BELIEFS AND HABITS, BELIEFS VS. HABITS: I’ve been thinking the past few days about a particular philosophic conceit (not necessarily one that is shared by many philosophers, but it is a conceit borne of philosophy): that getting at the meaning of life, or finding happiness, is in the main, if not entirely, about having the right beliefs. Thus one needs to know how the world is really, or what morality really demands of us, in order to find fulfillment in life.

Stated baldly, perhaps, this is obviously wrong. There is more to life than having the right set of beliefs, there are also having the material conditions of life, the social conditions, etc. But I think beneath this, the philosophical conceit says that none of these things will be sufficient if one has false beliefs about the world, about morality, even about the meaning of life itself.

Consider another picture, that puts priority not on what one believes, but how one lives. I would put this by saying that having the right set of habits – no matter what one believes about the nature of the universe, about God, about morality, even about the meaning of life – may be the key thing in whether your life is in fact a fulfilling one (or at least perceived by you to be fulfilling; I’ll put off “objective” measurement of fulfillment for another day). What you believe, on this picture, is secondary, and perhaps not relevant at all. If you lack a certain sort of upbringing, and a certain sort of structure in your day to day life, the right beliefs will be impotent.

This might be read as the point of some recent work on “virtue ethics.” But we should be clear. There is theoretical virtue ethics, which works on trying to analyze what right action consists in. The verdict of virtue ethics here would be something like morality consists in behaving as the virtuous agent does, rather than acting according to the moral law, or maximizing pleasure. The virtue ethicists may be right about this, but this is mostly a theoretical matter.

But there’s also practical virtue ethics. I find that most writing about this type of virtue ethics is in self-help books, where you are told what habits you need to get into, what you actually need to do, to live a meaningful life. How rare it is that one will read a theoretical text on virtue or morality and be moved to change how one actually lives day to day. Now, one may remain unmoved by any number of self-help books, and there assuredly are some very bad ones, but there is no question that the aim of these books is to change the way you live your life – and the best of the genre work on changing your habits, not your beliefs. If they write about what beliefs you should have, my sense is that this writing is merely instrumental: that you can throw away the those beliefs once you have successfully habituated yourself.

Andrew Solomon, in his great book on depression, “The Noonday Demon,” makes a similar point, I think: what seems to shake people out of depression is not some particular religion, or some particular mode of therapy, or even some drug (though he acknowledges in many cases the right medication will be a condition of getting better). Rather, what seems to help is routine and structure of almost any sort, even of the most absurd sort – such as taking one’s pills in exactly the right order, and going to all sorts of complicated calculations to find just the right amount of medicine x. This would be a surprising result if we felt that right beliefs should come prior to habits. Here habituation seems to be the key no matter what the underlying belief.

This may also explain why writers, who have little structure in their day, can be so prone to depression and feelings of meaninglessness. And perhaps it may show why having even a less than fulfilling job will still make one happy, to the extend that the job becomes something that gives form to one’s day: that one is not just left drifting. Some philosophers talk about how “action” is prior to “thought.” Could this be part of what they mean? And do their own lives – lives dedicated to thought – betray this deeper insight about thought and action?

- posted by Chad @ Friday, September 26, 2003