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.

Boethius on Mistaken Views on Happiness (part 2 of 2)

Last month, in an earlier post, I brought Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy into a conversation that, among Virtue Ethicists, tends to circle around the works and thought of two figures, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.  Both thinkers, as contemporary Virtue Ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre argues, carry out something very important in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Treatise On Happiness, a dialectical examination of various possible contenders to the good for human beings, i.e. happiness -- and what each one of us has to do within the story comprising our own lives, according to MacIntyre, is to carry out a moral inquiry analogous to those landmark dialectical, universal, and in that sense rather abstract investigations of moral philosophy.  For you see, as human beings, as plain persons, we really live in the concrete, we ask about particular goods and whether they will make us happy.  We work these matters out, not necessarily divorced from universal considerations, but within specific contexts and situations.

Boethius' own inquiry into happiness bridges the gap between a philosophical, universal moral inquiry into happiness and a personal, particular, even pressing situation in which he finds himself -- a prison cell, unjustly accused, his happiness in whole and in its parts seemingly undone by an unreliable fortune.  Philosophia -- wisdom, or at least its pursuit, personified -- comes to his aid, engaging in discourse, exhortation, dialogue with the glum philosopher and courtier, and among the topics over which they range is precisely that one:  what is happiness?  Who has got it right, and who has got it wrong?  And most importantly -- what makes this philosophical -- why are the wrong views wrong?  What's wrong about them?  To answer that, of course, also requires setting out something more about what's right, rather than just that it is right.

Yves Simon on Moral Virtue (part 2 of 2)

Last month, I wrote a rather longish entry (at least for this blog) setting out a few themes from Yves Simon's excellent short work, The Definition of Moral Virtue, focusing in that post on two things in particular:  his identification of three moral positions common in modernity which attempt to dispense with the traditional conception of virtue, and the implications of his distinction between nature and use as modes of goodness or badness.  What I left unaddressed was another major theme of his book, the difference between mere habits and habitus.  

That the virtues -- and for that matter the vices -- are at their bases, in the sort of being which they have, habits is a standard commonplace of Virtue Ethics.  You can find that term readily used in most translations of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, or Aquinas' Disputed Questions on Virtue and Treatise On the Virtues, as well as in other classic texts of Virtue Ethics traditions of moral enquiry.  Simon cautions us against that, however, showing how the Greek hexis and its Latin translation habitus involve something more and something different than the concept "habit" which we so often unthinkingly substitute in their place -- and in telling us why, he also teaches us some important and often overlooked lessons about virtue and vice.

Boethius on Mistaken Views of Happiness (part 1 of 2)

One of the essays I assign my Ethics students at the beginning of the semester is Alasdair MacIntyre's Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods (included in the Macintyre Reader). One reason I use that short piece is that it introduces an important theme, the idea that we are all, whether we realize it or not, involved in the processes of asking and answering certain fundamental questions:

. . . on an Aristotelian view, the questions posed by the moral philosopher and the questions posed by the plain person are to a certain degree inseparable.  And it is with questions that each begins, for each is engaged in enquiry, the plain person often unsystematically asking"What is my good?" and "What actions will achieve it?" and the moral philosopher systematically enquiring "What is the good for human beings?" and "what kind of actions will achieve the good?"  Any persistent attempt to answer either of these sets of questions soon leads to asking the other.

In MacIntyre's view -- and I think he's right -- we are all of us committed to one or another -- some more some less consistently -- to one moral theory or another, whether explicitly, consciously, deliberately so, or whether only implicitly, accepting it perhaps as the default, following a trajectory of desire we have failed, avoided, or even not had the opportunity to think out.  When we see these sorts of moral matters from a different perspective, we imaginatively place ourselves in the perspective of another, rival moral theory.  When we leave one perspective behind and adopt another -- whether by a gradual process or a sudden conversions -- we shift our allegiance from one moral theory to another.

Neophilia: Curiosity by Another Name?

I've been meaning to comment on a New York Times piece, What’s New? Exuberance for Novelty Has Benefits, since I first saw it, since it touches on a matter that has been explored, invoked, exhibited and exemplified, condemned and praised -- whether in narrational passages, speeches, philosophical dialogues, proverbial exchanges, compilations of reflections upon life and wisdom:  Curiosity, the desire not only to know, to connect, to uncover, but also in a certain sense to contrast, to find, experience, or produce the novel.  Researchers are reevaluating and nuancing their assessment of a trait upon which they'd previously taken a more categorically negative stance, "novelty-seeking, a personality trait long associated with trouble."

Originally, employing methods focusing on genetics and the brain:

they linked this trait with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior.

Now, though, after extensively tracking novelty-seekers, researchers are seeing the upside. In the right combination with other traits, it’s a crucial predictor of well-being.