Telic/atelic

Following up Michael's report and the phenomenon of losing passion for activities when we begin to study and practice them formally, Kieran Setiya's discussion of Aristotle's distinction between the telic and atelic…

"We are always engaged in activities both telic and atelic. I am writing a book about the human condition—which I hope to finish—and I am thinking about the ways in which life is hard, an activity that has no end. You may be teaching your kid to tie their shoelaces—hoping they'll figure it out—but you are also parenting. The question is not which of the two you are doing but what you value. Dostoevsky's argument is that the value lies in atelic activities: in the process, not the project. That is what the Bhagavad Gita seems to say: "motive should never be in the fruits of action" means "do not invest in the completion of telic activities"; if one values only the process, one will still act but "fulfillment / and frustration [will] be the same." I think that goes too far: outcomes matter. Does your kid learn to tie their own laces? Does the doctor save a life? It makes a difference whether or not they do. Still, we are prone to care too much about telic activities—about the completion of projects—and to miss the value of the process. When we do that, we negate the present moment and set ourselves up to fail. 

With telic activities, satisfaction is always in the future or the past. Your ambition is unfulfilled, and then it's over. Worse, your engagement with what you value is self-destructive. When you pursue a cherished goal, you aim to succeed, and so to end your engagement with something good. It's as though you're trying to destroy a source of meaning in your life. Meanwhile, it's projects like this that expose you to the risk of failure. You blow the interview for your dream job, mismanage your team, betray your ambition. 

When you value the process, your relation to the present, and to failure, is quite different. Because they do not aim at terminal states, atelic activities are not exhaustible. Your engagement with them does not annihilate them. You can stop walking, or thinking, or talking to someone you love, but you can't exhaust those activities, leaving no more to be done. The other side of inexhaustibility is expressed by Aristotle when he insists, perhaps confusingly, on the "completeness" of atelic activities: "At the same time, one is seeing and has seen, is understanding and has understood, is thinking and has thought." Atelic activities are realized in the present as much as they can ever be realized. If you value thinking and you are doing just that, you have what you value right now. Nothing you have done, or will do, can imperil this. 

Aristotle's insight was that living well is atelic: "But if you are learning, you have not at the same time learned, 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." Myshkin, for instance, whose failures are hedged by the fact that he is living as he should, whatever the results. 

We should follow Myshkin, insuring ourselves against failure through the value of the atelic. There are parts of life in which projects play a secondary role. We don't spend time with those we love in order to divide the labor more efficiently as we cook, complete a puzzle more quickly, or watch Fleabag on TV. We cook and do puzzles and watch TV together as a way of spending time with those we love. But even where projects loom large, as often in education and working life, in politics and society, chances are the process matters, too, unchained from failure or success. This value is easy to miss..."

— Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya