Virtues in Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will

We've been studying St. Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will in my Introduction to Philosophy class these last two weeks (here's video 1, 2 and 3 of the sessions).  This book has long been one of my favorite Augustinian works -- ranking up there with his Confessions, the City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and (what might come as a surprise, since they are considered minor works), the treatises On Lying and Against Lying.  On Free Choice of the Will is really quite masterful as a dialogue -- real discussion and exploration is going on in that text -- problems are raised, resolved, just to give rise to new deeper problems -- and gradually, a through what initially appear digressions, a complex picture gets systematically sketched out.

Time is always an issue in teaching Introduction classes -- there's never enough, even if everything goes exactly as it ought to, to devote adequate attention to everything in the monumental texts I am privileged to teach -- and one of the casualties this time around, specifically with respect to this text, is Augustine's discussions about the virtues, mainly carried out in books 1 and 2.  There's nothing like a full-blown and systematic Augustinian treatment of the virtues and vices in On Free Choice of the Will -- we learn much more, and much that is important, from other writings of his, not just from major works and specific treatises, but even from remarks made in his various Letters.  In fact, only the four cardinal virtues are examined in this work.  But, what he does say is interesting in its own right -- if all we had of Augustine was this one work, it would still represent an advance -- or, perhaps a departure -- in the tradition of virtue ethics.

Virtues and Knowledge in Plato's Meno

Anyone who has read the Meno in an Introduction to Philosophy class -- as I started my own batch of students on this semester -- carries away from it the commonplace that the dialogue is about trying to define virtue, and all of the interlocutors fail in this project, though not without making certain efforts and attempts.  This is one of those things that "everybody knows" about that text, a bullet-point, a blurb equally fit for inclusion in Wikipedia, as an examination question, or on a Trivial Pursuit card.

Certainly no useful definition gets arrived at in the back and forth between Socrates and Meno -- the real centerpiece attraction and achievement being articulation of the Platonic doctrine of recollection.  In its failures, the dialogue bears affinities with other aporetic dialogues where specific virtues are supposed to be -- but turn out not to be -- defined through dialectic:  the Euthyphro, where it turns out nobody really knows what piety is; the Laches, where it's courage that remains an enigma; the Lysias, with friendship, the Charmides with temperance -- and one might point out as well, throughout a number of these, justice and wisdom get brought up, but never really worked out.

What Do Students and Teachers Deserve?

Down the years, and more recently than in my earlier career, I've had the happy experience of being thanked and acknowledged in various ways by the students who I've taught in my classes.  When you consider the alternatives -- and they are most definitely live, often-experienced and -witnessed alternatives, ranging from being entirely ignored until a student wants something (a grade, an explanation, an exception, what's going to be on the exam), through suspicious arms-length-maintenance, or wariness of instructional idiosyncrasy, unpredictability, even malevolence, all the way to the outright contempt displayed in some settings -- the exhibition by students of a grateful and gracious attitude becomes deeply gratifying to any instructor who understands the value and process of education in which they are involved.

I have to admit at times feeling a bit bewildered by my students' responses to and admissions about my teaching and how it affects them -- and that, I suppose, is due to a remnant of the pedant still within me -- the part of myself which far more attentive to all that has been left out by a student's robust but still rudimentary presentation or reflections upon some item or idea of study than gladdened by just how much distance has been traversed, how much potential has been brought to actuality and consolidated within the mind, the soul, the memory, even the heart, of the young man or woman charged to learn with me for the space of a semester.  That competent but sterile, and in some sense dense or tone-deaf, part of myself responds all too easily by raising all sorts of other related matters, at risk of contextualizing away whatever spark of excitement, whatever haven for learning, whatever inertia newly-directed along a path of ongoing reflection that the way I structure and run my classes has afforded my students.

The Divided Self in Plato's Republic

Last week, I led my Ethics students about as far as they are likely to go this semester (at least accompanied by myself) into the heart of Plato's Republic, that dense and lengthy tome often assigned and maligned in a whole host of classes. It is one of the great early works of western literature -- of immense imaginative scope, motley as democracy with perspectives, crammed with ideas whose entire importance one cannot realize upon first (or even perhaps on tenth, or hundreth) read, offering so many lenses and mirrors for regarding the world, the soul, society, the self.  

It's a seminal work for Virtue Ethics, one against whose articulation of virtues and vices any other moral theory that wants to claim real membership in that tradition must measure itself.  After the initial sparring of the first several books, Socrates shows his hand plain. Gone are the aporetic and ironic meanderings of earlier dialogues like the Euthyphro, the Lysias, the Laches, or the Charmides. It's as if Socrates takes heart from the city, the guardians, the education he envisions in discourse and imagination, from their certitude and intellectual familiarity with the virtues -- now those virtues can be told. . . and even to some extent taught.

How Do We Get It Wrong? Let Us Count The Ways

One of the important aspects of a genuine Virtue Ethics approach that does not get as much discussion or examination -- and often isn't taught in Ethics courses -- is determining what ways, to what degrees, and for what reasons one has gone wrong, done wrong, morally failed.  All too often, we confine ourselves to thinking in terms of the virtues and the vices -- which, to be sure, is good, a better approach, one more adequate to the complexities of human beings and moral life than those oriented by other moral theories -- tending to confine evaluation to motives, actions, consequences, or social arrangements.

But, whether our goal is to fully understand the rich intellectual resources contained in the classic texts of Virtue Ethics, or to progressively develop and employ a coherent practical approach adequate to the complexities and demands of concrete moral life as we actually live it out, what is required is a well-differentiated grasp of how we go wrong, how we get things wrong, the range, differing seriousness, and types of moral failures.