Chapter 4:

The practice of self-respect

There is a breathtaking discrepancy between the traditional ways of resolving issues of the Good Life, both in the West, but also in almost every other culture as well; and our contemporary situation in which we must each decide these things for ourselves. On the traditional and otherwise almost universal view, decisions about good living can be referred to some authority or other that had impeccable credentials and could frequently give us confident and decisive answers.

The rules, customs, roles and conventions either came down to us out of the misty past with the status of law; the way it has always been, the ways sanctioned by our revered ancestors. Or it came down to us from our gods or God, divinely sanctioned, often with the danger of awesome punishment if violated, and translated for us by some of the highest in the land, our highest of priests or our rulers whose authority had divine blessing. Or, more commonly, from both tradition as well as from God or the gods. At the local level, all this wisdom was mediated for us by the local priest, or by the head of our household, who held their authority – as father – in a way that was mirrored in our relationship to our monarch, and our God.

Now, and just within a few hundred years, it has all been turned on its head. We must decide most of these things for ourselves, because we discover that we can no longer agree about those authorities on which so much had depended. When we look into ourselves – we, who must make these decisions – and also when we look at each other, the thing that seems most evident and compelling about the situation is precisely our lack of authority, or at least the remarkable weakness of it.

That it is weak is the first thing that we have to notice, even about the reason that seems to have forced us to look to ourselves. We turn to ourselves because we can’t reach agreement with each other, which has to be the first piece of the most disturbing news when we are used to things being so certain and confident and decided by somebody else in a paternalistic way. We can’t really trust anyone else with the answer after all. So why do we think we can trust ourselves?

Instead of thousands of years of custom and tradition, that presumably at least stood some sort of tests of time, we only have our own brief life-spans in which to figure it out, and we need to use the results of this figuring within, say, even the first twenty years. We can’t afford to wait until the end, and even if it did take our whole lives, that might just reveal, at the end, that our whole life had been wasted. There isn’t much time to figure out the meaning of life. Not to do it well.

As we look into ourselves more closely, and we look at each other, we find that, as we start to think about the good life, different reasons seem to weigh differently for each of us, which makes some of us wonder if we are dealing with reason at all. Science isn’t like that. Well, maths isn’t.

We even notice, as this works out in the moral judgments that we take for granted, that we have to be extremely cautious about intervening in other people’s decisions about their lives, because although their decisions may seem unwise or even silly from our point of view, it is always possible that, in some peculiar way that we can’t quite fathom, it is quite reasonable from theirs.

The discrepancy between the old and the new could hardly be more dramatic. From what had seemed like an absolute certainty and ultimate authority, it all now seems to have collapsed into personal opinion. Indeed, perhaps, simply into relativism, We daren’t judge what other people decide to make of their lives. But isn’t that much the same as saying that no one life is better lived than another? How can we say, on the one hand, that we mustn’t judge how other people decide to lives their lives, and at the same time say that some lives are better lived than others?

Some decisions about how to live are better than others

Although we are each responsible for what we are to make of our lives, and this should remind us that our duty is to respect the person’s right to decide – and we respect their conclusions only for that reason – this does not mean that some ways of making those decisions are not better than others.

Some people are less self-deceptive than others, and we understand something of the mechanisms of self-deception. Some people are better informed than others, and success at developing plans and executing them effectively can be affected profoundly simply by the facts that we do, or don’t possess.  Some people have more powerful and insightful tools for understanding than others. Some are more dangerously impulsive, or crippled by caution than others. Some people have good access to the articulate and relevant experience of other people, whereas others are more sheltered, or shut off, and fall into what seem to be obvious mistakes.

Many of us can make these assessments within our own lives – “if only I had known then!”, and this immediately gives us a clues as to better and worse. We clearly can learn more and learn to judge better. Sometimes. Sometimes we learn the wrong lessons, and our better judgment becomes compromised.

Hence, even though each of us is not only responsible for the authorship of our own lives, and will judge the right and the true in different ways, this does not reduce everything to a radical relativism, to an absolute equality of opinion. We may each construct our own worlds or “reality” in our own way, but some of our constructs are better than others, better adapted to our surroundings, more effective in dealing with novelty, more enabling in terms of what we can achieve in and through our worlds. Those who are better at it negotiate larger worlds, and do so more effectively.

If radical relativism made any sense, then there would be no educational issues at all, and no need of education – as we will recall from an earlier discussion. The reality constructed by the five-year-old would be just as adequate as the reality constructed by her thirty-five-year-old parent, and it would be disrespectful to meddle in it, and patronising to worry so much about her happiness, her safety or her future.

Some people are, in other words, better equipped in various ways to respect themselves by working out their own worthwhile life. Some have better intellectual tools than others, some are better informed, some are better at self-examination, some have better developed virtues for undertaking their duty of adding value to their lives. Any of us may be better equipped in some ways, and poorly equipped in others. Overriding these differences, however, is that we all expect each other to take responsibility for doing it well. To do our job properly; to fulfil our duty to ourselves, we need to equip ourselves as fully and completely as we can. Which means, really, that we are expected to take educational responsibility. For ourselves.

Conveniently, we can distinguish two different aspects of the self-respecting undertaking with which we must be equipped to deal. The first of these is that we must manage our learning experience. We must seek and cultivate experience so that we acquire the kinds of knowledge and understanding, the insights, the willingness to doubt and challenge ourselves, the tools for reflection and deliberation, the skills for practical action, the opportunities, the stuff out of which a life can be built.

Secondly, we must seek and refine principles and practices of decision-making specific to developing a life that is good. These will, of course, be built up within the context of the first – the management of our learning experience in general. What is distinctive about this second set of principles that must arise within our managed experience, is that they come to rule, to have authority over the whole process. We have to create our own authority over the good of our own lives.

Experience itself must seek to broaden and deepen, to provide the treasure out of which a good life can be built. The principles will plunder that treasure chest to enable the choices and to build the good life itself, in its specifics. But the principles, if they are well-developed, and if we use them properly, will also “point” to experience that is missing, to skills that are undeveloped, and to the dangers of misunderstanding that might arise from the limitations of experience, or poverty of interpretation. This will give oversight to the management of experience. It will introduce a focus specific to the needs of making something good of a life.

The personal side of reasoning

It is our life that is at stake, and we are responsible for it and for making it worthwhile. It is, therefore, up to us to take responsibility for the rules and principles, to seek them out, figure them through and decide upon their importance. We are the ones who must make decisions about our lives and, in the knowledge that lives can be made better or worse, it is up to us to take charge of our learning and discipline our minds to the task. It is a matter of self-respect.

It is important here always to keep in mind how differently each of us is likely to reason about these things when we are doing it well; why our reasoning can be so different, and good nevertheless. Our ability to reason is something we learn in groups, as reasons are exchanged, but the subtle shape of our concepts, and the fine force of our reasons grow out of our personal, very individual experience. Even when we learn a word, the judgements which we personally come to make of its use will come out of different circumstances contextually and historically.

You won’t be introduced to the word under the same circumstances, and with an identical linguistic history to me. Not only will our own language development have differed in subtle ways. We will confront the word differently; the occasions and circumstances will be different, and the experiential background that we bring to the occasion – our experiences of words, of the activities in which they are embedded, and of examples in our experience that give the meanings the force, texture and flavour with which they are at first imbued – will be different.

These differences are masked in much of our use of language and reason, where we are usually seeking common ground in a common enterprise, and even a special sort of precision – an agreement in judgement, to use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s expression.  Science is most obviously like this, and its social organization in which people seek and learn to refine common judgement, is a vivid example. Schooling masks these differences too, where language is to be formed into a predetermined shape that is publicly acceptable for the purposes of communication in school and beyond.

But what we should note about the process of schooling when we are aware of this is that what is sought – what is approved of and assessed – is  performance, and acceptable display, what we are able and willing to present to the world; not what we really think, believe or care about. We are assessed on what we can “show” that we understand, and “demonstrate” that we know. We are not (and cannot be) assessed on what we really believe, on what reasons we actually hold, and what we truly value or despise. Many of the hypocrisies and coercions of schooling lie precisely in this difference.

What is important to us here is that while bringing about this agreement in judgement is vital to our cooperation and our participation in communities, something different happens when reason is engaged about our selves. Who we are as a person, how we will construct our lives, their meaning, purposefulness and satisfaction lie as much in our disagreement with others, based on what has not been common in our experiences, as it does in our agreement.

What we believe, the reasons that actually count for each of us, and what we have truly come to value are firmly rooted in our own personal and complex histories, our personal experiential trajectories, unique and nuanced as these are. The shared tools of language and reason are vital to our abilities to understand ourselves, but they become individuated the deeper into ourselves that we probe.

We notice this complexity immediately in our rich and subtle differences in our tastes, wants and desires, inclinations, likes and aversions, even what we think of as our “needs”.  These things can range from the triviality of our ice cream preferences to the passionate commitments of our whole lives. There is difference here over your excitement about snowboarding, or eventing, and mine about fly-fishing. You enjoy fiction; I enjoy non-fiction. Or we differ in our taste in novels, and we may well be able to give reasons for our preferences. We may differ in our ranking of these reasons, but some of the time we won’t really see the point in what the others are drawn to at all. The reasons they find compelling might not even touch anything in us.

Personal as all this is, it doesn’t mean that many of the reasons can’t be shared, albeit incompletely, or that we are incapable of acknowledging criteria that will often separate better from worse ones. Some of these areas (and fly-fishing is one) have huge literatures devoted to why they matter, and considerable agreement – important moments of mutual recognition – can be achieved. But there is also great diversity and difference in priorities, and ordering, and much, perhaps, that is inexpressible.

Just as people whose religious convictions tend to converge can band together and try to impose their views on everyone else – to the point of making war on them – this can happen even in such areas of taste as fly-fishing, where upstream fishing of dry flies to sighted fish achieved a moral status that could cast heretics into the outer darkness.  But there were, of course, always heretics. And there were people among the righteous who eventually became backsliders, to the mortification of the faithful. The reasons and the weightings were never capable of being absolute at the personal level, and individuals evolved and changed.

So, too, we might all speak of love, but precision with the concept is elusive. What it could mean to a four-year-old is different from what it could mean to a twelve-year-old. The difference is greater by the age of twenty, how much more at fifty, let alone eighty. But the difference within each age may be just as big again, depending on the possibilities there have been for experiencing love, including how it has been distorted, corrupted, thwarted, betrayed or denied. The poets can draw us deeper into these complexities, insofar as they can understand them, but what we stand to gain, even from this, will still have to be built on our own experience, and its uniqueness.

This does not mean, of course, that our unique history of our experience is our prison. It is usually through being introduced to other possibilities by other people that our tastes and desires, our interests and wants evolve and become more sophisticated. As we are weaned, our caregivers introduce us to different kinds of food, and depending on the variation and the encouragement they provide, we develop new tastes and preferences that can last a life-time.

A good deal of the exercise of that curiosity and outward-going exploration that we are born to engage in is social. Other people pursue other interests and have other desires, and, depending on our trust, the congeniality of our relationships, and the quality of our communication, we can be willing to follow their invitations to try their pleasures and pursuits, exploring new potential interests and enthusiasms.

Profound changes can occur in these ways, as globalisation means that it is quite common for people to trade whole cultures. This was, perhaps more dramatic in the past, when, during the expansion of the United States westward, some on the frontier went over to native America. Whalers and sealers around New Zealand jumped ship and joined the Maori.

In lesser ways we can explore and evolve whole new interests and potential desires that may utterly transform our reasons for developing our lives in one direction or another, and again, it is this looseness in language between our agreements in judgment that so often provides a bridge. Metaphor. It is this (that you are familiar with) but not exactly. It has this as well, but not that. We inch our way from familiarity across the loose and inexact span until we find the new firm ground.

Why would any intelligent person want to believe this; do that? It seems remarkable that there are people who otherwise seem so intelligent who devote themselves to such things. In this we are enormously aided by those who, passionate about something, write to explain why, and it is interesting how spotty such literatures are. Perhaps in some cases the self-awareness is too limited, or the writing traditions too prosaic, or the passions so commonplace and taken-for-granted that too few think their passion needs explanation. Who wouldn’t be interested in this! It can be harder to find your way into these feelings if you come from across different tracks.

Something like good literary criticism is an advantage here too, where the criticism takes us into how the art works; into the subtlety of reference and nuance, into the sophistication of the purpose and the structure, of how it might all be experienced best. Then, when we we put ourselves through the experience of the art work again, there is an explosion of sensitive appreciation. In these ways we need not be islands in our unique experiential trajectories. We can share, we can expand, we can join together, we can teach each other, creating collective riches, but there is still a uniqueness to our personal treasure, every step of the way, that remains our own, and means that our good lives will never be exactly the same.

The management of experience in general: Growth for the sake of further growth

In order to take on our moral duty of respecting ourselves, we therefore need to be able to manage our learning or experience well, so that we can be effective at bringing about the Good Life that we are obliged to seek for ourselves. This means, in turn, that we must search out the right sorts of learning and experience, and make the most of them.

Our experience is conditioned by our social world. Language, and its role in thought, depends upon conventions and practices that we engage in with other people. Every arrangement we make with others, every association we enter into, every cooperative activity that we participate in is an occasion for experience for all of the parties. We cannot ensure that the experience of everyone will turn out well, but we can ensure that the rules and assumptions that guide our cooperation and collaboration are fair and respectful. Whatever else is going to happen, all who participate are going to have experiences. We need to ensure that the conditions of experience, so far as our participation sets them up, are educational, and not indoctrinatory.

Every association or institution that we enter into needs to be considered for its educational implications. We owe this to each other and to ourselves, so that we can all fulfill our duties to ourselves. Our partnerships and marriages, our sporting, work and commercial arrangements, our political institutions and our elder care facilities all must satisfy educational conditions, and certainly must not violate them.

John Dewey, the great theorist of education, experience and growth spoke of the “experiential continuum”; that experience has both internal and external aspects, experience changing the lived world as well as the being who has it, and that each experience both draws on previous experience and prepares for future experience. (1 EE) We particularly need to recognize that this continuum can proceed in harmful ways as well as good. For Dewey, this highlighted the role of reflection on experience, something that we need to cultivate, and learn to do well.

Dewey explored various numbers of phases or moments along the continuum of experience, and considered them applicable to all fields of inquiry or action, though the details will no doubt differ from context to context. Some continua of experience may involve no reflection at all, such as in the repetition of a blind habit, which nevertheless does exist on an experiential continuum, since repetition continues to automate the action and make it more liable to further repetition.

But reflective experience might proceed like this. An experience creates questions, doubts, uncertainties, surprises. Perhaps things did not go as we hoped, turned out wrong, or even surprised us by going better than we expected. Something led us into the experience; something was undergone. There is a consequence of some happening, and our awareness of it leads us to interpret what happened – superficially at first, and very likely in terms of habitual, even clichéd ways of seeing and understanding things. It may just be “Oh, no – there I go again! I’m always doing that! What a stupid fool I am!”

But proper reflection will begin as we take our interpretations or attempts to understand or explain more seriously and more critically – a step further, or to a higher level. We draw in other information. We attempt to be dispassionate. We compare, contrast, interrogate, exercise self-criticism, seek alternative models and explanations, construct hypotheses. All of this is towards a plan of action – what to do next, or next time, and it may involve something physical, such as moving our position, or making changes in the situation or circumstances. It may involve saying something different, or differently when we have another chance. Or it may involve looking for something different, or seeing something differently, going into the next similar situation with new information in mind. It may simply be reorganizing our thoughts, our explanations or our priorities and experiencing the implications of those changed ideas.

In any event, as we act – including even as we change our minds – the new undergoing is a new experience. Our plans, when implemented, have consequences in experience, and the cycle of experience continues the continuum of experience, with past experience being carried through into new experience.

The purpose of the reflection is to solve the problem, resolve the question, eliminate the doubt, but its larger purpose, the purpose of learning from experience, is growth. We should want, from this experience, to learn the right things, and not the wrong things. We should want a larger adaptability. But when we talk of experience, rather than just “learning”, (which we commonly understand as something that can be reduced to mere chunks, separated, isolated, and even reversed or “unlearned”) we are talking of organic wholes, of connectedness, of undergoings with histories, and that persist into the future. Meaning and feeling and thought grow into experience as we live, and they grow into future experiences.

But for growth to serve as such a criterion for successful reflection on experience, it must be more than “growth” as it is ordinarily understood, for (as we saw in Chapter 2) cancer can grow. So can hatred, racism, vengefulness, callousness, impatience, intolerance, cynicism.

Martha Nussbaum, in her discussion of the fragility of goodness, draws attention to what she speaks of as a little known but remarkable passage in Aristotle. He is giving advice to students of rhetoric on the relevance of knowing your audience, and remarks on the effects that aging can have. (2 The Fragility of Goodness p338)

It is clear that he believes that much of the goodness of youth is based on innocence and naivety, and that subsequent experience can modify attitudes and behaviour so that our initial goodness of character can decay, and with it our ability to live well. The young can be generous and unconcerned about money because they have known little of need. The old, however, are ungenerous, because property is one of life’s necessities, and they have learned, both how hard it is to acquire, and to keep. The young form friendships easily because they take simple pleasure in company, haven’t been betrayed and have yet to learn to calculate advantage. Pity is easier because they haven’t learned to suspect others, and are ready to believe them the victims of injustice. The old, however, have the experience of many years; have been betrayed many times. They expect things to go badly, have grown suspicious and have learned not to trust.

Because of this they don’t hate intensely, but don’t love intensely either, holding something in reserve. “. . . they love as if they were going to hate tomorrow, and hate as if they were going to love tomorrow”. “They are small of soul, because they have been humbled by life: for they desire nothing great or excellent, but only what is commensurate with life.”

They are cowardly and fearful in advance, because they know how easily things can go wrong, and where the young are warm and enjoy laughter, the fear of the old has made them chilly, more inclined to grieve, and are not so fond of laughter. Old age is a preparation for cowardice, through the accumulation of fear; they seek advantage rather than nobility, becoming self-interested, the scope of their lives reduced. Aristotle thinks that many virtues depend upon openness, guilelessness and trust in other people, and that a growing lack of trust, defensiveness and self-protecting suspiciousness undermines such positive things, and our goodness.

Too cynical? How often have we noted our elders warning us out of fear for us against some ambition, some project because they think it bound to fail, or imply that we are not up to it? Many even warn the young about their new love-interest. They don’t want us to be disappointed. The success manuals routinely advise us to not share our dreams simply because of the widespread propensity of others to cut them down; to point out the ways in which almost any adventurous idea is “impractical” or bound to go wrong. How hard is the price we pay for learning that people are not always what they seem? How do we change when we find we have to buckle down to the really hard stuff? “You wait ‘til you grow up!”

Of course this deterioration isn’t automatic or inevitable, but its prevention depends upon the way in which experience is handled as we pass through life, and there is nothing inevitable about learning to handle it well, either. Learning to handle it well depends upon experience too. Where such appropriate learning is to be more than just a matter of luck, it will depend upon spending one’s life in a culture, and among people, who are thoughtful about such matters, and talk about them; vulnerably and sensitively. They will model the critical abilities, the passion for living well. They will be alert to the dangers and able to facilitate the personal responsibilities that are involved.

This concern for proper growth in life that is so often heard does represent some of the values of Western culture, but it does not describe the realities of its institutions, associations, and activities, or the rules that organize them, both formal and informal. Nor does is describe the experience of living in and among them.

And so we can see the challenge of the experiential continuum implicit in Aristotle’s account of the love, the generosity, the trust, the optimism of the young and how they depend upon the innocence and naivety that comes from their lack of experience – and the narrowing down and chilling off of life as people age and inevitably experience betrayal and loss, not handling these well. Avoiding mis-educative paths calls for considerable skill – and often courage.

The least we want to aim for as we age and address these problems is to avoid losing that ready love, generosity, trust and optimism of the young, resolving our betrayal or loss in ways that retain these qualities without the naivety or innocence that made them lesser virtues that were expressed with a freedom that was only superficial and inexperienced.

Better than this would be to have a greater understanding now of love, generosity, optimism and trust so that they are, indeed, richer and more sensitively given and maintained. They are, perhaps, now models of these virtues, being based on awareness and understanding, and we give through them with a greater clarity, honesty and a freedom that is larger and more profound.

Such a working through would have to be done with considerable thoughtfulness and care. Problems like these that are inherent in the fragility of life aren’t the sorts of issues to leave to the wisdom of clichés or platitudes. Reconstructing painful experiences so that we are not damaged, but may, indeed, be enlarged by them, calls for insight and skill, which we are unlikely to work up “from scratch”, and on our own. This is the stuff of the sort of sustained and sophisticated educational development that our culture ignores, or hands over to “therapy” once the damage is done, thus medicalizing what is really an educational problem.

For Dewey, then, growth is not just anything that evolves out of experience, and it is not just any way in which problems may be solved. Aristotle’s older people do not fully resolve their problems of betrayal or loss. They handle them. They get over them. At least these solutions protect them from future harm, and this constitutes a kind of growth.

But for Dewey, it is not true growth unless they come out of these experiences better off than before, better equipped with greater effectiveness enabling more options and possibilities. The educational growth that Dewey would have reflection achieve is an enlargement of power and adaptability. The growth through the experience must be a part of an increase in the possibilities of growth in general. (3 DE)

Not just linear growth of a single skill.  Not growth in one domain or dimension at the expense of a narrowing of a larger whole, and certainly not a limiting of the possibilities of future experience. It must be an expansion of understanding, adaptability, insight, opportunity, sensitivity, flexibility, creativity or power – of the whole organism itself. We should come out of these experiences better human beings. The experiences of Aristotle’s older people have worn them down.

My own way of drawing this together, and hoping to make it clear, is that the growth must be in terms of the possibilities, the opportunities, the appreciations and the powers to construct, realize and live a worthwhile life. This is why career success, or making heaps of money, often aren’t enough.

People find that they can achieve great things in their careers, or accumulate great wealth, but then discover themselves (or be seen) to have not much of a life after all. Their families, perhaps, have paid the price, and that turns out to have been more important. Or they are rich, but largely ignorant of the world, or of their fellows, and what they are now ignorant of – how they have now dumbed themselves down beyond the understanding of wealth-accumulation – has robbed their lives of the possibilities of real worth that their riches might have assisted.

The importance of this sort of growth is embedded in Western culture to the point that it is a sense, a cultivated intuition, a hope which we are not very likely to have found if we went back several centuries. But for us it is part of the warm glow which surrounds the care of our young, and our dreams for them. Right from the beginning, we are delighted with the curiosity, the excitement, the openness, the enthusiasm, the natural, playful questioning and exploration of young children. Their growth out into the world enlivens jaded adults, even if it can also be wearying.

We encourage all this, within the bounds of our concerns for their safety, introducing them to new activities and experience to the extent that we can afford and have the time to, and ever watchful for the development of a thoughtful confidence. When we see or hear of children who have had their confidence crushed, or their range of experience significantly and unnecessarily curtailed, we are quick to recognize and deplore a developmental disaster. When we realize that their questioning and curiosity are “brought under control” in their schooling, it often makes us feel uncomfortable, but what can we do about that?

As they grow towards and into adulthood, we continue to make assumptions about growth and hope that it will be a key to life’s problems. We look to the development of their interests and enthusiasms, continuing to encourage safe exploration, and we hope that, in the course of all this they will discover something that they can be passionate about that will enable them to earn a living, and someone they can be passionate about who will help to fulfil their needs for companionship and love.

The culture has a whole discourse about this in which the young should dream big, follow their dreams; within safe and acceptable limits. We favour cliches about how they can do anything that they put their minds to. Step out of your comfort zone. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Don’t end up with a life of regret because you didn’t follow your dream. The world, after all, is your oyster. We celebrate the “successes”, particularly those who feel they can say “if I can do it, anyone can do it.”

Life, it seems, is about growth, about building dreams and setting out to realize them. But all of this talk about growth, which we do attempt to act on in our early child-rearing efforts, becomes more and more clichéd, more and more detached from reality and practice, more and more illusory if not delusional as the child grows into a teenager, and a young adult.

On the one hand, the idea of growth is subverted by the way in which the options are pre-packaged into boxes in the supermarket of choice, and on the other, by the appearance that there is nothing to know in order to choose well anyway. No real growth is required at all, let alone an educationally controlled, reflective growth. We don’t have to understand life or its issues and apparently there are no storehouses of wisdom within our cultures that we need to learn to sift through, and from which we can laboriously craft an understanding of the tasks that lie ahead of us if we are to make something of our lives.

This idea of life as being promoted as choosing items in a cafeteria or supermarket, and with the process of “choosing” itself as being something simplistic –  much like “picking” on the basis of very superficial information and criteria – has been advanced in educational criticism for many decades. Indeed, some theorists have turned against the idea of choice altogether, because it has become so bankrupted, trivialised and commercialized.

We no longer seem to grasp that living genuinely worthwhile lives would involve us in inventing and constructing the options for ourselves, and that this can be done with great thought, discrimination and even profundity if we have the right knowledge and skill, or it can be done extremely poorly, as an intellectual equivalent of fast food, and with dramatically different results for our lives.

There are, though, plenty of people out there peddling their own simplistic boxes – many of them religious – predigested packages re-digested to suit every generation that purport to give us all the answers on how to live (we look to be given the answer, of course. Our schooling taught us that). There can’t really be much to know about it, or they would have told us at school, where we were sent to learn the really important stuff. It must be so simple that any of us can just figure it out for ourselves from scratch, perhaps with the help of our parents, who did it in just the same way, of course, pretty much from scratch as well.  But things were different in their day.

If we were going to grow in ways that prepared us to develop worthwhile lives for ourselves, we would not only have to understand the continuum of experience, and of growth for the sake of growth, we would also have to take charge of our own experience, guiding and directing it in the interests of the larger growth for the rest of our lives.

When our own decisions, or the circumstances of our culture, came to indicate that such greater growth might be cut off, or shutting down, our awareness of what we owe to ourselves would put us on red-alert, and we would take steps to compensate, to work around, or to deal with the consequences, tidying up at the first opportunity. We would do this right through to our deaths.

But growth, even the further growth, is not itself the worthwhile life. Though we may take great satisfaction out of the process of growing, and some of us might even want to incorporate it into our lives as part of what makes them worthwhile, that is not why we need to pursue it. Indeed, we should pursue it for our own sakes even when we find little satisfaction in it, simply because it is a condition of our ability to construct a life that is worthwhile.

Our knowledge and our understanding of the range of our life’s possibilities and limits is the only measure we have of our efforts to live well. The more we have to build from, both in terms of quantity and quality, the better. The more profound the option that we chose against; the more profound our choice.

Dewey thought that growth was an end in itself, but I don’t think this is quite right. It provides the raw materials – the better the growth the richer the possibilities of those materials. And it provides a storehouse of tools and their possibilities; it furnishes the workshops out of which a life can be built. As such, growth for the sake of further growth is a part of the intrinsically valuable process of living such a life.

What we need to add, in addition to growth, and depending upon it, is the process of constructing the life itself – the life that we must make good, using the tools, and drawing upon the materials that growth makes available. The concept of growth, and even “growth for the sake of further growth” doesn’t have within it a conceptual structure, or suggest the principles for the mapping out of an actual life.

For this we will turn to another philosopher, John Rawls, and draw on his idea of constructing a rational life-plan, which he discussed in his book, A Theory of Justice. Rational life-planning enables us to consider the idea of growth for the sake of further growth in a more discriminating way. It enables us to home in among the possibilities of growth, to see what enlargements in our capacities, opportunities and understandings might matter if we are to construct worthwhile lives.

“Rational” life-planning

The terminology – “a rational life-plan” – needs a little explanation if it is not to be misleading. The purpose is to offer as much useful guidance in developing a worthwhile life, without imposing an idea of what that life should be or contain. Hence, it is important to avoid conveying that the life should be all about planning because, among other objections, this would be to impose a conception of good living, which is precisely what we are seeking to avoid. Indeed, Rawls says that how much to plan (and no doubt how to plan) is a planning decision. His base idea of a plan is very minimal: to the extent that any of us even have an intention of any sort, and follow rules, then we already are a plan. Just getting up in the morning (or not) takes us that far.

Similarly with “rational”. This word is, perhaps, rather strong, sometimes conveying cold hard logical processes that are opposed to emotion and feeling, and that compete with them. But all we really require here is that we are trying to develop a good life in the best way, that there is a difference between better and worse, and that reasons do count. We are engaging in a task of respect – attempting to value ourselves as human beings, and there is a lot at stake. How we go about it makes all the difference to our responsibility. Reasons, particularly good reasons, do count.

Regret

How much planning must we do then and how seriously should we take the business of reasoning well? Rawls offers an interesting suggestion. He proposes that we think of ourselves as a series of persons existing over time, and that all members of this special group of persons are equally deserving of consideration and respect. The eighty-year-old “you” deserves as much consideration from you, in your deliberation about your actions and their consequences, as the forty-year-old “you”.

He offers a simple and powerful test of our decision-making. To what extent is the option we are considering now, in our planning, likely to be a cause for regret by a future you? We should be considering that person, and the life that they will be living, as of equal value to the life that we are living now.

A young man, at twenty, inherited three million dollars (when three million dollars meant a very great deal more than it does today). He was, however, dedicated to seriously dangerous motor sports, and given the high mortality among his friends, he very much doubted that he would live to see thirty. With this in mind, he spent the money in a systematic fashion, so that none would be left by that age. But he survived and lived a long life.

What is the moral role of regret here? firstly, we need to set to one side our well-known capacity to make the best of things – that at thirty-one, and perhaps “settling down”, he engages his compassion for his younger self and reconstructs the story of his life to let go of any possibility of bitterness or continuing feelings of disappointment in himself, or sense of regret. He might even rewrite his history so that the story now seems more favourable than it really was. This is an excellent and adaptive strategy which enables us all to recover our lives after mistakes or disasters. But to the extent that we count on it in our planning, we will not respect our future selves.

So the consideration of regret in planning requires us to cancel out as irrelevant our knowledge of our ability to do this. Figuring it into our calculations would be to disregard the interests of the later person. The possibility of having to call on the compassion of our later selves for our younger self (or even the inventiveness of our story-telling) because the younger person’s decision-making was reckless is a signal that regret is, indeed, relevant to our decision. At the same time his planning of his life in terms of risk may be an abiding part of the person’s outlook. It may mean that, instead of having to engage compassion for his younger self, our friend in his thirties simply takes what has happened as an ordinary and acceptable part of his enduring running of risks.

This gives us a clue as to just how much reasoning “rational life-planning” might require. We might decide now to live our lives spontaneously, devoting ourselves to the moment with no thought to the future. But to the extent that this might ultimately lead to a life of wretchedness, it may be necessary for us to ask how well our spontaneity is fulfilling our duty of self-respect. Considered in terms of the way in which we must respect each other, it is important to give as much consideration to the duty of the future self to construct a plan of life as we do to our present selves – to the future person’s opportunities, knowledge and resources;  to their potential for growth – to the educational circumstances we will be creating for them.

This simple idea – of considering our future self of ten, twenty or thirty years forward as our moral equal, and as deserving of equal respect, should open up a whole new world of considerations. How do we protect that ten, twenty or thirty-year-much-older mind from the corruption of accumulated bad experience, from the negative effects of disaster, so that its extending continuum of experience is maintaining its ability to make good life choices, or even preparing it to make better ones than it does now? What should we be cultivating in ourselves now, out of respect for our future selves? How do we secure our flourishing, instead of our diminishing; our backing down from life?

We are used to thinking of our financial future. How good are we as our own educators in preparing ourselves for our educational future? What powers of educational understanding do we currently have, and might we yet need to learn? What would we need to do for our future selves to strengthen us against the culture of aging into which we progressively move as we age, the culture of loss and worthlessness?

I have already pointed out how poor we are at imagining our lives several decades hence. My experience of life, looking back, is not only that I have lived quite different lives, almost as different people, but also that the path would have been unimaginable. I could not possibly have expected myself to have imagined either becoming the person I am now, nor even the circumstances of life, it’s interests and commitments and many of its difficulties, as these now are being lived even though they do, of course, have remarkably strong threads and consistencies that run right through them.

But the life changes themselves have been beyond anticipation. The continuity is obvious enough, but only through hindsight, and it would have perplexed me had I known. How should I have prepared myself to negotiate this well? Perhaps my path is unusual, but I am sure that many will relate to these sentiments.

The lesson from all this, however, should not be that planning ahead or preparing ourselves is useless. It is that we must equip ourselves to think in the right ways as we go along; we must be good at figuring out what we need to learn about living well, about the swamps and bear traps and dragons that are likely to lie in our path, and about how to heal ourselves properly when things go wrong.

Rawls has a number of other suggestions for principles of rational life-planning that I don’t intend to discuss at any length; such as that shorter-term plans involve more detail and specificity, for instance, it being better that longer-term ones be more open and vague. Or that inclusive plans that gather together more of one’s aims, are better than less inclusive ones. And of course he recommends that plans mesh well with the facts.

Trivial as even that may sound, like the others it opens up again the whole world of the role of knowledge and understanding to the development of the worthwhile life, and should return us to an appreciation of education, and “growth for the sake of further growth”, particularly since Rawls considers the elements of life-planning as “suggestions” rather than rules or principles that we are obliged to follow, such that breaking a rule or violating a principle would mean that we had necessarily “made a mistake”. Satisfying any of these conditions well would depend upon just how well we were able to understand the possibilities and opportunities of life.

There is one pair of his principles, however, that does deserve closer attention here.

The Aristotelian Principle and its Companion Effect

Rawls proposes “The Aristotelian Principle” as a principle of motivation, which he considers to be partly explicit, and partly implicit in Aristotle’s thought (ATOJ p426).

. . . the Aristotelian Principle runs as follows: other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.

. . . of two activities they do equally well, they prefer the one calling on a larger repertoire of more intricate and subtle discriminations. (ibid)

He suggests that, since chess is more complicated and subtle than checkers, and since algebra is more intricate than elementary arithmetic, then a person who can do both in either case will prefer chess or algebra. The proviso “other things equal” is crucial; the alternatives must, in other respects, be of equal value. In other words, I may prefer checkers over chess because I enjoy playing it with my nephew, who can’t play chess. But then I am not comparing the respective value of the two on the intrinsic value of the games alone.

He mentions the possible evolutionary value of this propensity, and notes that it is visible in children and other primates. Indeed, if we consider the evolution of our wants and desires out of the primitive ones of food, warmth and being dry, and add the developmental implications of our curiosity, exploration and willingness to learn, it is surely hard to fault.

Many adults still place a high priority on the enjoyment of food, but sticking with milk is rare, or even to the very basic diet of the child newly weaned. The intricacies of cuisine and the complexities of good food-preparation pursued by those who love food should be sufficient witness to the Aristotelian Principle, just in themselves. Beverages multiply as well, as does appreciation for their quality, and once good wine is discovered, it can absorb the whole of a life.

That is not to say that any life has to be lived in the pursuit of some refinement or other. Rawls does not feel that his idea of life-planning depends upon it being true, and we certainly would not want to use it to suggest of someone’s life that did not display the principle was a life poorly lived, but he thinks that it does help to account for things that are often taken by human beings to be good in a life. I think, too, that it might help us to understand growth better; that the path to greater growth will often be to a greater subtlety and discrimination, which knowledge of ourselves and our world often requires. Our search for greater growth under favourable circumstances may be quite natural.

The larger contribution of the Aristotelian Principle is, however, what he speaks of as its “companion effect”.

As we witness the exercise of well-trained abilities by others, these displays are enjoyed by us and arouse a desire that we should be able to do the same ourselves. We want to be like those persons who can exercise the abilities that we find latent in our nature. (ATOJ p428)

And he suggests a “race”, or more properly, I think, a competition between our desire to emulate these rewarding displays and the limitations imposed by our learning. Our frustration increases as we reach our personal limits in replicating the performances of those who are highly skilled. At a certain point we may give up and content ourselves with enthusiastic spectatorship and subtle commentary – in the bleachers or in front of TV. Perhaps we restrict our own cricketing to the beach or the back yard.

This is a very powerful principle, because of the way in which he links it to self-esteem.

It is vital, to our plans, that we consider them worth pursuing and that we see ourselves as capable of realizing them, and he identifies these convictions and feelings as our self-esteem. Our abilities to have these convictions and confidence in our plans are, to some extent, socially conditioned, and therefore fall within the circle of conditional self-esteem discussed at the end of the previous chapter.

A sense of our own worth requires us to have a plan of life that both satisfies the Aristotelian Principle in order that our activities not be experienced as “dull and flat”, or give us “no feeling of competence”, and:

. . . finding our person and deeds appreciated and confirmed by others who are likewise esteemed and their association enjoyed.

. . . For while it is true that unless our endeavours are appreciated by our associates it is impossible for us to maintain the conviction that they are worthwhile, it is also true that others tend to value them only if what we do elicits their admiration and gives them pleasure. (ATOJ p440-441)

This pulls us back to our discussion of conditional self-esteem in the previous chapter. It is not now just that our sense of worth is easily influenced by whether we have qualities that other people admire or slight. It matters, in addition, whether at least some person or people we care about approve of what we might aspire to accomplish through our life-plans. If there is nobody we care about or admire who would appreciate what we would do, it is hard for us to sustain our own conviction that our plans are worthwhile.

In order to have sufficient self-esteem to carry through our plans, we need, then, some minimal community that is like-minded in valuing activities and undertakings or ways of being that we might want to consider including in our plans. This means that the worth of our plan – the possibilities of what could be good content in the Good Life that we must seek, is conditional upon what is culturally available to us.

It is not entirely clear what will count here. Those few women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who set out to train to become doctors, very much in the face of disapproval almost everywhere around them, might seem to be counter-examples. Yet they did know that good doctoring had been valued in their cultures for thousands of years. If they managed to establish any sort of practice at all, they stood to be appreciated for what they could do for those they cared for, and perhaps particularly by other women.

They may even have had some small experience of healing, even in relatively unskilled ways, before they attempted to become doctors, and experienced appreciation from those they were able to help. They may, moreover, have had some sense of a need around them that they saw themselves as capable of filling. There may have been a variety of things to stimulate their desire, and these need not all have been abstract, or remote from the possibilities of the appreciation of others.

This is not, however, to underestimate how hard it must have been. Most of us would have to see them now as quite remarkable, strong-willed, courageous and persistent, and even heroic women. We might conclude, from this, and similar examples of people who step outside convention and the most obvious sources of appreciation, and who labour long and hard and alone at something they consider worthwhile, that it must represent a huge drain on the resources of life, on the energy and commitment that they can devote to other aspects of their plans.

Such lives usually involve great personal sacrifice, a very compelling personal desire developed in some relatively atypical way, and a very considerable expenditure of energy in order to accomplish it. It would also suggest that whatever harm may have been done to their conditional self-esteem in other ways, there was some sort of opening here that let their unconditional confidence show through. They just couldn’t see why being a woman would make them any less capable, as a doctor, than any man.

At the same time, we can see easily enough why other plans are going to be favoured. In communities where being a dedicated, full-time housewife and mother is so universally approved and expected, and nothing much else is, there will be considerable incentive for a woman to build her plan around being one, since so much is offered to self-esteem by doing so. Here is a plan to be believed in, not only that it will be worthwhile, but that she can do it. Even where self-esteem is compromised in other respects, and even very largely, here is a way of gathering some pride and dignity back into life.

Now we have a mechanism that can help us to resolve our issues with the Good Life in relatively unsophisticated ways; a mechanism that we can use to fill the vacuum in skill and understanding that otherwise limits us now that our good has become a matter of our self-determination; in a world that pays so little attention to how best to accomplish that. We look around our culture for signs of appreciation for plans we might pursue, going for plans that attract the highest levels of approval and that we think might be within our grasp. That is how those boxes and those recipes come to have the power that they do. It is why the meritocracy works. It is a mechanism that enables our indoctrination.

That is how we become prisoners of our talents, since these are largely culturally defined. We find we have a talent for rugby. Developing that talent is intrinsically satisfying; because of the Aristotelian principle, and also as other people become aware of it, our self-esteem is fuelled by their approval. Our success here, our growing confidence and life-affirming feelings reinforce our unconditional self-esteem, even if it has been rendered fragile in other ways.

If the pursuit of our talent leads us to be a national rugby figure, in New Zealand at least, the resources for self-esteem will be overflowing; even with the potential to be dangerously so. Without wanting to cast a shadow over the glory of such a life, the question as to whether we should be a prisoner to our talents, condemned to a life in which they must be pursued, is still a question that must be asked.

Even if we have a talent that has extraordinary potential, does that mean that we must follow it at the expense of a life that seems, for us, much more worthwhile, even though it draws on much lesser abilities? Yet the prospect of wasting a talent; particularly if that waste denies some satisfaction to the community is sometimes advanced as if it would be a sin. Should the denial of a talent be something that we should forever regret; perhaps even forever feel guilty? Must we be slaves to them? If there is little else for us to do when it comes to working out what might be worth doing with our lives, then this is the sort of rule that we will fall back on, for want of anything better.

Elsewhere in the social order, the companion effect may help to lock us in to impoverished “good lives” quite apart from material poverty. People from these mean streets may not display many qualities that are viewed favourably in the society at large. We are not the sorts of people who get to college, and we struggle with employment. Quite apart from possessing the necessary schooling credentials, our appearance, our deportment, our accents and vocabulary – being limited to the culture of the streets – and in the absence of familiarity with more refined pursuits available “outside”, narrows the range of people who can appreciate what we can do. This limits what we might reasonably attempt to do to those sorts of things that are appreciated and admired (or even feared) around here.

In this environment, it might be what gangs approve of that is all we can aspire to for a life-plan. Around here, standing up for yourself and walking tall mean something quite different from what they might mean in corporate sales, or going to the bank for a loan for downtown entrepreneurship. Here, the talents that count, and are admired, might be rather different. Here, the pursuits and achievements so clearly admired by others on television are a world away from that narrow range that is “respected” in our blighted community; those limited sources of value and admiration that we can share with each other through the lawlessness, unruliness and unpredictability. In all those stories, something as simple as a boxing gym where talents are appreciated that can provide a bridge between our world and the world outside has so often represented a “way out”.

Understood in this way, Rawls’s idea of the companion effect gives us another window into indoctrination. Cultures and subcultures set up the possibilities of the contents of plans and self-esteem together. We could design these forms of indoctrination simply by devising narrow ranges of recreation and entertainments to celebrate – perhaps by encouraging national pride in our sports-people and entertainers. We could rigidly define roles and their expectations, such as parenthood. We could place jobs at the apex of what it is worthwhile for people to do in their lives, but place many of them out of reach for particular kinds of people. We could finely grade these jobs into hierarchies of worth. Hard to do? We could design our schools with this in mind, and support these values through celebrations in the media.

Then we might work to ensure that people had to struggle to gather together some conditional sense of self-esteem. We could do this by undermining unconditional self-love, through inducing fear, and encouraging them to identify their intrinsic value with the accidents of their birth and their apparent inabilities and weaknesses. We might also do this through encouraging particular kinds of self-consciousness and self-appraisal. Perhaps marketing and advertising could help here.

In these ways we could make them especially dependent on the popularity and approval widely encouraged around those recreations and entertainments, and the approval associated with those hierarchies of employment. Finally, we might pay considerable attention to shaming any who fell out of line. We wouldn’t need to “impose” conceptions of good living on anyone. We would simply need to encourage them to “choose”.

Our personal framework: an outlook on life

The danger that life-plans are things to be “chosen”, or to populate with the content of “choices” has already been mentioned; the danger, in particular, that it will reduce life-planning to assembling a plan through selecting from among pre-configured alternatives. Such a conception of planning can encourage us to think of choice on a model resembling picking items off a supermarket shelf.

Rawls doesn’t entirely discourage this view. His discussion is compatible with it to the extent that the potential contents of our plans are thought of in terms of activities and aims that others might already approve. This tends to focus our attention on potential bundles of wants and desires, and of activities and undertakings that have already been gathered under some sort of public or collective definition. Perhaps all there is to planning is that we try to bring our wants and desires into conformity with those wants, desires, activities and undertakings that are widely admired in our community, and then we choose among those things for our plans in ways that at least some other people can appreciate.

It is all too common to think of our wants and desires as the bedrock of our consideration of good living, just as it is all too common to think of the prime process in building a worthwhile life in terms of choice. “What is it that you want out of life?” The first step in figuring out what to do with your life seems to be to figure out what you really, really want.

The things that we so often have in mind when we think of life-choices, and even wants and desires, are, I think, second-order considerations, even if they tend to be the more tangible and obvious ones. The problem is not simply that our “life choices”, and the wants and desires in terms of which they may be made are more vivid, it is also that we tend to overlook that our lives have to be constructed, and not merely chosen, and that our understanding of life itself somehow precedes any real consideration of choice at all.

The idea of constructing our lives recovers that insight that we had achieved earlier, and are now in danger of losing – the insight into the uniqueness of our own experience –  and the insights into the uniqueness, the special character of our own judgment and reasoning that results. This is the uniqueness of experience that makes the pursuit of good living through self-determination different for each of us, as indeed is the possibility of its achievement. As we move towards the idea of choice, and even to the operation of the companion effect, we tend to lose sight of the differences of our own trajectories, and of what we each make of our own experiences. We fall away from the insight that led to self-determination and personal responsibility, biasing our thought about good living, once again, towards what we share in common.

We will make a better start if we think of the background, of what lies behind our more obvious choices, in terms of things like our “outlook on life”, our “point(s) of view”, or even what we make of life in this way or that. These are things that we construct from the earliest points in our mental development. In the sense that our intellectual lives are full of choices or decisions we might make about any idea, we could come to think of “choice” lying everywhere.

But in constructing our “outlook on life”, we are not just assembling something out of a box of public ideas, as we might with a mechano or a lego set. These outlooks and points of view are ones that can only be built from within our own experience and what we have made of it. They create the understandings, the priorities of perception – and the filters – that we bring to our more obvious decisions. They consist of many of the assumptions and priorities that we carry into our choosing-situations; including, even, in a supermarket.

What might such “outlooks-on-life” consist in?

Our optimism and pessimism, our risk-taking and our explanations and expectations of “the way things tend to turn out”. Our attitude to mortal questions, and as these evolve about ourselves over our life-times. The stance we adopt to our own vulnerability and fragility, of those around us and of the safety or danger of the world. Of the powers and limitations of human beings, and especially ourselves; of what, indeed, is “practical”. Of all kinds of generalizations that we make. Our faith. Our hope. Our gratitude. Our curiosity. Our need for certainty. Our adventurousness.

Of the role of time in our lives, and the significance to us of place. Our relation to the natural world, or even the universe. Of the limitations – or possibilities – of our personal history and its role in our identity, and our place in the larger history of our culture and the planet. Of our sociability; the ways in which we experience genders, ages, ethnicities and social classes. Of the complex ways in which we are dependent on, and independent of social relationships, from the most immediate to the most remote. And, of course, all of the things that might be framed under conditional and unconditional self-respect. And much more.

Now when we turn to our wants and desires, we see that they arise and evolve from within a framework of values and beliefs, convictions and assumptions that will shape their formation and no doubt evolve along with them. Whatever wants and desires, inclinations tastes and aspirations are emerging, their evolution will be informed, filtered and shaped by these complex preconceptions and understandings of our “outlook” and its “points of view”.

Some will become matters of mere idle wishing, or pleasant fantasy and dreams; things that might have been a part of our play in our childhood, or our daydreams at school, but are clearly unrealistic for people like us, in our time and place. Some will wither with experience as others grow in power and possibility.

We will learn more about what some are like, and we will discover that they become more or less compatible with settled aspects of our emerging background understanding of life. Our growing knowledge and perception of ourselves, and our world, and our growing knowledge of the requirements of our evolving wants and desires will filter, prioritise or set aside. What we wanted at five will be our joke at twelve, and forgotten at fifteen.

Our wants and desires mature, become more sophisticated. But they also conflict. Not all wants and desires can be accommodated in the same way, or at the same level. Or there can be many things we find appealing, but they lack stability. Perhaps we enjoy many things, but none so much that we would want to sacrifice the others for it. Perhaps there are things that dominate for a while, but nothing has so far dominated for long enough, or even enough for us to feel we could build a plan around it. “Decide what you want out of life”. Why can’t we get passionate about anything?

The “outlook on life”, then, provides the background, the matrix, the fabric out of which life-plans can be built. It is, in part, a nascent life-plan, in the sense that it contains settled and settling preferences and interests.  It will include our impulses and our inhibition of impulse, and the fears and triggers to anger, to attraction, and repulsion.  It will also include interpretive schemes that frame our perceptions, and our settled inclinations and tendencies to action.

And this is how the advice to “decide what you want”, as a recipe for our purpose or meaning in life is such a superficial and second-hand answer to the core problem of finding life’s passion, or purpose, or settling on its meaning.  The outlook-on-life that we already possess is the reservoir of wants, passions, purposes and meanings that are available to us. That outlook is unique and relative to us and our history. It is built out of the experiences that we have had and what we have made of them.

Only from this entire interpretive scheme, containing as it does, all of our conceptual understanding, the principles and rules we have adopted and constructed, as well as our settled preferences, passions and curiosities can we conceive of the possibilities for our lives at all. The outlook on life sets the limits to our imagination.

To attempt to “decide what you  want” as the basis for life-planning is to be limited to the outlook on life that already exists, and this can have severe restrictions. The more “unaware” we are of that outlook, the more we are prisoners to these limitations. Unaware, a good deal of its authority will at least be ambiguous – the freedom with which it has evolved being largely unknown. Unaware, it is more likely that its components will merely have been “caught” or “picked up” or unthinkingly assimilated from culture and convention, and subject to indoctrination.

Even where there is conscious awareness involved, that does nothing to guarantee that the quality of our outlook-on-life improves. We might, in response to trauma, make vows that we will never get in such a situation again, or that we will act in certain ways if we do, or we might reach certain unwise conclusions about ourselves. These decisions may arise from faulty generalisations, or be made in the gross immaturity of early childhood, or with our understanding compromised in other ways. That they involve moments of acute self-consciousness may do nothing to assure their quality.

Alternatively, we might, for instance, work on our outlook on life to clean it up or make it more powerful, comprehensive and sophisticated. We might make aspects of it self-conscious and deliberately chosen, where their precursors had been adopted unaware and with little freedom. We might work on fears and aversions, or impulses and desires that come to be understood as unreasonable. We might, through the explorations of growth for the sake of further growth, acquire insights and tools that enable us to improve our outlook-on-life and the quality of the judgments it contains.

The attempt to find our passion or our purpose does not, then, begin with plunging into our existing reservoir of experience and judgment. It begins with building that reservoir, and doing so with educational skill. Our outlook-on-life will be a better, richer, more powerful cornucopia for meaning, for wanting and for potential passion if it has been made self-conscious, becoming subject, in a continuing way,  to challenge, and to the developmental rules of growth for the sake of larger growth. The place to look for meaning and purpose for life is not, therefore, to look firstly to one’s “wants”, but to an outlook-on-life that has been managed self-consciously; that has been deliberately and reflectively grown.

It should be clear that doing this educational work is, itself, a component of life-planning. Even to the extent that the outlook-on-life has been acquired without awareness, some of its elements will still meet Rawls’s minimal condition of a plan. There will, for instance, be at least an organic organisation to it, and behavioural stabilities within it, and it will comprise judgments that will follow from the culture in various ways, all enabling the following of rules. But such an outlook on life may have little foresight assembled as self-conscious purpose. Life-planning, full-blown, begins to emerge to the extent that specific decisions and choices are made that issue in intentions extending beyond impulse.

As we begin to be self-conscious about our outlook-on-life, and particularly as we take on any tasks of managing or improving it, these processes become a part of life-planning. They are, however, an aspect of planning that differs somewhat from the search for, and implementation of purpose and meaning. They fall more under the heading of how to plan, rather than what to plan, and within the question of “how to plan”, they have to do with developing and refining the tools and resources for planning itself. We work on the choosing apparatus, rather than the choices themselves, but without any clear foresight as to where the choosing and planning that follow from the employment of that apparatus may lead. We clean up our self-love and self-esteem, and it could be a part of the plan that these are gifts we want for ourselves, but we may also do so to put ourselves in a position where the planning that we do is more likely to respect ourselves properly, and be more effective.

There is, then, within planning, a set of procedural issues having to do with the how of planning, and of the resources available to planning that will enable it to be of high quality.  The impulse to pursue this aspect of planning should follow, clearly enough, from our intrinsic worth as human beings, and from the exercise of our duty of self-respect. We should note that this aspect of planning, in addition to being a key condition of the general possibility of planning that does much to set and define the plan’s actual possibilities and likelihoods, is also an educational undertaking. It is a matter of self-education that can, in the end, only be carried out by the person in question.

Each of us must take responsibility for our own planning and its quality, and not just the plan we arrive at. We cannot simply hand the planning process over to the authority of external “educators”. That is, indeed, too much of our contemporary problem. The agendas of others, including those with commercial as well as particular political interests in what we do, already have too much influence over “how we should plan”.

But I haven’t found my passion; my purpose! Why can’t I get passionate about anything?

There is, I think, only one solution to these dilemmas. Larger growth. We must be curious, we must explore, we must give thought to the Aristotelian Principle in order to see how some things might acquire more interest and appeal as they are pursued in sophistication and in depth. We must see what things we return to again and again, or that come up in different guises. We must be educationally self-aware. And as a part of these things, quite often, we must clean up our emotional baggage. We will be at a disadvantage, of course, if this is not something that we have been equipped to do and have been doing over a considerable period of time.

Many of us should expect to have issues with curiosity and exploration, because we have been to school. One thing that we might want to give attention to in our current world, is the way in which conventional schooling so typically shuts down curiosity and the spirit of exploration – parents continue to give an abundance of anecdotal evidence from witnessing this happening to their children upon entering school. If, later in life, we find ourselves without real purpose and without real passion, then here is somewhere that we should look. It is likely that this has happened to us. As a consequence, a good hypothesis to explore is that our outlook-on-life needs treatment in the areas of our curiosity and willing exploration – and also, possibly, of the unconditional self-love upon which it depends.

We should note, too, that curiosity is related to our perception of novelty and anomaly. We aren’t likely to be curious about the things we unthinkingly take for granted. The taken-for-granted that is unthinking in our lives will be a part of our settled outlook-on-life. How can we challenge that? Access to, and cultivation of, appropriate and challenging conversation is a vital key.

What are life’s good and bad potentials, possibilities and opportunities, and how are we to work on them? Not “what do we want?”, or “what are we interested in?”, which is simply to be a prisoner of the limitation of our personal histories so far, but “what is there to want, that we might seek out different wants?” and “how should we evaluate wants – the ones we have, and the ones we do not have, in order to cultivate or inhibit them?” “What is there that we could be interested in, given the right introduction and chances?” “How should we evaluate the worth of interests?”

Why do people get so excited about this, or that, and make such sacrifices in their pursuit? We must try some of them and explore others vicariously. We must talk and listen to those who have taken them to more advanced levels, and read, trying to discover what they may see in them that gives greater satisfaction; that may even be worth getting passionate about. And we must look to our histories of experience, and what we make of life, to see whether there might be anything that we may have learned that may be holding us back.

What are the issues of life and education, insofar as we must take control of our own?

We must confront the fact, too, that the key judgments that go into organising an outlook-on-life and that give it power to issue prescriptions for action, are philosophical in nature. There are widespread cultural prejudices against philosophy and its apparent irrelevance – anti-intellectual prejudices that mean that the possible role of philosophy is a barrier for many. When we talk of an outlook-on-life, and its contribution to who we are, however, it has to be acknowledged that we are philosophical beings, and the fact of our outlook-on-life is the evidence of this. The strong sense of this is to be found, not in pronouncements of “philosophies of life”, or in professions of belief, but in the structure of experience and what we have made of it that issues in our actual actions and reactions; the beliefs and convictions that play a real role in our decisions.

Being largely philosophical in nature, an outlook-on-life needs to be refined by whatever philosophical experience we happen to gain with others, and whatever philosophical skill we use to develop our practical thought about life. Both of these will depend very much on the people we have around us, the people we come to meet, and the quality of our interactions with them. There will be a good deal more to say about these possibilities in Part 3.

Choices that matter

Just because choice is so often trivialised and reduces life to a supermarket does not justify us in continuing its trivialization, but neither does it mean that we should try to avoid the idea of choice altogether. Of course choice can be trivialised, and we can be manipulated through choice simply because it matters so much. Having real choices is indeed a mark of our freedom, and that is why the idea must be rehabilitated, just like those so many other important words that academics spurn because they appear to have lost their credibility, having been so over-used under poor theories and bankrupt ideologies that have overwhelmed the contexts in which they are indispensable.

Far too many people live lives over which they have little choice, no power to call their own. All that they have is impoverished, shallow, barely more than survival, but they have little if anything in the way of alternatives. They have little capacity to see opportunities, or the world has just shut down around them. Lack of choice is one of the ways in which we fall into slavery.

We are talking here of significant choice; choice that might make a real difference to the quality of life, to the possibilities of developing lives that are good. The sorts of freedom that people have given their lives and died for is not the freedom to choose between several dozen brands of beer at the local liquor store.

The key lies in the ways in which alternative can be invested with value, and again there is a strong connection here with the larger growth. Key choices will be those that can be understood in terms of larger implications for our lives – the bigger pictures – and it will be in terms of those larger pictures and our abilities to draw them interpret and appreciate them, that our choices will matter, and the alternatives acquire value. It is in terms of the sophistication of our understanding of what is at stake that those boxes and recipes betray themselves.

There are, then, decision-points that we can be quite sure will make dramatic differences to our lives, and that will stand out as dominant features of our plans. These, too, can be the product of recipes and boxes: “It is time I settled on a real career”. “It is time I settled down.” “It is time I had a baby.” Because they are such standard recipes and boxes, it may be worth ensuring that we arrive at them having exposed them to critical light, and having put ourselves under considerable challenge. We might create our own decision-points, according to our own timing, coming to them with a critical ownership that depends upon a well-considered “outlook on life” that we have deliberately worked on.  The danger is that we are overwhelmed by convention, by what is normal, by what everyone does, and by the expectations of others.

When we arrive at these decision-points and consider the task of dealing with the decisions we are now faced with we tend to spend a great deal of time perplexed about “weighing” the alternatives. When the day comes, however, I think we are pretty much stuck with the scales we have already built, the background “outlook on life” that we have constructed through our life so far, and the attention we have paid to doing so. At the point of decision we can list the pros and cons, and even give weight to them – and then tear up the lists in dissatisfaction, not quite knowing why. This doesn’t mean that it was an ineffective thing to do, of course; just that our true scales are somewhat more complex than the procedure implied.

Getting beyond the recipes and boxes – the simple supermarket – suggests a number of things about our growth and the extent to which we have been enlarging it and increasing its adaptive possibilities. When we reach a point of significant decisions in life, it can be beneficial to the quality of our decision that the road does, indeed, have forks, and that the forks confront us with a challenge, perhaps a number of dilemmas.

It is probably desirable, for instance, not merely that we have alternatives, but that the alternatives each exert a considerable pull. It does not bode well for our good if we have no option, and confront the decision-point with dismay; with a blank absence of animation for any option, as if every path just wanders off into the weeds, and we are forced to cast about to see what everyone else does.

Nor is it good if we are trying to decide which is the least aversive of a number of unappealing alternatives. If we come to the crossroads without an expansive and discriminating appreciation of what there might be to want and desire, and how these might play out in the opportunities to be sought in the world, we are going to start our decision-making from a pitiful base. So much will depend upon what we have already been doing for some time before. It is here that we are at our most vulnerable to boxes and recipes.

We are likely to be better placed if we can see the merit in a number of alternative real paths, if we have already felt their elements to be in competition, and if we have taken pains to heighten it. We want, in the end, to choose a path that we can value highly, and one good measure of the height of its value is an appreciation of the value that we finally turn down in the other alternatives. If we find a number of alternatives attractive, then what we turned down in choosing a path is a substantial measure of the value that we give to that one we choose.

Developing wants and desires that are powerful and discriminating requires that we have taken on our educational tasks of larger growth in thoughtful ways, and over some considerable time in advance. I will give several examples that suggest the importance of considerations that can only come from larger growth and the reflection that might go along with it, though they represent only the smallest opening of a windows of possibility.

I am assuming, firstly, that we have already been curious and exploratory, particularly of the range of different interests and possibilities of enthusiastic and passionate pursuits that other people follow, in order to see what might be in them for us. I am also assuming that, in each case, or at least those that show some appeal, we familiarize ourselves with the larger institutional and cultural contexts which make them possible, and within which they are embedded and give considerable shape to them. This would be the least that larger growth should require. If it is worth devoting much of our lives to these pursuits, then it is worth trying to gain some critical assessment of their true nature.

I am also assuming, that as we follow our curiosity into them, we cultivate some awareness of what entering into them is like, and of what giving our time and effort to them is going to do to the rest of our lives. We should be tracking our experience.

Considering the Aristotelian principle in decision-making

My own experience is that almost any activity or undertaking that I entered into because it appeared attractive and potentially worthwhile turned out remarkably different from the way it appeared before I got into it.  This appreciation that depends on experience may take some time. There is often a need to master some basics before it is possible to see the deeper attraction that an activity might hold. There are some things that just cannot be appreciated until a certain level of skill has developed, until new concepts and judgments are formed. Development into the activity is often essential to a larger appreciation of it.

Unfortunately, this means that we filter out many candidates for interest and enthusiasm, simply because we can’t follow them all and no insight into most of them beyond the entry level. Worse, perhaps, many of those pursuits that have the most to offer will be ones that involve a considerable commitment before we have a real chance to appreciate them properly. The Aristotelian Principle confirms this, to the extent that we might prefer activities that require the greater sophistication and subtlety, and involve the larger possibilities for learning. To the extent that we often can’t grasp what there is to a pursuit until we have committed some time, effort and resources to it, this imposes a big restriction on the range of alternatives that we are able to consider.

This all suggests the value of a certain humility to our inevitable rejection of many pursuits; that what seems quite clearly not to our taste may simply be because we have not had the right opportunity to develop it. Such humility is important when we wonder why other people pursue the things that they do.

Unfortunately, the length of this initial learning curve may also mean that what we find in this way may not always be favourable. We need to be aware of this, and use this knowledge wisely. Coming up to a decision-point in life without being aware, and without having learned to manage this well, and being confronted only with boxes and recipes, we will likely be under-equipped for good decision-making.

The “sliding doors” effect

Almost all significant choices will have a “sliding door effect” – that is largely what makes them significant.

There are conventional narratives that give us a glimpse in to this, and a number of movies,  We might think of “Sliding doors” itself, or “Groundhog Day”, or “the Unbearable Lightness of Being”.  The stories show a decision being made, and one-thing-leading-to-another that results in life and its understanding unfolding in radically different, incommensurable ways. Usually, these are narratives that take very, very minor, perhaps even unnoticed decision-points; little serendipitous things, like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, and this allows the stories to convey the existential and paradoxical mystery of our lives. But for this tiny thing, upon which every other experience and opportunity comes to be built, our lives might have been entirely different and we would have become quite different people.

Significant life choices, however, almost always have a sliding door effect. They become major choices for us, because it doesn’t take much thought at all to realize that our lives could take quite different paths, and make different people of us. Our decision will likely enhance some possibilities of experience, but almost always at the expense of the possibilities of other kinds of experience and growth. The significance of the differences make them worthy of consideration, and open up the principled role of regret.

Each alternative will involve commitments that will rule out many other things, or at least diminish their place and structure their opportunities. They will involve many years of our lives, and there will be many things that we will learn in all that time, but many other things that will be inaccessible to our learning and experience. We will not recover those years, but will be in a new phase of life when they are over, and some opportunities that might otherwise have been available to us will no longer exist, because of our age. Such choices have the danger that, while they will enable growth, they will limit the possibilities of larger growth.

Careers, partnerships, recreation, reproduction, changes of country and culture, significant religious and political commitments, can be of these kinds, but there are numerous others, and their significance for any one life is no greater simply because they are common. What does it mean for those lives when, say, fifty percent of our doctors wish they had done something else?

Appreciating the importance of these decisions for our future learning and experience involves building an extended and thoughtful understanding of the consequences of our actions. It involves the development of considerable foresight, and a considerable outward perspective in order to get a sense of the relative profit and loss. It is here, of course, that we would want to invoke the principle of regret into our decision-making.

But again, we are in danger if we have left these considerations to the point of decision, and have not been engaging them as a part of our experience and management of growth over time. When we consider pursuing some interest further to see what more it might hold, we are ruling out spending that time on other things.

Consciousness of this may help us to become aware of gaps we might want to consider important, that we might want to repair at a later date if we can. Our awareness here, and the thought that we have given it, should aid us when we finally reach that fork in the road. If we take this path or that, and it closes down some valuable part of the world and its chains of experience, what might we do to compensate; and how, if we think it matters?

“Educational (or developmental) time”

In this connection, I propose a principle called “educational time”. We are mortal, and have a finite time to live. We cannot, in that time, come to know everything, or experience everything (let alone be taught everything). We can experience some interests, and even do so with great passion, but we cannot experience them all. We cannot even experience more than a very tiny range of the possibilities that might be available just for our own unique lives.

In addition to this, we can only, in our waking hours, have certain kinds of experiences in a certain range of ways, because much of our day is devoted to mundane necessities that rule out anything other than incidental learning. This is why educational decisions, at the practical everyday level, are about what knowledge and experience should be of most worth to us personally; in the range of ways that life makes such things possible, and keeping in mind that experiences grow into and out of each other in that complex developmental continuum.

This does not mean that we should always be conscious of such an existential question in all of its complexity, and think or worry feverishly about it as a matter of routine. But it should not be overlooked, either, as conventional “educational” planning always does, with its poorly developed priorities, its preoccupation with packing more and more into schooling, and for longer periods of our lives,  and its indifference to the conditions under which our real lives are lived.

It does mean that it may be wise to consider how experience is happening, how our decisions affect them, and the sorts of assumptions and filters that we might put in place that facilitate some of our experiences and eliminate others, given that some will be more important than others, and that a clock is running. Considered thoughtfully, such considerations give power to our choices, and prepare us for those that are particularly significant.

Be careful what you wish for

A third example of the importance of the larger growth and the bigger pictures for making smart choices has to do with the superficial ways in which we can attempt to translate a simple enthusiasm, pleasure or passion into a livelihood.

This is at its most crude when young people decide to become teachers because they “like to work with children”, or people become caregivers in corporate resthomes or nursing homes because the “like working with the elderly”. That innocent and altruistic pleasure of “working with children” may be deeply compromised if it turns out that working in the conventional schooling system does more harm to children than it does good. To sustain such innocence often requires the maintenance of a huge romantic denial of what the larger institutional structure is really about, an unwillingness to entertain the criticism even superficially, plus a determined refusal to engage seriously with the extensive research and its implications.

In the nursing home, it turns out that maximising profit takes precedence over providing an environment that any of us would willingly consider living in, that the meanest of standards are all that are really met, that they run on a medical model that prioritizes the body over the mind. They are factories in which the aged are simply processed. Again, the enterprise is rife with ideologies and mantras of care and good will with the true good will of the prospective care-giver becoming compromised by an environment in which it can barely be exercised, creating a struggle with their conscience, their self-respect, for having to be a party to such an arrangement.

This same conflict can emerge in any career where we might propose to take our passion or enthusiasm into a place of employment. Indeed, we might propose a rule of thumb.

Be aware that any passion or enthusiasm that you hope to realize in employment is susceptible at least to being compromised, if not destroyed, by the larger managerial and social conditions under which the employment must be undertaken.

Conventional management arrangements, including internal politics and competitiveness, and the inappropriate exercise of authority can turn a passionate enthusiasm into a nightmare, as can destructive and unworthy organisational purposes that (for instance) put profit before people and social contribution – the real purposes and mission; not the ones for more public consumption.

The vulnerability of employees often means that they find themselves caught up in systems that lead them to compromise their integrity, and their self-respect. These problems are so widespread, and so potentially damaging of our good that it may be correct to say that attention to the conditions under which your work will be performed is as important, if not more important, than your enthusiasm for the work itself.

Yet this is one of the least visible features available to us when we are presented with all those boxes from which to choose in the supermarket of careers. It is not hard to see why. It is not the sort of thing that organisations themselves are keen to own up to – even to themselves – and nor are people who work under such invidious conditions.

Employees are unwise to say negative things about their employers, except to close intimates. They are often ashamed to find themselves in an unhappy position, and they often attribute their difficulties to themselves, as we should expect in unequal relationships. The boxes, and the recipes, are always quiet about these things, as is vocational training, and people will enthuse to strangers rather than betray themselves as bitter, estranged and marginalised, no matter how common their experience, or their feelings. I have witnessed numerous people who hate their work encouraging young people to make it their career.

It is therefore likely to be a difficult matter to get the appropriate intelligence on the contexts of employment when making career choices. Some industries, however, show very clear patterns, which is why I have mentioned the elder-care industry. No one should enter teaching, either, without reading fairly widely in both the popular and more academic literature that critiques schooling. Everyone should also be familiar with the contemporary criticisms of management systems, as well as with labour history as a matter of course, long before making major decisions that will lead them into schooling debt, decisions that come to dominate such large portions of their lives.

But again, this is not something that is likely to be addressed well if left until a decision-point looms. Some skill and perspective should already have been built, through the curiosity and exploration of the possibilities of interest and aspiration over a number of years.

As we work our way into an activity that seemed particularly worthwhile, and begin to gain that deeper experience of it, we can often find, for instance, that we are caught up among attitudes and aspects of character, and even corruptions among those we begin to associate with that make us feel uncomfortable, and lead us eventually, to abandon the whole idea.

These may have little to do with the activity itself, to which we may continue to feel drawn, but they may, instead, flow from the competitiveness, or the administrative power, or the commercialisation. Highly competitive sports, for instance, can lose their charm in comparison to the congenial forms played among friends. They turn out to be about different things; about ambition, about money, about influence, about the entertainment industry, about careers.

The warnings, for other areas of our life, can often be found here, where the price we might pay is not likely to be so great. This is where our larger understandings of these interests and the ways in which they are embedded in our social structures are important to our larger growth, and our larger growth is important to our ability to continue to grow in other ways.

These understandings must, however, be sought with the lessons in mind of Aristotle’s observations on the developments that can occur with age. We must be wary that our experience and understanding of the role of these larger forces is, indeed, enlarging; that it does not just lead to wariness, a cynicism about the inevitabilities of the destructiveness of commercialism, or of power, or of weaknesses of human nature.

We should be seeking to understand these things in ways that develop due caution, yes, but also with an awareness and sensitivity to the possibilities of positive opportunity, of counter-initiatives worth supporting, the promise of a better way. We should be seeking, not merely to adapt, but a greater adaptability, and this requires us to go beyond avoidance, and continue our open curiosity and positive seeking.

In these explorations of interests we can learn to look for the bad signs, and perhaps move elsewhere more quickly when we detect them. We can seek other ways – other means, other contexts, other forms of organisation that deserve to be encouraged and developed – to satisfy our wants, and fulfil our dreams.

No choice at all

Sometimes, however, whatever we might think to do – to make of our lives, to put at the heart of our plans – there are just no alternatives. One thing, one passion, one undertaking has so much enduring power for us that nothing else comes near to it, no matter how hard we might try. Indeed, this can be exactly how we would want it to be; that something has so much meaning for us has so much potential for fulfilment that anything else pales in comparison.

We might engage in other pursuits in order to relax and avoid taking life and ourselves too seriously, to give our minds and our passions some relief and play, but none of them can stand up against this. This is what we were born to do. This is what we give our life for. This is where the idea and role of choice reaches its limit. Some people have realized these things when they were eight, or five, or for as long as they can remember.

The stakes are very high here, of course. There are many mantras about the inevitability of success that follow from determination and persistence, and there will, of course, be many stories that support the advice. Such stories will be common because such paths will be common where such strong and abiding passions exist; people will be determined and they will persist in the face of repeated failure, and many successes will result from this.

They will be prone to survivor-bias, however. Stories of persistence that never get anywhere will be collected in a different genre. A reconciliation, in the end, that it just couldn’t be done. Not in my circumstances. Not in this time and place. We can never know what has been lost to us all as a result of such failed attempts.

If it matters that much, of course, determination and persistence will be an expression of the worth of the attempt. There is the role of regret again. What if I hadn’t done everything in my power? There can be dignity in such a reconciliation.

Having no choice in the matter has other fragilities. There is something disconcerting about the fact that there is no real test for our passionate pursuit. If were are able to conceive of a number of alternatives and make them competitive, then that would help us to bring in some degree of public judgment that is at least reassuring.

Several alternatives represent several communities of people through whom the companion effect can be expressed, and there is some reassurance, at least in that competition among communities, vying for our attention. A passionate enthusiasm that is so strong as to override all competition is isolating, however, confining us at best to a narrow, single-minded and highly devoted group that is usually marginalised in its passion. Are we really this peculiar; that unreasonable?

Such single-mindedness has to raise questions of indoctrination as well. Fanatical or obsessive commitments are characteristic of the most blatant forms of indoctrination; patriotism, or being caught up in religious cults, seemingly to the point of insanity. We know a good deal about the processes of indoctrination that can create these things, including the vulnerabilities that they can exploit.

Perhaps the best educational clue here returns us once again to the concerns for larger growth. In many of the cases of passionate single-mindedness that we might worry about, there seems to be some sort of decision, cultivated by the person or the authorities that they have chosen, to shut down their curiosity about other possibilities, other pursuits, ways of seeing or living; a shutting down, that is, to any sources of potential challenge to the commitment itself. We dare not entertain other possibilities. “Faith” is sometimes presented to us in these terms. It must not be disturbed. Such problematic single-mindedness is often characterised by a passionate growth in a single direction at the expense of any enlarging curiosity and exploration.

Though a single-minded pursuit will dominate in terms of the expenditure of our time and energy, and take from other explorations in doing so, there is no reason, in principle, why it should shut down larger curiosity, doubt or challenge, and every reason why it would be unwise to do so. Indeed, the possibilities of its own enlarged development will be curtailed by such a shutting down, because such challenges are often the challenge to do better.

A student spoke up in class, perhaps angry with me; certainly frustrated. Her parents were teachers. Her aunts and uncles were teachers. All she had ever wanted to be was a teacher. She had tried many other things, but it didn’t make any difference. All she cared about was being a teacher. Was I saying that she was just indoctrinated?

Her environment was certainly biased in favour of being a teacher, and had she taken no steps to test that bias, I would have expected the external conditions to have had an indoctrinatory influence, since the outcome would be reasonably foreseeable. Her parents and aunts and uncles were perfectly entitled, of course, to have chosen to be teachers as an expression of their duty to themselves. We could not expect them to reduce the chance of indoctrination by choosing to do something else.

But she tried many other things, and she clearly did so deliberately. Did her parents, aunts and uncles encourage this? I do not know. But there is insight here, and I prefer to think that they did.

This is, I think, all that we can expect to do to attempt to rectify a bias in our context of origin. We can challenge it. We can seriously explore the possibilities of other commitments and interests, other beliefs and passions. And that is what she did. Maybe nothing could ever hope to be as vivid as the things she came to feel and understand within her family. Her passionate commitment, it seems to me, is a great gift, and her attempt to challenge it, a considerable educational insight.  I could only hope for a wider culture that did more to encourage and enable such testing.

Character and its justification

We saw earlier that building a life-plan was not just a matter of populating a plan with activities and pursuits that would give life meaning and purpose and then figuring out how to realize them. It is not just about whether to take up mountain biking, or somehow make computer-gaming a career, or getting into fashion-design, or raising a family. It is about the sort of person we should be trying to become, which will include such activities, but also go considerably beyond them, and further into the background against which they make sense.

We also looked at one aspect of this larger contextual background; the outlook on life that we come to build, the perspectives on the world. This idea of an outlook, or even a “philosophy of life” can be thought of as capturing and organizing a huge range of themes across a landscape of domains, and what we “take on board” or decide about many of them will often be decisive for our effectiveness, well-being and the ultimate possibilities of satisfaction; across relationships, across work and play, across what can or cannot be changed in our world, what may or should not be tolerated or accepted, across spiritual and existential concerns. Our outlook on life is a considerable part of the definition of who we are. We become identified with it and by it, to ourselves and to others. Here is where we stand.

There is a danger to the expression of an “outlook on life”, however, in that we may be inclined to think of it in quite passive terms – as a “looking” outward on the world at the expense of our “doing” in it. We can think of it readily enough as being the fabric of belief and commitment that organises our feelings and passions, but lose sight of the way not only that it frames our actions and activities, justifying and explaining what we do, and giving conceptual shape to our decisions, but is also a part of the doings and undertakings themselves. The same problem arises when we speak of a philosophy of life, given the way that people are apt to think of philosophy as being detached from life, and impractical – and, indeed, given that many people deploy philosophy in just these ways. An outlook on life is very much a point of view that is alive in our action.

It is always better to think of mental processes in active terms – as verbs, rather than nouns or things, so that we think of explaining and justifying rather than explanations and justifications; believing and valuing rather than beliefs and values, inclining, resisting and denying rather than inclinations, resistance and denial. Choosing rather than choices, deciding rather than decisions.

The concept of “character” might help us here, because while  character is driven by concepts, principles and purposes, it is defined, equally firmly, by behaviour. Character is seen in the determined way we do things, or refrain from doing them, and even when these responses and reactions are so trained that they become unreflective habit, it is the purposes and intentions behind them that make them the aspects of character that they are.

Character is a matter of virtues and vices relative to some purpose. Usually, the purpose is understood in moral or ethical terms; they are strengths that issue in actions that are good, particularly when conditions are unfavourable, and weaknesses in our behaviour that allow us to succumb to something bad, even when doing good would not seem so hard. Though the concept is still alive in the language, it is unfashionable in popular discourse. Attention more likely being given to personality.

Personality has rather more to do with our surface and superficial presentation; the things that make us attractive. It is the appearance that we present to others, and is likely to influence our superficial popularity.  The trade-off isn’t a particularly fortunate one. There is nothing inconsistent with the idea of a serial killer with an engaging personality, and narcissists are famous for them. If we did have inner beauty or nobility, our personality may conceal it like a mask, just as it could mask a cold or black heart. As a consequence, it has much less to do with who we are than does the concept of character.

Though the central interest in character has been ethical, we can see its application readily enough in the pursuit of almost any undertaking that requires some sort of dedication. High performance athletes, for instance, display qualities that we clearly identify as qualities of character, and they display resistance to vices that might hold them back. All that getting up early on cold mornings, the long hours of training, the strict diets, the no-gain-without-pain, the demanding inner-game. Coaches and athletes work hard together to cultivate the routines and the difficult habits.

We can see it too in the career-success industries, and the entrepreneurship gurus. Again, it is the inner life and the seven (or however-many) habits of success. To be successful, you need to build the character that success requires. It is important to note, though, that as we move away from morality and into more narrowly defined pursuits, the ethical is only present to the extent that the specific purpose is ethical, or the pursuit undertaken with an ethical intent.

Winning, for some athletes, is more important than the rules and ethics of the game, and this will prioritise the skills and habits involved in not-getting-caught. The virtues of winning-at-all-costs may not be the virtues of good moral character, of course. Getting the sale, in some commercial enterprises, may be more important than getting it with ethical integrity, and these enterprises will have their outstanding sales-people. Soldiers for the mob, and mob leaders, will have virtues (and character) to suit. They will display the character of good and effective mobsters. These forms of character will mesh deeply into the relevant outlooks on life. Virtuous action will be defined by purpose.

All undertakings with any level of difficulty have virtues and vices associated with their performance; qualities of mind that are important to their effectiveness, such as habits and disciplines, passions and commitments, features of will and determination; and in character, we have a unity of purpose with the discipline to realize it in action. The idea of “character” can help us to maintain that unity among the outlook on life, the purposes and the practices of the “how” of planning, and the “what” of specific plans and their implementations.

But what happens when different undertakings involve different and conflicting virtues and vices; when a virtue in one becomes a vice in another? One answer might be to keep the two parts of our lives quite separate. Perhaps we are quite a different person when we are on the job from the person we are at home. Resolving these worlds can, however, call for quite convoluted solutions, often involving hypocrisies and forms of self-deception. We live divided, or our character lacks stability.

And this is probably why we tend to think of “character” in ethical terms. The ethical seems to trump the rest. There is more to life than a job, or a sport. What sort of person we ought to make of ourselves is a more important question – and task – than what sort of lawyer or engineer or entrepreneur, or sports-person.

Aristotle offered us the idea of an “architectonic art”, an art above all the others, that rules, orders and organises them, having a priority over them. Architecture, for instance, creates rules for the plumbing.  He considered “justice” to be the ultimate architectonic art, and would have embraced both self-respect and respect for others as aspects of justice.

In our context, I think it is clear that the art of “Respecting all persons equally” is the prime example of an architectonic art, involving as it does our duty to live a worthwhile life, with this duty made active in  “growth for the sake of our further growth” and in “rational life-planning”, along with our duty to consider the value of others equally to ourselves, and in terms of their equal duty to themselves. This art is to be exercised when we consider the methodological issues and commitments of how to develop good plans, along with what to plan, as well as the forms that our social arrangements should take, and the calls we and others might make on them.

“Respecting all persons equally” involves, of course, the virtues that we normally consider to be a part of being moral; of things like honesty and generosity and good-will; of justice, decency, compassion and moral courage. But respect also requires knowledge of other people, and of the consequence of taking action and implementing policies. It involves learning from others, that we might respect them better, but also for our own sakes, that we might better understand our own good. It calls on intellectual virtues – of a commitment to truth, of a willingness to doubt, of seeking to challenge one’s cherished convictions, of a preparedness to listen and change one’s mind, of intellectual persistence, of a sensitivity to good reasons, and of the search for greater skill, better intellectual method, and an appreciation for human development and intellectual history.

If we comprehensively survey the qualities involved in being committed to living a worthwhile life; the qualities involved in seeking and realizing one; as well as what is involved in respecting others; we will, inevitably, come up with a list of appropriate virtues, and we will be able to detail the vices that will defeat these undertakings. In this way we should be able to unpack the concept of character that we need for our life-planning to be undertaken in the spirit of justice.

“Respecting all persons equally”, understood in this way, is the ultimate architectonic art for human beings, spanning as it does both justice and self-respect, and reconciled to our human nature by education, since it is only through learning that these things can even be intelligible in human beings. Human learning is the only reason we get to speak of “character” at all.

“Respect” is the one ring to rule them all, to which all other activities and undertakings must conform and be consistent. It is the one ring to bind them all, and make them fully human.

Summary

The general parameters within which our good lives must be constructed

1.      The sliding doors effect

2.      The concept of educational or developmental time

3.      The changing developmental circumstances of the life-span

4.      The Aristotelian principle and its companion effect

5.      Our native endowment

6.      The cultural conditions in which we find ourselves

7.      (Yet to come in Chapter 17) The developmental or indoctrinatory “loop”

The ethical structure that can enable us

to build worthwhile lives for ourselves in our own best way

1.      The treasure of opportunity, possibility and the tools of enquiry and decision that we are able to achieve and test, through growth for the sake of larger growth, from the limitations of our context of origin and subsequent experience, more or less controlled

2.      Time-preference

3.      Regret

4.      The self-conscious development and management of our “outlook on life”, and particularly the way it addresses our cultural circumstances

5.      The cultivation of the virtues of character that enable the pursuit of understanding of a worthwhile life of one’s own, and its realization.

6.      The management of the sliding doors effect, educational or developmental time, the “loop” and the growth of experience

7.      The exploration, management, and cultivation of interest, enthusiasm, passion and commitment as the bases for actual plans.

8.      The development of the “how” of planning

9.      The development of the specific plans for a worthwhile life and their implementation.

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Dewey, John. Experience and Education. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2008.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1971.