What is Flourishing?

Introduction

Flourishing, or human flourishing, is the complete goodness of humans in a developmental life-span, that somehow includes positive psychological functioning and positive social functioning, along with other basic goods.

The term has gained more usage and interest in recent times, but is rooted in ancient philosophical and theological usages. Aristotle’s term eudaimonia is one source for understanding human flourishing. The Hebrew Scriptures, or the Old Testament, also speak of flourishing, as they compare the just person to a growing tree. Christian Scriptures, or the New Testament, build upon Jewish usage and speak of flourishing as it can exist in heaven. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas drew from Aristotle as well as the Bible, and utilised the notion of flourishing in his philosophical theology. More recently, the Positive Psychology of Martin Seligman, Corey Keyes, Barbara Fredrickson, and others, have expanded and developed the notion of human flourishing.

Empirical studies, such as those of the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, and practical applications, indicate the importance of the concept and the increasingly widespread use of the term in business, economics, and politics. In positive psychology, flourishing is “when people experience positive emotions, positive psychological functioning and positive social functioning, most of the time,” living “within an optimal range of human functioning.” It is a descriptor and measure of positive mental health and overall life well-being, and includes multiple components and concepts, such as cultivating strengths, subjective well-being, “goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience.” In this view, flourishing is the opposite of both pathology and languishing, which are described as living a life that feels hollow and empty.

Etymology and Definition

Although “flourishing” could refer to the general healthy state of a plant as it grows, properly speaking it is the stage in a vascular plant’s morphogenesis, specifically the stage of growth when it develops flowers.

Etymology

The English term “flourish” comes from the Latin florere, “to bloom, blossom, flower,” from the Latin flos, “a flower.” To contrast the term with a plant’s lack of full development, “flourish” came to indicate growth or development with vigour. Around 1597, the term came to include the notion of prosperity, insofar as a to bear flowers is an indication of the fullness of life and productivity.

Definitions

As an obvious consequence of the widespread use of the term “flourishing” in different fields and by different authors, there is not a general consensus about a definition of flourishing.

For instance, there is also a lot of debate about the mutual relations between flourishing and some related concepts, as the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, and the concepts of happiness and well-being. According to a Neo-Aristotelian view, the concept of human flourishing offers an explanation of the human good that is objective, inclusive, individualized, agent-relative, self-directed and social. It views human flourishing objectively because it is desirable and appealing. Flourishing is a state of being rather than a feeling or experience. It comes from engaging in activities that both express and produce the actualization of one’s potential.

According to some voices in Positive Psychology, flourishing is a “descriptor of positive mental health.” According to Fredrickson and Losada, flourishing is living:”

…within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience.”

According to the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand (Fredrickson & Lahoda, 2005), flourishing:”

…is a state where people experience positive emotions, positive psychological functioning and positive social functioning, most of the time. In more philosophical terms this means access to the pleasant life, the engaged or good life and the meaningful life […] It requires the development of attributes and social and personal levels that exhibit character strengths and virtues that are commonly agreed across different cultures (Seligman, Steen, Park and Peterson, 2005). On the other hand languishing includes states of experience where people describe their lives as “hollow” or “empty”.“

According to Keyes, mental health does not imply an absence of mental illness. Rather, mental health is a “separate dimension of positive feelings and functioning.” Individuals described as flourishing have a combination of high levels of emotional well-being, psychological well-being, and social well-being. Flourishing people are happy and satisfied; they tend to see their lives as having a purpose; they feel some degree of mastery and accept all parts of themselves; they have a sense of personal growth in the sense that they are always growing, evolving, and changing; finally, they have a sense of autonomy and an internal locus of control, they chose their fate in life instead of being victims of fate.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, one of the founding fathers of happiness research, wrote in his book, Flourish, a new model for happiness and well-being based on positive psychology. This book expounds on simple exercises that anyone can do to create a happier life and to flourish. Flourish, is a tool to understand happiness by emphasizing how the five pillars of Positive Psychology, also known as PERMA, increase the quality of life for people who apply it to their lives.

According to Fredrickson and Losada (2005), flourishing is characterised by four main components: goodness, generative, growth, and resilience.

According to Keyes, only 18.1% of Americans are actually flourishing. The majority of Americans can be classified as mentally unhealthy (depressed) or not mentally healthy or flourishing (moderately mentally healthy/languishing).

Tyler J. VanderWeele, a prominent epidemiologist and expert in biostatistics who has extensively studied human flourishing, has proposed the following, quite different, definition:

Flourishing itself might be understood as a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good. We might also refer to such a state as complete human well-being, which is again arguably a broader concept than psychological well-being. Conceptions of what constitutes flourishing will be numerous and views on the concept will differ. However, I would argue that, regardless of the particulars of different understandings, most would concur that flourishing, however conceived, would, at the very least, require doing or being well in the following five broad domains of human life: (i) happiness and life satisfaction; (ii) health, both mental and physical; (iii) meaning and purpose; (iv) character and virtue; and (v) close social relationships. All are arguably at least a part of what we mean by flourishing. […]If, however, we think about flourishing not only as a momentary state but also as something that is sustained over time, then one might also argue that a state of flourishing should be such that resources, financial and otherwise, are sufficiently stable so that what is going well in each of these five domains is likely to continue into the future for some time to come.[…] I would in no way claim that these domains above entirely characterize flourishing. […] I would only argue here that, whatever else flourishing might consist in, these five domains above would also be included, and thus these five domains above may provide some common ground for discussion.

Summary

To summarise the definitions above: Human flourishing is the ongoing fulfilment of human capacities within given contexts by advancing one’s own good and the common good.

In order to better understand this synthesis, one has to keep in mind that, in the view of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, a capacity of a being is a potential stemming from its nature to perform certain kinds of activities, or to undergo certain kinds of changes in accordance with its inner dynamism. For instance, the capacity to bear fruit or the capacity to grow are within a tree’s natural potential. On the other hand, the common good is some good—whether material or non-material—that has four characteristics: it is specific, in the sense that it is not general good-in-itself; it is objective, that is, it exists outside of the individual and is independent from the existence of any particular person; it is collective, for it exists only within some community; it is shareable, that is, many people can participate, enjoy, or use it simultaneously.

Aristotle and Flourishing

Aristotle and Biology

The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, contributed greatly to a deeper understanding of flourishing as a model for human life. Better-known for his work in metaphysics and logic, he was nevertheless a biologist first and foremost. His understanding of the development of flora and fauna, seen especially in his work Generation of Animals, provided a scientific background for recognising a similar development in the human being.

Eudaimonia

Aristotle’s term for the optimal state of the human being is eudaimonia (Greek: εὐδαίμονία). He gives various definitions and descriptions of eudaimonia, in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and in his Politics, among which:

“The active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them. Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.”
“Happiness therefore is co-extensive in its range with contemplation: the more a class of beings possesses the faculty of contemplation, the more it enjoys happiness, not as an accidental concomitant of contemplation but as inherent in it, since contemplation is valuable in itself. It follows that happiness is some form of contemplation.”
“So, as the function of the soul and of its excellence must be one and the same, the function of its excellence is a good life. This, then, is the final good, that we agreed to be happiness. It is evident from our assumptions (happiness was assumed to be the best thing, and ends-the best among goods-are in the soul; but things in the soul are states or activities), since the activity is better than the disposition, and the best activity is of the best state, and virtue is the best state, that the activity of the virtue of the soul must be the best thing. But happiness too was said to be the best thing: so happiness is the activity of a good soul. Now as happiness was agreed to be something complete, and life may be complete or incomplete-and this holds with excellence also (in the one case it is total, in the other partial)-and the activity of what is incomplete is itself incomplete, happiness must be activity of a complete life in accordance with complete virtue.”
“Happiness is the complete activity and employment of virtue, and this not conditionally but absolutely. When I say ‘conditionally’ I refer to things necessary, by ‘absolutely’ I mean ‘nobly: for instance, to take the case of just actions, just acts of vengeance and of punishment spring it is true from virtue, but are necessary, and have the quality of nobility only in a limited manner (since it would be preferable that neither individual nor state should have any need of such things), whereas actions aiming at honours and resources are the noblest actions absolutely; for the former class of acts consist in the removal of something evil, but actions of the latter kind are the opposite – they are the foundation and the generation of things good.”

Sometimes eudaimonia is translated as “happiness”; other times, as “welfare” or “well-being,” showing that no translation is fully adequate to capture its meaning in Greek.

Philosopher Joe Sachs emphasizes the importance of the activity of eudaimonia, a “being-at-work” of the human soul. This indicates that “flourishing” can adequately translate eudaimonia, insofar as the term signifies the dynamism of the principle of life and growth within a human.

Positive Psychology and Flourishing

Brief History

“Flourishing” as a psychological concept has been developed by Corey Keyes and Barbara Fredrickson.

Keyes collaborated with Carol Ryff in testing her Six-factor Model of Psychological Well-being, and in 2002 published his theoretical considerations in an article on The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing. qualified by Fredrickson as “path-breaking work that measures mental health in positive terms rather than by the absence of mental illness.”

Barbara Fredrickson developed the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. According to Fredrickson there is a wide variety of positive effects that positive emotions and experiences have on human lives. Fredrickson notes two characteristics of positive emotions that differ from negative emotions:

Positive emotions do not seem to elicit specific action tendencies the same way that negative emotions do. Instead, they seem to cause some general, non-direction oriented activation.
Positive emotions do not necessarily facilitate physical action, but do spark significant cognitive action. For this reason, Fredrickson conceptualises two new concepts: thought-action tendencies, or what a person normally does in a particular situation, and thought-action repertoires, rather an inventory of skills of what a person is able to do.

Previous theories of emotion stated that all emotions are associated with urges to act in particular ways, called action-tendencies. According to Fredrickson, most positive emotions do not follow this model of action-tendencies, since they do not usually occur in life-threatening circumstances and thus do not generally elicit specific urges. Fredrickson proposes that instead of one general theory of emotions, psychologists should develop theories for each emotion or for subsets of emotions.

The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions proposed by Fredrickson states that while negative emotions narrow thought-action tendencies to time tested strategies as handed down by evolution, positive emotions broaden thought-action repertoires. Positive emotions often cause people to discard time-tested or automatic action tendencies and pursue novel, creative, and often unscripted courses of thought and action. These positive emotions and thought-action repertoires can be seen as applicable to the concept of flourishing because flourishing children and adults have a much wider array of cognitive, physical, and social possibilities, which results in the empirical and actual successes of a flourishing life.

The concept has also been used by Martin E.P. Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, in his 2011 publication Flourish. Seligman, usually considered the father of positive psychology, characterizes human flourishing as excellence in 5 fields: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. Consequently, his model of human flourishing is usually called the PERMA model. He claims also that health is an essential element of flourishing, but he presents a quite vast notion of health, including biological assets (e.g. the hormone oxytocin, longer DNA telomeres), subjective assets (e.g. optimism, vitality), and functional assets (good marriage, rich friendships, engaging work). Although Seligman’s PERMA model is certainly useful for psychological studies on flourishing, it doesn’t capture the essence of human flourishing, since it may allow us to consider as flourishing evidently evil people, as brutal dictators, if they test good in these five fields. To avoid this misunderstanding of human flourishing, Seligman himself, and also other thinkers as Christopher Peterson, have also discussed what they call “character strengths” or “virtues.”. Seligman gives the following definition of flourishing:

To flourish is to find fulfilment in our lives, accomplishing meaningful and worthwhile tasks, and connecting with others at a deeper level—in essence, living the “good life”.

Measurement and Diagnostic Criteria

With the concept of flourishing, psychologists can study and measure fulfilment, purpose, meaning, and happiness. Flourishing can be measured through self-report measures. Individuals are asked to respond to structured scales measuring the presence of positive affect, absence of negative affect, and perceived satisfaction with life. Participants are specifically asked about their emotions and feelings because scientists theorize that flourishing is something that manifests itself internally rather than externally.

Keyes has operationalized symptoms of positive feelings and positive functioning in life by reviewing dimensions and scales of subjective well-being and, therefore, creating a definition of flourishing. To complete, or “operationalize”, the definition of what it means to be functioning optimally, or flourishing, diagnostic criteria have been developed for a flourishing life:

Individual must have had no episodes of major depression in the past year
Individual must possess a high level of well-being as indicated by the individuals meeting all three of the following criteria
- High emotional well-being, defined by 2 of 3 scale scores on appropriate measures falling in the upper tertile.
  - Positive affect
  - Negative affect (low)
  - Life satisfaction
- High psychological well-being, defined by 4 of 6 scale scores on appropriate measures falling in the upper tertile.
  - Self-acceptance
  - Personal growth
  - Purpose in life
  - Environmental mastery
  - Autonomy
  - Positive relations with others
- High social well-being, defined by 3 of 5 scale scores on appropriate measures falling in the upper tertile.
  - Social acceptance
  - Social actualisation
  - Social contribution
  - Social coherence
  - Social integration

Major Empirical Findings

Positive emotional feelings such as moods, and sentiments such as happiness, carry more personal and psychological benefits than just a pleasant, personal subjective experience. Flourishing widens attention, broaden behavioural repertoires, which means to broaden one’s skills or regularly performed actions, increase intuition, and increase creativity. Secondly, good feelings can have physiological manifestations, such as significant and positive cardiovascular effects, such as a reduction in blood pressure. Third, good feelings predict healthy mental and physical outcomes. Also, positive affect and flourishing is related to longevity. In a 2022 study of intrusive thoughts and flourishing, Jesse Omoregie and Jerome Carson found that people who experience flourishing would usually experience minimal intrusive thoughts. Omoregie and Carson further concluded that flourishing is a variable that helps in the reduction of psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts.

The many components of flourishing elicit more tangible outcomes than simply mental or physiological results. For example, components such as self-efficacy, likability, and prosocial behaviour encourage active involvement with goal pursuits and with the environment. This promotes people to pursue and approach new and different situations. Therefore, flourishing adults have higher levels of motivation to work actively to pursue new goals and are in possession of more past skills and resources. This helps people to satisfy life and societal goals, such as creating opportunities, performing well in the workplace, and producing goods, work and careers that are highly valued in American society. Authors, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, in their book, An Everyone Culture, “argues that organizations do best when they build an environment that encourages constant personal development among their employees.” This success results in higher satisfaction and reinforces Frederickson’s Broaden and Build model, for more positive adults reap more benefits and, are more positive, which creates an upward spiral.

Studies have shown that people who are flourishing are more likely to graduate from college, secure “better” jobs, and are more likely to succeed in that job. One reason for this success can be seen in the evidence offered above when discussing languishing: those that flourish have less work absenteeism, cited by Lyubomirsky as “job withdrawal.” Finally, those that are flourishing have more support and assistance from co-workers and supervisors in their workplace.

Flourishing has been found to impact more areas than simply the workplace. In particular community involvement and social relationships have been cited as something that flourishing influences directly. For example, those that flourish have been found to volunteer at higher levels across cultures. Moreover, in terms of social support and relationships, studies have shown that there is an association between flourishing and actual number of friends, overall social support, and perceived companionship.

Applications

The definition or conceptualisation of mental health under the framework of flourishing and languishing describes symptoms that can cooperate with intervention techniques aimed at increasing levels of emotional, social, and psychological well-being. Furthermore, as Keyes implies, in a world full of flourishing people, all would be able to reap the benefits that this positive mental state and life condition offers.

Education

Keyes mentions children as well as adults. He says that children are directly affected by maternal depression, and points out that the flourishing or languishing of teachers and the effect on students have not been studied. Keyes also speculates that teacher retention may be associated with the students’ frames of mind. Furthermore, if students can be made to flourish, the benefits to the education process are greater, as flourishing can increase attention and thought-action repertoires.

Engagement

Flourishing also has many applications to civic duty and social engagement. Keyes believes that most people do not focus enough on those aspects of life and focus instead on personal achievement. Keyes suggests that people should provide encouragement to children, and adults, to participate socially. People that exhibit flourishing are engaged in social participation and people that are engaged in social participation exhibit flourishing. Therefore, he suggests that people should give their kids a purpose, which creates a sense of contribution and environmental mastery that enhances feelings of well-being and fulfilment.

Criticisms

This psychological concept of flourishing is built on Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, but some researchers have suggested that there are other functions of positive emotions. Mackie and Worth propose that positive emotions diminish cognitive capabilities. They showed that when exposed to a persuasive message for a limited amount of time, subjects experiencing a positive mood showed reduced processing as compared with subjects in a neutral mood. Others have suggested that positive emotions diminish the motivation but not the capacity for cognitive processing. Flourishing is still a newly developing subject of study and, more tests need to be done to fully define, operationalise, and apply the concept of flourishing; this lack of research is also one criticism of the concept of flourishing.

Contemporary Flourishing Research

Global Flourishing Study

It is a longitudinal study about human flourishing, involving data collection of individuals of 22 countries all around the world. It is carried out by scholars at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard and Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, in partnership with Gallup and the Centre for Open Science. Its preparation began in 2018 and its first data are expected by the summer of 2023.

Johns Hopkins: Paul McHugh Programme for Human Flourishing

This programme based at Johns Hopkins University, founded in 2015, and directed by Margaret S. Chisolm, aims at bringing the results of interdisciplinary research on health and human flourishing to an audience of both clinicians and clinicians-in-training.

Harvard Human Flourishing Programme

This programme was founded in 2016 at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and directed by Tyler J. VanderWeele. Its aim is to study and promote human flourishing.

University of Pennsylvania: Positive Psychology Centre and Flourishing and Humanities Project

This interdisciplinary research project, based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Centre, directed by James Pawelski and founded in 2014, studies the relations of the arts and humanities with human flourishing.

Humanity 2.0

The Humanity 2.0 Foundation mission is to identify impediments to human flourishing and then work collaboratively across sectors to remove them by sourcing and scaling bold and innovative solutions. To support this mission, the Humanity 2.0 Institute integrates global research on key questions: What is human flourishing? What are the pathways to achieve human flourishing? What obstacles block these pathways? What are practical solutions to remove these obstacles? Research partners include the Human Flourishing Programme at Harvard University, the Pontifical Gregorian University and the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Centre and Flourishing Humanities Project.

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