Ms. Professor Fringemon on Principle

Here stands Ms. Professor Fringemon on Principle:

Ms. Professor Fringemon announces: "I am on principle opposed to men teaching courses on women in religion."

I ask: "Why? Are you a feminist essentialist?"

Ms. Professor Fringemon responds: "I do not have to explain my reason. Also, do not respond to this email."

The Virtue of Helpfulness

Cartoon by Ken Pyne

Ken Pyne - Cartoons For Sale

I was granted the opportunity to be helpful yesterday when Heddy, the instructor in an afternoon class prior to mine, had apparently forgotten her coffee cup and what I assumed to be her USB clip. I had five minutes to spare before class, so I went looking for her, but another teacher, Carolyn, turned out to be substituting for Heddy, so I ended up on a wild goose chase that eventually led back to the classroom, where I found the substitute teacher -- Carolyn, of course, whom I'd earlier encountered in the hallway before realizing that she was substituting, and who now understood why we'd passed each other a couple of minutes before. She greeted me with a smile of thanks for the effort I'd made, took her cup, and accepted the USB, informing me that a student had probably left it and that she'd see that the girl get it back. I later received a thoughtful thanks from Carolyn:

Dear Jeffery,

Thank you for picking up my tumbler, and my student's usb today.

I'm teaching Heddy's class while she's gone and had to hurry to my next class.

I appreciate it,

Caroline

I responded in my typically thoughtful manner:

Dear Caroline,

No problem. I'm always glad for the opportunity to seem nicer than I am.

Yours,

Jeffery

And I meant that sincerely, for I secretly begrudge my every act of helpfulness and only care about appearances and thus merely hypocritically perform good deeds, and I'm only letting everyone in on the truth about my actual character in an effort to appear deeply helpful to readers who want to know me better. In that spirit, let me urge readers to click over to Ken Pyne's amusing cartoon page for more of his humor and perhaps some of his purchasable cards.

No thanks necessary. Glad to be of assistance.

On two virtues developed through blogging...

Personification of Virtue (Greek Arete)

Celsus Library in Ephesos

(Image from Wikipedia)

A cyber-friend of mine, William Vallicella, maintains the blog Maverick Philosopher, which was one of my inspirations for getting started on blogging. This past spring, Vallicella took a month-long break from blogging, so I was somewhat alarmed to see a recent post of his titled "Four and a Half Years Into It: Why Blog? " My fear that he might be stopping for good was ungrounded, however, for he went on to briefly elaborate several good reasons to take up and continue blogging.

Some of what he wrote could be understood as a variation on developing what Thomas Acquinas called the virtue of studiousness:

"Properly speaking, study denotes keen application of the mind to something." (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, "Question 166. Studiousness," Article 1)

Or as Vallicella explains:

We studious types are not about to abandon study. It is is just too richly satisfying. Now if you read, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the game.

But nurturing the virtue of studiousness is not the only reason to blog. One can also note progress toward inculcating the old philosophical virtue of ataraxia:

Many are the reasons to blog. To develop a thicker skin is another of them. A thick skin is an attribute conducive to negotiating this world with equanimity. Since I've taken up blogging, I have noticed a definite uptick in the fitness of my psycho-armor. Nasty e-mails and the like roll off me. The scum of humanity offend me less. And one day, to cop a line from Nietzsche, "my only negation shall be to look away."

To assist me in joining Vallicella and Nietzsche at looking away, I've found trash icons very helpful. A mere click trashes the nasty email or the trolling comment far more succinctly than wasted words.

Of course, one need not become a blogger to develop the virtues of studiousness and ataraxia. One can read Maverick Philosopher instead and learn from a man who, despite having a doctorate in philosophy, actually is a philosopher.

Or go directly to his book: A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated.

Hans Blumenberg: "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity"

Sandro Botticelli, Augustine of Hippo

Studious, not Curious

(Image from Wikipedia)

Hans Blumenberg has a wonderful chapter in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age, titled "Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices," which shows the significance of Augustine of Hippo in classifying "curiositas" as a vice.

As we saw yesterday, Aquinas accepted this classification but strove to justify inquiry as a virtue. Indeed, he opposes curiosity to studiousness in his Summa Theologica, for in the "Second Part of the Second Part: Question 166," Aquinas states in "Objection 2" that "studiousness is opposed to curiosity," a distinction that still receives serious attention today, as shown in an article by Alice Ramos, "A Secular Contract, A Sacred Calling" (pdf) for Pi Lambda Theta's journal educational HORIZONS (Volume 83, Number 4, Fall 2005).

Blumenberg situates Augustine's classification of curiosity as a vice within Augustine's turn away from Manichaean Gnosticism toward orthodox Christianity and argues that Augustine retained a Gnostic distrust in the cosmos as an intricate structure within which mankind can remain trapped. For the Gnostics, the trap was set by an ignorant demiurge (though in Manichaean Gnosis, this view is somewhat ameliorated, a point that Blumenberg apparently missed), whereas for Augustine's Christian theology, the problem lies rather in the fallenness of the cosmos, which can distract the curious man away from the proper attention to his salvation.

According to Blumenberg:

Curiositas is indeed a category applied in turning away from Gnosticism, but the world in which it can become a possible cardinal vice is no longer the cosmos that is open to man and symmetrically intelligible in all directions from the center but rather a sphere filled with Gnostic attributes in which man is [literally] 'eccentric' -- for nowhere in Augustine either does Stoic geocentrism play a role relevant to man's understanding of himself.

Augustine's world is not fulfilling but seductive, and curiositas is a 'temptation' (forma tentationis) in the double sense that to test oneself on and with what is resistant and uncommon (tentandi causa) is at the same time to be tempted (tentatio). In its extreme form this 'tempted attempt' of the appetite for experience and knowledge directs itself at God Himself, since even in religion there is hidden the attempt -- the 'experiment' with God -- to demand signs and miracles not as promises of salvation but merely to satisfy curiosity. In this attitude God is taken into service and made into a means to the enjoyment of purely worldly experience. This makes clear what it means when Augustine again and again insists in his thinking on a strict differentiation between enjoyment and usefulness, between frui and uti. He sees the basic character of the world in its utilitas [usefulness] as the instrumentality ad salutem [for salvation], whereas a fulfilled and fulfilling existential relation is only to be expected from the fruitio [enjoyment, delight] directed at God. The ordering principle of human life, which can be spelled out in the form of the ethical virtues, is fixed in the maxim that one should correctly distinguish between the usefulness and the enjoyment of things. At the same time there emerges a criterion for the positively evaluated attitude to which curiositas is contrasted: All theory is concerned with disclosing the instrumental relevance of the things in the world, the serviceability inherent in them. But this means that the Augustinian interpretation of knowledge of the world is no longer the 'pure' theory of Hellenistic philosophy.

Curiosity violates this ordering principle of use and enjoyment and betrays its content of disorder precisely by the fact that in its extreme and logical consequence (as Augustine defines it), it subjects even God to the criterion of utilitas, so as to be able to seek fruitio in the human self alone. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 312-313)

In short, curiosity as a vice overturns the established order of things by making God 'useful' for human beings 'enjoyment' of themselves and thereby distracting them from a proper concern with their salvation and entangling them in improper pursuit for frivolous knowledge of a world whose fallenness serves as a temptation to mankind's equally fallen mind.

Augustine is not the sole word on this subject, for we've already seen Aquinas put Augustine in his proper place. Moreover, the early Medival Christians were greatly concerned with knowledge and its transmission, as a recently published book promises to show:

No period in the intellectual history of North-Western Europe has been so formative as the early Middle Ages, when missionaries transferred the learning accumulated for centuries in the Mediterranean basin to recently founded centres of religious scholarship in the ever expanding Christian world. The aim of this scholarship focused, first and foremost, on a proper understanding of the Bible as God's Word and Nature as God's Creation. During this period the foundations of medieval learning were laid in the monasteries and schools by men from distant shores who considered it their calling to entrust this precious knowledge to future generations of indigenous scholars. In this process, Syrians ended up in England, Irishmen in Italy, and Anglo-Saxons in Frisia and Bavaria and thus helped build a common intellectual culture in Europe. Even though the memories of these missionaries were fed with vast amounts of reproducible knowledge far beyond the capacity of modern man, the most important means of storing and conveying knowledge was the written word stored in what was then modern technology: the parchment codex. The composition of these books reflect the extent and diversity of early medieval learning. Sometimes they contain a single work, but often enough they contain compilations of diverse material which at first sight shows little coherence to the modern reader, and rightly so. In a way such miscellanies are mini-libraries. Nevertheless, they are storehouses of wholesome learning in their own right; further study reveals a rationale in such collections that leads us to a monastic learning environment, in some cases even to the classroom. The present volume demonstrates how the study of texts and manuscripts combined opens up windows on the early medieval world of learning as represented by glossaries, proto-encyclopedias, biblical companions, hagiographical guides, didactic verse, or descriptions of the world in word and image. The essays demonstrate that scholars have too often concentrated on the study of single texts, but especially that the compilations of manuscripts and libraries reflect the kind of knowledge that was required of monks, ministers and missionaries for the contemplation, celebration and promulgation of the Christian message.

Such is the promise contained in the blurb for Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages, a book of articles edited by R.H. Bremmer Jr. and K. Dekker as book 9 in the Mediaevalia Groningana New Series (Peeters Publishers).

Clearly, then, the early Medieval Christians, perhaps despite Augustine, were greatly 'curious' about the knowledge amassed over the centuries of the then fading Graeco-Roman world and were transmitting it to northwestern Europe through a process in which "Syrians ended up in England" -- though this sort of intellectual exchange was soon to be cut off by Islamic conquest of the Near East.

But this is enough heavy reading for today, and for those who wish to indulge their idle curiosity, feel free to visit this site to satisfy your ocular and aural desires both. For those who wish not to do so, consider this a test of your resolve and do not go there.

Christianity and Reason: The 'Vice' of Curiosity...

Saint Thomas Aquinas

On the 'vice' of curiosity...

(Image from Wikipedia)

...as exemplified by this blog and its topics.

Today, I am curious about the 'vice' of curiosity. So was Aquinas. In his Summa Theologica, in the "Second Part of the Second Part," he raises "Question 167," which concerns "Curiosity" and actually poses two questions:

"Can the vice of curiosity regard intellective knowledge? ... Article 1. Whether curiosity can be about intellective knowledge?"

"Is it about sensitive knowledge? ... Article 2. Whether the vice of curiosity is about sensitive knowledge?"

Notice that in both sub-questions, Aquinas presupposes that curiosity is a vice, i.e., the opposite of a virtue. This view of curiosity as a vice comes down to Aquinas from Christian tradition, and he cites such varied sources as the quasi-canonical intertestamental Jewish book by the 2nd-century BC Ben Sirach and the late 4th- to early 5th-century AD Christian theologian Augustine.

Now if one reads carefully what Aquinas says in "Question 167," one sees that he in fact defends properly attained knowledge -- both intellective (i.e., of the intellect) and sensitive (i.e., of the senses) -- from the accusation of being attained through practicing the vice of curiosity.

Nevertheless, curiosity itself is a vice.

Curiosity is an "intellective" vice, for example, in the following case borrowed from Ben Sirach:

Fourthly, when a man studies to know the truth above the capacity of his own intelligence, since by so doing men easily fall into error: wherefore it is written (Sirach 3:22): "Seek not the things that are too high for thee, and search not into things above thy ability . . . and in many of His works be not curious," and further on (Sirach 3:26), "For . . . the suspicion of them hath deceived many, and hath detained their minds in vanity."

And curiosity is a "sensitive" vice, for example, when employed as follows:

Accordingly to employ study for the purpose of knowing sensible things may be sinful in two ways. First, when the sensitive knowledge is not directed to something useful, but turns man away from some useful consideration. Hence Augustine says (Confess. x, 35), "I go no more to see a dog coursing a hare in the circus; but in the open country, if I happen to be passing, that coursing haply will distract me from some weighty thought, and draw me after it . . . and unless Thou, having made me see my weakness, didst speedily admonish me, I become foolishly dull." Secondly, when the knowledge of sensible things is directed to something harmful, as looking on a woman is directed to lust....

In what Hans Blumenberg calls "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity," Aquinas plays a more positive role than Augustine, for Aquinas defends "inquiry" from the charge of "curiositas":

The Augustinian idea of the inquiry that does not maintain the proper religious connection, the non religiose quaerere [i.e., nonreligious inquiry], finds in Thomas a very characteristic modification and Aristotelianizing correction. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT University Press, 1983), translated by Robert M. Wallace, page 332)

Aquinas, therefore, is playing a positive role in defending inquiry, but the fact that a defense is required against the charge that inquiry is an instance of the vice curiositas is itself a fact of impressive significance.

I'll return to this tomorrow.