Bernardo Reginster
Happiness as a Faustian bargain
In the original version of the legend,
Faust gives Mephistopheles disposal
of his soul in exchange for twenty-four
years of pleasure. In Christopher Mar-
lowe’s version, he becomes more de-
manding–he now asks for twenty-
four years of pleasure plus power and
conocimiento.
Which like a shooting star flashes and
dies?
Show me the fruit that rots right on the
árbol,
And trees that every day leaf out anew!
Though ready to oblige, Mephistopheles
is incredulous:
In contrast to these rather predictable
demandas, Goethe’s Faust makes a deeply
strange series of requests:
Such a demand does not daunt me,
Such treasures I can furnish you.
But still the time will come around, bien
Poor sorry Devil, what could you deliver?
Was human mind in lofty aspiration ever
Comprehended by the likes of you?
Do you have food that does not satisfy?
Or do
You have red gold that will run through
The hand like quicksilver and away?
A game that none may win who play?
A girl who in my very arms
Will pledge love to my neighbor with her
ojos?
Or honor with its godlike charms
Bernard Reginster is assistant professor of philos-
ophy at Brown University. The author of the
forthcoming “The Af½rmation of Life: Nietzsche
on Overcoming Nihilism,” he has published a
number of articles on Nietzsche and nineteenth-
century ethics.
amigo,
When we shall want to relish things in
peace.
But Faust is implacable:
If I ever lie down upon a bed of ease,
Then let that be my ½nal end!
If you can cozen me with lies
Into a self-complacency,
Or can beguile me with pleasures you
devise,
Let that be the last day for me! [. . .]
If I to any moment say:
Linger on! You are so fair!
Put me in fetters straightaway,
Then I can die for all I care!1
What Faust wants most of all, that for
which he is ready to sell his soul to the
devil, is not, according to Goethe, a life
© 2004 por la Academia Americana de las Artes
& Ciencias
1 j. W.. Goethe, Faust, trans. C. mi. Passage (Nuevo
york: McMillan, 1965), v. 1675–1702.
52
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Happiness
as a
Faustian
bargain
of ease, complacency, and pleasure–a
life “so fair” that it leaves nothing to be
desired. On the contrary, Goethe’s Faust
above all wants to pursue desires that
can never be satiated.
By and large, he does not demand de-
sires that are, strictly speaking, unsatis½-
capaz. He does want to get the gold, el
girl, and the honors–but he only wants
momentary possession of them. Él
wants, en otras palabras, never to be satis-
½ed once and for all, but to be moved by
desires that are perpetually rekindled,
like “trees that every day leaf out anew.”
This remarkable idea lies at the heart
of a dispute over the nature of happiness
that took place in the nineteenth centu-
ry. It began with the view that, under the
circumstances of our life in this world,
happiness is impossible. This view, de-
veloped by Arthur Schopenhauer, ser-
came very influential toward the end
of that century under the name ‘pessi-
mism.’ Schopenhauer saw in the “lofty
aspiration” that Faust attributes to the
human mind no less than the cause of
the impossibility of happiness. As pes-
simism was gaining acceptance, howev-
es, Friedrich Nietzsche, an erstwhile ad-
mirer of Schopenhauer, was already de-
veloping a powerful philosophical reme-
dy against it. In contrast to his predeces-
sor, Nietzsche found in Faust’s strange
request an essential clue to the true na-
ture of human happiness.
The dispute between these two philos-
ophers remains largely ignored to this
día. Perhaps this must be chalked up to
the assumption, still widespread among
professional philosophers, that serious
study of happiness is the almost exclu-
sive province of ancient philosophy.
Although I am not interested here in
a scholarly study of the details of the
confrontation between Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer, I believe we should ex-
amine with some care the key elements
of their distinctive and contrasting con-
ceptions of happiness. For the conflict
between them continues to polarize our
contemporary ethical sensibilities. Or so
I hope to show.
Schopenhauer argues that happiness
is impossible: “Everything in life pro-
claims that earthly happiness is destined
to be frustrated or recognized as an illu-
sión. The grounds for this lie deep in
the very nature of things.”2 This claim
rests on a certain conception of happi-
ness that Schopenhauer de½nes in op-
position to suffering: “We call its [el
will’s] hindrance through an obstacle
placed between it and its temporary
meta, suffering; its attainment of the goal,
por otro lado, we call satisfaction,
well-being, happiness.”3 Happiness is
de½ned in terms of the satisfaction of
desires (“the will” is Schopenhauer’s
name for our faculty of desire), mientras
suffering is caused by resistance to that
satisfaction.
Contemporary philosophers usually
distinguish between a conception of
happiness as desire satisfaction and a
conception that sees it as essentially he-
donistic. On the ½rst view, getting what
we want makes us happy even if it pro-
vides little or no pleasure. And even if we
derive pleasure from the sole fact of get-
ting what we want, this pleasure is not
essential to happiness. On the second
conception, all we want, when we want
to be happy, is pleasure.
Although he ostensibly characterizes it
in terms of desire satisfaction, Schopen-
hauer’s conception of happiness is ulti-
mately hedonistic: true happiness for
2 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation, trans. mi. F. j. Payne (Nueva York:
Dover Publications, 1958), volumen. II, cap. xlvi, pag.
573.
3 Ibídem., I, § 56, pag. 309.
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Bernard
Reginster
en
happiness
him requires a permanent absence of
pain and, por extensión, a lasting satisfac-
tion of desires, because “of its nature,
desire is pain.”4 As Schopenhauer sees
él, the mere occurrence of a desire cre-
ates a kind of affective dissonance in the
agent’s psyche: the desire is a source of
pain because it induces the agent to ex-
perience his actual condition as dissatis-
fying or lacking–and the resulting psy-
chological tension is a source of pain.
So if unsatis½ed desires are inherently
painful, then happiness must be “a ½nal
satisfaction of the will, after which no
fresh willing would occur, . . . an imper-
ishable satisfaction of the will.”5
Schopenhauer’s pessimism rests on
his view that it is impossible to satisfy
all of our desires. He defends this view
in the following passage:
The basis of all willing, sin embargo, is need,
lack, and hence pain, and by its very na-
ture and origin, it is therefore destined to
pain. Si, por otro lado, it lacks objects
of willing, because it is at once deprived
of them again by too easy a satisfaction,
a fearful emptiness and boredom come
over it; en otras palabras, its being and its
existence itself become an intolerable bur-
den for it. Hence its life swings like a pen-
dulum to and fro between pain and bore-
dominación, and these two are in fact its ultimate
constituents.6
The crux of this argument lies in the
observation that human beings are sus-
ceptible to boredom and in the subse-
quent claim that human life “swings
like a pendulum to and fro between pain
and boredom.” To appreciate the signi½-
cance of this, we must ask what kind of
4 Ibídem., § 57, pag. 313–314.
5 Ibídem., § 65, pag. 360.
state boredom is, and what our suscepti-
bility to it shows about us.
Boredom sets in, Schopenhauer ob-
serves, when all our desires for determi-
nate objects (fame, fortune, a new car,
½nishing this paper, etcétera) are satis-
½ed and no new desire comes to agitate
a nosotros. And yet when we are bored, we feel
as though something is lacking or left
to be desired. De este modo, Schopenhauer
describes boredom as an “empty long-
ing”–as a state in which the will, teniendo
attained some particular goal, continues
to will, this time without any determi-
nate intentional focus. Why does the at-
tainment of a determinate goal not suf-
½ce to ful½ll the will, so that it persists in
the form of an empty longing? Schopen-
hauer offers this lapidary answer: "El
goal was only apparent; possession takes
away its charm.”7
This answer is ambiguous. Suppose,
½rst, that I am convinced that I really
want to earn a medical degree, but that
I experience a feeling of diffuse dissatis-
faction or emptiness when I actually
reach that goal. A natural, if complex,
explanation for this feeling goes as fol-
lows: Earning the medical degree is not
what I really want after all; it is not my
real goal. My real goal, let us suppose, es
to secure the esteem of my parents. Este
meta, sin embargo, remains unconscious: I
could not admit it to myself, for exam-
por ejemplo, because it would mean acknowledg-
ing the distressing fact that I do not have
the esteem of my parents already. If earn-
ing the medical degree leaves my parents
indifferent, I will ½nd little satisfaction
in it because my parents’ esteem, no
the degree itself, is my real goal. Pero,
unaware as I am that this is my real goal,
my dissatisfaction will remain diffuse
and unintelligible to me.
Yet the feeling of emptiness described
in this example cannot plausibly be char-
6 Ibídem., § 57, pag. 312; cf. § 38, pag. 196.
7 Ibídem., pag. 313.
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Happiness
as a
Faustian
bargain
acterized as boredom. There is a subtle
phenomenological difference between
boredom and the feeling of emptiness I
just described. The diffuse dissatisfac-
tion I experience at obtaining the med-
ical degree when this does not secure
my parents’ esteem involves a sense that
something is still lacking–something
of a determinate, if unknown, naturaleza. En
contrast, when I am bored I have all the
determinate objects I want, and al-
though I have the sense that something
is lacking, it is not the sense that some-
thing determinate is lacking.
An adequate account of boredom,
entonces, must explain in one sense that
only something indeterminate is lacking.
Schopenhauer’s suggestion, al final,
is that we have, in addition to desires for
determinate ends and objects, a desire to
have desires, which is frustrated by the
satisfaction of all our (occurrent) deter-
minate desires. Boredom results from
the frustration of this peculiar desire: nosotros
are bored, Schopenhauer declares, cuando
we “lack objects of willing”–when we
lack not the determinate objects of par-
ticular desires, but rather objects to
desire.
This account of boredom is borne out
by the distinctive phenomenology of
this state. A bored individual will com-
plain that he has nothing to do. Obvi-
iosamente, he does not mean that he is under
no obligation to do anything; this would
be a condition of leisure, not a state of
boredom. He means rather that he has
no inclination or desire to do anything.
Nothing arouses his interest; nothing
engages his will. He is in the grip of an
empty longing, for he does not desire
anything determinate: he desires some-
thing to desire, but nothing in particular.
He only wants to desire again.
From Schopenhauer’s reflections on
the susceptibility to boredom emerges
the following picture of human willing.
Human beings obviously have many ½rst-
order desires for determinate objects
(p.ej., fame, wealth, food and shelter, y
so on). But their susceptibility to bore-
dom reveals that they also have a second-
order desire, es decir., a desire whose object is,
or includes, another desire. This struc-
ture of human willing in ½rst-order and
second-order desires shows why a ½nal
and complete satisfaction of all desires–
happiness–is impossible. The satisfac-
tion of ½rst-order desires for determi-
nate objects, which eliminates ordinary
pain, necessarily implies the frustration
of the second-order desire to have (½rst-
orden) desires, and therefore boredom.
The satisfaction of this second-order
desire meanwhile implies the frustration
of ½rst-order desires, and the ordinary
pain it causes. And so human life indeed
swings like a pendulum to and fro be-
tween pain and boredom.
Nietzsche does not deny that we have a
second-order desire to desire. De hecho, él
appropriates and re½nes Schopenhauer’s
idea. For one thing, he claims, the bare
desire to have desires does not adequate-
ly account for our susceptibility to bore-
dominación. When we are bored, we do not
complain that we have nothing to desire,
but rather that we have nothing to do.
The desire whose frustration is a source
of boredom is therefore more speci½cal-
ly a desire not just to have but also to
pursue desires. We want desires, in other
palabras, because they give us something
to do. We can also be bored, sin embargo,
even when we are engaged in the pursuit
of desires, namely when this pursuit
consists only of unchallenging activities.
And so the desire on which the suscepti-
bility to boredom depends is a desire to
confront challenges, or resistance, en el
pursuit of a determinate desire. To these
quali½cations, Nietzsche adds another:
Although we might occasionally want
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Bernard
Reginster
en
happiness
desires we are powerless to satisfy, mayoría
commonly we want not only to confront
resistance, but also to overcome it. Por eso,
he calls this desire for the overcoming of
resistance in the pursuit of determinate
desires “the will to power.”
Two features of this peculiar desire
require our attention. Primero, de½ned as
the overcoming of resistance, the con-
cept of power is, in and of itself, devoid
of any determinate content; it acquires
such content only from its relation to
some determinate desire. Por ejemplo,
a recalcitrant puzzle is an obstacle to the
desire to understand, and the strength of
an opposing player is resistance against
the desire to win a game. Respectivamente,
the will to power cannot be satis½ed un-
less the agent has a desire for something
other than power. Es, speci½cally, el
second-order desire for the overcoming
of resistance in the pursuit of some
determinate ½rst-order desire.
Segundo, insofar as it is a desire for
“striving against something that re-
sists,” this will to power contrasts stark-
ly with the desire for happiness (bajo-
stood as pleasure), because “that which
is here the driving force must in any
event desire something else [than happi-
ness] if it desires displeasure in this way
and continually looks for it.”8 This pecu-
liar desire is not for a state in which re-
sistance to the satisfaction of desires has
been overcome (happiness in Schopen-
hauer’s sense), but for the process of over-
coming resistance. So against the back-
drop of Schopenhauer’s conception of
suffering as resistance to the satisfaction
of desires, the will to power implies a de-
sire for displeasure:
Human beings do not seek pleasure and
avoid displeasure . . . . What human beings
want, what every smallest organism
wants, is an increase of power; driven by
that will they seek resistance, they need
something that opposes it. Displeasure,
as an obstacle to their will to power, es
therefore a normal fact . . . ; human beings
do not avoid it, they are rather in continu-
al need of it . . . .9
The two features of the will to power
that I have been describing–that its sat-
isfaction requires that the agent desire
something other than power and that
its satisfaction entails displeasure–com-
bine to give the will to power its com-
plex structure. The will to power implies
a desire for resistance to overcome,
which cannot be satis½ed unless the
agent also desires some determinate
ends in terms of which this resistance
can be de½ned; todavía, in desiring the over-
coming of resistance, the agent must
also desire resistance to the realization
of those ends. As Nietzsche puts it:
That I must be struggle and a becoming
and an end and an opposition to ends–ah,
whoever guesses what is my will should
also guess on what crooked paths it must
proceder. Whatever I create and however
much I love it, soon I must oppose it and
my love; thus my will wills it.10
The pursuit of the will to power is,
por lo tanto, eminently paradoxical, para
“the will is not satis½ed unless it has op-
ponents and resistance”–unless, eso es,
it is dissatis½ed. By contraposition, este
amounts to the claim that the satisfac-
tion of the will implies dissatisfaction.
In attempting to elucidate the signi½-
cance of this paradox, I want to proceed
carefully. I shall begin by distinguishing
two versions of the paradox. Sobre el
9 Ibídem., § 702.
8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books: Nueva York,
1968), § 704.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (Nueva York: Pingüino
Books, 1978), II, § 12, ½rst emphasis mine.
56
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weaker version, the claim is that the sat-
isfaction of the will to power implies
some dissatisfaction in the agent. Sobre el
stronger version, the claim is that the
satisfaction of the will to power implies
its own dissatisfaction.
Let us begin with the weaker version
of the paradox: The satisfaction of the
will to power implies some dissatisfac-
ción. This follows from the de½nition
of the will to power as the desire for the
overcoming of resistance. Willing power
implies willing to have determinate de-
sires and resistance to their satisfaction.
De este modo, an agent’s will to power is satis½ed
when he has determinate desires that are
dissatis½ed, es decir., when there is resistance
against their satisfaction.
On this reading, the paradox involved
in the claim that the satisfaction of the
will implies dissatisfaction is resolved
simply by assuming that the terms in op-
position have different referents. De este modo
we assume that in the ½rst instance sat-
isfaction is of the second-order desire to
pursue determinate ½rst-order desires,
while in the second instance, dissatisfac-
tion is of some determinate ½rst-order
desire. Still, it is a crucial characteristic
of the will to power that it involves the
stronger version of the paradox as well:
The satisfaction of the will to power
implies its own dissatisfaction.
To make sense of this, we must ½rst
remember that the will to power is not
a bare desire to desire, which would
amount to a desire for some determinate
end and for resistance to its realization. Él
is rather the desire for the overcoming of
resistance in the pursuit of a determinate
desire. The will to power will not be sat-
is½ed unless there is some ½rst-order de-
sire for a determinate end, unless there is
resistance to the realization of this deter-
minate end, and unless there is actual
success in overcoming this resistance.
Pero entonces, the conditions of the satisfac-
tion of the will to power do indeed imply
its dissatisfaction. For the satisfaction of
the will to power requires actual over-
próximo, es decir., it induces the agent to
break down the resistance against the
realization of some determinate end.
But the presence of such resistance is a
necessary condition of the satisfaction
of the will to power. Por eso, this satisfac-
tion implies its own dissatisfaction, en
the sense that it necessarily brings it
acerca de.
I may put the same point in yet anoth-
er way. We can distinguish between the
desire for the activity of pursuing a deter-
minate end and the desire for the deter-
minate end of that activity. The crucial
observation is that to be genuinely en-
gaged in an activity implies actually car-
ing about realizing its determinate end.
The activity itself consists of the pursuit
of this end, which once achieved brings
the activity to a close. Por eso, the desire
for activity is satis½ed only by a success-
ful effort to bring this activity to a close,
that is to say, to bring about its own frus-
tration. If we suppose the activity to be a
juego, Por ejemplo, the paradox assumes
the following form: Even though it is the
taking part that matters, rather than the
winning itself, we cannot really take part
unless winning actually matters to us.
But once victory is achieved, y el
game thus ended, we ½nd ourselves frus-
trated, since we are deprived of a game
in which to take part.
What is the implication of this para-
dox for the pursuit of power? Nietzsche,
remember, described it in the following
terms: “Whatever I create and however
much I love it–soon I must oppose it
and my love; thus my will wills it.” He
who wills power must not, strictly
speaking, hate what he creates and loves.
He must rather overcome it. But he can-
not simply undo what he has done and
do it again: since the obstacles to doing
Happiness
as a
Faustian
bargain
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Dædalus Spring 2004
57
Bernard
Reginster
en
happiness
it have already been overcome, doing it
again would no longer count as genuine
overcoming; living according to the will
to power is not living the life of a Sisy-
phus. His will to power demands new
challenges to meet, new resistance to
overcome. And this explains why the
pursuit of power assumes the form of
inde½nite self-overcoming.
Considerar, as an example, the will to
power as it relates to the desire to know.
It motivates us to solve problems, dis-
cover new worlds, and the like. Cuando
we are moved by it, sin embargo, we would
hardly ½nd satisfaction in going again
and again over problems that have al-
ready been solved, or traveling once
more through worlds already discov-
ered. What we need, bastante, is new prob-
lems to solve and worlds as yet unknown
to discover. De este modo, the satisfaction of the
will to power in the pursuit of knowl-
edge necessarily produces a continuous
self-overcoming in knowledge, es decir., el
movement whereby as soon as we attain
a certain level of achievement, nosotros pro-
ceed to outdo ourselves.
To say that the conditions of the satis-
faction of the will to power bring about
its dissatisfaction, entonces, is not to say that
the pursuit of the will to power is self-
defeating or self-undermining. Es
plainly possible to satisfy the desire for
the overcoming of resistance–one only
has to engage in the successful overcom-
ing of resistance. What I have called the
strong paradox of the will to power re-
veals one of its most distinctive features,
namely that it is a kind of desire that
does not allow for permanent–once and
for all–satisfaction. Its pursuit, sobre el
contrary, necessarily assumes the form
of an inde½nite, perpetually renewed
striving.
Nietzsche describes the appeal of this
pursuit in the following terms:
A tablet of the good hangs over every peo-
por ejemplo. Behold, it is the tablet of their over-
comings; behold, it is the voice of their
will to power. Praiseworthy is whatever
seems dif½cult to a people; whatever
seems indispensable and dif½cult is called
bien; and whatever liberates even out of
the deepest need, the rarest, the most dif-
½cult–that they call holy.11
We take the dif½culty of an achieve-
ment to contribute to its value. At its
core, the ethics of power is intended to
reflect the value we place on what is dif-
½cult or, as we might prefer to say, chal-
lenging.12 This view raises a number of
preguntas, for example about the nature
of the relevant dif½culty and the exact
role it plays in our evaluation of an
logro. Whatever the answers to
such questions may be, the idea that we
½nd value in the confrontation of dif½-
culty for its own sake enables us to ap-
preciate the appeal of Faust’s strange
request for a life without ease, self-com-
placency, and pleasure.
I began with the promise to show that
the nineteenth-century dispute between
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche exposes a
conflict between two conceptions of
happiness that continues to polarize our
own ethical sensibilities. We found that
the heart of this dispute concerns the
role and signi½cance of the Faustian
desire to desire. We may now conclude
with a general intuitive characterization
of these two conceptions.
Por un lado, Schopenhauer de-
½nes happiness in terms of the perma-
nent absence of pain, which requires a
“a ½nal satisfaction of the will, después
which no fresh willing would occur.”
11 Ibídem., I, § 15.
12 That we do ½nd happiness in the confronta-
tion of dif½culty has been established by some
well-publicized empirical research. Ver, en par-
particular, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psy-
chology of Optimal Experience (Nueva York: Harp-
es & Fila, 1990), esp. cap. 4.
58
Dædalus Spring 2004
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On this view, happiness is a ½nal resting
punto, a permanent state of peace and
contentment, free once and for all from
any form of agitation and worry. Es un
state in which, quite literally, nothing is
left to be desired. As a paradigm for this
conception of happiness, Schopenhauer
has prominently in mind the Christian
eternal life in heaven.13 As we are prone
to imagine it, the eternal life represents a
condition in which all of our desires are
satis½ed once and for all. The very desire
to desire, which Faust describes as “hu-
man mind in lofty aspiration,” precisely
precludes the possibility of such com-
plete and permanent contentment. En
demanding satisfaction for it, Faust is
therefore not only selling his soul to the
devil, pero también, quite literally, depriving
himself of the eternal bliss of heaven.
Por otro lado, in The Anti-Christ,
Nietzsche declares: “What is happiness?
–The feeling that power increases–that a
resistance is overcome. Not content-
mento, but more power; not peace at all,
but war . . . .”14 On this conception, hap-
piness is not a state, but a process–the
activity of confronting resistance in the
pursuit of some goal. This conception
of happiness conflicts with the previous
one in two important respects. Primero, far
from excluding suffering, it actually pre-
supposes it as an essential ingredient of
happiness. Segundo, it precludes the pos-
13 Another version of this conception of happi-
ness that Schopenhauer considers is the Bud-
dhistic Nirvana. This is not a state in which all
desires have been satis½ed once and for all, as is
presumably the Christian heaven, but a state of
detachment from all desires and therefore of
indifference to their frustration. Schopenhauer
argues that Buddhistic detachment is the only
way in which we can hope to achieve complete
deliverance from suffering, and even suggests
that Christian ethics is best understood from
that perspective.
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans.
R. j. Hollingdale (Nueva York: Penguin Books,
1968), § 2.
Happiness
as a
Faustian
bargain
sibility of a ½nal state of rest or content-
mento: it is of the essence of Nietzsche’s
new happiness that it cannot be
achieved once and for all.
In the Christian myth of the Fall, Ad-
am and Eve begin their lives in the Gar-
den of Eden, a place in which we imag-
ine their needs and desires are satis½ed
easily, as soon as they arise. Expelled
from the Garden, they now have to work
–i.e., they have to overcome resistance–
to ful½ll their needs and desires: “you
shall gain your bread by the sweat of
your brow.”15 In claiming to ½nd in this
punishment the very essence of human
happiness, Nietzsche assumes a radical-
ly ‘anti-Christian’ posture. En esto, en-
deed, very much like Faust, he might be
thought to be striking a bargain with the
devil.
15 Genesis, 3: 17–19.
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Dædalus Spring 2004