| "Achievement, Endurance, Cognitive Structure, Order, Play" |
Art & the Senses: Body & Mind |
| Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi- The Psychology of Happiness , Rider Books , August 17, 2026 |
This, the last in the sequence on the art-to-body interaction, goes back three decades. Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi was an academic psychologist whose work extended beyond the field of scholarship to be a presence, and an influence, in general culture. The Cabinet in 1997 were given copies of his books to read over their ministerial Christmas holiday. When Stuart Jeffries wrote a study of the existentialists “Grand Hotel Abyss” in 2016 he included “technological innovation keeps us leaping from one pointless task after the other...this distracted way of living runs counter to the popular theory of the Hungarian psychologist Mikhail Czikszentmihalyi that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow.” “Flow” was the metaphor devised by Czikszentmihalyi to describe what his research had revealed. He observed the correlation between intensity of activity with statements of happiness. In this condition concentration produced a level of absorption in which other elements, such as an awareness of time, evaporated. An application of skill had a fulfilment in satisfaction, a loss of self-consciousness and an emotional repleteness. The elements for reaching this psychological condition were various: a clarity of goal, a heightening of awareness, a feedback on the activity that was of the moment. The task itself must be pitched as a balance, neither too easy to accomplish nor too difficult. He devised the term autotelic personality. “τέλος” or “télos” is Greek for end or purpose. The autotelic personality undertakes acts because they are intrinsically rewarding. Traits of the personality include curiosity, persistence, and humility. The underpinning attribute is intrinsic motivation. Well-being is a regular in documents of public policy. Well-being in this theory may not be realised in the absence of challenge. His conclusion was that a work orientation rested on "achievement, endurance, cognitive structure, order, play, and low impulsivity." Czikszentmihalyi starts with consciousness itself, and the phenomenological perspective. He describes it as intentionally ordered information. “While consciousness is a mirror that reflects what the senses tell us about what happens both outside our bodies and within the nervous system, it reflects those changes selectively, actively shaping events, imposing on them a reality of its own.” Consequent to that are intentions. “Intentions are the force that keep information in consciousness ordered.” From this he looks to those who diverge from the norms of intentionality: heroes, saints, sages, artists, poets, criminals. “Consciousness can be ordered in terms of different goals and intentions. Each of us has this freedom to control our subjective reality.” Optimal experience derives from the ordering of consciousness. “In the flow experience, attention can be freely invested to achieve a person's goals, because there is no disorder to sort.” The opposite is psychic entropy, the disorder within consciousness. A flow experience results in a more complex organisation of the self. “Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. “Differentiation implies a movement towards uniqueness, towards separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.” “Flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well-ordered.” The familiar is not in itself sufficient. “Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging.” He looks at the nature of pleasure. Deep enjoyment goes beyond sensual reception. It combines the meeting of expectation but also the unexpected and even unimagined beforehand. The research identifies the components of enjoyment. When confronting a task there must be the ability to complete it. It must have clear goals and an immediacy of feedback. It allows for control over one's actions. The self and the activity merge. Paradoxically, concern for the self disappears but the sense of self emerges stronger after the experience. The extension to the arts starts with a reference to Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon, who lived 1561-1626, spoke of wonder as the seed of knowledge and reflection of the purest pleasure. An arts professional is cited: “Works that I respond to...have behind them a lot of conceptual, political and intellectual activity...the visual representations are really signposts to this beautiful machine that has been constructed, unique on this earth, and is not just a rehashing of visual elements, but is really a new thought machine that an artist, through visual means and combining the eyes with perception, has created.” Czikszentmihalyi has interesting observations on Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, influential phenomenological sociologists. They write against the bias towards language as principally an information-transmitter. Puns, wordplay, double meanings are essential for children. He places culture as a locus for creating psychic order. “There is much knowledge- or well-ordered information- accumulated in culture...Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy and religion are there for anyone to see as examples of how harmony can be imposed on chaos.” In a testament to the power of stories he finds that those who have failed to secure goals for themselves tend not to remember being told or having read to them stories by their parents in childhood. His conclusion is that the autotelic self, gifted with the ability to set goals, develop skills, be sensitive to feedback, to know how to concentrate, “means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy. Feeling a breeze on a hot day, seeing a cloud reflected on a glass facade...” The goal is harmony, purpose, and resolution expressed in action, combined in the making of meaning. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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