Casting Out Callicles

A Few Thoughts on the Dangers of Schooling

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:53:00 +0000

After a recent discussion with some friends about my distaste for traditional methods of schooling, I wanted to write something organized about the threat school can pose to education. Sadly, the best I had time to do was throw together a few scattered thoughts:

-In school we tell students they must learn or face a stiff penalty. Children are great game theorists, so they understand what this means. They know that when we provide an incentive for them, we are doing so because we think they won’t cooperate without that incentive. School teaches students that learning is something that normal people are reluctant to do; after all, why else would everyone need to be forced at grade-point to do it? We are perhaps entitled to be disturbed that so many students view education as a burden. We are not entitled to be surprised.

-Consider what Mister Rogers has to say about education:

Mister Rogers’ basic message is simple: learning is organic. It’s like gardening. Schooling, however, works in an entirely different way. Schooling is not organic; it is mechanical. Schooling treats the mind more like a machine than a garden. Schooling is designed to build a machine to store information and perform tasks, not to cultivate ideas.

-Thinking of education as an organic process does not mean letting children run free and do whatever they want. Cultivation takes effort and structure. Educating children means helping them to learn the kinds of discipline necessary to garden their minds.

-Schooling places the teacher in front of the student, handing down truth from on high. Organic education places the teacher alongside the student. This gives the teacher more dignity, not less. On the organic model, the teacher is much more than a source of information. The teacher is a master gardener of the mind, the student an apprentice.

-You might wonder whether there is anything wrong with the mechanical model of education. “After all,” you might object, “people need jobs. What’s so wrong about giving people the kind of training they need to get employed? Schools create good employees. What’s wrong with that?” This objection is problematic for two reasons. First, it’s not clear that its central assumption—that schooling produces good employees—is true. Schooling creates people who are capable of learning skills, retaining information, and, above all, responding to threats from people with power (or “obeying authority,” as it's usually called). You might think this makes for good employees. A century or two ago, when this model of education developed, that may have been true. In the twenty-first century, however, this kind of employee is becoming obsolete. Most schooling aims to produce the ideal factory worker, not the ideal google employee. Second, we should be concerned with the kind of people we are raising, not just the kind of employees we are producing. Work is not an end in itself. We work for the sake of something else. If we raise people who are able to work and stay alive, but do not have the tools to even begin to grapple with the question of what it is they’re working and living for, we’re missing the point.

-Yes, what I've said here raises more questions than it answers. The fact that this tends to leave us frustrated instead of intrigued is a symptom of the kind of schooling I've been criticizing.

On Christianity, Libertarianism, and Political Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:12:00 +0000

In a recent post on the Acton Institute blog, Joe Carter expresses his puzzlement at the idea of being a “Christian libertarian” and speaks as if the onus is on people who marry Christianity and libertarianism to show why this is a coherent combination. I’m not so sure I really count as a libertarian and hate labeling people, especially by their political views (I'm with Derek Webb: "there's no categories, just long stories waiting to be told. Don't be satisfied when someone sums you up with just one word"). And I don’t really care either to defend libertarianism or to give some grand argument to the effect that Christianity and libertarianism are in fact compatible. But I do want to challenge Carter’s starting point: the claim that there is some prima facie conflict between Christianity and libertarianism. Carter is puzzled at the idea that Christianity and libertarianism are compatible. I’m puzzled at Carter’s puzzlement.

To begin with, Carter doesn’t tell us how he is using the term “libertarian.” The broadest, simplest use of the term refers to a family of views about policies. In this sense, libertarians are roughly those of us who think that government interference in both our social and economic lives should be minimal. Generally, then, libertarians are more worried than left-liberals by government intervention in the economic sphere and more worried than social conservatives by government intervention in our moral and personal lives. This use of the term, of course, is rather course-grained. If we know someone is a libertarian in this sense, we know very roughly the kinds of policies he supports. But we know nothing about why he supports them. Libertarians have a broad range of reasons for their political views. It is these justifications that may or may not be compatible with Christianity, not the policy conclusions.

But what does it mean for Christianity and a political view to be compatible? Apparently Carter thinks that Christian's political philosophy ought somehow to follow from the commitments of Christianity. He writes:

Christians, on the other hand, must start with principles derived from the Bible and/or Christian tradition and work their way forward toward a coherent political philosophy. Again, I may be wrong, but I don’t see how starting from Biblical principles you’d end up with any political philosophy that resembled American-style libertarianism.

This is a highly questionable and contentious methodological claim. I don’t see how starting from Biblical principles you’d end up at any particular political philosophy. Sure, Christianity might conflict with certain political views. But at most it’s going to provide constraints on the views Christians can consistently hold; it’s not going to give us a particular view. Christians can and should begin doing political philosophy just like anyone else, by asking questions like "what is the function of government?" or "how can we successfully and peacefully live together with people who disagree with us about what it means to live well?" One's answers to these and other fundamental questions of political philosophy may be informed in certain ways by one's faith, but one cannot look up chapter and verse to find an answer in the Bible. There is no substitute, for the Christian or anyone else, for serious political philosophy.

When someone claims that they have the truly “Christian” political view, it usually stems in part from hidden assumptions that have nothing to do with Christianity. Naïve versions of social conservatism, for example, sometimes assume something like the principle of legal moralism—which holds the function of law is to make anything immoral illegal (less extreme versions usually just apply the principle only where convenient). While advocates of such views speak as if they’re just preaching Christianity, they are in fact preaching legal moralism. They may get much of the content of their moral beliefs from Christianity, but the claim that the function of law is simply to enshrine morality is a contentious (and I think implausible) claim about political philosophy that doesn’t follow from Christian doctrine. The same, of course, goes for libertarian principles. Libertarianism simply isn’t going to fall directly out of Christianity.

This means, of course, that it isn’t a good idea for Christians who are libertarians to walk around labeling themselves as “Christian libertarians.” This label suggests that the latter follows in some way from the former. And if “Christian libertarian” refers only to people who believe this, then I share Carter’s puzzlement at Christian libertarians. Unlike Carter, however, I reject the assumption that Christians’ political philosophies must be more or less directly derived from their theology, so I can conceive of a different kind of libertarian who is a Christian—one for whom the two views are compatible without one entailing the other.

At this point I think I’ve given plenty of reason to question Carter’s assumption that there is some sort of prima facie conflict between Christianity and libertarian political thought. I also think, however, there is good reason to think that the spirit of the two in fact fit quite well together. The core principle of both seems to me to be something like that real change is heart change. Unfortunately, busyness prevents me from spending the time to explore that idea here. If you’re interested in the thought, however, you can take a look at chapter 3 of No Fear in Love, a (now abandoned) book I tried to write before I began grad school. It’s not especially well-written, is under-argued, and it’s only an excerpt, but it should give you some idea of how I think about the theological and political import of the notion that real change is heart change.

Being a Philosopher

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:48:00 +0000

People who teach, study, and write about philosophy routinely refer to themselves as “philosophers.” Lately I have become deeply ambivalent about this language. At first glance it seems weirdly pretentious. If someone asks me what I do, I don’t answer “I’m a philosopher.” I do not expect my discomfort with this label to decrease the more I have written and the longer I’ve taught. Now I am a graduate student of philosophy. Eventually I hope to be a professor of philosophy. But a philosopher?

But as I've mulled over my discomfort, I've come to think it is far deeper than worries about apparent pretentiousness. The uneasiness I feel, however, is not with the notion of being a philosopher itself, but with making “philosopher” a professional term—as if one only need to teach and write on the right topics to be doing philosophy. Being a philosopher is not an academic accomplishment. After all, as Pieper reminds us, anyone can do philosophy:

Anybody can ponder human deeds and happenings and thus gaze into the unfathomable depths of destiny and history; anybody can get absorbed in the contemplation of a rose or human face and thus touch the mystery of creation; everybody, therefore, participates in the quest that has stirred the minds of the great philosophers since the beginning.

When is someone a “philosopher?” Maybe that’s not an important question. Maybe the better questions are "what is philosophy?" and "am I doing philosophy?" (doing philosophy, whatever exactly it amounts to, doubtless means more than teaching or writing about it)? And if the answer to the latter question is “yes,” or at least, “I’m doing my best,” that is all that matters.

Communication, Community, and the Internet (Re: SOPA)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

A remarkable thing happened this week. The internet was threatened by unprecedented government intervention and this threat was met with an online protest of unprecedented size. During all of this, I began reading Josef Pieper's Faith, Hope, Love, not having an inkling the two could have anything to do with one another. But when I ran across this passage in Pieper's discussion of belief, I couldn't help but think of this week's events:

I refer of course to the life of our fellowmen under the conditions of tyranny. As we all know, under such conditions no one dares to trust anyone else. Candid communication dries up; and there arises that special kind of unhealthy worldliness which is not silence so much as muteness. This is what happens to human intercourse under the peculiar pressures of dictatorship. Under conditions of freedom, however, human beings speak uninhibitedly to one another. How illuminating this contrast is! For in the face of it, we suddenly become aware of the degree of human closeness, mutual affirmation, communion, that resides in the simple fact that people listen to each other and are disposed from the start to trust and "believe" each other. We do not wish to rhapsodize about this, and grand words should always be used with caution. Still, we do well to recognize that everyone who speaks to another without falseness, even if what he says is not "confidential", is actually extending a hand and offering communion; and he who listens to him in good faith is accepting the offer and taking that hand. This very advertence of the will, which, admittedly we cannot quite call "love", though it partakes somewhat of love's nature—this sense of mutual trust and free interchange of thoughts produces a unique type of community. In such a community he who is hearing participates in the knowledge of the knower. (40-41)

The internet makes an astonishing amount of communication possible. As Pieper points out, anywhere where there is uninhibited communication, there is a kind of community. Just think about the kind of things social media makes possible. The protests against SOPA are themselves evidence of the power of the internet to connect people around ideas. The threat of SOPA was that it would hinder such open communication. Websites designed for content sharing could be punished because of the behavior of a few of their users. Given the high cost of carefully policing users, many such sites could be forced to shut down. More importantly, new sites driven by content-sharing would be difficult to get off the ground. And to what end? SOPA was aimed, as the end of the video below points out, at making internet users into consumers, so the entertainment industry can make a few bucks.

This video suggests we should be aware of future threats of the same kind. After all, the entertainment industry has long been trying to acquire giant, blunt legal instruments to protects its intellectual property. I don't discourage such awareness, but I would also recommend a different kind of vigilance. One rather disturbing aim of SOPA was to make us into lazy consumers, ready to watch or listen to whatever the entertainment industry puts in front of us. The best way to combat this is to take advantage of the internet's many ways of allowing active communication and community. Go find music you'd never find on the radio (for example, you can get all kinds of free, legal, new music at noisetrade.com). Learn about something you wouldn't pick up at work or in class (learnliberty.org, for example, is a great way to get introduced to classical liberal ideas about economics and politics). Make and make use of things that are only available because of the kinds of things that SOPA threatened. You can become just as passive an internet user as a tv watcher. Don't.

Snow

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:42:00 +0000

As I walked from my apartment to my office this morning in the softly falling snow, it did something to me that it is difficult to describe. It brings to mind a passage from Josef Pieper:

How splendid is water, a rose, a tree, an apple, a human face—such exclamations can scarcely be spoken without also giving tongue to an assent and affirmation which extends beyond the object praised and touches upon the origin of the universe. Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child's face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment ‘seen’ that everything which is good loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is – peace, salvation, gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that [as Plato says] "God holds in his hand the beginning, the middle, and the end of all that is."

Pieper on Teaching

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:49:00 +0000

This weekend I read Josef Pieper's The Silence of St. Thomas and ran across the following passage, in which Pieper describes Thomas Aquinas' approach to teaching:

Teaching, for Thomas, is something other and greater than to impart by one method or another the "findings of research"; something other and greater than the report of a thinker on the results of his inquiry, not to mention the ways and by-ways of his search. Teaching is a process of that goes on between living men. The teacher looks not only at the truth of things; at the same time he looks at the faces of living men who desire to know this truth. Love of truth and love of men—only the two together constitute a teacher. (23)

A good reminder at the beginning of a new semester of teaching!

Being Three-Dimensional

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:54:00 +0000

Yesterday, I read Wendell Berry's "How to Be a Poet". As I often find myself doing with his work, I spent some time chewing on it. While his advice is ostensibly about how to write poetry, much of it applies, it seems to me, to living well in general. Take, for example, the second stanza:

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

The bold passage was especially thought-provoking. How, it made me wonder, can I better live "a three-dimensioned life?" In particular, it got me thinking about the importance of being aware of the people around me. When you live in a world that is abstract and two-dimensional (like mine, in which I spend much of my day focused on a computer screen or a book), it is easy to forget the people that inhabit the three-dimensional world you live in. Between mulling over this and the usual reflection that comes with a new year, I began writing a series of injunctions to myself. A bit like Berry's poem (subtitled "to remind myself"), they are for me, but I figured I'd share:

-Don't let your work distract you from the people and places around you and then pretend it's because your work is important. Your work only matters because people matter.

-Write like you’re in a place—like you’re in a room talking to people. Think of your audience as listeners, not readers.

-When you choose to write about something, ask yourself: why does this matter? Focus on saying things that are important, not clever or sophisticated. It’s fine to fill in gaps in the literature, to expose a poor argument, or make an interesting point, but these are not ends in themselves. Pedantry is overrated. Be a human being, not an academic.

-Treat your body right. Get and stay in shape. Eat right. Quit living like a dualist. You are not separate from your body. Stop treating your body like your car. The soul is the form of the body, not its driver. Your body is not something that is external to you. Don't treat it like that.

-Get in a rhythm. Work when the sun is up. Relax when the sun goes down. Sleep enough.

-You have time. Everything can't happen tomorrow. Technology has trained you to seek instant gratification. Don't; you won't find it anyway. Very few things of any importance happen overnight.

-You are not in control. Stop trying to be God and quit whining every time you realize you aren't.

-You have nothing to lose. Nothing. Real treasure is not stored where moth and rust destroy. So quit worrying about moths and rust. Your citizenship is in heaven.

Old Truth for a New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:12:00 +0000

Sometimes it's good to be reminded of things we know are true. I read this passage from Josef Pieper's The Concept of Sin the other day and it seemed an appropriate reminder at the beginning of a new year:

To be entirely and completely in harmony [d'accord] with oneself - that only occurs to the one who is doing the good; to him alone belongs that happiness that comes to the one who is able to throw himself absolutely and with full sails into what he is doing. (38)

Quality Christmas Music: Behold the Lamb of God

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:50:00 +0000

Having just posted a rather stern criticism of "Christmas Shoes," I feel obligated to point readers to worthwhile Christmas music. Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God is excellent. It walks through the story of Jesus, beginning in the Old Testament, where his coming is foreshadowed in various ways. The songs are well-written and are crafted into an album that is a remarkably unified whole. It is one of the few Christmas albums I really enjoy.

One of the things I love about this album is the fact that I don't have to "feel" it to appreciate it. For example, my favorite song on the album is "Labor of Love," which Jill Phillips performs:

The first time I heard it, I cried like a little girl. This weekend I saw it live again (they do a Christmas tour every year, culminating in a show in the Ryman in Nashville) and, having heard it countless times (a few live), I didn't shed a tear. But that didn't change my ability to appreciate both the story the song tells and the beauty of the song telling it. A sure sign of an emotionally manipulative song is that when you stop "feeling" it, you lose interest. But "Labor of Love" is still beautiful, even when it doesn't stir my emotions in quite the same way that it did when I first heard it.

You can listen to the album here, though the quality isn't great on the player (all the more reason to buy it!). I also highly recommend seeing it played live on next year's Christmas tour. Going to the show at the Ryman has become a Christmas tradition for my family and there is no live show I would recommend more highly.

An Indictment of "Christmas Shoes"

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:08:00 +0000

Etienne Gilson wrote The Arts of The Beautiful decades before the release of "Christmas Shoes", but this passage couldn't be more appropriate:

Lacking the ability to produce beauty-which alone would justify their work from an esthetic point of view-artists bestow upon it other kinds of interests, of a higher order at times as in the case of religious, patriotic or social arts, or of a lower order, as when art makes itself subservient to plain entertainment. These foreign ends are not incompatible with beauty, but art certainly can do as well without them and, at best, it only tolerates them in small doses. (132)

The truth about "Christmas Shoes" is that is worthless from an aesthetic point of view. This fact is (rather less than effectively) masked, as Gilson describes, behind a veil of religiosity. We are not supposed to listen to a song like this to appreciate the song itself. We are supposed to listen to it to feel something that has nothing to do with the song.

Using less than compelling music for religious purposes is perhaps excusable when the music really is serving religious purposes. As Gilson points out, we might reasonably place religion among the "interests of a higher order" than art (I'm no fan of most worship music, but I'm not disturbed by the fact that worship services aren't high art; worship services should be aimed at planting truth in minds and hearts; aesthetic excellence is a means to that end in that context). The trouble with "Christmas Shoes" is that it isn't really aimed at religious purposes. It's not about God; it's about getting a good cry at Christmas time. It's aimed at entertainment, at stirring up feelings that have nothing to do with the quality of the song and too often have little to do with the God the song mentions so casually. The real problem with "Christmas Shoes" is not that it makes art subservient to religion (which can be unobjectionable; even the most sophisticated of hymns does that), or even that it makes art subservient to shallow religion (as do poorly written worship songs that are nevertheless really aimed at worship), but that it makes religion subservient to entertainment.

(There is, of course, good original Christmas music to be found, as I discuss in my next post)

Quote of the Day: Parfit on Kant's writing

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:12:00 +0000

One of my graduate seminars this semester is on Derek Parfit's new book, On What Matters. Parfit spends most of his preface singing the praises of his two greatest influences, Sidgwick and Kant, and his criticism of their shortcomings is often as pointed as his praise is enthusiastic. His assessment of Kant's style in writing is especially hilarious:

The first problem is Kant's style. It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else and say 'How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?' The answer could always be 'What about Kant' (xli)

Why I Read Jane Austen (and you should too)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:40:00 +0000

For a long time I operated under the rather misguided assumption that Jane Austen novels have little in them of interest to men. As I began to read philosophers like Henry Veatch and Alasdair MacIntyre endorse Austen’s work and describe it as a literary embodiment of a kind of virtue ethics, I began wondering whether I had her all wrong. Last fall I was trying to find some fiction to read and happened upon an inexpensive collection of Austen’s novels on Amazon. Soon I discovered that the stereotype of Austen I had was not only wrong, but grossly wrong.

What, exactly, is it, that makes Austen’s novels so great? It is not—contrary to the ravings of the sort of people who generated my previous stereotype (and whose behavior in doing so, ironically, is of a sort of which Austen herself would not precisely be fond, except, perhaps, insofar as such behavior brought to mind the pleasure of creating some of her less praiseworthy characters*)—the plots driven by romantic intrigue. Don’t get me wrong, Austen’s plots are quite an achievement. I have to be prepared to read one of her novels, because I know that once I begin I will scarcely be able to put it down until I finish it. But this is not the key to Austen’s greatness. Nor is the key to her greatness her moral judgment. While I am inclined, like the philosophers who pointed me her way, to approve in many respects of the vision of virtue that seems to be embodied in Austen’s work, that is not what makes her work so captivating.

What is ultimately so wonderful about Austen is just how complex, interesting, and often surprising her characters are. It is not so much the complex series of actions Austen has them take that is so interesting, nor is it the judgments Austen makes about her characters that are so profound. What makes Austen’s novels so engaging and powerful it is the fact that she creates characters that often puzzle us and leave us unsure how to judge them until the end (and yet when they make the decisions they do in the end, we find ourselves thinking their unexpected choices less than surprising after all, and think our final judgment of them to have been the one that should have been obvious to us all along). This takes skill not only in writing fictional characters, but an eye for the features of the character of real people. Just as painting or drawing well requires one to have an eye for color and lines in the world around him, writing such characters requires one to have an eye for people, an ability to recognize both the features of people's character that make them predictable and the quirks, idiosyncracies, and sometimes the hidden motives that occasionally make people defy our expectations. It is this vision for people that sets Austen’s work apart.

So if you haven't already, I encourage you to read some Jane Austen. I'm no literary critic and my ravings about her merits don't do justice to them, but I hope that if you've been avoiding Austen for the wrong reasons, that this might wake you up to the possibility that Austen is worth your time. But consider yourself warned: once you get a few chapters in, it will be remarkably difficult to put down.

*Needless to say (but I will say it) many Jane Austen fans I know do not deserve this description.

I'm with Fred

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:01:00 +0000

Methodological Ruminations: Reasonable Disagreement

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:47:00 +0000

For a few weeks I’ve been (rather slowly) working my way through Etienne Gilson’s The Arts of the Beautiful. While I came to this short book interested in Gilson’s views on aesthetics, one of the passages that has struck me as most interesting so far actually has little to with Gilson’s views about beauty or art. After spending the first two chapters simply advancing his own view, he prepares the reader to begin dealing with alternative views by briefly stating his methodology:

In my effort to be clear, I have paid little attention to interpretations of art opposed to my own. Polemics is an endless business and of very little profit. Still, there are several other ways of conceiving of the nature and functions of the fine arts. Moreover, each of those particular ways of conceiving of them has something to say in its favor, otherwise it would not exist. Last, but not least, we are never certain that our own answer is true until we make sure that it can take care of that which is true in the other answers given to the same problem. (54-55)

When I first read this passage I had just finished rereading the section of Gilson’s The Unity of the Philosophical Experience about Descartes and had been struck by just how evenhanded and charitable Gilson is to Descartes. I had remembered Gilson being rather critical of Descartes, but I had forgotten (or perhaps I just did not notice the first time around) how well he explains Descartes’ view. Gilson writes about Descartes like a good professor teaches. He inhabits the perspective of his subject, tries to think from his viewpoint. When I came the above remark in The Arts of the Beautiful I could not help but think of how the passage on Descartes reflected this methodology: in order to explain Descartes, we have to do more than show where he goes wrong. We need to make sense of what he gets right. “How could a reasonable person think that?” should not be a rhetorical question.

I had a discussion yesterday that reminded me of this point and made some sense of what this looks like in practice. One of my colleagues and I were discussing rather different intuitions we have about the moral relevance of animal suffering and he pointed out something I hadn’t considered: if I can’t capture his intuition by advancing a view that lines up with it, then I should be able to explain what mistake has led reasonable people to have such an intuition. At the time I thought of this primarily as a challenge to explain where he made an error. Indeed, after he made this remark he and another colleague half-seriously traded oversimple attempts at explaining the psychological origins of the other’s intuition.

As I walked home from the office after this conversation I was a bit troubled. On one hand, the challenge seemed appropriate: if I can’t capture an intuition that a lot of reasonable people seem to share, I should be able to explain it. On the other hand, something seems wrong about the kind of explanation that treats the intuition as unreasonable, in need of explaining away as some kind of simple error. As I was thumbing through The Arts of the Beautiful later, considering a few passages I’d marked before I continued reading, I ran across the above passage and realized that Gilson had exactly the right idea: if I’m going to give a good account of something I’ve got to do more than just explain why my opponents are wrong, but I’ve got to capture what it is that they get right. And if they’re reasonable people they probably got something right.

Thinking this way actually allowed me not only to develop an explanation of the opposing intuition but also to solve a problem in my position that had puzzled me before (namely, how to think about plants) and to incorporate an aspect of my view I hadn’t considered in connection to this issue (namely, the role of flourishing). This account will likely not convince many who disagree with me (because it rests on rather controversial metaphysical claims about flourishing and goodness, which themselves need to be explained and defended), but it does treat the intuition behind the opposing view as if the people who have it are on to something.

Doing philosophy is a bit like putting together a puzzle with other people, but with some unusual difficulties: some of the pieces we’re trying to fit together might be extra and we don’t have a box with a picture of what it’s supposed to look like when we finish it. If someone else has put a bunch of pieces together into what he thinks is some corner of the completed puzzle, it is unlikely that he is entirely wrong. Sure, some of his pieces might turn out not to belong in the puzzle at all and to be better replaced by other pieces. And perhaps he’s even managed to cram things together that don’t really fit. But if I’m going to try to put the puzzle together and do better than he has then it’s foolish to pay no attention to his attempt. If he’s not completely unreasonable, he’s probably put a few things together right. Or maybe he’s noticed the general form of things even though he can’t figure out how all the individual pieces go together. Either way, I ignore what he’s done at my own risk.

The Danger of Specialization in the Language of Poetry and Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Mon, 30 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Last fall, reading Plato's Phaedo for class, I noticed a line to which I had never given much attention before:

To express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul. (115e)

This struck me as worth considering further. It raised a flurry of questions: What does this mean, exactly? In what sorts of ways might one express himself badly? Is some faulty language harmless while other faulty language is dangerous? What exactly does Plato mean by harm to the soul? And then, if we get clear on what Plato means, and if he seems right, what would it look like in practice to take his insight seriously?

These matters came to mind again not long after that, as I began reading Wendell Berry's Standing By Words. There Berry expresses a similar worry about the danger of the abuse of language:

My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities. (24)

In this passage Berry seems to be thinking of our disintegration of language as more a reflection of the disintegration of lives and communities than a cause. He seems quite aware, however, of the way in which language use can reinforce and exacerbate the trends that it reflects. This becomes especially evident in his criticism of the use of specialized language in poetry:

One of the oldest doctrines of specialist-poets is that of the primacy of language and the primacy of poetry. They have virtually made a religion of their art, a religion based not on what they have in common, but on what they do that sets them apart. For poets who believe this way, a poem is not a point of clarification between themselves and the world on the one hand and between themselves and their readers on the other, nor is it an adventure into any reality or mystery outside themselves. It is a seeking of self in words, the making of a word-world in which the word-self may be at home. The poets go to their poems as other people have gone to the world or to God—for a sense of their own reality. (7)

Notice what poets do when they become specialized: they abandon the common language, the human language. This might be fine in certain specialized contexts, but there are some tasks that address themselves to human beings as human beings, not as specialists. Poetry, Berry suggests, is such a task. Because its aim is to engage humans as humans and not as specialists, it should employ a common language. When it does not do so it alienates non-specialists and impoverishes the specialists themselves.

This is also the case with philosophy. It addresses itself to human beings as such. Josef Pieper expresses this point well:

Within his own proper domain, however, the philosopher speaks of things that by their very nature do not concern the specialist only but every human being. His utterances are not necessarily grasped already after some superficial listening, without cost, as it were. There may result, on the contrary, serious difficulties for a full understanding... The decisive aspect in all philosophical expression is nevertheless this: to employ diligently, not a terminology, but the elements of our common language, and thus to speak in the power, of naturally grown words already familiar to everyone in such a way that the object of philosophy, the quest for wisdom, which is also of concern to everyone, is upheld and preserved with clarity. (In Defense of Philosophy, 101)

The phrase that begins this passage, "within his own proper domain," is the key here. Everyone has to speak in ordinary human language on some occasions, but need not do so in the proper domain of his specialized work. When a mathematician is having a conversation with an ordinary person, he'd best use ordinary language, but when he's talking to a fellow mathematician, thinking about a problem, specialized terminology is appropriate. Mathematicians, when operating as mathematicians, have their own language, and that's just fine. Philosophy, Pieper argues, does not properly have such a language.

This connection between Plato, Berry, and Pieper occurred to me quite a while ago, and I've been mulling over the danger of specialized language for many months now. It has only been recently, however, that I have seen the relevance of this point in practice (and, as is so often the case, the force of this point has only come home to me as I've seen its importance in practice in my own life). As I've begun to rework some papers to try to send out for publication, and as I've considered professors' comments on the papers I wrote this past semester, I've noticed something: the parts of my papers that are more interesting and well-written are the parts that employ ordinary language and avoid unnecessarily complex terminology. The same is true for the things I've been reading lately: the things I enjoy reading most are those things that are written for ordinary human readers, not only for academic philosophers. This does not mean, as Pieper rightly points out in the above passage, that philosophy will be easy to understand. But if anything makes philosophical writing difficult, it should be the difficulty of its subject matter, not the language it is written in. Learning to write in a clear, accessible way and still manage to make interesting claims about complex matters is no easy task, to be sure. But doing the kind of philosophy kind that addresses itself to man as man, not to specialists is worth whatever work it requires.

On George Costanza, Callicles, and the Good Life

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Thu, 26 May 2011 22:01:00 +0000

The beginning of my summer felt a like a slightly subdued version of this. Like George, I wanted to take full advantage of my summer. Unlike George, of course, I don’t have any special interest in Frisbee Golf or in dramatically naming the summer after myself. But I had hoped to take full advantage of having nearly no scheduled obligations this summer. For months I’ve been waiting for time to work on a couple of papers that want to clean up and try to get published. I’ve got dozens of books on my shelf that I’ve been waiting to read (not to mention a few that will find their way to my shelf soon). And ever since I moved to Ohio from Nashville I feel like the time I get to spend playing guitar has been slowly diminishing. I’d hoped to let my summer be a chance to dive into all these things for which I’ve simply lacked the time during the school year. I've spent every summer since I began college landscaping, and as much I enjoyed landscaping and the great folks I got to work with doing it, I've been looking forward to having a summer to spend doing nothing but the things I’m really passionate about.

Like George, however, my initial excitement was rather quickly dampened (though not, in my case, by bees). Only a couple of weeks into the summer I’ve found myself unmotivated and tired. As I’ve noticed, reflected on, and resolved to combat this lethargy, I’m reminded of the title of this blog, which has always had two distinct but related meanings for me. Callicles (as I explain here) is a character in Plato’s Gorgias who is opposed to everything Socrates (Plato’s teacher and the main character of most of his dialogues) stands for, which means he rejects objective standards of goodness, justice, and so on. The task to which this blog is devoted—casting out Callicles—is in part a matter of advancing a view of the world that embraces the sort of objective standards of truth, beauty, and goodness that Callicles rejects. But there is more to the task of casting out Callicles than that. Callicles’ anti-philosophy is, like philosophy, not merely a way of thinking, but a way of life. Callicles insists that the good life is not the examined, self-controlled life endorsed by Socrates and Plato, but a life of self-indulgence. Casting out Callicles, then, is as much a matter of refusing to live a disordered, self-indulgent life, as it is a rejection of a particular set of philosophical claims.

This task of casting out Callicles in everyday life is exactly the challenge that faces me this summer: I can do what feels good at the moment (lay around my apartment, play computer games, get things done I have to do, but accomplish little else) or I can do the things I know are truly worthwhile. The easy, shallow life does feel good for a moment, but the truth is that the pleasures of the shallow life are inferior to the joys of the good life. Even as I was writing the first paragraph of this post, recounting how I had looked forward to the summer, I was reminded of how much I really do love all the things I’ve now got time to do, and what a blessing it is to get to have a summer to do them. As I wind up this post I’m reminded of how much I enjoy writing, the one thing that I have, until this very post, had the more trouble doing than anything else since finishing my semester. Sure, doing the worthwhile stuff is hard, but as Andy Osenga observes, good things always are.

One blog everyone should check out

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:23:00 +0000

I don't know why I've never mentioned this before, but if you have any interest in political philosophy, you should be reading Bleeding Heart Libertarians. It gets my vote for best philosophy blog on the internet. It sustains a remarkably high level of discussion without becoming overly technical. It is perhaps the only blog where I ever bother to read the comments, because of the quality of discussion that goes on there.

Plato on bin Laden

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:49:00 +0000

After waking to find an internet full of celebration over the death of Osama bin Laden, I could not help but think of Plato's Gorgias:

Socrates: Doing what's unjust is actually the worst thing there is.

Polus: Really? Is that the worst? Isn't suffering what's unjust still worse?

Socrates: No not in the least.

Socrates rightly insists that it is much worse to be the sort of person who commits injustices than to be someone who suffers from them. To be the sort of person who is capable of injustice is far worse than to be a victim. The latter has simply encountered injustice. The former is unjust. Consider bin Laden in this light: that he was capable of doing the things he did should sadden and disturb us. Perhaps, rather than celebrating his death, we should mourn his life.

This does not mean we should not desire just punishment (it is unclear, of course, whether treating bin Laden as an enemy combatant rather than a criminal with a right to due process is just; I have not thought through this question carefully and have no considered view. The answer, it seems to me, is not obvious, and may depend to a considerable degree on facts about the actual encounter in which he was killed), but our gladness at the justice of any punishment should always be tempered by a sadness that such a punishment is needed, that a man could do things that deserved such punishment.

Re: The Royal Wedding (A few honest questions)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:18:00 +0000

Our response to any obsession of popular culture should be a simple question: is this a sign of health or a symptom of disease? Consider the obsession with the royal wedding. What drives this fascination? Is there a reason for it? Is there a good reason for it. What values does it expose? Are these good values or bad?

Mill on Christians and Christianity

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:20:00 +0000

One of my courses this semester is on the history of political philosophy. Because I’m familiar with many of the texts we’re reading, I've begun noticing things to which I’d given little attention the first time or two I read them. One thing that has been of special interest to me this time around is the way that these thinkers treat religion. In particular, I’ve been fascinated by the way some of these thinkers contrast Christianity in its culturally dominant forms with some kind of Christianity they take to be genuine. Rousseau and Mill are especially keen on this contrast. While these thinkers seem a bit confused about the precise content of authentic Christianity (Rousseau’s description of authentic Gospel Christianity is a caricature and Mill’s characterization of authentic Christianity seems have more to do with Christ’s moral teaching than any notion He is a Savior), each rightly notices that there is something terribly wrong with the stale religiosity of much of the Christianity they see around them.

I found Mill’s description of the way many professing Christians in his time lived was both convicting and compelling, and it is worth quoting at length:

They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them. The doctrines in their integrity are serviceable to pelt adversaries with; and it is understood that they are to be put forward (when possible) as the reasons for whatever people do that they think laudable. But any one who reminded them that the maxims require an infinity of things which they never even think of doing, would gain nothing but to be classed among those very unpopular characters who affect to be better than other people. The doctrines have no hold on ordinary believers—are not a power in their minds. They have an habitual respect for the sound of them, but no feeling which spreads from the words to the things signified, and forces the mind to take them in, and make them conform to the formula. Whenever conduct is concerned, they look round for Mr. A and B to direct them how far to go in obeying Christ.

My first instinct after reading something like this is, of course, to find someone else who fits this description. It’s all too easy to launch into ranting about how nothing’s changed since Mill, how the world today is full of a bunch of people who don't really live like they believe the things they profess to believe. And while it’s certainly true that there is no shortage today of religious talk and practice that remains untouched by any meaningful, life-changing belief, complaining about that is not the appropriate response. The appropriate response to a critique like Mill’s is self-examination. I should begin by asking whether my beliefs are meaningful and life-changing. We would all (Christians and others alike) do well to ask ourselves two simple questions:

What really matters?
Are the things that I say really matter really the things that matter to me in my daily life?

On The Petty Academic

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:41:00 +0000

The worst symptom (and most pitiful victim) of contemporary academic specialization is the petty academic—the specialist who fails to see the limits of his own specialization. There are few sights so pathetic as the professor who thinks his political opinions “educated” simply because he has spent many years studying some academic subject (it matters not to him what subject) and a few hours a week watching cable television news programs, listening to the radio, or reading the paper. The former has taught him to believe that he is an elite whose opinion should be listened to, while the latter has furnished him with, if not his opinion itself, the shallow terms in which his opinion is framed.

The petty academic does not—perhaps cannot—engage in either serious thinking or honest conversation about politics. Serious thinking about political matters would require him to step beyond the rhetoric he has learned from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, his blog of choice, or whatever supplier of contemporary political language (which so awkwardly manages to be at once uninteresting and exaggerated) he chooses. Honest conversation seems equally difficult for him. When among fellow ideological believers he knows only the smug mockery of them: the "other side," who are obviously wrong and are presumed either ignorant or irresponsible. While among those on the "other side," he is accustomed either to avoiding politics altogether (usually to his and everyone else's relief) or to a debate, in which his goal is to "win" by convincing a third party he is smarter (which, of course, he hopes they are foolish enough to think means he is right).

All this adds up to a rather sad sight—a man who would demand long, careful study to support the simplest claim made in his own academic discipline is all too willing to buy into the most foolish of popular political rhetoric. To see an educated man so easily excited by an Obama or a Bush, is as disgraceful as seeing such a man excited by a Britney Spears or a Justin Timberlake.

Pieper on the Danger of Merely Academic Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:03:00 +0000

Having had such things on my mind lately, I enjoyed running across this in Pieper's In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity:

It is essential to resist the sophistical corruption of the arts, the cheapening of eroticism, the degradation of death, as well as the tendency to make philosophy a textbook subject or an irresponsible juggling of big words.

On Merely Academic Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:43:00 +0000

-Contemporary academic specialists in the discipline named “philosophy” pride themselves in their intensely precise use of technical terminology. If they thought this precision a philosophical virtue, they would deserve no reproach. That they think this the philosophical virtue is an indictment on their conception of philosophy.

-The study of philosophy is known to prepare students well for law school. That professors of philosophy promote their discipline on these grounds or on any grounds of usefulness, as if philosophy can serve some other end and remain philosophy, shows that they do not understand philosophy. That they cannot comprehend the suggestion that the study of philosophy ought to prepare one just as well to be a poet shows that they do not practice philosophy.

I Love Philosophers' Sense of Humor

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:59:00 +0000

From John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

This way of arguing is as frivolous as the supposition itself is false.

He that will say, children join these general aspect abstract speculations with their suckling-bottles and their rattles, may perhaps, with justice, be thought to have more passion and zeal for his opinion, but less sincerity and truth, than one of that age.

Explanation and Tyrrany

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bryan) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:42:00 +0000

In Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, Wendell Berry writes:

The putative ability to explain everything along with the denial of religion is a property of political tyranny. So is the belief that one's explanations will save the world from some great threat.

This captures exactly what bothers me most about popular politics: the delusion that politics can easily fix all our problems, if only we can just get the right people in power or the right policy enacted (or repealed). This assumes that we know basically everything we need to know, and the only challenge is to get those pesky people on the other side who refuse to believe the obvious truth to get out of the way. This attitude is both arrogant and ignorant.