Detail from The Death of Socrates (1787) by Jacques-Louis David.Metropolitan Museum of Art
Linda Besner is an author based in Montreal.
I hate exercising. I don’t want to hate it, and I’ve tried all the forms that are meant to be fun. “Remember to smile,” intoned the robotic voice on a running app I tried. The instructor in the Pilates video billed her painful workout as “20 minutes of pure joy.” The closest I’ve come to a genuine experience of athletic joy is bouncing on a mini trampoline. But even leaping buoyantly skyward loses its cathartic glamour if done for the recommended 20 minutes every day. I have largely made my peace with the fact that I don’t have to enjoy it; I just have to do it.
The above feels sacrilegious to say; not the admission that I don’t enjoy exercising, but the admission that I am willing to force myself to do something unpleasant without trying to convert my inner feelings about it. The sentiment that obligation, rather than enjoyment, can be an honourable motive for doing something feels out of step with the zeitgeist. “Don’t Live a Life of Obligation,” implores a recent YouTube video by natural-medicine guru Josh Axe. “Keeping Obligatory Friends Around and How It Hurts You,” reads a 2021 entry on a website about female friendship. Obligation is a dirty word. It’s understandable; we’ve worked hard, as a society, to escape the notion that our personal value relies on meeting community standards. If to live authentically is to live in accordance with what my inner self demands, doing things I don’t like can seem like a failure to be myself.
I am by no means seeking or recommending a joyless existence. However, I wonder whether allowing more cultural space for a positive framing of obligation might help us to recognize and value how we actually operate in the world, and to consider what we need from each other, and from ourselves.
Our era is hardly the first to find obligation distasteful. Outside of the European philosophical tradition, obligation often has a more positive connotation; Confucianism posits mutual obligation as the foundation of human interaction. But Western thought has long been grappling with questions of obligation versus authenticity. “What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure – as a mere automaton of duty?” the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asked in 1888. The idea that it was destructive – even immoral – to imagine rules that might trump our individual desires and beliefs came out of Nietzsche’s conviction that, as he put it, “God is dead.” There was, he said, no universal truth; instead, each of us creates our own set of values. To avoid self-destruction, we can only commit to duties that fall within our inclinations.
Western thinkers of Nietzsche’s time were, in part, reacting against the hierarchies embedded in traditional notions of humanity’s purpose – who are we and what are we here to do? In classical Greek thought, duties are a function of one’s station in life: A person with a higher social status was understood to have greater personal obligations to other people, and to the state, than a low-status person. Men had greater obligations than women and children; free people had obligations that enslaved people did not. When Socrates was sentenced to death by the Athenian court in 399 BCE, the story (as told by his disciple Plato) is that he resisted his well-wishers’ urgings to flee. Speaking in the voice of the laws of Athens, Socrates upbraided himself, saying: “We brought you into the world, nurtured you, and gave a share of all the good things we could to you and all the citizens.” If Socrates believed that a law-abiding society should exist, he argued, he couldn’t shirk his own duty to obey the laws, even if that meant drinking poison.
Poisoning oneself out of loyalty to a mistaken state is going a bit far. But the idea that living among other people means that we have responsibilities toward them remains relevant. In this sense, obligation is often understood in moral philosophy as the left hand of rights. To say that I have rights is to say that other people have obligations toward me. My right to the wages for which I work corresponds to the obligation my employer has to pay me. My right to vote in democratic elections means that poll workers have an obligation to provide me with the correct ballot.
In our quest for the good and just society, popular discourse today is often focused on rights. Social-justice advocates speak and write passionately about the right to housing, the right to potable water, the right to bodily sovereignty. Rights-based approaches can help us centre our attention on the experiences of those suffering deprivation. But delineating rights is perhaps only half the discussion. What’s often left unclear is exactly whose obligation it is to ensure that these rights are upheld. “Consider the claim that all humans have a right to clean drinking water,” Dalhousie University philosophers Letitia Meynell and Clarisse Paron write in their 2021 primer on applied ethics. “Do we have an obligation to our neighbours to ensure that they have potable water? Is the local or national government responsible? Or, does the international community have a responsibility to ensure that all people have access to clean water? If so, does that mean that those of us who are university students and professors have a moral obligation to provide clean water to others across the world?”
Obligation can seem opposed to freedom, but in reality, it may be that my freedom depends on your fulfilment of a set of duties toward me. If I am to walk down the street in safety, it’s because other people recognize their obligation not to harm me. It’s not a right I can simply exercise by force of my own will; I need other people to act, or refrain from acting, according to their obligations in order to move this right from the theoretical into the practical realm.
Perhaps the language of obligation feels easier to use when we are discussing what we owe other people, and the language of enjoyment feels more relevant to our relationships with ourselves. “I’m trying to remind myself to enjoy writing more,” a novelist recently told me, as she struggled with the first draft of a book. “I guess I should be trying to enjoy the process,” my husband said, as he paused for breath midway through hefting a series of heavy boxes into a storage locker in the rain. These are difficult, demanding tasks; it’s odd to me that they would come with an expectation of positive feeling. Rather than an alternative to obligation, the feeling that we are “supposed” to do only the things we enjoy is itself a form of obligation.
Although different denominations have varying approaches to co-mingling joy and obligation, the commandment to enjoy is nevertheless a tenet of New Testament philosophy. “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice,” it says in Philippians. A sermon by the 19th-century Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon expanding on this passage exhorts his congregation to see joy as a requirement of moral life: “We are to chew the cud of delight; we are to roll the dainty morsel under our tongue till we get the very essence out of it.” Spurgeon emphasizes the compulsory nature of joy, writing that joy is not just “a desirable thing which you can do without,” but “a positive precept.” In other words, a duty or obligation. Perhaps the reason compulsory joy feels more insidious to me than other forms of obligation is that it seeks to control my inner state. I don’t mind so much being told what to do; I don’t like being told how to feel.
If the duty to enjoy was previously conceived as an obligation toward God, in our secular culture, enjoyment feels more like a duty we owe to ourselves. Yet philosophers puzzle about the status of obligations toward the self. Is promising myself something – making a New Year’s resolution to eat more vegetables, or telling myself I absolutely must finish writing this article by 4 p.m. today – the same as promising someone else? When the promiser and the promisee are the same person, it’s hard to see how the promise is binding. As University of North Carolina philosopher Daniel Muñoz writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “An obligation I can escape at will is like a prison with an open gate, a speed limit with no penalty.” If I can release myself from my own promise any time, it’s not much of a promise. The concept of owing something to oneself, Dr. Muñoz remarks, can therefore seem like a contradiction in terms, like “an obligatory hobby or a mercenary passion project.” One way of getting around this problem is the idea that we may have obligations not toward our current selves, but to our future selves. My future self isn’t exactly me; she’s a person affected by my actions, who therefore has some claim to my regard. If I fail to keep my promise to eat my vegetables, future Linda will suffer.
If we accept that obligations toward oneself can exist, perhaps my beef with the obligation to be joyful is that it is simply too hard. Much of what we need to do for ourselves – the acts of self-care and self-actualization that honour our singular existence as human beings – require effort that isn’t pleasant in the moment. Trying to square the sustained effort it takes to reach my long-term goals with a duty to enjoy myself from moment to moment makes me squirm with a sense of failure.
It seems likely to me that what sometimes seems a peculiarly joyless emphasis on joy in our cultural moment arises from a misapplication of Black feminist thought. “Joy is an act of resistance,” the poet Toi Derricotte wrote in 2008. As I understand the poem, Ms. Derricote meant that for members of a marginalized and oppressed group living in a culture that actively works against their well-being, reclaiming the possibility of joy is a radical refusal to accept the status quo. Divorced from this context, an emphasis on joy can quickly become absorbed into a capitalist ethos that maintains the status quo. Joy is radical when society asks too much of you; it’s not so radical if I occupy an identity constantly invited to treat the Earth, and other people, as if they exist purely for my enjoyment.
Early last year, Richard N. Haass, former president of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, published a book titled The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. Mr. Haass, a lifelong Republican, renounced his affiliation in 2021, saying on Twitter, “I concluded Trumpism was less an aberration for the Rep party than its new abnormal.” In an interview with PBS News Hour, Mr. Haass said of the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, that “just because democracy survived that day, it doesn’t mean we have the luxury of being sanguine.” In Mr. Haass’s view, a greater emphasis on the duties of citizenship could avert disaster. He includes among his list of obligations the obligation to be informed, the obligation to be civil and the obligation to compromise.
It’s a dark political moment, and, for many of us, joy may be hard to access; even harder to use as personal motivation for doing the difficult work of engaging with public life. Recuperating and revalorizing the idea of obligation could provide an easier route to building a social sphere in which we treat each other as rights holders, and actively seek out ways to uphold each other’s rights. In the process, we fulfill our duties to ourselves.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Friedrich Nietzsche's quote was written in 1895. It was written in 1888, but not published until 1895. This version has been updated.