Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell looks--but not too deeply--for the elusive bird of happiness

By KATHERINE GOVIER

rom time to time, a university philosopher comes from behind the scrim obscuring academic thought and trots his views in plain English before the public. Susan Jacoby, Isaiah Berlin and George Grant have had their moments. The latest called to the post of popular philosopher is the University of Toronto's Mark Kingwell, a thirtysomething voice from the ivory tower. His light-hearted, self-reflecting style, honed in magazines and in his previous books, A Civil Tongue and Dreams of Millennium, is well suited to delineating Canadian cultural anxieties. On reading the book we might well ask why, at this time, he has arrived in the spotlight.

His latest treatise, Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac (Penguin Books Canada; 408 pages), raises a philosophical chestnut going back to the Greeks. Kingwell notes Plato's observation that lovers of wisdom will be mocked and derided. But this is philosophy from an ironic, first-person standpoint. By way of introduction, Kingwell thrusts himself into comparison with the great thinkers of the ages while simultaneously depicting himself as lecturing before a U. of T. class with his fly inadvertently undone.

Throughout the wide-ranging cultural and historical analysis that follows, Kingwell places himself in other ludicrous positions: taking issue with Clinique ads ("subversive to be happy") as if they meant something; popping Prozac without a prescription to see what it feels like; attending the Option Institute in Sheffield, Mass. Kingwell gamely participates, becoming a George Plimpton of the soul.

Then he draws rather ordinary conclusions. Prozac is a failure; it causes him "edginess at literary gatherings." (It would be mad to feel any other way, I say.) His skeptical view of the Institute's teachings (Happiness is a choice) bring him, and us, no closer to an understanding of his subject. He discovers that advertising bombards us with what we are not and cannot have, suffusing our culture with envy. These are hardly novel or profound observations. Feminist writers from Naomi Wolf to Mary Pipher have said the same.

A good deal of Better Living carries on in the same vein, debunking the human-potential movement, cruising through Freud, Nietzsche, Epicurus, and Melrose Place. Kingwell rehashes dated objections to antidepressants, pronounces nose jobs and liposuction to be "ethically indefensible," detours into a dissection of "cool" and dispenses with religion in fewer than 10 pages.

His foray into psychiatry is more entertaining. Psychiatric diagnostic manuals now list 374 forms of mental illness, he notes, up from 297 a decade ago, a fact that in itself speaks to our cultural confusion about desirable and undesirable states of mind. Kingwell dips hilariously into the Journal of Medical Ethics, unearthing a 1992 article entitled "A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder." Smiling, carefree and unpredictable behavior and an impairment "when retrieving negative events from long-term memory" are the symptoms. Unfortunately, Kingwell is unclear whether the article is meant to be taken seriously.

Finally, and most interestingly, Kingwell examines the idea of eliminating regret and finding the happiness of oblivion. He questions whether human unhappiness lies in completion through intimacy with another person, an idea raised in Plato's Symposium, in which people are cut in two by the gods and must forever search for the lost half. Alternatively, Kingwell suggests that some of the happiest moments in a life may be the solitary ones.

Happiness, or the lack of it, is a sad issue, and under its affable but self-regarding surface this is a serious book. Kingwell settles on the conclusion that to be happy is to be good, that the truly satisfying life is the virtuous life. It is on the surface an unfashionable, but ultimately a pleasing, idea. We may take comfort from the belief that the unjust person lives poorly because his soul is in "grave disorder." And we may be sobered by the knowledge that we have to go back to the Greeks to uncover this notion, beneath the "layers of manipulation and distortion that blanket our ideas of happiness." But it is not a profound observation.

Much of what Kingwell says is new, and much of it is good. However, as a composer once said of a musical peer, that which is new is not good, and that which is good is not new. Better Living, by turns annoying, tedious and stimulating, offers readers an intellectual bus tour of today and the ages. To capture that elusive bird of happiness may not be possible, since, as the author suggests, we do not know who we are, and true meaning has long evaded us. However, he makes a good case that we can have some fun looking.