What is “Eastern” Happiness?
Erich Fromm and Lin Yutang on cultural differences
Is there a difference between the way we perceive happiness and life in the West in comparison with “Eastern” cultures? Erich Fromm argues that the capitalist West is stuck in a “mode of having,” searching for life satisfaction in the possession of things; while the “Eastern” view or life (in his example, a Japanese poem) is more oriented towards “being.” Chinese-American writer Lin Yutang (1895-1976) also thinks that there is a specifically “Chinese” way of being happy – but do they both mean the same?
This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.
If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me!
Erich Fromm and Bhutan’s National Happiness
In a famous passage, discussed in a previous post, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm compares what he calls the “Eastern” way of seeing the world with the “Western” way.
(I prefer to put “Eastern” in quotation marks here, because it really seems a bit odd and haphazard to stuff Mongolian, Tibetan, Indian, Pakistani, Burmese, Malay, Thai, Chinese, Korean and Japanese cultures, along with dozens of others, into one category. “Western” might arguably denote something more consistent and uniform, since the European/American West has a long tradition of at least having a common Christian foundation, common origins in Greek and Roman philosophy and history, and a pervasively uniform, mainly US-led pop culture in the present.)
Fromm, in his book “To Have or To Be,” presents two poems and asks us to witness the cultural differences in the way the two poets react to the beauty of a flower:
English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1850–1892):
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694):
I see the nazuna blooming
By the hedge!
”The difference is,” Fromm says, “between a society centred around persons and one centred around things.” While Tennyson wants to possess the flower, plucking it out and killing it, the Japanese poet is merely “looking carefully” at the flower, letting it live on instead of destroying it in the process.
Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German social psychologist and philosopher who had enormous popular success from the 1950s all the way to the end of his life in 1980. We discuss his work and his relation to Marxism and Freud.
We also saw in a previous post how Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index assumes that there are specific cultural values that are unique to that country: religious rituals, its traditional language, and even particular forms of behaviour or causes of happiness that are different from those found in the West.
Bhutanese happiness is supposed to be different from the Western concept of happiness:
So is there really such a thing as “Eastern” happiness? Do the Bhutanese, the Japanese and the Chinese perceive the world differently? And is there something that we Westerners can learn from “Eastern” happiness for our own lives?
Lin Yutang: There are no “higher” pleasures
Lin Yutang (林語堂, October 10, 1895 – March 26, 1976) was a Chinese writer and philosopher, and also, surprisingly for a man of letters, inventor of a Chinese typewriter. He lived much of his life outside of China, in New York, Taiwan and Singapore, and he died, aged 80, in Hong Kong. Surprisingly perhaps for a Chinese writer, he wrote some of his books originally in English, and this was also the case for “The Importance of Living” (1937), the book in which he discusses the differences between Chinese and Western happiness.
(By the way, in Chinese the surname comes first, so the man’s surname is Lin and his Christian name is Yutang – and yes, “Christian name” is right: he was, for much of his life, a Christian.)
The first striking feature of Lin’s understanding of happiness is that he does not believe in any “higher” forms of happiness.
Most of us would probably say that some pleasures are more basic: eating, enjoying the sun on a warm day, or having sex are all pleasures that are available not only to us, but also to animals. We usually think of such “animal” pleasures as less valuable, or less refined; while we would perhaps say that the enjoyment of classic music, or of poetry, or of fine art, is of a “higher” kind.
Hedonism is the thesis that happiness and pleasure are the same. But is that true? Does the enjoyment of pleasures like good food, chocolate, sex and a myriad other things that we consume everyday — do these things really make us happier?
But Lin Yutang immediately shocks the reader by refusing to agree with this. If we look at the supposedly “higher” pleasures, he says, we see that they really are more about the senses than the intellect. For example, looking at a painting, no matter how “high” and artsy it may be, just recalls the sensory experience of being in that place which is depicted in the painting.
Good novels also give us experiences of the senses. They are not primarily built of cold, intellectual analysis. Instead they transport us, by describing sensory experiences, to other places, evoke our memories of tasting food or of seeing beautiful landscapes, or scare us with the description of terrible experiences and fearsome monsters.
So for Lin Yutang, sensual pleasures are really the only kind of real pleasure – and what we call higher or intellectual pleasures are only pleasurable because they remind us of those other, more tangible pleasures. Sensual pleasures are stronger and more direct, and therefore one should always prefer them, he writes.
Interestingly, Bertrand Russell is not so far removed from this when he says that we should engage in the world with the “zest” and immediacy of a child.
In “The Conquest of Happiness”, Russell argues that what makes us happy is an active life, directed by a deep and sustained interest in the world.
“Chinese happiness”?
In his book, Lin Yutang also discusses the difference between Western and Chinese happiness. For this, he goes back to a Chinese classic: the “thirty-three happy moments” of literary critic and writer Jin Sheng-Tan (金聖歎), who lived from 1610 to 1661, when was executed for having protested against the appointment of a corrupt official. His thirty-three moments blend bodily pleasures with “higher” pleasures, but always stay firmly rooted in the enjoyment of the senses.
Lin Yutang. Source: Wikipedia
Here it is the contrast of heat and coolness that is the source of pleasure, and the happy moment culminates in the eating of rice. This is truly a moment of pure sensual pleasure.
Something more interesting goes on here. The source of the pleasure is not the wine, for that is not yet present. The source of the happiness that is mentioned in the last word of the passage can only be his friend and the fact that his wife has given up her golden hairpin in order for him to buy some wine. But both of these, the visit of the friend and the sacrifice of his wife, are not sensual pleasures.
The happiness that comes from them is not experienced through the senses, through taste or smell or sight. It is the happiness to know that one has the support and the love of one’s family and friends, and this is a feeling that cannot be properly described as a mere ‘pleasure’ of the senses.
The house is whitewashed, the floors swept clean. Yes, in a sense, these are sensual pleasures. But this is not where the pleasure reaches its highest point. It is the fact that the workmen leave and the friends arrive, “sitting on different couches in order.” Is it the fact that they are sitting “in order” that causes the author’s happiness, or is it not, more likely, the fact that his friends have come to spend an evening with him in his new house? And isn’t the latter really an expression of a higher-order, a typically human emotion, the love towards one’s friends? Would it be the same if the workmen were sitting in order on the couches? Probably not.
And here: Lin Yutang wants us to accept the point that it is the sound, just like water pouring out of a vase, that is the source of happiness. But then, why is it important that these are “our” children and that they recite the classics fluently? If they were strangers counting fluently from one to hundred, would the experienced happiness be the same? Or if the children were reciting curses or using dirty language, wouldn’t that also sound just like water from a vase? But would it cause the author quite the same enjoyment?
Is the East really different?
It’s difficult to see what the difference between East and West might be in these cases. Fromm, with whom we began our little trip to the other end of the world, makes a point about looking vs plucking the flower: about the spirituality of the East as opposed to the materialism of the West. And the government of Bhutan wants to suggest “that true abiding happiness cannot exist while others suffer,” and that this is the point of Buddhist happiness, while in the West, egoist happiness can co-exist with the suffering of others.
Lin Yutang’s book “The Importance of Living” is a passionate defence of the value of happiness in our lives and a meditation on how to achieve it. Lin is as provocative as his ideas are original and his polished, literary style is itself always a sensual pleasure.
Amazon affiliate link. If you buy through this link, Daily Philosophy will get a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks!
Of course, Lin Yutang and Jin Sheng-Tan are just two out of a procession of thousands of poets and writers whom China has brought forth over the centuries, and surely some would support the point that Fromm wants to make.
But we also see that things are not so black and white. The Chinese classic author does find happiness in having found the means to build a house. And not a hut in the forest, but a civilised, clean home with paper windows, paintings, calligraphy scrolls and sofas for his friends. The gold hairpin of his wife has to be sacrificed for a gallon of wine – and one is tempted to ask how the wife might have felt about that. Is this truly Eastern spirituality, or is it not just a form of domestic abuse inflicted by a drunkard on his innocent wife? And what about the children? Is the enjoyment the writer gets from the recitation of “our” children not an expression of a possessive attitude towards these children? Is this “our children” and the pride that the author derives from their performance not very much a kind of “having” instead of an experience of “being”?
That’s not to say that one direction on the compass is better or worse than another. But it does call into question the idealisation of “Eastern” spirituality by Fromm, and perhaps we have to be careful, when we read his work, to keep a critical distance to some of his arguments and his more persuasive attempts to make us accept his views.
And true happiness? Who knows, perhaps, after all, it can be found in spending a few minutes reading a blog post about Fromm’s philosophy and an ancient Chinese poet.
Return to The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this, please subscribe!
