250 ■ NOTES
mihalyi (1970), Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988), and Csik-
szentmihalyi & Larson (1984). The notion of complexity used here is
related to the same concept as used by some evolutionary biologists (e.g.,
Dobzhansky 1962, 1967), and it has been influenced by the poetic
insights of Teilhard de Chardin (1965). A very promising definition of
complexity in physical systems, defined as “thermodynamic depth,” was
being worked on by Heinz Pagels (1988) before his recent untimely
death. By his definition, the complexity of a system is the difference
between the amount of information needed to describe the system in its
present state and the amount needed to describe all the states it might
have been in at the point at which it changed from the last previous
state. Applying this to the psychology of the self, one might say that a
complex person was one whose behavior and ideas could not be easily
explained, and whose development was not obviously predictable.“[There’s] no place ...” The quote is from Csikszentmihalyi 1975, p.
94.
CHAPTER 3
page for research on the relationship between happiness and wealth,
44 see Diener, Horwitz, &. Emmons (1985), Bradburn (1969), and Camp
bell, Converse, &. Rodgers (1976).45 Pleasure and enjoyment. Aristotle’s entire Nicomachean Ethics deals
with this issue, especially book 3, chapter 11, and book 7. See also
Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988, pp. 24-25).47 Children’s pleasure in activity. Early German psychologists posited
the existence of Funktionlust, or the pleasure derived from using one’s
body in such activities as running, hitting, swinging, and so on (Groos
1901, Buhler 1930). Later Jean Piaget (1952) declared that one of the
sensory-motor stages of an infant’s physical development was character
ized by the “pleasure of being the cause.” In the U.S., Murphy (1947)
posited the existence of sensory and activity drives to account for the
feeling of pleasure that sight, sound, or muscle sense occasionally gives.
These insights were incorporated into a theory of optimal stimulation
or optimal arousal mainly through the work of Hebb (1955) and Berlyne
(1960), who assumed pleasure was the consequence of an optimal bal
ance between the incoming stimulation and the nervous system’s ability
to assimilate it. The extension of these basically neurological explana
tions for why one finds pleasure in action was provided by White (1959),
deCharms (1968), and Deci & Ryan (1985), who looked at the same
phenomenon but from the point of view of the self, or conscious orga
nism. Their explanations hinge on the fact that action provides pleasure
because it gives the person a feeling of competence, efficacy, or auton
omy.