Nikolai Rostov  has gotten himself deeply into debt from gambling in a stupid fashion, and has to go ask his father for help. While he’s waiting for his father’s return his sister and friend are singing, and inadvertently he joins them in harmony:

Oh, how that third had vibrated, and how touched was something that was best in Rostov’s soul. And that something was independent of anything in the world and higher than anything in the world. What are gambling losses, and Dolokhovs, and words of honor!… It’s all nonsense! One can kill, and steal, and still be happy… (War and Peace p 343)

Of course, Nikolai couldn’t actually be happy if he were to kill and steal, and if he were being reasonable he would admit that to be the case, but that’s immaterial to what he’s feeling.

I haven’t read very many Russian stories, just some Dostoyevsky, a couple of Chekhov short stories, and now War and Peace, but there’s a quality that has been present in every one of them that is more or less absent from all the English novels I’ve read, of which there are many. It’s a kind of spontaneous elation only tangentially related to what’s otherwise going on either externally or mentally. At the end of Chekhov’s very short story The Student, the protagonist, a seminary student who has been considering the chill, his hunger (it’s Good Friday), the poverty of his village, Peter’s betrayal, and has just made an old woman cry, has a little epiphany:

Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must have some relation to her. . . .

He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present–to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferryboat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigor–he was only twenty-two–and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.

In most of the situations like this I’ve encountered in Russian literature, the reason for an upwelling of joy and love is just a pretext: they’re young, strong, there are sticky green leaves on the trees in Spring; the sky is so lofty, still and beautiful; there’s golden sunlight reflecting off the water, somebody is dancing… in a word, the character has had an experience of Beauty, or gotten swept out of himself. Bullets whiz past, the troops charge, and Andrei is very happy. Alyosha leaves the body of the beloved elder Zosima and kisses the ground in rapture. Natasha is in love with everybody and everything at her first ball. It’s not even causally related to what follows: Nikolai behaves like a wretch before his father, Andrei becomes depressed and nihilistic for a time, perhaps the student goes home and moans about the cold to his parents. That’s more or less inconsequential: now there’s this memory of joy in the person’s soul, proving to him that life isn’t all what it seems, and perhaps it will come back later and confirm that perhaps life is worth it after all. Tolstoy is very good at working in these moments, and seems uniquely unconcerned with making any kind of neat lesson out of them. One’s soul touches the divine: what now? nothing in particular, just keep living and remember and sometimes look at the sky and ponder its beauty, but everything is a little different now, only one doesn’t know exactly how.

There’s a question wending its way through philosophy: what is the relationship between reason and truth? What, for that matter, is the relationship between the senses and truth? Do we know truth directly, through reason, through sense, or not at all? Heidegger, who I haven’t read, but have heard interesting things about from a classmate, apparently says that truth is unconcealment, and talks about the essences of things concealing and unconcealing themselves on a metaphysical plane. That’s cool and suggestive, but I don’t very well know what it means. Kant, as far as I can tell, thinks that we cannot know the truth of things in themselves – their essence – even in our own selves, for we have no unmediated experience of the intelligible world, but we nevertheless partake in Reason, and therefore participate in the intelligible world, from whence comes our capacity for freedom. But those aren’t his words; I think they’re a hybrid of Kant’s words and theological words – things like partake of and participate in. Aquinas says that reason is how we know truth, but our reason has been darkened on account of sin, and thus we reason imperfectly and cannot know the truth very well without revelation and grace. For Plato we have some sort off capacity to see into the realm of forms which must be trained by increasingly abstract uses of reason, like the prisoner being dragged around so he’s facing the light. Apparently Reason sort of sees or recollects Truth. For Aristotle we have a capacity for seeing first principles (nous) and we take those principles and apply reason to attain scientific wisdom. But it’s really more like mathematical wisdom, because it doesn’t involve much observation or testing; there’s no scientific method, just reason and first principles. Modern science, on the other hand, seems much more concerned with the sensory world, however mediated it may be by sense and various instruments of measurement.

But at some point the philosophers must have pushed the Truth by Reason Project too far, and something broke. What has broken seems to be the connection between the noetic and the emperical. Perhaps there’s no such thing as a that which perceives the immaterial; perhaps even those senses that perceive the material realm access reality through too many veils of conditioning and neurology and who knows what else; perhaps we’re just brains being stimulated in particular ways to think we perceive actual things; perhaps we can’t really know anything absolutely; perhaps Truth is Subjectivity; perhaps it’s just subjective; perhaps it’s unconcealment; perhaps we don’t actually partake in the intelligible world after all. So now non-philosophers who wish to maintain that, yes, through sense and reason and spirit we can know Truth, at least partially, feel forced to talk about objective, inerrant, really, truly, certainly true truth.

There’s a paragraph I unfortunately couldn’t find again from The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin where he talks about Tolstoy leveling his “devastatingly destructive genius” against all the theories of life and history of his day in a desperate attempt to find something that could stand up to his criticism, but everything crumbled before his stunning grasp of particulars  – for nothing could explain all of them, and he would accept nothing less. So in the end he supposed that the best thing was not to be so very rational; to be like the peasants with their possibility of intuitive understanding, unmediated by rationalization – but could not be so himself and it tormented him to the end of his life. (that’s the fuzzy version of Berlin’s take on things, anyway) It does seem to be the case that reason left to itself is way better at finding cause for doubt than for belief. We find that there are hallucinations and doubt that what we sense in true; we find that peoples differ in what it acceptable behavior and doubt that there is morality; even in mathematics we cannot find a complete system to satisfy our rationality entirely (something about the set that contains every set?); untempered rationality becomes the god who binds his own parents and the monster who eats her children.

The hope of objectivity is that there can be something sure, certain, and consistent that everyone can agree on. The fear is that if there isn’t everything will shatter and we will become isolated individuals uncertain of everything outside our own minds; and even much within us. In a word, that we’ll swing from Modern rationality to Postmodern nihilism. The danger is more convincing than the hope: human experience cannot be reduced to axioms and worked out logically. To call a truth objective is to set it up like a scientific theory, where it cannot be absolutely proven, but it can be disproved by any exception. If it is true that Reason is always better at disproving than at proving, Truth by Reason is bound to fail eventually.

This doesn’t mean I consider truth to be unknowable; but that’s a comment for another time.

For tomorrow’s Preceptorial we read The Fox and the Hedgehog, an essay on Tolstoy (especially This philosophy of history) by Isaiah Berlin. It begins:

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yeild a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and it may be, human beings in general. There exists a great chasm between those who, on the one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent and articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they say and are has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.

 Among Russian writers, for instance, Dostoyevsky is an archetypal hedgehog, and Pushkin is very much a fox. Likewise Berlin calls Plato a hedgehog and Aristotle a fox. Tolstoy is a brilliant fox desperately intent on seeing like a hedgehog. When Dostoyevsky wrote about Pushkin and made him out to be a prophet of a great cause, nobody could take it seriously as an account of Pushkin, who was nothing of the sort, but the account was appreciated as illuminating D. himself – for that really was D’s primary concern.

It’s a fairly interesting classification in general, and the essay is quite good. Someone should probably make this into a personality test – perhaps for Facebook or an ice-breaker for youth events. I’m not certain if it’s primarily a philosophical outlook or a temperament – in the case of Tolstoy it’s portrayed as both, since he was temperamentally a fox and philosophically a hedgehog (to which Berlin attributes no small part of T’s philosophical angst). I get a distinct impression that both Evangelicalism and Orthodoxy like hedgehogs; Fr. John certainly is one – everything is about the Incarnation. Really, everything. Chaos theory? Yeah, that’s about the Incarnation too (he just gave a homily on that very possibility; he hears “strange attractor” and thinks “the Holy Spirit!”).I’m not sure what an Orthodox fox would be like. Probably I wouldn’t label him specifically “Orthodox” simply because he didn’t relate pretty much everything to theology – even if he was sincerely orthodox in belief. I say that Evangelicalism tends to be hedgehog-centric because most preachers say outright that everything should be about salvation all the time if at all possible.

On the other hand, perhaps the school system is fox-centric. An intractable grasp of some Big Idea organizing all of one’s thoughts isn’t necessarily helpful; sometimes it can be a hinderance. I remember as a junior in college trying to organize all my thoughts for all my classes into one cohesive whole, failing, and as I was complaining that my teachers didn’t especially care if everything could be integrated into one beautiful whole – even in a single class, a friend pointed out that not everyone cares that much about the coherent whole. Public schooling, especially in America, tends to resist hedgehog-thinking because, first, the organizing principle would have to be non-religious and as neutral as possible in order to be acceptable – and most principles that are large enough to organize must be religious or philosophic in a way that may as well be religious – and because of the way subjects are split up. For all the attempts at imposing some possibility of coherence upon schooling, if a person doesn’t have an invincible desire to impose, find, and keep coherence, it’s not going to happen in our succession of “subjects.” 

It’s that time of year again: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWrMo) – when a bunch of writing enthusiasts try to churn out unedited novels of 50,000 words each during the course of 30 days. Preferably appallingly rushed novels. Preferably in blissful unconcern for any kind of quality or meaning. Despite not particularly wanting to write a novel at this point, I find the project strangely appealing. The phrase that most comes to mind for the kinds of novels this project is set on promoting is “penny dreadfuls;” so named because they used to sell in England for a penny. There’s something to be said for that. Rousseau is nostalgic for a time when people sung their stories as poetry; I suppose this is more evidence for English being a language more given to writing than speech – I know plenty of people who might aspire to write a novel, and nobody at all who aspires to sing bardic epics in the plaza. Things like The Canterbury Tales are both odd and difficult to us because they’re meant to be read aloud; not something much encouraged. So we write mounds of prose stories – novels – with as much gusto as the Miller lent to his tale, but a good deal less rhythm and rhyme; things meant to please the ear. It seems likely that if we moderns were to have a contest a la Canterbury Tales it would be conducted like a writing workshop: everyone sits down during the breaks in travel and writes a story; then they either exchange stories and read them, with everyone giving each story a rating, or perhaps each person would read his story aloud (in prose, of course) to the company. Probably the former; I agree with R. that most of us moderns don’t have an ear for oral discourse, or even stories; if there aren’t images to go with it we tend to have to take notes to figure out what’s being said. R. mentioned French preachers shouting and being very animated, but people still hardly understanding them; perhaps that’s because they hadn’t yet started adapting sermons to written culture with bulletins featuring outlines and partially written notes, handing out Bibles at the beginning of service, and displaying quotes by Power-point.

Something that I haven’t quite figured out about NaNoWriMo is whether these stories are actually meant to be read, as travelers’ tales were meant to be heard. As far as I can tell they aren’t. I have an acquaintance who has participated for the past few years, for instance, and she has a blog about her NaNoWriMo experience. It’s all meta-story stuff; no actual story, or characters, or excerpts, or anything with any actual story content. That seems common: on the NaNoWriMo message board there’s a lot of buzz about meta-story stuff; name generators, styles, word counts, dealing with writing block and writing stress, encouragement, complaint, and mutual support in general – I’ve failed to find an actual story or piece of a story or anything resembling a story, however. That, I think, must be an oddity of print culture. Because the novel itself is a physical object more than an oral story (an immaterial thing that must be told to have form), there’s a much greater possibility of private stories, where the mere fact that they’ve been written is sufficient, regardless of whether they affect any other human being. It takes us a step more away from Canterbury Tales, to a group of people who hang out together writing stories, but instead of then reading each-other’s stories and laughing about them, they refuse to give the stories out, and instead compare from a distance how long the stories are, and what structure they adhere to, what genera they’re in, how they came up with names for the characters, etc. I’m not certain why this is. It seems related to a culture and economic system that presses us to try to make money off of absolutely everything and be highly self-conscious of our written conventions. Every story is a potential publication. But the whole charm of NaNoWriMo is that it’s a bunch of amateurs who just want to write stories, even if they’re pretty bad – because it’s a human thing to tell stories, and we’re educated in such a way that it’s more natural for us to write stories than to tell them (unless they’re very short). Perhaps there’s something much more deeply personal and in need of protection, editing; much more like real labor in our narrative than in our opinion essays – though stories are by nature more like schole (leisure, study, contemplation) than labor. Is it because most of us have so much less practice at story telling than other forms of writing? Or because a novel is such a long story? Hmm.

I’m not sure yet how I feel about War and Peace; it’s been nearly 150 pages and there’s no coherent plot in sight. On the other hand, Tolstoy has very good descriptions of his characters (which he then, alack, expects the reader to remember until the fellow shows up again a hundred pages later), and beautiful passages like this:

“One step beyond that line [between the armies], reminiscent of the line separating the living from the dead, and it’s unknown, suffering, and death. And what is there? who is there? there, beyond this field, and the tree, and the roof lit by the sun? No one knows, and you would like to know; and you’re afraid to cross that line, and would like to cross it; and you know that sooner or later you will have to cross it and find out what is there on the other side of the line, as you will inevitably find out what is on the other side of death. And you’re strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and surrounded by people just as strong and excitedly animated.” So, if he does not think it, every man feels who finds himself within sight of an enemy, and this feeling gives particular brilliance and joyful sharpness of impression to everything that happens in those moments.

Tolstoy; War and Peace; Trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky. p 143

Speech distinguishes man among the animals; language distinguishes nations from each other; one does not know where a man comes from until he has spoken. –Rousseau

NOTE: In this post I’m entertaining the possibility that Rousseau is right in his theory of the origin of languages. That’s not necessarily the case, but it seemed worth considering anyway. I’m not going to examine its’ truth, because even R. doesn’t want to do that. He says in The Origins of Inequality that he thinks it’s a worthwhile story even if it’s not true historically.

For War and Peace class we discussed Rousseau’s essay on the Origin of Language yesterday. It was fairly interesting, though I’m not entirely certain how it helps us to understand Tolstoy better – something about the French vs. the Russian languages. There’s also an interesting theory of early languages (at least in the South) being primarily poetic and tonal so that they were very close to song, and that it is only with writing and commerce that they had need of analytical vocabulary and grammar structures. He’s quite wistful about the thought of some great rhetorician standing in a plaza, and delivering a poetic, melodic, emotionally compelling address that the average citizens could both understand and find beautiful. I’ll admit it to be charming, but R. very often paints charming scenes that in the end are only that – things which may or not have happened somewhere, but are unlikely to happen now no matter how much we might wish things otherwise – and many of us would not even wish them.

Anyway, I wish to entertain the possibility, suggested by R., that knowing a particular language radically alters how we relate to the world, and is more or less the embodiment of culture. It’s obvious that some languages are better at expressing certain things than others; that they have different sounds, assumptions about the world, and kinds of musicality available to them. Some of the broad distinctions R. makes is between Southern and Northern languages – the former he sees as being more musical, passionate, emotive, and oratorical; the latter as more practical, harsh, a-tonal, and analytical. As a result, the Southern languages are better for creating moving speeches and poetry, and the Northern ones to either getting practical things accomplished and delineating ideas precisely. He further differentiates languages that primarily written vs. spoken. Spoken language will be more dependent on tone, and very often sound will take precedence of precision of meaning, because the speaker will be sure to communicate his meaning with tone and expression. Written languages, on the other hand, must have a very precise series of definitions and a complex grammar, because everything that would normally be communicated with expression and tone must now be shown with punctuation, structure, and word choice. So as the language becomes more precise it also becomes cooler and less able to convey feelings directly. So the circumstances of the people forms the language, and the language forms to dispositions of the people, very broadly speaking. In case you haven’t noticed, R. is not in the least afraid of stereotypes.

I want to take this toward the realm of education, and how American education in particular treats culture. English is a language as much written as spoken, and according to R. is therefore more fitted to precision than feeling, and indeed must be very precise to convey not only information but the intended meaning, like voice and expression. It has been commented upon in Education, and seems true, that to the extent you train young people to habitually express things in a way that would be appropriate written down (“academic English”), to a similar extent we become constrained in our use of tone and expression – we can say more things in a less lively fashion (we acquire an “internal editor,” as it were). Poetry and music become more and more separated from regular speech.

Where I’m trying to go with this is, to R., nothing that uses language, or music, or anything else besides very basic physical actions like eating and sleeping (and even those, when done in company) – can ever possibly be culturally neutral. Regardless of Kant’s possibility of Pure Reason, even mathematics is not culturally neutral, because while right and wrong sums may be the same in every culture, the desire to form minds that think with mathematical precision is specific to certain cultures. Language is no more culturally neutral than religion is: perhaps less so. And when it comes to forming, preserving, and teaching our culture, we in America seem to have no idea what we’re doing. Especially in the schools. Teaching a student to read and write is not a culturally neutral act. It is in fact, an audacious act: if successful in more than a superficial way, it will likely change more about a person and culture that we could possibly predict. Someone taught a wandering poet to write (or wrote for him), and we have as a result the Iliad and Odyssey, monuments of Western Civilization. But we also have a great many novelists, but no oral epic poets. Of course, none of this is absolute, and I’m still only entertaining a notion. While we, with Rousseau, way be wistful for those poets who would sing or chant or whatever they did for hours on end before the assembled polis, there are reasons why writing has won. It’s an excellent invention. If it weren’t for writing I not only would not be communicating these thoughts, but would not even be having these thoughts, since I’m currently thinking about Rousseau who was thinking about the ancient Mediterranean, and I have no reason to suppose I would know about either in an oral culture. But he’s right in pointing out that something has been lost: that something is always lost, whether it be primal freedom and innocence, or public song and dance as natural as walking or speaking, or particularities of culture and language. But something that also seems true is that we’re never in a position to judge until it’s too late. In the case of language, it requires analytical language and experience to compare the desirability of an oral or written language, or even to know that it’s a question. And analytical language is the mark of a culture that uses written language. Certainly complaining about writing is a mark of a written language. And no culture has ever chosen to go back.

Something that’s been hovering around the edges of my thought is Fr. Oleska’s talks on culture along with my own experiences at TLT. What we really want is to offer equality in the discussion of how education should be handled, and a choice. But the only way to articulate the question: is it good and fitting that we divide up subjects this way, that we divide up time this way, that we do Western academics, which must needs be read and written – even if they’re read aloud, they’re not really told as a thing belonging to us all, rather than to Rousseau – is like that, in somewhat complicated rational form. The crux of the problem lies in this: that if it is true that languages and therefore a medium in which to apply reason differ to the extent that R. suggests they do: that his primitives would not and cannot discuss (and presumably construct) rational arguments of the kind modern Westerners are used to, then no wonder we’re frustrated, because it is not even possible for a person to ask whether the oral culture is better and worth keeping, or to know what the stakes are, until he is already mostly outside it. Thus, not only is there an inequality of power, but of understanding and words as well. So we either forge ahead, come what may, or do like the Federation in Star Trek, and institute a Prime Directive of non-interference, or muddle along somewhere in-between. Usually the latter, and not very reflectively, either.

We’re continuing with Kant’s Fundamental Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in Tutorial, and I think Kant is the only person we’ve read besides Marx that I simply don’t comprehend. He keeps talking about a priori pure reason, abstracted from all contingency. Probably I don’t understand because I’ve never read his prior work, the Critique of Pure Reason, but I’m left wondering what on earth is meant by “pure” reason, and why anyone would want to abstract it from all sensory or other non-rational experience. It seems to have something to do with figuring out hypothetical principles that can be agreed on by all rational beings, human or not. Why would we care about the thought processes of non-human rational beings? Why would we suppose it to be possible? That seems more the realm of imagination than reason. It’s kind of frustrating. What I mean by reason and Kant means by reason appear to be two different things, and I feel toward Kant’s ability to find universal imperatives in Pure Reason the way atheists must feel about people who talk about God speaking to them. In that respect Aristotle makes a good deal more sense to me: we have ends we wish to achieve that we perceive as good – usually because they create eudimonea (happiness in A’s sense). Never mind where the desired ends come from – they aren’t the realm so much of deliberation or reason, but of nous. We can sort of see them – or if we can’t, we can see good men and watch what they do. You’d have to be pretty depraved not to even be able to know that good men do goo things and their ends should probably be ours as well. Then reason deliberates on how to achieve possible ends. Or it engages in theoretical science, which is its’ more natural realm.

Some of that was not Aristotelian, but what I’m trying to get at here is… why would anyone want to come up with a metaphysic of morals? If someone didn’t want to try to do good because it is good, why would we suppose him to do it because it is rational? Or if this whole project is so theoretical that it’s not about convincing anyone to do anything, then why is it something anyone, including Kant, would want to think about? As far as I can tell the idea itself offers no incentive – pure reason is about as intrinsically attractive as being locked in a sensory deprivation chamber. Arg.

The truth is that we, in our hyperprosperity, may be able to live without meaning, faith, or purpose, filling our threescore year and ten with a variety of entertainments – but most of the world cannot. If economics is implicated in the conflict, it is mostly in an ironic sense: only an abundance of riches such as no previous generation has know could possibly console us for the emptiness of our lives, the absence of stable families and relationships, and the lack of any overarching purpose. And even within us, the pampered babies that populate the West, something – a rather big something – keeps rebelling against the hollowness of it all. But then our next consumer goodie comes along and keeps us happy and distracted for the next five minutes. Normal people (that is, the rest of the world), however, cannot exist without real meaning, without religion anchored in something deeper than existentialism and bland niceness, without a culture rooted deep in the soil of the place where they live. Yet it is these things that globalization threatens to demolish. And we wonder why they are angry? (Meic Pearse. Why the Rest Hates the West. p 29)

At book study today we were talking about inner stillness, and how to pray well it’s necessary to “strip away” thoughts and worries from the mind; Fr. J. told a story about visiting Mount Sinai and walking up it in the middle of the night – he had imagined maybe 20 or 30 people walking in silence and darkness; what actually confronted him, however, were some 500 chatting tourists with flashlights and cameras, along with a hundred or so Bedouin salesmen. So he was walking along, feeling irritated, accosted by fellows trying to get him to rent a camel, with a feeling of God telling him repeatedly not to judge, nor be irritated, and to let it all go; these venders cannot disturb you if you deal with the Bedouins of your mind and heart. So he hiked, prayed, and tried not to judge, until finally he began to gain some internal quiet. At that moment a man stepped directly in front of him, asking if he would like to rent a camel. So as calmly as possible he looked into the Bedouin’s eyes and said “I came here to pray – please, please allow me to do so.” The fellow understood; they bowed to each other respectfully, the follow stepped aside, and the path sort of cleared as though all the other vendors had gotten the message as well – and shortly there was a space away from the crown and a lovely dark quiet of the desert.

Why am I juxtaposing these two things? I think we like to blame something or someone for the disorder of our minds, our civilization, the world: everything. And to an extent it’s true. It’s true that the West produces a massive weight of vulgar entertainment that could keep a person distracted for a lifetime, just as it was true that the tourists and venders at Sinai were not behaving as one might wish of pilgrims at a holy place. But that’s not everything that’s going on. Monks will say that it’s possible to live in a cave in the desert in complete silence and still be distracted. We carry our distractions with us.

After going on for some forty pages about the hypothetical primitive man who’s self-sufficient and equal, whereas modern man is depraved, Rousseau (in the epilogue to The Origins of Inequality) writes:

What, then, is to be done? Must societies be totally abolished? Must meum and tuum be annihilated, and must we return again to the forests to live among bears? This is a deduction in the manner of my adversaries, which I would as soon anticipate as let them have the shame of drawing. O you, who have never heard the voice of heaven, who think man destined only to live this little life and die in peace; you, who can resign in the midst of populous cities your fatal acquisitions, your restless spirits, your corrupt hearts and endless desires; resume, since it depends entirely on ourselves, your ancient and primitive innocence: retire to the woods, there to lose the sight and remembrance of the crimes of your contemporaries; and be not apprehensive of degrading your species, by renouncing its advances in order to renounce its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer subsist on plants or acorns, or live without laws and magistrates; those who were honoured in their first father with supernatural instructions; those who discover, in the design of giving human actions at the start a morality which they must otherwise have been so long in acquiring, the reason for a precept in itself indifferent and inexplicable on every other system; those, in short, who are persuaded that the Divine Being has called all mankind to be partakers in the happiness and perfection of celestial intelligences, all these will endeavour to merit the eternal prize they are to expect from the practice of those virtues, which they make themselves follow in learning to know them. They will respect the sacred bonds of their respective communities; they will love their fellow-citizens, and serve them with all their might: they will scrupulously obey the laws, and all those who make or administer them; they will particularly honour those wise and good princes, who find means of preventing, curing or even palliating all these evils and abuses, by which we are constantly threatened; they will animate the zeal of their deserving rulers, by showing them, without flattery or fear, the importance of their office and the severity of their duty. But they will not therefore have less contempt for a constitution that cannot support itself without the aid of so many splendid characters, much oftener wished for than found; and from which, notwithstanding all their pains and solicitude, there always arise more real calamities than even apparent advantages.

Every person from every culture would surely prefer that we were not tempted by distractions that seem beyond our ability to surmount. Cultures of sufficient size usually reach a point of decadence where it’s even more difficult than usual for ordinary people to resist the noise that rises against and within us. Sometimes it leads to large monastic movements, or perhaps philosophies of stillness like Taoism. Here in America we even court the noise – not that that’s especially unusual either, but technology amplifies it. In any event, what’s the use in being angry? If Christianity is true then the external noise only has power if there’s inner noise to yell back at it.

[It] is a duty to preserve one’s life; and, in addition, everyone has also a direct inclination to do so. But on this account the often anxious care which most men take for it has no intrinsic worth , and their maxim has no moral import. They preserve their life as duty requires, no doubt, but not because duty requires. On the other hand, if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life, if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his own life without loving it — not from inclination or fear, but from duty — then this maxim has a moral worth.

To be beneficent when one can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations, for example the inclination to honor, which, if it is happily directed to that which is in fact the public utility and accordant with duty, and consequently honorable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not esteem. For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.

(Metaphysic of Morals p 15)

We’ve begun reading Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals for tutorial, and while I understand little and agree with less, it’s fairly interesting, because while the standard way of looking at duty’s place in ethics (at least among those I’ve known) is that we may do things our of duty if we can’t bring ourselves to do them out of gratitude, or joy, or love, or even inclination, but that doing anything merely out of duty is inferior, Kant takes the exact opposite position. The only way to tell that a person is really moral is to see what he does when a moral action has nothing but duty to recommend it.

Aristotle took what seems to be a more reasonable approach: there are two basic manners in which to be virtuous, he said – on the one hand is “moral strength,” which means fighting against strong destructive passions and winning (like St Augustine after his conversion), or on the other hand is temperance, which means not particularly wanting to do wrong to begin with. They are both virtues, but different ones, so that it may be possible to begin with moral strength and eventually grow into temperance (the reverse seems unlikely), but it is not possible to have both at the same time. Aristotle seems to consider temperance to be the better of the two, but as simply not available to some people, or to most people at some times of life.

What I take Kant to mean is that temperance isn’t really a virtue at all – or rather that it’s very difficult to tell if a temperate person is virtuous, whereas a morally strong person is exercising virtue all the time. But I think I made a mistake there, because Kant doesn’t speak of “virtue,” but of “morality” – and while I do not know the German he used, I am nearly certain it is not the same thing as aretē – virtue as excellence. Indeed, Kant begins with a statement apparently derived from his practical reason that is very peculiar indeed: “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will. He goes on to explain himself – I hope we talk about it in class tomorrow, because I cannot follow him at all. Apparently because anything, even specific virtues, can be made to advance bad causes, therefore they are not themselves good – as if a person were to use the virtue of prudence in order to be a more successful criminal, or courage to advance an unjust war. I suppose if you can’t gall God good, it’s pretty difficult to find anything that’s good in an unqualified sense. Plato said that somewhere out there is a form of The Good; Aristotle in the Ethics mostly concerned himself with keeping various relative goods in balance. If you’re intent on not referring to the divine it seems to be a more reasonable approach than to try to assign intrinsic goodness to something as amorphous as a “good will.”

This last week was what would generally be considered “midterms” – we had a short essay due in Tutorial and an oral (conversation more than examination) in Seminar; as of Monday we’re going to be doing preceptorials rather than seminars. It’s almost too bad: I liked seminar quite a lot, and rather wish that there could be all three classes running at once. But I’m certainly glad we’re done with Marx: his definition of Man is that he’s a determinate species being! Good grief! p>

In any event, I’ve been enjoying the semester thus far; it would even be alright if we had more work, like a short paper every week, though I appreciate the simplicity of only four essays per semester, and no other “educational artifacts” at all. I guess in Greek class they have quizzes as well, and in math students do proofs on the board. I also appreciate the simplicity of class always consisting of an hour and fifteen or two hours of discussing whatever was in the reading, without any other “learning activities.” There’s something kind of elegant about the whole set up. I’m uncertain if or how this experience might help me to be a better teacher, for a similar reason to why I didn’t find Emile especially helpful – good and worthwhile, but not helpful in practice. I kind of wonder, though: is it possible to have something like a seminar in high school, however imperfectly? Even if we’d have to choose a four page short story, and read it out loud before talking about it? Perhaps, I’d have to see. The whole thing about the method they use here is that you have to be able to trust the students.