Love of All Wisdom

I wanted to link here to a wonderful post I just found on Livejournal, though it appears to be a couple months old. The author, an artist, has written eloquently on something I’ve been finding vitally important but had not yet managed express. Namely, there is a concept missing in our vocabulary about work: we have a serious blind spot for what is between “career” and “hobby.” A career is what you do for money; anything you don’t do for money, gets relegated to the status of an indulgent pastime, a mildly pleasant but unserious way to while away the hours until your real work begins anew.

There’s a hidden, and I think pernicious, assumption underlying such a dualism: that anything not done for money is just not that serious. Feminists have rightly criticized the effects of such an assumption when it comes to childrearing and homemaking; but I think we’ve yet to seriously think about its effects for other kinds of unpaid work.

I do not plan on this blog ever making me any money. Nor do I plan on it advancing my academic career. If either of those happens, great. But those are not the point; I feel an inner drive to do a kind of writing that I can’t make money off of, and that’s more important to me than the kind of writing that does pay. This is something central to my life, and it makes no sense to relegate that to the category of “hobby.”

The original post’s author (who goes by the alias haikujaguar) suggests that we should refer to our meaningful unpaid work with the honourable names of “vocation” and “calling.” I’m less certain about this, because for so long these terms have had the connotation of paid work. The term “calling” comes from the German Beruf, which now simply means paid work. (Was sind sie von Beruf? is German for “What’s your job?”) (continue reading…)

What is the source of bad action, the root of our doing wrong or being worse than we should? I’m currently reading Iris Murdoch’s dense and rich Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, in which she most frequently identifies this source with ego. Attachment to ourselves is what makes us do wrong. The view has fairly obvious Buddhist affinities. Suffering, we are told in the Pali Buddhist texts, comes from craving and ignorance; this craving is often specifically identified with craving for selfish things, ignorance with belief in a really existing self or ego. Śāntideva states the view most explicitly: if we knew what the self really was, we wouldn’t act in selfish ways, and then we’d be the bodhisattvas we should be.

There is something I find worrisome about this position – something I think Ken Wilber has managed to catch. It relates to a point I made in a previous entry: that it can be wrong to avoid insisting on what is rightfully yours. Sometimes, it seems to me, we act wrongly because we are not egoistic enough. Again, sociological evidence seems to indicate women typically have this problem more than men; but men are far from immune to it.

Wilber catches this point through the generally developmentalist thrust of his philosophy: awakening proceeds in stages. First we must build a healthy ego for ourselves; only then can we transcend it. Wilber refers in this light to the “pre-trans fallacy”: someone who has not developed proper ego boundaries seems a lot like someone who has transcended them, because neither have strong egos; but that does not mean the two are the same. Something like Śāntideva’s meditation on the exchange of self and other – designed to break down a sense of ego and identify ourselves with other people – seems very much like a “snake wrongly grasped” if it falls into the hands of the meek and servile.

Aristotle is well known for saying that virtue is a mean between two bad extremes: learning to live well is like learning to hit a target with an arrow, neither too high nor too low. Such an account seems sensible, even obvious, when it comes to virtues like courage. Too little courage makes one a coward; too much makes one foolhardy, taking unnecessary risks. Virtue here seems clearly in the middle.

But what about justice? Aristotle thought that this too was a mean. If we demand more than we deserve, we are greedy; fair enough. But what if we demand less than we deserve? Aristotle thought that this too was a vice. But isn’t it a good thing to be nice and generous in this way? The Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius certainly thought so, and therefore disagreed with Aristotle. The essence of justice, said Grotius, “lies in abstaining from that which belongs to another.” Grotius’s claim moved society away from an understanding of justice based on virtue, and toward one based on law.

I think, however, that Aristotle is smarter than Grotius gives him credit for, in a way that has significant implications. If one asks for too much, Aristotle tells us, one commits injustice; but if one asks for too little, one suffers injustice, and both, in their way, are serious wrongs. It is unjust to refuse to stand up for yourself, to allow others to walk all over you.

The point is particularly important in an age where women are struggling for equality. The vice of submissiveness or meekness, of not asking for enough, is probably more prevalent in women than men. Sociological works like Women Don’t Ask note that gender wage gaps often arise because women don’t feel entitled to their fair share. Aristotle’s view is empowering.