Ethics and Self-Cultivation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

247 Pages·2018·1.11 MB·English

by  Matthew Dennis

Ethics and Self- Cultivation
This book makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature
on the cultivation of virtue. It focuses on the influence of Hellenistic tradition,
with its emphasis on the continued development of the self, on modern
philosophy, and also includes a number of contemporary perspectives on moral
self- cultivation. The volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students
in moral philosophy, moral psychology, philosophy of mind and epistemology.
— Liezl van Zyl, University of Waikato, New Zealand
The aim of Ethics and Self- Cultivation is to establish and explore a new
‘cultivation of the self’ strand within contemporary moral philosophy. Although
the revival of virtue ethics has helped reintroduce the eudaimonic tradition
into mainstream philosophical debates, it has by and large been a revival of
Aristotelian ethics combined with a modern preoccupation with standards
for the moral rightness of actions. The essays comprising this volume offer a
fresh approach to the eudaimonic tradition: instead of conditions for rightness
of actions, they focus on conceptions of human life that are best for the one
living it. The first section looks at the Hellenistic schools and the way they
influenced modern thinkers like Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Hadot, and Foucault
in their thinking about self- cultivation. The second section offers contemporary
perspectives on ethical self- cultivation by drawing on work in moral psychology,
epistemology of self- knowledge, philosophy of mind, and meta- ethics.
Matthew Dennis is a doctoral researcher on the joint-P hD programme of
the universities of Warwick (UK) and Monash (Australia), specialising in
philosophical accounts of character-d evelopment and self-c ultivation. His
current work draws on French and German philosophy, exploring how these
traditions have the resources to contribute to debates in Anglophone ethics. He
has published on Nietzsche, Kant, and virtue theory, and is currently writing on
the philosophy of technology.
Sander Werkhoven is an Assistant Professor of Ethics at the Department of
Philosophy at Utrecht University and a member of the Ethics Institute. His
main research areas are the philosophy of medicine and psychiatry, normative
ethics, and meta-e thics. He has published on theories of health and well-b eing in
international journals, and has papers forthcoming on Nietzsche and Canguilhem.
Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory
Virtue’s Reasons
New Essays on Virtue, Character, and Reasons
Edited by Noell Birondo and S. Stewart Braun
In Defense of Moral Luck
Why Luck Often Affects Praiseworthiness and Blameworthiness
Robert J. Hartman
Risk, Technology, and Moral Emotions
Sabine Roeser
Wittgenstein’s Moral Theory
Edited by Rashef Agam- Segal and Edmund Dain
Welfare, Meaning and Worth
Aaron Smuts
Moral Skepticism
New Essays
Edited by Diego E. Machuca
Explaining Right and Wrong
A New Moral Pluralism and Its Implication
Benjamin Sachs
Determined by Reasons
A Competence Account of Acting for a Normative Reason
Susanne Mantel
Ethics and Self- Cultivation
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Edited by Matthew Dennis and Sander Werkhoven
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
Ethics and Self- Cultivation
Historical and Contemporary
Perspectives
Edited by Matthew Dennis and
Sander Werkhoven
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dennis, Matthew (Doctoral Researcher), editor.
Title: Ethics and self-cultivation : historical and contemporary
perspectives / edited by Matthew Dennis and Sander Werkhoven.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series:
Routledge studies in ethics and moral theory ; 45 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017061296 | ISBN 9781138104372 (hardback :
alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethics. | Virtue. | Philosophy—History. | Self (Philosophy)
Classification: LCC BJ21 .E856 2018 | DDC 170—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061296
ISBN: 978- 1- 138- 10437- 2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 315- 10226- 9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
ContentsContents
Preface vii
MICHAEL SLOTE
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
PART I
Historical Perspectives 13
1 Roman Stoic Mindfulness: An Ancient Technology of the Self 15
JOHN SELLARS
2 Affective Therapy: Spinoza’s Approach to Self- Cultivation 30
AURELIA ARMSTRONG
3 ‘Was I Just Lucky?’: Kant on Self- Opacity and Self- Cultivation 47
IRINA SCHUMSKI
4 Nietzsche and Kant on Epicurus and Self- Cultivation 68
KEITH ANSELL- PEARSON
5 Nietzsche’s Ethics of Self- Cultivation and Eternity 84
MICHAEL URE
6 Ilsetraut Hadot’s Seneca: Spiritual Direction and the
Transformation of the Other 104
MATTHEW SHARPE
7 Foucault, Stoicism, and Self- Mastery 124
KATRINA MITCHESON
vi Contents
Part II
Contemporary Perspectives 141
8 Neo- Aristotelianism: Virtue, Habituation, and Self- Cultivation 143
DAWA OMETTO AND ANNEMARIE KALIS
9 Formal Excellences and Familiar Excellences 162
EDWARD HARCOURT
10 Cultivating an Integrated Self 174
LUKE BRUNNING
11 Moral Perception and Relational Self- Cultivation:
Reassessing Attunement as a Virtue 197
ANNA BERGQVIST
Epilogue: Reflections on the Value of Self- Knowledge for
Self- Cultivation 222
QUASSIM CASSAM WITH THE EDITORS
Contributors 230
Index 233
Preface
PrefacePreface
This volume is a very welcome addition to the literature of ethics. Much
philosophical discussion of human development focuses on moral develop-
ment and tends to assume that this is largely or substantially a matter of
moral self- cultivation; but the editors of the present volume have deliber-
ately chosen a wider focus. Self- cultivation can not only include trying to
find a way toward a morally better or happier life for oneself, but can also
be a matter of seeking to develop certain non-m oral excellences in one-
self, and the essays of this volume attest widely and fully to these enlarged
possibilities.
Even if most of us ethicists are mainly interested in moral issues, we have
to acknowledge that there are important ethical issues beyond the moral
as well. But the very breadth and scope of this volume raises issues that
could not be addressed in a single collection. Perhaps the most important
such issue concerns a major difference between moral development and the
development of non- moral excellences and of the capacity for a happy life.
The desire for happiness comes more naturally to us than the desire to be
morally good to others; it runs deeper and is less in need of cultivation than
moral motives are. To be sure, and as Bishop Butler pointed out long ago,
many of us thwart our own happiness in various ways, but for most of us
the desire to lead a happy life is always there. So when we become convinced
that certain practices or efforts will serve to make us happier, our motiva-
tion doesn’t have to change in order for us to have some desire to implement
those practices or efforts. Similarly, with certain excellences. According to
much of the psychology literature, human beings are born with a strong
desire for mastery or competence. This means that when an adult or ado-
lescent learns of a way in which they can become more competent at some
skill they already to some degree possess, there is an antecedent motive for
making the relevant change.
Self- cultivation in such cases has a strong foothold in or on our basic
psychology, but morality seems different. To be sure, there are studies indi-
cating that 2- year- old children can have empathy for the needs of others and
can want to help people who need help. But when moral philosophers talk
about moral self- cultivation, they typically refer to ways in which maturing
viii Preface
or adult individuals can go beyond such beginnings, and this is problematic
for reasons that the self- cultivation of many excellences and the pursuit of
one’s own happiness are not. Those who recommend moral self- cultivation
assume, for example, that an individual who is not very (or sufficiently)
benevolent or virtuous can be motivated to try to become more benevolent
or virtuous, but it is not clear how such a desire for change can actually be
motivated. As David Nivison once wisely pointed out, the desire to become
more virtuous seems, paradoxically, to somehow involve already being the
more virtuous person one supposedly wishes to become.
Now Aristotelians who recommend moral self- cultivation often claim
that moral virtue is like a skill, something that practice can make perfect.
But a skill like reading is something that, given the desire for competence
(and for the esteem of others, another basic human desire), most children
will understandably want for themselves. So, for example, when they prac-
tice reading skills either on their own or with the help of teachers, their
underlying motivation doesn’t have to change. Memory and the nervous
system (roughly) cooperate with the effort to learn to read and help reading
emerge as a skill. But virtue is not a skill that one can withhold or make
use of as one wills; rather (and as Aristotle made clear) it is a disposition to
act in certain ways, and this kind of disposition depends on motivation. In
that case, when someone who is less virtuous becomes more virtuous, their
motivation has to change, and the theoretical question arises as to why any
individual on her or his own should be motivated to change their motivation
in the necessary way.
This then leads to a further question as to how, even assuming such moti-
vation to change one’s motivation, a child’s, adolescent’s, or adult’s efforts
could actually and practically realise the desired change. One sees a moral
exemplar and let’s say one wants to be like them. But how is this going to
work? Copying their actions doesn’t seem enough because the desire to copy
or emulate is not the same as the moral motivations of the exemplar that
one wishes to develop in oneself. How, exactly, do the morally admirable
motivations develop out of acts of imitation? Not enough attention has been
paid to such questions, and though I think limited moral self- cultivation can
sometimes occur, I don’t think moral self- cultivation can have the sweep-
ing influence for good that its advocates have believed possible (I argue
this point at greater length in Slote 2016).1 Which makes it all the more
interesting, from my point of view, to recognise and explore forms of ethical
self- cultivation that are not specifically moral and that may be less motiva-
tionally and implementationally problematic.
For example, the desire for a happy or fulfilling life seems to provide a good
basis for possible and possibly realistic ethical self- cultivation. Although cir-
cumstances can make such a life nearly impossible for one (I disagree with
the Stoics about this), there is still a lot one can do with intelligent planning,
self- discipline, and self-r eflection to improve one’s chances of happiness;
Preface ix
and here one is working with something more psychologically guaranteed
than one is when one speaks of moral self-d evelopment. Lots of people want
to have better, happier lives and try to do something about that, but almost
no ordinary person both wants to become morally better and makes deliber-
ate efforts to cause that to happen. The latter fact is one that the literature
of moral self- cultivation never faces squarely, but it is a fairly obvious fact,
once one thinks about it, and in my opinion it points toward what I have
been saying in this preface, namely, that there is something problematic
about moral self- cultivation that is not problematic about certain other
forms of ethical self- cultivation.
But we have to be careful here. Our natural curiosity is relevant to the
cultivation of the excellence of self- knowledge, but the desire to think well
of oneself and to have the esteem of others is also basic to our psychology.
(On these points, see my Human Development and Human Life 2016.) And
these can conflict when self- knowledge is at issue. To really pursue self-
knowledge is to risk finding out very unpleasant things about oneself, so I,
for one, think that the desire for the excellence of self- knowledge is moti-
vationally and implementationally more problematic than overly optimistic
philosophers (most notably, Socrates) have assumed.
In other cases, the self-c ultivation may be less problematic. Nietzsche
asserts an ideal of individual strength, power, and self- control that has anti-
moral connotations we can find it difficult to accept. But if his ideal is a
distortion of what human beings on the whole are all about (he never rec-
ognised how naturally empathy and sympathy enter our lives), still one can
also think of it as a distortion of what is valid and psychologically motivat-
ing within all normal human beings: the desire, as I have said, for compe-
tence and mastery within (not necessarily over) one’s environment. Getting
a university education and/or going to a professional school can be ways of
cultivating these excellences for oneself, and there is nothing unrealistic or
problematic about this kind of ethical self- cultivation.
A final form of self-c ultivation would be trying to make one’s life more
unified or more of a harmonious whole, and this, certainly, is an ideal that
many philosophers have viewed as worth pursuing. But is a high degree
of unification or harmony within one’s life so uncontroversially a form of
excellence? I am not sure. The same considerations that make some philoso-
phers believe in plural values and even moral dilemmas could tempt them or
us to believe that too much harmony or oneness is not a good thing because
it fails to realistically reflect and/or reckon with the messiness of the world
surrounding us and within us.
To return to the issue with which I began, if my criticisms of the idea of
moral self- cultivation are on the right track, then the moral development
and education of individuals depends more on outside factors than on what
they can or want to do for themselves. This is a disappointing, perhaps
even a maddening, result for those who believe in the importance of moral