The Rational Person

4 May 2022

This blog is the direct result of the entry for 22 April in The Daily Stoic (Holiday & Hanselman, 2016, p. 124).  This blog also marks two years of regular posts with great thanks to the many readers who have responded with encouragement, questions, and comments. 

The Daily Stoic post identified three attributes of a rational person: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination.  What Holiday & Hanselman did not do was identify rationality itself as a virtue.  While I am a lifelong Aristotelian, I am not going to dig deep into Aristotle’s metaphysics, epistemology, or even his invention of logic, to justify the necessity of reason, but I will state this: A is A and syllogistic reasoning has built buildings, cities, legal structures, moonshots, medicine, and the arts from the pre-Socratics forward i.e., it works for me!

With rationality accepted, as the primary means of human knowledge, let’s look at the other three ideas in terms of building a good life.  Holiday & Hanselman expand on self-awareness stating that “...we must look inward.”  This goes to the heart of my understanding of both addiction and health: we come into life equipped with individual attributes: a character, a past, and a memory.  How we relate those three attributes dictates how our lives unfold. 

Heraclitus maintained that A man’s character is his daemon (Fragment CXXI).  However spelled, some readers will recall the word eudaimonia sometimes used as a preferred version of the modern idea of happiness.  In Greek, eu is well, and daimon is spirit, or in this tense, spirited.  As such, if character is spirit, our wellness is dependent on the nature of our own behaviour.

If a person behaves in ways that make her glad to be herself, it is likely she will be eudaimonic or well-spirited; able to meet life’s challenges with a reasonably optimistic objectivity and good will.  Per The Daily Stoic, this means being self-aware, self-examining, and self-determining.  Self-awareness is a mega-concept because it quickly slides into the search for the location of consciousness (neuropsychology) which is closely related to issues in philosophy of mind.  I want to steer away from these and view these three means of self-auditing as actions we can choose to do—or not do.

A person with self-awareness (it must be measured on a sliding scale) almost has to be self-examining.  That is, if you are sufficiently confident and present, you can look at your own life and actions reflectively, hoping to see these honestly but with self-compassion.  To be self-aware, in a mostly self-critical mode, would be difficult to cope with so we are almost certainly dealing with people driving upward-directed vectors i.e., people who (accurately) see their lives as moving in a positive direction.  Now let’s add The Daily Stoic’s third point: self-determination, or the ability to course correct, setting our direction based on chosen values.  While I think I agree, I am aware that this tidy state of affairs is the polar opposite of consciousness during active addiction.

To be in active addiction, is to be obsessed with an addictive behaviour because that (now harmful) behaviour once made me feel better—or at least lessened the negative feelings—so I could cope with my daily pain.  How much self-awareness exists in this perspective?  It is impossible to know.  If the pain, resulting from the stress and/or trauma that caused it, is of sufficient intensity, there is a perspective from which reaching for a bottle, a pipe, or a needle is at least understandable.  Unrelenting pain will bleed the life out of anyone. If addictive behaviour stops the pain...

Interestingly, there is a negative proof of concept in this argument.  If addiction is my way of life, my self-awareness is thwarted by my need to control my pain.  If my self-awareness is absent or denied, self-examination is going to be studiously avoided and self-determination is not considered beyond the means of gaining money and addictive fuel.  Part of the reason for low self-awareness is societal.  As a society we have typically treated those with addictive behaviours as pariahs, stigmatizing the people, the behaviours, and the culture.  And that’s one of SMART Recovery’s strengths: most contemporary addictive therapy seeks to allow the person with those behaviours to see her strengths—which are always there—and to let the self-destructive thoughts and behaviours go.

So what do we make of The Daily Stoic’s April 22^nd offering?  I did not realize this at the outset, but these are habits that can either enhance a well-orchestrated life or begin the turnaround of, for example, an addictive life.  I am thinking of the 12 steps.  By admitting our choice, in using addiction as a coping mechanism, we’re essentially going through Step 1, We admitted we were powerless over our DoC — that our lives had become unmanageable.  Self-examination is the essence of Step 4, Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  Where SMART and the 12-steps part ways are in the means and culture of self-determination: the 12-steppers rely more on G-d, per individual understandings of G-d, while SMARTies rely on rationality, connectedness, and values. 

With that understanding, the self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination of The Daily Stoic’s rational person looks about right.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the BCC’d emailing list.

References

Holiday, R. & Hanselman, S. (2016). The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living.  Portfolio/Penguin.

Patrick, G. T. W. (Tr.). (2013). The Fragments of Heraclitus.  Digireads.