Three verbs instead of three nouns
Philosophy has an old triad: truth, goodness, beauty. In Chinese it is 真善美 (zhēn shàn měi), and Kant gave each of the three a book: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). The last lectures behind this course propose something different, and this course adopts it as its own reading: the heart of a good life is not three kinds of knowledge but three verbs. To live (生, shēng, which also means to give birth, to grow, to be alive), to love (爱, ài), and to enjoy (乐, lè).
The reason is the one Lesson 3 ended on. Knowing about something can come after doing it, and sometimes it comes instead of doing it. In this reading, a good life has little to do with money or fame, and not much with learning either. It has to do with whether three verbs are working in you. Everything in this lesson that is not dated or attributed is that reading, offered as a view to weigh and not as a result, and the last section sets the objections beside it.
Life first
The Book of Changes has a commentary called the Xici, and one line of it says 生生之谓易 (shēngshēng zhī wèi yì). James Legge, whose 1882 translation is in the public domain, renders it: “Production and reproduction is what is called (the process of) change.” The Tang scholar Kong Yingda (574–648) glossed the first two characters as an unceasing word: each new birth follows the one before, so that things are always being born.
A question follows. Why “producing and producing” and not 灭灭, “destroying and destroying”? Destruction is change too. One answer is logical, and this course offers it as its own: a world that only destroyed would run out of things to destroy and stop, so destroying cannot go on forever, while making can. The lectures behind this course credit the argument to an old exchange between a Han scholar and a Tang scholar. We could not find that exchange in any text we checked, so we give the argument without the pedigree.
It is a neat counterweight to Sigmund Freud, who proposed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) that people are driven by a life drive and a death drive, on a footing that is at least roughly equal. (The word “Thanatos,” often used for the second, is not Freud’s. Wilhelm Stekel used it in 1909, and Paul Federn later applied it to Freud’s idea.) On the reading offered here, the two are not equals: making can run without end, and unmaking cannot.
Being alive is not the same as being active. About half a metre high and some two thousand years old, a clay figure sits in the National Museum of China in Beijing. It was dug out in 1957 from an Eastern Han tomb at Tianhuishan, near Chengdu. A storyteller or drummer, he has a cloth tied round his head, bare chest and belly, one shoulder hunched, a small drum hugged under his left arm, a drumstick raised in his right hand, and one leg kicked up. His head is thrown back in a laugh that fills the whole face. He is not athletic. He is alive. Figures like him were made for tombs, to keep the dead company, as burial figures generally were.
Chinese painting has a name for what the clay man has. Xie He, a critic of the sixth century, listed six criteria for judging a painting in his Gu hua pin lu (“Record of the classification of old paintings”) and put 气韵生动 first: roughly, a spirit that resonates and a life that moves. In this course’s reading, shengdong (生动, “lifelike,” “lively”) is a person’s or a thing’s inner life showing through its form, and it can be there in a figure that is perfectly still. Nothing in the museum record calls the Tianhuishan storyteller an example of qiyun. That link is the course’s own, drawn by looking at him.
What feeds that inner life? The lectures say first the body, and then a state of mind, and they lean on the old Chinese idea, and a modern one, that body and mind act on each other. The evidence is real and has to be kept small. In the Nun Study (Danner, Snowdon, and Friesen, 2001), the handwritten autobiographies of 180 Catholic sisters, written at an average age of 22, were scored for positive emotion. Decades later the sisters in the top quarter had a markedly lower risk of death, a difference of about two and a half times between the top and bottom quarters, at ages 75 to 95. In 2019 a team led by Lewina Lee and Laura Kubzansky reported that in two large American cohorts, women from the Nurses’ Health Study and men from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study, the most optimistic quarter lived nearly 15 percent longer, in the women’s case, than the least optimistic, and had 1.5 to 1.7 times the odds of reaching 85. Both are observational studies. Cheerful people may also simply have been healthier to begin with, and the research cannot yet say how much is cause and how much is who was already well. Popular claims have fared worse: the “positivity ratio” of 2.9013 to 1 that Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada published in 2005 was shown in 2013 to rest on mathematical errors, and its mathematics was formally withdrawn. Mencius’s “flood-like qi” (浩然之气, hàorán zhī qì) belongs to another kind of claim altogether. It is a moral courage, nourished by doing right again and again, and not a medical one.
Love before hate
Mencius (about 372–289 BC) rests his case that people are born good on one picture. Suppose someone suddenly sees a small child about to fall into a well. Legge’s English (1861, public domain): “they will without exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress.” It is not, Mencius says, to win favor with the child’s parents, nor to be praised by neighbors and friends, nor out of dislike of something. The last motive is read two ways. Legge, following the medieval commentator Zhu Xi, took the Chinese word 声 to mean “reputation.” Many modern translators take it as “the child’s cry.” Either way, the passage says the feeling comes first, and calculation, if it comes, comes after. In this course’s reading, that quick, unplanned response is what the verb love is built on.
The lectures add an argument from outcomes. Hate points outward but lands inward: the one who grits his teeth bites only his own. Love also points outward and, in the same way, warms the one who loves. The evidence for the first half is modest but real. A 2009 meta-analysis by Yoichi Chida and Andrew Steptoe pooled 25 prospective studies of healthy people and found that anger and hostility were linked to a risk of coronary heart disease about a fifth higher (a hazard ratio of 1.19), and in 19 studies of people who already had heart disease the figure was a little higher (1.24). It is a correlation, and hostile people also tend to smoke and eat worse. It is not evidence for a slogan.
A famous saying says that holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal to throw at someone, and it is often credited to the Buddha. What does the record show?
The lectures name two directions of love, and the pair is old. One loves what is better than oneself, and so is drawn upward. This is the love in Plato’s Symposium, where the priestess Diotima describes love as desire for what one lacks, a ladder that climbs from one beautiful body to beauty itself. The Swedish theologian Anders Nygren drew the contrast in Agape and Eros (1930–36): eros reaches for what is valuable, while agape gives to what is not. The other direction loves what is less than oneself, and the lectures point to the bodhisattva who stays in the world instead of leaving it. One correction on the example. The bodhisattva traditionally remembered for refusing buddhahood until hell is emptied is Dizang (地藏, Ksitigarbha), and the four-character slogan for it is a tradition’s summary, not a line in his sutra. Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, has different and later legends.
The lectures’ claim, in this course’s reading, is that loving the lesser is not charity from above. Someone surrounded only by people below them stops growing, and someone who lifts the people around them is lifted in turn. That is a claim about how people grow in company, and not a research result. It also gives no one a reason to love a person only as an investment.
Joy before worry
Fan Zhongyan (989–1052) is the author of the most-quoted line about worry in Chinese. In the “Record of Yueyang Tower” (岳阳楼记, 1046) he says that the good official is the one who is “first to worry before all under heaven, last to rejoice after them” (先天下之忧而忧，后天下之乐而乐, our rendering). Chinese sources add a detail that surprises many readers: he wrote it as a demoted official, in a kind of exile, at Dengzhou in Henan, asked by his friend Teng Zijing, who had rebuilt the tower, and he worked from a painting of Lake Dongting that Teng sent. He is said never to have climbed the tower.
The lectures turn the line against itself. If the rule is to worry first and rejoice later, when does “later” come? A parent says to study hard for a good school; at the good school, to study hard for a good university; then a good job, a good spouse, good children, and then the grandchildren. Each “then” is a tomorrow that turns into a today, with the next tomorrow behind it. Joy is postponed without end. The way out is to rejoice now: not that conditions have been met, but because this is the day that exists. This is a fair use of Fan’s line only in part, and the “Another view” below says why.
The tomorrow that never comes
Follow a plan that says you may be happy as soon as you arrive. See where it leads, then look at what was already in the day.
A Chan (Zen) master gives the lectures their answer. Yunmen Wenyan (died 949) taught on Mount Yunmen in what is now Guangdong. In case 6 of the Blue Cliff Record, the book of one hundred cases that Yuanwu Keqin compiled and commented on about 1125, Yunmen says to his monks that he does not ask about before the fifteenth day, so say a word about after it. Then he answers himself: 日日是好日, “every day is a good day.” The fifteenth day is the full moon, the midpoint of the month. In this course’s reading, he is telling them to stop sorting days into before and after, and into the ones that count and the ones that lead to them. Each day is the whole of a day.
Modern psychology offers a cautious echo, not a proof. Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert (2005) review a long line of experiments that find an impact bias: people overestimate how strongly, and for how long, a future event will make them feel, partly because they focus on the event and forget how soon they will adapt. Tal Ben-Shahar calls the habit of thinking that happiness waits at the next milestone the “arrival fallacy” (Happier, 2007), and the label is popular rather than technical. None of it shows that goals are pointless. It does suggest that waiting to be happy until you arrive is a bad forecast.
Henry David Thoreau, who spent two years in a cabin at Walden Pond from 1845, put the same idea in plain American prose in Walden (1854). To paint a picture or carve a statue is admirable, he writes, but it is far more glorious to carve and paint “the very atmosphere and medium through which we look,” and: “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
A safe place to practice
If a good life is made of three verbs, is there a way to train for it? The lectures answer: through art, because art is a place where each verb can be practiced without danger. A painting or a poem is a place to practice making (生), because nothing real is at stake if the first attempt fails. It is a place to practice loving, because an artwork asks for sympathy and can never be hurt, never lie, and never demand love back. The German word for this, Einfühlung, “feeling into,” entered aesthetics in the 1870s for the way people project themselves into things; English turned it into “empathy.” And it is a place to practice enjoying, in the deeper sense of finding oneself, which can be felt even in a tragedy that leaves the audience in tears.
The idea has an old Chinese form. “It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused. It is by the Rules of Propriety that the character is established. It is from Music that the finish is received,” runs Legge’s rendering of Analects 8.8 (兴于诗，立于礼，成于乐): poetry, then ritual, then music. The lectures read this as an order of education in which poetry, which seems useless, comes first, because a person who has learned to honor their own real feelings in poetry will honor them in society too. Analects 2.12 says the accomplished gentleman is not a utensil (君子不器): he is not a tool for one purpose. A school that teaches only what is useful, on this reading, makes tools. Analects 11.1, which the lectures also cite, is not read in that way by the standard commentators: it says that the men of former times were plain in ritual and music, and Confucius sides with them. We do not rely on the lectures’ reading of it.
A life as a work
Put the three verbs together and the lectures’ boldest sentence follows: a good life is one in which a person becomes a work of art. The person is no longer a product, made to a pattern, but a work: one of a kind, made by the person themselves. The idea is old and has well-known versions. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science (1882, section 290) that one thing is needful: to “give style to one’s character,” a great and rare art, practiced by those who survey the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and fit them into an artistic plan. In an interview given in Berkeley in 1983, Michel Foucault asked, “couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?” and in his last books on ancient Greece he spoke of an “aesthetics of existence.” Alexander Nehamas, in The Art of Living (1998), reads a line of philosophers from Socrates to Foucault as people who made their lives their work.
A Chinese painter did this long before the Europeans had a name for it. Wang Lü (born 1332, died after 1384) came from Kunshan in Jiangsu and was a physician as well as a painter. He climbed Mount Hua, the steep western peak of the Five Sacred Mountains, and afterward painted an album of forty leaves, with a preface, which survives and is divided between the Palace Museum in Beijing (29 leaves) and the Shanghai Museum. The Palace Museum dates it to 1383 and the Shanghai Museum to 1384. His preface says that a painting may describe form but is led by its idea, and it contains the line 吾师心，心师目，目师华山: “my teacher is my mind, my mind’s teacher is my eye, my eye’s teacher is Mount Hua.” The preface weighs three things against one another: the form of the thing itself, the form in the old paintings, and the form in the painter’s mind. The English-language study is Kathlyn Liscomb’s Learning from Mount Hua (1993). The story makes the lectures’ point in a Chinese key: a self is something a person makes by facing something.
Another painter, Shi Tao (1642–1707), said it flatly in his Sayings on Painting (about 1700): “The ancients’ beards and eyebrows cannot grow on my face” (古之须眉，不能生在我之面目), and a master has no fixed method, or rather has the method of no method (无法而法，乃为至法). A saying often credited to Qi Baishi, that to learn from me is to live and to resemble me is to die, is attributed to him by tradition, but we found no first-hand source for it.
There is a twentieth-century puzzle that fits here. In April 1964 Andy Warhol showed about 400 plywood boxes at the Stable Gallery in New York: silkscreened, painted, and built by carpenters to look exactly like the cardboard cartons that Brillo soap pads came in, whose design was by the commercial artist James Harvey. The boxes reportedly sold for a few hundred dollars each; a single one fetched more than three million at auction in 2010. The philosopher Arthur Danto saw them, and in “The Artworld” (Journal of Philosophy, October 1964) asked what made the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art that consisted of one. His answer: nothing the eye can see. Seeing it as art, he wrote, takes “something the eye cannot descry,” a knowledge of theory and of the history of art, which he called an artworld. In 1984, in an essay called “The End of Art,” he went on to argue that the story of art, in which each period tried to do what the last had not, had come to an end. He did not mean that people would stop making art. He meant that no style of making it was any longer the one that history required.
The lectures read the Warhol puzzle through a Zen saying. In the Wudeng huiyuan (1252) the master Qingyuan Weixin says that before he studied Chan, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers; when he first glimpsed the truth, mountains were no longer mountains; and at the end, mountains were mountains again. Danto himself quoted the saying in 1964 and again in 1981, though in other settings. The mapping onto the boxes below is this course’s reading, drawn from the lectures, and is not Danto’s.
Mountains, and boxes
Move through the three stages of the saying and see what each does to the boxes.
On this reading, Danto’s theory explains how an object becomes a work: a theory and a history lift it into the artworld. The third stage of the saying asks for something Danto’s theory does not: a person who no longer needs the theory to see, and who is the thing that has changed. The story of art about objects can stop, and the lectures suggest that the story about people does not. Success, on this reading, has nothing to do with winning a rank. A person who becomes their own work does not compete with other people’s, since there is no standard to compete on. This is why the lectures speak of such lives as equal and unlike. It is also the point at which an objection begins.
Another view
The idea of a life as a work of art has serious critics, among them some of the people on whom it rests. The French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) objected to Foucault’s picture of the ancient “care of the self” as too aesthetic: for the Greek and Roman schools, he argued, philosophy was an exercise in rising above the self toward a wider perspective, and Foucault’s version risked a new kind of dandyism. Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843) set a gifted aesthete, who lives for the interesting moment and ends in boredom and near-despair, against a judge who lives by commitment, as a warning that a life organized as a display is not enough. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argued in The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) that being true to oneself needs “horizons of significance” that the self did not invent: it makes no sense to say a choice is mine and important unless something outside me gives it weight. And if a life is a work, a viewer is always imagined, which is where Lesson 3’s worry returns: a curated life, performed for others, is the aestheticization of a person.
The earlier sections have their own limits. Mencius’s child at the well is an argument, not an experiment, and the experiment that seemed to confirm it, a 2012 report in Nature by David Rand, Joshua Greene, and Martin Nowak that quick choices are more cooperative, did not hold up: a registered replication across 21 labs (Bouwmeester and others, 2017) found no such effect. Xunzi, in the third century BC, held the opposite, that human nature is bad and goodness is made. Fan Zhongyan’s line concerns an official’s duty to the people, not the private pacing of joy, so turning it against itself is a clever use and not a fair reading. And we have kept the research on mind and body small on purpose.
Closer to home
For readers raised in China, nearly every example in this lesson is already in the schoolbook or the family saying: the clay storyteller of Chengdu, Fan Zhongyan’s line, Yunmen’s “every day is a good day,” and Shi Tao’s beards and eyebrows. The new thing is to read them together, as answers to one question: how does a person live a whole life without postponing it? Wang Lü, a doctor who found himself on a mountain, is the quiet example of a Chinese self made by looking.
For Chinese Americans there is a particular edge. Many grew up between two ideas of what a life is for: the one that tells a child to study hard for the next stage, and the one that says live by your own light. Maya Lin, born in Ohio in 1959 to Chinese immigrant parents, was a 21-year-old Yale undergraduate when her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was chosen from 1,421 anonymous entries in 1981. It was dedicated in 1982. A black granite wall inscribed with the names of the dead (57,939 at the time) was attacked as a “black gash,” and a figurative statue was added nearby, but the wall is what people remember. She made a work that did not look like any war memorial she could have copied.
For Americans generally, the voice is Thoreau’s, and his sentence about the quality of the day is the shortest summary of the lesson. Warhol and Dewey fit too, from opposite sides: one made the artworld’s boundary visible with a box, the other, in Art as Experience (1934), asked that the boundary be taken down.
What to keep
- This course’s reading swaps truth, goodness, and beauty for three verbs: to live, to love, to enjoy. The aim is to act before knowing, and not to delay living for the sake of knowing.
- Making comes before unmaking, love before hate, joy before worry: each is an argument, with some evidence (Mencius’s well, the studies of optimism and anger, the impact bias), and each has limits that have been named.
- “Every day is a good day” asks you to stop sorting days into the ones that count and the ones that lead to them, and Thoreau’s “quality of the day” asks the same.
- A life as a work of art is an old idea (Nietzsche, Foucault, Nehamas, Wang Lü, Shi Tao). Danto’s Brillo Box shows that the difference between an object and a work cannot be seen. The critics (Hadot, Kierkegaard, Taylor) remind us that a life made only for display is not yet a life.
Think it over
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Sources and further reading
- Zhouyi (Book of Changes), Xici zhuan I, in James Legge, trans., The Yi King (1882), Sacred Books of the East, vol. 16 (free online); Kong Yingda, Zhouyi zhengyi (Tang).
- Mencius 2A2 and 2A6, and Analects 2.12, 8.8, and 11.1, in James Legge, The Chinese Classics (1861–72; free on Wikisource), with the Chinese text on Chinese Wikisource.
- Xie He, Gu hua pin lu; William R. B. Acker, Some T’ang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting, Brill, 1954; Alexander Soper, “The First Two Laws of Hsieh Ho,” Far Eastern Quarterly 8 (1949); Paul R. Goldin, article on Xie He’s criteria, T’oung Pao 104 (2018).
- Information on the Eastern Han storyteller figurine (National Museum of China, Beijing; excavated 1957, Tianhuishan, Chengdu) from museum and press descriptions; the Sichuan Museum holds a different, standing figurine from 1963.
- Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920. Wilhelm Stekel and the word “Thanatos”: see the entry “Thanatos (psychoanalysis).”
- D. D. Danner, D. A. Snowdon, and W. V. Friesen, “Positive emotions in early life and longevity: findings from the Nun Study,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (2001): 804–813; L. O. Lee, L. D. Kubzansky, and others, “Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women,” PNAS 116 (2019): 18357–18362; S. D. Pressman and S. Cohen, “Does positive affect influence health?” Psychological Bulletin 131 (2005): 925–971; N. J. L. Brown, A. D. Sokal, and H. L. Friedman, “The complex dynamics of wishful thinking,” American Psychologist 68 (2013): 801–813.
- Y. Chida and A. Steptoe, “The association of anger and hostility with future coronary heart disease: a meta-analytic review of prospective evidence,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology 53 (2009): 936–946.
- D. G. Rand, J. D. Greene, and M. A. Nowak, “Spontaneous giving and calculated greed,” Nature 489 (2012): 427–430; the registered replication by Bouwmeester and others, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2017).
- Plato, Symposium (Diotima’s speech), trans. Benjamin Jowett (free online); Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, 1930–36.
- Fan Zhongyan, “Yueyang lou ji” (1046), Chinese text on Chinese Wikisource; Biyan lu (Blue Cliff Record), case 6; T. D. Wilson and D. T. Gilbert, “Affective forecasting: knowing what to want,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 14 (2005): 131–134; Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier, McGraw-Hill, 2007.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), chapter 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” (free on Project Gutenberg).
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), section 290; Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (1983), in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, Pantheon, 1984; Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, University of California Press, 1998.
- Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Blackwell, 1995; Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1843; Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard University Press, 1991.
- Kathlyn Liscomb, Learning from Mount Hua: A Chinese Physician’s Illustrated Travel Record and Painting Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1993; Wang Lü’s Hua Shan album, Palace Museum, Beijing, and Shanghai Museum collection pages. Shi Tao, Kugua heshang huayu lu (about 1700), Chinese text on Chinese Wikisource.
- Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–584; The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Harvard University Press, 1981; After the End of Art, Princeton University Press, 1997. Wudeng huiyuan (1252), on Qingyuan Weixin.
- Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: National Park Service and Library of Congress descriptions.