Philosophical Courage and Temperance in Plato's Phaedo

The Phaedo, a recounting of Socrates's last conversations with his friends on his deathbed, ostensibly provided by the young man for whom the dialogue is named, includes early on in the discourse a short and startling discussion of the nature of several virtues -- courage and temperance first, and then wisdom and justice.  Plato has Socrates advance a doctrine that is entirely uncompromising, and in some respects paradoxical -- only philosophers actually possess these virtues.

As Socrates explains, everyone else is not only mistaken about the nature of these two virtues, i.e. temperance and courage -- that would not be surprising after all, given that even Socrates concedes a lack of knowledge about these in aporetic dialogues like the Laches and Charmides (or even virtue itself in the Meno!).  The "virtues" they possess, what they call and consider to be "courage" or "temperance" aren't really so.  In fact, the courage of the many (or even the non-philosopher one) is actually a kind of cowardice.  The temperance of the many really amounts to a sort of intemperance (or if you prefer more contemporary language, self-indulgence, lack of self-control).

Are the Virtues Already In Us?

In my Ethics classes, one type of assessment and exercise I routinely require my students to engage in is what I call an Application Assignment.  I provide them with a complex, morally ambiguous, problematic scenario, which they then have to analyze along various lines.  I'll write more about those parameters in a follow-up post, and discuss just how the assignments work to foster student learning at several different levels.  For now, what I'd like to focus on is one very interesting, common, and revealing mistake I see some students make semester after semester.

A key component of the assignment is competently applying three of the moral theories we've been studying to the case in question.  This requires that the students do a bit of explaining about the key concepts of the theory, and then go on to particularize these to the characters of the narrative.  Students do all right with Egoism, with the authoritarian Might-Makes-Right theory, and often enough with Utilitarianism.  Many of them run into problems with Virtue Ethics, and there are a variety of distinct misunderstandings and misapplications.  I'm particularly interested in one recurring way students get matters wrong.  Some students interpret Virtue Ethics as asserting that the virtues lie within each and every person, ready to be used when situations call for them.

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.

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.

Blogging About Anger Past and Future

One topic -- or rather, when you start looking into it, sprawling network of nodes and notes -- I've long been interested in. . . and by "long" I mean most of my life. . . is Anger.  I'll admit that my interest was much more of a predominantly practical rather than detachedly speculative nature from the very start.  As far back as I can remember, I've struggled with and been puzzled by, suffered from others' and indulged in my own states or spells of anger.  I've held grudges, been righteously indignant, choked anger down, attempted to dispel or quell it with reasoning, by acts of forgiveness -- sometimes even did feel it less-than-expectedly ebb away or immediately dissolve.  I've fought with my fists and feet -- though thankfully not for a long time -- nursed and nourished silent resentments until the moment to strike back, shouted vile things, ran off in a rage, sometimes even -- as I got to understand anger's contours and lines of force both in general and in myself -- removed myself from situations.

To employ a distinction made first (as far as I know), by the great Christian Existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, for me the topic of anger as such is not a problem, but rather a mystery.

Questioning Continuous Improvement (part 1 of 2)

The relatively new term "continuous improvement" is one of those buzzwords that by its very connotative penumbra manages to project a kind of positivity, and it burrowed its way into and eventually set down roots within education circles some time ago.  That's not surprising -- there's a continual back and forth flow between the worlds of education and business, along the channels of marketing, management, training, and that ever-so-ambiguous domain of "leadership."

Throughout my own career in academia, first as a student, then as a professor, a writer, and a coordinator of faculty development and assessment of student learning, a constant background  has been this discourse between the world of business and that of education, sometimes low as an almost soundless murmur, other times out in the open, seemingly subsuming all the available attention from every other kind of activity.  I'd say that in the last five years in particular, "continuous improvement" has shoved and elbowed its way to the front off the line of formulations frequently on the lips and minds of college and university administrators, trickling down to department chairs and committees detailed with laboring that concept, producing plans, reporting data, then doing the whole thing all over again.

Questioning Continuous Improvement

Recently, Harvard Business Review blogger Ron Ashkenas argued a case that It's Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement -- a very welcome suggestion.  I've noted myself, in an Orexis Dianoētikē blog post, that too much weight given to a closely related and similarly endorsed notion, "best practices," not only can easily become a substitute for real thought and good practical reasoning, becoming counter-productive in the process -- the uncritical attitude towards these sorts of buzzword concepts is often indicative of a deeper failure, one which assumes form as institutional culture.

Are "Vices" Good For Us?

I use Twitter fairly extensively, for a variety of different purposes, one of which is to keep my ear to the ground, so to speak, or if you like a different analogy, to see what might come across my virtual desk. Spam or self-promotion aside, most of it is pretty good stuff.  At times, the articles linked to might be rather idiosyncratically, even misleadingly headlined, but in general, they provide a decent picture about what knowledgeable people in a variety of fields, professions, and communities are talking about. Given my own predilection for matters of morality, discussions of virtues and vices, it's no surprise that an article caught my attention: 10 'Vices' That Are Actually Good For You.  I suppose I ought to have known or at least suspected as soon as I saw the MSN Health logo coming up that it would be fairly ill-conceived, poorly-informed, disappointing the hopes the intriguing title raised -- despite what people tend to think, its tough to write well and competently on moral matters without a strong intellectual background and some practical experience in the field of Ethics.

Courage and Consolation

Earlier today, I was prompted to reflection on some material I've read and studied, taught and written upon, for years without ever really pulling back on the particular corner, turning over the ground, putting the grist into the mind's mill.  In one of my online classes, a student who suffered a terrible and harrowing experience, during the course of which their (I'm using the third person plural deliberately here) own actions -- and perhaps luck, chance, or grace -- brought them through with minor injuries, revealed this to the class, as well as what troubled that student even more:  Not all of their friends had been so fortunate.  Reading Sartre and thinking about our responsibility for who we make ourselves got the student thinking, remembering, raising feelings still not entirely processed through back to the fore, leaving them "morally rattled."

Fairly understandably, none of the other students commented on their classmate's post.  It's difficult to know how to respond to such personal revelations, particularly at the beginning of a class, when perhaps one has but the briefest of acquaintance with one's fellow learners.  I tend to think that in these sorts of situations the young find themselves more at a loss, resourcesless than do their elders -- though there are many very insightful, empathetic younger people and enough clueless older people to render that generalization not entirely reliable.  I wrote the student privately, offering condolences, a bit of my own experience, and a few suggestions about how the class and our subject matters might provide some resources for working things through.  Then I commented publicly.

In my public post, I praised the student's decision to write about the matter as "prudent," but in my private remarks, I invoked a different virtue: courage.  What was particularly striking to me was that the student's reply, thanking me for not leaving their post just hanging out there as well as for what I'd written in private, also mentioned and lauded courage, this time on my part.  Does that language, that concept, that virtue, fit this sort of situation?