Transcending Positive Psychology

Part 1, The Zombie Virtues of Positive Psychology

For almost thirty years, positive psychology has devoted empirical attention to studying happiness, well-being, and flourishing. Much of this research has made its way into self-help and wellness culture. Calls to practice gratitude and mindfulness, for example, are ubiquitous. And yet, as I point out in The Shape of Joy, positive psychology is handicapped in how it treats transcendence. Consequently, positive psychology struggles to give a full and comprehensive account of human flourishing.

As I describe in The Shape of Joy, positive psychology has consistently pointed toward transcendence as integral to well-being. Research concerning meaning in life, hope, awe, cosmic gratitude, mattering, and joy are all examples, locations where making contact with a reality larger than yourself enables self-transcendence. But committed as it is to the fact/value split, positive psychology has nothing to say about transcendence, which leaves an integral aspect human flourishing persistently unaccounted for.

To provide a case study of positive psychology's limitations and failures, in this series we'll take a close look at how the movement has handled and mishandled the virtues.

Right at the start of the movement, positive psychology's investigations into the sources of well-being led to a recognition and recovery of the ancient virtue traditions. Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia (literally, eu = "good" + daimonia = "spirit") which is variously translated as "the good life," "happiness," "well-being," "flourishing," and "living well." Critical to achieving eudaimonia was arete, the virtues. If eudaimonia was the target, arete provided the arrows. The key to achieving the good life was cultivating virtues.

Hoping to recover this ancient insight, positive psychology embraced the virtues. One of the first products of the movement was the publication of Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman. Accompanying the book was the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths, which assessed the 24 Character Strengths identified by Peterson and Seligman. These strengths fell under six virtues, cross-culturally culled from Western and Eastern virtue traditions: Wisdom and Knowledge, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence:

From here, positive psychology began to assess and treat the virtues and character strengths in a trait-like and atomistic way. That is, you take a test to identify your signature virtues and strengths. Having identified these signature strengths, you're encouraged to integrate them into daily life. If one of your virtues is Humanity you might invest more in caring for others, like volunteering in your community. If your virtue is Justice you might become more intentional in your workplace in speaking up about inequities. If Wisdom, you might start taking some classes to satisfy your love of learning. And so forth.

Stepping back, this is what virtue looks like hands of positive psychologists, a natural endowment you lean into to cultivate a happier life. This is virtue after the fact/value split. Virtues are tools in a self-help regimen, a means to achieve your best life now.

We are, here, a long, long way from Aristotle and the ancient virtue traditions. In appropriating the virtue traditions positive psychologists have failed to appreciate the worldview that made those traditions coherent. This is, as I describe in The Shape of Joy, a prime example of positive psychology's inability to account for transcendence. The virtue traditions were articulations of a metaphysical worldview that integrated fact and value. By pulling the virtues out of their native metaphysical context, positive psychology has rendered them incoherent. Simply put, the virtues of positive psychology are zombies. Shuffling corpses that have lost touch with the life that once animated them.

Telling the story of how that happened is the object of this series.