Wolterstorff on the Virtue of Disagreement

Nicholas Wolterstorff's wonderful autobiography that I have been reading on and off, is filled, as expected, with nuggets of deep insights. As when he reminds us that

the ability to separate person from argument is essential to my profession of philosophy. Philosophy lives on disagreement; consensus would kill it off. When I taught an introduction to philosophy course, it always almost turned out that there were a few students in the class have who have not acquired the ability to separate the person from the argument. Someone would say something in class discussion, another member of the class would disagree with what he or she had said, whereupon a look of dejection would cross the face of the first student, sometimes tears.

He goes on to tell how he took it as his mission to teach students to separate person from argument. As good an educational goal as any other!

PS: I remember early in my teaching career telling a student during a class that she was wrong, as in having "wrongly reasoned." I might have as well insulted her by derogatory namecalling, that's how my quite innocent retort was perceived.

The Craft of Living as "Technical" Knowledge

Thematically, this is a follow-up to the post “Straying Afield of Oneself.”

An essential part of this blog has been a repeated reflection, metacognition of sorts, on the activity practiced in this space. There is an intentional double-meaning to “practiced” as I intend it, referring both to the “production” of content and a type of “exercise” on myself. With all proper deference, I see such a double-meaning at work, for instance, in the Ecclesiastes and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. These authors produce meditations, and they meditate. Thus, to see their works merely as collections of inspirational sayings is to miss the point of it all. True, there are some good thoughts to be had in there, but it is the art of inscaping, the continual immersion into those essential axioms, that unlocks their power. Sustained growth and mindfulness rather than originality of thought carry the day here.

With that as a backdrop, I thought of sharing a quote from John Sellars’ The Art of Living. Sellars notes that

in the technical conception of philosophy, philosophy is conceived as an art (techne) directed towards the cultivation of an ideal disposition of the soul, a disposition that may be called excellence (arete) or wisdom (sophia). Thus one might say that the subject matter of this art is one’s soul (psyche) and its goal (telos) is to transform or to take care of one’s soul. The product (ergon) will be the transformed disposition of the soul, namely excellence or wisdom. This transformed disposition will… necessarily impact upon an individual’s behaviour, expressing itself in their actions. Alternatively, one might say that this art is concerned with one’s life (bios), that this is its subject matter, and that its goal is to transform one’s life. Thus one might say that the product of this art will be the actions (erga) that constitute one’s life, highlighting its status as a performative art (praktike techne) in which the performance itself is the product. This product conceived as an activity may be characterized variously as a good flow of life, as living well, and as well-being or happiness (eudaimonia).*

Rather than carrying the usual connotation of “specialized,” therefore, Sellar’s concept of “technical” knowledge tracks the word techne or craft. It is a type of knowledge that amounts to an acquisition of intellectual and moral skills through exercises such as clarification, repetition, restatement, and visualization for the purpose of appropriate action and the pursuit of the good life. (The fact that Christians insist on the necessity of divine intervention and aid on all these levels does not take away from the structure of “technical” knowledge.)

With that in mind, I aspire to an act of blogging—I am looping back here to the opening paragraph—as a type of self-styling, a crafting of self in view of my core identity values: surrender, essentialism, attentiveness, life-affirmation, equanimity, self-control, integrity, mind-growth, wholeness, and love. And while I would love for people to find at least some of the content useful—what blogger wouldn’t?—there is something intrinsically valuable in such an act of written self-articulation and accountability. “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on….”

*For the purposes of the blog post, I have taken the liberty of inserting simplified transliterations of the Greek terms. I have also left out some Greek words. Click here to see the original quote with all references intact.

"Straying Afield of Oneself"—Foucault and the Craft of Living

Let me begin with a few words from Michel Foucault’s The Uses of Pleasure:

As for what motivated me, it is quite simple…. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?… What is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself?… The essay—which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes… is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an “ascesis,” askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.

There are many moving balls here, but what strikes me as deeply pertinent is his definition of philosophy as a type of askesis, “an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought”; a motto of the Craft of Living blog. More than simply striving to be informative, the posts are “athletic” feats of sorts, a type of spiritual calisthenics in the form of probing, experimenting, crafting, and holding myself accountable. They are implicit attempts to work on myself as myself, or, the appropriate Foucault’s gratifying turn of phrase, to foster the “knower’s straying afield of himself.”

I won’t go into what all that Foucault is after here, except to note his correct assumption that true philosophy amounts to a craft, an art of letting go of the self; the illusionary, obstinate, narcissistic, false, incongruous, lazy, bored self. A genuine Christian philosophy will, of course, understand such self-renunciation—the “I no longer live” aspect—entirely in christological terms.