It may seem strange to look to modern psychology for support of classical education. After all, it’s the vagaries of modern thought that have got us into this educational trouble in the first place. The abandonment of tradition, the scientism and revolutionary overhaul of religion have all taken their toll on the proper training of our children.
However, there’s always a diamond in the rough, a silver lining to every “sable cloud”. I recently found such a rare jewel in the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Besides being one of the best written books I’ve read, Csikszentmihalyi’s thesis seems to confirm so many insights of the great philosopher Aristotle.
Future installments: Part 2: The Joy of Memory, Part 3: Narration as Flow, Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games, Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.
By this point I probably shouldn’t be surprised, given that I’ve already analyzed how the roots of the growth mindset lay in an Aristotelian view of virtue or excellence, along with more recently noting how the importance of habits for moral excellence mirrors the findings of neuroscience.
In Flow Csikszentmihalyi argues that happiness or optimal experience, as self-reported by people in numerous social-scientific studies, does not come where they or we often think it does, in unstructured leisure time. In fact, TV watching, for instance, is correlated with mild depression! Instead, the best experiences of a person’s life occur when in a state of flow, where the person is engaged in a challenging activity that has clear goals and feedback, requires ever more skill and therefore total concentration, such that he is swept into an almost timeless state of loss of self-consciousness (Harper Modern Classics ed.; 49-66).
The happy life, then, is a life full of the sort of activities that order consciousness optimally and crowd out what Csikszentmihalyi calls “psychic entropy” (36-39), which is when our consciousness is filled with the disorder of negative emotions, like anxiety, boredom, pain, fear, or rage. Throughout the book he discusses how to order one’s consciousness to achieve flow through the body (sports, dance, sex, music, tasting), through work and career at all levels of the social strata, through times of solitude and with other people, and even in the chaos of tragedy. In this way, his book is a life treatise on attaining happiness or meaning through flow, with many natural connections to Aristotle’s discussions of eudaimonia (happiness/blessedness) and excellence or virtue.
But the chapter that I found most exciting was entitled “The Flow of Thought,” in which were contained more reasons for a classical education per page than many of the best classical education books out there. So for this reason, I’m going to unpack his chapter on the flow of thought in a series of blog posts, setting Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas in dialogue with Aristotle, Charlotte Mason and other classical education thinkers. I think we’ll find much of value to bolster our convictions from this unlikely source in modern positive psychology.
Lacking the Flow of Thought: The Natural Disorder of Consciousness
Our psychologist starts off the chapter with a stunningly obvious and yet profound truth:
“Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without training, and without an object in the external world that demands attention, people are unable to focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time.” (Csikszentmihalyi 119)
The disorder of our minds, the waywardness of our fleeting thoughts, is, of course, something we all experience. But we are perhaps not aware enough of how we much we rely on external stimuli for relief. The pain of “psychic entropy” is significant, and escaping it drives us into all manner of entertainment and timewasters.
We’ve all heard the statistics on shortening attention spans, though apparently Gen Z is the first to sink below the level of a goldfish (clocking in at 8 sec. compared to the goldfish’s 9). But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised with attention grabbers more readily available than ever before. One of the quaint features of our psychologist’s tour de force is his attack on TV. As he states:
“Compared to other sources of stimulation—like reading, talking to other people, or working on a hobby—TV can provide continuous and easily accessible information that will structure the viewer’s attention, at a very low cost in terms of the psychic energy that needs to be invested. While people watch television, they need not fear that their drifting minds will force them to face disturbing personal problems.” (Csikszentmihalyi 119)
This analysis of why we give in to easy sources of entertainment rather than productive thought, relationships or hobbies could easily be updated to include more recent addictions to social media, click bait or silly YouTube videos. The reason we are seeking escape is the “disturbing personal problems” in our lives that we should be doing something about. If our minds were left to their wandering, these personal problems would quickly rise to the surface of our consciousness and fill our attention with fear, dread and pain.
But this isn’t just a challenge when we’ve neglected the moral demands of our lives, such that personal problems cloud around us; Csikszentmihalyi explains:
“Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or longterm frustrations. Entropy is the normal state of consciousness—a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.” (Csikszentmihalyi 119)
In other words, our minds are naturally in a state of chaos. They are attracted to problems and pain, which is good if we can do something about them, but we can’t always. And our minds are even inclined to make up problems, imagining them where none exist. It’s a useful skill that we have—to be able to plan and anticipate all sorts of problems—but the imaginative faculty is liable to getting out of whack.
From a Christian perspective we might think of the effects of the Fall on our hearts and minds. It’s no coincidence that a few chapters after Genesis 3, the text says: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (6:5 ESV). Perhaps this continual evil of our minds speaks to the disorder of consciousness that our psychologist discovered in his research.
Our psychologist has a lot of compassion for reliance on TV or any other external stimulus to relieve the pain of this natural state, but his warnings are still dire: “once one develops this strategy for overcoming psychic entropy, to give up the habit becomes almost impossible” (Csikszentmihalyi 120). The logic is that of a crutch. The more you use it the weaker your limb becomes. The weaker your limb becomes, the more dependent you are on using it. So goes our ability to focus our minds internally.
The internal flow of thought is, accordingly, a “better route for avoiding chaos in consciousness” because it comes “through habits that give control over mental processes to the individual, rather than to some external source of stimulation, such as the programs of network TV” (Csikszentmihalyi 120). This leads our psychologist to recommend the type of life of learning and educational leisure pursuits that the classical tradition has championed. He begins with training in memory, symbol systems, writing, history, science and philosophy, ending with reflections on being an amateur and the challenge of lifelong learning.
The training of the mind through the classical liberal arts and sciences is thus the antidote to the natural disorder of the mind.
Aside: Download the Free eBook “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom”
Wondering how to practically apply the idea of flow in your classroom? These 5 actionable steps will help you keep the insights of flow from being a pie-in-the-sky idea. Embody flow in your classroom and witness the increased joy and skill development that result!
You can download “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom” on the flow page. Share the page with a friend or colleague, so they can benefit as well.
Aristotle on Happiness as the Goal of Education
Our psychologist’s reasoning for why training the attention internally is better mimics Aristotle’s famous privileging of the theoretic life. The happiness of TV watching is not really a very exalted state. I already mentioned above Csikszentmihalyi’s finding that it’s correlated with mild depression. Relying on external stimuli to order consciousness is more like temporarily holding unhappiness at bay. As if the great flood waters of mental chaos are briefly halted by an unstable dam, so external attention grabbers simply stave off the inevitable.
Instead, training the mind in the liberal arts and sciences, even or especially in leisure time, is the surer route to happiness. This is because challenging leisure activities are actually the most rewarding and enjoyable. As our psychologist explains,
“To enjoy a mental activity, one must meet the same conditions that make physical activities enjoyable. There must be skill in a symbolic domain; there have to be rules, a goal, and a way of obtaining feedback. One must be able to concentrate and interact with the opportunities at a level commensurate with one’s skills.” (Csikszentmihalyi 118-119)
The liberal arts and sciences meet these conditions whereas TV does not. And they meet them in the highest way because they don’t require the vagaries of fortune.
David Hicks describes Aristotle’s views on happiness and education in his Norms and Nobility:
“According to Aristotle, the perfect end of education will be an activity that is engaged in for its own sake, complete and sufficient unto itself. Aristotle calls the activity for which education prepared man – happiness. So far, all might agree. But as to the nature of happiness, the opinion of mankind is divided. Many believe that happiness attends the life of pleasure; others credit the practical life with producing happiness; but the wise – Aristotle has no doubt – find it in the theoretic life, as the true end of education.” (Hicks 20)
Happiness, for Aristotle, is the ultimate human good and therefore is the ultimate goal of education, just as of everything else. Of course, he doesn’t mean by happiness the type of flippant pleasure dependent on circumstances that we tend to think of. That would be simply the feeling of pleasure and could be experienced temporarily while doing any pleasing activity, even if the chaos of disorder and mental evil is simply being held at bay.
In fact, eudaimonia might better be translated as “blessedness,” “fulfillment” or “human flourishing.” It is found in the life of virtue or excellence, meaning not only moral rectitude, but an active excellence of using one’s human powers to the best of one’s ability. It is in this context that Aristotle advocates for the theoretic life, or life of the mind, as the best method for attaining happiness. As Hicks goes on,
“Aristotle defends the theoretic life as the true end of education and the source of happiness. One does not require more than the bare necessities of life to achieve happiness in thought, nor is the active life of the mind dependent upon the inherently unequal endowments of nature. One need be neither strong nor handsome, well-born nor gregarious, nay, not even brilliant to participate happily in the theoretic life. The theoretic life completes the individual, holding him against the warmth of the divine spark in his nature and making sense of an existence otherwise consumed by the infinite wishing of one thing for the sake of another. Indeed, the theoretic life is the life of virtue, so long as we mean by virtue all that the Greek arete expresses: the life that knows and reveres, speculates and acts upon the Good, that loves and re-produces the Beautiful, and that pursues excellence and moderation in all things.” (21)
Training the attention through the liberal arts and sciences is thus the path to fulfillment in life. We might think of it as a sort of gateway on the road to bliss. Virtue, moderation, and meaning are companions along the way, but it starts with training the consciousness through the flow of thought.
A Christian analogy to this idea is the claim that wisdom is more valuable than any earthly good:
Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding, for the gain from her is better than gain from silver and her profit better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed. (Prov 3:13-18 ESV)
Wisdom is this tree of life bringing peace to our chaotic minds and ultimate blessing to our lives.
New Book! The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow Through Classical Education
Enjoying this series? Jason Barney revised and expanded it into a full-length book that you can buy on Amazon. Complete with footnotes and in an easy-to-share format for teacher training or to keep in your personal library, the book aims to help you apply the concept of flow in your classical classroom.
Make sure to share about the book on social media and review it on Amazon!
Future installments: Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.