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By Root 316 0

is what dolphins do. It is worth noting in passing how Aristotle’s biology reverses the contemporary Darwinian view. For the neo-Darwinian, the frolicking of the dolphin is assumed to have some survival value, either for the preservation of the individual or for the passing on of its genes. I suspect that if you were to ask a dolphin about this, he would say it is backward: he lives in order to frolic, he doesn’t frolic in order to live. This is the Aristotelian view, precisely. Such activities are experienced as intrinsically good. They contain their end within themselves; they enact that end, in “real time,” as we now say.

The mucking of the pig and the frolicking of the dolphin would seem to be leisure activities. Yet many animals do things that look a lot like work, changing nature’s forms to make them useful. The bird builds its nest, the spider its web. Some even use rudimentary tools—for example, an otter may use a rock to smash open abalone, or a chimpanzee a stick to retrieve termites. Thomas Hobbes suggested the human difference lies in the fact that animals begin with a desired effect and discover a sufficing instrument, whereas we are capable of viewing everything as a potential instrument and imagining all the effects to which it could potentially give rise, corresponding to wildly different ends. For humans, tools point to the necessity of moral inquiry. Because nature makes only ambiguous prescriptions for us, we are compelled to ask, what is good? If you give a young boy a hammer for the first time and watch his face, you will see an awareness of this burden dawning on him (as he turns to the cat, for example).

So there is an aspect of inquiry that hovers about our practical activities, which may or may not be brought to full awareness and issue in careful reflection. Following Aristotle, Brewer connects this aspect of inquiry to our experience of pleasure, the kind we get when we become absorbed in what we are doing (like Comaneci on the balance beam). He writes that there is an “appreciative discernment of value that accompanies and carries forward intrinsically valuable activities,” and that it is this evaluative attention that renders the activity pleasurable. “[T]o take pleasure in an activity is to engage in that activity while being absorbed in it, where this absorption consists in single-minded and lively attention to whatever it is that seems to make the activity good or worth pursuing. . . . If one were struck only by the instrumental value of the activity . . . one’s evaluative attention would be directed not at the activity but at its expected results—that is, at something other than what one is doing. This sort of attention . . . absents us from our activity and renders it burdensome.”7

There is a classic psychology experiment that seems to confirm Brewer’s point. Children who enjoy drawing were given marker pens and allowed to go at it. Some were rewarded for drawing (they were given a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon, and told ahead of time about this arrangement), whereas for others the issue of rewards was never raised. Weeks later, those who had been rewarded took less interest in drawing, and their drawings were judged to be lower in quality, whereas those who had not been rewarded continued to enjoy the activity and produced higher-quality drawings. The hypothesis is that the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward, and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it.8 That is, an external reward can affect one’s interpretation of one’s own motivation, an interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling. A similar effect may account for the familiar fact that when someone turns his hobby into a business, he often loses pleasure in it. Likewise, the intellectual who pursues an academic career gets professional ized, and this may lead him to stop thinking.

This line of reasoning suggests that the kind of appreciative attention where one remains focused on what one is doing can arise only in leisure