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Philosophical Moorings

Thomas Wren

As with the rest of human life, morality and moral education have an outside and an inside. Seen from the outside morality provides a way getting along with others, and from the inside it is a way of getting along with oneself. More crudely: moral education is at once a necessary condition for social control and an indispensable means of self-realization. Most of us, including philosophers as well as parents and educators, assume that these two functions of morality sustain each other: what is good for society is good for our kids, and vice versa. Nietzsche and a few other so-called rugged individualists have rejected this assumption but I will not spend time defending it here. Instead I will focus on the second of these two perspectives, the “inside view.”[1] My motives for doing this are twofold. First of all, I want to unpack the general understanding, shared by contemporary educators of all persuasions, that morality is a form of self-realization. Also, I want to situate this understanding within the philosophical tradition of what, using the term in its broadest possible sense, I will simply call “human development.”

Specialists in the fields of education and psychology may object that not all conceptions of moral education are developmental, and this is certainly true if we understand development in the biological sense of an organic unfolding of innate powers, taking place within a reasonably stable environment that sustains but does not itself shape the developmental process. It is also true if we understand development in a non-biological but equally narrow sense as an ordered progress through cognitive stages, each of which has its own logical structure.[2] But our everyday concept of human development is not so narrow. What is distinctive about developmental changeis not inevitability or logical structure, but its normativity. Plainly put, most of us think of development as a movement from a less desirable state to a better one, even though in the case of human development the “betterness” at issue is subject to philosophical debate.

In what follows I will trace the way philosophers have formulated the fundamental developmental idea of human betterness, since I believe the history of their struggles to understand what it means to be human have shaped the ways in which contemporary moral educators understand their own enterprise. I am tempted to say that here as elsewhere in the history of ideas ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. However, to say this would oversimplify the way theories emerge within an intellectual tradition. It would be more realistic, I believe, to think of traditions, including our philosophical tradition, as providing necessary albeit usually unnoticed moorings for a specific theory or practice such as character education or moral judgment development. Thanks to these moorings a theory or practice is secured, stabilized, and thereby rendered intellectually plausible and practically useful. This applies across the board, but as we will see in the following pages it is especially true for the theory, research and practice of moral and character education.

Buddha and the Greeks

When I spoke just now of “our philosophical tradition” I had in mind the usual pantheon of Western philosophers, beginning of course with the Greeks. But I will begin even further back, not only because I want to acknowledge the existence and power of ancient non-Western thought but also because even a very short look at a single non-Western conception of human development – I have chosen Buddhism – will reveal what is distinctive and, indeed, quite novel about the Greek conception that emerged about the same time on the other side of the Asian land mass. And so let us begin there.

As Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree a few years before Socrates was born in Greece, he suddenly experienced the famous awakening that was to become the Buddhist hallmark of human development. With his awakening came enlightenment into the human condition and nature of suffering, an enlightenment that Buddha spent the rest of his life trying to spread throughout what was then a predominantly Hindu culture. After his death two major sects developed, the more austere Hinayana, which emphasized the original doctrine of enlightenment as the developmental agenda for individuals, and the Mahayana, which emphasized group enlightenment or, more exactly, the need for individuals to work as group in order to achieve their respective enlightenments.[3]

This is of course just the tip of a long and complex history. But allowing for these and other differences within the Buddhist tradition, even larger differences emerge when we contrast the Buddhist and Greek traditions with each other. The dissimilarities between the terrain of the path toward enlightenment that Buddhists follow and that of the various paths followed by the ancient Greeks are relatively well known. For instance, the Buddhist roads are generally rockier, i.e., more ascetic, and the Greek roads more sharply signposted, i.e., more systematized. However it remains to be seen just how different are the endpoints that lie at the end of these paths. The Greeks understood enlightenment as wisdom, sophia, whereas the Buddhists understood it as the emptying of the self, nirvana. At Delphi the famous Greek motto "Know thyself," gnothi seauton, adorned the entrance of the temple of Apollo, the god of wisdom, and was reiterated by the pre-socratic philosophers Thales and Pythagoras as well as by Socrates himself. In contrast, “Lose thyself” is the message of the Noble Eightfold Path (Table 1), which within all the varieties of the Buddhist tradition constitutes the system of practice leading to human development.

Table 1. The Noble Eightfold Path

  1. Right Viewpoint - Realizing the Four Noble Truths (viz., that all experience involves suffering, that suffering is caused by desire or craving, that desires must be overcome, not satisfied, and that this is done by following the Eightfold Path)
  2. Right Values - Commitment to growth in moderation
  3. Right Speech - Speaking in a nonhurtful, truthful way
  4. Right Actions - Wholesome behavior, harming no one
  5. Right Livelihood – Having a job that does no harm to oneself or others, directly or indirectly
  6. Right Effort – Always trying to improve
  7. Right Mindfulness - Seeing things correctly and with clear consciousness
  8. Right Meditation - Reaching enlightenment, where the ego has disappeared

The Eightfold Path has been interpreted in several ways: as a progressive series of stages through which one moves, as a set of eight dimensions that require simultaneous development, and sometimes as the exfoliation of three even more basic categories, namely wisdom, virtuous action, and concentration. However, in virtually all interpretations enlightenment is seen as a progressive achievement, gradual albeit not a smooth curve, in which the degree of enlightenment is proportional to the loss of self and the preoccupations associated with the self.

We must be careful to remember that the Buddha’s message was that we must get rid of the idea of self, not the actual self, since in fact there never really is such an entity. Although the Greeks did not have a specific word for "self" they clearly thought of the human person as aself-contained thing. The Buddhist notion of selfhood is quite different: there is no underlying unity to the streams of consciousness that converge and diverge during a person’s life.[4] Our sense of self-identity comes from what Buddhists consider the unfortunate tendency to desire what we do not have, a proposition that has a very important implication: The ascetic elimination of desire also eliminates the sense of self. Of course eliminating the sense of self does not eliminate our streams of consciousness. But it does enable us to detach ourselves from worldly distractions and work toward enlightenment.

Admittedly, some forms of Buddhism such as Zen allow for sudden, short-lived “Aha!” experiences of enlightenment in which one achieves a state comparable to nirvana, realizes that all living existence is identical with the Buddha, and even becomes one with the Buddha himself. But the general Buddhist conception of human development is that getting rid of the idea of a self is a gradual process, sometimes referred to as an “unraveling.” Living a solitary life of meditation and asceticism, plus doing certain selfless acts, produces good karma, generating a better future life and eventually total liberation from desire, i.e., nirvana itself.

Socrates and Plato

The enlightenment that the young Buddha enjoyed under the Bodhi tree was apparently a rich and positive experience for him, but as just noted the descriptions and prescriptions passed down in the Buddhist tradition for the ascent to enlightenment are aimed at the very thing that must be denied, the idea of the self. To this extent, the cognitive component of human development as conceived in Buddhism is an essentially negative type of knowledge. For Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.) and Plato (428-347 B.C.E) however,[5] the ascent to enlightenment did not involve any special knowledge of the self, either positive or negative, but rather knowledge of the ideal Forms and, at the highest stage of human development, knowledge of the Good.

The doctrine of the ideal forms was developed by Plato in different ways throughout his various dialogues, but one of the most famous is his analogy of the Divided Line (Republic, 510-11), as shown in Figure 1.[6] Imagine, he said to his disciples, a line that is divided into two unequal parts, one corresponding to the visible world of sense perception and the other corresponding to the invisible world of intellectual knowledge. Then imagine each of these segments being divided into two similarly unequal parts, corresponding in the first case to material things and pictures or other sorts of images of those things, and in the second case to the highest forms such as goodness and justice and the somewhat lower forms that are, in effect, concepts corresponding to the material objects we perceive.

Figure 1. The Divided Line

Ways of Knowing / Objects of Knowledge
INTELLECTUAL
THOUGHT / Direct knowledge (episteme) / The Good, the higher forms / THE
FORMS
Rational thought (dianoia) / Mathematical concepts, the lower forms
PERCEPTION / Direct perception (pistis) / Physical objects / SENSIBLE
OBJECTS
Seeing images (eikasia) / Images of physical objects

As the diagram shows, the two middle segments are equal.[7] Plato, himself no mean mathematician, apparently regarded this numerical equality as symbolic in its own right, pointing to the close if not isomorphic semiotic relationship between physical things and the concepts we have of those things. To put the point in stage developmental terms, in the course of intellectual development our ascent through the stages of knowledge becomes increasingly difficult. We pass with relative ease through the lower portions of Plato’s line, i.e., from our perceptions of images and physical things to the knowledge of their formal concepts, but we pass with relative difficulty through the higher portions, i.e., to the understanding of the higher forms corresponding to those concepts. For Plato there is no great mystery here. It seemed self-evident that we readily recognize a physical object by looking at a picture of it (the first movement, from perceptual image to the physical thing it represents) and need only a little stimulation – modeled in the exchanges between Socrates and his interlocutors – to move on from there to the general idea of the object. However, what was not at all self-evident for Plato is the reason why these early passages are easy and the later passages, while not easy, are nonetheless pursued with passionate intensity. The dynamics of the ascent had yet to be explained.

Knowledge and love of the Good. His eventual explanation, which was to be replaced later by Aristotle’s notion of final causality as a property of individual entities, was that the world as a whole has a goal or telos, and that this cosmic teleology is derived from an external source. In Plato’s late dialogue the Timaeus he identified this source as a transcendent but benevolent “divine craftsman” or dêmiourgos, who lovingly imposes an intellectually rich mathematical order on a preexisting flux and thereby transforms chaos into cosmos. This account, which was foreshadowed in early and middle dialogues such as the Republic, Phaedo, and Philebus, fused the concepts of divine benevolence, cosmic order, intellectual comeliness, and striving of all sorts – especially the striving of human beings toward cognitive, moral, and religious excellence. Although there are always conflicting interpretations of the relationships between Platonic dialogues, many of today’s most prominent scholars associate the idea of a cosmic teleology developed in the Timaeus with the idea of the Form of the Good that he introduced in the Republic but never developed.

In a nutshell, Plato’s thesis had two parts: (1) because it is the highest form, the form of the Good is supremely intelligible, and (2) other forms participate in its goodness because they too are thoroughly intelligible albeit more limited in their referential range. Since even sensible things and images participate in the intelligibility of their respective forms (the tire on my car can be understood as representing, imperfectly, the idea of a perfect circle), they too have a derivative sort of goodness. Furthermore, something of the same sort also holds for the cognitions directed toward these forms and things: perceptual knowledge is good but intellectual knowledge is better. The movement from less to more adequate modes of thinking is, then, powered by the value-laden character of the hierarchy represented in the Divided Line. The ascent from the cave is based on a metaphysical dynamic.

Although the Good was the highest in a hierarchy of ideal Forms, it could be known indirectly in the course of knowing the lower Forms that reflect its goodness –indeed, one could even get a glimmer of the highest Form from the most banal perceptual experience. This idea is not as arcane or counterintuitive as it might first seem. We use lofty ceremonial language to commend saints and heroes for their goodness, but we also smack our lips after eating a hot dog and say, quite unceremoniously, "Mmm, that was good!" Banalities such as the hot dog commendation have been the subject of language-analytic theorizing by metaethical philosophers since G.E. Moore, but they also illustrate something important about Plato's original theory of the forms. In our lived experience the theoretical distinction between knowing and willing regularly disappears. In ordinary, nonproblematic circumstances – say on a perfect day at the stadium when the home team is winning and lunch was a very long time ago – to see or smell a hot dog cooking on the grill is by that very fact to want it. In other words, the hot dog is perceived as desirable or, as Plato would say, it is apprehended "under the form of the Good."

If this way of thinking applies to our perceptual experience of hot dogs it should be no surprise that it also applies to less humble forms of cognition. Christian philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas have hypothesized that the beatific vision enjoyed by the saints in heaven is at once a face-to-face knowledge of God and a perfect loving union with him. And theorists of human development have said the same thing about knowledge of the Good qua moral, which is to say the ideal Form of Justice: to know it is to choose it. Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg are examples of this sort of moral cognitivism.[8] The philosopher William Frankena is another. In his classical article on metaethical internalism, he argued that the very locution “X is the good [or right] thing to do” entails a motivational claim on the part of the speaker that he or she is at least somewhat inclined to do X” (Frankena, 1958; see also Wren, 1991).

But neither contemporary cognitivists nor ancient Platonists ever thought that it is easy to attain a direct, internally motivating vision of the moral Good qua moral. Piaget and Kohlberg postulated a series of logically structured stages through which one must pass on the way to the complete fusion of moral knowledge and moral virtue. Plato, on the other hand, simply told a story, his famous Allegory of the Cave. The allegory makes the same points that he laid out in his Divided Line analogy, but this time as a narrative. A group of prisoners have been chained together since birth and only see shadows on the wall in front of them, cast by a fire behind them against crude two-dimensional replicas of things in the outside world, which of course the prisoners have never seen nor even imagined to exist. One of the prisoners is dragged outside the cave where, after becoming accustomed to the bright light of the real world, he attains true knowledge or what we might call the higher stages of Platonic cognitive development. He sees for the first time and with increasing acuity the really real things (here read: eternal truths) that were so poorly imaged in the cave. Eventually he also sees the Sun itself, which like the Good, is the source of all things. The story does not have a happy ending, though. He later returns to the cave, where he is reviled by the prisoners for his inability to predict the goings and comings of the shadows on the wall. As often happens with those who try to enlighten others, he is eventually killed.