In my post about Alasdair MacIntyre the other day, I expressed admiration for his recognition that we need to learn the principles of action from the practices life. Here is a quote on the topic from his last essay:
We need to begin again and to do so by returning to the social context in which we learned the use of good and its cognates. What we first had to learn was how to make the distinctions between what we desire and the choiceworthy, and between what pleases those others whom we desire to please and the choiceworthy. We characteristically and generally learn — or fail to learn — to make these distinctions, as we emerge through and from the family into the life of a variety of practices: such practices as those of housework and farmwork, of learning Latin and geometry, of building houses and making furniture, of playing soccer and playing in string quartets. What we can learn only in and through such practices is what the standards of excellence are in each type of activity and how our desires and feelings must be disciplined and transformed and our choices guided by the standards of excellence in each type of activity if we are to achieve such excellence and through it the goods internal to each type of practice.
I might add that what we learn through these practices and activities is first and foremost that there is such a thing as excellence. As Aristotle put it at the very beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: "Every craft and every inquiry, and similarly every action and commitment, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim."
It was Socrates whom Aristotle followed in frequently asking not only "what is this thing?" (e.g., in Plato's Republic "what is justice?") but also "does this thing exist?" The latter question is more fundamental, because if a thing is nonexistent (say, unicorns or centaurs) then it doesn't make sense to puzzle over its nature and identity. But once we have the experience of excellence - say, witnessing athletic excellence at the ancient Olympic games or dramatic excellence at the Athnenian Great Dionysia - then we can start to talk about it, think about it, give an account of it, define its standards, compare examples of it, seek commonalities in excellence across different forms of craft and inquiry, and so on.
Moreover, I would posit that the best way to learn excellence is from the inside. As we say nowadays, "life is not a spectator sport" - and neither is excellence. To take a personal example: while it's true that I'll never be nearly as great a guitar player as my musical heroes (such as Julian Bream, Steve Howe, and Michael Hedges), it's also true that I have gained a stronger grasp of excellent playing by striving to improve my guitar skills, in part by attempting to emulate their excellence. The same principle applies in the visual arts (which is why at museums you sometimes see students painting works by the Old Masters), dance, tennis, woodworking, the experimental sciences, medicine, law, warfighting, etc. The basic rule is that one's knowledge becomes stronger to the extent that it is embodied and thus turned into a kind of second nature.
All of this takes time, for life is a process of ripening. This is one reason why philosophical reflection and instruction is somewhat wasted on the young. It is said that at Plato's Academy, students of philosophy could not begin the curriculum until they were forty years of age (and even then they had to start off with years of mathematics) - before that, they simply didn't have enough experience of life to make it worthwhile. MacIntyre echoed this sentiment in his focus on learning principles from practices. Thoreau said something similar in Walden:
The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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