Unedited and poorly thought out philosophical musing of the day*

Today I came across a post that challenges a lot of my thinking about human nature and cognitive/psychological capacities. Here’s a key paragraph:

Back to this nature-fulfillment business. Many folks seem to believe in “callings,” or nature-fulfilling activities. Maybe your calling is to make beautiful music on the piano. But it’s not like there are pianos in the wild, sprouting from the ground under the baobab trees. In a possible world without pianos, where would you be? Is the piano just a specification of a general to-be-fulfilled nature, a general naturally defined set of begging-to-be-realized potentials just hanging around in some kind of waiting room of the “self” (or subpersonal animal)? It seems doubtful. It seems more likely that the piano is an opportunity for a previously undreamt identity-shaping—capacity-shaping—commitment. There is no kind of personal nature that mastering the piano fulfills without pianos.

I think the last sentence would be better expressed as: “There is no kind of personal nature that mastering the piano fulfills and that exists even in the absence of pianos.” Later, he suggests that we do have such capacities, but they get added in as we undergo various experiences. The whole thing is here.

I don’t think he successfully refutes the Aristotelian/Kantian/Whateverian conception. It seems to me that the pianist finds playing the piano a fulfillment (or perfection or actualization) of a number of innate capacities: from fine motor skills to a general ability to recognize and appreciate beauty. In addition, the pianist discovers a substantial degree of subjective happiness when he or she fulfills these capacities. But the post raises the interesting question of the extent to which our mapping out of the psyche’s capacities is surreptitiously shaped by contingent facts about human history—e.g., the fact that we have developed pianos.

It also raises interesting questions about “callings.” Assuming people speak of their calling without having literally been “called” by a higher power, does their usage of the term amount to a self-deceptive way of simply reporting satisfaction or pleasure in what they’re doing? For example, I sometimes refer to philosophy as my calling, but all I mean by that is that (a) I enjoy it, (b) I think I can make myself of use to others by doing it, and (c) I’m willing to try to do it for money as long as the opportunity presents itself. Since this is all I mean, I rarely use the term, and I’m OK with that. But for those people who do use it to describe themselves, does it not usually serve to give them a false sense of significance? That is, it allows them to believe (wrongly) that their choice is in line either with the precise will of a deity or with the ultimate order of the cosmos, when in fact they’re just responding to neurostimuli? Lots of Christians I’ve known speak of their calling in a way that amounts to an attempt to either rationalize their individual choices or endow them with greater significance than they probably have (I remember hearing one girl avow that “The Lord wanted me to move to California;” we should all be so lucky). I hadn't thought of there being a secular analogue to this.

*UPDATE: OK, I had to edit this a little bit, it was driving me crazy.