It was a snowy winter night. A policeman on patrol stopped by a newly built park. There he saw an old man on the swing, nearly buried in snow. Deeming him as another random drunk, the policemen took no care, but still, something seemed rather bizarre about him – from the old man’s trembling lips comes a haunting lyric: “Life is brief. Fall in love, maidens, before the crimson bloom fades from your lips. Before the tides of passion cool within you – for those of you who know no tomorrow” (Kurosawa).
This is a scene from one of Akira Kurosawa’s most pronounced film works, To Live. Later on, the policeman learned he actually witnessed the very last moment of the old man called Kanji Watanabe, who passed away from severe stomach cancer. In his funeral, his family and friends deplored his departure and talked about his sudden personality shift: the unparalleled passion he instilled on dealing with a cesspool complaint, and his endeavor to push for a new children’s park in the bureaucratic municipal administration. In his funeral, the audience is implied with how he suffered before death: the helplessness upon knowing his ‘death sentence’, his unfilial son caring nothing but his inheritance, his boss taking credit for the park he toiled over for… but this is not the end of his misery, or his long, ‘unpleasurable’ life. Rather, this last scene on the swing is the destination of his journey, a late blossom of life, the conclusion of a long way towards the genuine understanding of ‘joy.’ What Watanabe had gone through is not a path rarely tread upon; it’s a confluence of philosophers, social theorists, and individual thinkers. Still, it’s a rather lonesome journey, because we all start uniquely from where we are, and embark on our own odyssey in answering ‘the concerning question.’
The question takes forms or variations like searching for meaning, pursuing a good life, exploring spirituality, living by faith, etc. Zadie Smith, in her essay, “Joy”, frames the question as untangling the intricacies of pleasure and joy. According to Smith, “a lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure,” meaning pleasure naturally leads to joy as the scale of emotion increases. Dealing with a public for whom pleasure and joy are merely two junctions on the same continuity, Smith approaches this issue from multiple angles and tries to establish her ‘theory of joy’ that is clearly differentiated from the fundamentals of pleasure. She first defines pleasure from her personal experiences, giving examples like food, people’s faces, and (occasionally) her child, suggesting that pleasure is a more immediate, physiological thing originated from “the flavor of something good in [one’s] mouth” or making fun of strangers by gawking and gossiping (Smith 1, 2). However, though Smith tries to define joy as something complicated and different as “a strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight,” she nonetheless builds her ‘theory of joy’ upon biological or physiological foundations: to elucidate the pleasure-joy distinction for readers, she relies on examples like “amphetamine ecstasy” that helped her get close to the feeling of joy when clubbing. This bottom-up approach to joy-pleasure distinction in a biologically-based perspective persists until the very end of the essay: when informed the quote, “It hurts just as much as it is worth” that reminds her of the hurtful nature of joy, she intuitively rejects this idea and is baffled why anyone would choose joy over pleasure, because “the end of a pleasure brings no great harm… and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.” This a biological understanding of pleasure and joy from the angle of sensory experiences, based on the economic assumption that rational man will always maximize utility by avoiding harm and choosing pleasure, which I deem as problematic and essentially counter-humanism. Though Smith is clearly critical of this embrace of a biology-dominated view of humanity, as she mocked it’s only what animals would sensibly do (Smith 6), this bottom-up methodology probably obstructs her from drawing a solid, confident conclusion that joy and pleasure are fundamentally different. In this way, Smith’s ‘theory of joy’ leads to a position where joy’s legitimacy cannot be upheld, and eventually, the pessimistic ending where she mocks on choosing the pleasure, massively produced and incessantly consumed, is just animal.
Still, despite this overall confusion about joy’s value caused by the author’s failure to take a non-biological and thus non-animal path towards a ‘theory of joy’, Smith does offer us some insight into what joy could be like. She insightfully points out “some small piece of joy” could be felt in particular experiences, though they only “mimicked joy’s conditions pretty well” (Smith 4). On dance floors, from the “communal experience” where “All was dance floor. Everybody danced”, from the smileys’ unconditioned generosity that allowed them to “pass beyond their own egos”, the needs for belongingness and love are evanescently satisfied, and thus a sense of joy briefly touched upon, enlightening on the audience how the true joy feels like (Smith 4). Though the author doesn’t explicitly point it out herself, she seems to unconsciously realize that joy is not a conditioned response to some random stimuli but a deep sense of satisfaction felt when fundamental psychological needs are satisfied (Smith 5). That’s why she emphasized the experience of clubbing only “mimicked joy’s condition” because it’s only an inferior, ephemeral satisfaction of the needs from which joy is derived, and it “had no substance whatsoever now, here, in the harsh light of the morning.” In fact, one of the reasons why we are more than Pavlov’s dogs is precisely our ability to feel joy, and our yearning for it. On the other hand, the true satisfaction of those needs where joy arises originates from things like long-term intimate relationships that actually yield very little pleasure (Smith 6). Hence, it’s possible to conclude pleasure and joy are different things: the former is the sensory gratification of physiological desires, while the latter is the satisfaction of human psychology’s deep, inner needs for love, belonging, self-esteem, etc.
As far as I am concerned, the author’s impotence in arguing for the clear distinction arises from our social reality. The capitalistic value or ideology blurs the semantic difference between the two words and tries to replace joy with pleasure because the latter can be commodified, easily reproduced, and thus used for profiting. Therefore, the essentially humanistic focus of joy is shifted to the technicality of pleasure – it’s not the problem of pursuing joy, but how to manufacture pleasure. This structural societal change manifests itself as the underlying semantic change that eventually results in the equivalency of pleasure and joy, as pointed out by Smith among her audience. The discussion of pleasure and joy’s difference and their relative significance, then, is posited in a broader structural value change in modern society, in which form is deemed to be greater than content, technology greater than human thoughts, and technicality greater than meaning. In this way, Smith’s essay could be usefully seen as a product of the socio-political reality of our times. Her attempt to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tool, or to negate the pleasure-joy equivalency theory as a superstructure of modern society from the angle of modern biology, is a destined failure. With this in mind, it’s ironic to look back to see how Smith starts with the ambition to entangle the pleasure-joy mess in modern society but only shows how hedonism entrenches the pleasure-joy continuity, which Smith fails to destroy (1, 6).
This disconnection to meaning as a symptom of modernity results in the inability to distinguish between pleasure and her joy Smith points out in her audience, and her own failure in putting forth a concrete argument in favor of joy. On the other hand, this general social trend of losing contact with meaning is also intimately related to the death of expertise, a concept suggested by Tom Nichols. In his article “How America Lost Faith in Expertise,” Nichols centers around the issue of the expert’s position in a democratic society. He points out the danger of the common skepticism over professionals. The essay’s theoretical construction consists of two main social roles within the US society, “professionals” and “laypeople”. While the former is defined as “people who have mastered the specialization of skills,” the later refers to everyone else in the modern society as a result of the division of labor, with little “competence to judge most of [the vital and intricate issues and acknowledges]” because the modern world is becoming too complex to be fully grabbed by any individual (Nichols 63, 64). The author then contends, “this overwhelming complexity produced feelings of helplessness and anger,” engendered by their frustration that the intellectual “is needed too much,” leads to a “natural skepticism regarding expert,” resulting in a “collapse of communication” (Nichols 61). The advent of the digital age only exacerbates the situation, where the “stupidest people… [are] one click away”, the boundary of fact and opinion is blurred, and the “echo chamber “effect leads to the retribalization of politics, “miring millions of Americans in their own political and intellectual biases” (Nichols 68, 69). On the other hand, due to this “collapse of functional citizenship,” “experts disengage, choosing to speak mostly to one another,” rendering conversation between social groups even more unlikely. This distrust of expertise, along with their knowledge, forces individuals to back to themselves and embrace individualism, which, in its extremist and worst form, could be detrimental (Nichols 72). Since no subject can be formed without the influence of ideology, the reckless break with intellectuals impairs an individual’s critical thinking and may lead to a complete penetration of mainstream social values like scientism or hedonism. In this broadly delineated social picture, the problem of pleasure and joy can thus be connected to the demise of expertise. Meaning, embodied by experts, is no longer a part of today’s mass society and mass culture that champions hedonism – no wonder why the distinction between pleasure and joy becomes blurry under this dominant ideology.
Here it brings us back to Watanabe’s personal struggle. Upon knowing his imminent death after just a few months, Watanabe finally retreats from the swamp of populist ideology which Nichols points out as a widespread phenomenon in modern society. Watanabe once lives in the way all others in the bureaucracy do – to “pretend” to work hard so that others won’t find out they are just redundant. His failure to find meaning in piles and piles of paperwork in his job makes him cherish his son and parenting the only meaningful thing in his life. The populist ideology grabs him so tight that when he is disappointed by his disloyal son and himself upon death, there is nothing meaningful in his life that can make him feel joy. The angst develops in a craving for meaning and joy, that can’t be possibly satisfied by some of his failed attempts: gambling, clubbing, and spending money like water. In his journey, Watanabe is then attracted to the enthusiasm and joyous love of life in his young subordinate Toyo. Inspired by her words, “why don’t you try making something too,” Watanabe realizes it’s never too late to ‘live’ and instills unparalleled passion in solving a cesspool complaint kicked around in the bureaucratic system, where he pushed around for a child playground. Though his endeavor is not recognized and the honor stolen by his boss, the policeman, who happens to witness his last moments, reports seeing him “on the swing… so perfectly happy.”
To Live is a modern tale of an individual struggle for meaning in a cold, apathetic mass society. Here, the convenience brought by advancing science and technology makes possible many things that were once unthinkable, but they don’t take care of ‘the big, concerning questions’ in life, which we usually eschew by escaping to passive consuming and entertaining. The scene where Watanabe tries to lose himself in gambling and clubbing is such a realistic representation of how meaning crises are handled in modern times – a never-ending cycle of consumption that makes you feel pleasurable each of the time but never satisfied, insatiable hunger for meaning only treated with endless entertainment like air. This is the same impasse that leaves Smith in bewilderment; if we hover around the concept of pleasure, linger in the mere biological aspect of humans, and refuse to see inside, this is as far as we can get. Nevertheless, to make the leap of faith and begin the search for “all that makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile” requires real courage and determination (Smith 5).
Personally, I believe we can straighten our backs facing the problem of meanings even without something serious as stomach cancer. Even for Watanabe, who wasted most of his life doing nothing in the bureaucratic system, it’s still not too late to start searching for meaning. The best part of the film for me is that it elucidates how self-realization can be attained in a daily form, in a practical manner, and it debunks the mundane belief that self-realization is a privilege of a few, and the commons can only turn to affordable hedonism. Though Smith’s struggle makes it look like such a mounting and painful task, it’s ultimately something as simple as to just “make something.”
Works Cited
Kurosawa, Akira, director. Ikiru (To Live). Toho, 9 Oct. 1952.
Nichols, Tom. “How America Lost Faith In Expertise”. Foreign Affairs, 2017, pp. 60 – 73.
Smith, Zadie. “Joy.” The New York Review, 10 Jan. 2013, www-nybooks-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/articles/2013/01/10/joy/.