Thriving and flourishing

Anyone interested in the mind’s involvement in health confronts the difficulty of making two vocabularies connect to each other. What is at stake is a relationship between thriving as a mammalian body and flourishing as a human being. While it is less controversial to think that a failure to thrive bodily may impact on one’s ability to flourish personally, our sense of this impact has changed as it has become less determined through the past century that a physical handicap will necessary force you to limit your life plans. Where 4000 athletes participated in the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens, it would have been unthinkable in the Athens of 1896.

But we are interested in an impact which runs the other way, a failure to flourish bringing about a failure to thrive. Now, anyone writing about such phenomena must have a conception of what it is for a human to flourish, and this necessarily relates to their political and ethical beliefs. For instance, we might claim that we cannot flourish if made to work an 80 hour week as insufficient leisure time would remain to allow us to live fully as people. But the drive to make the psychological end of the matter ‘scientific’, which includes a movement to free vocabulary from value judgements about what the Greeks called ‘eudaimonia’, the good life, attempts to avoid this difficulty. It must fail. Generally it achieves its conjuring trick by implicit reliance on the everyday ethics and politics of the kind of late capitalist, Western liberal democracy in which it takes place.

We are used to our qualities being scored in various ways - our credit rating, our attractiveness to the immigration services of another country, our research achievements for Higher Education’s Research Assessment Exercise. Unsurprisingly, then, a large part of the psychosomatic literature has looked to form a total of the number and severity of 'life events' we have faced: so many points for loss of spouse, so many for caring for dependent spouse, for loss of job, for moving house, etc. Implicitly a view is taken here that adverse events have an objectively quality in terms of their impact on our lives. We find for example that "caring for a dependent partner ages our immune system". But is this effect really independent of the ethical-political environment in which such an event occurs?

The BBC have recently broadcast Jane Eyre in 4 one hour episodes. This is not nearly enough to do justice to the book, of course. What is so clear here, and in many other cases of adaptations, is how time and again directors fail to let the past judge the present. Remaking ‘Pride and Prejudice’, we lose the Shaftsburyesque moral philosophy of Jane Austen, and instead project our contemporary 'girl power' back into the early nineteenth century. In the case of Jane Eyre, we scarcely touch upon the variety of brands of religious belief and practice prevalent in nineteenth centruy England. Only glimpses are offered of the missionary zeal of St. John Rivers, the mysticism Helen Burns imparts to the young Jane, or indeed much of Jane's own beliefs. We are not told that Jane sets herself the task of drawing herself and how she imagines Blanche Ingram to look as an exercise in correcting a moral failing she has located within herself.

To return to the topic of the adverse life events, consider this passage, which beautifully expresses a conception of the good life:

Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union: perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near-that knit us so very close! for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw nature-he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam-of the landscape before us; of the weather round us-and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of conducting him where he wished to go: of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad - because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance: he felt that I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.

What a gloriously intricate web of feelings expressed at the end. If we could aspire to these feelings in our relations to our dependents, how differently then might the ‘life event’ of caring impact on our health? For a contemporary philosophical discussion of an ethics which acknowledges our dependency on others and their dependency on us, I thoroughly recommend Alasdair MacIntyre's ‘Rational Dependent Animals’, where it is explained how, rather than seeing the provision of care for others as a burden, we should find that our good resides in it.