Morten Kringelbach delivered a lecture that I was able to virtually attend. Sadly I missed the first twenty minutes as I was having a eudaimonistic experience in the fields: I saw a murmuration of starlings. It was a small murmuration, but I could have watched it for hours. They were close above me in two groups which then came together in this vortex of synchronised activity before separating again,
It made me want to map it in a 3D computer programme and run it through matching software to see what human inventions or discoveries show the same or similar patterns of movement. Of course, I can't do that.
Anyway, the lecture. Morten, who seems terribly nice, is researching pleasure - you can find our more here. He's a psychologist and neuroscientist and all the philosophers were asking about the difference between hedonia and eudaimonia - in the brain. They know the 'pleasure' (hedonia) circuits, it seems, but have not been able to make a correlation with eudaimonia and specific networks.
I asked if he thought that a change in the relationship with self might be relevant. In pleasure it's my pleasure and what I feel, but in eudaimonia, it seems to me, there is either an absence of self or the self is so perfectly aligned with the process (like flow or inspiration) that it is not being tiresomely self-referential. He seemed interested in this.
The more I think of it, the more it seems right. Like Iris Murdoch's unselfing through wonder, awe, aesthetic pleasure - which acts as a turning toward the ethical. Meaning, it seems to me, is when the self is harmoniously aligned with experience in a way that confers not survival value (as with pleasure), but transcendence value. Going beyond the immediate needs of the organism.
Humans can afford to do that through outsourcing metabolic costs to the environment. We use fire and clothes to keep warm; cooked and processed food to make digestion easier; co-operation to lessen the burden on individuals and so much more in the modern world.
What I see as damaging this process - which I think has become fundamental to our well-being (as, ultimately, transcendence probably is instrumental in survival through enhancing the likelihood of inventions and creativity... and perhaps ethical behaviour) - is autonomy and individualism. We can't get out of the self-referential loops.
To allow ourselves to be driven - or led - by the force of inspiration, vocation, a calling, seems unfitting in a rationalistic, technological and highly individualistic society. Where autonomy is the highest value, we are unwilling to accept that ideas form themselves, that meaning is drawn into our lives through something like a gravitational pull, that inspiration is outside conscious control.
We want to be in charge - and in eudaimonia we are not. Ha! The word actually comes from a concept like that - the daimon is the spirit. Lose the spirit, lose the meaning.
But spirit needn't be New Age or religious, no. It's the undercurrent of all that we are not conscious of in our psyches and in our experiences being allowed to invest our lives with brilliance.
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