Some Thoughts on Residential Education
Peter Shea, December 2005
Moral empiricism and the difficulty of achieving moral confidence
“To learn what to do, one must become acquainted with human
lives.” This is the nerve of a position I want to call moral empiricism. The
charms and the unexpected consequences of this view present major problems for
moral thinking.
For
me, the movie Groundhog Day displays very clearly the attraction of
moral empiricism. The protagonist relives the same day many times, gradually
learning more about the people in the little community in which he is stranded.
As he gets to know people, his attitude changes and his actions change. As I
watched this movie, I was convinced by it: I came to think that the changes the
protagonist underwent were plausible and reasonable responses to getting to
know people, and that I would also undergo such changes, were I to have the
opportunity to relive one day, over and over, exploring at leisure the lives
captured in that day.
Groundhog
Day makes
one aware of a problem for moral empiricism, even as it makes the case that
getting to know people is important for knowing what to do. The daily
repetition in the movie comes to an end, surely, before the protagonist has
come to appreciate all the people in the little town he’s trapped in, and
necessarily before he can come to appreciate all of the people whose lives
might in some way comment on his own. There is no plausible stopping point, no
point at which one can say: now I know enough to proceed with confidence. Groundhog
Day makes moral understanding look like an endless task.
I
suspect that one appeal of moral theory is just that it promises to give one a
defensible limit to moral ‘research,’ reason to say “just these considerations
and facts are relevant to moral judgment.” Without such a possibility of
closure, there is no foundation for moral certainty, or even moral confidence:
one’s next encounter with someone might substantially shift one’s moral
perspective.
It
is important to see the full force of this worry. One could be easy with the
possibility that new experience might shift one’s perspective somewhat,
might modify one’s response in subtle ways. It would be hard to rule that out.
But the deep worry here is that one might have been fed, all one’s life, what
Wittgenstein calls a “one-sided diet of examples,” so that the moral view one
has come to, however subtle it may be in its distinctions, is fundamentally
perverse. One sees that possibility played out in Mark Twain’s depiction of Huck
Finn’s crisis of conscience about helping his friend Jim, a slave, to escape.
One imagines sensitive German kids in the middle of the Nazi years choosing
carefully among various flavors of beastliness. And, in our own day, Peter
Singer preaches with great conviction an ethical view that condemns all but the
most sacrificial and generous citizens of affluent societies as unspeakably
callous and morally deficient. The worry that an empiricist ethics must
undermine moral confidence is a deep worry.
At the same time, it seems unlikely that any broad theory
is going to yield useful judgments without including a substantial empirical
component, and thus encountering the problem of endless research. Views that
emphasize the production of consequences require acquaintance with human lives
to understand the complex consequences of human actions, especially in their
social and psychological dimensions.
Views that emphasize consciousness, knowing what one is doing and fully
willing what one is doing – perhaps even, as Kant suggests, willing what one is
doing as universal law – need accounts of lives for insight into the right
descriptions of what one is, in certain circumstances, doing: one often sees
more clearly into the heart of one’s neighbor’s action than into one’s own
action. It would be an odd moral thinker who was not to some extent an
empiricist, in just the bare sense that he or she found it morally important to
get to know people and to study their lives.
Any
attempt to teach ethics responsibly has to respond to these two empiricist
concerns: acknowledging the importance of getting to know people, as the basis
of moral insight, and addressing the problem posed by the limits of moral
reflection, as it must always be limited by the horizon of experience for any
individual moral investigator. One has to get to know people, to think well
about their affairs, and one cannot get to know enough people, to be
sure that one has taken into account all that needs to be accounted for. If an
ethics class is to model the sort of thinking that will be required of serious
moral agents, it must go beyond the consideration of abstract principles and
concepts to some rich appropriation of lived experience. In doing so, a class
risks introducing so many considerations that students despair of reaching any
enduring or stable result. That despair must itself be somehow addressed within
the framework of the class; the class should give some realistic estimate of
the scope and power of moral reflection.
In the
space that follows, I will discuss two quite different attempts to bring
experience into the ethics class: the process of learning from literature
outlined by Alice Crary in her discussion of Gilbert Ryle’s treatment of Jane
Austen’s novels, and a new kind of ethics education, residential courses that
make story circles central events of the course. Both of these efforts help students to
reflect on their own lives and the lives of others in an environment shaped to
make that reflection productive. The ways that lives come into moral reflection
in the two contexts are, however, quite different, as is the discipline
surrounding discussion and processing of this rich moral material.
Hanging out with people: literature and residential education as alternative approaches to teaching ethics
For
the last eight years, a group of faculty, staff, and graduate students loosely
affiliated with the University of Minnesota Philosophy Department has
experimented with residential workshops and courses exploring notions central
to the construction of a meaningful life -- friendship, vocation, creativity,
hope, and community. These residential offerings – some weekends, some
extending 4-6 weeks – allow participants to engage in common projects, to get
to know each other, and to make use of each other’s experience in their own
moral reflection.
The
core of the pedagogy for these residential offerings is the story circle, a
device adapted from traditions of the Highlander Folkschool in Tennessee.
Students are asked to tell a story from their own lives concerning a topic or
question that connects to the theme of the gathering. Stories are told without
interruption. Students are free to pass; no one is pressured to tell a story.
Large group discussion of the stories told is minimal: the processing of
material from the story circles happens in spontaneous conversations later. The
structure of the residential events allows a great deal of leisure, during
which such conversation can take place. In some workshops, small groups are
asked to continue reflection on themes presented earlier, and it is natural for
such small groups to revisit stories told in the large story circle.
The
leadership of these workshops and courses is unusual. The leaders do not
present a plan for the orderly processing of ideas and insights. Rather, they
set up the structure of the time together, to make certain kinds of
interactions likely, and they make themselves available, as participants in the
process of reflection – telling their own stories, participating in group activities,
and engaging in casual conversation. Although leaders make very light use of
their power to direct the action, the leadership is a substantial presence: as
many as 8 people in a group of 20 have some leadership role. The work done by
the leaders is subtle and diffuse. Partly, the leaders maintain faith in the
integrity and power of the storytelling and discussion process; partly, they
watch what is happening and adjust questions and course structures – time
constraints, activities, general rules – to encourage deeper and more
productive interaction and to avoid problems.
One
example of such structuring is the allocation of time. All of these residential
events, even weekend events, contain substantial stretches of unstructured
time. There are breaks in the afternoon for naps and walks, and there are long
evenings without programming. Perhaps most important, the groups prepare their
own meals: all workshops and courses are conducted without cooks or
housekeeping support. Meal preparation and housekeeping provide occasions for
people to come together in new configurations around practical tasks. These
occasions are generally the most fruitful times for conversation to happen.
The
leadership style developed for these residential experiences might prompt criticism.
The model requires a big staff, and then that staff does, overtly at least,
very little. The normal work of teaching, the normal structures of control and
guidance and information, are mostly absent. It is natural to ask: what do
these people get paid for? What is their function, in an event that is very
similar to: a group of people getting together to talk and eat, like a family
reunion or an Elks club meeting? How does this qualify as education?
One
way of approaching this question is to think about residential learning as
similar in some ways to the kind of learning provoked by serious novelists, as
that learning comes about in individual reading and in classes. Like novelists,
the organizers of residential philosophy gatherings bring people together and
invite them to learn from each other. Novelists exercise a different kind of
control that over their “events:” the people they “invite” are carefully
chosen, and the way those people show themselves is carefully structured. The
novelist leads the reader, a visitor to this temporary community, to particular
insights and attitudes. The leadership of our residential education experiments
is generally much looser, the selection of participants is much less
intentional, and our goals are more general. Nevertheless, the educational
environment of a novel is close enough to what we are up to in residential
philosophy education to make the comparison and contrast worth exploring.
Discussing
Jane Austen’s novels in a recent article,[1] Alice Crary
shows one way that an author can present a view – what Gilbert Ryle calls the
“wine tasting” method. According to Ryle, Austen introduces the reader a
variety of characters that exemplify a particular human quality – pride or
susceptibility to influence – in different ways. The reader is invited to
respond to these different examples – comes to see some as excessive, others as
striking the right balance. By engaging the reader’s emotions in this complex
way, Austen’s works persuade the reader how to stand with respect to important
human problems. Novels provide a means of moral formation and initiation.
The
story circle experience parallels this kind of learning. People tell their own
stories around some important moral theme: standing up for what one believes, friendship,
home. Like the novel, the story circle establishes a set of examples for
important qualities through the stories told in the group. It may happen that –
like Austen’s ideal reader -- people in the group take some of the stories told
in the circle to display excesses or deficiencies or ‘striking the right
balance;’ they may respond as, on Crary’s account, Jane Austen invites her
readers to respond. However, people in the circle also have the options of
taking the stories as simply presenting alternatives, as portraying different
responses to significantly different circumstances. They may say, “One cannot,
from the standpoint of one student’s story, readily criticize the behavior of
another: the cases they treat are too different.” The discussion does not
necessarily move toward a moral result, as Crary suggests that Austen’s novels
move toward an outcome, a recommendation: “be like the balanced heroine we see
at the end of the novel.”[2]
Shared
stories help moral thinking and conversation in a different and more basic way,
by putting concepts into play that help important discussions to happen. The
stories told provide a foundation for a shared understanding of the moral
concept that starts the circle. If I tell a story about friendship and you tell
a story about friendship, and we both accept each other’s examples as examples
of friendship, then, when we use the word with each other later, we each know
something about what the other means, and we each have a way of proceeding when
in doubt about the other’s statements or when in disagreement with the other’s
statements: we can go back to those initial stories that gave us confidence
that we understood each other about this matter. Storytelling establishes a
mutual confidence in the use of a word, at least within the residential group.
As Wittgenstein says, we know “how to go on” with a word, after we have told
and heard stories. That means partly: we have intuitions about what we can say
to each other using this word – and partly: we have ways of handling
disagreement and misunderstanding within this group.
To
some extent, any shared body of examples, including the examples derived from a
work of fiction, can provide such conceptual orientation. There are, however,
two related differences between the moral orientation gained by participating
in a story circle and the moral orientation gained by reading a novel. First,
in a story circle, one knows that there is always more to the story than has
been told, and the storyteller is available for questioning. One understands,
hearing a story in a story circle, that one is hearing one incomplete, possibly
edited, possibly inaccurate version of something that really happened – about
which there is more to discover. One can
ask different questions, and more questions, of an actual story than one can
sensibly ask of a fictional story.[3]
The
second difference is that, in hearing a story in a story circle, within the
context of a residential experience, one has choices: to accept the
story as given or to seek further information, by asking the person telling the
story questions or by getting to know that person in ways that may shed light
on the story. One chooses what to
pursue, from a menu of possibilities – the range of stories that have been
told. Thus, the interaction and discussion that happen after stories are told
is directed by the listeners’ decision and choice, as they resonate to various
stories and ask to know more about them. Individuals and clusters of people
within the group choose those matters that are central to their own lives, and
make those matters objects of reflection and investigation during the period of
the residential workshop.[4] Perhaps this
kind of choice is on a continuum with what happens for readers of fiction;
surely there are many ways of approaching a work, and reading, discussion, and
interpretation are also exercises in freedom. But the author of fiction has
something in mind in writing and is shaping our response in particular ways.
Our choices with fiction are limited. Nobody is editing or controlling or
shaping the material that surfaces in a story circle, and, for that reason, the
work one does on that material is a matter of choice in a way that interpretive
work on fiction never is.
The leaders of a residential philosophy
gathering do a different sort of shaping and directing than does the novelist;
they prepare a set of customs and expectations – a space – in which an
assortment of people who have never met before can interact fruitfully. The
instructors know that lives will be relevant to other lives. People will find
other people’s actions, attitudes, plans, strategies admirable or
reprehensible, similar to their own or very different. Participants will follow
up with other participants – about their stories and about the standpoint from
which the stories were told. They will get to know each other. The residential
education project consists in making it easy for various combinations of people
to get to know each other and to follow up with each other on anything that interests
them. Students have choices: to follow up or not. They can explore each other’s
experience or not, and that choice is a choice about who they want to become,
how much of this other person’s life they want to take on. Instructors do not
to urge people to get into each other’s business; they make various levels of
engagement possible and relatively safe.
A
residential course that incorporates story circles is in this way a version of
adult life – with some differences. More material is generated in a residential
course than in most adult living contexts, and the course’s rules of engagement
provide more opportunities for processing and following up than do the rules of
normal adult living.
This
suggests a way of understanding the relationship between a residential course
in philosophy with story circles at the center of its pedagogy and conventional
university liberal arts course. Like the novel, the normal classroom privileges
certain lines of inquiry, helps people reach certain insights. In its intentions,
the philosophy seminar room isn’t all that different from the physics lab. Lab
experiments are carefully cooked, so that students will come to certain
predictable insights. The puck used in experiments about inertia is constructed
so that it will behave according to Newton’s laws of motion, with minimal
interference from friction. Philosophy seminars, to the extent that they are
responsibly taught on conventional standards, are cooked in just the same way.
The readings shape and direct the students’ thinking.
A
residential course that makes story circles central to its practice is a
half-way house beyond the classroom. It introduces just the sort of complexity
that adult life serves up. The framework of the course – the customs and
procedures and rules – is constructed to help people learn from that complexity
Residential
courses of this kind supplement other liberal arts offerings at the university,
like the guided discussion of carefully crafted literature that Crary and Ryle
exemplify. Conventional “directive” teaching brings concepts, models, and
thinking strategies into play in people’s consciousness, making them part of
their repertoire. These concepts, models, and strategies are only useful if
they help people in making sense of messy and unpredictable social
circumstances – and if people actually use them in those circumstances. Residential courses provide some practice at
thoughtful life under very favorable conditions, to give students a taste for
such life and to help them address the practical problem of making a place for
life-shaping thought and conversation within their lives as working adults.
[1] Alice Crary. “Does the Study of Literature
Belong Within Moral Philosophy? Reflections in the Light of Ryle’s Thought.” Philosophical
Investigations 23:4 (2000): 315-350.
[2]
One might think of the wine-tasting method as supplemented by the Three Bears
method: the heroine overdoes, then underdoes, then gets it right. That sort of
moral instruction happens in journey novels of various sorts.
[3]
I suspect that it might be valuable to reread the early parts of Gallie’s Philosophy
and the Historical Understanding and also Naomi Scheman’s thesis discussion
of the discovery of anger, with this distinction in mind. Naomi’s thesis comes
out of an experience of consciousness raising groups, which have some
similarity to learning circles.
[4]
I have been repeatedly struck by the way that an element in someone’s story
that was intended as a kind of supporting detail became centrally important to
someone listening. A few examples: I once told a story about maintaining a
friendship over some decades, and another group member was very interested in
how one held on to friendships for that long. Another time, a visitor mentioned
in passing that, after many struggles with her weight, she had, without any
particular effort, arrived at the weight she had always tried to maintain. This
started a long conversation with a couple of women about social expectations
for women’s bodies and the various responses to those expectations. Most
frequently, some piece of one person’s story would provide openings for
extended conversation among a few participants: the ways in which the overall
atmosphere of the course was shaped by particular stories was more difficult to
determine.
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