A Note To A Friend On Individual Enlargement And Individual Flourishing

 R:

I suppose some people need to develop high order talents in order to flourish, not raise a family and earn a decent living.   Thus a talented pianist whose hands make it impossible to play well is unable to flourish, and suffers because of that.  But humanistic learning if often touted as necessary to proper flourishing and that I don't believe.  Maybe it's just that humanistic hype that I don't like.  It gives many people a false sense of their size.  

Me:

Which celebrity is the most middling thinker?

Bette Midler.

Anyway, let me, another middler or less in thought, try to do a bit of middling, if that, thinking.

Let’s distinguish between enlargement—or choose your own expanding-in-space metaphor— and flourishing. A person can be enlarged but be short of flourishing. It means—merging a few online definitions and marrying connotation to denotation—being beneficently successful in fulfilling inner gifts. 

So, on that, I quarrel with any notion of self destructive sacrifice to achieve success as a form of flourishing. Flourishing doesn’t entail those sacrifices though it certainly can depend on sacrifice and certain life choices. Whoever sacrifices destructively with much success but says that “It wasn’t worth it,” hasn’t flourished. In fact, the test for sacrifice, which isn’t in any thick sense a necessary condition of flourishing, is the question after success of, “Was it worth it?”

To have experienced, engaged and been compelled by say art—or other things too, but art is a unique category in this, almost a template for it—is expanding of one. But one can be a miserable jerk, feel moved and enlightened by say Measure For Measure and then then still be a miserable jerk but better in his misery for the experience. It’s a paradox but a miserable jerk can be enlarged. 

I more see humanistic learning in this category of personal expansiveness as distinct from flourishing. I reject the proposition that such learning is essential to flourishing. 

Another paradox occurs to me but only tentatively: one may flourish without enlargement. Flourishing is highly individualized and subjective. Bricklayers, plumbers, poets and uncountable others can all flourish in respect of their gifts which need not entail the widening of intellectual or affective consciousness. But enlargement, the expansion of one—again not morally or rendering anyone superior to anyone else—I think can be seen in people objectively. 

I start as X and through what I engage with, experience and am compelled by, I become, as compared to whom I was, X+. And I may or may not have flourished in that.