Eudaimonia is Not Therapy

I was going to leave this article alone, even though it addresses something I've been wondering about, until the last paragraph. The subject is the infusion of therapy-speak into everyday life. 

It's from the New Yorker, so 'everyday' means 'everyday upper-middle-class-and-higher life within certain fashionable communities.' Still, I know at least one person who services such a community, and runs a business doing it centered on Facebook and Instagram. She is all the time telling her clients how important it is to "heal" their "trauma." As far as I can tell her clients are at least relatively rich white women. Maybe some of them genuinely have trauma, but it seems to be the kind of stuff the article talks about:

During this exchange, Twitter served me an advertisement that urged me to “understand my trauma” by purchasing a yoga membership. Ridiculous, I thought. I’m not a sexual-assault survivor. I’ve never been to a war zone. But, countered my brain, after four years of Trump and four seasons of covid, are you not hurting? The earth is dying. Your mother issues! Your daddy issues! A clammy wave engulfed me. My cursor hovered over the banner.

So, as I said, I was going to leave it alone. After all, I don't want to beat up on fragile people, and these people are genuinely so fragile that they think they are being traumatized by living the life of a wealthy white woman in the better neighborhoods of the richest country on earth. There's definitely something wrong with them, but it isn't "trauma." Pointing out that their entire worldview is fundamentally unhealthy might seem like I was beating up on the weak.

But then that last paragraph:

Therapy seems to have absorbed not just our language but our idea of the good life; its framework of fulfillment and reciprocity, compassion and care, increasingly drives our vision for society. Writing this piece, I thought especially of the Greek concept of eudaimonia, or human flourishing. Some might call it blessedness. In any case, it seems worth talking about.

No, you thought wrong. 

Eudaimonia is often translated as "flourishing" or simply as "happiness," but the real thing it means is being fully engaged in pursuing excellence with all your vital powers. Now she says she's never been traumatized because she's never been to war; but in fact, war is the closest thing I've seen to eudaimonia.

Aristotle says that the goal of ethics is eudaimonia, a state of happy flourishing that you find when all of your vital powers are aligned in rational activity. More, he says, to fully experience this state you need a community that is set up to support it. The military deployed comes much closer to attaining Aristotle's ideal than anything else I've seen in the world. Everyone is working together towards some strategic good. They all have different jobs, but those jobs must align. Thus, there is constant rational communication and consideration of how to align different fires on a target, or different staff sections on a mission. This 'small, close knit' community is also a community that works together toward some goods that they pursue together through rational activity.

War being war, as Clausewitz says, 'everything is simple, and the simplest things are hard.' Thus, one needs all of one's vital powers in alignment to accomplish these goals. It is a very engaging sort of life.

It may well be that the broader society lacks a number of things that these smaller, close-knit and rationally ordered communities offer. Are these goods we can replicate? Certainly: any number of organizations could be set up to pursue goods in this way, although they will not all be as fully engaging of all of one's vital powers absent the extremes of war.

Are they goods that we do replicate? No, not really, not for the most part.

You develop tight knit friendships at war -- and then, if you study philosophy, you notice that Aristotle's ethics ends with a long discussion of the importance of friendship. 

If you want to find eudaimonia, stop ever going to therapy. Stop focusing on your problems, whatever they are. The only thing to do with death -- and whatever you disliked about your childhood -- is to ride off from it. Go join the local volunteer fire department, and work with them putting out fires or saving lives in medical emergencies. Study philosophy and argue about Truth and Justice with friends over beer. Take up an extreme sport with a good community that supports each other. Ride motorcycles. Ride horses. Learn a martial art and practice it intensely. 

Do everything you can except dwelling issues of 'care' and 'sensitivity' and all the 'hurts' and 'trauma' you've suffered. Stay away from anyone who tries to convince you that you're a suffering victim, or who is willing to treat you like one if you ask -- or so you'll pay them to help you dwell on your 'problems.' Dwelling on your problems is in fact the problem. Do great things instead.

6 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Eudaimonia, according to your more traditional definition, has to do with a process or an action - a pursuing of happiness or fulfillment. Life, liberty, and the pursuit...

Her definition seems to be more about having arrived at some outcome of feeling good. It is another version of the current debate about equality versus equity. The distinction is one of those things that seems small or moderate at first, but upon examination turn out to be the whole deal.

CS Lewis wrote about this from many angles: the doctrine of First and Second Things, that one can only find joy by pursuing something higher than one's own feelings, getting joy thrown in by surprise as a by-product. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God...and everything else will be added unto you." You mentioned going to war. Men do not go to war in order to find friends. They go for greater causes and find that friendship results.

It's an odd thing about trauma, as I have only slowly learned and wrote about recently. You mentioned fragility, and it turns out to be true that fragile people exposed to events the rest of us would simply shrug at have results indistinguishable from survivors of undeniable trauma. On the other hand, there is an almost inhuman imperviousness to trauma that is not mere resilience, but seems to be unaffected by human experience. That may not be good either, as even Jesus seemed affected by trauma at the end. Of course, the really frightening speculation by Lewis that Jesus might have been the most fragile and sensitive of men, experiencing far more pain than you or I would at any encounter is also possible. I don't think we will know the answer to that one until we get there.

Joel Leggett said...

Very good advice. Thanks for posting that.

David Foster said...

Arthur Koestler wrote about what he called the Tragic and the Trivial planes of life. As explained by his friend, the writer and fighter pilot Richard Hillary:

“K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.”

(“Tragic” as used by Koestler here does not necessarily mean *bad*, I think, but rather, it means *intense*, and probably with at least the possibility of Bad. "Ultimate" might be a better term than "Tragic for what Koestler had in mind.)

I think a lot of people in our society find the Tragic/Ultimate plane missing in their lives. Sometimes, their response to this is positive, as with the examples Grim mentioned. Other times, it leads to things like drug addiction, sex with bad people...and political activism of the Antifa type.

Sebastian Haffner, who was a young man in Germany between the wars, wrote that there was a certain kind of person who *did not want* to see political and social stability, because "all the raw material for their deeper emotions" came only from the public sphere.

Grim said...

@AVI:

Re: "er definition seems to be more about having arrived at some outcome of feeling good." That came up earlier this year, in this piece:

https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2021/01/eudaimonia.html

However, I think that she is talking about an activity -- the activity of therapy. Engaging in therapy, being theraputic for others, forming a community that dwells on their problems together, experiences being miserable together, and focuses their attention on all the ways in which they are hurt or disappointed, scared or worried.

So I don't think she's making the mistake the other writer was making. I think she's making her own mistake, which is at least as bad (and definitely not the correct definition of eudaimonia).

"Men do not go to war in order to find friends. They go for greater causes and find that friendship results."

Excellent point.

"It's an odd thing about trauma, as I have only slowly learned and wrote about recently. You mentioned fragility, and it turns out to be true that fragile people exposed to events the rest of us would simply shrug at have results indistinguishable from survivors of undeniable trauma."

I suspect that this theraputic culture is producing a lot of that fragility. Maybe not all of it; I know you prefer what Aristotle would call first-nature answers to second-nature answers (i.e., born-in and not habituated by training).

Yet there must be a significant effect, if you ask me, of training people to think of themselves as constantly in need of therapy; of constantly being traumatized; and of this being the normal condition of themselves and indeed of humanity. Training them to delve into their feelings of hurt and humiliation, and to surround themselves with people who will constantly reinforce that behavior. If I wanted to make an emotional wreck of you, I could think of no better way to train you than this.

Grim said...

Joel:

Thank you, my friend.

Grim said...

David Foster:

Yes, I understood what you (or he) meant by "tragic." One might say that the story one tells one's self about one's life is either tragic or comic; and the comedy of being constantly subject to trivial annoyances without being able to accomplish anything great is not, it turns out, a happier condition than the life of high peaks and terrible valleys.

"I think a lot of people in our society find the Tragic/Ultimate plane missing in their lives. Sometimes, their response to this is positive, as with the examples Grim mentioned. Other times, it leads to things like drug addiction, sex with bad people...and political activism of the Antifa type."

That could be. I know a guy who was a member of the proto-Antifa from way back in the early 1990s. At that time he and his friends were going to punk rock and other music clubs in Atlanta and picking fights with the Confederate Hammerskins in order to drive them out of hte punk/hardcore/ska scene. In a way, this was a benefit and a useful act of hygene; but in another way, it was a young man who liked to fight and was looking for a good excuse to engage in violence towards others. No doubt he drew a lot of sense of pride and high emotions from it.