DPLS 745fa09 - Leadership and Personal Ethics
Dr. Tom Jeannot
jeannot@calvin.gonzaga.edu; (509) 313-3500
Meeting dates
We have five meetings scheduled, all Friday evenings from 6 to 10 p.m.: Sept 4, 18, Oct. 2, 16, 30.
Written work
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.
The prototype of a research paper is a journal article for a research journal, and you are certainly free to write with the idea of publication in mind. But our aim in the course is philosophical reflection rather than quantitative or qualitative research in some determinate topic or area. Consequently, the aims of writing are exposition, critique, and reflective self-appropriation, having read, conversed, and thought deeply about the books that constitute the backbone of our course.
Moreover, whereas the style and tone of research are more impersonal in nature (depending on what one takes "objectivity" to be as a philosophical matter), a reflective essay, which might (or might not) be written more impersonally, inscribes the effort to concentrate one's own mind with the aim of making a personal record of one's own thought. Therefore, what I have in mind is not quite as free-form as a diary or a journal entry, which one typically sets out to write solely for oneself (although when we write, a "reader" is always presupposed), but your writing for the course will head more in that direction than in the direction of a report on the results of some or another statistical investigation and analysis.
You are to imagine yourself initially as entering into a conversation with our authors (on the Gadamerian view that reading and writing are like listening and speaking). Our authors are in some sense addressing you personally; they have something to say to you. On that premise, your aim in reading is to bring the "voice" of the author into the lifeworld of your own lived experience (as if you were going out for a walk or coffee or drinks with a friend). As you come to understand what your "friend" has to say to you, your first responsibility in active listening is to demonstrate that you have grasped what your friend has said (the conversational requirement of listening to the voice of another is an ethical as well as a hermeneutic imperative). Having listened well, which would show up in writing in the quality of your exposition, you have the same freedom as you accorded your friend to respond as seems best to you, whether to agree, to disagree, or to raise further questions (which would show up in writing in the quality of critique, where "critique" here has roughly the same meaning it has in "literary criticism").
In the European and Anglo-American traditions of philosophical investigation and reflection, the medium of its dissemination and development has been the written word, and it can be distinguished from literature on the one hand and the empirical or observational sciences on the other hand by virtue of conducting its investigations and reflections in the modality of argument, which essentially entails the exchange of positions with counterpositions in the attempt to discover what might possibly count as true. This search for truth through the sustained development of arguments (not in the sense of marital spats or office quarrels but in the sense of offering and developing reasons) is an integral moment in the process of forming and formulating beliefs (unless one simply believes what one believes in a manner essentially indifferent to what might possibly count as true).
From this point of view, having beliefs is a matter of holding-for-true. In turn, what one holds for true carries certain responsibilities, the key to which is one's own assumption of the responsibility for what Bernard Lonergan called the "transcendental precepts": be attentive; be intelligent; be reasonable; and be responsible. One's own personal commitment to these precepts, the willingness to become the custodian or steward of one's own intellectual acts and habits, taking responsibility for them as the integral characteristic of thinking for oneself, which is in turn the condition of the very freedom of thought, is the heart of reflective self-appropriation, and we might agree with Lonergan that reflective self-appropriation (self-knowledge and its entailments) is the aim of philosophy. Finally, then, a reflective essay is a written record of one's own attempt to live up to this obligation, to hold-for-true in the ongoing search to discover what might possibly count as true.
Thematic organization and texts
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.
I look forward to meeting and working with each of you, in the hope of mutually engaged, informed, literate, and most of all thoughtful and probing conversations.
Tom Jeannot
Professor of Philosophy
