Boethius, The Consolation 3.32

. . . “Yes, but nothing can be more beautiful than this too which reason would have us add to what we have agreed upon.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“Happiness seems to include many things: do all these join it together as into a whole which is happiness, as though each thing were a different part thereof, or is any one of them a good which fulfills the essence of happiness, and do the others merely bear relations to this one?''

“I would have you make this plain by the enunciation of these particulars.”

“Do we not,” she asked, “hold that happiness is a good thing?”

“Yes,” I answered, “the highest good.”

“But you may apply this quality of happiness to them all. For the perfect satisfaction is the same, and the highest power, and veneration, and renown, and pleasure; these are all held to be happiness.”

“What then?” I asked.

“Are all these things, satisfaction, power, and the others, as it were, members of the body, happiness, or do they all bear their relation to the good, as members to a head?”

“I understand what you propose to examine, but I am waiting eagerly to hear what you will lay down.”

“I would have you take the following explanation,” she said. “If these were all members of the one body, happiness, they would differ individually. For this is the nature of particulars, to make up one body of different parts.

“But all these have been shown to be one and the same. Therefore they are not as members; and further, this happiness will then appear to be joined together into a whole body out of one member, which is impossible. “

“That is quite certain,” said I, “but I would hear what is to come.” . . .

—from Book 3, Prose 10

No good thing ever comes easily, they always told, me, and if philosophy is indeed a good thing, philosophy will hardly come easily either. Perhaps it will even come the hardest of all, because it concerns itself with not just any good, but with the greatest good.

This is not an easy section of the text. In theory, it is about the relationship of universals and particulars, between what is common to the whole on the one hand, and specific to the parts on the other.

In practice, it asks us to really consider whether being happy comes from adding up certain individual things, or whether all the individual things are only expressions of one and the same happiness.

That didn’t necessarily help, did it? I am sympathetic, because the only time I had it explained to me in a classroom, the esteemed professor used all sorts of fancy terms I couldn’t wrap my head around. He then asked the room full of graduate students if it made sense, and they all nodded profoundly. I didn’t have the courage to say I was still as lost as before.

Perhaps my own reading, proceeding only from own reflections, is still too confused or simplistic; I am aware that I am not the sharpest tool in the shed. All I know is that when an idea seems too abstract for me, I try to use a very concrete analogy to nudge me along the way.

From my love of music, I often employ the image of an orchestra or a choir to help me think about the relationship of a whole, all of something, and a part, a piece of something.

So we understand that the performance of the music is like a whole, and that all the musicians contribute to it. Yet what actually produces that harmony? We think that the players are all somehow making the whole of the music, one by one, each through their own different parts in the score.

But each part, only taken in itself, is really not much at all. It is certainly not complete. When I played the double bass, I would sometimes spend whole minutes doing nothing at all, then suddenly produce a few quick notes, and then go back to counting the measures until I had to do something else. When I played my part alone at home to practice, it was certainly not a harmony; it was just individual sounds, here and there, quite boring and tedious. It had no sense, no rhyme or reason to it.

How about those first violinists, or those soloists? The got to noodle their way through the whole thing, and they were thought to be more important than the rest of us. But they weren’t. Their fancy finger-work was still nothing in itself, however impressive the musicianship.

No one distinct part in the piece contains the fullness of the music, and no one musician defines the entire work. Well then, surely they are doing it all together? Yes, but their individual playing or singing itself isn’t doing that. Otherwise, any playing or singing, all jumbled together, would make it a harmony.

Where is that harmony really coming from? Not from the bottom up, but from the top down. A composer wrote that score, and we freely follow it. A conductor assists us in doing this, but we are still formed by that score. The musicians are not the highest cause itself, but the means by which that cause expresses itself. They are the matter, not the agent.

The whole is not determined by the parts, but rather the parts are determined by the whole. Or put another way, the many do not shape the one, and instead the one shapes the many.

So too it is with happiness, and so too it is with God. No one element is the totality, and no mere combination of certain elements is the totality.

Remember all the individual things Lady Philosophy said we thought were happiness, and how we separated them, failing to see that they were really just mirrors of the one and the same?

Money? Honor? Power? Fame? Pleasure? Each of these fully reveals that perfect goal, but absolutely none of them, isolated and only of their own accord, amount to anything at all. Much like how the tuba player, and the timpani player, and that sassy bassist in the back row can’t really have any meaning as separated from the unity of the whole piece of music.

It isn’t the sum of the parts, or the dominance of one of the parts. It is something greater than the parts, in which all of the parts participate. Look to the head, not to the bits of the body here and there.

Written in 9/2015