Our Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor, Director of Catholic Studies, and Chair of Philosophy as Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI, was on the Acton Line podcast of the Acton Institute last year (but just let us know recently!). Give a listen here:
Reason, nature, and the human good – YouTube
The term kulturkampf, literally “culture struggle”, has long-since been translated into English as “culture war”. I have no desire to participate in a “culture war”. Indeed, as I will argue here, the very notion of the “culture war” is not only misguided but harmful. But as someone living within a culture, however, I do believe it is inevitable that I and everyone else—willingly or not, consciously or not—everyone does participate in the struggle over culture.
Why this “quibbling over semantics”? Before I get to the semantics themselves, I have to say that I have never accepted as legitimate the objection that one is quibbling over semantics. Words are important. They signify concepts, and concepts are that on the basis of which all human history (all that is truly human, that is) has unfolded. If you do not believe words are important, there seems to be no reason for you to read this—or anything. In fact, the objection of “quibbling over semantics” presumes a nominalist or at least idealist divorce between cognitive activity and things independent of cognitive activity; but pursuing that question would take us far off track.
Returning therefore to the semantics of “struggle” and “war”: I protest the latter term because it suggests an entirely inapt metaphor. War, to be waged justly, must have a reasonable expectation of victory. One adopts violent means out of necessity: the need, namely, to produce or restore an orderly way of life that allows human beings to pursue their natural and fitting goods. War should be irregular. And before anyone thinks about bringing it up, let me say that there is an entirely different way in which the concept of “spiritual warfare” or “spiritual combat” must be understood, which would take us into a discussion well outside the boundaries of what I am here to discuss today; but which, succinctly, may be presented by saying that there are conditions for decisive victory in matters of the spiritual soul of the human being. Not so in matters of culture, which is, by nature, an intrinsically temporally-unfolding suprasubjective reality constituted through a pattern of relations which attains a new foundation in every human being who is born and reared within a society of other human beings. Or to put this in other, simpler words, culture is an ever-present and ever-developing reality which can only exist through the exchanges human beings have with and towards one another. It is never final, because we human beings, as existing on earth, are not final; we, by nature, are creatures that change both over the course of our individual lives and over the course of generations. So long as humans have freedom of thought and will, culture may change.
Allow me an anecdote. When I taught ethics at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, a secular school in Boston, Massachusetts, I started each semester by giving the students a notecard on which to write their names, email addresses, a hobby or interest, and—in a single sentence or less—something they believe to be wrong with the world today, with the promise that I’d give my own answer later in the semester. Their answers ranged from the very thoughtful to the kind one might expect in a caricature of a beauty pageant. Most were focused on what could be called systematic societal issues: poverty, inequality, abuse of power, ideologies, a lack of charity or honesty among people as a whole, and so on and so forth. Throughout the semester, we read a variety of thinkers influential in ethics: David Hume, J.L. Mackie, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Philippa Foot, Marilyn Frye, and so on. Each, in some way, provides a “system” for ethics either as a whole or with regard to some specific problems: rules or sets of principles which, if followed, are promised to improve society. They might be rather loose rules or principles, or rather strict ones—but all had in mind the same goal, despite the significant differences in their means. Mind you, I was required to provide a survey course covering a broad range of thinkers and theories—ideally, I would have focused the course more intently on better thinkers, but the conditions of my employment were non-negotiable. Regardless, being required to teach a wide range of theories and thinkers, I spent most of the semester showing how these proposed systems have intrinsic and unavoidable flaws, no matter how strictly observed; how they fail in other words, how they do not provide us a secure and ethical society, and how they may be overcome or abused. Towards the end of the semester, we would read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—after the first book of which, I would read their answers as to what’s wrong with the world back to them. They would remember my promise, and that it was my turn.
“What’s wrong with the world?” I asked myself, out loud, before them. “Me,” I would answer; “I am.”
You might recognize this answer from a legend about Chesterton—I freely admit that I lifted it. But it is, I believe, a good teaching tool: yes, there are many systematic problems with our country, our world, our politics, and our culture. I cannot control any of those problems. I can try to change them, but I cannot control them; for all are dependent upon millions of wills not my own. I am, by nature, in control only of myself and even that only to a limited degree (i.e., I cannot will myself to be something I naturally am not—as I cannot will myself to be a top-tier athlete—maybe a decent one, but genetically that has always been out of my grasp—nor can someone born a man will himself to become a female, and so on). The circumstances into which we all are born are beyond our control. What is in our control is our capacity for virtue, the decisions and choices that we as individuals make. Naturally, this extends into those with whom we have close relations: our individuality is only relative, and we are ourselves constituted largely through the relations we have with others. But the faculty of the will extends efficaciously only to the self. We may influence others through a kind of formal causality—objective or specifying causality, to be precise, which is just what I was attempting to do with those students, showing them the truth through a careful, painful, difficult process, one class session, one reading, one assignment, one Socratic hour at a time—but we cannot control their wills. We can only attempt to specify objects for their thinking, propose to them what we believe is true, and strive to show them—most especially through how we live ourselves—the truth of the good, and thus that it is desirable.
It in this inability to control others and the difficulty of showing the truth in which the struggle over culture consists. It is perennial; it occurs again and anew with each individual human being who grows up in this or any other society. Believing that ever there could occur a society where the demonstration of what is true is not difficult, where the struggle for it does not recur on a daily basis, is a fantasy which obscures the truth of the matter. There are no shortcuts: the effect of specifying formal causality does not and cannot occur on a cultural scale through the impositions of force. It is a gradual process of developing habits and requires careful and constant attention. I had relatively decent success, teaching my ethics course, in persuading students to think that Aristotle was a very good starting point, to recognize that claim as true, in other words: but only because they were small classes of no more than 22 students. (I doubt the effects were lasting, unfortunately—a single isolated course with students exposed to little else of similar thinking. But I may hope that their thinking has remained on the track set down by the course, given the intensity of our discussions.) That is not to say a larger class could not have been likewise incipiently persuaded; but affecting such a first step towards persuasion among most of a large crowd would likely have been only superficial, a fleeting adherence born not of intellectual conviction but birthed merely through winning the moment—through presenting them a fictionalized, fantastic version of Aristotle: the bold, counter-cultural Stagirite who stands athwart modernity, etc., etc.
In the age of mass media, and especially the internet, where any message has the potential to reach masses of people, such reductive approaches possess a seductive allure—especially if we conceive of the cultural struggle as being a war. We see this video, or that trend, or this or that celebrity spreading a false message; we see their YouTube hit counters ticking over into hundreds of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of views; this odious Tweet (Twixt?) garnering countless likes and retweets, that Facebook post being shared over and over again; misinformation being spread far and wide; and we feel that we must combat these numbers with our own. Alarms blare in our mind and we hear the shouts of: “They are beating us! They are winning! We are losing!” They are gashing us; so we must, we think, respond in kind. We fashion exaggerated narratives, pseudo-historical accounts—we put on airs of gnosticism, of being the elect, being “those who know”.
But the battlefield of those who wage war on the truth is fantasy. To engage them in combat is to step on to that battlefield; to have to use their weapons, weapons which rely upon a kind of seduction into a way of living rather than understanding the truth about the good—weapons which aim at the lower rather than higher faculties of the human being. This would be to abuse the influence of objective causality.
I do not mean to suggest that fiction and fantasy cannot be put to good use. They can be powerful means for telling stories which elucidate truths better than can be done by any philosophy. But with the degradation of good philosophical thinking the fantastic loses its proper context of significance. For a right formation of the moral imagination there must also be the claritas of good intellectual judgment: not only that there may be produced good works of creative fiction but that their interpretation might be guided correctly. To gain these two goods of intellectual correctness and imaginative rectitude proves not a matter of battle, but of struggle. It is lived by each of us individually and realized culturally in our being with one another. Approached as a war, you may “win” a battle here or there—changing a school curriculum, passing a law, discrediting a movie or television show or speaker—but fought as battles, they are inevitable pyrrhic, costing us more than they gain.
An older version of this is available in audio form here:
I begin this inquiry into the contrast of studiousness vs. curiosity by quoting from a perspicacious essay of the literary theorist Allen Tate, penned in 1945, titled, “The New Provincialism”. Tate writes:
The provincial attitude is limited in time but not in space. When the regional man, in his ignorance, often an intensive and creative ignorance, of the world, extends his own immediate necessities into the world, and assumes that the present moment is unique, he becomes the provincial man. He cuts himself off from the past, and without benefit of the fund of traditional wisdom approaches the simplest problems of life as if nobody had ever heard of them before. A society without arts, said Plato, lives by chance. The provincial man, locked in the present, lives by chance.
Allen Tate, 1945: “The New Provincialism” in Essays of Four Decades, 539.
Perhaps, at first glance, this passage seems only tangentially related to the theme of our inquiry. What does study, or studiousness, have to do with provincialism? There are, in fact, many good answers to this question: for provincialism, in essence, consists in the belief that me and mine (whether of a “here” or a “now”) need neither study nor the humility which makes genuine learning possible.
Today our culture suffers a temporal provincialism—“It’s 2023!”; “Your model is outdated”; “What does the latest research say?”—that doubtless pains any person not captured by it. That is, to approach the works and words of tradition with humility reveals how small our knowledge and weak our understanding. But the provincialism of the present mangles the wisdom of the past through superficial readings and anachronistic interpretations.
What imposed this provincialist perspective upon us? One can, as so often is the case, point fingers at the moderns, the Enlightenment, the adulation of innovation and progress and so on and on. And one would be correct in doing so. But we must note that human beings tend toward provincialism regardless of time or place. The human mind, given license, will slide eagerly towards adopting the easiest of perspectives—that is, whichever requires the least effort to attain the most-immediately pleasant results.
Is it easier to dismiss the Scholastics as backwards-thinking theocratic sophists, or to read the millions of pages of subtle argumentation through which their studies and disputes were crafted?
Should we wrestle with the enigmatic thinking of Martin Heidegger—itself a complex compound of efforts at originality and hidden borrowing from the tradition—or can we just call him a Nazi and be done with it?
Can we bypass close study of Aristotle’s Physics by pointing out that he misunderstood the structure of the cosmos, or that he had no knowledge of quantum physics (as though the average person today understands what it means that bosons have an integer spin while fermions have a half-integer spin)?
The questions are, of course, rhetorical. Given the choice, most people will ignore or vilify whatever might challenge their beliefs. This dismissiveness produces a host of vicious qualities: most especially that of acedia—a despair of spiritual good, as Thomas Aquinas says. Such despair discourages real and meaningful inquiry. Correlatively, it encourages curiosity: which is the vice opposed to studiousness.
Likely this sounds a bit odd to our modern ears (suffered as they have at that provincialism!). What is wrong, what could be wrong, with being curious? While it may incidentally get someone into trouble—finding out some truth that others would rather we not—it seems to designate a search for knowledge.
Historically, however, the term was used to specify an inordinate seeking of knowledge. In other words, while knowledge is certainly good in its own right, it does not come to us in a vacuum. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes a multitude of ways, therefore, in which we can be ordered incorrectly to the good of knowledge.
First, he says, we can have some evil annexed to our study: as someone who might wish to learn medicine that he might poison more effectively, or—far more commonly—that someone might take pride in being educated. (I think here of every social media post that begins, “As a PhD/sociologist/philosopher/super smart person”.) In such cases, the growth in knowledge and therefore goodness is not the end of one’s inquiries, but, rather, some malicious purpose. Second, he goes on, the desire to learn the truth itself can be inordinate, even if knowledge is the end of one’s study. This disordered pursuit happens in four ways:
The first and the last, I think, are the most difficult today for us to understand. But why? Why are we so easily drawn to lesser things? How do we err by trying to know things “above our own capacity”? Are things truly “above our capacity” to know?
By contrast, the virtue of studiousness is, as Aquinas defines it, “vigorous application of the mind in relation to something.” But this virtue, despite its vigor, belongs as Aquinas says to the cardinal virtue of temperance. Despite being concerned with discovery and understanding of the truth, that is, studiousness is not an intellectual but rather a moral virtue, for it concerns our appetite for knowledge. But all goods may be inordinately desired—as in the above instances of curiosity. Thus, our appetite for knowledge needs to be rightly disposed, not only with respect to the things we experience in sensation (where there are many particulars we should not seek) but also with regard to intellectual knowledge.
Virtues, of course, consist always in the mean. What, then, is the mean of studiousness—where does it lie between the extremes, between the excess and the deficiency? What is this vigor—this vehemens—of the virtue? More pertinently, I believe, we may be hindered today by societal ills in our pursuit of this virtue. Is this hindrance truly the case? Why? What can we do about it?
This week we’ll be discussing these questions and more at our Philosophical Happy Hour – and you’re invited to join us!
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
In a world where habits often seem synonymous with unconscious and automatic reactions, it is time to revisit and explore the true depth and meaning of this vital aspect of human existence. The Lyceum Institute is pleased to present an 8-week intensive seminar on “Thomistic Psychology: Human Habits and Experience of the World.” Guided by the profound insights of Thomas Aquinas, the seminar will open up new horizons in understanding the complex reality of habits in human life.
Why Study Habits and Experience? The modern understanding of habit is often reduced to mere patterns of behavior. However, this seminar takes a unique approach, delving into the Thomistic tradition to unveil a more profound, multifaceted, and richer perspective. Further, this course intertwines the insights of Thomistic psychology with those derived from semiotics and phenomenology to examine not only the intrapersonal dimension of habits but also the intersubjective reality in community, culture, and environment.
The seminar, designed for those with prior study in or familiarity with Thomistic Psychology, consists of:
This is not just a seminar but a deeply engaging experience that promises to enrich your understanding of human nature and the world around us. It allows an immersive exploration of texts, lectures, and lively discussions, bringing resolution to difficulties, enhancing intellectual curiosity, and directing further inquiry.
It is more than learning; it’s participation in a dynamic intellectual community, sharing thoughts, engaging in constructive debates, and fostering a collective pursuit of wisdom. Your contribution will not only enlighten you but others as well, and you’ll have the opportunity to have your work potentially evaluated for publication.
Join us at the Lyceum Institute for this enlightening journey, a course that goes beyond the conventional, offering a unique perspective that could redefine your understanding of habits and their role in human experience. Challenge your thoughts, deepen your insights, and be a part of a meaningful dialogue about human nature and culture. Register today for “Thomistic Psychology: Human Habits and Experience of the World,” and rediscover the richness of human existence.
| Discussion Sessions 1:00pm ET (World times) | Study Topics & Readings |
| September 23 | The Nature of Habit » Lecture: Paradigms of Habit Readings: » Required: ST Ia-IIae, q.49. » Supplement: Selections from neuroscientific and psychological writings. |
| September 30 | The Being of Habits » Lecture: Locus Habituum Readings: » Required: ST Ia-IIae, q.50. » Supplement: Robert Brennan, “The Habits of Man” in Thomistic Psychology. |
| October 7 | Formation and Increase of Habits » Lecture: Determining the Indeterminate Readings: » Required: ST Ia-IIae, q.51-52. » Supplement: Selections from C.S. Peirce. |
| October 14 | The Unity of Habits » Lecture: Order and Union Readings: » Required: ST Ia-IIae, q.53-54. » Supplement: Notes on feedback loops and neuroplasticity. |
| October 21 | BREAK |
| October 28 | Virtues as Habits » Lecture: Holding the Self Well Readings: » Required: ST Ia-IIae, q.55-56. » Supplement: Yves Simon, “Work and Culture”. |
| November 4 | Moral and Intellectual Virtue » Lecture: Holding toward the World Readings: » Required: ST Ia-IIae, q.57-58. » Supplement: Yves Simon, “Work and Culture”. |
| November 11 | Habituation toward Virtue or Vice » Lecture: Struggle within the World Readings: » Required: ST Ia-IIae, q.63, a.1-2, 4; q.71, a.1-4. » Supplement: Josef Pieper, “Doing and Signifying”. |
| November 18 | The Habit of Responsibility » Lecture: Culture and Habit Readings: » Required: Selections from Thomas Aquinas. » Supplement: John Deely, “Philosophy and Experience”. |
Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).
One payment covers all 8 weeks.
If you prefer an alternative payment method (i.e., not PayPal), use our contact form and state whether you prefer to pay as a Participant, Patron, or Benefactor, and an invoice will be emailed to you.
[2023 Fall] Thomistic Psych: World and Habit – Public Benefactor
Upper-tier payment. Recommended for those with full-time employment in well-paying professions and sufficient resources to provide a little more.
$200.00
[2023 Fall] Thomistic Psych: World and Habit – Public Patron
Middle-tier payment. Recommended for those with full-time employment and children, or for those in professions that do not pay as well as they ought, such as clergy and teachers.
$135.00
[2023 Fall] Thomistic Psych: World and Habit – Public Participant
Basic payment. Recommended for those who are currently students, with part-time employment, or who cannot afford to pay more at the moment.
$60.00
| Standard price | Basic Lyceum Enrollment | Advanced Lyceum Enrollment | Premium Lyceum Enrollment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benefactor | $200 per seminar | $90 | 3 seminars included $90 after | 8 seminars included $90 after |
| Patron | $135 per seminar | $65 | 3 seminars included $65 after | 8 seminars included $65 after |
| Participant | $80 per seminar | $40 | 3 seminars included $40 after | 8 seminars included $40 after |
What is the purpose of art? It is not a new question. To the contrary, it resides among the oldest of questions. Some may despair of a meaningful answer, given the ancient age of a question yet still be asked—and, at times, asked as though nothing said in the millennia before us has given satisfaction. Yet, that art has a purpose cannot be denied: for even the most-mysterious seeming of acts arises for the sake of some end, even if the act itself misses the mark by a wide margin.
To many, art seems to be primarily about communicating a message. In the past decade, the media through which art is transmitted and promoted has been painfully, dare I say cringe-inducingly, self-righteous and moralistic. In the words of Anastasia Berg, “For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop.”[1] Such works—questionable as to which category is primary, that is, the art or the propaganda—may yet be lauded by the ideologues in support of their messages. But they are upheld as good works of art only by the most deluded.
To others, art may be purely about the “aesthetic experience”: by which is commonly meant works that somehow convey or evoke an emotional response at a perceptual level, a response that induces the audience to continue the experience. Thus, the work of art may be beautiful or hideous, joyful or tragic, but its purpose—so say such claimants—consists in the experience of the attraction. Notably, however, this attitude may result in works which require neither talent nor thought, but which have their whole being in provocation and stoking outrage. Such works, just as little as pieces of pure propaganda, seem to deserve the name “art”.
As Berg, again, writes, “Art must be for something—even if only for its own sake. For all their differences, everybody seems to agree that beautiful images have ‘value’—the question is merely what kind.” And, as she concludes:
If good art and its criticism can free us from anything, it can free us… from the comforting delusion that we can ever transcend our human limits, defeat death, unhappiness and evil once and for all, or live in anyone’s vision of heaven on earth. This does not mean, however, that we can ever be liberated from the infinite pull of beauty itself, or be able to attend to images only when we feel like it. It is rather like this: we can decide what to do, but we can never decide what to dream.
19 July 2023: [“On the Aesthetic Turn ” | The Point Magazine]
The “infinite pull of beauty”—as inescapable as dreaming: not always present to us, but something which comes whether we will it or not. Just as we are fascinated by dreams, so, too, we are by the beautiful—not only to perceive it but to create it. Yet is the purpose of art merely to free us from “comforting delusions”? Such liberation, I believe, is an indirect and necessarily concomitant resultance of what art truly does; but hardly its primary purpose, for such presupposes the prevalence of these delusions, a prevalence which itself contradicts human nature in a way that our love for and pursuit of art does not.
What then, can we say about art’s true purpose? Do we not need, first, to understand at least provisionally what art is? Can we identify its nature? Can we explain how someone creates it? Or how it is received? Do we know the work itself—the form that may make something even physically unexceptional into a vessel of beauty? What is the center—what is the final and orienting cause for art’s existence? Come join us this Wednesday (2 August 2023) for our Philosophical Happy Hour and discuss these important questions!
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
[1] 19 July 2023: “On the Aesthetic Turn”, The Point Magazine [https://thepointmag.com/criticism/on-the-aesthetic-turn/]
Today’s Philosophical Happy Hour concerns the issue of “tolerance”. As Geoffrey Meadows, who will be leading the discussion, writes:
Tonight I thought we might discuss the definition, limit, and moral status of “tolerance,” since our discussion on kindness uncovered this underlying sensibility of our age.
Perhaps a series of guided questions can get us started thinking about it.
Is tolerance some kind of virtue? If so, under which cardinal virtue does it properly belong? Perhaps patience? If not, is it a vice and to what species of vice does it properly belong? Perhaps cowardice? Is it, in itself, morally neutral?
Some have attributed a kind of doctrine of tolerance to St. Thomas taking their cues from his treatise on law (e.g., I-II q. 96 a. 2). Essentially, they argue that since the civil authority must permit or endure certain harms or evils, the citizen must also permit them. We are brought by the above to the limit(s) of tolerance. Which evils and harms can be permitted? On what basis might governments and individuals make such judgments? Is it a matter for prudence alone?
Join us this evening (5:45—7:15pm ET) for a lively discussion about tolerance, intolerance, law, prudence, authority, and the moral good! It’s a small step in the right direction.
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
We, as a society, are not well. Reports on “mental health” in the United States of America, in particular, estimate at least 25% of adult Americans meet the criteria for one or another mental illness. This number has only been increasing in recent decades, despite the large number of professionals who have entered in the field in recent decades. Why?
It seems, indeed, that the prevalence of mental disturbance has risen unabated. The rates of suicide have risen, and continue to do so. Likewise, the number of persons using mood-altering medicine to alleviate the symptoms of these disturbances. But, while many therapists offer thoughtful assistance, and the use of some medications may be fruitful in controlling the worst of symptoms in the most desperate of times, it seems the problem continues unabated.
The facile etiology of this increasing crisis is to blame conditions of the world: the inescapable permeation of all life by the rapid pace of technologically-mediated culture. Television. The internet. The smartphone. There can be no doubt that a 24-hour news cycle undermined our well-being. Likewise, the frantic fractious flurry of Twitter—there is no place better to break your mind by a thousand conflicting opinions and false reports during a crisis. The culture produced by this technological inundation has resulted in a profound inability to dwell in reality.
But technology, though an instrument of our mental ailing, is exacerbative rather than originating. The ailment, in other words, is already there.
What then, truly, is the cause of the “mental health crisis”? This will be the topic of our Philosophical Happy Hour on 7 June 2023. Everyone is welcome to join. Questions we will explore include:
We look forward to discussing these and other questions with you!
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
Law: the word, to many, conjures images of the courtroom or a legislature—ponderous tomes of tediously-written jargon rendering a complex web of oft-arbitrary-seeming stipulations and impingements. So prevalent is this imagery that to speak of the “natural law” sounds often like a mere metaphor. Exacerbating this “metaphorical” tenor of the phrase has been its use in ideological battles. Sometimes it is made a shield against criticism; other times, a sword to cut down proposals. But again and again, as history well shows, return to the notion is made, and not coincidentally when threat is made to the coherence of “nature” as normative in human experience.
The revival of interest in natural law in our own time is certainly related to the devastations wrought by positivism and existentialism in the intellectual and political life of a considerable part of Western society, which it is generally agreed is undergoing rapid and radical transformations. By our own example, then, we realize how the theory of natural law may be influenced by the aspirations of a society, at a certain moment of its evolution, and how great is the danger for that theory of becoming nothing more than an expression of these aspirations.
Simon 1965: The Tradition of Natural Law: A Philosopher’s Reflections, 27.
Rather than capitulate theory of the natural law to these “aspirations of a society”, one ought instead to understand what that law is. Perhaps most poignantly, we need to understand how that law is known. How do we discover the first principles of the natural law? How do these principles inform our moral reasoning? Join us for this 8-week seminar, led by Dr. Matthew Minerd, to investigate these and other related questions. Deadline for registration is 5 July 2023.
| Discussion Sessions 11:00am ET (World times) | Study Topics & Readings |
|---|---|
| July 8 | Lecture 1: Problematizing the Natural Law Historical overview of the Natural Law; Gleanings from the history of natural law thinkers; lay of the land in some contemporary natural law debates. Readings: » Simon, chs. 1 and 2. |
| July 15 | Lecture 2: Theoretical Issues in the Background of Natural Law Discussions Discussion of various themes in the background when discussing the natural law: nature, freedom, reason, natural theology, action theory. Reading: » Simon, ch. 3. |
| July 22 | Lecture 3: Law in General: Its Nature, Division, and Properties Reading of Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of law in general. Closest attention will be given to the general definition of law and the particular divisions of law. Reading: » ST I-II, q. 90–92. » Simon, ch. 4. |
| July 29 | Lecture 4: Natural Law and Human Law Reading of Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of natural law and human law, the latter considered as a concretization of the natural law. Reading (same for weeks 4 and 5): » ST I-II, q. 93–97. » Simon, ch. 5. |
| August 5 | BREAK |
| August 12 | Lecture 5: Natural Law and Human Law (continued) Reading of Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of natural law and human law, the latter considered as a concretization of the natural law. Reading (same for weeks 4 and 5): » ST I-II, q. 93–97. » Simon, ch. 5. |
| August 19 | Lecture 6: The Noetics of the Natural Law Introduction to the critiques of practical reason needed for understanding how the natural law is known. (This will develop themes that we will have already encountered in Simon). Reading: » Minerd, Matthew K. “A Note on Synderesis, Moral Science, and Knowledge of the Natural Law.” Lex naturalis 5 (2020): 43–55. » Rhonheimer, Martin. “Practical Reason and the ‘Naturally Rational’: On the Doctrine of the Natural Law as a Principle of Praxis in Thomas Aquinas.” |
| August 26 | Lecture 7: Some Basic Discussion of New Natural Law and its Critics The NNLT has developed quite a bit in the past sixty years. It has many branches, more than we can cover in an introductory seminar. We will consider a terminus a quo in an important early article by Germain Grisez and a terminus ad quem in a recent critique by Steven Jensen. Readings: » Grisez, Germain G. “The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1-2, Question 94, Article 2.” Natural Law Forum 10 (1965): 168–201. » Jensen, Steven J. “The Fatal Flaw of New Natural Law Action Theory.” The Thomist 86, no. 4 (October 2022): 543–572. |
| September 2 | Lecture 8: Final Thoughts about the Natural Law Discussion of the place of Natural Law in Thomism. Some comments on the place of natural law in early Christianity and in Orthodox thought. Closing remarks on the importance / state of the natural law today Readings: » Harakas, Stanley. “Eastern Orthodox Perspectives on Natural Law.” Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics (1977): 41-56. » Bourke, Vernon J. “Is Thomas Aquinas a Natural Law Ethicist?” The Monist 58, no. 1 (1974): 52–66. » Simon, ch. 6. |
Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).
One payment covers all 8 weeks.
If you prefer an alternative payment method (i.e., not PayPal), use our contact form and state whether you prefer to pay as a Participant, Patron, or Benefactor, and an invoice will be emailed to you.
[2023 Summer] Moral Noetic – Public Participant
A payment level recommended for those who are currently students, who are between jobs, or who have part-time employment.
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What are the virtues of a good listener? What are the dangers of listening? Dr. Mark McCullough answers these questions.
What are the virtues of a good listener? In the weeks that follow, I will answer this question in four installments: in the first three installments I concentrate on four different virtues important for good listening: generosity, curiosity, compassion, and courage. In the fourth and final installment, I discuss dangers for the listener, each one corresponding with its companion virtue by looking closely at the role of listening in the poem The Divine Comedy written by the thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante. I conclude by offering advice on how to avoid being pulled into the self-destructive narratives that we hear others tell themselves as well as those fictions we tell ourselves.
Generosity is the first virtue of a good listener because, without it, we cannot practice the other virtues important for listening. Like prudence, which Thomas Aquinas called the “mother” of other cardinal virtues, generosity gives birth to curiosity, compassion, and courage. These are the gifts of generosity, and this virtue is characterized by abundance.
When we listen, we give our time and our attention. Time and attention are no small gifts. Neither is patience which is a capacity for and an offering of our time and attention. This offering is characterized by calm confidence. Listening starts when we patiently give our time and attention and wait. We do not simply tolerate waiting while listening for something to emerge. We accept waiting as a condition of emergence, either in the form of words or silence.
Originally, the word “generosity” characterized a person of “excellence or noble birth.” Though no longer the meaning we associate with it, there is a lesson to be found in this word’s origin. Anyone can be a generous listener but to practice listening well is to present oneself habitually as having the capacity to give with minimal diminishment. Such a capacity suggests potential as when we say for example that a particular animal breed is “good stock.” In other words, the breed promises great things based on prior success. Listening, too, has a history and this is why we often return to others we consider “good listeners” when we feel we need to be heard (more on this “need” later).
Notice above how I wrote “to practice listening well is to present oneself…”. Listening, like most relational acts, has an element of presentation. When we listen, we present ourselves to the one to whom we will listen. We indicate our availability with eye contact or sitting closer. Technology, the shift from face-to-face to the virtual realm, has made presenting ourselves as good listeners more difficult. To present ourselves as available to hear someone when we are on a phone or video call is challenging. Even more challenging might be how to be generous with these forms of media. “Is it a good time to talk?” is a question I often hear from a friend who calls after a long absence to catch up. A simple “yes” might confirm my availability, but it doesn’t always confirm my capacity for listening. For that, I rely on further confirmation, the “mmm” and “huhs” that holds my presence for them, as my eyes are either hidden from view or flattened by a screen.
Which brings me to an important, personal rule about good listening. Never pretend. Never present what you cannot minimally commit to. It is better to tell a loved one that another time is better for listening and choose the time than it is to commit now and give your attention by half. Such a halving (or quartering, or worse) reveals an impoverished listener and is ungenerous, even if it seems generous relative to what the listener who is beset by many other responsibilities believes she can offer. One experience of being listened to is far more precious than a thousand instances of competing for someone’s hard sought-after or over-promised attention.
The feeling of having been listened to is often commensurate with the perception of the listener’s generosity. When we present the gift of ourselves as available to receive something important, we reflect the capacity necessary to recognize whatever might emerge, especially feelings of pain, anger, and loneliness. Good listening does not present a vacuum or echo chambers like the ones created deliberately in the offices of poorly trained therapists. Good listening bespeaks of a plentitude where every emergent articulation of one’s experience has its proper place. Disappointment? There’s a space for that. Anger? There’s a space for that too. Before we can understand exactly what the disappointment or anger is, a space is created by the presented capacity of the listener. Before understanding, we have the grounds for understanding in a shared space. Those grounds must be ample, providing more space than might be imagined by the one who needs listening to.
In my next post, I will concentrate on two more virtues of good listening: curiosity and courage.
As soon as the soul arrives at self-consciousness, it is no longer merely the form, the end or even the principle of organization; a world opens within it that increasingly separates and detaches itself from the life of the body, and in which the soul has its own life, its own destiny, and its own end to accomplish. It is this superior life that the incessant progress of life and nature seems – without being able to attain it – to aspire, as if to its perfection, to its good. This higher life, in contrast, has its own good within itself; and it knows this, looks for it, embraces it, at once as its own good and as good itself, as absolute perfection. But pleasure and pain have their grounds in good and evil; they are the sensible signs of good and evil. Here, therefore, in this world of the soul, the truest good is accompanied by the truest form of sensibility; such are the passions of the soul – that is, feeling. Feeling is distinct from the spiritual and moral activity that pursues good and evil, though it gathers their impressions.
Continuity or repetition must therefore gradually weaken feeling, just as it weakens sensation; it gradually extinguishes pleasure and pain in feeling, as it does in sensation. Similarly, it changes into a need the very feeling that it destroys, making its absence more and more unbearable for the soul. At the same time, repetition or continuity makes moral activity easier and more assured. It develops within the soul not only the disposition, but also the inclination and the tendency to act, just as in the organs it develops the inclination for movement. In the end, it gradually brings the pleasure of action to replace the more transient pleasure of passive sensibility.
In this way, as habit destroys the passive emotions of pity, the helpful activity and the inner joys of charity develop more and more int he heart of the one who does good. In this way, love is augmented by its own expressions; in this way, it reanimates with its penetrating flame the impressions that have been extinguished, and at each instant reignites the exhausted sources of passion.
Ultimately, in the activity of the soul, as in that of movement, habit gradually transforms the will proper to action in an involuntary inclination. Mores and morality are formed in this manner. Virtue is first of all an effort and wearisome; it becomes something attractive and a pleasure only through practice, as a desire that forgets itself or that is unaware of itself, and gradually it draws near to the holiness of innocence. Such is the very secret of education: its art consists in attracting someone towards the good by action, thus fixing the inclination for it. In this way a second nature is formed.
Félix Ravaisson 1838: De l’habitude in the English translation by Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair, Of Habit, 67-69.
Félix Ravaisson (23 October 1813—1900 May 18) was a French philosopher influential in the latter half of the 19th century, particularly in the school of French Spiritualism and particularly as a “spiritual realist”. He exhibits in Of Habit, his most influential and enduring work, a familiarity with Aristotle and the Peripatetic tradition. He is also known for his influence on Henri Bergson, whose theory of the élan vital would likely not have been without Ravaisson.
