Flourishing: From Aristotle to Positive Psychology — Happiness 3 (C1)

HAPPINESS · LESSON 3

Flourishing: From Aristotle to Positive Psychology

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Two lives

Task Read about two fictional people. Write two letters: which life went better, A or B? Which life was happier, A or B? Then write one sentence explaining your first letter.

A

Sami

B

Noor

For forty years Sami worked in a comfortable office job he found mildly dull. His evenings were good food, television and friends; his holidays were by the sea. He was rarely stressed, and when asked, he said honestly that he was content.

Noor spent the same forty years running a school she founded in a poor district. There were money worries, long hours, failures and real exhaustion. She was often stressed and sometimes unhappy. She grew enormously, made deep friendships, and the school changed hundreds of lives. She says she would not change it.

Went better?

Happier?

READING

The highest good

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, probably based on his lectures in Athens in the fourth century BCE, opens with a claim about purpose: "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good" (Ross's translation). Most goods are wanted for the sake of something else: we earn money to buy things and take medicine to be healthy. If the chain is not to run on forever, there must be a highest good, wanted for its own sake and never for anything further.

Almost everyone, Aristotle says, agrees on its name: eudaimonia, usually translated "happiness", though "flourishing" is closer. People identify it with "living well and doing well". The disagreement is about what it consists in: some say pleasure, others honour, wealth or knowledge. Aristotle sets out three main lives, devoted to pleasure, to politics and to contemplation, and dismisses money-making as a mere means: "wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking".

READING · CONTINUED

The highest good

Eudaimonia, he argues, is complete (always chosen for itself) and self-sufficient (on its own it makes a life worth choosing). To say what it is, he turns to the function argument. A flute-player, a sculptor and a carpenter each have a function, and each does well by performing it well. Has a human being none? Growth and nutrition we share with plants, and perception with animals. What is distinctive of us is a life of activity guided by reason. So the human good is "activity of soul in accordance with

virtue", where virtue means excellence: doing the distinctively human thing well.

Two features matter for everything that follows. Eudaimonia is an activity, not a feeling or a state: someone with every virtue who sleeps through life is not flourishing. And it is not just a matter of opinion: whether you flourish depends on how your life actually goes, not only on how it feels to you.

READING

One swallow

Aristotle then adds a condition: happiness must come "in a complete life. For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day" (Ross). The Greek word is actually spring, the season the first swallow announces. A good afternoon, or even a good year, is not yet a good life. Flourishing belongs to a whole life, judged across its length.

This raises an old puzzle. The Athenian lawgiver Solon had advised calling no one happy until they were dead, since fortune can always turn. Aristotle takes the worry seriously. Priam, king of Troy, was prosperous for most of his life, then in old age saw his sons killed and his city

destroyed. Nobody, Aristotle says, calls happy a man who has "ended wretchedly" like that.

So flourishing is partly exposed to luck. Aristotle accepts that it needs external goods: "it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment", such as friends, wealth and political power. The lack of some things, among them good birth, children and good looks, "takes the lustre from happiness". Yet he will not make happiness a mere hostage to fortune. A good person bears misfortune "most nobly" and will never become truly miserable, though one who meets "fortunes like those of Priam" cannot be called blessed.

One swallow

Task In pairs, discuss at least three of the questions under the text. For each, say whether you think Aristotle would agree with you.

1. Can one year of a life be happy if the life as a whole is not?

2. Is Aristotle right that flourishing depends partly on luck, such as health or birthplace?

3. If someone feels content but never uses their talents, is their life going well?

4. Can a life go worse after death, for example if someone's life's work is destroyed?

5. Where you live, do people judge a life more by its ending or by its best years?

Two kinds of well-being

Modern psychology inherited the ancient argument. Since the 1980s, most happiness research has measured subjective well-being: how satisfied people say they are with their lives, and how much pleasant and unpleasant feeling they report (Ed Diener, 1984). Richard Ryan and Edward Deci (2001) called this the hedonic tradition. A second, eudaimonic tradition follows Aristotle. It asks whether people are functioning well: using their capacities, growing, connected to others and living with purpose, whatever their mood on the day.

In the module's terms, mood scores speak to Pleasure and life-satisfaction ratings lean towards Desire. The eudaimonic tradition tries to measure Flourishing. Today's four models all claim a place in that third box, at least in part.

Pleasure

Desire

Flourishing

How does your life feel?

Are you getting what you want?

Is your life going well?

hedonism

desire theories

objective-list theories

Aristotle and four psychological models

Teach-back: four models (cards 1–2)

Task Each group takes the card your teacher gives you. Prepare a two-minute explanation for the others, without reading the card aloud: (1) what the model claims; (2) how it is measured or studied; (3) one finding; (4) which of the three answers (Pleasure, Desire, Flourishing) it is closest to, and why.

Card 1: Ryff's six dimensions (1989)

Card 2: PERMA (Seligman, 2011)

Carol Ryff, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, argued in 1989 that well-being research had little theory behind it. It measured mood and life satisfaction, and ignored what thinkers from Aristotle to the humanistic psychologists had said about living well. From their work she built six dimensions of psychological well-being: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery (managing the demands of daily life), purpose in life and personal growth. People rate how far they agree with statements about each one. In her first study, of 321 American adults, four of the six (relations, autonomy, purpose and growth) were not strongly linked to the older measures: evidence, she argued, that they capture something those measures had missed.

Martin Seligman launched positive psychology as president of the American Psychological Association in 1998. In Flourish (2011) he revised his own earlier theory: the subject, he now said, was not happiness but well-being, and its goal was flourishing. Well-being has five elements, PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement (absorption in what you are doing), Relationships, Meaning (belonging to and serving something bigger than yourself) and Accomplishment. Each element had to pass three tests: it contributes to well-being, many people pursue it for its own sake, and it can be defined and measured separately from the others. The best-known questionnaire, the PERMA-Profiler (Julie Butler and Margaret Kern, 2016), asks three questions per element, each answered on a 0 to 10 scale.

Teach-back: four models (cards 3–4)

Task Listen to each group. Then agree as a whole group: which model is closest to Aristotle, and which is furthest from him?

Card 3: Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)

Card 4: Self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi began by interviewing artists, chess players, rock climbers and surgeons about the moments they valued most. Many described being carried along by a current, so he called the state flow. It arises when a challenge matches a person's skill, goals are clear and feedback is immediate. Attention is total, self-consciousness disappears and time seems to change speed. The activity becomes autotelic: worth doing for its own sake. Using the experience sampling method, in which people are signalled at random moments to record what they are doing and feeling, he found a paradox. In a 1989 study of 78 American workers, most flow experiences happened at work, not in leisure, yet people were less motivated at work. Flow is often not felt as happiness at the time: the enjoyment comes afterwards.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan began in the 1970s with a puzzle: paying people for an activity they already enjoy can make them less interested in it. Their self-determination theory grew into an account of well-being built on three basic psychological needs: autonomy (acting from your own will and values, which is not the same as independence from others), competence (feeling effective) and relatedness (feeling connected to and cared for by others). Like nutrients, they argue, the needs are universal: when they are met people thrive, and when they are frustrated people suffer, whether or not anyone consciously wants them. A 2015 study of 1,051 young adults in Belgium, China, Peru and the United States found the same pattern in all four countries.

READING

Can science measure a good life?

Each of these models claims to capture more than a pleasant life. Do they?

The first problem is method. Almost all the measures are questionnaires in which people rate statements about their own lives. A Ryff scale therefore records how people judge their purpose or growth, not whether their lives are purposeful in fact. An objective-list theory, by contrast, holds that a life can go badly even when its owner is satisfied with it. Measured by self-report,

Flourishing can slide back into how people feel about their lives.

The second is overlap. If the models capture something different from ordinary happiness, their scores should come apart from it. The evidence is uneven. Using three large American surveys, Kristen Springer and Robert Hauser (2006) found four of Ryff's six dimensions so closely related that they behaved almost as one; Ryff and Burton Singer replied that the six-dimension model holds.

READING · CONTINUED

Can science measure a good life?

Todd Kashdan and colleagues (2008) argued that the line between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being is clearer in philosophy than in the data. Corey Keyes and the philosopher Julia Annas (2009) answered that the distinction is real, and that ignoring it has costs.

The third is values. Someone chose the items on each list. Ryff drew mainly on European and American thinkers, and Seligman set the tests for PERMA's elements himself. Critics argue that ideals such as autonomy and personal growth are prized most

in individualist societies. This is Lesson 1's worry about objective lists in a new form: who decides what makes a life go well, and on whose behalf? Self-determination theorists reply with cross-cultural data, and with the point that autonomy means acting willingly, not acting alone.

Grade the claims

Task Write a letter for each claim.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

1

PERMA measures a different kind of well-being from ordinary happiness (life satisfaction and mood).

2

Ryff's six dimensions are six clearly separate things.

In very different countries, people whose needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are met report higher well-being.

3

What the evidence says

“PERMA measures a different kind of well-being from ordinary happiness.”

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

Weak. In 2018 Fallon Goodman, Todd Kashdan and colleagues gave 517 adults questionnaires for both PERMA and subjective well-being. Statistically, the two came out as almost the same thing (a latent correlation of 0.98), and they related in nearly identical ways to 24 character strengths. Seligman replied in the same journal that PERMA was never meant to be a new kind of well-being, only a closer look at its building blocks. The five elements may still be useful separately; the claim that together they measure something beyond happiness has little support.

Map a life

Task Groups of 3 or 4. Choose one life below, or a novel or film plot you all know well. Copy the grid and fill it in for at least three models (Aristotle, Ryff, PERMA, flow, self-determination theory). Then agree: is this life flourishing so far, by Aristotle's standard? Which of the three answers would rate it highest?

A

Ines, the restorer

B

Kwame, the founder

C

Lin, the carer

Ines, 52, restores antique tiles in Lisbon. She loses herself for hours in the work and is one of the best in her trade. She earns little, lives alone and rarely sees friends. Asked, she says she is content and would not change a thing.

Kwame, 45, built a logistics company in Accra from nothing, and it now employs 400 people. He is wealthy and admired, but outside investors now decide most things, he works most evenings, and he admits he rarely enjoys a day. His children are proud of him and see him seldom.

Lin, 38, left a promising engineering career in Taipei to care for her father, who has dementia. Her days are tiring and shaped by his needs, and she has little time of her own. She has grown close to him and to other carers, and says this work matters more than anything she has done.

Map a life

Model

Where this life flourishes

Where it doesn't

Whose good life?

Task In pairs, discuss at least four questions. For each, decide whether the models are getting at something real, or one culture's idea of a good life.

1. Can a questionnaire tell whether a life is going well, or only how it seems to be going?

2. Is it paternalistic to call a contented person's life "not flourishing"?

3. Which item on these lists would people where you live rank highest, and which lowest?

4. Should governments or employers try to raise people's PERMA scores?

5. Can a life full of flow but short of close relationships be a good life?

6. Would Aristotle recognise positive psychology as his heir?

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of someone you know, or a character from a book or film, whose life seems to flourish in a way a mood survey would miss. Which of today's models captures it best?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Think of an activity that reliably puts people into flow: a sport, a craft, a game, a kind of work. What makes it work?

Before Lesson 4

This week, notice one moment of flow, your own or someone else's, and what made it possible.

Pleasure

Note the challenge, the skill and the feedback, and whether it felt happy at the time or only afterwards.

Desire

Next lesson: Happiness Across Cultures. Is the good life the same everywhere, or do today's lists belong to one part of the world?

Flourishing

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (1)

TEACH-BACK: FOUR MODELS suggested "three answers" placements; groups may argue otherwise

• Ryff: Flourishing by design. Its six dimensions describe functioning, not feeling; but they are measured by self-report, which pulls the scores back towards how people judge their own lives.

• PERMA: mixed. Positive emotion is Pleasure; Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment lean towards Flourishing. Like Ryff, it is measured by self-report.

• Flow: closest to Pleasure in how it is studied, since it is an experience recorded moment by moment. It fits awkwardly, though: flow is often not felt as pleasant at the time, and Csikszentmihalyi treats it as part of a well-ordered life.

• Self-determination theory: Flourishing. The three needs are said to matter whether or not people want them met, which is exactly what separates it from Desire.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (2)

GRADE THE CLAIMS suggested

1 W. See "What the evidence says": Goodman and colleagues (2018) found a latent correlation of 0.98 between PERMA and subjective well-being among 517 adults, and Seligman's reply (2018) conceded that PERMA is not a new kind of well-being.

2 M. Contested. Springer and Hauser (2006), using three large American surveys, found four of the six dimensions (self-acceptance, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth) so closely related that they may amount to one; Ryff and Singer (2006) defended the six-dimension model in the same journal, and the debate has not been settled.

3 S, for the association. Chen and colleagues (2015) found that satisfying each need predicted well-being, and frustrating it predicted ill-being, equally in Belgium, China, Peru and the United States, and the result fits a large body of self-determination research. The caveat: the data are self-reports and mostly correlational, so they show the needs go with well-being more firmly than that they cause it.