Abstract:

This talk considers the importance of appreciating, and not merely liking or wanting, goods like beauty and excellence, developing Platonic and Murdochian themes in conjunction with an emotional state account of happiness. Previously I posited attunement--roughly, tranquility, confidence or poise, and expansiveness of spirit--as a central aspect of happiness. Attunement is conceived as an emotional response to conditions of security, where one feels psychically "at home" in one's environment. Its negative counterpart, disattunement, is a kind of psychological alienation.

Here I want to distinguish a related form of attunement, one that has to do with our relationship to the world: whether, for instance, we regard the world merely as a vehicle for personal gratification--as consumers, as economists use the term--or rather through the lens of appreciation--as something of value in its own right, mattering regardless of any interests they might serve. In the fitting appreciation of things, I suggest, we bring ourselves into alignment with the world's goodness--its beauty, for instance--and hence a kind of external or relational attunement. Relational attunement, I will suggest, is a core feature of meaning in life, and is closely linked to psychic or emotional attunement.