of this kind typically generate true contradictions. The aim of the article is to show that if we accept this diagnosis, then we might have a conjunctive kind of dialetheia: a true state description of the form ‘Pa and not Pa’ (for some property P and object a), wherein the two conjuncts, separately taken, are to be held untrue. In practice, people suffering from (or being affected by) happy unhappiness (if there is some condition or state of mind of this kind) cannot be said strictly ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’, but we can say they are both. In this respect, stratified inconsistencies are interesting case studies for conjunctive paraconsistency (see Ripley, 2015; Barrio & Da Ré, 2018, d'Agostini 2021), whereby some ‘Pa and not Pa’ is acceptable without explosion since the rule of Simplification for contradictions does not work.³

In the first section the case of happy unhappiness is presented with other two similar cases. In the second section, the logic of stratified contradictions is explored: the basic idea is that contradictory stratifications are brought about by special properties, whose logical impact is ruled by the mutually modifying effects of their parts, so that the resulting contradiction is to be conceived as a peculiar, ‘inseparable’ conjunction of contradictories.⁴ The last section substantiates the idea by considering eudemonistic ascriptions: when and how are we entitled to say that a is happy, or unhappy, or neither or both? Can we really say that a is both, or neither, stated that a is happy to be unhappy, or unhappy to be happy? And if we can say a is both, what is the behaviour of the resulting contradiction?

1 Happy Unhappiness, Fortunate Misfortune, Unfortunate Epistemic Fortune

The famous Italian poet (and philosopher) Giacomo Leopardi was extremely unhappy in his life. His negative mood pervades all his poetical and non-poetical work. Inspired by his own unhappiness, he authored beautiful poems. Was Leopardi unhappy, in writing what he wrote? Perhaps he was not. As Paul Valéry observed, well written unhappiness is not so unhappy, in the end.⁵ If we accept Valéry’s suggestion, we will not say that Leopardi was unhappy, nor will we say he was happy. We would more correctly say he was both, as he suffered from (or enjoyed) happy unhappiness: a complex property, with internally conflicting parts. Maybe he was happy as a poet, and unhappy as a human being (§ 3.4), but we have to note that he was happy poet in virtue of his being unhappy man, so we can say he had the special stratified property.⁶ Evidently, we are not referring to the real poet who really lived in the XIX century, but to the ideal–typical Leopardi, taken as paradigmatic of a man whose unhappiness (via poetry) grounds his happiness, so that we can say he has the property of being happy to be unhappy (§ 3.2).

A similar case is The Paradox of Fortunate Misfortune (Smilansky, 1994, 2007). A young girl, Abigail, was born ‘with a combination of unfortunate defects’ in her legs and breathing. To correct them she needed to learn to swim and to continue swimming in an intensive way, which she did, so that, after a certain number of years, her breathing and legs became normal. Meanwhile, she became an excellent swimmer, to the point that she won the women backstroke championship for many years.⁷ What do you think about Abigail? Was she fortunate, or unfortunate? Both? Neither? She was both, in a sense, but we cannot exactly say she was one thing or the other. The appropriate description of Abigail’s case is that her misfortune has made her fortunate. In the same way, we can say that the ideal–typical Leopardi was happy in virtue of and thanks to his unhappiness.⁸ Surely, in the end, Abigail’s fortune was dominant, but in our honest evaluation of the entire case we do not assume one or the other of the two incompatible properties (see 2.1).

Symmetrically opposed is the example of unfortunate fortune mentioned by Fricker (2007: 19–21). It is not presented as a paradox, or as a ‘true contradiction’, it is rather intended to show that ‘credibility is not a good that belongs with the distributive model of justice’ (Fricker, 2007: 19). Nevertheless, it is a useful case study for our present needs, as it depicts a situation whose description and evaluation may involve stratified contradictory predicates. A certain knower, let us call him Gilles, has always been ‘overly esteemed in his capacity as a knower’, and has received an education that favours in him the persuasion that such esteem is justified. His self-confidence strengthens the persuasive impact of his assertions, so confirming (to him and to everyone else) the idea that he has special epistemic authority. Thanks to all this, Gilles receives many social advantages, for instance lucrative employment and high status in all his conversational or discussive transactions. Now ‘all this also causes him to develop such an epistemic arrogance that a range of epistemic virtues are put out of his reach, rendering him closed-minded, dogmatic, blithely impervious to criticism’ (Fricker, 2007: 20). Eventually, he is ‘wronged precisely in his capacity as a knower’, he suffers from a disadvantage that is strictly due to his preliminary advantage and is unprivileged precisely in virtue of his original privilege. Gilles is clearly a case of unfortunate fortunate person (at least from an epistemic point of view).

Do you think that Leopardi was happy? As far as you are acquainted with his case, can you honestly say he was? Most likely, you cannot. If anything, you know his unhappiness was of a special kind, so you can hardly say that he was unhappy either. Do you think Abigail is only fortunate? Most likely you do not. She has been a truly unfortunate girl, in many respects, but you cannot say that she is completely unfortunate, as this would underrate her fortune. Similarly, it is evident that Gilles’ fortune as a knower has made him an unfortunate knower, but we cannot truthfully say he is only epistemically unfortunate, for the same reasons why we cannot say he was a fortunate knower.

And yet, in all these cases we should admit that the two predicates are jointly appropriate: we face objects that have (or seem to have) opposite properties, but we cannot say they have only one of them.

2 Two Gaps for One Glut

In this account, happy unhappiness, fortunate misfortune, unfortunate fortune and similar cases release some true conjunction of the form ‘α & not α’, but in a way that does not allow for Simplification (&Elimination). We have a ‘true contradiction’, a dialetheic situation (Priest, 1987, 2006), but so made that the two contradictory terms are inseparable, as they, separately taken, are untrue. As it were, two gappy (untrue) sentences form a glutty conjunction.⁹

Adopting a convention proposed in d'Agostini 2021 and 2022, I suggest distinguishing dialetheism, intended as the general idea that there are two contradictions, and di-aletheism (to be pronounced di:-ə-ˈli-theism), whereby a true contradiction is a true proposition or statement whose negation is true.¹⁰ A dialetheic but not di-aletheic account of contradictions can be generalized, so we endorse, as mentioned, a conjunctive version of paraconsistency. A similar conception implies that in contradictory cases, the usual behaviour of ‘and’, whereby ‘p & q’ is true iff ‘p’ is true and ‘q’ is true, does not hold; the left-to-right direction of the bi-conditional fails: the two conjuncts are so closely connected, that no separate assertion of them can be held true. It is not the case here of endorsing a position of this kind in general, but the mentioned cases confirm that the conjunctive program may work, at least for some kinds of inconsistency. Leopardi was not strictly happy, nor was he strictly unhappy, though we can say he was both. Abigail was not strictly fortunate nor was she fortunate (the two predicates only capture a half of the situation), but she was both.¹¹

2.1 Unassertability

The separate judgements ‘Abigail is fortunate’, ‘Gilles is unfortunate’, ‘Leopardi was happy’, must be held unassertable, not because they do not strictly correspond to parts of a subsisting state, but because they are incomplete, and specifically misleading, state descriptions. The nature of ‘assertability conditions’ is a controversial topic in the philosophy of language,¹² but there is general agreement about the potentially deceiving action of incomplete statements.¹³ In fact, in case of (putatively) true contradictions, the conjunctive view is very intuitive: in case ‘p and not p’ is true, any separate assertion of ‘p’ or ‘not p’ will be deceiving, omitting a relevant part of the case under discussion.

Evidently, not every partial truth is ‘unassertable’ in this sense. Very often, partial descriptions of occurring states are perfectly assertable, even in the case of strictly connected (‘fused’) properties. Suppose you describe a certain red and round object α: the two properties are metaphysically fused together (see Fine, 2012: 72), but you can truthfully say ‘α is red’ and ‘α is round’ separately. Instead, in case of Abigail, Leopardi, and Gilles, any exclusive selection of one of the two state descriptions would be definitely misleading. In Grice’s classical paradigm, one would say these assertions would violate the maxims of quantity (incomplete conversational conveyance) as well as the maxim of quality (failure of truthfulness), and the latter in virtue of the former. If you assert (or assume, or think) that Abigail is fortunate, people (or yourself) might be led to conclude that she does not deserve any solidarity, while in fact, in a sense, she does. If you assume Gilles is unfortunate, you omit a part of the story which is crucial to understanding his case. Your ascription of the predicates, separately taken, would make your audience believe falsity. Leopardi’s case may be more controversial (see § 3.3), but accepting Valéry’s suggestion, you would not say he was purely and simply unhappy; there was something more in his story (possibly, a special sort of creative unhappiness?).

Such a view can be supported by considering other cases of putatively true contradictions that do not present the stratified form. For instance, Cobreros et al., (2015: 379–380) draw similar conclusions for vagueness, they construct a pragmatic-epistemic semantics for gluts wherein contradictories are taken as bearing ‘half-truth’ (see also Cobreros et al., 2012). To support their view, they mention an experiment of Serchuck et al. (2011) concerning typically vague predicates, such as ‘tall’. As it seems, most naïve speakers accept that a borderline tall man b is tall-and-not-tall but are unwilling to accept an instance of the Excluded Middle, that either ‘b is tall’ or ‘b is not tall’ is true. This does not simply mean that they want ‘a third possibility’. Rather, they are aware that the contradiction is true (is made true by an occurring state of affairs), but the two ‘epistemic parties’ separately defending ‘b is tall’ and ‘b is not tall’ are both incorrect, because they offer an incomplete state description as it were the whole truth.

Generalized conjunctivism in paraconsistency is to be supported by other considerations; yet we can begin by supposing that—at least in this pragmatic-epistemic approach—the idea has some plausibility.

2.2 Predicates that Modify Themselves

Generally, non-simplifiable ‘and’ in natural language are not propositional and cannot be translated into propositional conjunctions, nor do they function anything like conjunction. But the claim that all ‘ands’ are of this kind is ‘an Aristotelian fallacy’, as there are several cases of unreducible conjunction (Schein, 2017: 97). Most similar to the ‘and’ of which we are speaking are cases involving predicate modifiers.

‘Abigail is an American girl’ is correctly translatable into ‘Abigail is a girl and Abigail is American’, and the two conjuncts can be asserted separately without equivocation, because both ‘girl’ and ‘American’ are intended to modify Abigail (just as happens in the case of the red-round ball). Instead, ‘Gilles is a good politician’ is not equivalent to ‘Gilles is good and Gilles is a politician’, as Gilles might not be a good person, and accordingly, equivocation may come from the scope of negation: stated that Gilles is not a good politician, it may well be that Gilles is not a politician but is good. Evidently, we have properties that modify properties: ‘good’ modifies ‘politician’, but not Gilles directly.

Now, we can admit that the kind of conjunction that joins ‘Leopardi was happy’ and ‘Leopardi was unhappy’ is such, that one proposition works as a modifier of the other. More precisely, each of the two properties modifies the other: they are mutual modifiers. As the two properties are ascribed to the same object, the most evident consequence is that if Gilles is a good politician we can infer that Gilles is a politician, while having that Leopardi was affected by happy unhappiness (or unhappy happiness), we cannot infer Leopardi’s happiness or unhappiness. The close connection of the properties is given in virtue of the mutual modification imported by one and the other. And more specifically, they are inseparable because the separation of one, alethically, implies the exclusion of the other. Clearly, dialetheists contend that in case of contradictions the exclusionary action of truth fails: the truth of ‘p’ does not necessarily entail that ‘not p’ is untrue (or false). A conjunctive account of dialetheias implies that, instead, alethic exclusion is preserved: when we say ‘it is true that Leopardi was happy’ we mean that ‘Leopardi was unhappy’ is untrue, but we are perfectly entitled to depict the situation by saying ‘it is true that Leopardi was both happy and unhappy’. In practice, negation loses all exclusionary action, while truth preserves it.¹⁴

You might give various interpretations of these cases. Some of them will avoid the dialetheic conclusion. For instance you may be willing to adopt a non-adjunctive strategy, so you may say that Leopardi’s happy unhappiness is only apparently expressible as a stratification of incompatible properties, for instance, because the happiness is not to be ascribed to him or to his being unhappy, but to his work. Or you may concede that he actually instantiated the complex property, but there was no mutual modification, as he had rather successful and not strictly happy unhappiness: he was a successful though unhappy poet. Much depends, evidently, on the sub-properties you postulate as distinctive of happiness, so I will reconsider these options later (§ 3.2.). But also the other strategy makes sense: the description of his case in terms of ‘Hλ & not Hλ’ has some plausibility. And if you accept this, you ought to endorse, eventually, a dialetheic and non-di-aletheic conclusion: Leopardi had both properties, but one cannot truthfully say or think that he had only one of them.

2.3 Stratified Truth

It is important to remember that in the cases of Leopardi, Abigail, and Gilles, we have some object λ that has a certain property (being happy, being fortunate or unfortunate) in virtue of having another, opposite, property. Unhappiness is cause-ground of happiness, misfortune generates fortune, and vice versa. Interestingly, the same should be said of the Liar’s sentence ‘μ’ that says

‘μ’ is untrue

As we know, if one assumes it is true, then it must be untrue, and if it is untrue then it is true. But ‘μ’ is (said) true in virtue of being false, and false because it is (said) true. So its truth grounds its falsity and vice versa. Again we have mutual modification of properties. Abigail’s misfortune implied her fortune, Leopardi’s unhappiness implied his happiness, just like the truth of ‘μ’ implies its being untrue, and Gilles’ fortune brought about his misfortune as a knower.

There is no need here to develop the analogy, but consider that, as mentioned, the focus on stratification has been one of the main lines in the analysis of Liar-like paradoxes, which makes us think that the idea of mutual modifiers could be profitably applied for a new glutty interpretation of these paradoxes.¹⁵ We can admit that the sentence ‘μ’ ascribes to itself the stratified property of being a truly untrue statement, so a predicate of the form T〈¬Tx〉.¹⁶ As I have suggested elsewhere (d'Agostini 2021, 6866–5867), such an interpretation can be supported via an assertion-sensitive semantics, so that the Liar’s sentence ‘¬T〈μ〉’, taken as an assertion, is held to be truth-implying, so perfectly equivalent to T〈¬Tμ〉. Normally, assertion-sensitive approaches to the Liar are intended to reject the dialetheic view (see Goldstein, 2000; Jago, 2018, Ch. 9), but it can be acknowledged that, given T〈¬Tμ〉, with the only support of the T-schema, we will have T〈μ ∧ ¬μ〉.¹⁷ The move from the stratified to the conjunctive form is perfectly acceptable. The point is to see whether, once obtained the conjunctive truth, we are still willing to accept the separate truth of it conjuncts. If the epistemic-pragmatic account of the previous cases works, then we will not. As a matter of fact, ‘μ’ cannot be held true, nor can ‘¬μ’, but there are reasons to believe that the state description in terms of ‘μ ∧ ¬μ’ is true.

3 Stratified Happiness: A Hypothesis

In the previous section we have established three points. First, that stratifications may release contradictions, so that, given Φ(not Φα) for some property Φ and some object α, you can correctly (truthfully) describe the situation in terms of ‘Φα & not Φα’. Second, that Simplification (the left-to-right direction of the bi-conditional definition of ‘&’) fails in these contradictions: we have a complex property, consisting of a close connection of sub-properties that modify each other (one––if taken separately––is intended to exclude the other). Third, that such a view consists of accepting the dialetheic idea that there might be some cases of true contradictions but implying a different view about the joined subsistence of contradictories. It is assumed the conjunctivist view whereby contradictories are inseparable parts of only one state of affairs (d'Agostini 2021, 6868), so that any separate assertion of one or the other is unassertable, and untrue.

Now the next step is to check whether these ideas can be applied to the case of happiness, or rather, to explore which notion of happiness can support the theory.

3.1 Stratified H

The property we call happiness (H hereafter), is especially challenging, as in principle, there are reasons to believe that the concept we call H is multi-dimensional, variously conceived as an emotion, a mental state, a value, an affective episode, an enduring or transitory state, a disposition, etc., occurring for the most disparate reasons and based on the widest range of conditions. ‘The fauna of happiness is very varied. Amusement, being care-free, comfort, content, delight, elation, enthusiasm, exhilaration, affective fusion, ecstasy, fun, gaiety, gladness, …’ (Mulligan, 2016: 134). Despite this, there is a rich variety of recent contributes about H, especially, as Haybron, 2020 stresses, in the philosophy of psychology and of social sciences. Our focus here is on the alethic evaluation of H, so not on ‘H’ strictly intended as a mental or social state, but as the property of being H, expressed by the predicate ‘x is H’ which we can (correctly or incorrectly) ascribe to some object x.

In practice, we are interested in the ‘logic’ of H, and hence in the truth conditions of H-ascriptions.¹⁸ In particular, we need to specify when and how we can truthfully ascribe the predicates:

• (1) H(Hx) (x is happy to be happy)

• (2) ¬H(Hx) (x is unhappy to be happy)

• (3) H(¬Hx) (x is happy to be unhappy)

• (4) ¬H(¬Hx) (x is unhappy to be unhappy)

The cases (1) and (4) seem irrelevant, at first, as normally we are happy to be happy, and unhappy to be unhappy, so the iteration has no distinctive effect. The equivalence.

• (5) H(Ha) ↔ Ha

Seems to hold unrestrictedly. But note that if (5) holds, then (2) and (3) are implausible, and (1) and (4) are simple happiness and unhappiness, respectively. Instead, if we admit of (2) and (3), then also iterated positive and negative H (1) and (4) must hold.

In fact, the endorsement of (5), and hence the irrelevance of stratifications, is generally due to postulate that H is a value as such (an objective value), so that (1) and (4) are obvious, and (2) and (3) are wrong, being unequivocal marks of mental disease, or ‘incorrect emotions’ (Mulligan, 2016: 135). However, in the psychological literature the second order factivity of H expressed by (5) is discussed, namely considering that a happy person is not always happy to be happy (or unhappy to be unhappy).¹⁹ More specifically, the idea that being happy about one’s own unhappiness or being unhappy to be happy is always a symptom of mental disorder is arguable, as one may have many subjective reasons to be ¬H(H) or H(¬H). For example, insecurity, lack of self-esteem, excessive discipline, religion, repeated negative experiences, realism, coolness, a sense of guilt or regret in consideration of human frailty, are somewhat subjectively justified reasons for being in some sense ¬H(H) or H(¬H) (unhappy to be happy; happy to be unhappy).

Also note that (2) and (3) can be held equivalent, in principle, but much depends on how one interprets the stratification. One might think that in case of a having H(¬H), H is dominant: a is definitely H, and the same holds for ¬H(Ha), so that given H(¬Ha) and ¬H(Ha) we would have Ha and ¬Ha, respectively. This obliteration of the ‘internal’ predicate may make sense, sometimes (see § 3.3), but the stratified cases mentioned in Sect. 1 are peculiar. Here we see that having a certain property is the condition for having the opposite, and this is why we can accept the inference from (2) or (3) to ‘Ha & ¬Ha’.

3.2 H as Reflexive Property

There is no need to give a general theory of H in this context. We are only interested in checking whether a minimal but plausible view about H can confirm the account of happy unhappiness as a sort of stratified contradiction along the suggested lines.

Let us first assume that we are dealing with H as a property of persons. Surely, this only holds if we conceive H as a metal/existential state, or an emotion, while we sometimes speak of ‘H’ (and similar properties) as referring to situations, facts, or acts (see typically the ‘felicity conditions’ of speech acts, or the ‘political happiness’ of societies). Our focus is the instantiation of reflexive cases of the kind (1)-(4), and normally, as far as we know, only people are capable of reflexive attitudes: there could be a happy situation, or a happy nation, but not a situation or a nation that is happy, or unhappy, to be happy, or unhappy.

So, we have the first condition:

• (i) the object x that is said to be H (the H-bearer) is a person.

Now we can ask: what is it that makes a person H? what can we assume as H-maker? As it is normally conceded, a can be H for a variety of reasons, and may receive happiness from a variety of sources. All the sources and reasons normally admitted in the literature seem to be plausible H-makers. What we can say altogether is that there is a variety of putative goods that one may enjoy as sources (reasons) of H, ranging from positive self-perception, to economic or intellectual or practical or spiritual or moral flourishing, from the classical eudaimonia (which is possibly the most general concept), and to the less well-known but equally expressive oikeiosis (being at ease in the world, which for the Stoics comes from knowing oneself). Finally, we may move from well-being calculus, as traditionally intended, to the economics of ‘capabilities’ as ‘fundamental entitlements’ (Nussbaum, 2003), or to what Kant conceived as the only ‘moral sentiment’, the respect for oneself and one’s own morality.

We do not need all this, as our aim is the logical form of stratified H, we need to preserve the general ascription of H without any specific connection with one or another theory of H. Thus, we may assume that to be said H, you must minimally enjoy some unspecified goods (spiritual, psychological, practical, empirical, juridical, existential), which work as ‘reasons’ for H (Mulligan, 2016: 134–135; see also Haybron, 2020; and Landau, 2017: Ch. 5). Then we have the second condition:

• (ii) x can be said H if x enjoys one or more goods of unspecified nature (such as health, well-being, intellectual flourishing, public admiration, etc.)

Evidently, (ii) gives the external, objective conditions of H-ascription, but normally, they are not held sufficient, as people may possess many goods without being (and being considered) H (and without considering them ‘goods’ at all). No objective collection of goods seems to provide, as such, a truthmaker for ‘a is H’.²⁰ We should include a third condition, the subjective part of the story, given by self-evaluation:

• (iii) x can be said H if x is aware of possessing one or more goods and evaluates them altogether or singularly as goods as such, for x and x’s life.

Notably, the basic idea that justifies the subsistence of cases of the kind (2) and (3) is that H requires self-evaluation, and self-evaluation is iterable: I can evaluate my evaluations, and thus, I can judge them wrong or right, I can evaluate my state of life (my eudaimonia or my condition of oikeiosis) but I can also evaluate whether this condition or state is a source of H or not.

Simply, in virtue of (iii) we admit that H postulates reflection. An H person is aware (in some sense and to some extent) of being H. No happiness without perception of one’s own happiness. A person reflects on her life (or mental or existential state) and gives an H-evaluation of it.

What we deal with is that the objective judgement of happiness (whereby ‘a is H’ is true) is grounded on subjective second order conditions, so that (i) H denotes the state of mind or state of being of a person; (ii) such a state is grounded on more or less objectively positive conditions (goods); and (iii) the person evaluates such conditions as positive source of H. We can also move to the characterization of ¬H accordingly: ¬Ha will be a person who lacks some (more or less objective) goods, of whatever kind, and is aware of her own lack as a negative condition.

Now all this given, how can we picture the state of a whose happiness is a source of unhappiness (or vice versa)?

3.3 Consequences

Some consequences of this threefold characterization deserve to be noted.

First, in virtue of (iii), each ‘good’ would work as a H-source/reason for a only if it is acknowledged by a as good for her. In this respect, we ought to anticipate each entry by ‘thinks’, ‘believes’ or ‘feels’:

a is H if a believes/feels to be in good health

a is H if a believes/feels to be successful in her own enterprise/life

a is H if a believes/feels to have what she wants

These evaluations might be wrong (as Mulligan, 2016 stresses): maybe a is unknowingly ill, her success is only apparent (in fact, if a knew some more details of the case, she would evaluate her state differently), maybe she believes to have what in fact she does not (for instance, she believes to have the fidelity of her husband, the admiration of her employees, etc.). Despite this, a’s situation would work as an exact truthmaker for Ha.

Second, in virtue of (iii) we admit that H-bearers (persons) must be aware to be H. Which means, for our concern, that expressions such as:

a is not aware of being H

I was not aware of being H

are inappropriate, or rather: they postulate a different, solely objective, notion of H (say, as objective well-being, richness, success, eudaimonia, etc.). Our characterization is different, as it searches for an objective overall judgement, though grounded on subjective conditions.²¹So when someone says: ‘a is not aware of her own H’ or ‘I was not aware of being H’, what she actually means is:

what would make me H is not a source of H for a

what makes me H now was not a source of H for me at that time

Accordingly, when we speak of ‘unaware happiness’ we mean that there are or there were what we conceive as the conditions of being H: a in our judgement enjoyed many goods and should be happy to enjoy them, or she ought to love her life as it is; but these conditions are not or were not active sources of H.

Third, our conception of H as established by (iii) can overcome the difference between subjective and objective H, as we postulate that H is grounded on objectively subjective goods: we can acknowledge that a certain condition that we would perceive as a source of unhappiness can work, for a, in opposite direction, without dispelling the objective status of overall H-evaluations.²² This works especially in the case of Leopardi, as one might possibly say that he was not aware of his own happiness, so there would not be any contradiction: he was unhappy, period. But if we keep to our characterization of H, such a view is implausible. In virtue of (iii) we cannot admit of unaware happiness or unhappiness (see § 3.4).

A fourth consequence is that (iii) justifies the possibility of ‘neither’ people: people who are not ‘H’ but are not ‘not H’ either, to the extent that they do not reflect upon their conditions and the goods they have (or lack). In this sense, H works as a partial predicate, denoting a sparse property. Someone is H, someone is not H, someone is neither, for unconscious or indifferent, or because does not approve of giving special evaluations of the H-sort. A person can be satisfied by the goods she has, or believes she has, without being strictly H or non-H.²³

3.4 Contradictory H?

As mentioned, our concern is not ‘Leopardi’ as a real historical poet, but the ideal type we can discover by exploring his case and by accepting Valéry’s diagnosis: the ideal poet λ, bearer of stratified happiness, whose case is similar to Abigail (α) or Gilles (γ). Both α and γ are fortunate and unfortunate in virtue of opposite conditions. Accordingly, λ, the happy unhappy poet, was (in hypothesis) happy in authoring his poems and essays, but he wrote them just because he was lacking some subjective goods (in Leopardi’s historical case he was alone, ill, forced by his father to study many hours every day, etc.). And thus, the conditions of his unhappiness were the same conditions of his happiness.

There is a wide and various literature about depression and negative moods (lack of goods, unhappiness) at the origin of creativity.²⁴ To the extent that creativity is held to be a capital condition of H, a certain combination of H and ¬H can be assumed as ideal-typically distinctive of poetic or artistic lives. What has been advanced in Sect. 2 is that, in cases in which ¬H is truly the condition of H, or vice versa, there might be a contradiction, but with a fusion (inseparable unity) of contradictories; the stratification brings about a special property, a special sort of inseparable H and ¬H. We have obtained in the previous sub-sections that H is subjective (it requires a person’s self-evaluation); it is a multidimensional concept, as different ‘goods’ (subjectively determined as such) might be reasons for H, in isolation or jointly; and H-evaluations regard H-bearers’ condition, for the present state or globally.²⁵

What we now must confirm is whether such a characterization of H can justify the ideas advanced in Sect. 2 in case of λ. Having stated that a collection of givens may make Ha true, we can express the conditions of H by a set of g₁, g₂ … g_n. (There is no need to introduce special technicalities, or some ‘H-calculus’ to justify (2) and (3) as correct state descriptions.) A possible diagnosis could be thus to state that some g_i in a’s postulated set of conditions is a’s unhappiness, and a’s evaluation of her own condition as ¬Ha becomes a good, as far as it prepares the conditions for Ha. In this sense, the negative mood that is caused by the self-aware lack of some perceived goods is the H-maker for a, what makes a H. In case of λ, we would have that if λ is aware that g_i (his unhappiness) is the condition of his creativity, and if his creativity makes him happy, then he would be happy to be unhappy, in at least subjectively justified sense.²⁶

Now the already mentioned strategies to dissolve the contradiction seem arguable. One may parametrize the incompatibles, stating that λ is H as a poet, but ¬H as a human being. Generally, parametrizations, or ‘non-adjunctive’ treatments of contradictions, are very intuitive, and adaptable to many cases of cognitive dissonances: it is assumed that ‘p’ is true in a certain respect, for a certain time in a certain world or according to a certain story, and ‘not p’ is true, but in another time, world, or story. But this interpretation is hardly applicable to our case. First, the opposite properties we are speaking about are instantiated by the same object in the same world (ideally, the actual world), and they belong to the (more or less fictional) object, according to the same story. Second, the parametrized state description will not capture the mutual modification of the two properties, the paradox whereby having ¬H is the condition of having H, even if H in principle should exclude ¬H.²⁷

Another alternative strategy is to suggest that λ is able to transform his own lack into a positive good, so that λ deserves to be called definitely and altogether H, happiness is dominant. The idea is typical of all those positions that stress the possibility of ‘overturning’ bad into good, and in this dialectic, a would judge her failures as indirect sources of success, and hence of H, and as such, not as failures but as steps towards H.²⁸ These intuitions are not applicable to our case (and to other stratified incompatibles), because the negative side (unhappiness) is the permanent cause of the positive. If λ were to experiment some failure, λ would become unhappy, and, simultaneously, would become happy to be unhappy, but being aware that his ¬H is the source of H, he will appreciate his own H as a good. As there is mutual implication, like in the Liar’s case, we cannot say there is real dominance of H or ¬H, no more than can we say the Liar’s sentence is dominantly true or dominantly false.

Alternatively, a dynamic interpretation of the contradiction would state that λ’s H-state is oscillating, or he is (believes to be) sometimes H or ¬H, but we cannot say he is definitely H, nor can we say he is definitely ¬H. Our idealtypical poet λ would perceive himself as enjoying a fundamental good (creativity) in the act of writing, and in evaluating his own products; immediately after, he would perceive that his own unhappiness is the condition of his H, so he would remember his own lack of goods and his miserable condition, but he will in turn be aware that this unhappy state is the condition of being the artist that he is. H and ¬H would be intended as belonging to distinct temporal slices, so that we cannot ascribe to λ’s overall state one or the other property. The contradiction would no longer be a contradiction of the form ‘Hλ ∧ ¬Hλ’.

The dynamic interpretation has some plausibility. Many authors believe that Liar-like contradictions, releasing biconditionals of the form α ↔ ¬α, do not bring about any effective (metaphysical) dialetheia, viz. a true proposition of the form α ∧ ¬α.²⁹ However, even the supporters of this dynamic view may concede that the bi-conditional form, capturing the mutual implication of contradictories, is a form of contradiction. If not else, it satisfies the ‘Aristotelian challenge’, i.e. the meta-contradiction, whereby in a true contradiction we should have the joint subsistence of two incompatibles, two items that cannot jointly subsist. Whether the jointness is to be interpreted in terms of static factual conjunction or mutual implication (or as an ‘and’ inferred from a mutual implication, in virtue of the Excluded Middle) is still up for debate (see Authors 2020 and Ficara, 2021).

In any case, dynamic or static parametrizations do not seem applicable to the mentioned cases of Leopardi, Abigail and Gilles. As I have repeatedly mentioned, in these cases, as well as in the Liar’s case, we have opposites (the extension and the anti-extension of a property) which work as mutual modifiers, so that one subsists in virtue of the other: the Liar’s sentence is true in virtue of its falsity, just like Leopardi is happy in virtue of his unhappiness, and Abigail has become fortunate thanks to her unfortunate condition, while Gilles is an unfortunate knower just because he has been fortunate knower (and vice versa).

In this sense, we can say we have one person with two properties, one state of affairs joining properties which work as mutual modifiers; and the properties are so closely intertwined in virtue of their mutual action that one can say there is only one property, made of incompatible sub-properties, in stratified form. Leopardi as well as Abigail and Gilles, and not unlike the Liar’s sentence ‘μ’, can be seen as typical bearers of one special property made of joint incompatibles. There is negation, intended as marking the anti-extension of happiness, fortune or truth (what is not true, not fortunate, not happy), but there is no exclusion-negation (and no falsity as truth of negation), as λ and similar objects are located at the border between having and not having fortune or happiness, so jointly and not separately having both, one property and its negative correlate.³⁰