Review of The Well-Rounded Life. By Amy Berg. Princeton University Press. 237 pp. $27.95.
In his iconic treatise, Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill claimed that deploying “the higher faculties” was superior to pleasures involving “mere sensation,” which he attributed to an “infirmity of character.”
According to Amy Berg, a professor of philosophy at Rice University, Mill was “wrong, both descriptively and prescriptively.” In The Well-Rounded Life, Berg makes a thought-provoking and compelling case that people who tap both kinds of pleasure and balance them appropriately tend to be more socially connected, resilient, and happier.
Berg acknowledges, however, that well-roundedness is more difficult to achieve for some of us, including the working poor, mothers with small children, and socioeconomically elite men who believe that work is the place to find meaning and fulfillment.
That said, Berg cites a study conducted by a team of psychologists, in which 83 percent of participants described their ideal lives as a balance between work and leisure, with the latter including time spent with family, participation in religious activities, and learning new things.
Being well-rounded, Berg writes, allows us to do justice to our multiple skills, potential talents, and interests, and to “achieve a balance” between and among them. It facilitates the development of relationships, casual and intense, with a diverse set of people, be they bakers, potters or cyclists. Well-roundedness allows us to avoid what psychologists call “the hedonic treadmill,” stimulated by the “same-old, same-old” sets of experiences.
A commitment to well-roundedness also generates opportunities for fruitful cross-pollination. Compared to other scientists, Berg reveals, Nobel Laureates are seven times more likely to be visual artists, sculptors or printmakers; 12 times more likely to write poetry, plays, essays, and books; 22 times more likely to dabble in acting, dance, and magic. Sometimes, Berg speculates, the skills at play in one domain prove to be transferable to another one.
Even being bad at a hobby, she points out, has an upside. It can relieve stress from a demanding job. It can be fun. And in what Berg calls “silver linings perfectionism,” it can develop character when we bump up against the limits of our skills.
To be sure, well-roundedness requires trade-offs. But Berg maintains that ambivalence about choices between competing options “is a sign of a healthy, functioning person.” She encourages anyone who is convinced, for example, that finding a cure for cancer must be his or her life’s work to internalize the value of the space occupied by “playing the oboe, learning to pole vault, or teaching preschool.” And to recognize that, alas, “it is rarely the case” that sacrificing a casual interest will free up the time to write The Great American Novel. For this reason, Berg confesses that she herself “errs on the side of choosing well-being over meaning.”
For most of us, Berg concludes, life “is not as unified”—or as exemplary—as it is in an obituary or a biography. And she encourages her readers not to spend too much of their time “trying to live up to a great story,” i.e., a decision to pursue a goal, the achievement of that goal, and the arc of sacrifices redeemed. All too often, this approach sets conditions that allow far too few of us to clear the bar.
Berg understands that “sometimes we have to put the B plots on the back burner so the A plot can cook.” But she insists as well that most lives “don’t revolve around one or more central projects.” And that accomplishments “that reach the heights of meaning may be out of reach for the ordinary well-rounded person.”
Most importantly, Berg emphasizes that the necessity of making life-changing choices “isn’t only a reason for gloom: it’s a way to learn what really matters to each of us, what kind of life we want to live, what kind of person we want to be.”