The Nature of Chickens

Reflections on "productivity" from Cal Newport, Josef Pieper, and Minty the hen

Minty the hen, hard at work

This comes belatedly to you from Boston, where I’ve arrived (improbably via San Francisco) to teach the annual The Machine Has No Tradition seminar. It’s lovely to visit the USA, but travel scrambles the schedule! With due apologies for the delay, what follows continues recent reflections on how we shape practices of work and attention, or have them shaped for us, in relation to the prevailing technological and philosophical environment.

So far I’ve explored the limitations of “grindset” as a sustainable structure for flourishing, detoured into how digital media shape our thoughts, and asked whether there’s a moral dimension to this formative power, especially in its sometimes calculatedly addictive and distracting operations. Having arrived there, I reflected that it’s difficult to write about the effect of technology without coming up against the solvent effect its operation has on the forms of things. But we’re so far into the dissolving that forms as such are scarcely available as ideas, unless we retrieve key concepts from the medieval philosophy that preceded our technological moment to help us do so.

In the course of following this line of thought, I read (among others) Georgetown professor Cal Newport’s 2016 Deep Work. I recommend this book to any of my readers who is after practical advice on regaining the space and capacity for sustained deep concentration. In it the author outlines the neurology of deep concentration, its vital necessity for reflection, inspiration, and creativity, and the way it’s impeded by the distraction-filled busy-ness typical of contemporary “knowledge work”. He argues that sustained focus can be cultivated, by minimising distractions such as social media, carving out blocks of uninterrupted time, and dedicating time to non-work activities to allow for mental rest and refreshment.

This is all good, wise, sensible stuff and rings true to me personally. I also agree enthusiastically with his assertion that focused deep work feels vastly more meaningful and rewarding than distracted busy-ness. But, reading the book, something about its wider framework bothered me. I couldn’t put it into words - until reader

Seth Grube

recommended a 1948 essay by the German Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, for its discussion of the “noonday demon”. I was surprised to find this essay, titled Leisure, the Basis of Culture, also clarified what was missing in Cal Newport’s contemporary work - and something I’d been grappling with in the post on “grindset”. That is, a stubborn agnosticism on the question: what should I concentrate on, and why?

Writing just after two twentieth-century European wars, Pieper asks: are we going to rebuild in the Western tradition? To do so, he argues, necessitates preserving the core of that tradition: a contemplative state of being he calls “leisure”. Pieper sets this against what he presciently identified as the post-war direction of travel, toward a society of “total work”, ordered only to production and utility.

To clarify this distinction, Pieper takes aim at the very concept that forms the basis for Newport’s book: the idea of “knowledge work”. He argues that this contains within it a fatal collapse into one, of what are in fact two distinct types of thought, as understood by the ancients. For the Greeks, and later medieval Christian thinkers such as Aquinas, thought was composed of effortful discursive reasoning - ratio - in combination with a more receptive perception of truths that are simply there: intellectus. Ancients and medievals alike saw intellectus as both a human capacity but also “beyond the sphere allotted to man” ,in its quality of reaching-out toward “the order of pure spirits”. Pieper quotes Aquinas as describing this faculty as “a sort of participation in the simple knowledge which is proper to higher beings”.

And as Pieper argues, to employ ratio is “work” - sometimes very hard work - but intellectus is not:

Knowledge in general, and more especially philosophical knowledge, is certainly quite impossible without work, without the labor improbus of discursive thought. Nevertheless there is also that about it which, essentially, is not work.

And thus, he argues, when we speak of a “knowledge worker”, what we are implicitly doing is flattening our understanding of what “knowledge” is. We’ve reduced it from the composite of effortful, discursive ratio and contemplative, perceiving intellectus, to the first of these alone. Pieper particularly blames Kant for encouraging the belief that follows from this, namely that “herculean labour” is required to obtain any valuable knowledge. The whole domain of thought is thus annexed for ratio, effortfulness, and productivity - while any insight which is simply right there is rendered worthless by virtue of its simplicity.¹

Pieper draws on Aquinas to argue further that if we view as valuable only the effortful aspect of thought, thought itself comes adrift from orientation toward the good - because, as Aquinas says, “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult.” The good may be difficult, but is not necessarily so; what’s difficult may be good, but is likewise not necessarily so.

In what, then, does the good consist? I’m being a little unfair to Cal Newport in suggesting he should have an answer to this. Deep Work is about productivity, after all, not virtue ethics. But only a little unfair: if you’re enjoining people to develop a capacity for deep focus, then shouldn’t you have at least something to say on the broader moral framework within which that becomes valuable?

By now, the implicit critique of “grindset” should be becoming clearer. For Aquinas, per Pieper, being virtuous - pursuing the good - means “mastering our natural bent”, which is to say in the broadest sense what is given us to do and be. That’s partly organismic, and partly personality-based, meaning there are aspects to our “natural bent” that we share with other humans, and some which are distinct to us. But for Aquinas, and Pieper, we have such a “bent”; we flourish when living and working in accordance with it, and rebel against this at our peril.

This relation between ease, effort, nature, and virtue is easier to see when observing non-human animals. There’s an obvious ease and joyfulness, for such creatures, in being themselves. Watching our hens scratch and peck, for example, they never stop working. It’s effortful in a sense, but it’s also clear that in doing this work (scratching and pecking) they are being what they are. There’s a feeling of ineffable rightness about the rummaging and foraging. Just look at that picture at the top of this post, of Minty the hen: have you ever seen a creature more fully occupied in being herself?