On Flourishing, or a more robust conception of it
Starting a conversation toward 'Flourishing Studies'
On July 25 I had a conversation with philosopher C Thi Nguyen in which he made an irresistible statement, "[We need] a richer more robust conception of well-being and health and flourishing."
Every word that Thi shares in that conversation is worth your full attention, but in this short clip what he meant is that, at least in the west, we have long carried the idea that if we have autonomy and you can choose what you do, that is the definition of a good life. But our lived and living experience is that, no, that's not what sates a person, expands them, brings joy to a life, at least it is not merely that. I think he was right to invoke 'flourishing' as language that itself challenges this simple notion of how to live a fulfilled life, stretches our conceptions and our capacity to imagine as only new language can.
Political philosopher Danielle Allen articulates the gravity of Nguyen's clarion call in her masterful reimagining of a theory or justice, Justice by Means of Democracy, understanding this conception of flourishing as core to our egalitarian society itself, "Justice consists of those forms of human interaction and social organization necessary to support human flourishing. The design principles necessary to implement justice will flow from our understanding of human flourishing."
Allen reminds us that there are some domains, political and social philosophy for instance, in which flourishing has long been a part of the lexicon. Indeed, eudeamonism, a system of thought that is concerned centrally with how human beings flourish and that takes flourishing as the overall goal of all thought and effort, is a philosophy with an intellectual history going back to antiquity. We can (and should) learn much from it.
But taking Nguyen seriously, as I do in a way more aptly described as reverence, we must ask whether we really understand flourishing. What new positionalities offer novel perspectives and understandings of flourishing?
There are perhaps lenses un- or under-explored.
RAdio Detection And Ranging (RADAR) works by sending out a radio signal and collecting the signals reflected back to the receiver by whatever object they encounter. In this indirect way we can determine the position and velocity of those objects, start to piece together their shape and make sense of what they might be. It's not unlike how one might explore a pitch black room, feeling around effectively 'sounding' the room like a radar, creating a map of it in one's mind.
We are sensorially limited. And the ways we have learned to make sense of the physical world from our restricted sensing are remarkable metaphors for that process in the conceptual or cognitive world. We rarely identify a concept precisely, rather we tend to act more like a cognitive radar: sound ideas about it, hypotheses and thoughts, which may catch a border of the thing and mostly miss. Through many of these soundings we might figure out an outline of the thing.
Timothy Morton, who originated the term in his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, describes hyperobjects as entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. It's an enigmatic term. Ready examples include the sum total of plastic we have littered across the Earth over the past century, which will last for millennia, or climate change. We might witness evidence of these things, but their totality is beyond us.
For some concepts that approach this realm of 'hyperobject' our radar-like mapping must be continual. Just as we seem to have a complete outline, the concept changes so that we need to re-explore it. The process must be continual. Flourishing may be like this, never still, ever unsettled, always moving and morphing based on ourselves and the world we live within. It's a hyperobject, and Allen articulated why it is vital to our world to sustain and nourish that sounding of it.
Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, one lens is inadequate. So, what I want to do here is think about some of the lenses, the positionalities, that seem perhaps under-explored with respect to what they mean for flourishing, new soundings that reveal its outline now.
What I hope is that this can be a threshold moment that we are attempting to give language to. Today, at this outset, what I offer is merely an inadequate list of those lenses, a scratch space for constellating.
Each of these are intelligences for flourishing, and their interactions, the singing lines between them, are where new wisdom for flourishing will emerge. Participating in this emergence is an invitation to be in conversation about them, allowing each to be a dimension in the outlining of what flourishing is. As these lenses come into sharper focus, future posts will be dedicated to them individually and in depth. Perhaps these converge toward something like 'Flourishing Studies' around which new structures and groups and networks will form, a new ecology of knowledge that requires interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity (not unrelated to Perry Zurn and colleagues' Curiosity Studies). Flourishing Studies recognize flourishing as a phenomenon powerful enough to deserve its own field of study.
How might we explore this emerging conversation, enacting Flourishing Studies? Perhaps first in transforming the language we use around health and well-being--no longer merely surviving, but a more muscular thing. Perhaps through the development of the philosophy of flourishing, or the epistemology of it, that recognizes its unfinishedness and ongoingness and furnishes the techniques and tools for making sense and living alongside and in harmony with it. The great wisdom traditions and nature herself offer guidance on this transformation. Both understand life as in continual flux, with daily moment-to-moment change in consciousness. Flourishing Studies must synthesize those teachings into a description of being and becoming that is defined by shifts. Perhaps an epistemology of flourishing flows from a philosophy of unsettledness.
Flourishing Studies are a literacy for a society in which the social boundaries are steadily shifting, that acknowledges the fluidity, hybridity, and intersectionality of our world and indeed our own identities. Allen prescribes a design principle of 'social connectedness' and a connected society as instrumental to achieving social justice. Her prescription furnishes a principle for the institutions and the communities that we create and cultivate: maximize bridging ties, or those ties that link disparate groups and individuals, realizing in the project of social justice Mark Granovetter's advice in the pioneering work The Strength of Weak Ties. Flourishing Studies is a new space for us to collect and constellate things traditionally disconnected toward healthy relationality--how and where different kinds of social ties form.
The reach of a deeper and more robust understanding of flourishing would be long. What would scientific discovery look like in the language and lens of flourishing? In that light, somehow the metrics we use now start to seem inadequate or misdirected. What does flourishing call to mind in an education? In community life? The 'metrics' that respond to these questions are not the easy things to measure and certainly not the things we measure now.
Vivek Murphy once said that mental health is not merely the absence of distress. Health, generally, is not merely the absence of sickness. It is becoming apparent that 'health' is too small a word for what we mean. And we remain too small, in too small a world, while this conception of health occupies the place on our tongues, in our throats, within the amygdala for what we mean by living, being, and becoming. Let's let flourishing expand that conception of life and living, but resist the urge to let it be something fixed or finite. Flourishing is an ongoingness and if we are to understand it capaciously and not let it harden into something flat we need to treat it as a hyperobject in need of continual study, perpetual soundings from across these different ways of knowing to know the shape and movement of it. Our task now is to create what this studying looks like, how to create communities and infrastructure and institutions capable of it.
Robert Penn Warren wrote, “The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth....a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process of a healthy society itself.” Flourishing can be new language for us now, in this world we are walking into. Flourishing repeatedly appears across the history of our language and thinking and disciplines. We need to constellate those into a more robust conception of it as an ongoingness and an unsettledness. Perhaps a philosophy of unsettledness and the structures necessary for Flourishing Studies might transform our lives in accordance.