Temperance and courage

Temperance: curbing the passions Courage: strengthening the passions against fear.

Those are Thomistic definitions cribbed from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I'm an Aquinas neophyte so I can't vouch for how good they are (I'm inclined to trust the source though).

From the same source, chastity, sobriety and abstinence are parts of temperance, as you would expect. But so is humility along with meekness, clemency and studiousness. Studiousness!?

One of the big challenges reading Thomas an Aristotle is that so much of it seems so sensible that you can just read it and nod along because everything you see seems easy to accept. I find I need to stop myself and force myself to see the weirdness: Why is "studiousness" a form of temperance?

Here is a list that goes with courage: endurance, confidence, magnanimity, patience and perseverance. We need to not nod along but see how some of those are weird enough that we need to think how they fit in.

Occasionally, the difficulty in achieving or avoiding certain objects can give rise to various degrees of fear and, in turn, discourage us from adhering to reason’s instruction. In these cases we may refuse to endure the pain or discomfort required for achieving our proper human good. Note here that fear is not innately contrary to reason. After all, there are some things that we should fear, like an untimely death or a bad reputation. Only when fear prevents us from facing what we ought to endure does it become inimical to reason.

Sometimes, however, we should risk death or loss of reputation. It's not an easy calculation to determine what circumstances merit that. 

As I've noted before, there is something masculine about courage. That isn't to say that there aren't courageous women or cowardly men but there is a natural link in the mind. Some would think me sexist for saying so but I don't think so. 

Looking back on my life, I grew up in a female dominated household and studied at female-dominated schools. Of the four cardinal virtues—prudence, temperance, courage and justice—the first two tended to get the most emphasis.
You see everywhere this in our culture. There are a whole lot of people out there who call themselves "social justice warriors" but they are really about controlling other people not about being just to other people. Their morality is the morality of the pack. And we can see this in how they stampede one way and then another. There is something pathetically cowardly about them, the way they shout down and attack in groups. It's really an attempt to shame others into conforming.

The problem here is not that they are "womanly" so much that there is a lack of balance. We need more courage and justice in our systems and our fathers didn't help us to acquire that.

A Lenten Project

I don't own this image or the words attached. I found them on Facebook. I do mean to own them in the sense of internalizing the moral attitude expressed. (If you do own the image and/or words and object to my using them, let me know.)

Jane Austen and fortitude

After yesterday's post, I think I am prepared to answer a question that has long puzzled me: Why did Jane Austen rate constancy so high? It was, for her, the supreme virtue. That is to say, of the virtues a human being could develop by themselves, constancy was the highest and the most important. It was the virtue that made all the other virtues work together.

That's worth lingering on for a moment to remind ourselves of a really basic point. Honesty and patience are both virtues but even a person possessed of these needs to have a higher virtue directing them to be virtuous in a general sense. It wouldn't do to be honest with Nazis nor does it make sense to be patient with them, except as a ruse to save your life right now and, ideally, set them up so you can defeat them in other ways later.

For Jane Austen then, constancy was the virtue that pulled the others into line. That is interesting in that it conflicts with the standard order which tends to place prudence and justice above constancy. For example,  the Catholic church, following Aquinas, prudence is the supreme virtue. Aquinas said that justice serves prudence because prudence was the greatest human virtue. Constancy was a product of fortitude and it, third on the list, served both justice and prudence. Now, there was no good reason for Austen to accept Catholic morality but she would not reject it out of hand either.

I think the way to answer the question is to approach it from another angle because it's a bit easier to figure out why she didn't simply take fortitude in preference to constancy. Fortitude or courage were too much associated with masculinity for Austen's purposes. Jane Austen was not a feminist, at least not in the modern sense, but she was very much concerned with women and that was a decidedly rebellious thing to do in her era. We might call her a more prudent rebel than, to pick the obvious example, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Austen was well aware that physical fortitude and moral fortitude (which is another way of saying constancy) were related and even knew that moral fortitude was impossible without physical fortitude. Fanny's success is very much a product of her physical fitness and Marianne Dashwood's near disaster is very much a product of her failing to take care of her body. But Austen saw physical fitness as something that was not wholly in a woman's ability to control herself. Fanny's fitness depends on Edmund Bertram standing up for her and making sure she gets opportunity to exercise.

Now we might condemn Austen for not being feminist enough on this point but her attitudes are probably the result of her recognizing the grim realities of her time. Women simply were dependent on men for protection to a degree that we find it hard to imagine.

The more difficult question is why Austen emphasized constancy while recognizing that physical fortitude was a necessary but not sufficient condition for it. Why not, as tradition had, embrace a more general virtue that included both physical and moral fortitude? The answer to that, I think, is that she did so precisely because a woman's physical health was not under her control, which is to say her body was not under her control. And, in the late 18th and early 19th century, it was not. That is hard for us to grasp because a woman's right to control her own body is the starting point for feminism.

And we can carry that logic on to see that prudence and justice were also matters that were largely outside a woman's control. In a rigidly controlled class structure such as existed at the time, what counted as justice would have been fixed items for most people. Likewise, being prudent is less important when most of your fate is contingent on matters you could not hope to control. The very richest would have been able to get away with things that others could not, and we see that reflected in a characters such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice but Austen grasped that for women of her class, that is to say, the lower gentry, "prudence" and "justice" meant no more than conforming to what was expected of you.

Constancy becomes the supreme virtue because it was the most important virtue that is mostly within a woman's control. It is there that a woman can succeed as a woman to the degree that success is possible. And we read Austen incorrectly if we fail to see how much of Elinor's, Elizabeth's and Fanny's fate is beyond their control; things could have gone very, very wrong for any of them even had they always behaved absolutely impeccably. In fact, we can see that Fanny had far less leeway than Elinor and Elinor had less than Elizabeth. Emma, on the other hand, is rich enough that she could be far stupider and still get away with it, as she did.

Austen's position on the virtues is, for the above reasons, very much like that of the Roman stoics. They were also writing in a rigid society where what counted as justice was largely given and where prudence was likely to be over-shadowed by reversals of fortune you could not hope to control. They, however, emphasized courage and believed that human beings should be indifferent to their emotions. Austen recognized that emotions could be channeled—that a moral life required us to bot nurture and control our feelings. That makes her one of the most important writers on morality of the modern era.

I think it also, and I'll come back to this, makes her worthy of being called not just romantic but the greatest of the romantics.

Some stuff I'm just working out

In theological parlance faith, hope and love are known as the theological virtues. Faith is especially related to the intellect and its pursuit of truth, hope to the memory and its experience of beauty and love to the will and its appetite for goodness. (from Benedict XVi: A Guide for the Perplexed)

Hope is related to memory and its experience of beauty! That is fascinating. I don't much about all this as the medieval accounts of the virtues are new to me.

The text goes on to say,

The theological virtues are also related to the Gifts of the Holy Spirit with wisdom, understanding and knowledge having a particular association with faith, fortitude with hope, and fear of the Lord and piety with love.

Why does fortitude go with hope?

Fortitude is a cardinal virtue. That means a lot of stuff but the thing that I'm thinking about now is that it is one of the virtues that you can cultivate on your own. That is unlike the theological virtues which only come with grace. On the other hand, how do "gifts of the Holy Spirit" work? Is the fortitude that comes as a gift of the Holy Spirit a special variety of fortitude that cannot be had through conscientious habit formation alone? Probably.

Fortitude, in Catholic moral thinking, is what gives us constancy. Is that constancy the same as what Jane Austen understood as constancy? It gets tricky here because the vocabulary is fluid.

In the medieval discussion of the virtues, "fortitude" replaces the classical virtue of "courage". Fortitude is understood to be more than courage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (#1809) says,

Fortitude is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause.

For Jane Austen, the supreme examples of Constancy are Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. We see it most impressively when Sir Thomas, irked at Fanny for refusing the marriage proposal of Henry Crawford, sends her home to endure the squalor of poverty in the hopes that this will make her change her mind. Fanny holds out even though it becomes painfully obvious to both her and us that she may live a horrible life as a price of her constancy. So, yes, I'd say that Austen means the same thing by constancy as the Catholic church does by fortitude.

And that's all I'll say for now.

PS: It is the Feast of Saint Agatha today and fortitude is the virtue of martyrs (speaking in the classic Catholic sense and neither in the sense of passive aggressive family member trying to undermine you nor of terroristt murdering others while committing suicide.)

Matt Weiner on rising from poverty

"Everyone loves the Horatio Alger version of life. What they don’t realize is that these transformations begin in shame, because poverty feels shameful. It shouldn’t, but everyone who’s experienced it confirms this. Sometimes people say, I didn’t know we were poor ..."

Constancy 2

Some final thoughts about constancy and, for now, Elinor Dashwood.

I've been thinking about Elinor in comparison to the stoics. The stoics also believed that emotions entailed judgments. They believed we should resist emotions. When I feel passionate in response to something I see, I should resist that passion and be rational instead. They thought of emotions as passions, things that drove us, that we were being passive when we allowed our emotions to run.

And that is certainly true in some cases. If I let my anger run free, I will soon reach a point where I am a raging out of control. And Elinor, in the quote I began with, was worried about a similar process with another emotion.

She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.

The process whereby we allow our anger to feed itself and become more and more convinced we are are entitled to lash out at others is like that.

The stoic solution, however, is very different from Elinor's. She would reign in her feelings. She is willing to let them drive her. She is Platonic in the sense that she thinks the passions are a force to drive our lives like a horse drives a chariot. They would act as if they didn't have any. They believe that by doing this, they act more rationally. Eilnor doesn't think that way. She thinks having feelings is very important; she believes that they are what drives us in helpful ways.

To do so they have to be the right sort of feelings. We have to have a fundamental disposition. If I spend a lifetime letting myself lose my temper, my fundamental disposition will be harmful. If I spend it channeling and controlling my emotions, I'm more likely to have a good fundamental disposition.

That opens up a whole lot of questions that I don't necessarily want to answer now so I'll stop here for now.

Is narcissism really the problem?

Up until a week ago, I would have said it was. Perhaps not "the" problem but certainly "a" problem.

I've tended to buy into the claim that narcissism is a major problem in our culture but I've always had problems spelling it out. A while back, Amy asked me to spell out what I understood to be narcissism and why it was a social problem. Not for the first time, I found that what seemed clear when I didn't have to explain it, suddenly became murky when I did.

And then I saw a reworking of Waterhouse's painting of Echo and Narcissus. If you don't feel like going to the link, instead of staring down into the water, Narcissus is staring down into a smartphone whose screen is labelled "Instagram".  I saw it on Facebook and it struck me as shallow and stupid.

And then I had to figure out why I felt that way.

The painting has two figures: Echo and Narcissus. Who are we in this interaction? I'm sure we all agree that we're not Narcissus. So we're Echo then? What's she like?

I keep seeing these babe pictures on Facebook. Some woman desperate for attention posts a picture of herself in a bathing suit. We all see through the tricks she has used to make herself look better than she really does and yet all her friends click on "like". A few even write comments. And we call her a narcissist.

It strikes me as more like Echo and her problem is echoism, to coin a term. The person who does this desperately needs others to validate her worth. (In mythology, Echo distracted Hera with her lively chatter until Zeus and the nymphs he had been philandering with got away. Hera punished her by rendering her only capable of answering back the concluding words of what others had said to her. Those are the two poles of echoism: chattering to distract others so they don't figure out what we really are up to and feeding back what others give us.)

The true narcissist is the one who comments, "Looking good".

Did you catch it? If you say, "Looking good", the flip side of that is an implication that she doesn't always look this good. The echoist reading that comment will feel happy then empty and will have to go back to the narcissist for more. When she does, the narcissist will make her earn it. The narcissist would be relatively harmless if we didn't have these weaknesses.

I think we have more to fear from the echoism than narcissism for the echoist enables the narcissist.

I had to deal with a narcissist for years. By herself, she was pathetic but her power and reach came from the forces she could draw on. She could draw on echoists, some of whom were in her own family, by simply threatening to withdraw her love, and they'd be her stormtroopers.

Today, the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Canada are both narcissists. They're both painfully shallow boys. Neither is particularly intelligent in the normal sense of the term. What they have going for them is that they are geniuses at exploiting the weakness and insecurity of others. "Because it's 2015!" is a stupid and empty thing to say but Justin Trudeau could count on a whole lot of people cheering him for doing so because it made them feel like insiders. He knows that people will check their brains at the door for the chance to feel they are on the ride side of the joke.

There is no obvious cure for this problem. On one level it seems obvious: we need to be strong and stand up for ourselves but try spelling out what you mean by that and you run into trouble. Shouldn't you be standing up for others? Do you really want to find the meaning to your life inside yourself? Whatever that means.

In the story Ovid tells and Waterhouse painted (image above courtesy of Wikipedia), there are only two people. If Echo does not seek to fulfill her desperate need for love from Narcissus, the only person she has left to go to is herself. That isn't as crazy as it might seem. A well-regulated self love is essential to a virtuous life. But what regulates it? If the only measure of what is well-regulated is our own feedback, then we cease being Echo only to become Narcissus.

Social science only gets us so far. We need to be able to reference moral realities and not just psychological states or interpersonal relationships to get out of this trap.