PicoBlog

The closest I’ve come to success as a self-help guru is drawing the distinction between telic and atelic activities. This language gained some traction as a way to clarify the contrast we register implicitly between project and process.

Projects are telic in that they aim at an end or telos that completes them. Listening to a song, making a friend, commuting to work: these activities strive towards terminal states. The song is over, the friendship formed, you are back at the office again.

Atelic activities are different. Listening to music, spending time with your new friend, working thoughtfully and well: these activities aren’t defined by endpoints that exhaust them, but are forms of process. You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you can’t complete them, leaving no more left to do.

I borrowed my terminology from the linguistics of verbs, but the distinction corresponds to one that Aristotle draws in his Metaphysics, between two kinds of action:

But if you are learning something, you have not at the same time learned it, and if you are being cured you have not at the same time been cured. Someone, however, who is living well, has at the same time lived well.

Aristotle calls activity of the first kind kinêsis, the second energeia: they are telic and atelic, respectively. Telic activities are in his terms “incomplete”—unrealized while they happen—whereas atelic activities are realized in the present as much as they ever can be.

In Midlife, I argued that one form of midlife crisis turns on the telic orientation: being excessively project-focused. The problem with projects is that they place fulfillment always in the future—the goal has yet to be achieved—only to consign it instantly to the past. No wonder the present feels empty. Worse yet, telic activities are “autosubversive, for [their] whole purpose and project is one of self-annihilation”—to quote Aryeh Kosman on kinêsis. The point of engaging with a meaningful project is to finish it, extinguishing a source of meaning in your life.

When we appreciate the value of atelic activities, by contrast—listening to music, spending time with friends—we find fulfillment in the present moment, and while we can’t go on forever, we’re not aiming to exhaust or eliminate what’s good.

None of this implies that achievements don’t matter, but they are not all that matter, however much they sometimes seem to be.

In Life is Hard—out now in paperback!—I asked a further question: how does this distinction bear on our relationship with failure? It’s projects that succeed or fail, once and for all, but worthwhile projects almost always have atelic counterparts—standing to the project as doing philosophy stands to publishing a paper or teaching a class—in which we find a value that is hedged against the threat that we will fail. There’s value in doing philosophy, listening to music, spending time with friends, even if nothing comes of it.

This is not to say that atelic activities are easy or that they do not offer forms of failure of their own. Doing philosophy well is hard, if atelic, and we don’t often succeed in it. That’s why a more atelic orientation is not a recipe for slacking off, as critics sometimes fear. But the shape of failure here is very different from the failure of a project: it’s about how well we do what we value doing, not how it finally turns out.

Case in point: the philosophy of project and process. It’s worth thinking about these issues, whatever the upshot; but it’s difficult to do it well. Reflecting on the ethics of the telic and atelic is itself atelic, but not on that account easy—and I’ve come to think I missed the oppressive flipside of atelicity, an onerous truth about the purely processive.

What is atelic is inexhaustible, and where it is a source of joy, its inexhaustibility is joyful, too. If you love listening to music, you don’t have to worry that by doing it you’re depleting it; listening not a finite resource. But infinitude can be a burden. Take Aristotle’s instance: living well. If living well meant living high, its atelicity would be welcome news. But living well means treating other people and oneself the way one should, and while this matters, perhaps more than anything, it isn’t always fun. If the tyranny of projects is that they must be constantly replenished as they self-destruct in failure or success, the tyranny of the atelic is that it never finally ends. There is no rest, except for the wicked.

Kant makes use of a distinction that has always puzzled me, between perfect and imperfect duties. Perfect duties call for specific actions, like telling the truth, keeping a promise, sparing an innocent life; imperfect duties leave more latitude, asking us to fight for justice or help those in need, without telling us exactly when or how. But the contrast is opaque. Why don’t imperfect duties call for specific actions, too: doing enough to fight for justice or help the needy? It may be said that these descriptions underspecify what to do, and that “enough” is indeterminate or vague—but the same is true of perfect duties. To say that you have a duty to tell the truth is to leave open which words you should use, how loud to say them, and much more. No duty ever specifies an action down to every detail and perfect duties, too, are articulated in vague and open-ended terms.

I wonder if the real contrast turns on perfect duties’ being telic—they speak to completable projects—where imperfect duties are atelic. Their open-endedness lies not in the fact there are many ways to meet them, but in their inexhaustibility. To fight for justice, or to help those in need, is not to aim at a terminal state but to engage in atelic activity. Understood in this way, both kinds of duty are well-named, since perfective verbal aspect marks completion—you kept your promise, told the truth—while imperfective aspect marks what is ongoing, as the object of imperfect duty always is. The demands of decency are interminable.

This is the burden of the atelic, the exhaustion of inexhaustibility. With a perfect duty, we get to say that we are done, once and for all. The burden is lifted, to our relief. But the object of imperfect duty is not a project to complete. However much we may wish otherwise, we are never done with justice or with human need; we are never done with other people, with compassion or respect; and we never get to exhale, gratefully, “I am done with being good.”

ncG1vNJzZmijo5rBqsXAZ6qumqOprqS3jZympmegZMSpsc1mmKZlmWKxsLrEZpmeoZ6ceqi7zp0%3D