Category: Aristotle

Achilles, Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Psychology

Poetry in Motion

I’ve just finished Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Flow’. There are things to criticise. Some points – the time we waste in front of TV notably – are right but he makes them repetitively. His style occasionally grates. But, in my humble opinion, it is an outstanding book. My Bayesian brain infers he is likely a pretty outstanding man.

There are many themes to pull out, ideas to take forward, good advice and thought provoking evidence. My simple summary is – just read it. I’ve given ‘Flow’ its own link in the sidebar to the right.

Two personal things I’ll draw out. First Csikszentmihilyi’s advice to read a piece of poetry every day. I’ve never much cared for poetry. But, as he says, I’ve discovered a poem is a simple and rewarding pleasure. It doesn’t take much. Just five minutes and two or three poems at bedtime and mood and life are subtlety and magically enhanced. I told my partner. She’s taken with it too. And now we both have books of poetry on the go. My advice – just do it.

The second personal thing was my curious desire to get the book over with. Mainly, I think, so I could get on with all the things I now want to read as a result of reading the book. But also because I ever-so-slightly feared Csikszentmihalyi might barrel off the rails and disappoint me at the end.

Many potentially great books have been marred by a lame ending. I worried about this one. Tantalisingly the penultimate chapter was pretty good – synthesis, some emergent structure and integration of themes. So, as I said to to a particular friend, I was anxious that the last chapter would be a major disappointment. He said ‘Don’t read it, write your own final chapter’. Good advice, but a somewhat daunting challenge, so I read it instead, and I’m glad I did.

No easy answers therein, but a validation of my own thesis, that the good life requires both thought and action – Aristotle and Achilles. Csikszentmihilyi also recommends the thinkers and writers of history and antiquity as invaluable guides. I increasingly agree. But his final challenge is a tough one: to learn to master oneself and then get beyond the self to find an overarching meaning for our lives and tune into and live vividly in the full ‘flow’ of the real world. Easy then.

Discussing this on Monday with another friend, we concluded life takes the balance of a Nureyev: to balance internal with external, self with others, the world within with the world without, skill with challenge, what we achieve in life with what we would want to be remembered for.

Stoic, Sceptic, Epicurean, Existentialist, pick your school of philosophy, they are all scratching the same basic itch: how much to stick your neck out and risk your mental and physical health in the hurly burly of the real world.

Finding ‘meaning’ for Csikszentmihalyi or a ‘telos’ for Aristotle is the tough one. For Aristotle’s harp player it’s playing the harp well. For me the meaning of life is getting clearer, but it’s reassuring to know there are philosophers and poets to help me on my way.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Psychology

The Good Life

I used to be a strict Act Utilitarian – the moral act is the one that produces the most overall happiness or least harm. The undergraduate philosophy case studies all seemed clear cut to me.

Knowing what we know now, would I have assassinated Hitler in 1934? Sure would. If a sadistic Generalissimo passed me a gun to kill an innocent in exchange for the lives of several others, would I pull the trigger? Under duress and with no alternatives, reluctantly, yes.

To my untrained late-teen moral mind, rational calculations seemed to provide a better framework than the rules of religions and imperfect man-made moral codes. Undergraduate philosophy taught me how to ‘reductio ad absurdam’ any nuance or shade of grey. Life was black and white. Add it up, make the call, don’t expect to be understood, live with the consequences.

But the pointer on my my moral compass started twitching in my mid-thirties. Act Utilitarianism can feel calculating, look immoral and set bad precedents. A good outcome is a bad justification for a rotten process. Some things shouldn’t go under the wheels as we drive hard to a destination. We have to stand for some things, or we stand for nothing. Sometimes what the head can justify sickens the heart.

Enter Aristotle in my Forties. Eudaimonia, arete and telos – flourishing, excellence and fulfilling our innate potential – they feel like the ingredients of a good life to me. There are some rules and a handful of prohibitions in Aristotle’s Ethics. But ‘moderation in all things’ is the basic gist. Thinking and talking about Aristotle this week, I have a clearer idea why I prefer the life’s work of ‘eudaimonia’, to the instant gratification of ‘happiness’, as a moral end.

Happiness is a mental ‘state’. In eras where life was nasty, brutish and short it must have been pretty rare. Perhaps no surprise then that ‘happiness’ bubbled to the surface with Bentham and Mill as the ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ were robbing people of eudaimonia and the ‘telos’ of crafts and village life. William Blake, whose poems I’m reading at the moment, gives a flavour of this in ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’.

But in the affluent, materialist, 21st century Western world, I fear happiness is a false god. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll put transitory hedonistic pleasure on an altar. Thinking about this, I was reminded of another undergraduate philosophy ‘thought experiment’ – the brain in a vat. What if all my sensations are fed me by a mad scientist thorough electrodes plugged into my brain?

Here in the ‘real’ world we are closer and closer to being able to live purely for audio-visual, digital and chemical pleasures without needing a mad scientist. People need to participate in their lives not plug in, switch off and get high. This is substantially Csikszentmihalyi’s case for embroidering our lives with varied challenges, new skills and personal growth.

Aristotle gives life an achievable and worthwhile end – to be the best of who we are. It is an optimistic, forgiving, perfectible, self-improving and thoroughly ‘open system’ – in his nutshell: ‘we are what we repeatedly do’.

Virtues and excellence grow with our actions, a little reflection and lots of practice. There’s plenty of room in Aristotle for happiness – especially through friends. There’s an explicit acknowledgement of ‘flow’ – the work of the harp player is to play the harp, and of the good harp player to play the harp well. But above all the good life is the one we lead every day by growing, improving, refining, learning, reflecting and acting.

I think Aristotle trains core moral strength better than the rational calculation of Utilitarianism. Better to act, learn, feel and constantly improve than use intellectual brute force to calculate the answers. Life is more Bayesian than arithmetic, more non-linear than deterministic. It’s a life’s work to work on the answers for myself – and to enjoy the journey.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life

Cross Stitches

I’ve subscribed to Montaigne’s Essais on dailylit.com which breaks him up into comparatively bitesized chunks. Still the discovery that there are 426 daily episodes to look forward to sometimes feels a long haul. I’m up to episode 62.

Some days I skim him, some days I ignore him completely. But sometimes he discusses something with himself, in his meandering way, which speaks to my own day. Whenever I’m close to cancelling my daily dose of Montaigne, something crops up which piques my interest.

The other day I was tickled in Chapter XXV by his discourse on copying, citing and stealing the ideas and expressions of others. He describes the occasion he spotted a piece of stolen intellectual treasure in an otherwise dull read:

…After a long and tedious travel, I came at last to meet with a piece that was lofty, rich, and elevated to the very clouds… and so wholly cut off from the rest of the work, that by the first six words, I found myself flying into the other world, and thence discovered the vale whence I came so deep and low, that I have never had since the heart to descend into it any more.

In some ages quoting and embroidering ones own words with those of others has been considered scholarly. In others a sin. Montaigne is ambivalent, but on balance feels – properly cited – it is good to draw on others: 

…I myself… attempt to equal myself to my thefts, and to make my style go hand in hand with them, not without a temerarious hope of deceiving the eyes of my reader from discerning the difference… Besides, I do not offer to contend with the whole body of these champions, nor hand to hand with anyone of them: ’tis only by flights and little light attempts that I engage them; I do not grapple with them, but try their strength only. 

When I first read Aristotle and indeed almost any of the thinkers I’ve ‘tried the strength of’, it is easy to feel – at least for ethics – that it has all been thought and said. But an insight from Csikszentmihilyi reassures me that it’s still well worth thinking for myself. Like Aristotle, he maintains that there is no reliable guide or recipe for ‘the good life’. There are, at best, principles and then it is the work of every individual to create our own virtuous circle of thought and action. As Aristotle says: we are, what we habitually do.

That we each have a personal Odyssey to navigate, is reason enough to embroider our thoughts with the golden threads of others from all the ages. But Csikszentmihalyi’s further point is, even where great thinkers have distilled the essence of the good life for their age – Aristotle for the Ancients, Epictetus and Seneca for the random cruelty of the Romans, the Apostles for the tough early years Anno Domini, yogis, Confucius, the Buddha and others for their times and places – the times they are a constantly changin’. 

So not only is living ‘the good life’ a personal challenge, but it is a fresh generational challenge for every epoch given our vastly different social, technological and interpersonal contexts. 

It is almost impossible to imagine the scale of the technological difference between me typing on an Apple bluetooth keyboard in 2011 and Montaigne scratching on parchment in 16th Century France. And yet a decent proportion of what drops electronically into my inbox from his pen is in some way pertinent and relevant. I find it remarkable that both Aristotle and Montaigne travel the ages so well. 

And so to my handy consolation from Montaigne for this week. I’ve spent the last couple of days wrestling with the interaction between my two ‘lovely’ children and two other ‘lovely’ children. Of course they are each individually and collectively lovely, and the interactions between them have been mainly delightful. But they have also been occasionally loud, wearing and late one afternoon briefly teetered towards ‘The Lord of the Flies’. Who was it who said other people are hell? They were wrong – it’s children.

Overall though it was lovely – and with no qualifying speech marks. But yesterday morning as temperatures and tempers warmed, it was nice to enjoy a moment of Montaigne on the iPhone, reassuring me that 400+ years ago, Renaissance parents struggled with many of the same challenges: 

We often take very great pains, and consume a good part of our time in training up children to things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally unfit.

Nevertheless, I am clearly of opinion, that they ought to be elemented in the best and most advantageous studies, without taking too much notice of, or being too superstitious in those light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years.

But, in truth, all I understand as to that particular is only this, that the greatest and most important difficulty of human science is the education of children.

Reassuringly parenting down the ages seems much like John Wanamaker’s view of advertising: everyone knows half of it doesn’t work, the problem is no-one knows which half. Much like ‘the good life’, ‘good parenting’ is a fresh challenge for every parent and every age. It is indeed the greatest and most important difficulty of the human sciences, but also – at least most of the time – the most rewarding.

Aristotle, Life, Psychology

Fluid Dynamics

A good friend put me onto the ‘flow’ psychology of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. As is not uncommon with names with unfamiliar spellings, it’s easy to glide over Csikszentmihalyi in text while subconsciously logging him as unpronounceable. But if you are going to commend him to others it’s good to get your mouth round his name. Broken up it’s not so hard ‘Chick-sent-me-hi-yee’. And there is modest satisfaction to be had in mastering the unpronounceable – a theme I will return to…

Csikszentmihalyi’s thesis is beguilingly simple. ‘Flow’ is the exhilarating feeling of meeting ‘high challenge’ with ‘high skill’. When challenge is low, and our skills are too, we slump into boredom and apathy. When challenge is too high we suffer worry and anxiety. Where our skills comfortably exceed our challenges we are relaxed or in control. When a challenge threatens to stretch us we are alert and ‘aroused’. Finally, ‘flow’ is that feeling of achievement, fulfilment and flourishing which comes with doing a difficult thing well.

In the classic ‘flow’ diagram (above), there are eight segments: control, relaxation, boredom, apathy, worry, anxiety, arousal and ‘flow’ with a point of intersection in the middle. Some people add a ‘subject mean’ as a central zone around the point of intersection which is our personal average zone for a given activity or situation.

When I first looked at one of these diagrams I more or less cottoned on to the eight segments. But I couldn’t decide what to make of the point of intersection – is it a good place? Or a bad place? Or is it a completely neutral place?

Over last weekend, playing football, then watching it, a children’s film, my mother and thinking about ageing bodies and minds, I conclude the ‘subject mean’ or ‘point of intersection’ is a moveable feast. And therein lies the rub, it seems to me. With ‘flow’, the goalposts are constantly moving – and not just one way.

How so? One of the great lessons of adult life is that aptitude usually comes a poor second to application and practice. Almost everything gets easier with practice. Equally, no-one from Einstein to Nijinsky achieved great skill without hours and hours (or if you believe Malcolm Gladwell more or less 10,000 hours) of practice. Watching my kids trying new things they readily assume – as I did when I was young – that they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at something due to early luck or accidents of fate.

Certainly some kids learn faster than others, some are more physical some have greater dexterity. But like everything with nature and nurture, these basic skills and aptitudes are developed or not developed by the hours spent at a blackboard, in ballet shoes… or in football boots.

On Saturday I was kicking a football about with my son. I was a decent footballer in my day, but very one footed. No left peg. But trying it, within the space of a dozen passes concentrating uniquely on using my left foot, I went from feeling completely off balance to passing comparatively cleanly, crisply and accurately. Not exactly ‘flow’, but some ‘arousal’ and less ‘anxiety’ than the first clumsy attempt. My point of equilibrium had shifted a little.

Later in the day, I watched one of the most talented midfielders of the last 15 years demonstrate the opposite. Paul Scholes saw red in the all Manchester FA Cup Semi-Final at Wembley. A lunging high tackle earned him a sending off. His immensely gifted feet, and the quickness to single-handedly turn a game, now were fractionally too slow to ‘flow’ at the highest level. He was ‘aroused’ to futile anger instead.

From a footballer’s inexorable decline, to the sad story of 1970s Prime Minister Harold Wilson which preys on my mind from time to time. We all hope that when the body falters the mind will stay sharp. Poor Harold Wilson, who went to the same Oxford College as me, was allegedly the first to realise his hitherto razor sharp brain was slipping. He felt the need to resign quickly before anyone else noticed. From Paul Scholes and Harold Wilson I infer our ability to ‘flow’ can diminish with physical and mental decline – and our ability to cope with it too.

But perhaps inexorable decline is not the way to think about ‘flow’. Watching my mother play with my kids on Sunday, she showed them a yoga stretch which her yoga teacher recently described as ‘awesome’. She won her first ever lawn bowls team trophy last year and took the individual ladies prize this year. She is 67. Perhaps we need to be kind to ourselves and move our interests and our ‘mean points’ so we don’t lose our own joy as we age. I think of this on my bike some days when cycling to work feels like a chore. In a decade or two I will dream of the physicality and strength I take completely for granted in those moments. It changes my perspective.

But even if we are kind to ourselves over the long haul, finding ‘flow’ every day is a new challenge each and every day. On Saturday morning I watched ‘Night at the Museum’ with my boy. It’s a jolly Ben Siller romp in a New York museum where all the exhibits come to life and brawl with each other at night. It’s my son’s current favourite. As with so many of the US kids genre, there are plenty of worthwhile homilies and invariably a good moral to the story.

After twists and turns and trials and tribulations this one ends with father and son reunited and Attilla the Hun, Christopher Columbus and assorted cowboys, animals, Romans and great Americans dancing together in one big non-alcoholic all night party. The moral of the story? If we all pull together, everyone can get along. But in the real world, once the ‘flow’ of a romping script’s worth of challenges had been briefly toasted, they’d all have been ‘bored’ and ‘apathetic’ by morning – and fighting again the following night. With ‘flow’, unlike fairy stories, there are no “happily ever afters”. Every day needs filling. No challenge, no ‘flow’.

So Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ is both blessing and curse – like Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, it’s a life’s work, and there is no easy solution. To paraphrase Csikszentmihalyi himself: life is “what we experience from morning to night, seven days a week, for about seventy years if we are lucky, for even longer if we are very fortunate… there are no gimmicks, no easy shortcuts. It takes a total commitment to a fully experienced life, one in which no opportunities are left unexplored and no potential undeveloped, to achieve excellence.”

So every day, whether it’s kicking a ball with my left foot, unevenly strumming a ukulele or lashing together another blog post, all are opportunities to ‘flow’. The art of ‘flow’, I think, is recognising it is there to be had in small things as well as large, in things we are objectively very ‘good’ at. But also in things we aren’t but are prepared to give a try.

And if ‘flow’ is an internal ‘feeling’ then we substantially have the power to judge it and feel it for ourselves. So I’ve decided the art is in choosing well the things we invest time in doing, being kind to ourselves in setting the bar and not being too hard on ourselves as we progress. Like a personal pacemaker in our own race of life, ‘flow’ runs only as fast and as far ahead of us as we let it.

Aristotle, Life, Work

Laughter

As I wrote the other week, I now know the cognitive cost of self-control is ‘ego depletion’. In Wired’s less technical terms, acts of self-control ‘piss the ego off’ and attract us to angry thoughts, words and deeds.

‘Ego depletion’ has sometimes caused me to undo my good works with an ‘unnecessary’ withering remark or ‘unduly’ bleak assessment. But whilst these may seem ‘unnecessary’ or ‘undue’ in the eyes of others – and damaging certainly – experience, and now evidence, show a ‘depleted ego’ demands its redress. Is there a better way? This week, I discovered, that laughter works just as well as scything remarks in topping up the cognitive cost of self-control.

I was in an absolutely packed three day management meeting in Madrid. Travel, time differences, lots of people, lots of subjects, lots of personalities and inevitably a certain amount of self-control required to navigate with aplomb. Surely the perfect tee up for one of my incongruous blasts. But this week I didn’t do it.

Of course I was tempted. Tired, hot, periodically irritated and regularly in receipt of the ‘gift’ of feedback, a good put down or an acerbic ‘reality check’ was sorely tempting for a sore ego. But I didn’t do it. Instead, I applied what I have learned in recent months and years: watch my energy, leave other people’s stuff alone if it doesn’t really concern me, avoid tangling unnecessarily. Best of all though, I stumbled upon some humour.

Humour in big meetings is a delicate balance. People are often more ready to laugh ‘at’ you than ‘with’ you. As Aristotle rightly points out there is a fine line between ‘boor’ and ‘buffoon’. But a winning smile and an amusing turn of phrase was sometimes all it took to lift the mood when the whole room was just as ‘ego depleted’ as I was.

The net result? I left with the job done – feeling tired, but cheerful – and with smiling goodbyes all round. Much better than angry with myself, diffident and apologetic for unnecessary barbs.

In sum, a moment of laughter tops up a depleted ego far more effectively than a verbal headbut – however tempting…