The descriptive sub-title of this blog—Against Professional Philosophy—originally created and rolled out in 2013, is “A Co-Authored Anarcho-Philosophical Diary.”
Now, ten years later, after more than 300,000 views of the site, this series, A Philosopher’s Diary, finally literally instantiates that description by featuring short monthly entries by one or another of the members of the APP circle, in order to create an ongoing collective philosophical diary that records the creative results of critical, synoptic, systematic rational reflection on any philosophical topic or topics under the sun, without any special restrictions as to content, format, or length.
In this two-part twelfth installment, Boethius applies some of the core ideas of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience to the experience and practice of doing philosophy.
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS
#1 Changing Social Institutions From Without Or Within
#4 Respect For Choices vs. Respect For Persons
#5 Thirty-Six Philosophical Precepts of Martial Arts Practice
#6 Enlightenment, Education, and Inspiration
#7 Rigged and Lucky: The Myth of Meritocracy in Professional Academic Philosophy
#9. How Much Does The Chatbot Brouhaha Affect Anarcho-Philosophical Teaching and Learning?
#10 Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and Faculty as Mental Health “First Responders”
#11 There’s Nothing…And Everything
#12.1 Philosophy and Flow States, Part 1: Real Philosophy and Professional Academic Philosophy.
A Philosopher’s Diary, #12.2–Philosophy and Flow States, Part 2: Integrated Flow States and Philosophy as a Way of Life
(Wikipedia, 2023)
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed flow states, real philosophy, and professional philosophy. Again, a flow state, per Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990/2008), is a psychological state in which one addresses a challenge having clear goals and feedback, in which one experiences full focus, attention, and control, and (perhaps as a result) loses one’s sense of self and the spatiotemporal surroundings irrelevant to the task. People treat such states as meaningful and find them correlated with success, and as such, flow states are a type of optimal experience. A chess player loses themselves in the game, and with focused attention and concentration, produces a beautiful checkmate. An artist’s focused attention produces an inspired and beautiful artwork. A teacher focuses fully on helping a student, attending to the task to the exclusion of their other professional distractions, loses their own sense of self temporarily but the student learns. And as I discussed in Part 1, real philosophers can experience flow states too, and like writers or athletes getting in the zone, might lose themselves in the concentration and focus that produces good real philosophy.
Scale all of this up, and we have an interesting question: might all of life be optimized and integrated somehow into a large-scale flow state or a succession of interrelated ones? And with respect to real philosophy, what might that life look like, a real-philosophical life of integrated flow states? Here Csikszentmihalyi naturally meets the work of Pierre Hadot, probably the best-known contributor to the concept of (real) philosophy as a way of life. Hadot proposes considering (real) philosophy not just as a subject, not just as a set of thinking tools, and not just as a search for a goal like enlightenment or fundamental truth, but instead as a way of living.
Inspired by various threads in ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, much of Hadot’s position can be found in his essay “Philosophy as a Way of Life,” which is the final chapter of a collection of essays of the same title (Hadot, 1995). Hadot’s view runs through various other works as well (see, e.g., Hadot, 2009), and for ease of exposition I’ll closely follow Lodge’s summary here. Also for ease of exposition, for the rest of the essay I’ll just call real philosophy “philosophy” unless I’m speaking about the professionalized version specifically. Philosophy as a way of life:
(1) is a type of moral conduct
(2) is a mode or way of existing
(3) must be practiced constantly
(4) has the goal of transforming one’s life, and
(5) is therapeutic. (Lodge, 2021)
The features interrelate: The “mode or way of existing” (2) gets cashed out as the activities and dispositions of moral and intellectual virtue: in short “a type of moral conduct” 1. toward most everything. The “constant practice” (3) one might revise as “constant practice as is feasible or as an ideal goal,” given nonphilosophical practical needs and obligations. That practice guides improvement and thus transformation of one’s life (4) for the good. And the good is not just epistemic but therapeutic (5). It is good for one’s well-being.
Lodge adds a summary of Hadot’s position on wisdom (for one might consider philosophy as the practice or seeking of wisdom, as at least one goal of philosophy). The concept of wisdom is contentious of course, but whatever the analysis, on Hadot’s view wisdom brings:
(6) peace of mind
(7) inner freedom, and
(8) cosmic consciousness. (Lodge, 2021)
These again interrelate with each other and with (1)-(5). Philosophy as therapy, in an intellectual, moral, and personal sense, brings inner peace of mind (6), and with philosophy’s tendency to cultivate intellectual virtues like intellectual courage and independent-mindedness, “inner freedom” (7) as well.
What of (8), “cosmic consciousness”? Hadot means nothing New Age here, but instead just any kind of larger perspective than one’s own, and the broader the awareness, the more ‘cosmic’ the perspective. That larger perspective might be social, in considering and empathizing with the diversity of individual standpoints. It might be scientific, in considering larger forces and time-frames of the physical world more vast than what applies locally to oneself. I would add that it might even be intellectual, in considering a larger perspective by which specific intellectual inquiries fit. All such larger perspectives can breed moral and intellectual humility, transformation and freedom from over-attention to one’s own concerns, and thus again can be therapeutic in a moral, intellectual, and personal sense.
One can find these aspects of philosophy as a way of life in the works of philosophy all through its history, and both in Western and Eastern approaches. Hadot finds philosophy as a way of life exemplified in the tradition from the presocratics through the Hellenistic period, and most especially in stoicism, epicureanism, skepticism, and cynicism. One can find philosophy as a way of life advertised in later works too, as Ambury, Irani, & Wallace’s collection shows (2021). It is perhaps underappreciated too in our assigned course readings and our emphases in discussing them. If it’s early modern, we might for instance call attention to Descartes’s ethics (see Breidenstein, 2021) in addition to the metaphysics and epistemology. We might do the same for Leibniz’s panpsychism as a sort of cosmic consciousness (see Lodge, 2021: p. 109). We might call attention to Russell’s final (and greatest?) value of philosophy, near the end of “The Value of Philosophy,” that clearly alludes to a “cosmic consciousness”-type value (Russell, 1912/1959: ch. 10).
Can we blend Hadot with Csikszentmihalyi’s account of flow states? I think so, but we need to extend the idea of individual flow states to an aggregate sense, in order to think of longer life experiences, or even a whole life, optimally, as a unified set of flow states.
Csikszentmihalyi’s final chapter considers such a life. It has three features: purpose, resolve, and inner harmony. First, a unified purpose serves as a challenging goal, a life goal or life theme that gives significance, and it unifies individual actions (which themselves are flow activities). Second, there is resolve to pursue that challenge, and third, there is inner harmony of conscious states from the resolve to pursue the challenge. This picture mirrors the picture for individual flow states. Individual states involve a challenge, a life of them involves a unifying one. Individual states feature resolve or interest or curiosity regarding the task, a life of flow states features resolve to satisfy the unifying purpose. Individual flow states feature complexity, the same for a life of flow states, and for each there is harmony among the component tasks for meeting the challenge.
Is all of this even possible? Flow states’ rarity seems to give them their value. It might seem vanishingly rare to have a life of them. Could we? If we consider the variety of purposes humans have taken on in earnest, the answer somehow seems easy:
All things considered, it cannot be said that humankind has lacked the courage to back its resolutions. Billions of parents, in every age and in every culture, have sacrificed themselves for their children, and thereby made life more meaningful for themselves. Probably as many have devoted all their energies to preserving their fields and their flocks. Millions more have surrendered everything for the sake of their religion, their country, or their art. For those who have done so consistently, despite pain and failure, life as a whole had a chance to become like an extended episode of flow: a focused, concentrated, internally coherent, logically ordered set of experiences, which, because of its inner order, was felt to be meaningful and enjoyable. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990/2008, p. 224)
As with individual flow states, one might first think of great athletes or artists, and those are indeed rare. But as Csikszentmihalyi makes clear (and as I also mentioned in Part 1), flow states can be had for any kind of challenging task. Humans do take those on, and as the quoted passage above indicates, many of us take on unifying life challenges as well. Those present the chance for a scaled-up life of flow states.
Note also (again as I mentioned in Part 1) that while individual flow states themselves are optimal and good for the individual, the activity the flow state involves might well be morally neutral or wrong. Individual acts of burglary might be done in a flow state. The point scales up: One might have a unified purpose and resolve to be the city’s best burglar or the best drug lord. The moral calculus for the activities of a life of flow runs separately from the good features of the states or the life itself. Csikszentmihalyi gives us exemplars here: Malcom X, Edison, and Eleanor Roosevelt for the good and right, and Adolf Eichmann for the bad and wrong.
Let the activities of the philosophical life be good and right, and while it is a reasonable question specifically as to how, they at least serve good ends. What of those ends? What is the purpose of philosophy? We philosophers have given many answers: I usually list, in order from highest to even-more highest, truth, knowledge, understanding, wisdom, and enlightenment. These are all elusive concepts, but they roughly run from accurate representation (or truth, or true belief), to justified true belief (at least), to knowledge of explanations (why those known truths are true), to understanding tied with knowledge of application (in the right circumstances, in the right ways, with the right motivation and virtue). Enlightenment is most elusive of all, yet for my purpose here just let it be a sagelike ideal state of maximal independently-driven wisdom and intellectual virtue. As per an APP distinction, let’s call it heavy-duty enlightenment, informed by the wide-scope, long-term, real-philosophical community, as opposed to enlightenment acccording to contemporary interests dictated by the current rendition of the professional academy, which would be enlightenment lite.
I have to admit I don’t find myself on the higher end of this. More common for me, and I suspect also for other philosophers, is to have one problem, one topic, one question, one argument, etc. as the focus, and reaching some level of understanding and wisdom on that is the goal. But that’s only a one-problem-at-a-time focus. If one focus is to be a life theme, to return to Csikszentmihalyi and a life of flow states, I don’t have it. I wonder how many of us really do. Switching to scientists, consider E.O. Wilson. One might find him an exemplar for a life singularly focused on a specific quest for understanding (he was thought to be the planet’s scientific authority on ants), but that was only a start, a phase. For he went on to become more generalist later in life, in the sense of cultivating and promoting more purposeful things for science itself, especially for conservation, and such things to improve the moral lives of other people, the general population. Bertrand Russell might be philosophy’s version of this. I tend to read his early career as singularly focused on philosophical logic and analytical philosophy of language, though like Wilson, his later life was as a public intellectual promoting rational thinking.
This is too simplistic for Wilson and Russell, and it’s not the picture for the rest of us either, philosophers or not. Russell’s intellectual/philosophical interests were wide, with an early “core” of analytical philosophy of language, logic, and philosophical logic, yes, but also deep dives into, for example, Leibniz, philosophy of mathematics, logical atomism, knowledge of the external world, and pacifism and antiwar activism. Few of us have Russell’s reach on so many things, but the model is that of sustained flow-state focus on one issue or topic at a time. Instead of a life devoted to a single life task attended to via unified flow states with resolve and inner harmony, we see a series of such tasks accomplished in the optimal flow-state way.
But I can’t relate even to this more modest picture of the philosophical life too much. I’ve written articles and done interesting projects, but never even a book-length of anything in depth. When I dissertated long ago, in hindsight that was an interestingly unified flow state or integrated set of them. I happened to defend a position on a metaphysical topic fairly central to philosophy, and while I didn’t choose the topic solely for that reason, it was one reason. In addition to its feeling like an extended flow state, it brought about many of Hadot’s cited features of philosophy as a way of life: As all dissertators and book authors know, it was a “way of being,” it was “(near) constant,” it was transformative (given the intellectual goods gained), and I’d even call it therapeutic. For it is therapeutic to figure something out for oneself, with help from others, yes, but in general from the free exercise of one’s mind. That inner freedom to discover and create hits Hadot’s by-products of wisdom too, along with peace of mind (from ongoing progress, from knowledge that “you can do it”). Did I achieve cosmic consciousness? Not of the universe, unfortunately. But I did find and appreciate interconnections within philosophy, and I did get some of that intellectual sort of bigger-picture cosmic consciousness.
That was a wonderful experience. But later projects have been similar, and I wonder if other philosophers can relate. It’s never been a single over-arching project or life theme that’s unified everything, not in my case, but instead it’s been a series of topics or interests or projects. On occasion I’ve succeeded in capturing that kind of combined Hadot-Csikszentmihalyi experience of living a life of philosophically-oriented flow states. Still, on the negative side, the less-than-ideal side, those experiences have been somewhat short-lived, a month or a few months at most. They do have logical connections among them, somewhat, but there again is no general unity that might unify my intellectual life. They also don’t generalize or apply to the moral lives of others, at least not in a heavy-duty transformative or therapeutic way.
Or at least that’s true on the research and scholarly end. As I’ve mentioned in Part 1, I have a teaching life too. For me, that’s far easier to see as a life of integrated flow states with purpose and resolve, and as a life in line with Hadot’s picture of philosophy as a way of life. I have a personal connection with older family members who are teachers, and like most of us I’ve had inspiring teachers I aim to emulate. I find philosophy teaching easy to describe in grand terms, with important purpose where it’s easy to have resolve. For example, like many, I consider philosophy teaching to help people cultivate their own motivation to pursue truth, knowledge, understanding, and enlightenment, and all (I say, and we philosophers say) importantly involving philosophical topics and techniques. With that breadth of integrated pursuits, it is easy to see the varied elements of a philosophy class as directed ultimately at a (heavy-duty) enlightened self. Given that I in fact agree wholly with that picture of philosophy and the teaching of it, and that I’ve more-or-less come to it of my own accord and inquiry and analytical thinking, it is a purpose I’ve made my own.
I get various kinds of harmony out of the teaching motivation. The inner states of the teaching/facilitating itself harmonize. But there’s another harmony too that philosophy teachers surely can relate to: Helping guide others to think better, whether just for basic reasoning tools or for higher goals of wisdom and enlightenment, helps me toward those goals too. Teaching logic refines my own reasoning practice (or at least keeps me freshly practiced). Guiding more content-focused courses helps me see new things from my students, but also it forces me along the same path as those I’m helping, where I gain in the same ways I’m hoping for them to gain. That is one of the most enriching kinds of integrated flow states I can have as a teacher. Over longer time-frames it’s an integrated life of them. Does it hit Hadot’s common features of philosophy as a way of life? I think so: It’s a way of being, it is a sort of moral life, it’s constant practice (aren’t teachers always thinking of their craft?), it’s an ongoing transformation. It’s therapeutic given the ongoing self-improvement. Do I get the good features of wisdom per Hadot? Again, I think so. When there’s success at least, there’s peace of mind or ataraxia from doing someone an intellectual good. There’s inner freedom in cultivating the craft and from exercising informed free choice as to technique. Is there cosmic consciousness? Again it sounds New Age-ey, but I do feel a connection oftentimes with the larger humanity when I’m doing teaching work. Small though my part might be, I’m playing a role in helping humanity at large.
I suspect a lot of us who aren’t heavy researchers think this way, and I suspect a lot of research-heavy philosophers think this way too when they can. But push this meditation on a life of flow states as a philosopher some more. A natural question is whether and how to integrate the scholarly and teaching sides. One might propose two philosophical “lives” of flow, one for scholarly investigations (communal or individual) and another for a pedagogical life of helping people learn (that can be inside or outside of an institution or academy). But I think the Hadot picture from the ancients imagines those lives integrated. The Stoics would have found the idea strange of a philosopher only living a life of inquiry into foundational understanding and ultimately enlightenment for oneself. Then again, the Stoics favored the view of humans as social animals with fundamental obligations to each other, and that idea isn’t unique to Stoicism. So then we have a proposal of a highest sort of philosophical way of life that integrates teaching (or whatever one does to help others improve) with the scholarly pursuits that presumably would have to inform the teaching.
Here too, many of us probably find this agreeable. At least for those philosophers I know (and even some of the more professionalized ones), part of the teaching side is integrated with the scholarly work, with the two lives mutually informing each other. Surely those two integrated purposes make for something larger, with flow states for a multitude of philosophical activities integrating into a philosophical life akin to a long-term flow state.
Many further questions present themselves here, both critical and elucidative, but I’ll address three before closing.
First, a philosophical life obviously faces interruptions. Not everything is focused on research and teaching philosophy, or even on thinking about philosophy, and perhaps rightly so. Learning happens best with spaced practice. There are practical interruptions: I need to do a grocery run, I have to exercise, I have to cut the grass. On the one hand, anyone interested in an integrated philosophical life ought to concede this. The integration is as is feasible. But on the other hand, more tellingly, on reflection even a lot of the “practical” interruptions still wind up having philosophical thoughts in the background. They might even be in the foreground: Yard work is an excellent task for letting contemplation happen. So there may well be many gaps in an integrated philosophical life, but the gaps wind up getting filled by more philosophy than at first glance.
Second, another question pertains to flow states themselves. Might the philosophical life then wind up being “selfless”? For in individual flow states, the self drops away and one loses contact with spatiotemporal concerns (bodily and otherwise) with no direct connection to the task. Integrated sets of flow states would have the same quality. Scale up to a whole life and then we have a selfless life? Perhaps so, but only in the sense of a lack of explicit self-awareness in favor of full focus and attention to one’s purpose and the tasks that are its means. That does seem to be the proposal. But the question calls attention to some ironies involving flow states. They’re optimal states for the person, with great value attached to them, but they don’t involve awareness of the self per se. One “loses oneself” in a task as something valuable for the self. Self-conscious self-awareness drops out in favor of focused attention. For a philosophical life, would the ideal one would have the same feature? I’ll leave the question open.
Third and finally, there’s the impossibly difficult question of specific points of focus. Is there an optimal area of scholarly interest in philosophy? For the teaching side, what pedagogy? It’s true one can pursue most anything in our field and get both flow states and self-cultivation. Some areas might offer better opportunities for integration with one’s personal situation and with philosophy as a whole. Does this matter? Maybe, but on the one hand, perhaps the lesson would be that too much specialization makes an integrated life of flow more difficult. Not impossible, yet if an ideal life is a challenge to achieve anyway, there seem to be wiser and less-wise choices of scholarly interest. But on the other hand, if E.O. Wilson could start with ants and broaden this interest to the public value of science, then we shouldn’t be too chauvinistic about topics and questions. Hadot would warn of the dangers of what he called “discursive philosophy”—philosophy principally about the arguments and the production of ideas, especially within the received view of what matters. That mode dominates professional academic philosophy. But even within discursive philosophy there can be attention to philosophy as a way of life, and even its appreciation can open the path to something closer to an optimal, integrated philosophical life. What of the pedagogical side? There too can be many options. Even within that range though, there can be more- and less-optimal choices. There’s now no shortage of extensive scholarly work on philosophy pedagogy. But the choice for an integrated philosophical life surely involves integrating the purpose of teaching with one’s own self-improvement. That also includes attending to something like Hadot’s features of philosophy as a way of life and the by-products of wisdom. That goes for the teaching side as much as the scholarly side, and for integrating them.
My thinking on many of these ideas couldn’t have happened without a student’s interest. This past Spring I supervised a senior thesis on philosophy as a way of life. He came to me with the topic and I readily accepted. We never considered flow states and Csikszentmihalyi’s work. But I’d always wanted to look into Hadot more, and I was glad to get a perspective on the nature of philosophy of which I’d only been hazily aware before. I thank that student for what the thesis gained for me, and that is perhaps a smidgen of the kind of integrated philosophical life I’ve partly analyzed here.
REFERENCES
(Ambury, Irani, & Wallace, 2021). Ambury, J., Irani, T., & Wallace, K. (eds.) Philosophy as a Way of Life: Historical, Contemporary, and Pedagogical Perspectives. Malden MA: Wiley.
(Breidenstein, 2021). Breidenstein, J. “Cartesian Philosophy as Spiritual Practice.” In (Ambury, Irani, & Wallace, 2021: pp. 83–96).
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990/2008). Csikszentmihalyi, M. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
(Hadot, 1995). Hadot, P. Philosophy as a Way of Life. Trans. M. Chase. Malden MA: Blackwell.
(Hadot, 2009). Hadot, P. The present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson. Trans. M. Djaballah and M. Chase. 2nd ed., Stanford CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
(Lodge, 2021). Lodge, P. “Leibniz’s Philosophy as a Way of Life?” In (Ambury, Irani, & Wallace, 2021: pp. 97–116).
(Russell, 1912/1959) Russell, B. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
(Wikipedia, 2023). Wikipedia. “Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.” Available online at URL = <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi>.
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