Review Essay: The Goods of Getting Human Flourishing Wrong

I

There is little doubt that human flourishing has become an increasingly ubiquitous topic, both in the academic landscape and at the intersection of academic and popular discourse. In the former, alongside several decades of growth in quantitative and empirical studies on human flourishing, ¹ interdisciplinary approaches are rapidly multiplying (Oxford University Press’s new series The Humanities and Human Flourishing is one example among others). The flourishing (unfortunately, a mandatory pun in these recitals) intersection of academic and popular work on this subject likely needs no other attestation than the recent monograph, co-written by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier (Portfolio, 2023). The general fascination with human flourishing suggested by Brooks and Winfrey’s book is born out, to give one final indication, by the article that topped New York Times 2021 most-read list: a feature by psychologist Adam Grant on the difficulty and ubiquity of languishing. ² Languishing, Grant writes, is the “neglected middle child of mental health,” falling between depression and flourishing. Many of us, according to this analysis, are not doing poorly, but neither are we flourishing.

So run, in many instances, introductions to new books and research projects in human flourishing. The field is proliferating, interdisciplinary efforts are increasing, and growing interest from public audiences reveal a crucial point of contact between a wide variety of methodological and scholarly discourses and life outside the university. Research efforts aimed at human flourishing are (we cannot help but feel) self-justifying precisely because their subject appears impervious to critique: who, after all, does not want to flourish? And if worlds beyond sociology, psychology, and epidemiology can help us do so, if historical philosophy or theology can help us in that aim, the humanities have an invaluable rationale.

As I shall try to have argued by the end of this essay, I think this is a good thing, though not without certain qualifications about how and why it is so (and how and why it might go wrong). Here, it is worth noting that one interesting dimension raised by the self-justification of studies of human flourishing is that the work of reviewing books such as these is not restricted to consideration and evaluation of their scholarship and of the scholarly disciplines and traditions on which they draw and to which they contribute; these are books, rather, whose success depends, often explicitly, on whether what they have to say can actually transform us, make us happier. But this just means that while the rationale for flourishing studies is impregnable, it is also, by that very same fact, almost useless. What matters is what sort of work is being done in and by this appeal to human flourishing. Socrates took it rather for granted that his interlocutors wanted to be happy; discrepancy arose in all the disagreements we find about what that means and how to go about achieving it. In being about something very essential, then, the measurement of these books is actually quite arduous, for their success is dependent on the sorts of normative claims they make about human nature and about its ends. To stake a claim, that is, about what constitutes (or even contributes) to human flourishing is, unavoidably I think, to stake a claim about human nature. To get to the substance of this contention, however, requires some recital of the content of these books.

II

Two different approaches to human flourishing are found in these three books, and for that reason, I will first consider the more restricted projects offered by Hanson and McClure before turning to the account of flourishing as such offered by Briggs and Reiss. Unlike the latter, Hanson’s study of philosophies of work and McClure’s study of emotions take up distinct elements or dimensions of human life that matter for human flourishing. While Hanson’s work is even more restricted as a history of Platonic accounts of labor, parallel methodologies and structures link both books. Chapters progress chronologically, beginning with ancient/classical Greek conceptions and concluding with contemporary subjects. In both texts, each chapter takes up a single author, a discrete period, or a scientific/philosophical tradition (in McClure’s book), offering in total a historical survey of Western conceptions of labor or emotion.

This pathway in Emotions carries us from the Greeks, to Philo and early Christian theologians, to Darwin and evolutionary interpretations, Freud and psychological explanations, and finally contemporary socio-cultural and constructivist accounts. McClure’s interpretations are irenic, though hardly uncritical. Each engagement aims explicitly at an analysis that identifies what is misguided and unhelpful while still gathering the best insights to construct a better account of emotions. So while the early Greeks and Christians are both critiqued, though happily not uniformly, for their skepticism about the pathe (whether we should think pathos a Greek translation of emotion is a question well raised but not fully considered here) and equation of virtue with apatheia, they are affirmed both in the first two chapters and in the book’s constructive conclusion for their sensitivity to the relationship between emotional life and human flourishing. Similarly, Darwin and evolutionary and natural scientific accounts are praised for correcting this putative Greek/early Christian distinction of emotion from what is essentially human, they are, in turn, critiqued for attempting to explain emotions only through natural and biological frameworks. The psychological approaches offer some help in their attentiveness to how emotions function within (and are often only explained by) particular social and historical contexts, a perspective that is more fully articulated through the sociocultural, neuroscientific, and constructivist pictures explored in the final two chapters tracing more contemporary accounts. These approaches, McClure summarizes, correctly understand that emotions “are both physiological and social” (p. 123).

It is clear even before the book’s conclusion that McClure finds these contemporary constructivist approaches to offer the fullest and best account of what emotions actually are: “fully-body” (p. 127) “psychological events” (p. 148), generated from “a complex interplay of multiple factors, including physiological, cognitive, and social” (p. 127). The book’s judgment that this historical genealogy reveals progressively better understandings of emotions is attested in the variation of a formula that closes each chapter. In each conclusion, McClure identifies the ways in which the foregoing account has failed to be adequate. The Greeks are dinged for six reasons—including otherworldly focus, preference for reason/logos, and chauvinistic and classist judgments about rationality and flourishing. Fewer inadequacies are found as the genealogy progresses. After the final sociocultural and constructivist accounts, in fact, McClure cites only one definitive demerit, though it is a significant one: the absence of normativity. “Most natural scientists, social theorists, and neuroscientists,” McClure writes, “do not prescribe what should be to effect human flourishing: they usually seek only to describe what is” (p. 123). Even the constructivist view, attuned to how emotions express and embody various contingent relations, requires “a view of flourishing that can be used as a standard against which emotions’ origin, experience, value, and use can be measured” (p. 151).

I will return below to this judgment—and, in particular, to the ways in which McClure appeals primarily to contemporary accounts to explain what emotions are and to classical and late-antique accounts to incite us to consider what emotions are for. The interplay of ancient and contemporary (and the very basic questions of why and how ancient sources might be helpful in the pursuit of human flourishing) concerns Hanson’s book as well. The pathway in Philosophies of Work aims less at a reckoning with dominant theories of work than it does, as mentioned above, on a body of reflection on work that shares, in Hanson’s telling, a particular Platonic shape. What that sharing consists in is, first, a recognition that work responds to reality (emerging in and from the nature of our being in the world); second, that while work aims to change or bring about something in the world, work concerns (perhaps even primarily) the transformation of the self; and, third, that work is linked to morality, not only in its shaping of the self but also in its central role in human community (p. 3). After a brief survey of accounts of labor in pre-Socratic Greek thought, the densest and most provocative chapter offers a (re-)reading of work in Platonism, primarily through the Republic. Hanson argues that rather than distinguishing philosophy from the arts of making (techne), Plato instead held the techne in high-estimation, perceiving the crucial role work played in the organization of the just polis to which philosophy is itself ordered. Work and philosophy are thus not definitionally distinct in Hanson’s reading of Plato, but essentially linked. (It perhaps goes without saying that the vision of Platonism here is not one of immaterial escapism but a pragmatic and political philosophy.) The following and somewhat misleadingly titled chapter on early medieval accounts of work covers the traditions of desert asceticism, Benedictine monasticism, and Augustine. Subsequent chapters consider accounts of work in late medieval monasticism, before turning to modern perspectives in Petrarch, Martin Luther, John Ruskin, and Simone Weil.

There are fine distinctions worth parsing in these chapters. Throughout, Hanson following Socrates account of the best sorts of goods in Republic II, Hanson traces an understanding of work as both good in itself and good for the benefits it brings. The latter form of goodness, as Hanson acknowledges, needs very little defense, but it also has nothing essential to do with work itself. Accordingly, the early and medieval Christian debate, carried out primarily in monastic literature, queried the good of labor when life might be sustained by gathering, miracles, and gifts. A striking affirmative answer to that question might be found in the Desert Father Abba Paul the Great, who we read wove and unwove the same basket throughout Lent. Work, for some of these writers, as Hanson traces, was an impediment to contemplation and prayer; for others—the majority of this tradition—work was often praised as an aid in the life dedicated to deification. It could be such, however, only when work itself (and its benefits) were ordered to ultimate ends. In such fashion, the debates Hanson traces concerning the relation between work and contemplation revolved, often, around the interpretative difficulties presented by three particular passages: the prelapsarian vocation of Adam and Eve to till the Garden (Gen 2.15), Christ’s command not to worry about tomorrow (Matt 6.34), and Paul’s command that those who do not work should not eat (2 Thess 3.10). In the exegetical thicket raised by these passages, work’s value emerged precisely through restrictions concerning its evaluation and role—its goodness a matter of its being undertaken without anxiety, without any acquisitive purpose, and always relative and subordinate to the higher (and ultimately immaterial) goods of the Christian life. Hanson takes Augustine, as he puts it, to capture precisely this central late-antique and medieval Christian position. For Augustine, Hanson writes, labor “was to be practiced in a manner helpful for, but always subordinate to, the main goal of sanctification. To use Augustinian terminology, work should be loved just to the degree that it is worthy of love” (p. 103).

As the book turns from this monastic context to modernity, the focus shifts from an evaluation of the potential value of work to, especially in the chapters on Ruskin and Weil, analyses of work disrupted and disordered by vicious social, economic, and political arrangements. The primary philosophical concern here, however, remains the same: work in a nineteenth-century pin factory might be good for its benefits (however limited they might be), but is such work good in itself? In both Ruskin and Weil, Hanson finds voices deeply attuned to the ways in which the goods of work appear only within the broader order of communal justice (exemplified in Plato’s heuristic of the ideal city of the Republic). These chapters, unsurprisingly, in their attentiveness to the brutality of capitalist arrangements ordered only to the maximizing of profit, hardly seem historical pieces.

One might well be justified in asking just how much weight the Platonic qualifier is able to carry across these various studies—a question Hanson himself acknowledges in allowing that readers may not find the book’s Platonic genealogy “fully convincing” (p. 6). A critical judgment might note that, in fact, in at least two chapters neither Plato nor his writings are referenced. Such a judgment, however, amounts to a quibble that misses thematic continuity in a search for a history of text reception. While not all of the writers examined here are explicitly Platonist, the work Hanson offers in the text draws out a certain body of reflection on two central issues concerning work in Plato’s thought. These are, first, the relationship between work and philosophy, explored in the chapters concerning the medieval debates about work and contemplation, and, second, the value and goodness of work as it emerges only within the order of a just political body, explored in the final chapters of the text that respond to industrialization and emergent global capitalist economies.

Here, then, we can dog-ear one more item for consideration below: while Hanson’s and McClure’s books share in offering historical considerations of a dimension of human life, they differ materially in how they develop their constructive proposals. McClure does so by taking, discarding, and ultimately combining; Hanson by finding and tracing common themes. Both approaches, however, are equally distinct from the account of human flourishing offered in Briggs and Reiss’s Human Flourishing. Briggs and Reiss’s work aims not at an exploration of a facet of human life or experience but at the whole; their goal, as they put it, is to “explore what is meant by human flourishing and see what it has to offer for those seeking after truth, meaning, and purpose” (p. 3). As the writers themselves admit, however, flourishing, while universally desired (as noted above), is flexible enough to cover various and often divergent accounts. Universally desiring to flourish, we find ourselves at a loss to say which account of flourishing is true. The more specific aim of the book, then, is to offer one such account, constructed from the “contributions of both scientific insights and spiritual wisdom” (p. 3). Materially, Human Flourishing makes good on this promise, shifting smoothly if often rapidly from references to and engagements with quantum measurement to Isaac Asimov, to sociological findings from the World Happiness Report, to John Donne’s poetry, to Anselm of Canterbury, to gene therapies such as CRISPR. These various reflections are structured around six central concepts in the text that Briggs and Reiss identify (as premises rather than conclusions) as central to human flourishing. These are three dimensions (material, relational, and transcendent) and three pillars that support these dimensions (truth, purpose, and meaning). A fully (or at least adequately) flourishing life, then, we might surmise, would include faring well materially—Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is cited here unsurprisingly (p. 37)—socially and transcendently. The last of these is by explicit admission primarily construed through the authors’ own Christian experience (p. 9). It is, however, specifically not restricted to particular religious practices, beliefs, or experiences, and explicitly often illustrated in terms of the making and experience of art. “We hope,” Briggs and Reiss write, in a comment to which I shall return below, “that readers will be able to apply the principles which we set out to wherever they are coming from” (p. 9). Faring well in these dimensions, consequently, depends on the aforementioned pillars, which Briggs and Reiss term “moral and intellectual foundations” (p. 109). What it means, then, to flourish in the three dimensions—in order not to be wholly and viciously subjective—must be measured in terms of their adequacy to truth (what is really the case, to the extent we can know it), purpose (more or less, telos), and meaning (the experience of our lives and activities as comprehensible and worthwhile).

Briggs and Reiss’s methods of describing these foundations embodies the interdisciplinary logic of the text as a whole. The chapter on the pillar of truth, to offer one breakneck summary of discrete sections, affirms truth in terms of a relationship between something like meaning/expression and objective reality; substantively, it moves from the question of simulation posed by The Matrix, to a brief reading of Plato’s Cave, to the interesting differences between maps of Oxford created between 1578 and 1728 (an illustration that truth can be represented differently based on perspective and need), to a caution concerning naïve optimism about mathematical truth (via Russell and Gödel), to the limits of truth claims in the natural and social sciences (here the reproducibility crisis), to truth as consensus in moral communities, to the importance of truth-claims in religious belief and practice, to the fraught status of truth in postmodernism, and finally to a constructive proposal that identifies both scientific and nonscientific approaches in terms of their interest in truth but distinguishes them in terms of their methodologies and in terms of the “objects” of their truth claims.

All this, of course, constitutes only a description, rather than an analytical review of these pages, but the catalog reveals the impossibility and mistake of attempting to do just that. Rather than sustained interpretation or argument, the chapters offer collections of pieces of evidence, and this is undoubtedly by design and illuminating of the book’s particular project. Far more important than any particular argument (or any single, particular piece of evidence) advanced in the text is the text’s embodying the possibility of integration of apparently (or at least putatively) disparate disciplines and discourses; there is the general outline of a methodology here guided by the assumption that almost all (or perhaps all) areas of human experience and thought are relevant to human flourishing; it is a methodology that aims at rays of generality and light that unite them. It is perhaps unsurprising, however, that in a book that cites and references such an astounding catalog of studies, works, events, and thinkers, that often the discrepancies and different perspectives throughout are left un-(or at least under-)explored. What unites the book, in the end, is primarily its conviction that these approaches can speak together, but absent some closer attentiveness to disagreement and how different perspectives (on truth, say) are embodied in different practices and communities, the universal vision presented here succeeds in being universal only by asking, rather than answering, what things like truth, purpose, and meaning might, in fact, mean. Absent strong claims along those lines, the kaleidoscopic approach to these foundations serves to identify broad phenomena of human fascination but not necessarily to embrace the difficult work of contending for anything in particular. A salient example here comes near the end of the text, in a comment responding to Tyler VanderWeele’s definition of five domains of human flourishing. ³ While VanderWeele’s definition has featured in various sociological studies—and Briggs and Reiss note its very neat overlap with their own dimensions and pillars—they offer a caution concerning sociological assessment, in so far as it commonly depends on self-assessment: “Self-assessment has its uses, but its components should be open to more objective measurement” (p. 319). The degree to which one affirms this judgment is also the precise degree to which the need for an objective measurement appears. Who measures? By what measurement? A similar sort of question is begged, in fact, on the same page: “Happiness generally comes to those who work towards something of enduring value” (p. 319). How, though, are we to determine what is enduring (what is meaningful, purposeful, etc.)?

III

What seems clear to me is that Briggs and Reiss’s aim to draw from both “scientific insight” and “spiritual wisdom” is too nebulous a methodology to accomplish the rather ambitious goal of this work, which is to give an account of human flourishing. The very basic claim here, that a full account of human nature and its goods would need to draw from both the generally scientific fields and from religious and cultural thought, and practice is not all that controversial—or, rather, if there is controversy here it lies in this description of the book’s project as a reification of what is perhaps an overly simplistic dichotomy between science and spirituality. ⁴

This lack of controversy is, undoubtedly, by design. This is a book written explicitly with all readers in mind, aiming to reveal just how much they share, aiming to offer an account of human flourishing generally enough articulated (satisfaction of material needs, community, and something more, filled with truth, purpose, and meaning) that, say, a Sudanese Muslim, a United States Evangelical, and a British atheist might find themselves in agreement. But this itself strikes me then not as a project concerning human flourishing but as the introduction to one. The components of flourishing explored here are uncontroversial precisely because they are relatively universal. Almost everyone, for example, will agree that human flourishing would require some sort of community: the human is, as Aristotle put it long ago, the πολιτικὸν ζῷον, the political animal. ⁵ This is precisely why the work of understanding and moving toward flourishing consists in determining what sorts of communities and what sorts of friendships—what sorts of politics—contribute to human flourishing (not, to be sure, universally for all times everywhere, but here and now). Most of us will not agree with how Aristotle imagined his ideal political community, though of course many have learned from it. Nor would we agree with how a segregated town in the 1920s in the American South imagined the ideal flourishing community. Few of us think homelessness, evictions, and poverty in our own cities are examples of flourishing, even if they are examples of human sociality.

I would hope it goes without saying that this is, of course, neither to suggest that the authors of Human Flourishing would find these examples adiaphorous nor to imply that no resources for critiques of racism, sexism, or systemic poverty are available in Human Flourishing. But I do mean to argue, on the contrary, that while the book offers a worthwhile anthropological study (one potentially quite useful for interfaith and interdisciplinary dialogue) in considering what basic components or structures of flourishing are found across different communities, what it means to actually flourish, or to fail to flourish, is to navigate or fail to navigate the different ways in which sociality, material needs, and transcendent aspects of human life are embodied in practice, community, and belief. Absent the consideration of those particular commitments, the information presented here cannot help but remind atleast me of the scientific catastrophe Alasdair MacIntyre imagines in the remarkable introduction to After Virtue, an image he uses to explain the poverty and confusion of our moral lives absent a coherent community of moral imagination and practice.

What this book offers, then, as I am arguing is not really a picture of flourishing, but a collections of examples drawn from a truly remarkable set of disciplines, places, and discourses, about various dynamics of human life. But there is a certain awkwardness here, given the fact that both authors acknowledge their own Christian particularity and, even more, that the book’s conclusion, presented as a sort of laying of cards on the table, declares love to be the missing ingredient of flourishing in the foregoing account of flourishing. This claim is likely to incite little furor, as such; one cannot help but notice how strangely and awkwardly the authors offer a Christian account of love to say what such a love might mean while still, unmistakably seeking to describe a picture of love that fits all. On this, while there may well be a certain tongue-in-cheek deadpan at work, it is indicative of this fraught and unexplored boundary between the universal and the particular that this chapter’s account of love is introduced with the following: “An international speaker, writer, and activist identified three enduring virtues: faith, hope, and love” (p. 311).

I have devoted this extended space to Human Flourishing as a way of returning to a consideration of the three books as a whole but now within a broader context to evaluate the judgment given above that the universal desirability of human flourishing and its self-justifying nature as a topic of academic or popular study can either occlude or reveal the immense difficulty of the content of human flourishing. It is well and good to say that love is central, but what that means will look very different if, say, one agrees with Augustine that we love only with God’s love, or if one believes love is best understood as altruism or charity and fully explicable in natural biological and evolutionary terms. These certainly need not be competing answers, but if one believes the first it will necessarily enjoy a certain priority. ⁶ The content of human flourishing is difficult because what we might reasonably mean by human flourishing will involve the making of risky normative judgments, the coherence and truth of which will ultimately only be found (and even then only partially) in communities that embody those judgments.

And, again, there can be no doubt that the aim of helping the reader to flourish—both by constructive judgment about what constitutes human flourishing and critical judgment about what impedes it—is explicitly shared across all three books. McClure expresses this aim directly in an introductory comment that both stresses the importance of our emotions for flourishing (“life would be less rich, less meaningful, and less just without practices that can explore, understand, and interpret our own and others’ emotions” [13]) and contends that failing “to access, identify, interpret, engage, and use emotions” can lead to floundering rather than flourishing (p. 13). ⁷ The closing pages of Hanson’s book make this clear too, identifying precisely how the Platonic account of work traced through the book’s pages might, at the very least, change our attitudes concerning work, by helping us see the disorder of a culture that worships work, even while disparaging many workers and creating a culture sustained by work and products that do not serve genuine human needs (p. 199). ⁸ Briggs and Reiss, too, advance their own hope that their book might effect change through addressing our confusion and helplessness concerning how best to live our lives:

In our optimistic moments, we hope that what we write will help some to lead more flourishing lives . . . We do believe that at a time when most of us are bombarded with messages about what we should or should not do to live healthily, attain a work-life balance and find meaning, a careful consideration of the contributions of both scientific insights and spiritual wisdom to human flourishing can provide a new angle that many will find helpful. (p. 3)

The impediment identified here is a meaningful one—and almost certainly parallels the “morass” McClure names in describing the confusion that surrounds our understanding of our own emotions and their meaning. This impediment is meaningful not least because it precisely serves to identify one risk that attends all three of these works, which is to add more to the cacophony of messages, which are often contradictory and incomplete, when they are not motivated by predatory interests.

We might, accordingly, distinguish these three books in terms of the therapies they offer for our confusion about flourishing. Both McClure’s and Hanson’s projects are premised on the value of past traditions and approaches to illumine our own confusion, even if, as traced above, their appeals to historical texts differ. While there is arguably more coherence in Hanson’s development of a Platonic account of work, what both texts offer, in the end, is an account of a central dimension human life—an argument that includes both how we should understand it (in light of and in the context of and sometimes in opposition to various other accounts) and how that understanding might be embodied in particular practices. Both texts then model a vision that clarity amidst confusion (about work, about emotions, about human goods) is found in and by way of particular commitments and practices. There is, of course, much risk here precisely because such accounts are often quite wrong (and, in my opinion, will always be wrong and incomplete, which is not only bearable but good). These risks are apparent in both these books. Hanson’s reading of the harmony between techne and philosophy (and his rehabilitation of poetry in Plato) is not an unsupported interpretation, but it remains a contended position. McClure, in my estimation, uses the Greek and early Christians well to stress the importance of interpreting emotions in light of final ends, but the readings of these figures are at times tendentious, to say the least. Plato, for example, is seemingly identified as one who held a “pleasant and contented state” as the highest good (p. 162); about Aristotle, we read that the highest good is entirely self-sufficient and “nothing and no one can make it better” (p. 26); Plotinus, in turn, is described as one who wedded “Platonism and Christianity” (p. 160). ⁹

The danger that attends the ambition of McClure’s work is evident in these examples. There is no doubt that a more careful and detailed reading of the book’s classical and late-antique sources would generate a richer understanding of the complexity and nuance of emotions in that period. The risks McClure takes in this project, however, are ultimately secondary to the risk of offering a judgment about the meaning and role of emotions in general—about how we should understand them. As the introduction to the book states, this is a risk because misunderstanding and misusing emotions can inhibit our flourishing. At the heart of McClure’s book—as at the heart of Hanson’s—are judgments that the writer could be (and might well be) wrong about. This strikes me as very essential to the flourishing discourse, and it marks one limitation of Briggs and Reiss’s work, in which there are few places where the writers genuinely risk being wrong. In this, Human Flourishing, like many of the sociological studies it both references and from which it distances itself, offers much help in understanding general frameworks concerning human flourishing. My critique, that is, is certainly not that the constructs elaborated in the book are not interesting in so far as they name general, perhaps even universal aspects of human flourishing—at least five of the six constructs examined in the book are readily discernible in Nicomachean Ethics. But it seems important to also note that, for Aristotle at least, there was no such thing as flourishing outside the particularities of a life, the making of particular decisions, and the forming of particular habits. ¹⁰ The former speaks about the conditions necessary for flourishing or analyzes the components of flourishing—both genuinely valuable but essentially not to be confused with flourishing itself. ¹¹ Knowing, for example, that friendship is important to human flourishing and statistically correlates with greater happiness and life-satisfaction reinforces a great deal of my experience of human nature, but it tells me almost nothing about whether it would be wise to befriend this or that particular person, to break off this or that particular relationship. The values of a “scientific” approach to human flourishing (whether this comes by way of generalizing or quantitative analysis) are certainly real, but care is needed to distinguish the findings of these approaches from the contingencies of their expression and experience. Here we might find Aristotle instructive again, in his warning to the reader not to expect a greater precision from the world of ethics than ethics can offer. Where “scientific knowledge involves demonstration,” in the realm of ethics, because “one cannot deliberate about what is necessary, [so] practical wisdom cannot be scientific knowledge . . . It is not scientific knowledge because what is done can be otherwise.” ¹² This warning, as I understand it, expresses quite clearly how the truths of human flourishing are found nowhere other than at the intersection of our best understanding of the shared or universal (the human of human flourishing) and the particularity of this or that contingent life and community.

As such, the foregoing critique has not been intended to suggest that there is nothing to learn from sociological and empirical approaches to human flourishing and no less that there is nothing to learn from Briggs and Reiss’s account of the general structures of human flourishing. Such structures, which identify the importance, say, of friendship and social community, understood for what they are, constitute important tools in the task of identifying precisely where the work of flourishing might begin and in what it would consist. (And this is to say nothing for the value of these studies on a grander scale: policy decisions informed by the findings of these studies are unquestionably more promising than those determined by traditional measures like GDP.). But, of course, all this is also to say that insofar as these studies are generalized (and objective precisely because they are generalized), they are and should be seen as propaedeutic to the content of flourishing itself. As Briggs and Reiss note in a crucial sentence, “The extent to which human flourishing can be based on truth depends on the truth that humans choose to select” (p. 147). The recognition of the necessity of choosing in this observation—even if, perhaps, it belies the complexity of agency in the communal shaping of what constitutes truth and flourishing—is instructive precisely in illuminating both the gap and the relation between universal and particular that are essential to flourishing. McClure’s and Hanson’s texts, in this sense, take up and operate in this gap, in the field opened by general analyses such as that found in Human Flourishing. They operate there by offering up normative judgments about fundamental aspects of human life. These judgments could lead to flourishing only in being embodied, not just in individuals but in communities. They also risk being wrong and, even more basically, risk the discord of disagreement with other visions and embodiments of human goods. Without such differences, however, it would be difficult if not impossible to imagine the transformation and conversion that give human variety and discourse its life.

THOMAS BREEDLOVEBaylor University, Waco, TX, USA