SEPT 6

2: SEP 6 - 1. Some classical ideas on H&W

Assigned

• Hall, C2 – “The Wisest Man in the World” (18)
• Labouvie-Vief, "Wisdom as Integrated Thought"(27)

In-class

• 1st Writing and Dropbox Practice

Hall, C2 – “The Wisest Man in the World”

• Socratic wisdom -- Chaerephon and the story from the Apology.

• Socratic wisdom -- Knowing that you do not know something. Awareness of ignorance, but also, by implication, of standards for knowing.
• Does Socrates behavior in the Apology, toward Meletus and his verdict, show wisdom or contempt?

• Axial Age Hypothesis, 23 -- for more on this, see the wiki page, "Axial Age"

• digress on cultural evolution -- maybe a better way to theorize this idea.

• Greek

• Heraclitus - wisdom in recognizing the "flux" of reality. Note contrast with Platonic/Socratic model - forms.
• Contrast between Pericles and Socrates, p. 28

• Pericles -- "civic wisdom" - Athenian model for decision making. Quasi-democratic. (Wise culture/ wise person)
• Socrates -- anti-body. renunciation of desire. p.29: Hall hints at the modern research on emotion and evolved responses. He might have said: Emotions are "epistemic".
• both selling "deliberation" as a virtue

• Confucius

• 6th century BC China - collapse of Zhou dynasty. Period of chaos and suffering.
• Characteristics of Confucian ideas of wisdom - concept of "gen," put above even wisdom. (gloss)
• By contrast with Plato, Confucian wisdom is practical, meant to guide life, recognizes primacy of emotion.
• Like Socrates, Confucious was not personally well-integrated into society.

• Buddha 563-483bc.

• slight corrective to Jaspers quote on 32. A bit old school
• "awakening" vs. "wisdom"

• Theological (divine wisdom) vs. Secular (practical wisdom)

• Hall makes the point that Christian thought re-emphasizes the distinction between "Sapientia" and "Scientia"
• Solomon's wisdom came in a dream from the divine. (More about him later.)
• Are models of divine wisdom at odds with secular views?

Labouvie-Vief, "Wisdom as Integrated Thought"

• Main ideas:

• Sees the modern resurgence of interest in wisdom as a way of counteracting the tendency to theorize cognition only in terms of objective forms. Contrasts "objective" vs. "organismic" (emotions, subjective, interpersonal) thought.
• Explores a historical thesis about the development of Greek culture from Homeric to the philosophical, that Homeric man was embedded in action in a way that Greek philosophy is not. On the other hand, philosophy opens up a split in consciousness that requires integration. Plato's anti-body philosophy needs to be surpassed.

• In her own work, she came to find Piaget as having an objectivist bias. (Similar to other critiques of pre-evolutionary psch. Haidt's "rationalist delusion".)

• Modes of Knowing

• Mythos and Logos - Her terms for a contrast she finds in Piaget, Freud, others. Oral - meaning derived from shared experience / Written - meaning disembedded from context. Ultimately in Homer vs. Plato/Socrates.

• Mythos - speech, narrative, plot, dialogue ::*Logos - gather, read, count reckon, explain, reason objectively. Deductive certainty.

• Her question: which of these is associated with mature (and by implication wise) thinking?

• Mental Models

• Birth of logos - Pythagoras, abstraction from matter. Associates it with rise of complex and larger societies. (Disgress with update on cultural evolution.) By contrast, Homeric thought shows "mythos"

• 58: "In the Homeric poems, there is little evidence for the self-consciousness typical of the modern person. The Homeric heroes do not engage in reflection but are embedded in action. Theirs is a concrete, sensory existence. It shows little evidence of the mental types of regulation mastered by the modern adult: impulse delay and monitoring and self-ownership of action and feeling (Onians, 1954). There is no language of a self different from its concrete actions and assets - a self as a permanent, persistent agent who authors its actions but is not identical with them. Indeed, there is no word at all, no specific designating concept, for the self, since "... no one in Homer thinks of himself, but rather engages in an interaction or dialogue, be it with another person, with a god, or with a part of himself (Simon, 1978, p. 72).

• 59: "By Plato's lifetime, a dramatic change in the language of the mind had occurred, and Plato's writings represent the culmination of a new way of speaking about the mature adult. For Plato, the adult is no longer embedded in a concrete, organic, and participatory reality. Rather, the new reality is one defined by a new function, psyche, variously translated as soul, mind, or spirit. Most of Plato's writing is concerned with delineating the new faculty that allows us to live in that new reality and with differentiating it from a reality of concrete sensory textures. "

• The dissociated mind

• Claims that Plato's model is limited bec. it focuses on mind over body, inner over outer...p. 60. Can a mature mind be described only in terms of logos?
• Mind without body, suspicion of imagination, identification of thought with the masculine (62)

• The reconnected mind

• The problem of the dissociated mind is address in the 18th-19th centuries during the Romantic era: Kant saw the problem, but later thinkers theorized a more "connected" mind, rejecting rationalism. Habermas is a positive example in 20th century.

• The Loss and Gain of Wisdom

• 70: cites evidence from developmental psych. younger vs. older adults: read.

• 71: "More mature adults, however, were able to create more symmetrical representations of self and other. They were able to accept responsibility for the conflict and to understand that the other is not necessarily motivated by malevolent intentions. Thus for anger, lack of maturity involved an overpolarization of self and other, whereas maturity brought a compensating ability to experience empathy and to maintain connectedness.

• 77: "The view of wisdom I am proposing, therefore, retains many of the elements significant in Plato's theory. It squarely rejects the position that the abstract and theoretical and the concrete and practical constitute incommensurable domains of mental functioning. Instead, it accepts the position that a theory of mind, self, and reason for better or worse also implies a prescription for how to conduct and evaluate one's life. The limits of the Platonic vision of wisdom as it has persisted through the ages derive, however, from the attempt to dissociate the two poles that are necessary to the evolution of wisdom. Hence, the objectivist Platonic vision proposes a concept of reason that rejects rational evaluation of elements deriving from one of these poles, mythos. Thereby it opens itself to profound irrationality. "

1st Writing and Dropbox practice

• Please write a 250 word maximum answer to the following question by September 11, 2023, 11:59pm. This assignment will give us some initial writing to look at and give you practice with the dropbox protocol for turning in pseudonymous writing in the course. For this assignment, the writing itself is ungraded, but you will receive 15 points for following the instructions accurately.

• Topic: Drawing on our class discussion and reading of Labouvie-Vief, what do you see as the main contrast she is trying to show? What would be some contemporary examples? Do you agree with her main claim about this contrast?

• Prompt Advice: While this is ungraded and informal writing which asks for your opening impressions, try to give your answer some organization and structure. Try to pay attention to word choice and sentence structure. I strongly encourage you to draft your answer the night before it is due and return to it on the night that it is due.

• Advice about collaboration: Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes, verbally. Collaboration is also a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs in the class. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

1. To assure anonymity, you must remove your name from the "author name" that you may have provided when you set up your word processing application. For instructions on removing your name from an Word or Google document, [click here].
2. Format your answer in double spaced text, in a typical 12 point font, and using normal margins. Do not add spaces between paragraphs, but do indent the first line of each paragraph.
3. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student ID number in the file. Always put a word count in the file. Save your file for this assignment with the name: Gossip.
4. To turn in your assignment, log into courses.alfino.org, click on the "#0 1st Writing and Dropbox practice" dropbox.
5. If you cannot meet a deadline, you must email me about your circumstances (unless you are having an emergency) before the deadline or you will lose points.