October 2, 2017 (NYTimes.com)

In the autumn of 1826, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill suffered a nervous breakdown — a “crisis” in his “mental history,” as he called it.

Since the age of 15, Mill had been caught firmly under the intellectual spell of his father’s close friend, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was a proponent of the principle of utility — the idea that all human action should aim to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. And Mill devoted much of his youthful energies to the advancement of this principle: by founding the Utilitarian Society (a fringe group of fewer than 10 members), publishing articles in popular reviews and editing Bentham’s laborious manuscripts.

Utilitarianism, Mill thought, called for various social reforms: improvements in gender relations, working wages, the greater protection of free speech and a substantial broadening of the British electorate (including women’s suffrage).

There was much work to be done, but Mill was accustomed to hard work. As a child, his father placed him on a highly regimented home schooling regime. Between the ages of 8 and 12, he read all of Herodotus, Homer, Xenophon, six Platonic dialogues (in Greek), Virgil and Ovid (in Latin), and kept on reading with increasing intensity, as well as learning physics, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics, while tutoring his younger sisters. Holidays were not permitted, “lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired.”

Not surprisingly, one of the more commonly accepted explanations of Mill’s breakdown at the age of 20, is that it was caused by cumulative mental exhaustion. But Mill himself understood it differently. In his autobiography, he wrote:

I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to: unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent… In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

In the wake of this episode, Mill slipped into a six-month-long depression.

There is something comical about Mill’s self-implosion; it’s as if he had spent years looking forward to a sailing trip only to suddenly realize, upon embarkation, that he hated boats.

It is also strangely relatable. We have all lost faith in a deeply held project at one time or another. And, politically, we are in an age of upheaval; faith in old ideals seems to be dying out, creating a vacuum. Perhaps we can learn something about ourselves, and our political moment, by peering into Mill’s own crisis of faith.

Why on earth wouldn’t Mill want to achieve his life goals?

It wasn’t because he thought he had the wrong goals. Mill never did abandon utilitarianism, though he later modified Bentham’s doctrine in subtle ways. Instead, Mill tells us that his crisis was born in a concern about whether happiness is really possible in the perfect world he sought to achieve — a world without struggle:

[T]he question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.

Mill is not at all clear about his line of thought here. But we can speculate. One possibility is that he is worried that, if we ever were to achieve an ideal social world, we would quickly take it for granted, or become “spoiled.” It’s a familiar tale: the child that always gets what he or she wants ends up forever unsatisfied and always wanting more (psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill). And perhaps Mill thought the same is true for adults — that facing a degree of “struggle and privation” in life is essential to happiness, because it provides us with a vivid reminder of how lucky we are when we have it good.

Or was Mill concerned that, in a perfect world, with nothing more to strive for, we might simply grow bored? As the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once upliftingly put it, “life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom.” When we are not consumed by the desire to achieve something (food, shelter, companionship, wealth, career, status, social reform, etc.), we are tortured by boredom.

Schopenhauer’s vision of life is sensationally pessimistic — indeed, entertainingly so. But there is some evidence that Mill was in a Schopenhaueristic mood in 1826 (though he almost certainly hadn’t yet read him). Mill writes that, during his crisis, he was “seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations” — an anxiety he says was highly characteristic of “the general tone” of his mind at the time.

“The octave consists only of five tones and two semitones,” he explains. By the laws of mathematics, there is only a finite number of possible tonal combinations. What will happen to music (and, indeed, composers) when there are no more combinations to be discovered? And what will life be like when the work of social reform is done? What will consume us then? How will we escape boredom? These are suffocating thoughts.

Somehow new music continues to be written. And, realistically, the work of improving human life and social conditions will never be “done.” Still, it is easy to sympathize with Mill’s anxiety. Some part of us prefers to struggle or quest after an ideal, rather than attain it. Retirement seems to function in this way for many people: as an orienting goal but a disorienting reality.

Also, there is something disconcertingly alien about a “perfect” world. It is part of the human condition, as that condition is normally understood, that there is some gap between how the world is and how we think it ought to be, what we have and what we want, who we are and who we would like to be. We try to narrow this gap. But its ongoing presence is part of life as we know it. And within certain limits, we even embrace it.

In movies and literature, for instance, our favorite protagonists tend to be flawed or troubled in some way. In “Edward Scissorhands,” it is the monster and the disenchanted teenager that we root for, not the creepily perfect suburbanites. And in music, many prefer the “human” — that is, soulful but imperfect — composition or performance over its technically flawless counterpart. In its early forms at least, rock music certainly cultivated this kind of ethos.

Did Mill, who admits to being something of a “reasoning machine” throughout his teenage years, suddenly grow weary of mechanistic perfection? Perhaps he was disturbed by the imagined inhumanity of a world without struggle or privation — by the possibility that it might lack the romantic charms of human failure and frailty.

It took Mill two years to find a way out of his crisis. It was only after he began reading, not philosophy, but the poetry of William Wordsworth, that he was fully convinced he had emerged.

What was it about Wordsworth’s romantic poetry — intensely emotional (often melancholy), solitary, autobiographical, and infused with bucolic English imagery — that had such a profound healing effect on Mill? He explains:

What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed… I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this…

Mill was searching for a reliable source of joy, one that could survive the unbearable goodness of the world he sought to achieve. He was looking for a happiness that could stave off incursions of dissatisfaction or boredom once the ultimate battle is won, and (at last!) tranquility reigns. The answer, he discovered through reading Wordsworth, is to take refuge in a capacity to be moved by beauty — a capacity to take joy in the quiet contemplation of delicate thoughts, sights, sounds, and feelings, not just titanic struggles.

This discovery is convenient for a philosopher. Mill was trained, from a very young age, to think: to be a quiet contemplator. So, it’s no surprise that he was desperate to make sure he could still take joy in his allotted craft, once the hard labor of social reform was done. But, as Mill says, imaginative pleasures are available to “all human beings,” not just poets and philosophers.

I hope, and suspect, that Mill is right about this: that we all have the ability to find some durable joy in quietude, normalcy and contemplation. In our personal lives, and in our political lives too, it would be nice if we could escape Schopenhauer’s pendulum: to simply enjoy where we are, at times; to find some peace in the cessation of motion.

If we can do that, then a perfect world might not be so bad after all.