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Work as a Gift

2024-03-11

While reading British anthropologist Alan Macfarlane's fascinating book Japan through the Looking Glass recently, I was introduced to a conception of economic interaction almost entirely different from that in the West:

Working for an employer is seen as a gift of one's labour and the wages are the return of the gift. The Japanese word for salary is roku, which means 'gift'.... [Macfarlane's friend Toshiko Nakamura] enlightened us further. Payments for goods and those for services are considered to be totally different things in Japan, she said. Up to the nineteenth century school fees were not an obligatory but a voluntary payment, usually made in goods rather than money.... There are still a lot of 'voluntary' fees in Japan. Toshiko's sister-in-law teaches piano but finds it nearly impossible to ask for payment and relies on the parents of her students to do the honourable thing. Often when fees are paid, presents are also given at certain times of year which underlines the idea of payment as a 'gift'. Thus fee payment is part of a social relationship, not a cold economic transaction.

Although I had only glimmers of that attitude during my business career - mostly at one technology firm that felt almost like a family - now that I'm freed from need and can collaborate only with people whose company I enjoy, my work feels much more like a gift. Sometimes I even receive a gift in return, as I was delighted to do today from my friend Christoph Kerschbaumer in return for my help with editing his excellent new book Beyond the Code: Setting You up for Success as a Software Engineer.

(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)

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A Plague on Both Your Houses!

2024-03-07

We all know the story of Romeo and Juliet, that pair of star-crossed lovers who through a series of mishaps and misunderstandings end up committing suicide. Yet amidst the tragedy and the romance we pay less attention to the civic background: duelling families whose constant strife seriously jeopardizes the peace in the Verona of old. Both the prince and the people are fed up with the Capulets and the Montagues; in Shakespeare's rendering, when the prince's kinsman Mercutio is mortally albeit unintentionally wounded by Romeo in yet another street fight, he cries out "a plague on both your houses!"

I suspect this is how many Americans feel about the Democrats and Republicans. Here in Colorado, nearly half of registered voters are independent, yet by design our options at the ballot box are pretty much limited to the two big parties, which in turn are beholden to their least moderate elements. Both locally and nationally, neither party wants to work with their enemies across the aisle, fingerpointing and backstabbing are the order of the day, and good governance is merely a fond wish (why solve any problems when you can use the lack of solutions to rile up your base?). And here we are again with a "choice" between Trump and Biden, whose "leadership" has been rivalled in American history only by the incompetent presidents of the 1850s. It's no wonder that some folks speculate (without justification, in my view) about a coming civil war.

Although I am far from having the answers, I do think political moderation and acting locally are two important pieces of the puzzle, which each of us can pursue both individually and in our own communities. If more people reflect on our situation and decide to model reasonable civic-mindedness, perhaps together we can pull ourselves back from the brink.

(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)

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Traits of Mind

2024-02-25

Following up on my recent post about Plato's Laches and Aristotle's Ethics, I've continued to ponder the need they identified to provide an account for how you live. Although I'm still researching the relevant texts, it appears that Aristotle at least identified such a need in all five of the traits of mind that he discusses: craft, understanding, insight, wisdom, and sagacity (see my Aristotelian glossary for more about these terms). Here is a sketch of my findings so far.

Let's start with craft or technē (Aristotle's examples include shipbuilding, medicine, and music). Such crafts are passed down from generation to generation through teaching, emulation, and a community of practice; they have their lore, their shop talk, their handbooks, their theories; and if you ask a skilled practitioner why they do things a certain way, in all likelihood they will be able to provide an account of their methods and intentions.

As to understanding or epistēmē (sometimes translated as "science" but that's too narrow), almost by definition it is the ability to reliably explain why things are the way they are, which necessarily includes providing an account for their properties and causes.

Insight or nous might seem like a more intuitive process, wherein you simply "see" that two or more entities are so similar that they deserve to be grouped together under the same kind. Yet here too it's reasonable to provide an account for the induction you've made, as for instance biologists do in their classification schemes when they specify that certain differences are quantitative rather than qualitative.

Because wisdom or phronēsis is the process of thoughtful deliberation that leads to conscious choices and commitments, it too seems to presume that you can account for why you decided as you did.

Finally, sagacity or sophia is, according to Aristotle, a combination of understanding and insight, so it simply inherits the qualities of its underlying components.

Thus these traits of mind help to establish a lifelong practice of accounting for your conclusions, commitments, and actions - and, ultimately, for the way you live your life.

However, unlike Nikias in Plato's Laches, we don't have Socrates to goad us into living an examined life and to prevent us from engaging in rationalization, wishful thinking, and just-so stories. More on that next time.

(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)

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Pair Reading

2024-02-17

Over the last few months I've taken up a new practice: reading with friends. The concept is simple: choose a friend, choose a book, slowly read it, and share thoughts on each chapter as you go along. It's kind of like pair programming for intellectual exploration.

So far I've been reading (or I'm about to start reading) the following books:

That might sound like a lot, but since we read slowly (a chapter every week or two), it's easy enough to make leisurely progress.

As to why I'm not reading books in larger groups as you might find in a college seminar or the Catherine Project, I feel that the one-to-one interaction (e.g., the choice of books to read) is more tailored to my relationship with a specific person and thus approaches more closely what Emerson in his essay on friendship called "the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one".

Naturally, in parallel I'm maintaining my own "single reading" (currently focused on Aristotle's Metaphysics), but I find the pair reading even more rewarding.

(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)

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Called to Account

2024-02-05

In Plato's dialogue Laches, Lysimachus and Melesias are searching for someone to teach their sons about courage, so they engage the Athenian generals Laches and Nikias in conversation, with Socrates participating alongside. Socrates encourages Lysimachus to seek an account (logos) of virtue from Laches and Nikias, since they are older and presumably wiser than Socrates himself. When Lysimachus agrees that this is a good idea, Nikias makes a fascinating observation:

You strike me as not being aware that, whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and has any talk with him face to face, is bound to be drawn round and round by him in the course of the argument - though it may have started at first on a quite different theme - and cannot stop until he is led into giving an account (logos) of himself, of the manner in which he now spends his days, and of the kind of life he has lived hitherto; and when once he has been led into that, Socrates will never let him go until he has thoroughly and properly put all his ways to the test. (187e-188a)

Yet Nikias does not object to this rather rough handling: "[T]o me there is nothing unusual, or unpleasant either, in being tried and tested by Socrates."

The verb βασανίζεσθαι, translated by W.R.M. Lamb as "being tried and tested", can also mean "being closely examined" (with a clear connection to "the examined life") or even "being questioned under torture" ... rough handling, indeed!

There is a further connection to Aristotle's exploration of the kind of wisdom (phronesis) that guides our actions. As discussed in my post some weeks ago about understanding what you know, Aristotle holds that understanding (episteme) must be "accompanied by an account" (meta logou) in order to be complete. Likewise, complete wisdom (phronesis) and excellence of character must also be accompanied by an account; this implies that you must be able to explain why you act as you do by grounding your conduct and commitments in the universals of human nature and experience. It is precisely this kind of account that the rich and the powerful, the famous and the fortunate believe it is beneath them to provide. (The ancients had a special word for this: hubris.) By contrast, the person who endeavors to live an examined life is always willing and able to give an account of how they live - not necessarily a flawless account of a flawless life, but a well-reasoned account of a reasonable life.

Here are a few brief examples. As Aristotle describes matters, the decadent person has made a thoroughgoing commitment to always pursue whatever pleasure presents itself at the moment; yet that policy cannot be defended with a well-reasoned account of how they live because it does not activate core human capacities for, among other things, long-term relationships and deliberative action. Similar stories can be told about people who crave ever more of things that have no natural limit, such as money, power, fame, and prestige: because they have set no reasonable limit to their actions and emotions, they cannot give a well-reasoned account of how they live.

Returning to Socrates, notice that in Plato's Apology he is quoted as saying "the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being." It is not that someone who can't give an account of their life cannot remain alive or even be successful by some conventional standard, but instead that they are not living in a way that is worthy of the best within us.

As I wrote almost five years ago in a short review of Edith Hall's book Aristotle's Way, Aristotle (along with Socrates and many others) does not talk down to us or give us a few simple life hacks; instead these great thinkers exhort us to join the aristocracy of the human spirit. That level of excellence is rare and difficult (as Spinoza put it), but eminently worth striving for as a human ideal.

(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)

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Crafty

2024-01-27

Aristotle is well-known for having pioneered our vocabulary of potentiality and actualization. An especially meaningful form of human potentiality or capacity is what he calls a hexis: a stable, voluntarily acquired trait that, when applied, results in reliable activity of a certain kind. Aristotle identifies three such primary traits in human life: virtue or excellence of character (aretē), knowledge or understanding (epistēmē), and craft or skill (technē).

For Aristotle and the ancient Greeks more generally, both knowledge and virtue were ends in themselves, whereas the end of a craft was not the exercise of the craft but whatever the craft might produce outside of itself. Thus, for example, the end of shipbuilding is the ship, the end of medicine is the health of the patient, and the end of music-making is the performance. Significantly, a craft - unlike a virtue - can be used for good or for ill; that purpose is determined by the virtue, or lack thereof, of the person who uses the product of the craft (e.g., a ship can be used for peaceful commerce or for murderous piracy).

In the modern world we have reduced all of these traits to one: technē. For us, as loyal heirs of Francis Bacon, knowledge is no longer an end in itself but primarily a means to gaining power over nature or, increasingly, other people. Similarly, virtuous activity is no longer an end in itself but primarily a means to getting ahead or feeling happy.

The result of reducing knowledge and virtue to crafts is a crafty instrumentalism that cannot question the boundless pursuit of power, wealth, status, fame, and pleasure. Those simply must be valuable because so many people seem to value them, and the only value of knowledge or virtue is to help us attain even more of them.

Yet there exists an older, wiser alternative. Unfortunately, because technē is the ocean we swim in, it's hard to see how to square the ideal of a more contemplative life with the requirements of modern society. To my mind, finding the beautifully right balance here is one of the main tasks of the examined life in this day and age.

(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)

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