DPLS 745su08 Leadership and Personal Ethics

Class Dates:  June 24, July 1, 8, 15, 22
Class Night:  Tuesday, 6 - 10 pm
Class Location:  RC 112

In Lieu of a Syllabus

            Your written work will be due before my grades are due in the Registrar’s Office.  You will be writing reflective essays grounded in our reading, rather than a research paper.  Your options will be to write either (1) a single essay on one or more of our books, in the neighborhood of fifteen to eighteen pages in length; or (2) two smaller essays, each on one or more of our books, each in the neighborhood of eight to ten pages in length.            

            Our course in leadership and personal ethics is thematically organized under four headings: character, freedom, meaning, and love.  Our texts are Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.

The first and second meetings: character

            Our first two meetings will focus on Aristotle’s classic work, the Nicomachean Ethics (in Terence Irwin’s English translation).  The NE is composed of ten books altogether.  In our first meeting, we will focus on the first five books; in our second meeting, the latter five.  If the proposition is true that “leadership,” as opposed to mere “power-wielding” (Burns, 1978), necessarily includes a moral dimension; and if the proposition is true that the exercise of “leadership” is personal and inter-personal in nature; then there is an integral, organic connection between leadership and character (where “character” is the moral dimension of human personality).  A conversation about character and character-formation can be either poorly conducted or well conducted.  Although Aristotle’s lectures are two and a half millennia old, he nevertheless provides us with a more or less rigorous, more or less complete method, organized on the basis of a normative, evaluative distinction between “virtues” and “vices,” for understanding, thinking about, and assessing what a sound moral character is; and not merely as the property of an atomic individual, but in the context of a healthy, morally awake, morally sensitive community.

The third meeting: freedom 

            If ethics is a “science,” then perhaps Aristotle was right to think of it as a “practical” rather than a “theoretical” science.  In a practical science, however, more than one correct conclusion follows from true premises.  Hence, there cannot be an “ethics algorithm.”  Or: only a free being is capable of moral judgment and the ethical qualities of action.  But what is human freedom?  The great founder of twentieth-century existential thought, Jean-Paul Sartre, offers a profound meditation on the situation of a free being in his lecture, “Existentialism is a Humanism” (included in a little book called Existentialism and Human Emotions).  Sartre may be correct or he may be mistaken.  In any case, his lecture affords us the opportunity to spend an evening thinking about what freedom is and what it means to be free, and particularly its place in personal character and conduct.

The fourth meeting: meaning 

            Suppose we are free in the morally relevant sense.  Is the reality of a free being a world without meaning or purpose?  The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, reflecting on his experience in a Nazi concentration camp, takes up a challenge from the great German classicist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche had thematized what he called “the will to power.”  Frankl argues that even more fundamental than the will to power is the “will to meaning.”  Three times in his little book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he quotes Nietzsche against Nietzsche, paraphrased as follows: the one who has a “why” to live, can live with almost any “how.”  Frankl argues that the will to meaning satisfies a human need as vital as our needs for food and shelter.  What does it mean for a free being to live a meaningful life?

The fifth meeting: love 

            Frankl had argued that the existential need for a meaningful life could be satisfied through work, love, and redemptive suffering.  Of these three existential sources, perhaps love occupies a privileged place, shaping our work and redeeming our suffering.  But how can we think and talk about “love” without sounding like a Hallmark greeting card?  Another great psychologist and philosopher might be able to help us out, namely, Erich Fromm, who wrote a beautiful little book called The Art of Loving.  Fromm gives us the opportunity to think about the meaning of love as we exit our course.