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Life is Like a Box of Thin Mints

The second time ‘round reading On the Shortness of Life, Seneca’s point to not live “as if [you are] destined to live forever” resonated with me much more than it did before (5). By “living like you are immortal,” Seneca means that people have a tendency to put off the things that they truly value doing and deem to be worthwhile until later on in their lives; he sees this as incredibly foolish, because no one who’s ever walked the earth has ever been guaranteed any amount of time on it. And he’s right; our stints of being alive are finite, and we definitely aren’t entitled to a lengthy tenure.

As melancholy as that might be, it’s true, and it’s definitely not a secret. Everybody knows they’re going to die, and very few people know when. But funnily enough, most people sure act like they do. I suppose people just avoid the thought of their own mortality; I’d have to surmise that very few people enjoy looking forward to death. But that willful ignorance doesn’t just subvert a sense of dread at one’s inevitable demise; it also makes life seem a lot less valuable. If you have an endless supply of anything, you’ll probably start taking it for granted. 

Take Girl Scout cookies for example; a huge aspect of why they seem so special is that they’re only available for several weeks every year. If they were on the shelves 24/7, they’d probably command the same level of appreciation as vanilla wafers (which isn’t much, in my experience). The very reason life is valuable is because we’re only dealt so much of it. If it never ended, we’d have no incentive to make our days count. Therefore, it’s easy to see why ignoring the fact that you’ll die causes a depreciation of life. This is why “live like you’re dying” is such a well-known cliché- when people really want to make the most of life is when they literally cannot ignore that they don’t have much of it left.

Who knew that Seneca had so much in common with Tim McGraw?

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Hindsight

@leahvaidya’s post touches upon Quintilian’s assertion of the value of teachers who have sound character, but I’ll be taking a closer look at that lesson. 

One constant throughout every Socratic dialogue we’ve read this semester is that Socrates always defines his terms before taking up a line of questioning. Speaking retrospectively, I’ve realized that quite a lot of our time in this class has been spent just trying to define the terms we’re working with. Quite often our class discussions begin with a question of “well, what is [virtue, love, rhetoric, etc.]?” posed to the class, and I don’t think we’ve ever had an easy time riddling out an answer.

This is why when the Phaedrus framed of rhetoric as “a way of directing the soul by means of speech,” it really shook things up for me. We’d never discussed rhetoric in these terms before, and it seems to me that bestowing rhetors with the responsibility of directing the souls of other people adds a whole new dimension of importance and gravity to practicing rhetoric. The ability to manipulate the core of who other people are is not one to be taken lightly, and I think Quintilian was at least somewhat aware of this.

I believe Quintilian knew that skilled rhetors had this ability to have an enormous influence on people because honing one’s skills was not the only thing he harped on. Almost all of the second chapter of Book II is focused on cultivating a good character amongst students of rhetoric by taking care to keep watch over the people that influence them. Quintilian advocates only for teachers who have “impeccable character” and are “free from the grosser vices” (271, 275). He even goes so far as to state that if parents fail to choose a teacher who is free of vice for their children, then “everything else that we are trying to put together for the use of young people is pointless” (275). Quintilian knew that if rhetors were not brought up to be good people, then their skills would be used to push people’s souls in the wrong directions, and all of their education would be for naught.

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Good Friends are Good. Shocker.

Our prompt for this post asks, “how and towards what should we be directing the souls of our friends?” That’s a pretty big question, so I’ll just start off with friendship and work my way through it from there.

 In Aristotelian terms, true friendship is a very idealistic sort of thing. The way he tells it, it only happens between two truly good people, “who are alike in their virtue” (144.8-9). These people are good to one another not because of any ulterior motive, but simply because they are good people and want to see good things happen to their friends. This seems somewhat similar to our modern idea of unconditional love. This relationship of unselfishly reciprocating goodness will continue to thrive for as long a time as the two friends remain good people; it cannot continue if one friend ceases to be good. Additionally, these true friendships are uncommon, since truly good people are few and far between and a relationship of this quality takes a long time to create.

 This whole concept of friendship relies on an outlandish, black-and-white view of morality in which people can be completely good and completely bad, so it doesn’t really hold up well outside of a theoretical context. However, the idea that the best friendships (or the best relationships in general, really) contain unconditional love and goodwill does seem to have some merit to it. That’s the bit from Aristotle’s writings on friendship that I’ve found to be the most valuable. 

 It follows that if you’re a true friend to someone, then you’d want the best for them. You’d want them to have the best possible experiences and be the best possible version of themselves that they can be. In Socratic (or technically Platonic?) terms, you would want to direct their soul towards a state of goodness. To steer their soul in any direction, you’ll need to interact with your friends, and every meaningful human interaction has to do with language. This is where rhetoric comes in.

 In the Phaedrus, Socrates navigates Phaedrus’s soul away from mistakes by showing him the problems within Lysias’s speech (using rhetoric to show off by prioritizing style over substance and valuing your own ability to persuade more than truth). If Socrates had not pointed out these fallacies and explained them to his friend, Phaedrus would likely have tried to emulate Lysias whenever giving speeches in the future, since he was gushing over Lysias’s speech at the start of the dialogue. Here, Socrates uses his own aptitude for and knowledge (and divine inspiration from the Muses, if you’re into that whole thing) of rhetoric to ward off threats to Phaedrus’s soul.

 However, I don’t think that rhetoric is the only way to direct our friends’ souls towards goodness. Socrates also teaches Phaedrus that in rhetoric, truth is important. If you are to really know the truth about goodness, surely you cannot just read and hear about it in books and speeches. To truly know goodness is to experience it and live it yourself; Only then will you know to where you must direct the souls of your friends. In short, you yourself must become good before you can really help your friends achieve goodness.

So, how and towards what should we be directing the souls of our friends? As far as I can tell, we should direct them towards goodness by being good ourselves and encouraging them to do the same.

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Making a Game of Rhetoric?

At the start of this reading, Phaedrus and Socrates are having a discussion about truth. The manner in which Phaedrus spoke about giving speeches seemed to be driven by a desire to win one’s audience over; whether or not your speech is true is irrelevant (260A). As Leah writes in her post, knowing your audience is important, but Phaedrus explores the idea that the audience might be the most important thing in rhetoric. In this mindset, you ought to be concerned about the power of your speech to persuade, rather than to promote truth. This mentality lends itself much more to an idea of rhetoric as a skill to be honed and shown off. In this rhetorical framework, debates between rhetors would be made to showcase the cleverness, eloquence, and charisma of those pitted against one another. That’s all well and good if indeed the object of speaking well is merely to get those who are listening to you to agree with you. However, if rhetoric is actually a virtue, then it is far more than just a game of thoughts and tongues.

Cool side note: Socrates basically explains his whole strategy for arguing at line 262A. He advises Phaedrus that when trying to “shift one thing to its opposite” in an argument, you are usually more successful “if you proceed in small steps rather than in large ones.” This is exactly what Socrates does when practicing elenchus; through questions, he creates an extremely gradual progression from his adversary’s original claim to his own point of view so that by the time his opponent realizes what’s happening, their opinion will have already been turned on its head and they will have no opportunity mount a defense. I just thought this was an interesting Easter egg of sorts that shows continuity between Plato’s texts.

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Final Practice

Today’s practice at Ben Franklin was definitely one of extremes. The debaters were especially rowdy today, and there were frequent instances in which we had to reign in the rom because it was simply too loud to hear what those in the practice debates were saying. On the other hand, the last practice debate of the day was probably the best one I’ve seen from our kids this entire semester. Aside from slight misuse of World War Two events as a historical precedent, all six debaters who participated were pretty stellar. If everyone shows up on Saturday and debates like they did this afternoon, this team ought to be in good shape.

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I’m confused (for the most part).

Looks like I’m the first to post for the second Phaedrus reading.

This second helping of Phaedrus admittedly threw me for a loop at first. Socrates’s ramblings on a vague, convoluted structure of the soul and the mechanics of love struck me as pretty strange. His implicating of the Grecian gods, winged-horses, charioteers, and a journey to the peak of some divine circular mountain upon which one can gaze out and see some sort of manifestation of a mysterious “place beyond heaven,” (247C) which the mere sight of will evidently imbue one with “the subject of all true knowledge” (247D) into a discussion about how one ought to deal with those who love him or her seemed extremely tangential. Maybe it just went over my head. I know it’s important to define the terms that you work with in a rhetorical discourse, but these explanations that Socrates offers seem to go way too far into detail. It’s as if he abandoned his principle of only speaking as much as necessary that he laid out earlier in this same dialogue (242A).

The one aspect of this speech that did seem to make sense to me was when Socrates provided more clarification about his horse-drawn chariot metaphor (253D). He likens the whole setup of one charioteer and two horses to the soul, and then divides the example into three parts: the charioteer and each of the horses. One horse is timid and obedient to its training from the charioteer, while the other is completely wild and wants to do everything that seems pleasurable to it. The charioteer is there to hold both horses in line and keep the chariot between the ditches (253D-254E). This reminded me of my days in Psych 101 when I learned about Freud’s theory of the three-faceted mind containing the Id, the Ego, and the Superego (which are pretty close in concept to the bad horse, the charioteer, and the good horse respectively).

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Jack of All Friends, or Master of One?

All of my classmates provided insightful commentaries on many different facets of Aristotle’s writings of friendship, but I was surprised to see that none of them mentioned his views on the topic of having multiple friends.

On page 148, Aristotle wrotes that “one cannot be a friend – in the sense of complete friendship – to many people…” He goes on to say that it is extremely difficult to maintain good relationships with many people, since a good relationship requires that you “have experience” and “become familiar” with whom you are relating (148). Getting to know someone truly well and accruing meaningful experiences with them takes quite a lot of time, and the more time you spend on one relationship, the less you’ll have to spend on others. It seems to me that Aristotle is thinking of relationships with specific individuals in the same way that most people think about specific skills. For example, if you spend all of your free time learning to play the piano, you will become a masterful pianist, but the odds are then extremely slim that you will also achieve mastery in carpentry. However, if you spend half of your time learning to tickle the ivories and the other half studying woodworking, then you’re likely to become competent in both disciplines. Perhaps then, you could build yourself a decent piano on which you could play simple songs. The point is that you won’t be playing Beethoven’s Ninth from memory and building world-class baby grands in the same lifetime. Likewise, you need to be invested in friendships (and all other relationships) for them to be meaningful; make an effort to improve them and get better at them, just as you would with a craft or sport. And if you want to have multiple relationships, be sure to devote the necessary time and effort to each of them.

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Philosophers with Benefits?

I can earnestly say that I never expected to read about an ancient Greek philosopher making a case for the “friends-with-benefits” system to be used between old men and adolescent boys. Without the historical context provided by the introduction, this dialogue reads like a weird literary antithesis to Call Me by Your Name, but the knowledge that it was fairly common for older men and young men to have temporary amorous relationships in ancient Greece makes the whole thing far less strange. In these “paederastic affairs,” the older man gained romantic, emotional, and sexual pleasure from the young partner, while the young man received an intellectual and ethical education from the older man in return (xvi). And people think tuition is rough today…  

Jokes about content aside, Socrates offers some input on the rhetoric of Lysias’s speech after Phaedrus concludes his recitation. He enjoyed listening to it, but ultimately declares that it commits one of Quintilian’s cardinal sins: it prioritizes style over substance. Socrates says there are some good points in the speech, but Lysias is mainly making it in an attempt to show off his own aptitude for eloquence (235A). Socrates avoids committing this offense himself while giving his counter-speech by ending it as soon as he’s made his point. He keeps things efficient by only explaining the disadvantages of lovers at length. He does not bother to go into detail about the advantages of non-lovers like Lysias does; he just clarifies in one sentence that “every shortcoming for which we blamed the lover has its contrary advantage, and the non-lover possess it” (241E-242A). Socrates seems to like his speeches like erastḗs liked their erṓmenos- short and sweet.

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First Day Back

Today was our first day with the debaters since the tournament, and I thought it went pretty well. We split them into two groups and began to go over the topics designated for Wednesday (employees’ criminal history and the North Korean nuclear predicament). We started off in the same way that we prepared for the surprise topic during the debate tournament. The debaters took the lead and came up with as many points as possible for both sides of the argument. Afterwards, coaches took the reigns and went through our pre-prepared points based on the research we’d done during the week. I’d say that the only negative of today was that far less than our entire team showed up. Oh, and some students were presenting nuclear war as a possible solution to overpopulation, so that wasn’t great either. But otherwise, it was a good day.

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Know Your Limits

@katponders does a great job of dissecting and distilling the lessons withing Laches. However, I do want to provide some clarification in regards to her comments on my last post. I did not mean to imply that taking on the lifelong mindset of a student means that you ought to accept that you will never know anything- I meant that you ought to accept that you will never know everything. Therefore, you ought to be open to both letting go of old knowledge and gaining new knowledge. If I didn’t make that clear, that’s totally my bad. Additionally, I completely agree with @katponders’s assertion that jailing yourself in loops of logic that ultimately lead nowhere is not a productive way to approach philosophy (or anything for that matter).

As for her commentary on Laches, I think it is very wise for her to acknowledge that the meaning of “courage” has probably changed a bit since the 300s BC. Keeping that in mind definitely makes all of their claims seem more sensible. In my opinion, the least sensible aspect of Laches is that everyone in this dialogue seems to be seeking specificity on a subject that, within the context of their arguments, is inherently broad and imprecise (courage). While pursuing this impractical level of precision, they all end up trying to link courage to even more abstract concepts such as knowledge and virtue (684). That seems counter-intuitive to me. Taking a cue from Aristotle, I think they ought to “look in each area only for that degree of accuracy that the nature of the subject permits” (Aristotle, 4-5).

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Don’t Swat the Gadfly

I think @leahvaidya has the right idea about how we can go about “teaching” virtue. It is true that pinning down a precise definition of virtue that is applicable to all situations seems like a veritably impossible feat. So, if we cannot say exactly what virtue is for everyone, we ought to focus on how individual students of ours may be able to achieve virtue and then proceed from there. As Leah says, there is no way for teachers to singlehandedly shape their students into virtuous people; the students have to make an active choice to pursue virtue if this endeavor is to succeed. Teachers can assist in their students’ pursuits of virtue by equipping them with the mental and moral tools that ought to be necessary on that journey.

My favorite lesson from Laches comes from Nicias’s explanation of Socrates to Lysimachus on page 673. As someone familiar with Socrates’s constant questioning, he explains to Lysimachus why it is ultimately more valuable than it is annoying. If we are willing to keep the company of someone like Socrates, we will very likely be shown the error of our ways on an unflinchingly frequent basis. Generally speaking, most people do not enjoy the prospect of being wrong, but Nicias makes a case for why we should. In his words, he doesn’t “regard it as at all a bad thing to have it brought to our attention that we have done or are doing wrong. Rather I think that a man who does not run away from such treatment but is willing […] to value learning so long that he lives […] will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.” Nicias is advocating the philosophy of always assuming the role of a student (which I am quite fond of). Our capacity for learning new things is directly related to our willingness to let go of old knowledge, no matter how comfortable that old knowledge may be. Being hospitable to one’s critics isn’t always easy, but it ought to be done.  

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Third Time’s the Charm (hopefully...)

I thought today went really well. We started off by recording the debaters’ preferences for positions (first speaker, second speaker, rebuttalist), and from there we sorted them into teams of three, just like they will be put into during the debate. We ended up with enough students to make four teams, which was fortunate because we only had time for two practice debates. Both of those debates were on plea bargaining, since the debaters told the Monday coaches that that was the subject they were least familiar with. While two teams debated, the other two took notes on the proceedings and offered constructive criticism with the coaches afterwards. The first debate was a little rocky as far as content went, but the second one was much more coherent. Procedurally, they were all at least competent. The more time we spent working on it, the better things seemed to go. It seemed to me that every student learned something today, and I’m excited to see how they perform on Saturday!

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Clock’s Tickin’

“How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off our sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!” Well, that hits like a ton of bricks. Not to say that I haven’t enjoyed the years I’ve lived thus far, but this quote certainly does make the mentality of working towards an eventual goal of retirement pretty damn silly.

Quickly switching gears, part of the quote that @instantbouquetdelusion mentions in the middle of her post struck me as a tad strange; On page 23, Seneca writes that “of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive.” As a full-time student at this university who has a job on top of a myriad of other responsibilities, I would not consider myself in any way to be largely “at leisure.” Additionally, I feel that I have been making quite a bit of time for philosophy by way of this course. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely don’t think myself to be a fully-fledged philosopher, but I’ve definitely been doing my due diligence in regards to studying philosophy in this class, and it at least seems like I’m learning for my trouble.

If we play by Seneca’s rules, it would appear that unless we drop almost everything and resign ourselves to lives of leisure and focus nearly solely on philosophy, we are doomed to live unenlightened lives of frivolous social inconsequence. I don’t know about you all, but I kind of resent that. Is it so impossible to philosophize while also tending to other responsibilities? I’m more than willing to meet Seneca in the middle and agree that studying philosophy is definitely an activity of merit that ought to be practiced, but to suggest that it is the only really worthwhile thing to do with one’s life seems like a gross generalization.

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Coaching: Round 2

Today’s coaching session flew by for me. It felt like the hour went by incredibly fast compared to last week. We had a nice bump up in attendance this week (thirteen kids compared to last week’s eight), but I felt like their energy as a group was down compared to last time. The older kids mentioned that they went on a field trip today, so that may have factored into their fatigue. I discovered today that nearly all of our debaters have established strong preferences about which position they are most comfortable working in, which came in handy when separating them into teams for practice debates. During those debates, I got to observe two sides arguing about the fashion model topic. The side in favor of the current state of modeling argued largely on the basis that models who don’t fit the current ideal (thin/tall) would not fit into fashion designer’s clothes. Their opponents mounted a respectable rebuttal, but I was amazed that none of them brought up the point that the designers could just make the clothes for people of any size in the first place. It was odd to see them take for granted that the designers could only make clothes in one way, but I guess it goes to show how caught up people can get in the debate.

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Much Ado About Nothing

@jlfoster13, you are not alone in your frustration. Despite somewhat expecting this outcome, I was still pretty miffed that the entirety of Meno ended more or less where it began. After an increasingly intense and lengthy philosophical game of mental tennis, bouncing back and forth between whether virtue can or cannot be taught or thought of in a tangible way, somehow we are still left without a working definition of virtue. Instead, we are drawn to the conclusion that virtue is “a gift from the gods that is not accompanied by understanding” (100). Thanks a lot, Zeus. You gave us the most infuriating gift of all time- an incomprehensible concept. But honestly, what should we expect from the god who rewarded the guy that gave fire to humankind by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle eat his liver for the rest of time? It doesn’t seem to me like Zeus is really looking out for us…  (RIP Prometheus; thanks for the fire)

Aside from the frustration, there were some really interesting concepts brought fourth during Socrates’s reasoning. The concept that all humans innately possess the capacity to understand all knowledge is an interesting one. If the servant that Socrates prompted to think-out some of the basic rules of geometry is any indication of the rest of humanity, then it seems that anyone might be able to reason out anything if given the right amount of time and the right bit of logic to begin from. I have no idea if there is any real credence to that generalization, but it is thought-provoking (in my opinion). I also thought that Socrates’s quote that “we should not only think it right at the time, but also now and in the future if it is to be at all sound” is a great bit of wisdom (89c). It advocates that one should always think critically, even if that means re-examining things that we believe are already established to be true. As I’ve often learned through personal experience, there is always a chance that I can be wrong. However, if I commit to constantly checking myself, that chance ought to become progressively smaller.

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I Have No Idea What I’m Doing.

I think I am developing a love-hate relationship with Socrates. I really enjoy reading the dialogues of him practicing elenchus and critical thinking, and his eloquence and brevity are always engaging. He also seems to strike this fascinatingly paradoxical middle ground between admitting that he knows absolutely nothing and coming across as the most arrogant man of all time. He truly is a captivating character. It was great to find an added layer to that character in Meno, when Socrates basically laid the groundwork for Aristotle’s claim that all actions aim at good (page 67). Whenever Meno tried to disagree with that claim, Socrates immediately defended it with vigor until Meno changed his opinion. It’s no wonder that his influence made itself so prominent in Plato that it affected Aristotle.

As for the “justice and moderation” thread that seems to be running through our discussion, I agree with @kitcat-26 in saying that acting with justice and moderation does not guarantee that one is behaving in a virtuous manner. Even if your actions result in something Just and moderate, your character can be corrupted by immoral motives. If you do something charitable out of spite for someone who called you greedy, for example, you may have done good while actually being bad. Bearing this in mind, actions alone cannot possibly constitute virtue. So I guess actions in accordance with morally good motivation are what make up virtue? But then on those terms, I’m presenting a fragmented definition, which Socrates says is against the rules. I suppose I’ll return to Socratic wisdom, as I very often do, and admit that I don’t know.

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It’s All About the Benjamins

I’d say that our first day at Ben Franklin went really well. From the very beginning, the kids were all-in. They dove headfirst into the shoe game with no apprehension; it was nice to see that they aren’t “too cool” for fun activities like that. After the icebreaker, Sydney and I grouped up with the older kids and continued going over the upcoming tournament’s topics by asking the students what they recalled from Monday’s session. Most of what they remembered was about the Israel/Palestine issue, so we focused extensively on the plea bargaining and fashion model prompts. I was very pleased with how much the kids engaged with the topics, and I was even more impressed with how much they were able to grasp. After concentrating on those two topics, we ended with a mini-debate game. This last activity showcased just how tenacious these kids can be about defending their opinions, and I think we ought to put an emphasis on learning to control that tenacity and direct it towards constructing organized responses, because today it almost always dragged them into shouting matches. But overall, these kids seem wicked smaht, and I’m excited to head back next Wednesday!