What are "classical eyes"?

In my opening post, I say that this blog represents an attempt to look at the world fresh through classical eyes.  But what does that mean?

One way of putting it is that classical thought is different from modern thought: so what would it look like if it were still a living tradition?  Or in other words, supposing that we stripped classical thought of those cultural accidents that cling to it like barnacles: what would be left?  Or yet again, in my collection of cycling quotes at the top of the page I have extracts from a number of ancient authors (Epicurus, Epictetus, and the like), but also from William Blake and Robert Pirsig.  In what sense do they represent "classical thought"?

I'm tempted to say, "Heck, I don't know. It just sounded good."  And honestly my sense for what is "classical" is in the first place a sense, not a reasoned theory.  It is almost an aesthetic perception that these thinkers, or these kinds of thought, belong over here and not over there.  But once I wrote it, I started puzzling over what I see common among them, and over what I find so attractive about classical thought as against modern.  And I have begun to make out a few concrete points.

The first is that classical thought is naive, in the very technical sense that it looks at the world more or less directly and not through layers of theory.  Socrates asks, "What is friendship? What is beauty?"  Epicurus asks, "How can I be happy?"  Pirsig asks, "What is Quality?"  All of these are questions about the real world, about experiences all of us have had.  You don't have to go read a stack of books before thinking about them.  And you don't have to distort your experiences to make them conform to some kind of Procrustean ideology.  It sounds a little strange to say that, because we are so often told that classical philosophers were cloudy-headed idealists.  Everybody who knows nothing about Plato nonetheless knows that Plato proposed something called the Theory of Forms which said that the world we see around us isn't real.  What is remarkable, though, is how little of classical philosophy has that kind of abstract flavor.  (And in Plato's case it might be useful to remember as well that he was a very deep thinker; if he said something that sounds crazy to us, it is worth considering that perhaps we don't understand what he meant. I think I can make some common sense out of the claim that the everyday world is "unreal" and perhaps even out of the Theory of Forms, although my understanding might still be wrong. Remind me to come back to these points in a later post.)

Modern thought, by contrast, is heavy with theory.  You can't expect to be taken seriously diving into a question unless you have first read what all the other important points of view have said.  You want to know why you should tell the truth, and you haven't thought through Anscombe's critique of consequentialism, or weighed the competing claims of utilitarianism, deontology, pragmatism, postmodernism, Focauldian antihumanism or Barthesian structuralism?  For shame!  Back to the library with you!  The problem with this approach is that it never gets off the ground.  And even if you adopt a single theory and stick to it -- maybe you seize on Randian objectivism for all I know, and damn the torpedoes! -- that theory becomes a filter which limits what you can see.  In effect, it blinds you to features of your experience which might otherwise be obvious.

Related to this is that classical thought is practical.  Fundamentally classical philosophy is concerned with helping you to live a better life; understanding is secondary.  Oh, understanding is still important -- to be sure!  It is just that understanding your life is a means to improving it.  Understanding is never a goal for its own sake.  This is why the core of classical thought is ethics.  The core of modern thought, by contrast, is epistemology; because what is important for modern thought is to have a clear understanding of everything, and this requires first having a clear understanding of what is the basis for any clear understanding.  This quickly leads to an infinite regress that's a waste of time and helps one see why people make jokes about philosophers.  But this special kind of narcissistic decadence is less at home in classical thought.

A third feature of classical thought is that it is willing to accept that things have a nature, and that at least some things have a purpose.  This could be considered a special case of the naivete that I discussed above: since we all know in real life that things are what they are, and since we are used to asking what things are for, a naive approach to philosophy would consent to carrying that common sense understanding into the philosophical arena.  Modern thought scoffs at both ideas: surely you can't be so simple-minded as to think that things have a nature!  Or a purpose?  Heavens!

And yet, they do.  Take the idea of human nature, for example.  Modern thought has subjected this simple notion to a withering assault, aiming to prove that the simple, naive idea of human nature is nothing more than an interpretation, a creative misreading, or an ideological mask designed to hide class interests or the will to power.  And yet, no amount of ideological reinterpretation will ever allow humans to derive nutrition by eating rusty nails or ground glass.  The biological reality of the body is a clear limit where nature becomes obviously real.  And if there is a biological human nature, why not a social or ethical one?  Doesn't modern thought also teach us that our minds are "merely" eiphenomena of our brains?  And our brains have a biological nature.  Surely it is only logical to suppose our minds might have a nature too -- or at any rate it seems arbitrary and willful to deny it.  But this is a point of simple common sense that classical thought never gave up in the first place.

Or consider purposes.  Yes, we are told that the physical sciences make it appear that things unfold (at the physical level) without purposes, and I do not propose to turn my back on modern science.  That would be foolish, and the best classical philosophers were no fools; they accepted what science they had, and any revitalized classical thought today must accept the science we have now.  But to concede purposelessness at the physical level does not entail purposelessness at any of the levels above that: biological, social, or ethical.  We all know from introspection that we do things because we have reasons for them.  And surely the easiest explanation for why cats have curved claws is that they are for catching mice.  So again the naive or common-sense view is also the classical one.  (The apparent conflict between a non-teleological physical science and a teleological understanding of so much else is a puzzle I am tempted to call Strauss's Paradox, because Leo Strauss highlighted it as a critical point in the introduction to his Natural Right and History. But I do think the paradox is more apparent than real. This requires another post that I'll ask you to remind me to write.) (Update on 2020-03-28 ... yes, over seven years later. I finally wrote that post and you can find it here.)

Is there more?  I don't know.  I am still feeling my way here.  I do think there is a sensibility that can fairly be called "classical" as opposed to "modern" and that it provides a valuable perspective, one worth reviving.  It may take me a while to characterize it completely.

Debtor

You don’t hear a lot about Sara Teasdale these days – or at least I don’t.  But I’ve found a couple of her poems that I really love, and here is another I happened upon the other day while I was wasting time instead of working:

So long as my spirit still

Is glad of breath

And lifts its plumes of pride

In the dark face of death;

While I am curious still

Of love and fame,

Keeping my heart too high

For the years to tame,

How can I quarrel with fate

Since I can see

I am a debtor to life,

Not life to me?

Thoughts on marriage and divorce

My wife and I are separating – slowly and fitfully, but the plan is clear.  We have been married 28 years at this point, and have two sons in high school.  But in many ways the marriage has been very difficult for most of that time.  So I find I have been thinking about divorce more and more during the past few years.  And over that time my thinking has changed.

Back when I was young and things looked simple, I was dead set against divorce.  It looked simple: if you promise that you are going to stay with someone until death, then if your word is any good you honor it.  End of discussion.  If you had asked me to explain myself – why should it matter if you honor your word? – I would have had some trouble to answer.  When I was a kid, I took that as an absolute.

After I had been married for several years, I could have said a little more.  By then I would have said that marriage can be very difficult, but that it’s good for you to be able to endure hardships.  So to make the bond of marriage inviolable means that you can’t just quit when the going gets tough, that you have to come back and work harder and ever harder at it.  But I would have added that in the end it is worth it.  I really believed that.

But is it true?

In passing, I should note that the idea isn’t exactly crazy, or at any rate that others have had it before me.  That hardships build character is a commonplace; when I tell one of my boys that he’s not getting something he wants, he rolls his eyes and says, “I know, I know, it builds character.”  And the story is that Socrates married Xanthippe (proverbially a shrew) for much the same reason:

It is the example of the rider who wishes to become an expert horseman: "None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me," he says; "the horse for me to own must show some spirit" in the belief, no doubt, if he can manage such an animal, it will be easy enough to deal with every other horse besides. And that is just my case. I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else.

But to say that it is always worth hanging in there is to say that there is something of supreme value in marriage itself.  Is there?  What is the point – the meaning, the value – of marriage?

There’s not a lot said about marriage in classical philosophy, or at least not that I have found yet, outside of purely pragmatic discussions of marriage as just one more of a series of social institutions to be governed by the political order.  I am reasonably sure that Plato never discusses marriage as such outside the Republic and the Laws, although he allows Xanthippe a minor speaking role in the Phaedo.  I’m less confident of the other classical philosophers, but am willing to hazard a guess that marriage didn’t figure very large in their minds.  Certainly the centuries that separate us from them have also changed the institution of marriage in significant ways, so that we come to it with a whole different set of ideals and expectations (among them romantic love and fidelity for the husband).  In the Republic Plato famously abolishes marriage altogether, allowing his citizens to sleep with whomever they like so long as they restrict childbearing.  (He has far more rules about childbearing than about sex.)  In the Laws he reinstates marriage as a practical necessity; but while he gives rules for how marriages shall be conducted, he mentions divorce only once, in Book 6 at 784b:

Let the begetting of children and the supervision of those who are begetting them continue ten years and no longer, during the time when marriage is fruitful. But if any continue without children up to this time, let them take counsel with their kindred and with the women holding the office of overseer and be divorced for their mutual benefit. If, however, any dispute arises about what is proper and for the interest of either party, they shall choose ten of the guardians of the law and abide by their permission and appointment.

Considering the length at which Plato treats other topics in the Laws – think, for example, of the elaborate and lengthy discussion of drinking parties – such a brief mention suggests this really is not a point of interest for him.

But what can we figure out on our own?

I think that in its essence, marriage is about two different things, that it has two different points – leaving aside all the pragmatic considerations that two can live more cheaply together than apart, and that it is convenient to have a guaranteed Friday-night date. 

1. The first is that, as above, marriage is a school for character. 
2. The second is that marriage is an environment for raising children. 

 It’s possible to imagine other effective ways to handle both of these goals; but here in the modern West, none of these other ways is nearly as feasible or effective.  Compared to the available options, marriage really is the best practical way available today to achieve both these ends.*

What do I mean?

When I call marriage a school for character, I’m not being sarcastic.  Every last one of us is born selfish and self-centered.  It is only through interactions with others that we learn to be better than that.  Of course we learn a lot of the basic social skills growing up as children, or going to school.  We learn other skills in the workplace.  But our interactions in the workplace are highly specific, they are filtered to allow only certain kinds of activity.  What’s more, they end at 5:00, or whenever it is that you personally knock off to go home.  The personality you have to display at work can be a kind of role, a mask that you put on in the morning and take off at night.  It is a set of learned behaviors designed to get you what you want (such as not being fired).  As long as you can set it down when you leave work, it’s not really you.

But marriage changes all that.  Now you have to be social and civilized – kind, caring, and unselfish – at home, too.  And it’s not just while doing this one kind of task over and over, or while attending that kind of meeting.  It’s always, and it’s in all circumstances.  Even if your kindness and civility start off as a mask, it’s a mask you can never set down and after a while it becomes a part of you.  You really do have to adapt and change yourself – for the better – in order to live with this other person, and in order to handle all the unpredictable things life will throw at you.  Sometimes your spouse (even the best spouse, to say nothing of a Xanthippe) will make you want to tear your hair out.  But as long as you hang in there you have the opportunity to learn to become better.

What about children?  There has been a lot of research on what children need growing up, and I don’t pretend to be an expert.  But my sense is that much of it bears out what might be considered a reasonable common sense intuition: first, that children need consistency and stability, that they need to know the adults in their lives can be relied upon, that they need multiple adults in their lives so that they have the possibility to stand apart from any single one of them to observe and criticize; but also second, that children are pretty adaptable to any specific configuration of those adults in their lives, so long as all of them are sane, reliable, ethical, and so on.  The first point should be obvious, because how else are children supposed to learn if not by repeated experience?  And without sane, stable adults in their lives that they can trust, children cannot have any repeatable experience from which to learn ethical or moral structures for their lives.  The second point should be obvious because different peoples around the globe have structured family life in different ways, and their children have thrived.  It’s not that this or that structure is the only right one; but some family structure is necessary and no one parent can do it all alone.

So what about divorce?

In general, I’m still against it – or rather, more exactly, I would still urge caution.  Divorce as a way to avoid the inconvenience of other people still strikes me as too cheap and easy; as long as there is a chance for you to grow into a better, wholer human being, you should consider sticking in there and working harder.  Much as I hate to admit it, I learned a huge amount in the almost three decades that I have been married to my wife.  It has been a very rocky road; but I was so much less mature back when we got married that it is embarrassing for me now to think about it.  And what matured me more than anything else in that time was the struggle of my marriage.  If I had stayed single (a fantasy I sometimes indulge in), I would still be the same childish prat now at 50 that I was at 22.

The difference is that I don’t see myself growing any more, except possibly in the wrong direction.  For years my marriage made me more patient, more considerate, less selfish.  But now I am watching the trend reverse: I have finally gotten so fed up with my wife’s multiple crazinesses that I have thrown in the towel, and I am growing ever less patient, less considerate, and more selfish.  This is progress in the wrong direction.  I can’t guarantee that divorce will halt my moral deterioration, but I’m pretty sure that staying married is no longer going to help anything.

What about the children?  That’s still a concern.  It’s probably my biggest worry.  I have tried to cushion the blow.  In the first place, I waited till they were both in high school; and for both of them that has meant boarding school, so they are out of the house.  Until that time, I really did choose, quite consciously, to “stay together for the sake of the children.”  In the second place, … well, we still have to work out custody arrangements, and our state is famous for being unfriendly to fathers.  But they are boys (which should help my odds of spending time with them) and they are old enough for the courts to listen to their opinions.  I hope therefore that we can work out something reasonable.  Naturally if they choose not to spend time with me, there won’t be much I can do about it.  But I don’t really expect that and am hoping for better.

If you take seriously the two goals for marriage that I identify, one unexpected consequence is that there is at least one circumstance in which (I think) divorce should be mandatory.  Well, two. 

The easy and obvious case that everybody recognizes is when there is a risk of physical injury inside the family: if one parent is genuinely at risk of harming the other (or the children), then of course the second parent and the children have to get out.  (For the moment I deliberately bypass the question whether there has been a genuine risk of harm in all cases where there was an allegation of such risk. But if the risk is real, go.)  Sorry, that was a digression.

But the other time when divorce should be mandatory is if you come to realize that the two of you cannot agree on fundamental ethical principles and have not had children yet.  Since children require a stable environment with adults they can trust, the two of you have got to agree on the basics.  That doesn’t mean agreeing on everything – I like mushrooms and my wife hates them, but that’s not why we are divorcing.  But my wife and I disagree about far more basic things, like whether or when it is OK to bend the truth or outright lie, and this means that we don’t have much respect for each other.  (Elsewhere I have written a lot about her lying and how I think she harms herself with it, and some day I might re-post some of that here.)  Of course the boys have detected this lack of mutual respect, and it has been a problem.  The thing is, I saw these disagreements long ago.  If I had had any sense back then, I would have seen that this particular incompatibility (unlike so many others) was not simply a challenge to be overcome with enough love and work but a show-stopper.  But hindsight is often clearer than foresight, especially when the latter is befogged with love and hope.

Note the qualifier, "and have not had children yet."  Once you have them, of course, the whole calculation becomes more complicated because now you owe them something in the way of a stable environment to grow up in.  This is why I call it mandatory to get out before they are born -- or rather, before they are conceived; because afterwards you may no longer have the luxury of divorce, or at any rate not easily or right away.  It becomes a far more difficult calculation.  In my case, as you can tell, I stuck it out for quite a few years.  I tried to model better behavior than my wife did, but it has to be up to some Outside Observer to tell me how well I did.

I guess nothing valuable is easy....

__________

* When I say there are alternatives, I think for example of other societies around the world that have successfully organized family life in other ways.  I also think of the fantasy of communal life with Plato describes in the Republic, particularly because I don’t think it is so fanciful as many seem to believe.  But that, too, is a topic for another day.  In any event, none of these alternatives is very practical in the modern West.

Plato's "29 Commandments"

There is a long speech in the Laws (716A-718B and 726A-734E) where Plato has his Athenian Stranger give a good comprehensive summary of a kind of civic morality.  This really is a long speech … and while I suppose it must have some kind of literary merit as such, it can take some real patience to slog through.  But I had a professor once long ago who had the curious habit of referring to this speech as “Plato’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’”.  I suppose his idea was that it contained so many of Plato’s other teachings packed into one place, in epitome.  Anyway, a couple of decades ago I was writing a friend about it and tried to boil it down to a list of bullet-points – so that my friend could see the forest without losing his way in all those blasted trees.  Here is what I came up with.  (The wording and numbering are mine; the groupings are suggested in the text, but again I am responsible for the wording.) 

I was tempted to keep the title "Plato's Sermon on the Mount" but decided that by reducing it to "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots" I had made it more like a list of commandments.  More than ten, however ....

FIRST, HONOR THE GODS.

1. There is a divine Order.  Following it brings happiness, while flouting it brings chaos and ruin.

2. Take God as the measure of all things, and strive to become godlike.

3. The gods bring good things to the good, but do not receive the gifts of the wicked.

4. Honor the Olympians and the underworld gods; next in order of rank, honor the daemons; next, the heroes; next, your ancestral gods; and next, your living parents.

SECOND, HONOR YOUR SOUL AS YOUR MOST DIVINE PART.

5. Do not praise yourself without always striving to improve yourself.

6. Do not blame others for your errors.

7. Do not practise forbidden pleasures.

8. Do not shirk commended toils.

9. Do not judge that mere life is worth any price.

10. Do not honor beauty above goodness.

11. Do not crave to get wealth ignobly.

12. Do not prefer the bad to the good, since becoming bad is its own punishment.

THIRD, HONOR YOUR BODY

13. The best body is a mean in beauty, strength, and health.

14. The best property is a mean between wealth and poverty.

15. Even the best bequest to your heirs is a mean.

FOURTH, HONOR OTHERS

16. The old must reverence the young, and must teach them by example.

17. Rate what you do for others lower than they rate it; rate what they do for you, higher.

18. Honor your kin and friends.

19. Honor your native laws.

20. Honor strangers.

21. Honor suppliants.

22. Be true and trustworthy.

23. Do no wrong, neither consent to wrongdoing.

24. Be friendly, and share your good qualities.

25. Be ambitious of excellence, but not jealous of others.

26. Fight passionately against wrongdoing, but be gentle with wrongdoers; for no-one does wrong voluntarily.

27. The greatest evil is self-love, which blinds you to what is truly good and bad.

28. Avoid extreme joy or sorrow.

29. Praise the virtuous life as the happiest one, the one which brings the greatest excess of pleasure over pain.

Heavy weather over the Electoral College

So it's Election Night.  That means any moment now it is time for the editorials to start appearing asking, "Why do we have an Electoral College? Why is it still kicking around after all these years? And doesn't it thwart (or risk thwarting) the Will of the People?"

Sure.  Right.  All that.  Fair questions, I suppose.  But only the last one has an interesting answer.

After all, the real answer to "Why do we have an Electoral College?" has to do with the bickering and dickering in the Constitutional Convention, lo these many years ago.  There are plenty of places to go read about it.  And the real answer to "Why do we still have an Electoral College?" -- or, in other words, "Why haven't we gotten rid of the blasted thing yet?" -- is that it's actually a lot of work to change the Constitution, and it just hasn't been worth it to anybody to bother.  Most of us have day jobs, and the Electoral College isn't that much of a nuisance most of the time.

Ahhh, but.  There's always that last question.  "Isn't the Electoral College fundamentally wrong, because it thwarts the Will of the People?"  This one is a bit more interesting.

First off, let's unpack the argument against the Electoral College.  The basic problem is that it is possible for a candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote and win the electoral vote, thereby winning the election.  Rutherford Hayes won against Samuel Tilden.  George W. Bush won against Al Gore.  As of the moment that I am writing this, the websites I'm looking at are all calling the election for Barack Obama against Mitt Romney, and right now they also report Obama ahead in the popular vote.  (Who knows what tomorrow morning will bring?)  But for several hours this evening those same websites were reporting Obama ahead of Romney in the electoral vote and behind him in the popular vote.  Heck, by tomorrow maybe something will have changed again in either one tally or the other.  This one too might have turned out to be one of those elections like Hayes-Tilden or Bush-Gore, and strictly speaking it might still.

So what?

It's only a problem if you think there is something special about winning the popular vote, that makes you a better choice for President.  Of course, we all learned as schoolchildren that we live in a democracy, and a democracy is supposed to be governed by the majority. 

But step back a minute and reflect: Is the majority always right?  Does the majority always pick the best guy?  Unless you define "best" to mean "the majority choice" I think the answer is pretty obviously No.  The majority is made of human beings, and humans can be notoriously pig-headed and obtuse.  We aren't always, but we are sometimes.  Why should we be better during elections than we are the rest of the time?  And if we aren't any better during elections, why should the bare numerical majority -- especially in a close election -- always infallibly choose the right guy?

There's no reason.  We can't suppose they do.  But what are our other options for choosing a President?

Since I wrote in my previous post about looking at the world through classical eyes, you might wonder if there were anything to Plato's suggestion in the Republic that the wise should rule.  But it's hard to see any practical way to determine who is wise; and in fact Plato himself abandons this notion in the Laws for a more complex scheme that seems to give the preponderance of authority to the old and well-connected.

What's more, even if we could identify the wise and virtuous, there is a strong empirical argument that they make ineffective Presidents.  In the twentieth century alone we have clear examples of men in the White House who were intelligent, informed, committed, and compassionate -- fine human beings all around -- whose performance in the White House was nonetheless strikingly lackluster.  (I am thinking in particular of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.)  And at the same time we can point to other men in the same office -- men like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who had a far more ... ummm ... flexible sense of morality -- who nevertheless achieved important things.  So it is not so easy to pick out the right guy ahead of time.

The one thing we can ask for, though, is political stability; and this in turn requires a deterministic method for deciding who shall be in charge.  Hereditary monarchy provides such a system, at least most of the time, but monarchy is out of fashion these days and would never be accepted in this country.  No, for reasons of political culture and history we plainly have to use some kind of election.  But it's better if it is a form of election that converges quickly to a clear and certain answer.

And this, the Electoral College gives us.  Do you remember the mess involved in recounting the vote in Florida back during the election of 2000?  If we relied on a strict nation-wide popular vote to choose the President, then in a close election we might have the same mess in state after state across the Union.  It might take months -- routinely -- for us to know who really won.  And in the interim, nothing could be done because nobody would really know who was in charge.  As it is, there are maybe half a dozen states where we have to scrutinize the results carefully.  And then we have plenty of others -- California for the Democrats, Texas for the Republicans -- which are just no-brainers.  We know how they will turn out.  And so in the absence of some huge electoral upset, the kind that would be visible as soon as the very first precincts started reporting, we can drive to an answer pretty fast.  Often in a single night.  We give up the ideal of rule by popular democracy (although as noted I think we wouldn't much care for the practical consequences if we had to live with them), but we achieve a kind of deterministic certainty nonetheless consistent with genuine voting.  We get to the end of our counting pretty fast and painlessly.  We declare a winner, and we move on.  For the most part (let's say the last century and a half) we have been able to change ruling parties without gunfire or tanks in the streets.  And that has to be worth something.