Morality and Art: Blame the Biographer, but not the Artist (The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Vol. 14, pp. 32-64; 540-604)

In his Lives, Plutarch does not write history, but biography.  His purpose in so doing is to teach morality.  He compared his task to that of the portrait-painter:   

"It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives.  And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.  Therefore, as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated by others."  (pp. 540-41, italics added) 

Having just read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, I found Plutarch's analogy of the biographer to the portrait-painter fascinating.  While the analogy worked for Plutarch's purposes, I think a closer examination of art and biography reveals some important differences.  Plutarch was not writing a history or a novel, but a biography.  His purpose was to discover "virtue or vice in men" by examining and recording the way great men lived.

Wilde, on the other hand, was an artist.  And his purpose was different than Plutarch's purpose.  "Vice and Virtue are to the artist materials for an art....  All art is at once surface and symbol.  Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.  Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.  It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors....  We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not not admire it.  The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.  All art is quite useless."   (Dorian Gray, Preface).   

While Wilde argues that art is "useless," I do not think he means that it is without value.  I think he means that art is an end in and of itself to be enjoyed.  Wilde does not use the term "useless" pejoratively.  In fact, art, as a thing we enjoy intrinsically,  has more value than things, or works, which are useful only as a means to an end.  For Wilde, "virtue or vice" are the means to an enjoyable, artistic end. 

For Plutarch, the end is to make "the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men."  (p. 540)  His work is a means to a higher end: to use the lives of good and notorious men to teach morals to his audience.  That is not to say that there is not artistic value in Plutarch's work.  Secondarily, the Lives is beautifuly written and has artistic value in and of itself, regardless of the reader's ability to improve his life as a result of its study.  But, at least under Wilde's definition, the Lives is not art.  Likewise, I can use Oscar Wilde's masterpiece as a paper weight, or as a trophy on a book shelf to impress my friends (not that they would be impressed).  But according to Wilde, if his work is of any artistic consequence, it cannot have any "ethical sympathies."  For "[a]n ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style."  (Preface)  The art itself is the end, and there are no other layers to explore.

It is tempting to find a lesson in ethics and morals in The Picture of Dorian Gray.  But it is not a moral story.  The story does not teach a lesson on morality, nor does the picture in the story reflect any "ethical sympathies."  Dorian Gray's changing portrait does not reflect the artist Basil's view of the world.  Rather, it mirrors and reflects the worldview of the spectator, the dandy Dorian Gray.  As Lord Henry preaches, when Dorian blames a book given to him by Henry for Gray's own bad behavior:  "You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be.  As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that.  Art has no influence upon action.  It annihilates the desire to act.  It is superbly sterile.  The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.  That is all."  (p. 172)    

It makes me wonder why Socrates wanted to get rid of all the poets in his Republic.  Maybe they just weren't very useful?  Also, I seemed to have learned a great amount from Wilde's book.  I didn't just enjoy it, but I feel like I learned a lot about the nature of art and the purpose it plays in our lives.  Does this mean that the book is not "art"?  Or was this lesson merely a collateral result of a story that was primarily meant to be read and enjoyed for its own sake?

I'll have to think about that.

Men are (Political) Animals (Politics, Book 1, Vol. 9, pp. 445-55)

Again, in the interest of catching up, this shall be a short post.

Dr. Adler does a great job of showing Aristotle's logic in arguing that man is a political animal and that the state is "natural."

(1)  the state arises out of human need;
(2)  all men are meant to live in a state;
(3)  if the state is natural, how it comes about cannot be completely due to human deliberation and rules;
(4)  since the state is a natural, it has an end or purpose.

"If all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good."  (445)

So if the state has an end or purpose, what is that purpose?  I would think that if the purpose of man is to lead the good life and to be happy (as discussed in the Nichomachean Ethics), the purpose of the state is to allow all to engage in the pursuit of happiness.  I am thinking about taking this theme and writing a paper on the role of the "pursuit of happiness" in the formation of public policy.  It seems to me that our policy makers and business leaders are so focused on economic benefits, that we are missing out on improving the well-being of our citizens.  Money, except for a minimum amount to provide for our basic needs, does not lead to greater happiness.  So it certainly follows that public policy designed to help people achieve as much money as possible is not necessarily going to lead to a happier society.  If it works out well, I will be able to do some research on this idea.     

There is so much more to this, but I have to move on.  I'm most of the way through the Plutarch reading, so I'll be blogging my thoughts on that soon. 

Don't Worry, Be Happy (Nichomachean Ethics, book 1, Vol. 9, pp. 339-48)

I've been keeping up with my reading, but haven't done a good job keeping up with my blogging.  I hope to get back in gear.

This has been my favorite reading up to this point.  I won't go into much detail (so as to allow me to catch up), but here is a quote from the reading:

     "He is happy who is active in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external   goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life.  Or must we add 'and who is destined to live thus dies as befits his life?'  Certainly  the future is obscure to us, while happiness, we claim, is an end and something in every way final.  If so, we shall call happy those among living menin whom these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled -- but happy men."  (p. 346)

Thus, for Aristotle, happiness is a moral virtue.  Somebody who leads a good life and not necessarily somebody who has a good time.  The good life takes a lifetime and is not easy to attain. 

I've been reading a lot of articles lately on "happiness," and my favorite is "What Makes Us Happy" in the June 2009 Atlantic by Joshua Wolf Shenk.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/7439/

I would recommend it to anybody who wants to live 'the examined life."

Look Within and Know Yourself (Oedipus the King and Antigone, Vol. 5, pp. 99-113, 131-142)

Here is the setup in a nutshell: You have a bright, capable ruler who is "renowned of all." But he has a problem. He has, without his knowledge, committed two of the worst sins a man can commit. He has killed his father and married his mother. The blind man tells him what happened, but our hero doesn't believe him. When he finally does figure it out, he blinds himself.



The city of Thebes is "sorely vexed." The Gods are not accepting the sacrifices of the people. So they come to Oedipus the King and ask him to find out what's going on. Oedipus calls on the prophet Teiresias to tell him why the city is cursed. Teiresias knows what is going on. When Oedipus' parents had him, the oracle informed them that he would kill his father and marry his mother. So they put a wedge through his ankles and gave him to their servant to let him die of exposure. Instead, the servant gave the child to another servant, who gave the baby to a couple to raise in another city. During his travels, Oedipus gets in an argument and kills a man, who happens to be his birth father. Then, when he gets to Thebes, he solves the riddle of the sphinx and saves the city from its woes. For this, he is much "renowned," and he marries his mother, the Queen.

But Teiresias, who happens to be blind, does not want to tell Oedipus the truth. For this, Oedipus accuses Teiresias of being involved in his father's death. The blind Teiserias tells Oedipus what happened.

"And I tell thee -- since thou hast taunted me even with blindness -- that thou hast sight, yet seest not in what misery thou art, nor where thou dwellest, nor with whom. Dost thou know of what stock thou art? And thou hast been an unwitting foe to thine own kin, in the shades, and on the earth above; and the double lash of thy mother's and thy father's curse shall one day drive thee from this land in dreadful haste, with darkness then on the eyes that now see true."

I love the use of irony: the man who sees does not have a clue and the blind man can see everything. Eventually, after his wife and mother kills herself, Oedipus blinds himself (does this mean he can now see?). Oedipus cries out "Nay, to the gods I have become most hateful." And indeed, "what a stormy sea of dread he hath come!"

How often do we make life decisions without knowing who we are? We choose careers, marry, choose to have kids without knowing who we really are and what we really want to be? Some of us get lucky and some of us don't. I see my role as a father to do everything I can to help my children become self aware. The problem is that self-awareness usually doesn't come until we have some life experience behind us. And we can't get life experience without taking some chances. I think this is the greatest challenge of life -- getting life experience, and self awareness, while avoiding that "stormy sea of dread trouble." This is probably one of the great challenges of being human. I wish I had some answers on how to deal with it.

In the case of Antigone, Creon the King imposes a sentence beyond his authority and gets Thebes in trouble once again. He decreed that the dead son of Oedipus, who tried to start a civil war, would not be buried and would be left to the birds and dogs. When his sister tried to bury him, Creon sentenced her to be entombed. The Gods were not happy that Creon confused the living and the dead, and once again they refused to honor the sacrifices of the city. By the time Creon recognized the error of his ways, his son who was engaged to Antigone hanged himself and his wife killed herself in anguish as well. While Creon probably had some right to impose some kind of punishment against both Antigone and her brother for breaking the law, he too lacked self-knowledge. He lacked knowledge of the limits of his authority. Once again, a blind Teiserias asks him "do thou hearken to the seer?" And when he didn't, it came back on Creon hard. At the end of the play Creon states in agony that he knows not "which way [he] should bend [his] gaze."

I'll bet, when he figured it out, he decided to bend it within.

An Update on DeChristopher

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_14680017

So, this begs the question: should DeChristopher want to be punished? Should he make an ironical defense like Socrates? Or should he really try to get off? If he gets off, does this take the wind out of his civil disobedience sails?

NY Times article on textbooks in Texas

Here is an interesting article that goes along with some of my arguments in my last blog.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?hp

Who Shall Teach the Children? (The Republic, Books I-II, Vol. 7, pp. 295-324)

"... [A]nd then [Socrates] saw what [he] had never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing." Thus Socrates put himself in a position to teach the youth of Athens. The debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus illustrates two of the great debates of their time and of ours: what shall we teach our kids and who shall teach them?

In the Republic, Socrates and his young companion Glaucon are persuaded to delay their travels home to go to the home of Cephalus in Piraeus. Once there, Socrates engages in conversation with Cephalus, where we learn a thing or two about this man. When Socrates asks Cephalus how he enjoys old age, Cephalus replies that "[f]or certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then as Sophocles says, we are freed from the gasp not of one mad master only, but of many." I imagine, after reading this, that Cephalus was a man of passions and a servant of temptations in his younger years. But in his older years, when his passions have waned, he has turned to the gods "for he had been sacrificing in the court." Cephalus also had great wealth. And the "great blessing" of having a lot of wealth was that he could pay off the gods for his earlier misdeeds.

And when asked about justice, Cephalus gave an answer reflective of his shallowness; he answered that justice is "to speak the truth and to pay your debts." When Socrates shows that this answer lacks precision, Cephalus decides he needs to leave "to look after the sacrifices." Cephalus' lack of intellectual rigor reminds me of religious ideas that masquerade as science or history. The so called scientific idea of "intelligent design" can not be supported by science, or even by basic common sense. And as even conservative courts have found, it has no place in public schools. In the Republic, Cephalus' quick exit represents Socrates quickly dispensing of the tradition and folklore of his time. Once it is dispensed of, he moves quickly to more substantive arguments.

Unfortunately, tradition and folklore won't go away so easily in our time. Conservatives have stacked local school boards with religious apologists, who make every effort to infuse science and history classes with religion. Religion has a place. That place is, as the Bible teaches, in the closets and in the home of the believer, or in private schools. And while I do not fault religious organizations who voice their views in the publis square, religious speech and religious ideas should be subject to the same skepticism and criticism as non-religious speech and non-religious ideas. Our public schools should be charged with helping young citizens evaluate arguments of all kinds made in the public square, and not to indoctrinate them with religious doctrine and belief. There is no basis to teach as fact religious belief in public school. What the religious teach in church or in their homes is their business, but I don't want my kids exposed to religion in public school.

And this brings me to Thrasymachus, a much more formidable polemicist than
Cephalus. While Cephalus reflects the lack of intellectual rigor in supernatural belief and tradition, Thrasymachus' arguments reflect the treachery of tyranny. According to Thrasymachus, justice "is the interest of the stronger." The cynical view is that justice reflect merely an allocation of different interests, with the interests of the stronger (or richer) usually taking precedence over the interests of the weaker (or poorer). And it is difficult to argue that this isn't how it is. Currently, if the religious have the power (which they often do), they will seek to teach religion in school, or infuse religion into science textbooks. The same can often be said of the dogmas of the left. But Socrates is concerned less about what is, but more about what should be.

So, to answer the questions I ask at the beginning, who should teach and what shall they teach? Socrates makes an interesting argument in this regard: he argues that if you are a doctor, are you likely to step in and practice medicine in place of another doctor who is giving proper advice? In other words, if a physician is in a restaurant watching another physician attend to a patient, would a just physician step in and take over, even if the other physician was properly taking care of his patient? No, probably not. But he or she would step in if a non-physician or a quack physician were doing the wrong thing.

So, what should our teachers teach? This obviously depends upon what subject is being taught. But, as Socrates teaches, the teacher is like a midwife helping a woman deliver a baby. The student is the one going through labor and the teacher is there to guide and to help the student to learn. But the student must learn for himself or herself, with the teacher there to guide him. And it is up to the student, with the assistance of the teacher, to find his end and his excellence. "And in the same is true of all other things; they have each of them an end and a special excellence[.]" Our teachers should teach those things that will help students to attain an end and a special excellence in their lives. They should teach students to look inside themselves and figure out where that end and excellence will best manifest themselves.

So who should teach? Scientists trained in teaching should teach science. Mathmeticians trained in teaching should teach math. And preachers and theologians trained in teaching should teach religion. If a science teacher is not teaching proper science (like the quack physician in the restaurant), then the "just" scientist should step in and teach science the way it should be taught. For "the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest but that of his subjects," and the true educator is not to regard his own interest, but that of his students. And it was when Socrates persuaded Thrasymachus to assent to this idea, that he realized that justice does not come in bringing about the "interest of the stronger." And when Thrasymachus realized this, "perspiration poured from him in torrents; and then I saw what I had never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing."

Well, We Can't All Be Socrates Now, Can We? (Plato, Apology and Crito, Vol. 7, pp. 200-219)

We admire and revere Socrates, Thoreau, and Ghandi. We love the concept of civil disobedience that these men represent (especially after they're dead). More recently, many cheered Tim DeChristopher when he submitted fake bids at an auction to prevent oil companies from drilling on public land. We sometimes criticize those who sheepishly follow whatever rules they impose (or allow to be imposed) upon themselves. We often mock those brainwashed by religion or other mind-numbing dogmas.

As Thoreau describes it:

A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.... Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.

While I don't agree with Thoreau's description of our soldiers "as horses and dogs," he raises the question: where would society be without its followers? Someone has to clean the toilets, pick up the garbage, and wash the sheets. If we don't have somebody to carry the explosives, how will we kill the enemy who refuses to follow our rules? Could we have a society full of Socrates, Thoreaus, or Ghandis? Are social bonds and full individual realization compatible at all? While the unexamined life may not be worth living, what would happen if everybody sat under a tree waiting for the apple to fall on their heads?

On the other extreme, we have the Holocaust. Obedience run amok led to the death of millions of people. We teach King's classic Letter From Birmingham Jail in our schools, and then expect, or at least hope, our students can figure out when to, and not to, follow the rules. Soldiers are referred to in the law as "reasoning agents." They are required to disobey illegal orders. But only after presuming that every order is lawful. We marvel at the subjects of the Milgram experiment, who intended to shock others, while simultaneously stating that they wanted to stop. It is not surprising that those conducting the experiments concluded that "[p]erhaps our society does not provide adequate models for disobedience." And why should it? Didn't we all agree to put up with a few laws so that we could attain some degree of self-fulfillment?

We revere our gadflies (when they are dead) for figuring out these models of disobedience on their own, and yet we kill and imprison them. We punish them because they refuse to follow our laws and our social mores, yet we revere them for making us better and for "stir[ing us] into life." And while we revere Socrates as being the flag-bearer for civil disobedience, his civil obedience led, in small part, to his death. He realized that civil disobedience would have no worth if not accompanied by a cost. We punish our disobedient to give meaning to their purposes. How can one be a martyr without pain?

Crito had a plan to set Socrates free. He could have gotten away. But his conscience chided the very thought:

"But if you go forth, returning evil for evil, and injury for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging those whom you ought least of all to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will receive you as an enemy; for they will know that you have done your best to destroy us. Listen then to us, and not to Crito."

"This dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other. And I know that anything more which you may say will be in vain. Yet speak, if you have anything to say."

Crito's Response: "I have nothing to say Socrates."

"Leave me then, Crito, to fulfill the will of God, and to follow whither he leads."

Those called upon to disobey our unjust laws have a high price to pay. It is only when that price is paid, that we realize the value of their purpose. We don't remember Socrates only because he furthered a just cause, but we remember him, in some small part, because he died for it.

Reading Number 1

Plato, Apology and Crito. Vol. 7, pp. 200-219.

I'm excited to start my reading.