The Rationale for The Bat of Minerva

In the mid-1990s, I started a television show on regional cable in Minneapolis and St. Paul, The Bat of Minerva. Since then, my life has been entwined with the form and content of that show and with the archive it has generated. The rationale for this enterprise has grown and changed over twenty years. One milestone in its development was an interview I did on the show's twelfth anniversary with my student Mary Callahan as interviewer. Another was an University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study panel on oral history, which gave me an opportunity to compare and contrast my approach with those of oral historians.

An Online Introduction to Ethics: Confucius, Socrates, and Plato

As I came to teach ethics more online than in person, I discovered the value of short Youtube lectures. The unfolding Youtube collection is available here.  Over the last few years, I have worked quite hard to construct a truly practical introduction to ethics with a focus on questions of character, habit, and attitude. The spine of this course is the opening lecture series, which develops first the distinction between traditional and critical ethics and then the idea of Plato's Republic as a kind of nest in which several different lines of investigation are nurtured. The lectures below are the principal items in that series:

Succeeding in an Ethics Course

Confucius and the Golden Rule: Two Starting Points for Learning About Ethics
 
Confucius and Plato: Traditional and Critical Approaches to Thinking About Ethics

Heroes

What is selfishness?

Freedom and Resistance

Plato and the Principles of Community

Plato and John Bondhuis: Constructing the Places Where People Live

Talking Monsters Out of Being Monsters: Considerations from Plato's Republic

The Arguments of Their Lives: the Role of Lives in Moral Deliberation and Moral Teaching

In 2005, I completed a thesis in moral philosophy at the University of Minnesota. I had been working on a huge issue, trying to understand Descartes' idea of a provisional  ethics as the basis of any viable applied ethics. I chose one promising strategy within provisional ethics, the idea of looking to other lives for guidance in uncertainty, and made that the  center of my thesis. Even within this limited topic, I found myself selecting only  some of the most accessible pieces of the tradition for my chapters. I did, in a preliminary way, what I set out to do: I showed that there is a basis within the canon of introductory ethics for integrating a very common thinking strategy (the  reference to the lives of others and to stages of one's own life).  Some very complex examples remain to be discussed, and  the  broader project of provisional ethics is still waiting to be explored. 

I include here the first chapter of the dissertation. I hope at some point to post the other chapters as well. 

1

Introduction

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

                                                                                Gerard Manley Hopkins

The apostles converted the heathen with miracles and the arguments of their lives. Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

DEFINING THE TOPIC

This thesis is an investigation of two related topics: strategies for practical moral reflection, thinking well about the overall shape of one’s life and about particular moral choices that are forced upon one, and strategies for teaching introductory ethics in a way that helps students to engage in practical moral reflection. I want to ask about the right place for the study of actual human lives in practical moral reflection and the teaching of introductory ethics.

This question is difficult to specify. The term “practical moral reflection” may create some particular difficulties. In one way, all moral reflection is practical; that is, all moral reflection is relevant in some way to the question, “How shall we live?” But clearly, moral discussions take place at various distances from this question. The disputes among meta-ethical positions have consequences for practical moral thinking at a very general level. They establish what the enterprise is about, what kind of attention it deserves. The disputes among general views in normative ethics, for example, the dispute between deontological and consequentialist approaches, are a level closer to practical concerns. Perhaps the analysis of central moral concepts like “person” or “need” is closer yet to the pressing decisions that people have to make and to everyday moral thinking.

But all of these controversies are at some substantial distance from particular cases. It is not likely that the central disputes in moral philosophy will come to any satisfactory resolution soon enough to adjudicate pressing moral problems. Moral philosophy consists largely of the development and articulation of various enterprises in moral theory, and there are powerful voices urging that all these enterprises have serious flaws. Bernard Williams’ book, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, does deep criticism of all the major alternatives in moral theory, and leaves the reader at the end floating in deep water, clinging to a very small raft. One may not agree with all of Williams’ points, but the fact that a major figure in moral philosophy could write such a book, after decades of intensive debate among advocates of the major theoretic positions, suggests that perplexity and disillusion shadow the steps of even the most committed adherent of a particular moral theory.

One’s reflection about how to handle oneself tomorrow or whether to attend law school cannot wait on the resolution of higher-level questions. In writing of “practical moral reflection,” I want to focus attention on the sort of reflection that might plausibly contribute to urgent moral decisions, to decisions that have to be made with the knowledge that the large general theses in ethics are importantly controversial and that many huge questions are unresolved. 

Talk about the relevance of lives to moral thinking might seem comparably problematic. On one level, the relevance of lives to moral reflection is obvious. Any moral view that takes one’s past seriously gives one reason to reflect on one’s history. Moral views ask questions about one’s past. “What promises have been made?” “What debts have been incurred?” “What wrongs have been done to other people?” It would surely be of interest to think about the ways that moral views make space for the individual’s past, in moral reflection – how, for example, Kantian accounts take the moral agent’s past seriously in different ways than do utilitarian views. But this line of thought is not my central focus here.

Similarly, any moral view that values experience will have some place for reflection on the lives of others. The meaning and implications of moral concepts like bravery, truthfulness, and fairness are not immediately evident from definitions. To get a grasp of these notions, one must reflect on how people handle situations that come up: the soldier going into battle against overwhelming odds, the salesperson allowing a customer to retain a misconception about a product, the parents of a sick child allocating family resources among the children. It is hard to imagine how one could develop any usable moral vocabulary without telling stories and citing cases. 

In the last thirty years, some moral philosophers have given substantial attention to short stories and novels as instances of moral reflection, as material for moral reflection, and as tools for teaching.[1] Any full treatment of the place of lives in moral reflection and teaching must take account of these discussions; much of what can be said about the relevance of fictional accounts for moral reflection will apply to lives as well. One of the reasons that people are interested in considering novels like Middlemarch and Hard Times in ethics classes – or in their own philosophic writing – is that they take George Eliot and Charles Dickens to have captured important features of real lives, presenting those features in a clear and memorable way. It is certainly tempting to assimilate a discussion of the relevance of lives to moral reflection to this broader discussion of the relevance of substantial narratives to moral reflection.

In this thesis, I resist that temptation, realizing that any complete discussion of my topic must eventually take advantage of these philosophic resources. There is an important difference, I think, between considering lives and considering extended works of fiction based on lives. Works of fiction are reflective products embodying interpretations. Memoirs are also interpretations, under a different discipline. To ask about the meaning and shape of a life is to push past interpretation in search of evidence, argument, meaningful reality. When I point to Dorothy Day and say, “She was a modern, successful woman in love with a man, and she ended her relationship with him because he had no sympathy for her religious interests,” I am providing evidence about a human possibility. Someone who wants to say “I could never do that” is forced to look at Day’s life and consider what differences between Day’s life and her own account for this alleged impossibility. The real lives of human beings present that kind of challenge to other human beings. When I say, “Dorothea Brooke (a character in Eliot’s Middlemarch) married an unappealing man much older than herself out of a sense of duty to promote his work,” I am giving a very different kind of example. With respect to Dorothea, one can question the possibility of such an action. She is, after all, a fictional character. Further, if I want to find out more about this decision and its context, I run up against walls. There are no answers to the questions like: “What did Dorothea read?” or “What was the quality of her physical relationship with her husband?” The story of Dorothea’s choice is provocative, and it is arguably a part of the real canon of Western moral philosophy, but it cannot serve as evidence about human possibility in the way that Dorothy Day’s life story provides such evidence.[2]

The focus of this thesis is, in particular, the place of lives in moral reflection. Lives are conceived as the ‘spaces’ or ‘containers’ within which particular, morally charged events like promises and crimes occur, within which particular, morally important qualities like virtues and attitudes emerge. One never has a complete life in view, only incidents and fragments and stories and bits of evidence. One can know someone well for 40 years and still not feel confident giving his or her funeral eulogy: the shape of the person’s life may still be a mystery. It is more satisfying to attend to shaped and delimited fragments of lives (“Whatever Grant’s life may have meant, he said this to a soldier on the eve of battle in 1864.”)  or readings of parts of lives (“Suppose that John Adams was motivated by a concern for his historical reputation to reconcile with Jefferson late in life.”).

Without discounting a limited and focused moral interest, I want to address in this thesis the ways that practical moral thinking engages with lives as wholes, as complexly connected unities of disparate actions and events. Of course, any life one encounters is represented by only partial evidence, and one is always in the position of inferring things about the life as a whole. Yet, I want to say, some moral thinking consists in an effort to go beyond anecdotes and episodes to try to see one’s own life or that of another person whole and complete, and to weigh the relevance of the life thus seen (or reconstructed) for one’s moral decisions. We are sometimes satisfied with stories, and we sometimes want to go beyond stories to an appreciation of the connections and commitments within a complex life. In this thesis, I want to consider some reasons one may have for giving lives this more general and sustained attention.

The point of my investigations is to separate out, from among the many considerations that legitimately bear on moral decision and the shaping of our lives, one strand of reflection: the funeral eulogist’s strand, or the historian’s strand, if one’s life is grand or despicable enough to interest an historian. The eulogist and the historian stand beyond particular moral questions and ask how the life taken as a whole bears on other lives: what it has to say. This is, of course, an endless investigation. A good eulogy or a good history will start a process of reflection in its audience; this process may continue for the whole length of their lives, becoming perhaps an important constituent of audience members’ own biographies.

At my father’s funeral, the eulogist chose to quote at length from an oral history my father had recorded years earlier, in which he reflected on the lives of his neighbors in the little farming community around Forest City, Minnesota. The point of the eulogy was to say: this was a man who admired these kinds of people. I take this to be one natural way in which decency is talked about in ordinary contexts: by establishing lives as objects of reflection and placing them in a sequence of other lives. It is close kin to the repeated identification of the Israelites in the Hebrew scriptures as the descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The moral tradition is defined by a sequence of lives.

In the Hebrew scriptures, examples and lives both figure prominently. The scriptures model different levels of moral reflection. The second book of Samuel tells the story of King David’s pursuit of Bathsheba, the wife of one of his army officers. David seduces Bathsheba while her husband, Uriah, is away fighting. Bathsheba becomes pregnant during her husband’s long absence. To save himself embarrassment, David orders that Uriah should be abandoned in the midst of battle, so that he may be killed. David then takes Bathsheba as his wife. The prophet Nathan calls David to account for this:

And The Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him, and said to him, "There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his morsel, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him."

"Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb, and prepared it for the man who had come to him."

Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, "As The Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity."

Nathan said to David, "You are the man!"[3]

This story illustrates the power of example in moral thinking. David cannot see his own action clearly, but he easily understands and judges a similar action in the life of someone else. This is one important way that moral teaching and reflection can happen.

The book of Samuel illustrates another level of reflection also.  This individual story is part of a long narrative of David’s life, from his beginnings as a simple shepherd, through his battle with Saul, his rise to greatness, and the collapse of his kingdom into civil war as his sons battle for supremacy. In putting this long, complex, morally difficult story (and other equally complex stories) at the center of moral and religious reflection, the Jewish tradition makes a point about the nature of moral thinking that goes beyond the use of examples: those within that tradition locate ourselves and make sense of themselves as moral people by coming to terms with difficult and ambiguous lives. It is this kind of moral thinking, applied both to our own lives (as we construct our own ongoing history) and to the lives of significant people around us, that is the central topic of this thesis.

TREATMENT OF LIVES IN PHILOSOPHIC LITERATURE AND IN ORDINARY MORAL CONVERSATION

This discussion has a long history. In the two books that stand at the beginning of the western tradition of ethical thinking, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Plato’s Republic, philosophers are admonished to attend to complete lives. Aristotle says in the Ethics that eudaimonia – the happiness and value of a life – should be judged only with respect to the complete life. He quotes the proverb, “One swallow does not make a spring.”[4] Plato, in the last book of the Republic, presents a mythic story of Er, a man who travels to the realm of the dead and observes there how people who have died choose the lives into which they will be reborn.[5] Plato pictures one such chooser quickly committing himself to the luxurious life of a tyrant, and then realizing, too late, that that life involves doing horrible things, eating his own children. Plato suggests that philosophers will be better equipped than non-philosophers to make this mythic life choice well. This seems to mean: philosophers will wait to see lives whole and complete before evaluating them; they will not be dazzled by one feature of a life, to the exclusion of all others.

Talk about taking lives seriously has been eclipsed in the tradition by other lines of thought. These two suggestions are quite isolated, even within the writings of Plato and Aristotle.  Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is mostly a discussion, one by one, of those qualities and ways of acting that make up an admirable life. A well-lived life displays moderation and courage and appropriate generosity. It contains friendships and civic engagement and non-practical thinking. One wonders how to take the cautionary note, that only a complete life should be judged to be happy. Is this merely a nod to the extreme case, in which someone who has lived well encounters such a terrible disaster at the end of life that the life must be read backward from this disaster? Or is Aristotle suggesting that there is something to be understood about an admirable life that goes beyond an appreciation of admirable qualities? Is he suggesting that one must come to understand also how these qualities fit together in some natural and coherent way, how they contribute to the biography of the admirable person, in order to really understand an admirable life?

Plato’s suggestion that the philosopher will be better than the non-philosopher at judging lives is likewise difficult to connect to other accounts of philosophic ethical inquiry in Plato’s writings.  Over and over, Plato’s character Socrates shows his interlocutors to be incapable of giving a satisfactory account of those virtues that they judge to be central to their lives. These demonstrations likely contain quite pointed criticism, in veiled form, of the action and thinking of some of the interlocutors: the problems in principle that Socrates finds with Laches and Euthyphro may suggest deep and persistent flaws in their characters. Yet Socrates seems not to examine the value of lives as wholes, in any obvious or overt way, and it is hard to say how Socratic inquiry would help someone over-impressed by one feature of a life to see that feature in context and evaluate the over-all worth of that life. Perhaps Plato is merely suggesting, in the Myth of Er, that the philosopher will take his time about things, will ask questions, and so will not make precipitous and irrevocable judgments of any sort. But the Republic’s suggestion that the philosopher is a judge of lives as well as an evaluator of conceptual accounts opens an intriguing line of interpretation and inquiry with respect to Plato’s writings in general: does he give any account of this aspect of philosophic practice, or provide any clear bridge between conceptual investigations and this other, apparently different project? Also, quite independent of Platonic interpretation issues, this suggestion in the Republic introduces into the tradition the question: is there some value to taking the measure of complete lives that is not achievable if one simply evaluates individual opinions and individual actions?

Anyone who listens to casual ethical conversation is familiar with the idea that complete lives are a natural “unit” of moral thinking. When people have the conversations that guide and redirect their lives, when people undertake the personal and private questioning that is at the heart of ethical reflection, they mention names, they bring up lives. People are sobered by the lives of those whose resources are severely limited; they resolve to be content with what they have and to make good use of it. People are inspired by great achievements and want to emulate them. People are warned off by watching lives going wrong; they turn away from the weaknesses and failings that lead to bad ‘destinations.’ Being like some people, distancing oneself from other people, coming to terms with ambiguous or problematic people – that’s a lot of what people do when they think about the direction and meaning of their lives.

Perhaps most frequently, in moral conversation, people bring up their own lives. They look back over the course of their lives in much the same way one might look over the course of another’s life, asking questions. What are the dominant themes? What is the direction of this life? What major commitments and loyalties dominate its course? What are the roots of my current convictions? People say that college is partly a place to find out who you are, and that expression captures something of this process. People want to make a new beginning, rooted in something more than momentary impulse and desire, so they ask what impulses have been persistent and deep in their lives.  The an                   swer to that question, when it comes clear, may move the person asking to recoil from his or her life, to begin anew by making up for and repudiating the past, or it may move that person to reaffirm and endorse the direction the life has already started to take.

By contrast, in the contemporary literature in applied ethics, the unit of discussion is seldom: the life – or even a substantial stretch of life. The topic is sometimes a possible guiding rule for lives (a principle like “Never lie!”) or a quality of a life (courage or generosity) or a particular decision, a case (“Ronald wishes to marry, but his marriage will break the heart of his ailing mother.”). And it seems to those who do ethics that this state of affairs is perfectly proper and necessary.

As one might expect, when philosophers teach ethics to general college and university audiences, they mention cases and principles and virtues, but they seldom attempt to comment on rich pictures of individual lives or to make a space for their students to present such pictures. [6] Biographies are seldom on the reading lists of ethics courses, and students who try to tell their life story in class are encouraged to focus their remarks on some particular question or issue. This way of teaching is natural, given the way ethical thinking is undertaken in the profession, but it raises an ethical question: what does it mean that the preferred way of teaching in academic applied ethics differs importantly from ethical thinking in non-academic life, just in that lives are not particularly important to academic discussions but are quite important to non-academic discussions?  Is this a fault of academic ethics teaching? A virtue? Perhaps both?

One might think that the neglect of lives in philosophic literature is   appropriate, that the focus and precision of academic discussions is a clear virtue. One might say, “People in ordinary talk and ordinary thinking name individuals whom they admire or individuals whom they detest as a kind of lazy way of identifying the qualities and commitments they admire or detest. It is the job of philosophic discussion to get to the point of the examples, to name the qualities and commitments in question, and then to continue the discussion with only those qualities and commitments as the topic. The individual, the individual life, properly drops out.”

The neglect of lives in ethics teaching may be defended in a similar way: clear ethical thinking leaves particular lives behind, and good teaching encourages students to clarify their ethical thinking. Further, students often come to ethics classes with the purpose of finding some way to get distance from the overwhelming examples of their parents and friends. They want their ethics classes to carry them beyond conventional morality to something more authentic, and the influence of lives is felt to be conventional. A student who says, at the end of a semester of ethics, “I just want to live a life as good as my Uncle Harry lived” has opted to remain primitive, to remain undeveloped. He gets a “C.”

These approaches to reflection and teaching may be correct. The point of my discussion is to worry about whether some such dismissal of lives in serious ethical discussion is appropriate. Philosophers are leaving behind a very robust tradition of ethical discussion – naming people, referring to lives – and they are encouraging students who come to their courses seeking help in ordinary moral decisions to leave this tradition behind – or, at least, to regard it as preliminary to serious ethical reflection. This dual abandonment should not happen lightly. If something important is lost or misunderstood when principle-discussion or virtue-discussion replaces Uncle-Elmer discussion or Aunt-Flora discussion, that may be a loss both to academic progress in ethics and to the quality of decision-making among the students who pass through introductory ethics courses. 

It is also possible that the requirements for academic progress in ethics are different from the requirements for good practical reflection in some important ways. It may be that teaching people to be good professional moral philosophers may not be the best way to the help them think well about the urgent decisions in their lives. An approach that works well for academic discussions may be ill suited to day-to-day moral thinking, and it may be that the best day-to-day practical approach is of limited value for investigating the kinds of questions that academic philosophers ask

Moral philosophers are obliged pay attention to the common strategies for navigating life under conditions of intellectual uncertainty, even if those strategies are of little use in resolving the traditional problems in moral theory. The main economic support for the work and livelihood of moral philosophers comes from the teaching of undergraduate introductory classes in ethics. Students come to those classes in a particular state of mind. They have already encountered alternatives to their habitual ways of thinking that challenge and confuse them. They have encountered different disciplines with different approaches to the important questions in their lives. And then, in any competent introductory ethics class, they learn that there are several different and independent traditions of moral thinking that have persisted, in lively debate with each other, for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. It is reasonable for such students to ask for advice, not about settling the huge questions raised by their recent experience and education, but about living with those questions or in spite of those questions – that is, about finding some reasonable way to navigate their lives, given the likelihood of long-term perplexity on fundamental matters. Teachers of moral philosophy have a professional responsibility to consider what tools are available for resolving this practical difficulty, even if such tools turn out to be of little use for theoretical investigations.

STARTING POINTS FOR THIS DISCUSSION

It will be my goal in this thesis to examine ways in which lives have been taken to be important to moral reflection. I will take as my starting points three principal texts. The first of these, Mill’s On Liberty, presents a utilitarian view about social and legal restrictions on expressions of unpopular opinions and on the full development of eccentric ways of life. In the course of this political discussion, Mill introduces an ideal of human excellence that, in one way, warns people against taking lives seriously, while, in another way, it requires a close attention to one’s own life and the lives around one as a prerequisite for mature moral thinking. The questions and complexities arising out of this discussion will provide the framework for the following chapters.

Plato’s Crito and Descartes’ Discourse on Method will be the central texts for a discussion of two quite different suggestions about the relevance of lives to moral reflection and the guidance of a life: the view that Socrates represents to Crito that Socrates’ own prior loyalties, commitments, and patterns of action are properly decisive in governing his decision about fleeing prison, and Descartes’ suggestion that it is reasonable to respond to a condition of moral perplexity by attending to the conduct of modest and sensible persons. These texts will be the starting points for more general considerations of the ways in which one’s own life and the lives of others are relevant to one’s moral reflection.

In the final chapter of this thesis, I will explore how the various suggestions contained in the earlier chapters illuminate the moral importance of biographical material – and other rich ways of encountering lives -- for individual reflection and for teaching. Using three quite different examples as starting points, I will begin to answer the questions: how does one think about a life and, more specifically, how does one bring the information about a life to bear on serious moral questions?

It is important to see the limits of this enterprise. The discussion of the relevance of lives to moral reflection is present at many points in the history of philosophy, and surely considerations about lives can be relevant to moral thinking in many ways. This thesis attempts to open the discussion by examining a selection of interesting claims about the relevance of lives to moral reflection and to moral teaching. A complete treatment would be much longer.

To illustrate the practical implications of this work, I’d like to sketch briefly three strategies of moral reflection. These are, first of all, possible teaching strategies. They are also particular approaches to thinking about moral questions. To think clearly about the place of these strategies in the ethics curriculum, and in one’s own moral reflection, one needs to think clearly about how lives bear on moral thinking.

(1) Consider the use of the learning circle or story circle approach to the investigation of ethical notions like friendship. This strategy is very simple. Students are asked to tell a story from their own lives in which a notion under discussion figures prominently.[7] For example, they may be asked to tell a story about a friendship that was valuable in their lives. Each student is encouraged to speak at some length, without interruption; each is given the option of passing. Commentary after the circle of stories is minimal: the facilitator or the participants may make some comments about common features of the various stories or differences among them, but there is no attempt to subsume the stories under some large conceptual net. The assumption is that people will learn, in various and different ways, by respectfully hearing these stories, one after another. The respect one gives to this activity, the place one gives it in the mix of reflective or teaching strategies one uses, depends crucially on whether one thinks that such stories have value in a way that isn’t exhausted by deriving from them a set of principles or concepts or common qualities. If one thinks that friendship is a fairly simple moral matter, governed by straightforward, obvious, easily articulated principles, then one will find the whole storytelling enterprise to be, at best, a simple-minded introduction to the topic, at worst a waste of valuable time. If one takes friendship to be complex and difficult in a way that only this sort of storytelling can helpfully illuminate, one will be very much more tolerant of this practice.

(2) The question of the uses of online journals, weblogs, in moral reflection and moral teaching is also importantly connected to these general questions about lives.  It has recently become easy to produce a kind of public journal online; new internet software makes it possible to conveniently and quickly upload text and pictures to a public weblog, accessible worldwide via the internet. This sophisticated new tool allows for a new kind of informal publication: a daily or weekly chronicle of thoughts, responses, points of view, interests. Such publications provide, over time, a record of the thinking, response, and action of the writer. They provide a glimpse of the person’s intellectual and emotional life. One might ask: how is this tool relevant to ethical investigation and to the teaching of ethics? For example, does a teacher of ethics enrich his or her class in any substantial way by maintaining a weblog and alerting students to its existence? If the life of the instructor in a course on ethics matters as an exemplary life, if students would profit from surveying that life in thinking about how to live, then this kind of publication could be useful, providing a window onto one individual’s habitual pattern of thought, response, and action. If the life of the instructor in an ethics course is irrelevant to the matters under discussion, then the weblog technology is much less interesting; abstract discussions of principles and concepts are well conducted within formal publications, and lectures are appropriate formats for less rigorous presentations of that kind of material. The weblog is interesting because it allows readers to place thinking in time and to build up a picture of a life that is involved with particular trains of thought. One’s assessment of its place in individual moral reflection and in ethics instruction depends on the importance one gives to that kind of picture.

(3) The question about the value of personal involvement in situations one judges morally is important to moral reflection and to the teaching of ethics.  Some courses in ethics contain community involvement or community service components. Other courses discuss cases and issues from the local community without offering students any direct experience with the people affected by those moral issues. In either case, it matters substantially for teaching how one imagines the importance of involvement, of being there, of meeting the people concerned, to an understanding of an issue. One can take actual experience in the situation as supplementary to rich descriptions, possibly alerting people to some consideration they might not have noticed, or one can take that experience to be necessary to an adequate assessment of the problem.

The question about the place of field experience in the teaching of ethics is similar to a difficult question about moral reflection in general. It is a common experience, across a broad range of morally charged circumstances, that one is unable to maintain within the circumstance itself those attitudes and perspectives that one develops, thinking about it in advance. One cannot say to someone “in the flesh” what one has practiced saying in front of one’s mirror. One of the most basic problems about moral reflection is to understand what this phenomenon means and what it implies for moral thinking. One can make a case that involvement in real circumstances, confrontation with participants in real moral crises, obscures moral judgment: the only reasonable place from which to judge is at a distance from the case. One might also hold that one can only judge rightly when one has been in the middle of the situation one is judging, talking to the people and experiencing the pressures that come to bear on them. One might also make some complex distinctions among cases: in some cases, involvement is necessary; in others, it impairs judgment.  One’s decision on this point will mark one’s approach to moral thinking in profound ways.

In this thesis, I will defend a very common and popular approach to ethical thinking: the biographical and evaluative consideration of complete lives. This approach is often slighted in academic discussions, in favor of other valuable approaches that have a narrower scope. I will argue that this strategy of moral reflection is well established in the tradition of moral philosophy and should be included in the repertoire of individual moral thinkers and in the curriculum of introductory ethics.

---

[1] See Martha Nussbaum Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), Alice Crary, “Does the Study of Literature Belong Within Moral Philosophy? Reflections in the Light of Ryle’s Thought,” Philosophic Investigations, 23:4 (2000), and Robert Coles The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).

[2] It seems important to me to distinguish these two kinds of resources for philosophic inquiry partly because, if they are not distinguished, the literary resources are likely to dominate the discussion and eclipse the narrative of actual lives. In particular, in teaching, the elegantly crafted literary stories can crowd out the messy and complex stories of students’ own lives. Only a reflective and teaching practice that acknowledges the particular contributions of both literary examples and of the investigation of lives can strike the right balance in using these resources.

[3] 2 Sam.12: 1-7 RSV.

[4] Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1098 a19.

[5] Plato Republic 617b.

[6] The standard approach to the use of cases in applied ethics courses can be seen in popular texts like Beauchamp and Childress’ Principles of Biomedical Ethics (New York and Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1994) or Wasserstrom’s Today’s Moral Problems. The standard of competent work in the area is particularly clear in Wasserstrom’s two contributions to his anthology, “Privacy,” and “Is Adultery Immoral?” Carol Bly’s anthology, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World: Reading and Thinking About Ethics (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1996) and Alain DeBotton’s The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) explore an alternative approach that takes better account of the complexity of lives. 

[7] A discussion of the learning circle approach is found in John Wallace’s article “The Use of a Philosopher: Socrates and Myles Horton,” in Irene E. Harvey and C. David Lisman, eds., Beyond the Tower: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Philosophy (Washington, D.C., American Association of Higher Education, 2000), pp. 69-90.

 

Plato on the Choice of a College Major

I teach Plato in ethics classes; I ask students to write about their lives, in the same classes. This forces the issue: can one, without twisting things around, bring Plato's thinking into dialogue with the concerns of U.S. undergrads in the 21st Century. I think this is an important question, because I think people come to undergraduate philosophy classes with some hope that they will be of use. I don't think teachers should change the subject until they have exhausted the search for a way to really be of use. This paper, presented for the Minnesota Ancient Philosophy Circle, is one effort to explore connections.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Plato and the Undecided Student: Deciding What To Think About

Peter Shea

Growing up, Socrates was my hero. I saw him as a guy who would think hard about whatever came up, making everyday experience interesting and deep. He wasn’t afraid to keep on thinking, when huge difficulties emerged – to live with uncertainty and doubt; he had no need to bring every discussion to some simple and satisfying conclusion. Also, he was willing to move around, taking on friendship, beauty, fighting in armor, mathematical knowledge.  He didn’t let himself get stuck on some one, intractable problem.

When I went to college, I majored in philosophy because, to me, that meant not majoring in anything at all: holding on to my universal hunting license.

Two new influences led me to write this essay. My students have made it clear to me that the choice of a major is a very big deal for them, morally and practically. It just won’t do for me as a teacher to have nothing to offer them with respect to what they see as the biggest decision of their college careers.

Martha Farah, a neuro-ethicist, came to speak at the Gustavus Nobel conference. Her closing remarks provided my most recent incentive to write about the choice of things to think about. She said:

“If we all we are is physical stuff, what the heck does anything matter? I mean, do I care whether one leaf blows east or west, outside on that lawn? No. So why should I care if you or I happens to get run over by a truck. What does anything matter? How do you find meaning in a physical world? Steven Weinberg, who is a physicist, wrote about this and said, ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’ And I think that, if that’s a problem for physical science, it is even more of a problem in neuroscience… Even if I am thinking my neuroscience thoughts and viewing it all as a physical system and at some level it doesn’t matter, the second I step back into my normal human being mode, I do think things matter.”

 

It was an odd moment. Farah realized that she was in front of an audience that had taken pains to come to this conference, and that she had just told them it was all meaningless.  Stepping firmly back into her human shoes, she ended her talk with a heartfelt testimony about how meaningful this conference had been to her.

Her speech reminded me of the physicists at Los Alamos, waiting for the first nuclear explosion, aware of arguments that such an explosion would ignite the atmosphere and end life on earth. I wanted to say to them, “Shouldn’t you at least wait a bit, to do an experiment that might put an end to physics in the entire universe?” In as similar way, I was tempted to ask Farah, “Shouldn’t you back off from lines of investigation that make investigation seem pointless? Isn’t this self-defeating scholarship?” Her remarks seemed relevant both to my choice of research projects and to my students’ choices of courses and majors.

The point of this paper is to ask what help might be found in Plato’s dialogues for thinking about what to think about and what to avoid. A related question is this: what openings are present in the Platonic canon, which is the staple of introductory philosophy courses, for initiating discussions about choices of major, choices of courses, and choices of intellectual “projects?”

What would Plato say to the college student trying to choose a major? Are there any areas of study that Platonic arguments picture as dangerous or self-defeating?

Consider this advice from the Apology, “"…the greatest good for a man [is] to discuss virtue [excellence] every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men…" 38a

That might argue for a philosophy major, with an ethics emphasis.   In Laches, mediocre offspring of great men are considering how to educate their own children, so that those children may surpass them and restore the family honor. 

The parents are trying to decide whether lessons in “fighting in armor” are worthwhile, and they consult three advisors famous for  battlefield accomplishments, two generals – Laches and Nicias – and Socrates, who is famous for his courage as a soldier.  The generals give conflicting advice derived from their understanding of the realities of battle. Socrates suggests that understanding any such matters depends on first understanding courage, and launches a long, twisty definitional discussion.

What strikes me about this, thinking as a parent who has made all sorts of similar calls about educational opportunities, is how bizarre this move is. All of the assembled discussants agree that winning battles is important. The relevant considerations for deciding about lessons are the “battlefield” appropriate considerations: does this training make someone an effective soldier. The overarching discussion of courage may be relevant to these ground-level decisions in some way, but such decisions can’t wait on the outcome of debates at the higher level. That’s like saying that questions about how to cook steak wait on the outcome of debates about vegetarianism. Surely, if the vegetarians make their case, that will at least diminish the interest of any reasonable person in cooking meat, but cooking classes can’t wait on the outcome of animal rights discussions. As the conversation moves further and further from practical matters, one can imagine the fathers sinking into despair.

One wants to ask: does Plato expect the reader to accept this odd substitution and hijacking of the debate? Is that the point of the Laches? I suspect not, though I am very far from a full account. I am impressed, first of all, by the care expended on Laches’ and Nicias’ practical speeches. The generals are shown as resourceful arguers, approaching the problem of an innovation in training with intelligence and insight. It is difficult to take the point of the dialogue to be that those arguments just don’t matter.

I think that Plato is playing a trick on the reader of the Laches. He is getting that reader to empathize with the parents, to doubt the relevance of philosophy, and then, in a very subtle way, making a modest point about the usefulness of philosophic education – as valuable for Laches and Nicias and also for the young boys.

The reader’s anxiety, as the dialogue progresses, comes from the inconclusiveness and abstractness of the discussion: how will this discussion ever lead back to “fighting in armor” or any other concrete teaching question? But does the discussion need to reach some conclusion, to be useful? Suppose one remembers, as any informed Athenian would remember, the disasters that befell Laches and Nicias later on. Laches failed to recognize the value of strategic retreat, and failed to stand up to the demands of his soldiers for action: he marched his army out of safe cover to confront a superior force, when reinforcements were on the way. Nicias failed to effectively stand up to his fellow citizens, in opposing the Syracuse campaign and the impossible team selected to lead it. Both, in other words, imagined courage in too a narrow way: as consisting of standard successful moves on the battlefield. 

I take Plato to be saying something like this, in the Laches: “I freely admit that philosophic discussions can go on a long time without reaching a resolution, and also that they are sometimes quite distant from practical concerns. But suppose that Laches and Nicias, in their early years, had been invited to take even the first steps on the philosophic path, to notice that their central virtue, their reason for living, was broader and more diverse than they had thought, encompassing many behaviors, in different circumstances, and involving relations not just with enemies but with fellow citizens. The first steps of Socrates’ investigation take them already beyond the mistakes that cost them their lives. ” On this view, Laches is a defense of a little philosophy – of the power of even simple lines of investigation to shake people out of dangerous assumptions. It suggests, concretely, that the boys need a philosophy tutor. (Perhaps the Laches is part of the recruiting campaign for the Academy.)

So Laches supports at least the idea that one should minor in philosophy, whatever one’s major. The first steps of philosophic progress are valuable, even to practical people.

Is there an argument in the dialogues for majoring in philosophy? I think there might be one in the Theaetetus, but it is a limited argument. Theaetetus begins with the story of a young man coming home, dying, having fought well. It then flashes back to show Theaetutus as a boy, a very promising mathematics student whose estate has been mismanaged and wasted by his trustees. There’s an odd interlude at 10e5 where Socrates mistakenly claims that Theodorus, a mathematician and Theaetetus’ teacher, is the trustee of Protagoras’ estate. Theodorus corrects him: “It’s not I but rather Callias, the son of Hipponicus, who’s the trustee in charge of Protagoras’ things. I turned away a bit too soon from bare argument to geometry.” Callias is notorious for wasteful expenditure: Protagoras and Theaetetus are both badly served by their trustees. 

What does this move in the dialogue mean? One possibility occurs to me: the dialogue is criticizing Theodorus for turning from bare argument to geometry – for switching his major from philosophy to mathematics, leaving an important “estate” to the care of a supremely careless man. What is the estate: the whole question of the possibility of knowledge as opposed to opinion, of investigation as different from persuasion. The objections that Protagoras raised needed an answer, for public reasons: in the absence of some public ideal of truth, people will come to regard debate as simply a persuasion contest. The sorts of foolish and wasteful military campaigns in which good young men are killed result from a debased intellectual climate. Theodorus stands convicted of betraying Protagoras, and Athens, and, ultimately, men like Theaetetus, all for not persisting in his philosophy major. (It is important that the young Theaetetus meets Socrates, who could initiate him into philosophy, shortly before Socrates’ death. The responsibility for training Theaetetus falls to Theodorus, who can only teach him mathematics. The line of philosophic transmission forward from Protagoras and Socrates is broken.)

If this reading is right, the dialogue argues for a particular major – but only for a particular sort of person. Theodorus is talented; he could have helped to unravel the problems raised by Protagoras. He could have continued and passed on the tradition of philosophic inquiry. There was an important public reason to do so: Athens needed a sound epistemology as it confronted the problems of democratic government. Theodorus had the responsibility to take on the important problem of his time, and he did not rise to the occasion.

This is a promising suggestion, for the undecided student. One’s choice of a major is not just a personal choice: one should think about what one can contribute to the world and about the particular needs of the world into which one becomes an adult.

Are there any majors that Plato rejects? There is the unargued claim in Republic that the desire to look at corpses is a base appetite contrary to reason (which might keep people out of mortuary science and forensic medicine). There is also an argument in Republic against teaching dialectic to young people that may contain the germ of a more general rejection. At 538c, Plato pictures a young man who has grown up respecting certain guidelines of action, without having thought about them very hard. This young man has immoderate desires, which he restrains out of respect for the principles he has learned. Then someone questions him about his beliefs and “reduces him to the belief that this thing is no more beautiful than it is ugly, and the same with what is just and good and the things he honored most.” This person will then give way to his desires, since he no longer respects the guidelines that have held them in check, and will descend thereby into what Plato elsewhere describes as a kind of madness. Only carefully selected people who have been through rigorous training can, at the age of thirty, be trained in dialectic and trusted to use it to find the truth. In particular, at that age, they can be trusted to keep at the search for the requisite five years, and not wander off skylarking after they finish day one of the “chastity” unit: “arguments against.”

A philosophy major is not safe for the sanity of most students – and perhaps other majors, like anthropology and sociology, are dangerous in the same way: they validate ways of life different from the one that maintains the young person’s sanity. Like the Theaetetus recommendation, this advice is particular: to students of a certain age, whose principles are not well established.

This comes close to Farah’s suggestion that certain lines of thought leave one with the sense that nothing matters. Plato here argues that moral dialectic is one such line of thought, at least for those under the age of thirty.

Finally, we come to the closest point of contact between Plato and Farah, Socrates’ autobiographical remarks in Phaedo about his reasons for turning away from the natural sciences, in particular anatomy and physiology. Two passages seem to me to sum up his reasons. The first responds to, specifically, an account of his remaining in prison in terms of some causal story involving his bones and muscles, “These bones and sinews would long since have been off in Megara or Boeotia, impelled by their judgment of what was best, had I not thought it more just and honourable not to escape and run away, but to submit to whatever penalty the city might impose.” 99a

The point  seems to be that causal accounts of the kind one could hope for from natural science would explain some human behavior, but not behavior like “remaining in prison to face execution when one has the option of fleeing to comfortable exile in Megara.” This would be a pretty straightforward argument: natural science cannot explain the most interesting phenomena – in fact, it predicts the opposite of what sometimes happens. (This seems to be actually a problem for neuro-ethics: the accounts of the evolution of sacrificial behavior work far better for limited sacrifice, like that involved in child raising or food sharing, than for martyrdom on principle.)

There’s an interesting feature of this example: the action that is inexplicable (remaining to face execution) is the product of a sophisticated train of thought, the fruit of a lifetime of philosophic reflection. If Socrates had pursued physical science, this counter-example might well not have existed. The decision to seek accounts other than physical causes for action brought about the behavior that physical causes cannot explain.

The Phaedo’s second objection to the pursuit of natural science accounts of human action seems to be this: “To call these things the reasons for my actions, rather than my choice of what is best, and that too though I act with intelligence, would be a thoroughly loose way of talking.” 99b

So what is wrong with loose ways of talking? Surely, whatever accounts the neuroscientist gives of the course of a human life are going to be different from accounts given in ordinary terms. Someone diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder might say: “I wanted to be sure whether I had turned off the stove. Each time I left the house, I couldn’t quite be sure I had turned it off, so I returned to the kitchen again and again.” The neuroscientist Norman Doidge, describing the brain states involved,  writes, “Because the caudate didn’t shift the gear automatically, the orbital frontal cortex and the cingulate continued to fire off their signals, increasing the mistake feeling and the anxiety.” It turns out that, in this case, when people describe their obsession in the looser way suggested by brain imaging, this description enables them to take control of the process and end the compulsive episode. (They say, “That’s my OCD kicking in” and shift their thinking away from the problem ‘Did I turn off the stove?’ to some distracting and pleasant memory.)

Perhaps what Socrates is saying here is just that some phenomena, like people acting for the best, are so interesting that any investigative method that obscures such phenomena is unacceptable. Or he might be saying that the normal ways of talking about the interesting phenomena like the choice of the best, are good enough and do not need to be supplemented. Or perhaps he just doesn’t have access to examples in which natural science accounts are illuminating, in the way that the neuroscience account of obsessive behavior is both illuminating and helpful in therapy, so he doesn’t see what use there could ever be for a looser account of human action.

It is not clear how close the objections in the Phaedo come to Farah’s worry, that complete accounts will lead to a sense that nothing matters. One can take Socrates to be saying that some kinds of accounts are just inadequate to moral facts, like choice of the best, or that they are useless for a discussion of such facts. But that is different from saying that one will cease to think that anything matters if one studies natural science. There is, however, this possible link: to the extent that one attends to those phenomena that natural science explains best, one may come to forget about moral choice, perhaps also to forget to make moral choices. And that may be equivalent to: coming to think that nothing matters. Socrates the natural scientist might have no reason to attend to moral thinking, and might not live the sort of life that provides a difficulty for natural scientific accounts.

I want to conclude by saying something about the ethics of teaching. It seems important that teachers of philosophy validate the intellectual problems confronted by students, encouraging them to respond to arguments within the tradition. In my experience, the most pressing decisions undergraduate students face are decisions about what to think about: what courses to take, what majors to pursue, what careers to enter. It is important that philosophy teachers identify points of access to the introductory canon, points at which those works address student concerns. This paper is one preliminary contribution to that project. 

Celebrating Thoughtful People

I was a founding member of the Minnesota Independent Scholar's Forum and did a newsletter and calendar for them for several years. On an important anniversary, they  asked me to speak. I reviewed my own history with them and suggested some directions for the future. Some of what I suggested is out-of-date; the "Lives and Ideas Channel" never happened, though I think it is still a good idea. This paper is perhaps my most ambitious effort to do a coherent and comprehensive account of what I have been up to over the years from age 26 to 64.

June 14, 2008

Talk for the MN Independent Scholars Forum Annual Meeting

“Celebrating Thoughtful People: You Too Can Think for Yourself, Act With Insight and Care, and Maintain a Thoughtful Presence in a Crazy World”

Peter Shea

My job: to speak from a particular perspective about the social change potential of independent thinkers and scholars, first reviewing my history with that perspective, then suggesting some directions for the future --  for this organization or for allied efforts.  The perspective I want to represent is contained in the title of this talk. It needs a little explanation.

Immersion – There are enough ideas around to be immersed in them, enough ways of thinking and living too. But isn’t it odd that we can have great concentrations of ideas – the complete Shakespeare, the complete Dewey, the complete Heidegger – lying around and not one little bit of it enters us, and then someone drops a chance quote, alludes to Romeo and Juliet or continuity of experience or Dasein, and that’s the little bit we can run with, the light of our lives for awhile.

For awhile this year, I went to the St. Peter library and just took what they had on the shelves for audiobooks, whatever I thought I could stand, usually just one such find per visit, and almost every one changed my life. I don’t know why. It got in under the guards somehow, just because it was sort of chance.

I think of this as a little bit like quanta: people can only absorb new stuff in particular size packets. My hunch is that lives are one right size of packet for carrying ideas, and that people absorb ideas as they encounter lives.

I have “celebrate” in my title, and that sounds like Arbor Day or Memorial Day or the Nobel Prize, none of which much interest me today. I mean by “celebrate” something else, something like “put out there” or “make accessible.”  The title says basically that if you put lives out there, make them accessible, this will help people to think for themselves, act with insight and care, and maintain a reflective presence in a crazy world. I don’t know how true this is generally, but it seems true for me. Coming into close contact with the lives of thinkers helps me think. If I am already thinking, it helps me think better. I pick up attitudes, hopes and confidence, enthusiasm. That’s the perspective I want to share today: accessing the lives of thoughtful people matters for one’s own growth, and for the growth of the community in intelligence and responsibility.

Now for some quick history of me and this idea, over about the same 25 years that the Forum has been at work, which is roughly the same period as my experiments and adventures have covered.

I have been teaching college, all over, and I can say there isn’t as much celebration of thinkers there as I’d like – big old dead ones, yes, but not ones close enough to people to get under skin, and also there’s just a tendency to think that you can pry the idea off the person and just feed people the idea, but I don’t think that works very well, until people get used to working with ideas. So finding a way to teach has been much on mind, for a long time, and that was where some of these celebration ideas started. Let’s start there, also, beginning with the latest thing I’ve tried, the place I came here from yesterday, a carefully crafted exercise in extended celebration of thoughtful people. Let me tell you a little about it:

I am on a short break from philosophycamp, a four week residential course at Shalom Hill Farm near Windom, Minnesota. We have 15 students; the staff includes 5 instructors, 2 apprentice instructors, and a course grandmother. In addition, two resident fellows take part for one-week periods and are available to students for conversation. The principal activity of the course is a story circle held most mornings; people are asked to dig back into their memories and tell a story that connects to some important concept connected to the course theme: “Lives Worth Living: Questions of Self, Vocation, and Community.”  Topics for stories include hope, friendship, home, taking a stand, and experiences of grace. The story circles set up many subsequent informal conversations later. They prime the pump.

Beyond the learning circles, our days are structured by meal preparation, occasional field trips, and activities organized by the students themselves, or by instructors: dance classes, reading groups, writing groups, and philosophy discussions. The staff structures very little, but we are always around. All this takes place on a small farm in a very quiet prairie landscape, far from compulsions and addictions.

This course is now in its seventh offering, and the team that created it, led by U of M professor John Wallace, has drawn inspiration from many different traditions of education: the Danish folk high schools,  Reggio Emilia preschools in Italy, the Highlander Folkschool in Tennessee, and of course John Dewey. Dewey’s influence might be summed up in this way: he suggests that the teacher in the right sort of school must be familiar with the present experience of each student, the attitudes and impulses pressing forward into the future. The teacher is responsible to design experiences that move each student forward in a natural and continuous way, without big jumps, in the direction of growth and learning and wider sensibility – while somehow keeping them together as a group. We are acutely conscious that this fine idea  requires superhuman powers in the educator; one must craft a group experience that connects seamlessly to various particular experiences of each group member. Lacking the power to do that, doubting sometimes that even God could figure that puzzle out, we bring about instead a sort of blood stream: a changing nutrient bath of ideas and lives from which students are encouraged to take what they need – from instructors and staff, from fellows and visitors, and – most important – from each other. We produce activities that show people to each other in various dimensions, instill an ethos that encourages inclusion, friendliness, and experimentation, and then we step back and watch the course develop.

The idea of the course then is to just to give people access to each other’s minds and lives, in an environment that is safe and structured so that basic needs are met. People report, just after and for years after, that this summer changed and empowered their lives: helped them find meaning and direction. They got from this course what people get from good friendships, but we made it possible for several pretty good new friendships to happen at once, and to happen inter-generationally, and to happen across a wider spectrum of other diversity than natural friendships generally span.

This is about as good as classes ever get, and I am very proud of the years of work that have gone into refining the structures, learning how much to structure, producing a financial base to make the bizarre overstaffing of this thing possible, and developing a feel for what students go through when they are given freedom to explore and experiment.

Before I started this work, I had about a twenty-year fixation on a teaching idea called “philosophy for children,” originally developed to bring philosophy to elementary school children but easily transferred to other contexts. Its basic structure: the leader reads a text to a class, or shows a picture, or somehow presents an artifact, one rich in possible meanings and questions and ideas to talk about, but presentable in two minutes or so. Matt Lipman, the founder of this movement, wrote little children’s novels packed with ideas, real curriculum materials, but lots of other stuff works just as well. Anyhow, once the leader presents the artifact, he or she says the magic words, “What’s worth talking about?” and then begins collecting agenda items, things people want to talk about. These are the starting points for individual discussions, in which the leader takes the role of telephone exchange or router: making sure that people understand what is being said, and that they see how each person’s statement fits into the evolving conversation.

Again this is a celebratory practice: we make kids’ minds available to each other, produce a situation in which – I swear this happens, naturally and a lot – kids come to depend on each other’s strengths of mind to help them understand something that they want to understand. Lipman’s calls this cooperation the “community of inquiry;” it arises spontaneously whenever one gives people ownership of a conversation, and it progresses through careful coaching in listening and in knitting a conversation together – as long as leaders resist the temptation to have the last word, to play the expert game.

These are both wonderful approaches, and I am proud to be part of developing and practicing them. They give me hope for the classroom, a place in which I have had my biggest disappointments, all my life long, whether I was student or teacher. But they aren’t enough. Both are limited: philosophy for children gets at thoughts, but never at the lives with which those thoughts are in dialogue, and through which they are illustrated and made tangible. Kids become available to each other as thinkers. Philosophy camp gets at ideas and lives, again in a flexible way that puts a premium on choice, with diversity of age and experience. But it is expensive, and it is bounded in time, and it only reaches a few students each year

Here’s a second bit of history.

What I have mostly worried about is that classrooms exist in a society, and that if you get people all interested in thinking and trying out new ways of being human and then dump them into a media world, advertising world, business world, social world that is predatory and manipulative and simple-minded, all the teaching innovations begin to look like snowballs heading for hell, and that is way discouraging for a teacher.

So my other big push, in the celebration line, has been toward experiments in modifying the cultural opportunities available to people. My simplest idea was just: a calendar of readings, conferences, and lectures. I wanted everyone to have access to everything that was free and open, or cheap, to see the people who came through town. The whole events scene was needlessly and stupidly balkanized, so that even academics were missing out on major events in their disciplines, and non-academics were missing out on pretty much everything, while very interesting visitors had audiences of 15, most of whom already knew their work. This project started out on paper, as the newsletter of the original Scholar’s Forum, moved to an electronic version a few years before the internet was available to support such a thing, and ended maybe 2 years before the technology arrived to make it easy and painless. The project I think has never been picked up, now that it could be done so easily.

This was another experiment in access, but again, limited: a person can’t make much impression, on a quick visit. But I knew that individual lectures, caught by chance, had been life-changing for me, and I wanted that opportunity for everybody.

From publicity, I moved to direct event sponsorship, working partly with Brooke Portmann’s Abondia Center, which initially brought professional musicians into living rooms and very small venues for concerts and discussions. This project grew out of Brooke’s concern that Minnesota audiences were cool to contemporary music; she wanted to introduce them to performances carefully, so that they would get to know and like sounds that initially seemed very strange to them. Later, Abondia expanded its range,  sponsoring discussions of ideas, of song texts, of visual arts and architecture, always in small, intimate, hospitable settings where audiences had good opportunities to interact with speakers and with each other. Abondia did fine work. It provided metro area audiences with opportunities to interact personally with scholars and artists, and to encounter the intelligence that guided their projects, rather than simply encountering their projects as established facts. Abondia ended, after several years of active programming, primarily because no local granting agency would support this level of investment for a small audience. That is a recurring problem in making ideas and lives broadly available; the most valuable kinds of interaction are long-term, small group encounters, and those are usually expensive.  

From work with Abondia, and from my own independent experiences running conferences and lecture series, I got a sense of what these could do for an audience, and for me as an audience member, providing things to think about for a long time, structuring a year’s worth of ideas sometimes. They were lots of work, funding was uncertain, but they were enormously satisfying.

As Abondia’s work ended, I got an opportunity to continue that kind of event programming on regional cable. The Metro Cable Network, regional channel 6, sold an hour of cable time, midnight to 1 am, for about a thousand dollars a year. The station reached approximately a million people. On an impulse, I rounded up some used equipment and  a cluster of sponsors, and founded The Bat of Minerva, a philosophy interview show that soon became a “thoughtful person interview show.” The show soon found a stable format: single person, one hour interviews conducted from the behind the camera. (This saved me dressing up, getting my hair cut, finding a camera operator, locating a studio. The Bat became a very efficient operation.) The interviews explored how ideas were rooted in the lives of people who cared about ideas, how they first came to the projects and passions that eventually took over their lives. My tone was generally friendly; I tried to represent all the ignorance and interest of my viewers, and to present each guest in an affirming way, being careful to choose guests I had reason to affirm.

The Bat is still with me. It has been cablecast for about 14 years, with new episodes most weeks of the year. Basically, the Bat is a very much more efficient way to do talking heads - and reading heads - than any live performance ever could be. It gives up, so far, on interaction, which Abondia had, and gains a sustainable “platform,” which Abondia could never manage. It does a limited job well, and contributes to a climate of thought and interest in the community.

Recently, I have been exploring technology that would allow the expansion of the Bat to a full channel, multicast to colleges and universities throughout the world and perhaps, through that network, to local cable stations in need of material. This would provide a new educational possibility: a media-world, using all the hours of the year, in which learning about lives was the central priority. I love channels very much, as safe places to visit for a particular kind of treat: the sci fi channel, Sundance, PBS. One goes to such places trusting that somebody has one’s welfare in mind: they want to show good stuff. Unfortunately, most channels, commercial and non-commercial, have become predatory: someone is out to fool you, to get something out of you, to enlist or convert or overhaul you, to make you give them money somehow – at best, every 15 minutes or so. Such spaces are not safe. But television is also the most promising medium I know for producing a kind of parallel world or parallel dimension, broadly available, from which the “real” world can be critically assessed. A channel provides parity: 8775 hours of real life, 8775 hours of broadcast life – every year.

The Lives and Ideas Channel, as I have provisionally named my new enterprise, faces formidable obstacles, but, at present, on an obscure server in St. Peter, Minnesota, it actually exists, transmitting 10 whole hours of programming, over and over, to colleges and universities all over the world. It has, so far as I can tell, one regular viewer, me – but it is launched. Ask me back at your 50^th anniversary, and I’ll tell you if it worked.

At this point, my primary energy is devoted to the cable and multicast media, because of their incredible reach, and because of the great satisfaction I get from interviewing people. If the audience out there doesn’t benefit, I at least benefit, and I come away from every taping more convinced that lives inspire and educate.

One final example: over the last eight years, approximately, I have been part of the amazing adventure of lay preaching in the liberal end of the Roman Catholic Church. Over time, our tiny parish developed a support system to encourage or seduce more than 50 people to preach at Sunday mass, reflecting on the readings shared by most Christian churches on a three year lectionary cycle. The backbone of this practice was a regular Thursday morning meeting in which people responded to the scriptures and tried to understand how those scriptures might connect to the concerns of people in the parish. These discussions were wide-ranging, sometimes historical and scholarly, sometimes philosophical, but always honest. The effect of this practice was to introduce this small parish to 50 of its members, showing what their minds were like, how their experiences shaped their thinking and action. People introduced in this way could talk to each other. Because of the variety of distinctive approaches, people remembered particular sermons for years, comparing this Sunday’s approach to what happened three years ago, when this reading last came up in the cycle. We have grown a local theological and philosophical tradition, our own conversation about matters of importance to us. This also is an example of the celebration of lives and thought in a community capable of holding fast to individual contributions, a kind of collective memory.

What directions does my experience suggest, for independent scholarship in Minnesota, and for the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum?

1. A rich public space. People who think broadly need broad access to local events. The ideal that motivated the Humanities Scholars Newsletter endures. Every year I get to cover the Spark Festival for the Bat. It’s a one-week celebration of new music and multi-media work at the U of M with a rich schedule of lectures, panels, and performances, almost entirely free and open. The festival organizer, Doug Geers, has also worked hard with the Bat to ensure that the festival generates lots of interviews for regional cable. (A substantial Youtube presence is perhaps a year away.) Doug’s generosity is part of a U of M tradition: much U of M programming has always been free and open; the major carrier of that tradition right now is Ann Waltner at the Institute for Advanced Study, who produces maybe 30 events a month, with a strong invitation to the community, and strong support for regional cable dissemination of key ideas. Other Minnesota institutions are equally generous. Together they form a potential free university of amazing size and scope. With proper information tools (perhaps even a revived HSN in electronic form), and with sensible use of cable and Youtube to supplement live performance, this university could be available to every intellectually curious person in Minnesota.

Another part of this same project is that we as citizens must demand public financing of institutions that support the intellectual life of the whole community in an inclusive and cost-effective way. The grants program of the Minnesota Humanities was very small, in the total scheme of public education funding, but it leveraged maybe 5 dollars of work for every commission dollar spent, and gave many people the chance to try out programming ideas for which they had no institutional support. (I always regarded the Commission as my primary grad school, where I learned to put together public programming over twenty years of fruitful collaboration.) This program fell victim to budget cuts a few years ago; we must work to have it restored.

2. Access to lives and ideas across the generations – Philosophycamp works so well because it brings together people from 18 to 84 in a context that encourages conversation, learning by example, and reflection on practice. It is progress over a bunch of people in a community center sitting in a circle on squeaky chairs trying to talk about race or community crime, though that conversation is also hugely important. The segregation of thought is deadly. Each generation carries the hope for the others. Elderly people know that seemingly impossible problems have been solved, that it is possible to live through very desperate times. Young people give hope that the projects and ideals of their parents and grandparents will be carried forward, that the world will be in good hands. A healthy community is one in which those groups talk, and develop a shared confidence, and trade ideas and strategies and ways of living. 

For intergenerational work to succeed, the lessons of philosophycamp need to be generally applied. Seminars and conferences and the whole academic apparatus just aren’t enough to get the generations together in the right way. The course we do every summer grew out of two years of experiments with weekend retreats and one day events, involving story circles, common food preparation, and time for spontaneous informal interaction. The models for this kind of event are pretty well mapped out; the Highlander Folkschool was enormously successful at bringing people together to share experience and to plot social change, and our team’s work, applying and adapting those ideas to rural development issues in southwest Minnesota, suggests that the strategies developed there are very robust plants indeed.

Intergenerational outreach is particularly vital in the area of scholarship. Scholarly impulses show up very early in kids; there are powerful minds at work already in elementary school. But the models these kids encounter for how life can go on seldom include any accurate or appealing image of the life of the mind. There’s no scholarly counterpart to Friends; the West Wing probably came closest, in my experience. Scholarly kids, intellectually voracious kids, need encouragement and modeling from their adult counterparts. I think of my old friend Bill Phillips, a retired stockbroker with a good University of Chicago education and a lifetime of accumulated interests who has for more than a decade led a volunteer humanities seminar at St. Anthony Middle school, turning a generation of kids on to opera and Richard Feynman and Thornton Wilder and bridge as a strategy game – on to all the things that he has come to love, in a rich and varied life. His work is a model, and I would hope that an organization like the Forum could provide a framework within which such projects could be easily organized and administered.

My son is visiting today from New York. He just finished a degree in everything interesting (creative writing, religious studies, philosophy, literature) and got started really working. How is someone in his situation going to imagine going forward, if the only public models of intellectual and creative life are a few specialized spots in higher ed institutions. A culture that supports inquiry and creativity in a strong way has to contain many publicly available models of how to go on, and that requires conversation across the generations.

3. Tools for satisfying conversations across differences of ability, education, and interest. One lesson from philosophy for children is that adults and kids can have mutually satisfactory talks about ideas, non-condescending, non-slavish talks despite great differences in sophistication, if the right objects – deep and inexhaustible objects --  start the conversation and if the right disciplines – disciplines of clarification and mutual respect – are firmly in place. Some of the best philosophic conversations I have ever had took place in elementary schools with fifth grade students. This possibility is an enormous discovery. It opens the way for building a broad common base of understanding and interest among thoughtful people with very different resources. With such tools, scholarship can extend into the elementary schools, into community settings, into book groups, without the kind of “expertise aura” that so often freezes things and condemns a roomful of bright people to nodding silence while one person drones on and on – intriguing, but still strangely tiresome. There is surely a place for informed, specialist discussion, for the wonderful conversation that can only happen among people who know a lot about the same things. But scholars sentence themselves to life in a shrinking enclave, a little fort on the prairie surrounded by ever more silent native people on horseback, waiting, unless they find a satisfying way to open really fruitful dialogue across differences of sophistication. The tools for such dialogue are well developed; best practices are established. We just need to adapt them.

4. Let’s clean the “Kill your television” stickers off our bumpers. Television, despite its massive degradation, despite its role as carrier for every mental illness popular in this society, is still the greatest inspirational and educational medium ever devised. The television channel can initiate people into new areas of thought and feeling, support established workers across a broad range of disciplines, and, probably most important, maintain everybody’s peripheral vision, their sense of stuff at the margins of their own lives that is important and necessary for them. Very recent advances in editing software and in production equipment make a real broadening of access possible for the first time ever. Many people can produce watchable stuff, any group can, and they can do it without devoting their lives to the project. I think I have proved that. My show, in all its aspects, takes less than four hours a week to manage. It is a hobby level thing, but its quality, at least in good weeks, compares pretty well with comparable efforts on PBS. And the next generation of prosumer equipment will come close to erasing the difference. I am not talking about “community access cable;” that has been around for a long time, and serves an important function. I am talking about the possibility of generating channels worth of intellectually challenging programs, on very small budgets, to make a place that smart people and curious people will visit by choice when they sit down on Friday evening to chill out, a home for the curious and disaffected, the ones who respond to Sex in the City by saying, “Way too much information!” We need to claim this medium and shape it, before the predators claim it all and we are left with the real desert of pornography, violence and manipulation that critics say is already the state of the broadcast and cable media. Television isn’t dead yet, and we cannot afford to let it die.

5. The opening of options for thoughtful lives. One of the great pleasures of doing my show for the last 13 years has been cataloguing that various ways that people think in a sustained way. Let me just list some:

a.Gene McCarthy, trying at the end of his life to say just what limited things government could actually accomplish for social good.

b. Leah Fundakowski, chief writer for the Laramie project, collecting hundreds of hours of interviews to understand how people make meaning around acts of shocking violence: the murder of gay teenager Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, the Jonestown massacre, and at the same time exploring the power of theatre to help people bring closure to their involvement with horrific acts.

c. Ryan Batalden, a young farmer in Lamberton, trying to articulate his reasons for returning to farming when most of the bright people in his generation are leaving the farm, trying also to confront honestly the sacrifices and deficits that rural life imposes on young people.

d. Katrina Vandenberg, poet and memoirist, writing her way through her grief at the death of a friend in the hemophiliac AIDS epidemic, and confronting the cruelty of that tragedy: the technology that offered very sick people a chance of a normal life then suddenly killed them, in masses.

e. Connie Reinnert, running a little paper in Jackson, Minnesota, and thinking through carefully what a paper can do for the civic life of a small rural community.

f. John Davis, after a blindingly successful career in educational administration, trying to capture the attitudes and approaches that worked for him in rescuing institutions from the brink of collapse, over and over.

g. Susan Webster, art historian, tracing out the various strands of public involvement in the architectural masterpieces of Ecuador, through good careful research recovering these monuments as unifying elements in Ecuadorian cultural life.

This list is random; I could go on for hours describing what thoughtful people are up to locally. I want to insist that this list crosses all the normal boundaries. Academics are doing good work, making efficient use of the extraordinary advantages that colleges and universities provide. Independents for whom thinking and scholarship are hobbies are doing good work. Activists and practical folks who steal a few minutes between crises to think about what they are really up to are doing good work. Independent scholarship needs to connect to all of these folks, to bring all of them into the conversation. The worst outcome for any independent scholars movement would be one more balkanization in an already over-balkanized geography. We need to keep reminding each other, and, as public actors, remind the community at large, how big the tent is, how many different ways people think with power and magic and responsibility.

6. Let’s not write off the churches. To the extent that a church is in living dialogue with another historical era: Christianity with the first Century, Islam with the time of the prophet, Judaism with the early history of nomadic peoples, Buddhism with formative times in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese history – they have, built into their very foundation, an opportunity for perspective, for double vision, on our current society and its deep craziness. Churches may not always take good advantage of their advantages, but I have seen one church do so, powerfully, and I know that such community wide reflection can be a stable platform for intellectual and emotional growth.