Well-Being as Nature-Fulfillment? WTF?!

by Will Wilkinson on January 10, 2007

What are happiness and well-being? No need to make it complicated. Dan Haybron is correct:

The short answer, according to me

Happiness is best understood as consisting in a person’s overall emotional condition. This includes moods, many emotions, and a person’s mood propensity, or tendency to experience various moods (which varies considerably over time). To be happy is roughly for one’s emotional condition to be solidly positive, with a heavy predominance of positive over negative affect.

Well-being consists in nature-fulfillment, making my view eudaimonistic. The account will likely take this form: well-being consists mainly in the fulfillment of the self’s emotional and rational aspects—i.e., in being authentically happy, and in success regarding the commitments that shape one’s identity. But our subpersonal natures probably also count, so we might add, secondarily, the fulfillment of our “nutritive” and “animal” natures: health or vitality and pleasure.

Almost correct. So, I take it back. Plenty of need to make it complicated. Starting about ten minutes ago, I no longer understand what “nature-fulfillment” is. I have no idea what my self’s “emotional and rational aspects” are. I have emotional capacities and cognitive capacities of various sorts—powers Hobbes might say. But I can’t exercise all of them. I am budget-constrained in the exercise of my capacities. Which ones to exercise, then? Which one’s to develop, perfect? Which to ignore, let wither? (How do I even individuate them—know where one ends and another begins?) If I’m supposed to exercise just the ones that add up to “well-being,” then we’ve circularly defined well-being, and haven’t said anything about it.

Further, I claim, our basic, culturally untutored cognitive capacities don’t add up to some kind of natural “rationality” in either an Aristotelian or Kantian (or whatever) sense. Rationality is an art. So our normative conception of rationality (and probably our conception of various forms of emotion) just is a kind identity-shaping commitment that doesn’t exist prior to or independent of set of social conventions and a personal commitment to hew to them. If I shape my identity by commitment to the exercise of certain emotional or rational capacities, then it may be necessary to sacrifice the exercise of some other emotional capacities—for example, the ones that reinforce a “solidly positive emotional condition,” or happiness. Can happiness be anathema to some people’s well-being?

Back to this nature-fulfillment business. Many folks seem to believe in “callings,” or nature-fulfilling activities. Maybe your calling is to make beautiful music on the piano. But it’s not like there are pianos in the wild, sprouting from the ground under the baobab trees. In a possible world without pianos, where would you be? Is the piano just a specification of a general to-be-fulfilled nature, a general naturally defined set of begging-to-be-realized potentials just hanging around in some kind of waiting room of the “self” (or subpersonal animal)? It seems doubtful. It seems more likely that the piano is an opportunity for a previously undreamt identity-shaping—capacity-shaping—commitment. There is no kind of personal nature that mastering the piano fulfills without pianos.

It is tempting for me to see this conclusion as a fat shiny nail craving the tender attentions of my hammer and to argue (Bang!) here is an argument for the proliferating plenitude and specialization of market society. The more piano-like opportunities to uniquely shape a custom soul, the better. But, the thought is, there may be no relevant fixed “nature,” and so there may be little normative  oomph in the possibility of committing to and fulfilling a particular constructed nature, unless there is something especially fitting about that nature relative to the infinite alternatives. But in that case we still need something fixed, like natures, just more individualized and specific.

Maybe we do have them, not because we come with them built in, but because they get built in through the interaction of our natural material–basic capacities, powers, etc.—with the culture we find ourselves embedded in. The more various and abundant the culture, the more fine-grained our micro-natures. So well-being as nature-fulfillment in market societies requires the maintenance of markets that churn out a dizzying variety of undreamt identity-shaping ”pianos” that we can commit to in order to realize our seemingly factory-installed but hyper-individualized “potentials.”

So, Bang!, anyway.

Viewing 6 Comments

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    Let me see if I understand you. Are you arguing against the idea of inborn talent? Or are you saying that inborn talents are coarse-grained, and get refined to fine-grain talents via the environment?
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    Jeff, That can't be it, because what I'm saying is deep.
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    When I was in grad school for piano, people who got "sponsorship" -- a wealthy person or foundation to cover their living expenses so they could keep their life to practicing, performing, and making connections at wine and cheese parties -- were considered lucky. I always considered such people unlucky, because this process ensured that any further development of their sense of themselves would be stunted. ItI think it perfectly healthy to, at 18, think that your calling is to play Chopin and that's all you want to do and could possibly do. But it's equally healthy, at 24, to have further information modulate that concept -- so, for example, if you realize that hundreds of other graduates of other schools every year play Chopin as well as you, and maybe your goal is less "you" than you thought; if you gut out making a living for a couple of years commuting an hour each way to the suburbs, to teach kids who don't practice, to subsidize your concert career; then you get a different sense of whether playing Chopin is "you". It might still be. It may be that you realize that what you really loved about music is more differentiated, that you love the compositional structure, or the climate of ideas of that time, or reinventing Chopin for today, or you just like applause. So maybe it's a lot more fulfilling and less grueling to do the booking for a great concert series, or be a music history professor, etc.

    I don't see why the development of "talent" doesn't contain the same basic properties of indeterminacy as embryology or neurology. No one gene or neuron connects to any particular final outcome; the whole thing develops in a contextual, nonlinear way. The unfolding of "talent" may obey similar principles.
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    Our specific nature (pianist specializing in contemporary muic, philosophy professor specializing in ethics, or libertarian blogger) certainly isn't given in advance. We start with certain goals, we attempt to realize them, but the goals often look different when realized. Perhaps we realize them poorly or anyway, not well enough to become quite what we'd had in mind (e.g., a concert pianist who can support himself by performing alone). Or perhaps we find that, although we're pretty good at our goal (being the witty life of the party), the achievement of the goal persuades us that it was a shallow goal, or a goal that others chose for us. We may decide upon realizing or attempting to realize our goals, that the goals are not really "us" after all. We then reconsider our goals and attempt to adjust them to what our attempts to realize those old goals have taught us about our real values and how we are cut out to realize them. The hope is that we can ultimately achieve a life that viewed from the outside, we would regard as a realization of our deepest self. But that deepest self in its individual details will be as much a creation of this dialectic of goal and realization as it is a discovery made in the process.
    However, at a more general level, I think this creative trial-and-error adjustment of goals to means and means to goals is itself the expression of our natures as rational agents. The World Controllers in Huxley's Brave New World attempt to achieve maximal happiness for their people by denying them this expression of their human/rational nature. Therefore, in the terms of Will's post above, they are attempting to give people happiness at the expense of their well-being.
    (Subjective happiness, I think, is best understood as the sense of well-being -- i.e., it is a usually reliable, but not infallible indicator of well-being. The world controllers are like dieticians who design a delicious food that makes people feel full but which provides no nutritional value whatever -- not even calories -- and who prescribe it for every meal.)
    Our rational nature plus our talents certainly cannot provide us with a recipe for correct self-expression, but it does put some constraints on self-expression. (It also may reconcile us to the nature of our lives -- dissatisfaction is, on this account, an essential part of the dialectical process leading to our individual self-expression.)
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    Fly, you seem to have an externalized commodity based notion of happiness=well being=talent. Strange to my ears.

    Eric: Is talent really so plutocratically symbiotic?

    CJW: Why is it that when you realize 'goals ain't us,' you reevaluate your concept of "goals" rather than the one you hold of "us?" Dialectics is a dead end (Deleuze & Guatarri).

    Just passing through the ivory tower. You boys are amusing.

    Reminder: "Up until now philosophers have tried to understand the world, when the point is to change it." (Karl the Idiot).
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    Will, I agree that specialization is cool. So does Arnold Zwicky. Check out this note on Language Log:

    http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/arch...

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