Overthink
The best of all possible podcasts, Leibniz would say. Putting big ideas in dialogue with the everyday, Overthink offers accessible and fresh takes on philosophy from enthusiastic experts. Hosted by professors Ellie Anderson (Pomona College) and David M. Peña-Guzmán (San Francisco State University).
Overthink
Success
Cooked, slayed, delivered, ate. In episode 108 of Overthink, Ellie and David break down what it means to succeed, and why this sneaky word pervades our society today - in everything from the ambitions of classic American stage figures, to the refined effortlessness in Zhuangzi’s tales, to the corporate world of buzzwords. Your hosts discuss party planning, tenure tracks, inspirational quotes, haters, why science seems so successful, and the pitfalls of thinking we’ve got it all figured out. Plus, in the Patreon bonus, they reflect on the interpersonal tensions of sharing successes, and making the best of our mishaps.
Check out the episode's extended cut here!
Works Discussed
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
William Desmond, “Philosophy and Failure”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, What is Success?
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Tim Wu, “In Praise of Mediocrity”
Zhuangzi, “The Secret of Caring for Life”
Modem Futura is your guide to the bold frontiers of tomorrow, where technology,...
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Hello and welcome to Overthink.
David:The podcast that succeeds at connecting philosophy to contemporary life.
Ellie:I'm Ellie Anderson.
David:And I'm David Peña Guzman.
Ellie:David, if you google "philosophy success," you are likely not to find anything actually philosophical. What you are likely instead to find, I'm not sure if you found this too, is a bunch of corporate BS about, like, eight hacks for success. So I actually had a hard time initially like linking into the research for this episode because it was just a wall of corporate stuff.
David:Yeah, I got a lot of "five steps to make your company successful." A lot of "how to" and a lot of manuals. And it was also a lot of, "I am the CEO of such and such. Here is my philosophy for success."
Ellie:Exactly, that was it. And so my next step, and don't worry, these weren't my only two steps - we are better researchers than this. But my next step was to google"philosophy success quotes." And I found some real gems. So I want to start off the episode today by sharing some of what I found. And part of what I found was a lot of quotes that were attributed to people that then when I tried to follow up the references, I could find no references for. So this happens a lot, right? It's like brainyquote.com and there's absolutely no reference for where this quote actually came from. And so you might remember from our gossip episode, listeners, that there's like this viral Socrates triple filter for gossip that indeed maps onto nothing Socrates actually said. This is sorta what I found with the success quotes. So I'm going to read you three quotes about success, which may or may not have been said by the people to whom they are attributed because they came from websites such as onevibrantlife.com and capitalideasonline.com. And I want to hear your thoughts on which of these quotes is the best and why.
David:Okay. But they are all from philosophers or is that not the case?
Ellie:No, they're not all from philosophers.
David:Okay. Great. Let's go.
Ellie: Number one:success depends on previous preparation and without such preparation, there is sure to be failure.
David:Life coach quote, definitely. Physical trainer.
Ellie:Wait, no, David, you're supposed to tell me what you think about the quote. Hell, I think, guessing who said it is great, so let's keep that in. Not originally what I had in mind, but maybe more fun, but I want you to reflect a little bit on it and just in the moment, then I'll read the next one, same thing, then I'll read the third one, and then at the end, tell me which one you like the best, ok.
David:Okay, so this one sounds banal, and that's why I say it comes from a physical trainer telling me to get ready for my workout. And in this particular quote, obviously the reference is the relationship between success and preparation. And I think the author of this quote, whomever that may be, is very careful to point out that preparation is a necessary condition for success, but not a sufficient condition for success. So if you don't prepare, you will not succeed, but it does not follow that if you do prepare, you will definitely meet success. So I like the carefulness here in the construction.
Ellie:Okay. Okay.
Second quote:success is to be measured not by wealth, power, or fame, but by the ratio between what a man is and what he might be.
David:Oh wow. By the ratio between what a man is and what he might be. This sounds like an inspirational quote that you find in a birthday card or an anniversary card. And I actually...
Ellie:Only for men.
David:Only for men, women's success is not to be measured at all because it doesn't exist. but I obviously like that it moves away from the traditional ways in which success is typically measured, which is wealth, career and social status. And it points to this difference between who we are and who we can be. So the difference between actuality and possibility, it actually reminds me of the way in which Henri Bergson defines sentience and consciousness. It's when what is opens itself up to what could be. So I actually like that.
Ellie:Okay, so you probably think it's not written by a life coach.
David:No, this could be by a moral philosopher, like an ancient moralist, or a modern moralist. I don't know.
Ellie:This is so fun. Okay, third and final. Success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency.
David:Hate it. It's always only about greatness. I don't care who said it. They're wrong. Yeah. nobody says, oh, you're succeeding in life because you're just like consistently doing the same thing over and over again.
Ellie:I thought you're joking at first, but you actually are leaning in.
David:Yeah, no, I think by definition, success means going over and beyond a certain expectation, perhaps, or a threshold that is the default for oneself and others.
Ellie:Okay. Okay. Yeah. And actually I can, because you pressed on this particular point, I can add that I chose the first part of the quote for succinctness, but there is a continuation of it: they go on to say, "Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come." But it seems like you still disagree?
David:Okay. No, because it says consistent hard work. So there is a sense of effort and striving. but that one, now I don't like it. I like the beginning, but I don't like the end. Work hard consistently and greatness will come, as if external conditions beyond your control do not affect your likelihood of succeeding at a particular endeavor. Which, is not the case.
Ellie:I'm telling you, no matter how hard I work at basketball, greatness will never come for me.
David:No, but maybe consistency will come, Ellie. You'll become a consistent basketball player. Who knows?
Ellie:Consistency is the condition for the possibility of greatness, but yeah, it's not sufficient. So now the time has come to tell you who these quotes are from. Although, as I mentioned, I'm actually not entirely sure the people to whom they're attributed said them. I did my darndest to find the sources for these first two, and I could not find them.
David:But the third one you did find?
Ellie:The third one, I'll explain. Okay, so the first one, and just as a refresher, this was the idea that success depends upon previous preparation, is attributed to Confucius.
David:Okay.
Ellie:Searched this, couldn't find it, could be a translation issue. We will come back to Confucian ideas of success later in the episode in a more well grounded fashion. But if anyone knows the source of this, let me tell you, Google wasn't helping me and I wasn't even using the very, very crappy new AI assistant that they have. So yeah, that's a story for another time. Second quote, this is successes not to be measured by wealth, et cetera, et cetera, but by the ratio between what a man is and what he could be. Attributed to H. G. Wells.
David:Oh, wow.
Ellie:Science fiction writer.
David:Okay, come on H. G. Wells.
Ellie:You guessed moral philosopher, and you guessed life coach for Confucius, but I would guess life coach for what may or may not be Confucius, right? So, valid.
David:Thank you for emphasizing that. I really hope that quote is fictitious.
Ellie:And then third and finally, wait, you didn't say who you think said the third and final.
David:Oh yeah, the consistency one. I think that would be a tech bro, like a contemporary tech bro.
Ellie:Okay, not terribly far. It is none other than Dwayne the Rock Johnson.
David:Like actual life coach of the stars.
Ellie:What do you mean life, actual life coach of the stars?
David:I don't know, is he? Like he just looks like a life coach, because he's so in-shape.
Ellie:He looks like a life coach, but he's not a life coach to the stars. He is himself a star.
David:Yeah. Okay, fine. He is a life coach to himself and has managed to succeed in his own area.
Ellie:Today, we're talking about success.
David:Is our culture addicted to success?
Ellie:What does it mean to succeed at something?
David:And what is the cost of success? We live in a culture that fetishizes success in practically all areas of life. We are expected to succeed in school, in the workplace, even in our private and social lives. There was this New York Times opinion piece that came out in 2018 called In Praise of Mediocrity, where the author, Tim Wu, observes that Nowadays, even our hobbies are being contaminated by the logic of success. Wu says that we don't go for a run anymore. We rather are training for a marathon. We don't paint for pleasure on the weekends, we are trying to land a gallery deal, or trying to increase our social media through our painting. And he's essentially alluding to the fact that we are living in an age where everything is supposed to be measured according to whether or not it's advancing a larger goal, and this constant demand that we're placing on ourselves and that we're placing on one another for excellence is ultimately backfiring, because it means that our sources of joy are ultimately becoming new sources of anxiety.
Ellie:This feels like a very 2018 piece to me, although I think it's obviously still in many ways relevant to what has happened in the years since. But I feel like that those years between 2018 and 2020 or 2021 were really the time of praising mediocrity, laziness, doing nothing, right? Like we've talked a little bit about on the podcast before. I want to focus a little bit on this idea of mediocrity as a contrast to success, because, success's opposite, it's technically failure rather than mediocrity, but I think there's still something to this idea that the contamination of the logic of success in our hobbies has meant a kind of dismissing of mediocrity or just like enjoying something for the fun of it and not worrying about what the output is. But I think in general, when we talk about being successful, we basically mean financially or at least career wise to have gotten accolades. Professional recognition, et cetera. And so I would say that when Wu says that our hobbies are being contaminated by the logic of success, he means that we're treating hobbies as jobs. And jobs are things at which you can be more or less successful, whereas hobbies are not. You can be better or worse at a hobby, more or less excellent, but not more or less successful.
David:I think he does mean that our leisure time is being inundated with the norms of work culture, which means that, in connection to hobby, suddenly you can be subject to evaluation and assess as to whether or not you are improving. And that would be similar to the way in which workers are reviewed for their performance in the office. So he does think that there is this kind of hemorrhage of office culture onto leisure time. Although I would say that I think failure is the opposite of success. When we turn it into the term successful as a description for a person, I do think the opposite is a mediocre person. You're either successful or mediocre at what you do.
Ellie:No, I would say you're either excellent or mediocre at what you do, but the conflation of excellence and success is symptomatic of the contamination of work culture, which is associated with success, with just overall goodness or value, which is not.
David:I guess that depends on whether we think that there is a concept of success that doesn't incorporate under the concept of excellence. Can you succeed without being excellent at something or being recognized or seen as excellent by those around you? So that's why I think that since the opposite of excellence is mediocrity and since excellence is built into, or baked into the concept of success, I do think of somebody who is mediocre at what they do as the inverse of somebody who is successful.
Ellie:I would say somebody who's bad at what they do should be the opposite of being successful, but they aren't always so, right, take the case of some recent political leaders. But I would say that the rise of a concept of success, such that we can say that somebody is successful without saying what, is the best possible evidence that our society has implicitly adopted the notion of career and financial success as the core aspiration for its members. So even if success is not intrinsically different from excellence, I think in our society it is. So if you say so and so is successful, and you don't specify at what, the implication is that they're successful at their job. Probably means that they have a lot of money, right? So if I don't have to specify what I mean when I say someone is successful, it's because everybody already understands that I mean they're successful in their career. And the fact that they can understand that means that they understand that career success is the basic notion of success in our society.
David:So I think you are right about that, because if somebody were to tell me about you that you are successful, I would assume that they mean as a philosopher, and as a professor and that you are successful, not only in the sense that you excel at it, but that it also provides you a comfortable life, right? So I wouldn't infer from that...
Ellie:I would take a little bit more money living in Los Angeles in 2024. But yes, I do. I do make a good salary for which I'm very grateful.
David:Yeah, but like the point here is that I wouldn't infer from that, for instance, that you have been successful at many other things that maybe we should also consider, have you been successful at making close friendships? Have you been successful at finding happiness? Have you been successful at forming a nuclear family, if that's a goal that you have for yourself? So when it is used without qualification, it is definitely a careerist concept. I think the concept also presupposes the existence of obstacles to the attainment of the goal in question.
Ellie:Okay. Yeah.
David:You succeeded at getting a grant because there was competition of other applicants. You succeeded at getting an apartment despite how expensive and scarce housing options are, in cities like New York, LA and San Francisco. And I take it that this is what Wu is getting at in that article that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, that we no longer just enjoy basic life affirming activities, we rather turn them into stages in a larger obstacle-ridden course that is meant to terminate in a socially legible goal that justifies it. And here I would even go a little bit further than Wu on this point and add that it's not just that we are treating our non work activities as work, but also that society is holding us accountable to the logic of success at an earlier and earlier age. I'm here thinking about the increasing professionalization of children, that happens especially in middle and upper middle class families where children are being pressured to succeed at younger and younger ages, sometimes as early as kindergarten, like you need to be the number one kindergartner in your classroom or else you won't get into the region's top elementary school or to the top middle school and you're going to be a failure of a human being. And so I think what we're really seeing is what I might call the compression of childhood where kids are expected to be evaluated by the standards of a teenager or a student when they're only four, five, six years old.
Ellie:And I think, that certainly could signal, scary development of the placing of capitalist expectations of productivity and success onto young children. There's also a sense in which this might weirdly be a return to old approaches to childhood, pre Victorian age, where children were held to the same standards.
David:Like little adults working in the factories?
Ellie:Yeah, but I'm thinking too about differences in parenting expectations with respect to success because there's definitely a kind of stereotypical parent that is, "you're doing amazing, sweetie," to whatever their kid does, like they just want their kids to get the participation trophy, they're perfect no matter what they do, there's an absence of expectations around your performance relative to the competition. And then there's another stereotype of parents, often like an immigrant parent, especially an Asian immigrant mom, this is a stereotype of somebody who's like,"yeah, you're never doing well enough." I see this all the time on TikTok, like Asian young adults, especially students who are making fun of the internalized voices of their parents, feeling like they're never doing well enough at school. It's "oh, you got all A's? what about A pluses?"
David:Yeah, and the voices of our parents definitely become internalized as we get older, and they do shape our concept of success for good or for ill. It stands to reason that if success is becoming a bigger theme for children, and that's when those kids are living with caregivers, most often their parents, then the parents' metrics for their children's success will come to be the dominant metrics in the children's own mind when they are adults, and they will become the standard by which they self evaluate.
Ellie:I think that is fair to say. And I also think pointing out that it's often the immigrant parents who are really invested in success for their children has to do with the sense of needing to make it in a society where there is not already privileges built in, relative to maybe the, "you're doing amazing sweetie" parents who sometimes are the parents who are able to provide built in opportunities for their kids by virtue of connections in big cities with like family, friends, etc. But I also want to say that here we see a real slippage like in these internalized voices and in educational and parental expectations of what success looks like between people's understandings of success in an objective sense, like, "did you make top grades? Did you get into a school?" et cetera, and our personal feelings of success. Because I think one thing we constantly see in our society across a lot of different metrics, is that people who are by any standard successful, don't feel successful. Or at least don't feel successful enough.
David:Yeah. And so we might ask, what does it mean to feel successful? And I would perhaps propose that the feeling is a combination of pride, in particular pride in the self, in combination with a feeling of, again, having overcome an obstacle or difficulty. So for me, the feeling of success would be something like, pride in the self in the face of adversity.
Ellie:Okay, maybe almost as though the feeling of not being successful enough has to do with that internalized voice of, "why didn't you get the A+," but then the feeling of success could be the response to that internally. Like, "you know what? I actually killed it. And I was at the top of my class," or whatever it might be.
David:And it was hard. I think that's key. Yeah.
Ellie:Yeah, no, I think that point about adversity is right. I wonder, though, whether we would really want to say that the feeling of success is necessarily associated with pride, because I also think it could be a feeling of satisfaction. Like, after all, we're not always successful by virtue of our own merit alone, and so there might be situations where pride is inappropriate. So for instance, to use an example from my life, I was overjoyed when I got my job at Pomona in 2020. I just felt so good, but I had also been on the job market for a long time, and I knew I had been qualified for jobs that I didn't get, and also that other people had been just as qualified as I was for the Pomona job. So my joy at getting the job involved more relief, I would say, than pride. And in fact, when people like my sweet family members who don't work in academia, suggested that I should feel proud, it actually felt wrong.
David:Okay, I can definitely see that and I do the idea of satisfaction being a feeling that accompanies a lot of instances of success or maybe one that should accompany success. Maybe we can introduce a distinction here, because your example about being happy and joyful that you got this job maybe is connected to the fact that you had reason to expect that that was on the table for you, right? Like, you went to grad school in philosophy, you got a PhD, so a job in academia is the next step according to the traditional trajectory of that career path. And so, you had reason to believe that you could possibly get it, and that's what you wanted to get. And so here there is an expectation, and so when you succeed at meeting that expectation, that feeling is not quite pride, but rather relief that you didn't, not get that job. But when we're not necessarily expecting to succeed at something as a matter of course, but rather we're dealing with a situation where we went over and beyond what we expected of ourselves, I do think the feeling in those cases is not just relief or satisfaction, it really is pride. And so maybe you were relieved to get this job, because again, it kept you on the academic path, but I would venture, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Ellie, that you're not just relieved that you have a successful philosophy podcast with yours truly, you're actually proud of it. And it's because it represents you and I doing something that goes beyond what is common in our profession.
Ellie:Yeah, and overcoming adversity, for sure. And working our absolute asses off. Yeah. Anyway, there's a lot more we can say about that.
David:Yeah, I don't know. But the point here is that we often react to these feelings that are tied to success, whether that's relief or pride, with a celebratory attitude, right? and I think that's perfectly fine. I think it's okay for people to celebrate their achievements, even if those achievements are not merely the result of individual merit.
Ellie:I couldn't agree more. I love to celebrate achievements. I think appreciating when a slay is a slay is crucial.
David:Is slay a success, technically? Or is it just I did something that was very impactful?
Ellie:No, I do think a slay is a success. Maybe it's a success in cases where making an impact is the condition of achievement. If success means achieving something you attempted, then a slay means achieving an attempted impact.
David:Okay, I'm happy to agree with you on the nature of the slay. But one point to make is that I don't think we always experience the feeling of satisfaction or pride when we succeed at something, so the feeling doesn't always go with the reality.
Ellie:Yeah, exactly. That's how I started this whole line of conversation. So I'm glad you're bringing it up.
David:Yeah, and so you said we don't always experience pride, but I think we don't even experience relief in many cases. There are many instances where we experience our own success in largely ambivalent terms. And I find this quite interesting, actually, from a philosophical perspective, because I mentioned in the last episode that I recently started playing tennis again. And, I went to this tournament, I did very well, made it to quarterfinals. So that's a kind of success, in many ways. The feeling was actually bittersweet, because then I realized how much I had put tennis on the backburner, so the success came with this complementary feeling of regret at the same time, so very ambivalent. And another example of this ambivalence is just the internalization of that superego parental voice that you mentioned, Ellie. There are cases where we succeed, and we still might feel disappointed, or maybe not feel anything at all, in part because we have internalized the idea that what we have done is not enough, and that we ourselves are not enough. And to feel satisfied with one's station in life, obviously, is to feel like you have done enough, but that's really difficult for us humans to feel.
Ellie:Yeah, so there's a difference between, on the one hand, having your feelings of success mingle with other feelings that are, let's say, maybe more negative feelings, and, on the other hand, not having the feeling of success at all, because, let's say, you have this internalized voice like, this wasn't good enough, right? But I think this whole conversation reminds me a bit of the difference between what in psychology is known as satisficers versus maximizers.
David:Ooh.
Ellie:Satisficers are people who are satisfied when things are good enough, whereas maximizers are those who want things to be the best they possibly can be. This comes up a lot in the context of research on online dating, right? This idea that we're moving from a satisficing model to a maximizing model, but I think it can apply here as well.
David:Yeah, I would say I'm definitely a satisficer and not a maximizer.
Ellie:I would agree with that. although I don't actually know that we need to be one or the other. I think we can be satisficers in some areas, and maximizers in others, and what's more, I would actually say that we can simultaneously adopt both approaches. This is one of my main strategies in life, we might call it a life hack. Because I think one of the tricky parts of success is that the goalposts are always shifting. Like you might have big dreams, but the markers of success along the way only reveal themselves to you as you go along. So you think you'll be happy when you get the job as professor, then when you're there, you're like, "oh, I'll be happy when I get tenure." Then when you get tenure, you think you'll be happy when you retire, but the actual satisfaction always eludes you.
David:Yeah, we're never happy. This is what is known as the hedonic treadmill. We're always seeking further and further pleasures, but that's more really about happiness than about success, no?
Ellie:Yeah, for sure, but the reason I bring it up is because at each stage of achievement, I think it's important both to have one eye on moving forward, knowing that this is only one stage of your human life, but also to rest in appreciating the achievement. I think we can be satisficers and maximizers at the same time and success even within the same area, actually, like appreciating, "oh, this is good enough." And also, I have my eye on some further project. And success truly is being able to appreciate life while having one eye on the next goal at the same time.
David:This reminds me of the existential notion of success, which Beauvoir discusses in the Ethics of Ambiguity. She has this great line where she says, "there is an element of failure in all success." And I take her to mean that as humans, our projects are never quite finished. They're always open onto the future, and they're always haunted by nothingness or by lack of stability of meaning. And this is just what it means to be a human being.
Ellie:We're always on that satisfaction treadmill. Enjoying Overthink? Please consider supporting our podcast by joining our Patreon. We are a self supporting and independent podcast and as a supporter, you can help us cover our production costs, gain access to extended episodes and other bonus content, and also join our community of listeners on Discord. For more information, check out Overthink on patreon.com.
David:Is it OK to ever abandon your quest for success? And do you have to justify it to other people? We know that there are major costs to success in all areas of life. So take the example of professional success, which is the classical notion, right? Sometimes success in your career comes with a change in your professional role and title, which means increased responsibilities. You know, for a long time, we wanted to be tenured professors, but now we also have the responsibility of serving on all kinds of committees, doing all sorts of administrative work, so on and so forth.
Ellie:The royal we there, David. I don't have tenure yet.
David:Yeah, but you might soon, and so success also puts you, I would say, as a whole individual under more scrutiny, because you come to be seen as a representative or as a role model in the area in which you excel, and that definitely applies to you, Ellie, right? Like now you are a philosopher who is known largely through your YouTube and podcast work. And so it's possible that somebody might succeed and yet not want the cost of that level of visibility. And I would say that sadly, as a society, we definitely don't value people who don't succeed, but sometimes we value even less people who choose not to succeed because they don't want to pay the price of their success.
Ellie:Yeah, and this notion of what we value when we value the search for success has me thinking about a lot of American literature, because I think a lot of American literature and maybe art in general is about people's ways of dealing with not being successful. One of my favorite works of art is the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, which I think is a quintessentially American artwork. And this play, you might know from reading it in high school, a lot of us did, but it's like one of my dad's favorite plays, if not his favorite play. So I grew up very much with this, something I saw probably too early, something in discourse in our family. And it's about a loser con man, basically, who deludes himself and others into thinking he's successful, but who at bottom is a deeply tragic figure. Because this delusion can never really succeed. It's one of many examples, I think, of American artwork that depicts failure as the highest tragedy.
David:Yeah, and because our society encourage us all to have these absurdly wild dreams that are often, let's be honest, totally unrealistic, what ends up happening is that we're dealing with the feeling of failure at many points in our lives, right? The feeling of being a failure is practically ubiquitous. It's basically the fear of being a loser, like this con man from Miller's play.
Ellie:Yeah. And there's all this cheesy stuff online about how to avoid this, how to be successful, right? I don't know if it's like how not to be a loser, but it's effectively trying to help you not be a loser. Because, yeah, I do think that's like such a classic American fear. But one of the things I think actually helps reroute our ways of understanding away from this
success failure metric:there's a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that's maybe a little bit cliche at this point, but I think still really nice. You ready to hear it?
David:Yeah, I want to hear
Ellie:this. Okay, I'm just going to read it to you and to our listeners. It's called What is Success?"To laugh often and much. To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children. To earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty. To find the best in others. To give of oneself. To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition. To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation. To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
David:Can you repeat the title of the poem?
Ellie:What is success?
David:Okay, so that's what I thought because it's funny that the title is what is success, but then it lists all these things and then it says, this is to have succeeded in the past tense. And it reminds me of that ancient notion that you can never truly know whether an individual has lived a good life until well after they have died, because part of your legacy is the effects that your lives had on others, once you're no longer there. So it seems as if you don't succeed in life, you actually succeed in death.
Ellie:And the past tense is only used in the final line of the poem, because it begins with to laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children. So all of the other lines are in the present tense, except for this last line. And I think the poem, like I said, it's become a little bit cliche. It might have some live, laugh, love vibes today. But I think it has a good message because it encourages us to think about success in a more personal and affective way than in a social or external one, right? It's not about your accolades or your achievements. It's about what you actually did, how you actually spent your time. And then also in terms of your achievements, it's to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, rather than to have made the Fortune 500 list. Yeah. Something like that. You know what I mean?
David:I love that one of the conditions of success here is being backstabbed by haters and fake friends. It's if somebody has backstabbed you, who was a shitty person, you know you have succeeded as a human being.
Ellie:Yeah, you've endured the betrayal of false friends.
David:Yeah. I'm trying really hard to do that.
Ellie:I think, whether or not you agree with that, I think the point would be that you are engaging in your social world in a way that you're dealing with criticism, the approbation of critics, and also dealing with betrayal. And one thing that I also like about this poem is that it emphasizes that there's always going to be a core social element to success, even though success doesn't have to be measured by accolades or financial achievements, right? And so I think when we're talking about success, there is always going to be an external or objective element, at least. And this reminds me of the Confucian way of thinking about fulfilling one's roles and duties in life. So now we're talking about actual Confucian philosophy, not your brainyquote.com Confucius. Although, I had a really interesting conversation this spring with philosopher Jing Hu that we have on our YouTube channel, about why the term Confucian philosophy is in many ways like not that helpful a term. But she says in everyday parlance, let's continue to use it. So I really recommend our interview with Hu if you want to check that out on our YouTube channel. But even though success is not really a word that's thematized in what's known as Confucian philosophy, there are some concepts that I think are really helpful for thinking about success, particularly the ways that it might involve both a felt sense of satisfaction and a more external sense of living up to what's expected of you. There's an emphasis on the concept of Li in Confucian philosophy, L I, and I'm sorry for my like abysmal Americanized Chinese pronunciation. But to embody Li is to fulfill the roles that have been assigned to you, such as parent-child, elder friend-junior friend, or ruler-subject. And these social relationships in this worldview are where morality and spirituality flourish. So there's not a strong distinction between internal achievements, which are like spiritual or moral, and external achievements, which are social. So fulfilling one's role is really crucial in a lot of strands of Confucian philosophy. And Li, the term, is sometimes translated as civility, propriety, ritual, or the way things should be done, right? And so this is what it means, to embody Li is to fulfill your roles. But fulfilling your roles even though it has this external or even objective aspect to it, is highly dynamic. And so those terms are never going to really encapsulate what we're talking about, because you have to constantly negotiate how to perform your role in the world and figure out what's the most appropriate response in each case. And the goal here is another concept that is foregrounded in a lot of ancient Chinese philosophy, whether Confucian philosophy or also Daoist philosophy, and that's Wu Wei, which means effortless action or harmony. Rather than needing to agonize about what action to take in particular circumstances, you have a sense of flow, of embodying a dance and improvising some of its elements.
David:I like this combination of a felt sense of satisfaction with something like social etiquette. Maybe that would be also an appropriate term to use here. And I wonder how you think about this notion of effortless activity or effortless sense, in connection to our social lives, right? Because it does highlight the fact that success is a fundamentally social concept, because we succeed when we are seen by others as successful, and when we are remembered by others as having succeeded, right? You cannot be successful in a vacuum solely in terms of your own self perception. And so I think these strands of Confucian thinking do highlight that fundamentally social dimension that is at the core of success, that requires, not just an audience that sees you as successful or not successful, but that sets the norm for what success means in the first place in a particular cultural setting.
Ellie:Yeah, I think that's generally right, although there is also, important to this notion of wu wei, an idea of harmonizing with nature too, so it's not just about relative community standards, or even like universal community standards, but also with an adherence to what is right in a more fundamental sense. And one of the examples of this that comes up in the philosopher Zhuangzi's texts is that of Cook Ding. There's this cook named Cook Ding, who's like a master butcher. And Zhuangzi tells the story of Cook Ding cutting up an ox for Lord Wenghui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, Zhuangzi says, zip, zoop, this is a literal quote, he slithered the knife along with the zing and always in perfect rhythm. And Lord Wenghui looks at Cook Ding and says, imagine skill reaching such heights. And Zhuangzi uses this as an example of effortless action in everyday life. The simple act of a cook who knows exactly what he's doing. I'm sorry, David, as somebody who works on philosophy of animals, you are probably not very happy about the example being that of slaughtering an ox, or cutting up an ox, rather. But you can see, we can say cutting up broccoli, and there's just like a perfect sense of where the skin of the broccoli needs to be cut, where to chop, which I think speaks to the dynamic nature of this, right? Like Cook Ding is the most successful possible cook, but he is successful because he knows exactly how to respond in particular circumstances. Each ox, each broccoli is different, and yet he knows exactly how to respond in each moment to it.
David:So this would mean that success has a lot to do with effortlessly living up to a certain ideal of what you should be based on your office or your station in life. In this case, a butcher or a broccoli killer. And it reminds me of a different way that we often use the word success, which is not just to refer to people. But rather to refer to events or even things. for example, we sometimes say that a party was a success, and when we say that, we're not really suggesting that any one person or everybody enjoyed the party. We're rather saying something about the party itself. And it probably has to do with the fact that the party moved effortlessly. And so I wonder where we get the sense of events like a party being a success. It's not something that we can quite calculate or give a recipe for, like, five interactions with strangers. And I would say the same thing happens with art because we often also say that a work of art is either successful or unsuccessful. And I'm not sure what to think about that. But I do have an idea about Why we say that events are successful, and I do think it has to do with them being smooth and running without any hiccups, as in the case of a sporting event or a party, but also it has to approximate the cultural ideal of the event in question, much like the butcher is embodying the platonic ideal of the highly efficient butcher. I think the same thing applies to parties, that there is a comparison to a norm.
Ellie:Okay, I'm wondering how we would put this definition of success in dialogue with the dictionary definition of success earlier where, you said that success has to do with the achievement of certain goals and you added to that dictionary definition that you think success also requires overcoming obstacles. Because it strikes me that's actually quite absent from what you just said, right? There's an absence of hiccups in successful parties. And I think that can be true, but not necessarily. So I think if there is a hiccup in a party, but then it gets overcome, still very much can be a successful party. But we wouldn't say that a successful party requires the overcoming of obstacles in order to be successful. So I think I'm just noting that might be a difference between how we think about success in the workplace or in life in general, versus how we think about the success of an event.
David:Yeah, no, I think that's right. And it has to do with the fact that with events they have, it's a temporal conception of success, right? It's something succeeds for a certain period of time, whereas in the case of individuals, it doesn't have that temporal closure. And so I would say that an individual can be successful in relation to overcoming obstacles and hiccups, but maybe a party doesn't have to do that. Although I would say that if there's a huge hiccup and it's not overcome, then the party is not a success. So I don't know, I don't know where I fall on this.
Ellie:Okay, yeah, but I do take your point that a party is successful if it adheres to certain cultural ideals of what a party is. And we can say that for events in general, right? An exhibit is successful if a lot of people come to the opening night and then, a lot of paintings are sold or artworks are sold. An organizing meeting is successful if people attend, there are good discussions, and there are action plans coming out as a result of those discussions.
David:And I wonder whether then we might be able to say that the difference between the success of individuals and the success of events is that individuals succeed by overcoming obstacles, but events succeed once they have already avoided obstacles and they are the representation of that overcoming, right? By the time a good wedding happens, it's because everything that could have gone wrong didn't go wrong. So it's the culmination of having overcome.
Ellie:So far, we've established that people can be successful or unsuccessful, and so can parties or events, but something else that can be successful or unsuccessful is a theory, especially scientific theories. This is not my area at all, David, and so I'm really excited to talk to you about it because I suggested that we talk about. the success of theories on the podcast. And you were like, Oh my God, I was going to say the same thing. And you have all this research to bring to the table. So I'm relying on you for that because I didn't end up doing research on this on my own. How is the concept of success involved in disputes about scientific knowledge and practice?
David:So it's interesting that one of the branches of philosophy where the concept of success appears most explicitly is the philosophy of science. And there, the concept of success is at the center of this schism between two ways of thinking about science. And those are realism and antirealism, which are two philosophical stances about the relationship between science and reality. Now, the beef between these camps basically boils down to the following: we know that science is a highly reliable method for gathering, organizing, and generating knowledge about nature. And science does this by producing theories, scientific theories, that explain phenomena. So we have theories that explain gravity, we have theories that explain natural selection, theories that explain how, whatever, like neurons work, so on and so forth. And the thing about these theories is that they are shockingly successful, right? Like our theory of gravity helps us build planes that don't fall to the ground. Our theory of biological evolution helps us create medicines that cure conditions and don't kill us, so on and so forth. And so philosophers of science have been asking for multiple decades now, what is it that makes these theories successful? In virtue of what do they succeed? And it seems like the only way to answer that question is to say that these theories are, in some sense, true.
Ellie:And I take it that truthfulness here would be understood as correspondence to a state of affairs in reality, which is very familiar view from what philosophers call the correspondence theory of truth. Truth happens when we have a correspondence between our beliefs and actual state of affairs out there in the world.
David:Yeah, that's exactly the idea that there is almost like a mirroring relationship between our beliefs and the way the world is. And you might think, okay, if people agree that scientific theories explain phenomena, and that they are successful, and that therefore they must be true, what exactly is the issue here? Where is the philosophical disagreement? And it all really boils down to how we interpret the nature of scientific theories themselves. Because the antirealist camp holds that scientific theories are not really mirrors that we hold up to reality that reflect the true nature of things. Rather, they are constructions at one remove from the real. They are instruments or heuristics that are very helpful and very powerful, but they are not translucent reflections of reality itself. So here we might think about Thomas Kuhn, who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a representative of this. anti realist position where he says, look, it's not that science is getting closer and closer to a perfect picture of reality. Rather, science just gives us different paradigms, but neither of them is more true in an absolute sense. They just give us different questions and therefore different answers. And this is exactly where the realists come in with their rebuttal.
And usually they say something like this:"look, if scientific theories were just convenient instruments that we create to manipulate reality, but that don't actually match reality, then they shouldn't really work on practical terms as well as they do. But the fact that our theories are so successful, must necessarily mean that they must in some way mirror reality, because otherwise, why should we expect them to actually be efficient?" And this argument has been called by some people like the philosopher Hilary Putnam, the miracle argument, which basically says that you have to be a realist. about science because otherwise you turn the success of science into some weird miracle that we cannot explain otherwise.
Ellie:Analytic philosophers love to come up with a name of an argument. Miracle argument, I thought we were going in a Humean direction there, but this is a different kind of argument about miracles than Hume's argument against miracles. So would you say that this miracle argument is widely accepted in philosophy of science? And how would an anti realist respond to this?
David:Issue that anti realists are having a real difficulty addressing this "miracle" argument, which, is compelling to say, it clearly works, so it must be true. And to be honest, many of the answers that antirealists have given to this miracle argument are very technical and sometimes not super satisfactory. And realists often feel like this is their bulletproof argument against antirealism. Now, the problem for the realists is that their position that theories are successful because they are true also has a bunch of weaknesses of its own. So really neither position is immune from criticism. So for example, one issue that realists face Is that, as you point out, Ellie, they are working with something like a correspondence theory of truth, which has been widely critiqued in epistemology, in the philosophy of mind, in the philosophy of language, over the past century. So it commits you to something that a lot of philosophers consider to be a very naive understanding of how truth works. The other problem with the realist position that science is just giving us a photograph of reality is that it seems to ignore history, in particular the history of science. And you're right that analytic philosophers of science love to name an argument, to christen it in a way, and this argument about history is called the argument from metainduction. So it's less cute than the miracle one, but it basically goes like this: we know that basically 99 percent of our scientific theories have been rejected, over time. And so chances are that whatever theory we happen to embrace in the present will be either rejected outright, or reformed beyond recognition in the future, right? There is no way that our current scientific theories will not undergo some kind of evolution moving forward. And so if we know that our current theories will be overcome and they will become obsolete, can we really say with any degree of confidence that they are true with a capital T? And so there seems to be a kind of presentism or a kind of historical amnesia that happens when realists say, Oh, look, you guys, our theories now really are a translucent picture of the real.
Ellie:And this is a point that comes up in a lot of philosophical discussions around truth. Like the pragmatist notion of truth, for instance, is often accused of suggesting that, because we only found out that the Earth revolves around the sun at a certain point in time, the earth actually only started revolving around the sun at that point. But this strikes me as a broader point about scientific falsifiability as well, right?
David:Yeah, no, you're right. I think it speaks to the commitment that scientists have to saying things that are either true or false, or at least in principle falsifiable, right? That some beliefs about the world can be proven false by experimentation. And I think if we pan out just from this particular debate between realist and anti realists about the success of scientific theories, we get to a larger debate. about the relationship between philosophy and science, and the role that success plays in the relationship between the two. Because a number of people have said that one of the big differences between science and
philosophy is precisely that:that science creates theories that are either successful or not, i. e. falsifiable, whereas philosophers create theories that are just not subject to the same standard, right? Philosophical theories are not the sort of thing of which we could say that they either succeed or don't succeed because we don't have the same kind of connection to objective reality or even to the notion of scientific progress.
Ellie:Yeah, I would just say that I think philosophy can be successful, or at least more or less successful. So I don't buy this idea that just because philosophy may or may not be different in kind from the natural sciences, it doesn't have success criteria. one thing I think about in terms of philosophical success is, do concepts that philosophy generates help us to make sense of human experience? not because they "map on" to some external reality, right? Or develop a perfectly coherent account of the world. But I do think that there are concepts that can really help us understand our human experience. And one of my hopes as a philosopher is to contribute to those discussions and, to help people in that way. Of course, there are also successful questions that we can ask, right? Like good questions, I think have success criteria as well. Logic has success criteria. So the idea that philosophical theories can't be successful or unsuccessful because they don't have the same falsifiability criteria as empirical or natural sciences, just seems overly narrow to me. And I would even venture to speculate that it might have to do with the legacy of positivism. Maybe coming out of pragmatism, but maybe pragmatism we want to exempt here, which is very deeply tied to notions of truth as productivity in a much more narrow, even capitalist sense, than what I'm talking about, which is as like creative potential, helping us understand our human experience.
David:No, you're right. And that's a really great point because it points to at least two conceptions of success, right? One, and the one that is operative in the philosophy of science in connection to scientific theories, is success over other competitors, right? Where we can say that this theory is successful because it beat other theories by being true, where those other ones turned out to be false. But in the case of the Deleuzian proliferation of concepts, it's not that this concept is successful because it is more true than another. Rather, it is successful because it illuminates aspects of our experience of the world, without it necessarily entailing competition or defeat of alternatives. And so I think that's really the kernel of the difference here. And this way of thinking about success as illumination it still ties success to something positive, to aiding us. And that's how the philosopher William Desmond understands the relationship between success and philosophy in an article that he published called Philosophy and Failure. So using the opposite of success in the title. And he says that philosophy helps us understand precisely the failures that are constitutive of the human condition. So think about the fact that so many philosophers reflect upon death, right? In their writings, from the ancients to the existentialists. And that's because death represents a failure. It represents the fact that being fails us in the form of finitude. We fail to be when we die. And philosophy can help us make sense of this inevitable fact of our existence by making us come to terms with this. Philosophy can also help us understand the failures of the human mind, like the limits of, the human apparatus of reason, which is something that you see, for example, with, Kant's idealist philosophy. Or even with Schopenhauer's idea that we just can't ever defeat the will. The will is something that dominates us. And so philosophy succeeds precisely by focusing in on the failures that define what it means to be a human.
Ellie:I do think certainly philosophy can help console us in times of failure, but perhaps that's for a different episode. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live Q and A's and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info. Go to overthinkpodcast. com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.
