Sprezzatura: should you want to excel?

The cases of Rachael Gunn and Simone Biles

By now, many people will have seen videos of the Australian breakdancer Rachael Gunn (aka Raygun). Her routines (which involved among others imitating a kangaroo) have been widely mocked on social media. Some authors such as Stacey Patton have also charged the b-girl with turning breakdancing into a global joke, being insensitive of its cultural context (though she as a university professor who works on this), and cultural appropriation. Though she earned zero points, Gunn said “I worked my butt off preparing for the Olympics."

Clearly, it isn't enough to work your butt off. You cannot through sheer grit win an olympic medal. It involves things outside of your control, including your bodily properties, your background, good teachers, early exposure etc. When we tell our kids that they can do anything if they work hard enough, we're lying to them.

We don't tell our kids nearly enough that being OK at something where you have fun is good enough. We are so performance oriented. The problem with the focus on achievement, as I've realized lately, is that it is never enough if you measure your worth by your achievements. There's always some better, higher goal out there. I want to embrace this idea of being just OK at something. I'll never become as great a lutenist as the professional players I admire, but that is fine.

Yet, on the other hand, how delightful is it to watch someone excel at something. How wonderful is it to excel at something and through performance or works, to have other people share in the joy. When I feel a bit down, I'll sometimes watch Simone Biles's olympic floor routine and it brings joy.

As I've argued in this piece published in The Philosopher, there's a shared delight in sprezzatura, the seeming effortless grace, which Baldassare Castiglione discusses in The Courtier (1528). But as I also pointed out there, a tension arises between the seeming effortlessness of sprezzatura and the hard work that goes into training and practice.

A solution to that tension I found in the Daoist concept of wuwei, or non-doing. A lot of high-level performance really to lose yourself in the skill, in a flow-state, and to harmonize yourself with the environment. Biles is not surmounting the limitations of the human body, but is using her body in such a way that gravity, the properties of the mat, her own weight and gravity point, all harmonize to make such a skill possible.

It is good to strive to be excellent. We must make a balance between striving for excellence and your worth is not defined by excellence. To see how, here's a scene from the Studio Ghibli movie Whisper of the Heart. The story really speaks to me because of this sense that excellence is possible. You have the protagonist, the girl Shizuku and her friend Seiji walking along a road at night. Seiji tells Shizuku that he wishes to become a world-class luthier (violin maker). But he has no idea whether it will succeed. He will try his best and give up a lot to achieve his dream.

Shizuku thinks it's nice if you know what you want to do and tells him she just lives from one day to the next. She has no idea what she wants to do. But further on in the story, Shizuku will also find her dream: to become a writer.

Whisper of the Heart is perhaps my favorite Studio Ghibli movie, because I find the two characters of dreaming and trying to reach for these goals so relatable. I had no idea if becoming an academic and writer would work. I was stapling together little booklets with illustrations and stories as soon as I could write decently (around age seven), and I wrote philosophical essays since my early teens. I come from a working class family where the main books in the house were cooking and gardening books before I started introducing fiction and non-fiction, and even now I have class-induced impostor syndrome. Now I have published several books, a trade book in the works, and many papers published.

Through the years of striving and job market insecurity, I still felt, though the odds were low, that I should have a shot. And whatever we may think of people who make it (like Biles) and people who clearly do not have the chops in spite of their efforts (Gunn), it's important to recognize both that an attempt at excellence, no matter how earnest, may fail, and that human excellence is a great good—in the arts, in sports, and other walks of life—and that it is a shared joy.

Ultimately, I draw again from Daoist philosophy and Zhuangzi in particular to think of this tension. In chapter 2, we read:

There is such a thing as completion and injury—Mr. Zhao playing the lute is an example. There is such a thing as no completion and no injury—Mr. Zhao not playing the lute is an example. Zhao Wen played the lute; Music Master Kuang waved his baton; Huizi leaned on his desk. The knowledge of these three was close to perfection. All were masters, and therefore their names have been handed down to later ages. Only in their likes were they different from him [the true sage]. … Their sons, too, devoted all their lives to their fathers’ theories but, till their death, never reached any completion. Can these men be said to have attained completion? If so, then so have all the rest of us. Or can they not be said to have attained completion? If so, then neither we nor anything else has ever attained it (Zhuangzi, ch 2, Burton Watson translation)

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. We know Huizi (the great logician's) name because he excelled, we do not know his son's name, who in spite of hard work, did not attain that level. But if they did not “attain completion” well how does it look for the rest of us? Are ordinary lives not worth living?

Of course they are. Zhuangzi gives us a clue how. In that same chapter (the famous “this” and “that” passage), Zhuangzi talks about “finding the hinge”

The state in which “this” and “that” no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right, then, is a single endlessness, and its wrong, too, is a single endlessness. So I say, the best thing to use is clarity (Zhuangzi, ch 2, Burton Watson translation)

When you find the hinge, this is the state in which you can be effortless (wuwei), in which you can harmonize with your environment and be part of a harmonious whole. Striving becomes mastery, satisfaction, self-acquiescence. You could be this as the master luthier in Whisper of the Heart, Seiji's grandfather, who knows exactly what he's doing, and doing it without much effort and in confidence. That sort of living is a kind of excellence, even if it's not the high-flying olympic efforts of Simone Biles. You could be great at simply walking your dog, doing laundry, or talking to friends. I feel that this Daoist insight straddles the tension between our recognition that human excellence is valuable, but that we are not defined by how society views our achievements.

Bonus track: Whisper of the heart, Country Road, features a lute (and realistic playing!)