From Action and Contemplation to Stress and Relaxation

The phenomenon of stress among young people is not new, but it appears to be ratcheting up — as is the attention given to it. In our region of northern California, a recent cluster of high school suicides has prompted a new level of urgency, and a determination to understand teenagers' less visible but more pervasive forms of desperation. Parents and schools are beginning to reexamine their approaches, scaling back homework and extracurricular activities and encouraging teens to practice mindfulness meditation and yoga as stress relievers. These responses, however positive, reflect a widely held assumption that stress is a consequence of overscheduling and increased pressure: reduce the pressure and unpack the schedule, it holds, and stress will dissipate. But where this assumption takes the problem to be one of excess — too much homework, pressure, scheduling, distraction — others perceive a larger problem of absence. "The biggest problem growing up today is not actually stress," observes William Damon, professor of education at Stanford. "It's meaninglessness." As Damon argues in his 2008 book The Path to Purpose, we could expect more young people to thrive "if, during the early years of strenuous effort and high achievement, they had found purposes that went deeper than the grades and awards" expected of them. Purposelessness, like stress, he points out, is not confined to the affluent — those most likely to overschedule their children with expensive activities and to buy books that tell them not to — but afflicts all income levels. And, like stress, it requires a remedy more intensive than relaxation.

Damon's diagnosis of meaninglessness actually returns to the earliest definitions of "stress." Although it feels like an inescapable feature of our age, the term only entered the popular vocabulary in 1983, when a Time magazine cover story declared "a stress epidemic." Detailing "how heavy a toll stress is taking on the nation's well being," it found stress to be responsible for two-thirds of doctor visits in the United States, six of the country's leading causes of death, and untold costs in lost productivity. Hans Selye had first drawn attention to the phenomenon of "stress" in the 1950s, borrowing from engineering the term for pressure on an object from an external force. An endocrinologist, Selye analyzed in detail the physical manifestations of stress in the body and advised relaxation as an antidote: "If we are just doing too much," he observed, "the great remedy here is to learn to relax as quickly and completely as possible."

Yet even Selye was convinced that the incapacitating stress he observed in his research subjects and all around him had its origins and ultimate remedy in the philosophical rather than the physical realm: the ultimate protection against stress, he concluded, is "a satisfactory philosophy of life." In Stress without Distress, a popular self-help book that he published long after his research made him famous, Selye elaborated the connection between philosophical and physical health. To remain healthy, he observed, "man must have some goal, some purpose in life that he can respect and be proud to work for." He noted that his medical research provided such a purpose — and a remedy to stress in his own life: "The capacity to contemplate the harmonious elegance of Nature, at least with some degree of understanding, is one of the most satisfactory experiences of which man is capable. ... There is an equanimity and a peace of mind which can be achieved only through contact with the sublime."

If Selye is the father of modern stress research, the father of modern relaxation research is Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, who built on Selye's insights into the physiology of stress. His popular 1975 book, The Relaxation Response, recommends the regular practice of deliberate relaxation as "a built-in method of counteracting the stresses of everyday living." Where stress is the by-product of activity, relaxation, according to Benson, involves "the adoption of a passive attitude, which is perhaps the most important of the elements" of its practice. Describing the ancient roots of such relaxation practices in meditation and prayer, he acknowledges that they "may connote exotic Eastern cults or Christian monks who spend most of their waking hours in monastery cells contemplating God." Yet, he insists, even such religious practices hold relevance for modern secular life, a point he makes by citing William James: "To find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process."

Much as Selye identifies stress with philosophical failure, Benson identifies relaxation with the healing of psychic, and not merely physiological, wounds: in this, both medical authorities suggest that the work of "reaching unity" and "peace of mind" will ultimately come not from medicine but from a more profound source. Strikingly, the very works that popularized the contemporary sense of "stress" and "relaxation" insist that those terms are inadequate to diagnosing and treating the root problems of the phenomena they describe. Stress, in Selye's account, results not simply from action or overaction but from action unmotivated by a driving purpose. And the need for relaxation, in Benson's view, comes not merely from modern pressures but from a troubling disunity or disharmony at modern humanity's core.

As Selye's and Benson's work has been absorbed into the cultural mainstream, the terms "stress" and "relaxation" have been isolated and treated as purely physiological phenomena; missing are the philosophical disorders that Selye and Benson diagnosed at their base. But without those philosophical underpinnings, stress and relaxation devolve to the therapeutic. They also detach from history, encouraging us to imagine that our contemporary experience is unprecedented. It isn't, of course. But in the absence of historical context or philosophical depth, it resists analysis — and ultimately, understanding.

As used today, "stress" and "relaxation" represent the poor successors to an older and richer pair of terms that can lead us a fuller and deeper understanding of our contemporary struggle. That pair is "action" and "contemplation." Their long and dynamic history embraces meanings that would be at home in our present age — describing, at various times, a life marked by frenetic obligation versus one of deeply centered calm — but it also restores philosophical depth to experiences that we perceive to be historically isolated and isolating. When Benson appeals to the need to "[remedy] inner incompleteness and [reduce] inner discord," he describes a disorder that runs deeper than overscheduling. And when Selye commends "the capacity to contemplate the harmonious elegance of Nature," he imagines no narrowly therapeutic means of stress relief. To restore the significance of these terms — and, by extension, of our current struggle — we will need to turn back to the classical period, where they first took root.

Foundational terms in philosophy and ethics, "contemplation" and "action" represent distinct choices that are fundamental to the well-lived life. They received their earliest definitions in the work of Aristotle and Plato, who use the Greek terms theoria and praxis, which contrast the philosophical posture of searching and beholding universal meaning with the practical one of acting in the world. For both, "theory" is clearly superior to "practice," but the two cannot be separated. Indeed, they exist in a symbiotic relationship. As Aristotle explains, we pursue action in order to secure time for pure contemplation, just as we fight wars in order to achieve peace. Yet, as Plato insists in his famous model of the philosopher-king, those who achieve the highest states of theoria through contemplation are obliged to return to the world and apply their wisdom in its service, no matter how strong their desire to escape it. Neither philosopher could imagine an active life not guided by contemplation, nor a purely contemplative life that did not find expression through action.

But the fortunes of the two terms shifted dramatically once they were taken into other cultures, which adapted them to new circumstances and values. Where the Greeks prized the contemplative life but stressed its integration with action, the ancient Romans emphasized action, scorning the decadence of what they called otium Graecum — Greek leisure. Their most eloquent spokesman was the statesman Cicero, who argues that "action is chiefly employed in protecting the interests of our fellow men; it is therefore indispensable to society: and consequently holds a higher rank than mere speculation." Reflecting the ideal of "virtue" — or, as etymology defines it, manly valor — action befits Cicero's Roman republic, which relies on the contributions of its educated citizens. Yet "action" for Cicero is a product of the "liberal" arts, which belong to free men, as opposed to the "servile" arts, the province of mere workers. Cicero's "action" is the work of the brain, not the work of the hands. Opposed to "mere speculation," it is another form of thinking: thinking directed toward the world, not outside it.

The Christian Middle Ages returned to the Greek ideal, preferring contemplation to action, terms adapted to Christian doctrine to elevate the life of prayer over that of worldly commitment and distraction. Still, like the Romans, their greatest spokesmen emphasized the reciprocity of the two. Thus, Saint Augustine sounds like Aristotle when he insists that "no man has a right to lead such a life of contemplation as to forget in his own case the service due to his neighbor; nor has any man a right to be immersed so in active life as to neglect the contemplation of God." Likewise Augustine's follower, theologian Gregory the Great, may hold Plato in mind when he observes that "a good order of life is to strive from the active to the contemplative," but Gregory is also eager to emphasize the interdependence, even the unity, of the two. Just as two eyes working together add dimension to sight, Gregory insists, we must aspire to lives that knit action and contemplation together.

In another vibrant metaphor, Gregory compares the integration of action and contemplation to the unity of breadth and height. So he explains the balanced values of love of neighbor (vita activa) and love of God (vita contemplativa) along two dimensions: "Breadth pertains to charity for the neighbor; height to the understanding of the Maker. While [the soul] enlarges itself in width through love, it lifts itself in height through knowledge, and it is as high above itself as it extends outside itself in love of neighbor."

Renaissance thinkers recovered Cicero, along with his preference for the active life, even as they expanded the medieval concept of otium sanctum — contemplative leisure specific to the life of a monk — to describe the transcendent stillness of the scholar's study. Yet they also inherited the Greek and Christian ideal of a life that embraces and reconciles the two, as Petrarch expresses when he extols the value of "leisure that is neither idle nor profitless but productive of advantage to many." Renaissance education drew from this ideal of contemplative study that could be brought to fruition to benefit the common good.

An important shift in this balance emerges with the advent of the scientific revolution — and with it, a new understanding of "action" as a primary virtue and "contemplation" as not only secondary but debased. The formative work of modern science, Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667), predicted a new order in which "speculative men" would be ruled by "active men," thanks to advances in science. This view is captured in the title of John Evelyn's Publick Employment and an Active Life Prefer'd to Solitude (1667), which asserts that "the most useful and profitable of studies" partake of the active, rather than the contemplative, life: "the Wisest men are not made in chambers and Closets crowded with shelves; but by habitudes and active Conversations." Evelyn could be writing today when he insists that action-driven business trumps contemplation-driven higher education: "Action is the proper fruit of Science, and therefore they should quit the education of the colledge, when fit to appear in business." Planting science in the camp of action, Evelyn severs it from Augustine's scientia, "the intellectual understanding of things eternal," and interrupts a long tradition in which action and contemplation are seen as allied, self-supporting, and even mutually dependent. How do we account for this departure?

Looking back on the period, Hannah Arendt, the greatest modern philosopher of the vita activa, explains that the advent of the technological age in the seventeenth century radically disrupted the valuation of action and contemplation that had been in place since the terms' classical origins. In her philosophical masterwork, The Human Condition (1958), she asserts that modernity gave priority to action over contemplation to the point of eliminating contemplation as a valuable feature of human life and hollowing out action as the highest expression of human agency. Previously defined as the practice of virtue on behalf of the common good, action came to be identified with "production" and valued as the expression of "productivity." As a result, Arendt argues, the very idea of action lost an important dimension. Instead of carrying intrinsic value, "action" came to mean an undertaking on behalf of some other goal — and thereby became instrumentalized, such that a life of action shed the sense of purpose and dignity that had long defined it. At the same time, wisdom, in the classical sense of the philosophical apprehension of truth, was devalued and superseded by the productive virtues of practicality and utility.

Instrumental thinking is intensely, almost obsessively, oriented toward the future. Once we switch it on, we can't switch it off again. Its depredations are most visible in the lives of the young, like those stress-addled subjects with whom we started. Anxiety around college admissions instrumentalizes school in many communities, where worry and pressure starts by sixth grade and increases through senior year. Among students like those studied by Denise Pope in Doing School, school becomes a means to an end. As one teen asserts:

People don't go to school to learn. They go to get good grades, which brings them to college, which brings them the high-paying job, which brings them happiness, so they think.

Yet once students get to college, the rat race doesn't end. Many college students we know have expressed a growing sense of shock when they discover that the destination they have worked so hard to reach is just another way station on the road to somewhere else. "Getting into Stanford," or any other school, is not an end in itself. The pressure for exemplary grades does not stop. The race for prizes doesn't magically modulate into a life spent conversing about politics, arts, sciences, and pressing issues of the day. Instead, these pressures intensify, even as the path becomes less obvious and economic pressures encroach. Some of our students become quite dismayed when they realize that this pattern extends indefinitely into the future. As the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky wryly puts it, "We study hard in high school to get admitted to a top college to get into grad school to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice."

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Today's "epidemic" of stress and busy-ness represents the far point of the impoverishment of action that Arendt observed: human agency employed in the absence of purpose. Arendt was right to recognize that action began to lose meaning when it was elevated over contemplation, but contemplation was not so starkly eliminated as she believed. Rather, both action and contemplation lost some of the richness of meaning each had, over centuries, been accruing. The polarization of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa hollowed out the meaning of contemplation no less than it did that of action. If "action" has been reduced to "busy-ness" and its surfeit, "stress," then contemplation has been reduced to "relaxation" and its accompanying, negative attributes — laziness, boredom, and waste of time. Recovering the value both of action and of contemplation means overcoming the polarization that has led to the impoverishment of both terms. This can only happen when we understand that it is the delicate balance of action and contemplation that gives both terms deep significance: action without contemplation becomes meaningless, just as contemplation without action becomes purposeless. Returning each to the other — as writers in earlier ages recognized — restores a balance of action and contemplation in which each is equally necessary to the other, as both are to the maintenance of a meaningful life.