More on excellence as momentum from reality

What is excellence? Part of the answer lies in an analysis of what it means to excellently engage in a practice. (You can engage in a practice without excellently engaging so; the point of the analysis wouldn't be to find out what it means to engage in a practice, but precisely what it means to engage in it excellently.) This is for another time, however; let's simply assume we know well enough what that means.

Even then, it is only part of the answer, because I believe excellence is also rightfully attributed to persons, not just to single episodes of a person's actions, thoughts, and feelings; and we need to say something about the relationship between a person's excellently engaging in practices and the ascription of excellence to her as a person.

What makes a person excellent is more than that this person frequently performs excellently in practices; excellence in a person is not simply her mostly thinking, feeling, and acting excellently; to put the point differently: to attribute excellence to a person is more than just a shortcut for 'when she engages in practices in her life, she often (or mostly, or typically) does it in an excellent way, she is frequently excellent in what she does'.

Rather, I think that it's the other way round: excellence in engaging in practices flows from someone's excellence as a person; of course, it then also reflects on that person, and makes us see and admire her as excellent. But excellence in engaging in practices is not constitutive of excellence in persons, it is how that excellence manifests itself (shows and articulates itself) in that person's actions, views, and feelings.

Engaging excellently in a given episode of a practice never exhausts the excellence of the person who engages in that episode, there is always more to that person than is revealed in a single episode. There is also always more to a person than is revealed even in a series of episodes of a given type. Excellence as a person unifies excellence in engaging in various episodes of diverse types. But even if you take the sum total of all episodes in which a person has (yet) engaged and extract how excellent the performance of that person has been in those episodes, you wouldn't have arrived at the excellence of that person. You would also have to consider all episodes in which that person might have been, and how she would have acted, thought, and felt then.

By now it would seem that we have arrived at a conception of excellence in a person which takes it to be equivalent to a structure of dispositions: the dispositions to act, think, and feel in any given episode of the various kinds. But even this wouldn't be enough: for these dispositions (and this total structure of dispositions) will inevitably change all the time, and it will change precisely (if only minutely) every time a person engages in a practice. There is no fixed structure of dispositions to act; there is a dynamic structure which continuously changes.

This has two important consequences. The first consequence is that excellence as a person can neither be determined by the actual episodes of that person engaging in practices nor by all the possible episodes of such engaging. It cannot be determined by the space of all possible situations in which a person might find herself and the way she acts, thinks, and feels in those situations: this is too wide; it leaves out the crucial ingredient of which episodes actually happened and shaped the structure of dispositions to engage in practices. And it cannot be determined by the concrete set of actual situations (so far) in which that person found herself and in fact engaged, that is, it cannot be determined by the factual history of that person: this is too narrow, for it leaves out ways she might have responded to circumstance which simply by historical accident didn't occur. Thus, the first consequence can be put this way: when we're looking to figure out what excellence as a person means, we have to consider both the entire space of possibilities and the actualities that have in fact obtained. In other words, the way events have unfolded in reality has a part in determining the excellence of a person (as a person).

The second consequence is that excellence of a person is something that develops. Every time you respond to how events unfold in an excellent manner will move you towards your excellence as a person. There is no fixed structure of dispositions; there is an ever-changing structure as long as you live (or, more precisely: as long as you live your life, by acting, thinking, and feeling in response to the world around you; this might leave out some merely vegetative states, although the borders here might be fuzzy). Shaping your ways of acting, thinking, and feeling so that they become more excellent means thus to become more excellent as a person. Conversely, letting yourself go, taking your own weakness as given and not improving on them will move you, on the whole, away from excellence.

Both trends are self-perpetuating. The reason why they are self-perpetuating has to do with the first consequence above: reality itself (by the more or less random chain of events in which you find yourself partaking) plays some role in shaping your excellence. Thus when you are moving yourself towards excellence as a person, you will after a while find yourself supported by how events run: you will gain, as I put it in my book, momentum from reality. If, on the other hand, you let yourself go and forgo excellence in what you do, you will sink further and further towards weakness, and the gravitational force of events will compound that effect. Both going for excellence and refraining from that quest have a self-perpetuating characteristic that comes from the role which reality plays in your engaging with it.

Introductory book about the ideas behind this blog

During the fall months of the past year, it's been a little quieter than usual on this blog. The reason was that last summer I found that I needed something more of a coherent presentation of the ideas behind it — a kind of backgrounder and introductory text. So I sat down to write that. The result has taken the shape of a small book, which is now available in a draft version. (There is still some formatting work I want to do to optimize readability, and possibly smallish corrections in wording and grammar.)

You can download the pdf version here.

The table of contents looks like this:

Preface

Activities

  Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · Philosophy

Goals

  Beauty · Excellence of character · Eudaimonia

Theory

  Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · Present

References

Can unreality be more real than reality?

Some people claim that the worlds of fiction (in novels, or movies) are more real than the world around us, the everyday world. It's a paradoxical idea, but it seems a common one. Oscar Wilde, who had a taste for paradox, didn't let this opportunity pass and had his bad boy hero Lord Henry Wotton say of theatre performances: "I love acting. It's so more real than life."[1]

A little less playfully, Robert Nozick has remarked that

Some literary characters are more real than others. Think of Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, Lear, Antigone, Don Quixote, Raskolnikov. Even though none of them exist, they seem more real even than some people we know who do exist. It is not that these literary characters are real because they are 'true to life', people we could meet believably. The reality of these characters consists in their vividness, their sharpness of detail, the integrated way in which they function toward or are tortured over a goal. [...] These characters are 'realer than life', more sharply etched, with few extraneous details that do not fit. [...] They are intensely concentrated portions of reality.[2][3]

(When I recently wrote my article about Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, I noticed the same impression of the main character, Aschenbach; I remarked there that

Mann’s whole carefully crafted framework of symbols and allusions, parallels and consequences, seems to have the singular purpose of producing a strongly coherent, compulsively unwinding plot which at closer examination leaves not the minutest detail to chance — everything’s in the scheme, so to speak. (And that’s what primarily constitutes the high literary quality and artistic value of the novella, after all.)

Philosophy often looks to literature (and, we might add, also to other highly sophisticated art forms such as drama or film), in order to find material to analyze or examples to use in demonstrations.

In seeking a reflective understanding of ethical life, for instance, [philosophy] quite often takes examples from literature. Why not take examples from life? It is a perfectly good question, and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.[4]

In other words, there is a reason why philosophers rely on literature for their examples instead of making up their own ones. Literature, as it were, is in the business of making good examples, whereas making up your own examples would risk making them too simple, or unrealistic — 'cartoonlike', as Bas van Frassen calls it:

An example could be a real happening or a story. But a cartoonlike sketch of a story is neither. Both in real life and in real literature, the observer finds himself in a context so rich that — despite the clear limitations on what he can observe — he has a basis for conclusions about thought and emotions. Cartoonlike sketches, however, do not generally give him such a base [...].[5]

So, carefully crafted literature (or, more generally: carefully crafted fiction) can bring us insights that are at least as good as those we can gain from life, that is, from our own experience. Combine this with the fact that we often have no way to experience certain situations ourselves (how could you know what it is to be a renowned writer such as Aschenbach unless you've had a similar career yourself?); thus in some way, fiction provides us with a repository of insights about the world which are just as authentic, but richer than what we could experience ourselves.

To connect back to the main theme of this blog: this function of fiction is a special case of the more general practice that I've called imagination — the process of generating unreality. Among other things, the function of imagination in our lives is to provide rich materials to fill us with a sense of purpose, and a sense of possibilities. (Which always must be counterbalanced by a closeness to reality, which results from the process I call 'reflection'.) Life just by itself couldn't give us all that. And that's why we have fiction (and unreality, more generally speaking).

[1] Oscar Wilde, The picture of Dorian Gray. In: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Collins 2003, 67.
[2] Robert Nozick, The examined life. Philosophical meditations. New York: Simon & Schuster 1989, 129–130.
[3] Note that Nozick, when he uses terms like 'real' and 'reality', employs them in a slightly different sense than the one I've used throughout this blog when I refer to forms of unreality. The literary characters Nozick talks about belong to instances of unreality (in my sense of the word), which Nozick expresses by saying that they "don't exist". Yet they have a profound effect on our world, in part by the process I've called sedimentation, and more generally by the fundamental role of our use of imagination in our lives. These aspects are what Nozick is about when he speaks of their (in his sense) being more real.
[4] Bernard Williams, Shame and necessity. Berkely: UC California Press 1993, 13.
[5] Bas C. van Fraassen, "The peculiar effects of love and desire", in: Perspectives on self-deception, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Berkeley: UC California Press, 1988, 123–156 128.

Reflection and Imagination

In an earlier post, I introduced reflection as a high-level concept for an activity that helps us to remain close to reality when we navigate our lives.[1]

The counterpart to reflection is imagination. This is where we produce unreality, in all its forms. We do it when we come up with ideas what to do this evening, when we are creative decorating our surroundings, when we're problem-solving, day-dreaming, story-telling, lying ... you may be professionally making up stories (because you work as a scriptwriter) or seeking for high-opportunity scenarios (because you're an entrepreneur); you may be a little fearful and imagine all sorts of weird things that may happen when you walk a dark path at night, with shadows floating along and creaking sounds that can be heard; you may be re-inventing yourself every so often or creatively play around with world history (or the history of your town or company) to inspire people to get to the next level with doing something really worthwhile. In all these cases, imagination is the activity that widens the space in which we think and feel (and ultimately, act) by supplementing reality with counterpart worlds out of unreality.

I call them counterparts, not enemies; imagination complements, not subverts reflection as an activity. We constantly do both, and have to, in order to live our lives successfully. But they must be in balance.

Again (as with reflection), 'imagination' is a term that has had many, and for the most part much more strict and narrow uses in philosophy. And just as before, the way in which I shall employ it is broader. I use it mostly in the sense in which we say of someone that "he has no imagination". We'd say that of someone who normally acts in a certain way, has certain habits and preferences which all indicate that this person is rather not creative, imaginative, spontaneous, and so on. Someone, on the other hand, who does have imagination would brim with ideas, make up stories, try out new ways of decorating their surroundings, and so on. In other words, such a person would regularly produce unreality (deliberately and usually with the result of improving their own lives and that of others).

Reflection and imagination are in constant interplay, a complicated dance of forward and backward. We need both for success in our lives, though we must keep clear of the extremes in both direction: an excess of imagination can be as damaging as shutting it off completely. Imagination, the producing of unreality, gives us a drive and provides us with energy; reflection, the constant re-alignment with reality, gives us a sense of direction; because imagination is something that goes on in your own mind, it's also reflection that keeps you interactive socially. (Or, to put the point differently, the reality we're talking about includes social reality just as well as physical reality, historical fact etc. — reflection keeps you close to reality under all those aspects. Thus, it cuts down all sorts of fantasies about the behavior and opinions of other people, fantasies that otherwise might well lead you astray.)

Now, all this is only a very vague sketch, obviously there are many details yet to be filled in. There is, however, a connection with ethics in this point which I wanted to mention already at this early stage. Ethics, the study of character and leading a good life, is a particularly important stakeholder in the philosophy of unreality, and one of the main points of contact is the interplay between imagination and reflection with all its consequences.

[1] I've discussed reflection in this sense already in other blog postings: one on the reflective stance, and in another one that looked deeper into how reflection neutralizes unreality by facilitating a critical aesthetic stance.