There is an aspect of inquiry that hovers about our practical activities, which may or may not be brought to full awareness and issue in careful reflection. Following Aristotle, Talbot Brewer (The Retrieval of Ethics) connects an this aspect of inquiry to our experience of pleasure, the kind we get when we become absorbed in what we are doing (like Nadia Comaneci on the balance beam). He writes that there is an “appreciative discernment of value that accompanies and carries forward intrinsically valuable activities,” and that it is this evaluative attention that renders the activity pleasurable. “[T]o take pleasure in an activity is to engage in that activity while being absorbed in it, where this absorption consists in single-minded and lively attention to whatever it is that seems to make the activity good or worth pursuing. . . . If one were struck only by the instrumental value of the activity . . . one’s evaluative attention would be directed not at the activity but at its expected results—that is, at something other than what one is doing. This sort of attention . . . absents us from our activity and renders it burdensome.” (From Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 194).

• The wisdom of learning to take pleasure in activities while being absorbed in them, rather than merely for instrumental purposes.

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