Transcending Positive Psychology

Part 3, Teleology and Life Before the Fact/Value Split

So, if we are living after the fact/value split what used to glue facts together with values?

Much of this story is told in Alasdair MacIntyre's seminal book After Virtue. MacIntyre's work is not without its critics, but it's difficult to overstate just how influential After Virtue has been. For my part, After Virtue is at its most powerful and persuasive in its analysis of the Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue traditions, and how we have lost much of that ancient framework. This is relevant for our conversation about how positive psychology handles the virtues, why I called them "zombie virtues."

As I described in the first post, Aristotle called the goal of life eudaimonia, the "good life." Necessary for achieving eudaimonia is arete, "excellences" and "virtues" in living. Virtues for us have a moral connotation, but for the Greeks virtue was as much aesthetic as moral. Living well was like playing an instrument well. Life involved skill. Life was performance. Life was art. Consequently, to achieve the good life you had to be and become a certain kind of person, an "excellent" and "virtuous" person.

The metaphor about playing an instrument is apt because it implies a teleological approach toward life, and this teleological framework is what kept values and facts connected.

Again, as I described in the last post, after the fact/value split we cannot extract value judgments from factual descriptions. But within a teleological framework we can. Specifically, if we know what something is "for"--its telos, purpose, or goal--we can determine through observation if something is "good."

Let's go back to the musical instrument. If I hand you a broken guitar and ask you the question "Is this a good guitar?" your answer would be, "No, it's not. It's broken." Notice how a value judgment--"This is not good"--flows out of an observation about the guitar being broken. A value judgement is flowing from a factual observation. Precisely what I said yesterday could not be done!

So what's the difference? The answer is teleology. If you know what something is for you can determine if something is good.

The ancient world operated within this teleological framework. Aristotelian science was teleological. Everything in the world moved toward its telos, its final goal and ultimate purpose. The telos of an acorn is to become a tree. The telos of a guitar is to play music. And the telos of human life was eudaimonia.

With the advent of the Scientific Revolution science pivoted away from Aristotle. Teleology was replaced by causality. Where teleology looked forward in time toward ultimate goals, causality looked backward in time to trace chains of prior cause and effect. When this shift occurred, the fact/value split was introduced. In denying ultimate goals and purposes, in eschewing teleology, science could no longer say what human life was "for." And without teleology factual descriptions could no longer inform value judgments. The fact/value rift was introduced, along with all the consequences I described in the last post.

This loss of the teleloogical worldview is why Alasdair MacIntyre describes the modern world as living "after virtue." The ancient virtue traditions--Greek and Christian, along with all the other ancient virtue traditions--presumed teleology. Human life had a telos, and that telos allowed us to determine if we were living well or not. Living excellently, virtuously, skillfully, and artfully was moving toward our telos. Fail to move toward that telos and your life was impoverished, even broken, like a busted guitar.

Today, without a teleological vision of life, we lack the capacity to ask and answer questions about the quality of our lives. Am I living well? Who can say? If I don't know what life is for how can I make a value judgment? My life might be a guitar or it might be shovel. So if you see me in the backyard trying to dig a hole with my guitar, who are you to tap me on the shoulder to say I'm misusing my life? If you can't say what my life is for you can't make evaluative judgments about how I'm using or misusing my life. We're living after virtue, after the fact/value split, after teleology.

And this, finally, is why I called the virtues of positive psychology "zombie virtues." As an empirical science positive psychology is committed to the fact/value split. That is to say, positive psychology, as a descriptive project, cannot speak to normative values. Phrased differently, positive psychology is silent when it comes to teleology. Positive psychology cannot tell you what life is for, if anything. And yet, positive psychology presumes to grab ahold of the virtues from the ancient virtue traditions and import them into modern therapeutic contexts. But the virtues, as we have seen, are teleological. Virtues are directed toward a telos. Positive psychology is attempting to transplant teleological plants in non-teleological soil. Positive psychology is preaching virtue in a world living after virtue.

This is why I've described the virtues of positive psychology as "zombie virtues." Positive psychology has grabbed ahold of the virtues but jettisoned their teleological context, the purposes that animated them and gave them life. Without teleology, the virtues become zombies, lifeless and directionless.

In the next post, I'll describe what some of this looks like close up.