Dr. Erin Stackle: Happiness and Traditions of Thinking (Part 1 of 2)
One of the things I am looking forward to as I continue to develop this blog is getting to interview some of my favorite people. Every couple of months I am going to post an interview with someone who is wise, insightful, or interesting. Fortunately, for this first interview, I have found someone who is all three.
Dr. Erin Stackle is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. She completed her undergraduate studies at Gonzaga University, and her doctoral studies at Boston College. She focuses her study and teaching on the work of Aristotle, Plato, and 20th-century phenomenology.
I have had the pleasure of taking Dr. Stackle both of the previous two semesters and am looking forward to taking her class next semester titled, "Is Faith Compatible with Reason?"
Traditions of Thinking
Ian: Dr. Stackle, thank you for joining me today. I want to start by asking you, how did you come to be a philosophy professor at Loyola Marymount University? Why Loyola, and why philosophy?
Dr. Stackle: When I was an undergraduate, I was in an honors program. The summer before we began our freshman year we had a reading list on which was Plato’s Gorgias. That was the first time I had ever read any philosophy, and I found myself struck when reading it that people asked these kinds of questions. I had in the back of my mind thought about things like that, but I didn’t know that there was any place where people actually did this. I was intrigued on the basis of reading that.
Gonzaga’s core requires, as ours ought, four philosophy classes. I took those and two additional classes to get a philosophy minor. I liked philosophy and was interested by the conversations, but at that point I was already head over heels in love with literature and chemistry, and did not have sufficient attention to spare.
I had come into college convinced that I should be a doctor. My father is a physician and my mom is a nurse. There are a lot of medical people in my family. I went to medical school thinking that all of the intellectual interests I had could be integrated into my work in medicine. I could supplement my medical work with reading on the side. When I got into medicine, I discovered that it is a very practical discipline. Even though physicians know many things about the body and illnesses, they know very little systematically. A lot of medical knowledge is based on statistical correlation—like noting that when people are wrapped in blankets when they are cold, things go better.
I have a mind, and I discovered this very clearly when studying medicine, that really likes systematic answers. I want to understand why, to understand the causes of things, and medicine is not a discipline that allows for that. A patient comes in with back pain. You try to guess what exactly the back pain is and what is causing it. You try to find out what the patient has been doing. You take your best guess, and you make a decision and send the patient away.
You often never hear if what you suggested worked. That was very dissatisfying for me. I realized that I needed to find some kind of work that used the systematic thinking that is natural to the way my mind works. The more that I engaged in thinking about what that would be and talking to people about it, the more I realized the kinds of questions I want to know are answered by philosophy. I thought for a while about going into chemistry or physics. But, even those disciplines ultimately have to turn to philosophy for answering the fundamental causal questions.
Once I realized that, I applied to graduate programs and, by the grace of God, got into a few. I went to Boston College. Before I finished, I saw this ad for a job at LMU teaching specifically Aristotle. Most job ads are more generally phrased than that. Somehow, I just felt like this was my job. Despite not having a completed dissertation, I applied for the job, and it went well. I then rapidly finished my dissertation and came here.
Ian: You mentioned that philosophy is natural to the way your mind works. I assume that you would not say that philosophy is natural to the way everyone’s mind works. Do you have some suggestions for how to figure out what is natural to the way one’s own mind works?
Dr. Stackle: One of the things I love about liberal arts education is that you get exposed to a lot of different ways of intellectually engaging the world. There are all of these long traditions of ways of thinking about reality, most of which we have not been exposed to before coming to college. Even if we took a history class in high school, we often have not looked at the world as history scholars look at the world. By being in a liberal arts school where you are encouraged to take courses involving different ways of intelligently seeing the world, you get a chance to bring your mind into conversation with different traditions of conversation, and that gives you one way of figuring out which ones captivate you or which ones make you feel newly alive.
One of the things I worry about with people who come in with a strong determination of what they are majoring in is that they do not have the leisure or the luxury of seeing how their minds work. Sometimes, you do just fortuitously get the thing that you loved from the beginning. I know a lot of people come into, say, our film school having already experimented with film and deciding that that is the thing they are in love with. A number of those students, though, as they take various courses here, realize that they would rather do classics, and they end up switching. If they had instead gone to a school that was just a film school, they would find themselves ten years later not that satisfied but not knowing there are other options.
I think it is very hard when you are caught up in one way of engaging the world to realize what other ways there are. You work to optimize based on what you know, and if you do not know that something else that is better is out there, you never make a change.
The same thing happens with relationships. You date someone, and there are things that annoy you. You put up with them, because you assume at some level that this is the best that you could possibly get. Then, when you meet another person, you realize, “Oh! All this time I was putting up with this unnecessary unhappiness, and I had no idea that this other level was even possible.” I think the same thing is true of ways of looking at and seeing the world. You do not even understand that there is a way that your mind might be more alive and activated. And habit keeps you grounded in what you know. It takes a lot of courage to consider leaving what is familiar.
Happiness
Ian: That transitions into our next topic. I am taking a class from you right now on Aristotle and the Nichomachean Ethics. We are examining topics such as the purpose of our lives, happiness, and how we achieve them. How should we think about happiness when we are trying to determine what we should practically do with our lives? To what degree should we be focused on happiness when making these decisions?
Dr. Stackle: One of things I like about the way Aristotle opens his book is that he points out that we are already always thinking about happiness. Whether we are paying attention to it or not, we are always motivated in the things we do by what we think is our highest end. We are just often wrong about what our highest end is. To the degree that we would prefer to be right, and I take everyone to actually prefer being right, it seems like we really do have to take seriously the question of what our highest good is and carefully consider that.
This is one of the reasons that I love that we require all of our LMU students to study ethics philosophically by taking a course in ethics. Almost all of the philosophical ethics classes require people to read part of Aristotle’s book. Then, they at least ask themselves the question, “What are my activities directed toward?”
A lot of times it can seem daunting to accomplish everything all at once, but if you think of your activities as being organized in a kind of hierarchy, I think it helps to see that everything you are doing is directed toward your currently operating highest good. If you can change the way that you see what your highest good ought to be, you can figure out what the hierarchy is going down. It is of course extraordinarily tricky when you are trying to convert from seeing the world one way to seeing the world another way.
Ian: This raises the question, “How should we begin to transform the way we see the world and pursue the highest good we ought to be pursuing?” How are we to attain ultimate happiness when we don't currently have it or know exactly what it should feel like?
Dr. Stackle: It seems like you always have a kind of internal gauge, but it is very hard to distinguish between that internal gauge of satisfaction with your life and the immediate gratification that comes from getting what you think you want. One thing that can be helpful is to at least recognize that those two things are not the same. See if you can figure out ways to attend to the ways that you are or are not satisfied by your life in the midst of the constant calculation that you are doing to maximize pleasure, which is what motivates most people’s actions.
When you are about to do something, you are motivated by what you think is going to get you what you most want, what is going to get you what you take to be your highest good. I propose that in these situations, you consider that you might be wrong. Attend instead to whether this activity you are about to do is the kind of thing that usually works in social situations. Consider what the likely consequences are for your honor. For your friends. Consider whether you might actually want more from the situation than you are currently aiming to get. Consult deeper desires than the ones that are directing your current habitual actions. I think this opens a little bit of a space for you to pay more attention to how you can actually engage in a more satisfying way. I think a lot of the power to change your life lies in these little openings—these interruptions—in the midst of your regular activities. It opens a space for reason to more effectively guide you. For people who pray, praying for guidance in those openings can be very helpful. Since the actions you choose shape the person you habitually are, making better choices in the spaces created by these interruptions makes you better, or to put it in other words, more satisfied.
Ian: On that note, is there a possibility of focusing too much on becoming perfectly virtuous? Is there a risk of focusing too much on the potential of ultimate happiness and not enjoying the actual life you are currently living? How do you balance trying to achieve your highest good while also enjoying life in the moment and not sacrificing the time you have been given?
Dr. Stackle: I think that if the things that you are doing are, in fact, the things that are more virtuous and more consistent with your happiness, you will enjoy them more. I do not think there is a conflict between enjoying your life more and being more attentive to ways that you can be more virtuous.
I do think that there are ways that people can think of it as “I have to fix myself and until I fix myself, I am not going to enjoy anything.” Usually, when they do that, it is a very notional thing. They are thinking that they have to fix themselves because someone else said so or, in principle it must be right. They are doing things that they are not really enjoying in part because they have not trusted that these really are things that actually are making their lives richer.
Some of my students are working on character conversion projects this semester, including you. Some of them are already noticing the ways in which their lives are getting easier and richer in the small ways that they are able to have improved so far. They see, “Oh, in this situation, I did not drink seven beers in a row, and I actually enjoyed my friends’ company more than the times when I have.”
I think if Aristotle is right about what actually satisfies us, then as we do it more, it must satisfy us more and make our lives go better.