What is Happiness? - Purposes of College Education, Lecture 2

Welcome back everyone. Uh today we're going to talk about the question of uh what is happiness and how it relates to virtue and and ultimately justice and to the theme of character. The first section of the class as I mentioned last time is going to be devoted to the question of character. How might college change who you are and how you live? And we're going to look primarily at what Plato has to say about this, but we're going to cover a few other thinkers as well. [music] [music] Uh the ancient Greeks uh in particular the philosopher Heracitis had a saying, a man's character is his fate. Ethos is character anthropo of a man really of a person that's genderneutral and don is fate but it's also the demon who uh um sort of looks over you during your life like the guardian angel almost. Uh and this in a sense goes both ways. A man's character is his fate could say the kind of person you are is going to result in the kind of life you're going to live. But there's in Greek it doesn't really matter which direction you say it in. So in a sense it could be that a man's fate is his character and there's some sense in which the character is something that develops along with you throughout your life and that's a theme we'll see um in Aristotle and Plato and and also perhaps a little bit in um Confucious. This is a painting that Raphael the Italian Renaissance painter painted in the early 16th century of Heracitis as part of his of Raphael's painting of the school of Athens in the Vatican. But his model for it was Michelangelo. So the the features are those of Michelangelo, but he's representing um Heracitis and Heracitis was one of those prescratic philosophers known mainly for fragmentaryary sayings that we hear that he had. One of them is everything flows and you don't step into the same river twice. That's probably one that you've heard. uh and Heracitis had a lot of emphasis on change on the on on the fact that one fundamental feature of experience is change. So today some of you will have been at my first year lectures uh either this past week uh at the first year assemblies or the or last year in which I touched on some of the themes I'm going to talk about today but I'm going to go into a little bit more detail. Apologies for those for whom you've heard some of the material, but hopefully you'll understand what I was trying to get at a little better. U the theme really of the course uh but particularly of the first few weeks is how should we live? How do we decide how to live? And I'm going to introduce that theme by talking about the sociologist Max Vber and some of his observations about university education that are quite relevant to the course. Um and then we're going to look at two ancient philosophers on the nature of virtue and happiness. Aristotle with his notion of flourishing or happiness. Udimmonia connected to the word demon in in the uh or fate in uh the quotation from Heracitis. Confucious and his idea of benevolence as one of the essential human traits. Um Confucious lived about a century before Aristotle but had a lot in common with him. And then I'm going to end the session with a reading of um Henley's poem Invictus which I also read at the assembly last week. So it's an encore for those of you who are in the first year class or who are maybe parents or grandparents of people in the first year class. So as we start the character section of the um of the course uh I want to talk about what character means. As I said at the assembly, character is a somewhat controversial matter in education. Some people feel that for example, a lot of conservative critics will say that universities and schools don't do enough to build character. We don't tell students how to behave. We no longer focus in local parents the way that maybe we once did. We're not passing on appropriate moral values. On the other hand, some progressive critics will say that we are even if inadvertently passing on author authoritarian values or failing to critique the values of a society that they see as corrupt in one way or another or oppressive in one way or another. And the issue of character seems like a um almost a red herring to such critics. uh in particular I want to talk a little bit later on about the ch the connection between ethics and politics that is how do you live individually as a human being and to what extent is that determined by or embedded in or distinct from uh your political views but the Greek word for character is ethos uh we use that word all the time to mean sort of a an atmosphere or a culture or a set of beliefs it's also the word that Aristotle uses in his poetic to talk about the character in a play. So it all it can also mean the charact character in that sense. Um and one of the questions we'll see is whether character is something you're born with and that just evolves the way an oak evolves out of an acorn or whether in fact character is something that changes whether you can take personal active methods to improve your character. I won't talk too much this time about the uh University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth, but I mentioned her briefly last week and Dh Dr. Duckworth is well known for her theory of grit and she wrote a book about grit. She also wrote a PhD dissertation about grit and she has a whole character lab that is all focused on grit. And the notion of grit is the idea of character as the ability to keep with things and get it done. Why did I insist on my kids going to all those piano lessons even though neither of them talented though they are can play shopan now that they're grown-ups? Well, there's some sense that like just the sticking to it and doing the thing gives you a grit and an ability to keep working. Maybe that's an upper middle class notion of grit. There's also the grit of like getting it done despite all the difficult circumstances that you face which we'll see a little bit in the poem Invictus at the end of the um of the uh lecture today. But the notion of uh character as grit I think is only one and maybe one particularly middle class 21st century capitalist version of a notion of character. I don't say capitalism in a negative sense. I don't see 21st century in a negative sense, but it's one that focus on self uh regulation, executive function, the ability to get things done, the ability to overcome obstacles. It's about achieving what you want to achieve. And it doesn't necessarily question what achievement is or what the goal of that achievement is. um in a different way. I think Aristotle and Confucious are also interest are interested in different elements of character less connected to grit also very much notions specific to their historical time but I think still relevant to us. So something that we're going to go a little bit beyond this notion of grid. Um and I I think I mentioned last week last session on Wednesday also the fact that we don't know it it is arguable when character changes. Again, I my children may or may not watch this on video, so they may or may not be annoyed with me for saying it, but you know, there's some sense that any of you who are parents or siblings may have that uh you kind of know the kids' character from very early in life, right? They were behaving that way already in the crib or in year one or year two and everything else that comes later just seems like a confirmation of that. There are also ways though in which people seem to change over time and neuroscientists tell us that an important time for these changes is between roughly 18 and 25 when we still have this so-called neuroplasticity. Um that's a kind of a scientific question. There's also an ethical or normative question. How should character be changed? Should it be the job of universities which after all are very engaged in research and science and humanistic scholarship and so on to also address moral character or is really moral character out of the question to some extent for for the university? Or if it is part of what the university does, is it really to be done by the professors who after all are chosen for their expertise in particular disciplines or should it be done perhaps by student life folks or people among the professors who are selected for being the ones who are most pastoral in their approach. I mentioned last time that my that um my predecessors who would have been teaching this course 200 years ago were all ministers up until about the middle of the 19th century. Almost everyone on the L faculty was a minister. I think I failed to mention that my greatgrandfather, the the father of those little kids in the sailor suits that you saw last time, was also a minister, an Anglican minister, what in the US is called an Episcopalian minister, a minister in the Church of England. And I do think sometimes that we as academics getting to lecture to people particularly when we have such a wonderful venue to do it in uh might get ourselves confused with ministers or there might be a question to what extent are we continuing the pastoral work that once upon a time was conducted more by ministers to what extent uh are we here to import moral values. So this was the kind of thing that really interested Max Vber. Vber is uh the father of modern sociology, a German philos a German thinker interested in economic history who essentially invented sociology along with Durkheim who was a French contemporary of his. Uh and during the first world war he was a fairly conservative nationalist conservative veering over to liberal at times and he became more liberal over time. At the end of the first world war as he saw Germany being defeated he gave two very famous speeches about the nature of modern um professional life. Uh one is called science as a vocation or scholarship as a vocation. These were speeches he gave to graduate students. Um and the other is called politics as a vocation. And in those two he sort of asks what are the conditions of our activity as in as modern academics in the university system and the nation state system that we all inhabit. Admittedly the system he inhabited in 1918 was not identical to the one we inhabit now and obviously he was in a country that was on the verge of being defeated in a war and his was not a democracy. Nonetheless, a lot of the themes that he raises remain very relevant for the role of education in the research university today. So one thing says in the uh sciences of vocation and we may read a little bit more of these uh later in the semester he misques Toltoy in an interesting way and I've spent a good amount of time trying to figure out where Toltoy said this and I found that there are articles unfortunately they're written in German so they're a little more challenging explaining how he came up with this paraphrase of Toltoy but the paraphrase of Toltoy is science is meaningless because it has no answer to the only questions that matter to us. what should we do? How should we live? Now, Vber is not necessarily endorsing this point of view of Toltoys, but he's calling attention to a distinction that Toltoy makes u or let's say a distinction upon which Toltoy relies and that Vber makes much more explicitly between facts and values or we sometimes say in the social sciences between positive and normative claims. positive claims and positive is used in different ways in lots of other places as is normative. I'm going to just explain the use in the social sciences. Positive means a claim about the way things are the way about the is it is that way. Science describes things the way that they are aims to describe the things the way that they are. And you can't ask should it be that way. If you if you show that through science that evolution is how organs came to be the way that they are, it's not a question of should it be. It's a question of is it? What's the proof for that? and how can you describe it? But normative questions sometimes get pushed to the side or harder to answer in the context of a university or more broadly than just the university of an entire scientific and industrial revolution in which we try and answer questions on the basis of fact and science and reproducibility. It's very hard what what scientific argument would be sufficient to tell you that uh things should be one way or the other that you should go to church on Sunday that in his example Germany should be a democracy or not be a democracy a political scientist might study the ways that democracies develop and might tell you some of the weaknesses and the strengths but ultimately it's not for the political scientist to tell us what form of government is best at least that's the view of a lot of modern social science and it's debated but That distinction between fact and value is key here. And then normative, we sometimes hear the word normative used in the sense of uh the mainstream or the assumed, the white male etc. Um normative in this sense means instead making a statement about norms about what is right or wrong. In other words, it is good or it is bad. It is right to believe in God or it is wrong to believe in God. It is right to cheat on your taxes or it's wrong to cheat on your taxes. Those are normative questions. And what Vber is saying here is that science cannot answer normative questions. It cannot tell you how you should live. It cannot tell you what you should do. Those are questions involving the should or the ought. So this is the is ought distinction. So what instead can university teachers do? And Vber makes I think a very good case. It's a very long essay. So we'll see if if people want to read it or not. We'll have some optionality to that. He makes a very good case that the job of university professors is to force the individual or at least help the individual to give himself or herself an account of the ultimate meaning of his own conduct. Now this is a very interesting sentence. He's not saying he well first of all he says we're going to force you to do it and then he sort of backs away from that and says well at least we can help you to do it. So first of all the individual coming to the professor has to want to do this to some extent. I can't really force anybody to go home and give yourselves an account of the ultimate meaning of your conduct. Uh but also that concept of the ultimate meaning is a is a striking one in an academic setting. How much of the time do we talk about ultimate meanings? That's why I was kind of both surprised and delighted and a little bit nervous about giving these lectures here in the chapel. Uh for the most part, academia is about describing the way things are and trying to describe them accurately. It's less about meaning. Why is it that way? There are passages in Virginia Wolf where she talks where she in to the lighthouse where the artist Lily Brisco says uh what is the meaning of life and then retracts the question because there is no answer perhaps at least that's one view very common modernist view from around the same period as Vber in the early 20th century that there is no answer to the ultimate meaning of life or the ultimate meaning of our conduct. But the point that Vber is making is that he wants to insist that we ask you, particularly those of you at the back of the room, the students, to give an account of that. But as I get older, I also occur, it occurs to me that when I stop doing all of this and have more time on my hands, I may also have to give myself an an account of the ultimate meaning of my conduct. I'm pushing that off for a little bit while for for now. Um, okay. So, facts and values. So vber in keeping with the modern social sciences in fact as as one of the people who establishes the modern social sciences makes a sharp distinction between what is and what ought to be and science is primarily making claims about facts or describing the world as it is. Um, when we look back to our classical writers, they're not making such a sharp distinction. And we see this in all kinds of current debates. Like the debate about transgender identity, for example, is one where people will say, well, is it a scientific fact that there are two genders or that there more than two genders or that there are in between or non-binary forms of gender? But they're not very often that apparently uh scientific claim is also a normative claim. The person who says there are only two genders is saying people shouldn't be non-binary. The people who says there are multiple genders are saying that it's okay to affirm that. And so the distinction between is and odd breaks down a lot in our contemporary culture. And yet it's really very present in scholarship and science and what drives um the university. And then I also wanted to relatedly say this is all about why the reason I'm giving you all this is why are Aristotle and Confucious different from 20th and 21st century thinkers. uh it's to help us get outside of our own assumptions and more into into the mind frame of the ancient world. So that in contrast to some of the ancient philosophers that we're about to study, uh when we talk about character, we tend to emphasize autonomy, the ability to make a decision for yourself. And that's a relatively under underweighted thing. I wouldn't say it doesn't exist because there's a notion of freedom in a lot of our ancient thinkers, but it's a little bit less crucial that you make these decisions on your own in these uh in the thinkers we're going to encounter. And so we have to be aware of that. We're going to come up, this is going to come up a little bit more later in the course. Um but for our own modern context, we want to think about autonomy. That is to say, the choices you are making to decide what kind of character you want to have, the choices you're making to decide what kind of life you want to lead. And so I think I said this last time um I've just slightly rephrased it that for the undergraduates in the room, I want you to think of your time at Yale as an opportunity to think about what it means to lead a responsible life. That does not mean you have to spend every waking moment doing that. It's just like a side assignment, but a very important side assignment in a sense or an underlying assignment behind everything else you're doing. And for others who are here, I hope that this is an opportunity to reflect on the shapes of our lives together. And then just to finish this sort of introduction to the theme of character, I want to touch on the notion of happiness. And the title of this lecture is what is happiness? Um, we're I'm going to mostly focus on what Aristotle and Confucious have to say about happiness, but I want to call attention to certain key themes. We all know that we want to be happy, but what exactly does that mean? In fact, my colleague Lori Santos in the psychology department offered the most popular course in all of history on the pursuit of on the psychology of happiness on how to be happy. But the meaning of happiness itself is um complex. So on the one hand, there's the mental state of feeling pleasure. How do you feel? How would you rate how happy you are right now? But what we'll see in the thinkers we're looking at this next couple of weeks is a more objective notion not so much about how you feel although I think they would all say that you will feel happy if you live this way but rather about a notion of flourishing again what Aristotle calls udeimmonial we'll come back to that um having a good fate we see a version of this concept of happiness in the declaration of independence life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that doesn't just mean like being having fun all the time, going to the bar, etc. It means some broader kind of happiness, although it's closely connected to property in the 18th century. The philosophers we're thinking at looking at are thinking about it as udeimmonia, having a good fate. And we're going to look at virtue. Now, to some extent in modern life, we might think of virtue as something that might even be at odds with happiness. Like the thing that makes me happiest might be eating a lot of chocolate cake, watching bad movies, or doing something worse than either of those that is not virtuous. But for the the Greeks and also for Confucious, a true a truer kind of happiness is one that involves leading a virtuous life. Their virtuous life though is not defined quite the way we do. And I think the fact that they're not really influenced by the Bible, by Judaism or Christianity or monotheism is connected to this. There's no not necessarily a thou shalt notion of virtue. We think of virtue is like don't do the thing you shouldn't do. Uh theirs is a more positive idea of virtue as flourishing and being excellent in some particular area. And I think their view is mostly uh secular although we'll see moments in which it becomes a little bit more religious. Okay. So now to the main content Aristotle. Aristotle was 44 years younger than Plato. Socrates had died before Aristotle was born. Um he was Plato's student at the academy in Athens. Plato was already middle-aged by this time and later on Alexander was the tu sorry Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander the great uh Alexander the great of course was a conqueror of Athens and was not a democrat so like the other philosophers we're encountering not necessarily a democrat he created his own school the lysum um and he taught many of the most important concepts in philosophy they come down to us often in the notebooks that his students uh collected and edited after his life. One of his students was his son Nikcomicus. And what we're talking about today are the Nikcomian ethics or Nikomakian ethics. I always have a hard time pronouncing that, but anyway, which are here. This translation is very good. I'm annoyed with Oxford and Penguin because they tend to change their additions every few years, but if you can get this particular translation in commentary, it's a good one. And then we'll look a little bit later at Confucious's the analytes. There's an introductory comment in the Aristotle by uh an introduction by a philosopher at Oxford named Leslie Moore I think and there's a translation and introduction to Confucious by our colleague Anping Chin um in the Penguin. So I highly recommend and Ping's version. Um what we're going to see in the next few weeks is a notion of virtue or excellence or happiness that's connected to the role of the agent, the person doing the action. It's not about is the way I'm acting the right way. Am I sorry, it's not about is the action I'm undertaking the right action necessarily or at least that's not the primary concern. The primary concern is instead what does it take to be a good person and the argument from that is that to be a good person will mean that your actions will be good. I'll explain more about this as well in a moment. So in other versions of the course we dive a lot deeper into Aristotle and Confucious but because I wanted to focus a lot on Plato I'm basically introducing them now to give us this question what is virtue what is excellence and how does it make us happy. So Aristotle says in the nicomeckin ethics, what is the highest of all goods achievable by action? And he says that both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness which means living well and fairing well. But he says everybody disagrees about what is meant by happiness. And most people think that it is pleasure, wealth, or honor. I'm tempted to take a vote, but I won't do that because I have another audience participation thing in a moment. So, the first of these is pleasure. To judge from the lives that most men lead, most men seem to identify the good or happiness with pleasure, which is the reason they love the life of enjoyment. So, for example, sex, uh, food, TV, video games, maybe alcohol or drugs. All things that probably are okay, some of them, some of those things are okay in a little in small amounts, but that overall will cause you trouble in the long run. But this is the kind of way that people, he thinks people spend most of their time. But he says there's another group of people of superior refinement and of active disposition who identify happiness with honor which is the end of the political life. Now you have to understand that Greek ancient Greek society was very much focused on politics and on the role of the city and particularly in Athens. And so for Aristotle, higher than mere pleasure was the honor of participating in politics, holding office, speaking in the in the court, speaking at the legislature, having a um being being respected and honored in that way. But then he goes on to say there's something more than honor, which is virtue. We might even suppose he says virtue rather than honor to be the end of the political life. How would we distinguish virtue and honor? Honor seems like something a little bit more external. Honor is some is a case where people think highly of you and you get your pleasure from the fact that people think highly of you. Virtue seems to be of a more internal or objective nature. I feel virtuous or I am virtuous. Maybe the gods know that I'm virtuous. It doesn't essentially depend as much on reputation as honor does. Then he says third comes the contemplative life and he says we're going to consider it later. So I'm going to give you a spoiler alert for Aristotle. In the end, he thinks the contemplative life is best of all, which is very suitable to philosophers and we academics like the idea that the contemplative life is best of all, but it was is probably not the the majority view. I would say the majority view is more in favor of honor or virtue. Finally, he says wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. And I mentioned this is a pre-c capitalapitalist society but even today we have this question to what extent should we build up wealth what and what's the virtue of wealth in itself. There are people who think wealth is just a bad thing you know because it's ultimately theft as Rouso says uh there are people who think that you should have a moderate amount of wealth but we have to recognize that in our society capitalist society there is a kind of built-in dynamic that encourages us to just build our wealth more and more. This was another theme of v of vberers in his Protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism. And I think one of the things vber says is that there used to be a taboo against building up too much wealth. Like it just was not considered a good thing in ancient societies. I guess now again today we see where there's some taboo on it. But the notion that what you're supposed to do with your time and energy is build wealth and that you're going to use that wealth um for the various kinds of pleasures. It's sometimes seems to become an end in itself but it's very important to Aristotle that wealth is not an end in itself but only a way to get to one of these other things and uh we'll focus now on virtue a few key words of Aristotles in this regard I mentioned Paul politics or polace life in the in the polace which is the city state character or ethos and ethics is the philosophy of character how should one behave It's closely linked to politics. And here we come to this question of the personal is political. To what extent is a decision I make about how to behave connected to broader political themes? To what extent is it just a personal decision? To what extent must I take into consideration my political views or the political situation of the day in making each ethical decision? These kinds of things will come up over the next few weeks. I've talked about happiness or flourishing. And I want to just say one more thing about virtue or excellence. I mentioned the thou shalt notion of virtue. Virtue the original word mean meant manliness in Latin. Virtue something that a man possessed. But we often think of it in modern culture in a sort of an almost feminine way preserving your virtue. Virtue as something having to do with sexual purity and so on. And when I say feminine in this regard, I I recognize that I'm talking about stereotypes. But there is a stereotype in mo in modern society that virtue is a feminine thing. Um, arete likewise has a sort of a masculine theme to it. But what ver what Aristotle means by virtue is not so much resisting temptation as excelling at what you do. And virtue ethics is the modern name for the type of ethical system that is focused on the agent's moral characteristics. That is to say, the kind of person that you want to become. Okay. And now we're going to do a couple of deeper dives into Aristotle and then Confucious. And then I have a a little task for you. So Aristotle lists a number of virtues. The first of which is courage. Again, this is a masculine oriented virtue called Andrea in Greek, which means manliness. Um and for every virtue Aristotle says a little bit different from us we often think the opposite of ver of virtue is a vice for every virtue Aristotle says there is an excess of it and there's also a def deficiency of it so the deficiency of courage obviously is cowardice that's the wrong amount of courage not enough but on the other end there's something that's called too much courage the excess of courage which he calls rashness running into battle when you shouldn't doing things that are dangerous because you're trying to show off your courage. And for every virtue, Aristotle says there's a mean, meaning um not an average in our modern sense, but just a point in between the two that you want to be at. So some of his others are relatively familiar. Temperance, not drinking too much, not ex not excessively indulging your preferences. Liberality, which is being generous towards other people. A little bit more surprising is magnificence. He's focusing in mag in magnificence on big you have to remember the context that Aristotle is a wealthy citizen of Athens and he's mostly speaking to other wealthy citizens of Athens. Magnificent is about good charitable acts and support of religion naming chapels after yourself giving large donations. So it's a bit of an odd virtue for us and oddest of all is pride which we think of as the opposite as as one of the sins. But pride is the appropriate sense of your own responsibility as a male Athenian citizen of means that you are behave that you behave in accordance with your status. And for each of these there's an opposite. First there are the deficiencies. Self-indulgence you're not tempered enough. You overdo it. Drink too much. Meanness you're ungenerous towards people. Miserliness. You don't perform your religious duties. Undue humility. you pretend or you you have a false modesty or you underestimate your own uh status and on the other end there are the excess of each one. Um insensibility is not enjoying pleasures at all. You have to have some pleasure in life. Being totally temperate would be too much. Prodigality is being so generous that you use up everything you've got. Vulgarity is excessively uh generous donations and so on. if you want to put your name on everything and everything has to be uh coated in gold and and so on. Uh vanity is pride, excessive pride. Um and then there are others that are a little bit more familiar to us. Good temper, which is sort of getting along well with people. Friendship, which he spends the most time on of all. And friendship is a very egalitarian kind of virtue. It's about getting along with people. But again, it should be noted that Aristotle is not a modern democrat. He's mostly talking about being uh getting along well with people of your own social status, that is other Athenian citizens. Truthfulness, which is pretty much present in most ethical systems, and ready wit, which is just being a good good company. And then the deficiencies of these are irassibility, getting angry too much, not being a fun person to hang around. um obseousness, which is when you uh I I heard the other day the expression, I'll use the British version of it, blow smoke up somebody's bum. Uh you know, like you're always trying to make people happy by uh by telling them how great they are. Uh boastfulness, uh which is oddly connected to truthfulness, but anyway, we'll we might come back to that. And buffoonery, which is the class clown. Okay, it's nice that you have a good sense of humor, but don't overdo it. I'm always confused about borishness and buffoonery, but [laughter] borishness, I think, is like not getting the joke in the first place. Right now, remember, you got to remember these are all English translators, so I'm they've all got these very British expressions, so we might find other ways to say this. Unarassability is a funny one. It's like when somebody's mean to you, you actually should stick up for yourself. If you're too unarassable, that's not a good idea. And churishness is the um uh churishness is an excess of friendship like treating everybody like they're your equal even when they're not. And then false modesty is another uh deficiency. So what we see in Aristotle is like these are the kinds of person you want to be. You can probably see from the list that they're while many of them still make sense to us today, a lot of them are a little bit time bound like they're specific to Athenian culture, 4th century BC citizens. They own property, they own slaves, they were not like working with their hands. Um, and yet many of these virtues are virtues that we would still recognize. What I like best about it, leaving aside the individual virtues, is the notion that virtue is not a thing where there's an opposite, which is a vice, but instead virtue is somewhere on a spectrum and you want to be not too much of a thing and not too little of it. Now, I want to turn to what Aristotle has to say about liberal education. Then I want to do a little bit of Confucious and then I do have an exercise for you. So Aristotle says here that the kinds of things that you should be learning, the people in his c class anyway, are the actions that are going to support virtue and in particular that he is not interested in wage earning kinds of work. He's not going to teach you any skills that are useful for earning a living, but instead the kind of learning that is useful for its own sake. Skipping ahead a little bit, I'm going to say that this notion of the liberal arts, which obviously has a kind of snobbishness to it, is to separate the arts that we teach in an academic setting from the purely money-making arts. And even though I think we are to some extent beyond that way of thinking, there's still a little bit of that built into the notion of the liberal arts today. like the liberal art and in fact the students might get criticized by family members. Why are you studying the liberal arts? Why don't you do something useful? What Aristotle is saying is the fact that it's not useful is actually one of the good things about it. You're doing it for its own sake and not for the sake of anything you can get out of it. So here are the classical liberal arts that um developed out of Aristotle. Um the quadriium were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. These are the things that having to do with numbers. And you can see that some of them have a certain usefulness like astronomy was useful for finding your way around. Um, and arithmetic and geometry can be used in all kinds of contexts, but they were sort of the essential learning. They weren't learning how to make things per se. They were kind of the more theoretical end of things. And the trivia and we humanities people are always annoyed by the fact that the word trivia comes from the trivium, which refers to the linguistic arts, um, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. These are not really studied exclusively for their own sake. In fact, we study these things in part for the sake of things we can do with them. They're useful tools to have, but they're also seen in the western tradition that really leads up to the founding of Yale as things that are essential for a gentleman to know, things that are connected to high class status. For example, music being a like my kids having to play the piano for all those years. it it's just part of having like a good education. And many people will say, well, why does all of that matter? Shouldn't we instead do things that are either going to earn us money or that are going to have more direct impact on the world? And built into our notion of a liberal education, the fact that actually some of these things are worth doing even on their own just for the sake of their own beauty or their own mystery or their own truth. I'm skipping why study classical writers and I'll try to come back to that because I want to give you a little sense of confucious. So Confucious lived about a hundred years before Aristotle and I think I quoted to you last time this passage in which he talks about the value of conversation. The key thing here I think is the notion that conversation and the ability to talk with other people is essential to understanding your humanity. It's a way of fulfilling your own humanity. This is Aningchin's commentary and you'll see that that Confucious's virtues have something in common with Aristotle's. He talks about humaness uh which is probably the central one which is something about integrity about being a person that you can rely on. He talks about fairness or righteousness which is a little bit like honesty or truthfulness. Ritual propriety is his version of magnificence. The Chinese notion of what it is to be proper in religion is quite different from the ancient Greek one but still there's an idea there. wisdom and trustworthiness which clearly are ones that some that uh Aristotle and Confucious have in common. I've done this little chart and I think that humaness and good temper are related, fairness and truthfulness, trustworthiness and friendship and both of them have wisdom. Whereas Aristotle uh Confucious has this emphasis on propriety that is to some extent missing from Aristotle maybe implicit in him and Aristotle has these other ones liberality, magnificence and pride all of which have to do with like largeness and grandness and being uh and display uh which are perhaps a little bit at odds with Confucious. Now, I'm very reluctant to draw from this some conclusion about Greek culture and Chinese culture because we're looking at just two thinkers who happen to be extremely influential on Greek and Chinese culture. But there is an interesting sort of thing where uh um in Confucious there tends to be an emphasis on what's correct and following authority and in Aristotle there's a little bit more of an emphasis on like an individualism or individual excellence and display. So that's just a thing there, but I don't want to overdo it because in fact they have more in common than they have different from one another. Confucious says um in an important passage and this is one that connects the liberal arts in in Asia with the liberal arts in the west that a gentleman is broad of spirit and intellectually agile. He can take on different problems and apply himself to many situations and so is not a vessel or aqi for a specific use. And interestingly in Chinese culture right up until like the late 19th century to get a place in the um state bureaucracy you had to pass a test on Confucious and the other great classical writers. So these liberal arts were in a sense the pre the prerequisite for having a job as a um civil servant which was a very high status job in China at the time. Likewise, Aristotle was the official philosopher of Europe up until the Middle Ages. And a knowledge of the liberal arts was considered an essential part, although it was to some extent the leisurely life of a gentleman, it was also an important part of being a citizen, a a civil servant if you had to write or or a priest in that you had to be able to write, you had to be able to do numbers and so on. So we see that the liberal arts in Europe and in the and the west had some quite a lot in common with the traditional six Chinese arts. Um writing of course in Chinese is particularly complicated because of the calligraphy. Mathematics was important to China as to the west and music too. Um archery and chariot charioteering do not appear on the curriculum of Yale College but perhaps they should. So, I'm going to ask everybody before you go to um over the weekend think about this little self- assessment thing. It's the following question. The first question I have for you, just note down the question and think about it over the weekend. Then we'll have a discussion of this at the beginning of next time. Um what are three virtues you feel you have at this moment? Are you magnificent? Are you liberal? Are you proper? But they also can be virtues that are not listed by Aristotle or Confucious. Okay. And then the next question I have for you is this is particularly for the students for those of us like 60ish or above. Let's just say over the next few decades because we aim to have many years ahead. But for the undergraduates my question is over the next few years what virtues would you like to develop and I'm going to end with Nelson Mandela. So, um, in my speech last week, I talked about Nelson Mandela, who spent 17, uh, sorry, 27 years of imprisonment, 18 of them on Robin Island. Um, and who apparently, and all of this has a little bit of a mythmaking element to it, recited to himself regularly and taught others this poem, Invictus or Undefeated. It's an interesting case. I'm an editor of an anthology. It's an interesting case of the power of uh literary anthologies because this poem is in the Oxford book of English verse and all across the Commonwealth or the British Empire at the time people had copies of the Oxford book of English verse. So I also read this book this poem when I was a kid and I hope it resonates with all of you and it's connected to the question of character as the ability to withstand the buffeting of circumstance. Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. Now, in the next couple of weeks, we're going to look at a variety of ways of looking at character. It's a Greek word as it comes down to us about to what extent can you shape your future. It was a very Victorian concept and Nelson Mandela obviously sort of drew on this of facing up to the fact that nature out there is in some ways hostile. And in his case it wasn't just nature it was the society he was living in. It was very hostile. How do you maintain your self-determination, your virtue, your excellence in the face of all of these bludgeonings of chance? Clearly, I hope none of us are going to be imprisoned for 20 plus years and none of us are likely to wind up doing what for our communities what Nelson Mandela did for South Africa. But the notion that character is about being able to face the challenges that you encounter and that you can become master of your fate, captain of your soul is one that I'd like us to come back to over the course of the semester. So before I dismiss everyone, I'll just remind students to please write in your journal about the purposes of college education and what is college for? And everybody, please come back to me next week and we'll start off by talking about the virtues we all think we might already possess or hope we might already possess and the virtues we plan to develop in the coming years. Thank you all for being here. >> [applause]