In my last article we explored the analogy between Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of artistry or craftsmanship (Greek: techne) and moral virtue, taking our cue from the Nicomachean Ethics book II. Along the way we discovered the foundation for these two types of excellence in habit development or the neural networks of the brain. Excellence, according to Aristotle, comes by the type of practice or exercise that works along the lines of nature. The modern Copernican revolution of neurobiology confirms this thesis by revealing the role of myelin, a white fatty substance that is wrapped around neural circuits that fire together. Skills like reading and writing, driving taxicabs, running a four minute mile or acting courageously in the face of danger have a basis in the brain, even if the spiritual nature of human beings cannot be reduced to matter and electrical signals.
We closed the last article by proof-texting the importance of practice from the New Testament letter to the Hebrews: “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb 5:14 ESV). We equally could have quoted from Paul’s famous encouragement to Timothy, “train yourself for the purpose of godliness…” (1 Tim 4:7). The word commonly translated as godliness (eusebeia) is the Greek word for piety, the fulfillment of one’s obligations to family, the broader community, and God himself. It is a virtual summary of all the moral and spiritual virtues. And Paul’s point is that Timothy should train himself, as a man exercises at the gymnasium to stay in prime shape for military service or the competitive games.
The word for ‘training’ is gymnazo and had already become a standard metaphor for moral and intellectual cultivation by Paul’s day. In fact, Socrates himself had some of his famous discussions about virtues like friendship or temperance with his followers in the gymnasium. On more than one occasion he compared his method of dialogue to a wrestling match and once exclaimed that he had a furious love for that type of exercise in the pursuit of truth (Plato, Theatetus 169b-c).
In ancient Greece gymnastic training itself consisted, as we might have guessed, of physical exercises in strength, speed and dexterity, and these became the analogy for mental gymnastics of all kinds. Even today many standard textbooks contain “exercises” which attempt to “train” the mind in various skills through practicing them again and again until they become easy. In The Liberal Arts Tradition Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain restore the value of gymnastic training as fundamental element of the classical tradition. By implicitly connecting it to the quadrivium arts (see the tree illustration in the front matter), they draw on this analogy between athletic training and mathematical exercises. But on a deeper level, philosophers made a link between the moral training of the gymnasium, which fostered military virtues like courage and resourcefulness in the face of danger, and the virtue-training of the soul. For instance, Isocrates, the first great rhetorical teacher of Greece, advised one of his students,
Give careful heed to all that concerns your life, but above all train your own intellect; for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body. Strive with your body to be a lover of toil, and with your soul to be a lover of wisdom, in order that with the one you may have the strength to carry out your resolves, and with the other the intelligence to foresee what is for your good.
Discourses, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 209, p. 29
Unlike many in the modern world, Isocrates saw no conflict between bodily training and hard work on the one hand and the mental and spiritual training of philosophy or prudence on the other. This earlier move goes some way in explaining Aristotle’s understanding of artistry or craftsmanship as an intellectual virtue, even without an awareness of the nervous system. As another example, take Socrates, whom we might call the first philosopher. Instead of fitting the stereotype of an ivory-tower intellect, cultivating the mind but despising the body, he never neglected the compulsory military exercises, even into old age, and sharply rebuked any who did (see Xenophon’s Memorabilia). Proper cultivation of the body and mind, after all, are necessary elements of moral excellence, as well as of the intellectual excellence of prudence or phronesis, the ability to deliberate and act appropriately with regard to what is good for human beings.
Deliberate vs Purposeful Practice in Artistry and Morality
The analogy between morality and artistry, specifically the artistry of bodily training, is thus well established in the tradition. But there are differences to be noted as well, since not all practice is the same. Some practice is deliberate, with clear goals and feedback and an agreed upon process of steps in the cultivation of excellence; however, there are practice regimens that are less clear and agreed upon, where the movement toward excellence is more cloudy and ambiguous. This second sort of practice may still aim at excellence, and therefore it has been called ‘purposeful’ in modern research on elite performance, but the pathway is less structured and clear. It is more like bushwalking than marching on the Via Appia.
In his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Erikson describes the difference between this deliberate practice in the clarity of day and purposeful practice in the gloom and obscurity of night:
In short, we were saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field. We’re referring to activities like musical performance (obviously), ballet and other sorts of dance, chess, and many individual and team sports, particularly the sports in which athletes are scored for their individual performance, such as gymnastics, figure skating, or diving. What areas don’t qualify? Pretty much anything in which there is little or no competition, such as gardening and other hobbies, for instance, and many of the jobs in today’s workplace—business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on. These are not areas where you’re likely to find accumulated knowledge about deliberate practice, simply because there are no objective criteria for superior performance.
Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance. Of course, before there can be such teachers there must be individuals who have achieved a certain level of performance with practice methods that can be passed on to others.
With this definition we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice—in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve—and a practice that is both purposeful and informed. In particular, deliberate practice is informed and guided by the best performers’ accomplishments and by an understanding of what these expert performers do to excel. Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there. (Peak 98)
Before this passage Erikson notes that he and his colleagues had identified certain fields, like musical performance, chess and athletic activities, where the “levels of performance have increased greatly over time” (Peak 97). This increase in feats of elite performance coincided with the development of “teaching methods” that assigned the student practice exercises specially designed to advance the student’s skills along the well-worn path of mastery. Since these exercises can be improved and honed as time goes on, students can advance more and more rapidly than their predecessors, and the myelin-wrapping activities of deliberate practice can enable human beings to attain greater and greater feats.
A good example of this is 25 year old Roger Bannister breaking the 4 min mile mark in 1954. Before this time, it was thought to be physically impossible to break this barrier, but once Roger Bannister broke it several others quickly followed suit, and to date the four minute barrier has been broken by more than 1,400 male athletes, including some high school students.
Anders Erikson highlights the need of a teacher for deliberate practice, who is qualified in that area of artistry or craftsmanship and therefore able to provide the exercises. This reaffirms our conclusion from last article, that contra the Rousseauian claims of unschooling, students learn best through the organized instruction of a teacher. However, we can note that in artistry or craftsmanship not all fields are equally susceptible to this type of deliberate practice. Erikson mentions hobbies like gardening and a number of professions, like teaching, business management and consulting, as areas that lack “objective criteria for superior performance.” He’s not claiming that practitioners of these arts cannot get better at what they do, but their path to excellence is less precise. They may practice purposefully toward improvement but there are no widely agreed upon standards (“objective criteria”?) or clearly laid out steps. In these arts, people practice in the dark.
Identifying Subcategories of the Arts in Aristotle
It may be helpful at this point to lay out again my basic outline of Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues, including an extra layer of subcategories, in order to draw your attention to the nature of the virtue of techne which we have defined as artistry or craftsmanship.
It will be noted that under techne are included athletics, games and sports, which are rightly regarded as intellectual virtues under Aristotle’s definition, because they produce something new in the world through a true course of reasoning: the athletic performance whether in simplicity of a long jump or the complexity of a gymnastics routine. It is perhaps helpful to classify athletics and sports alongside the other arts in order to collapse the cultural false dichotomies of our day. Anyone who has seen a master athlete, say a gymnast, perform, will be hard pressed to exclude his work from the broader category that includes professional musicians and artists, as well as professions, trades, and the common and liberal arts themselves. These are all complex skills or areas of mastery, and our five part division is intended simply to gesture in the direction of the main types of craft or artistry that have been devised by human ingenuity and divine inspiration.
Purposeful Practice in Artistry and Morality
But as we have said, not all techne have as fixed and exact a path of improvement as the others. And this is not only so in artistry, but also in matters of morality. In fact, this difference between deliberate and purposeful practice was anticipated by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics book II, where he also strikes a note reminiscent of the parable closing the Sermon on the Mount (i.e. building your house on the rock by putting his words into practice):
Since, then, the present inquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge like the others (for we are inquiring not in order to know what excellence is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use), we must examine the nature of actions, namely how we ought to do them; for these determine also the nature of the states that are produced, as we have said. Now, that we must act according to right reason is a common principle and must be assumed—it will be discussed later, i.e. both what it is, and how it is related to the other excellences. But this must be agreed upon beforehand, that the whole account of matters of conduct must be given in outline and not precisely, as we said at the very beginning that the accounts we demand must be in accordance with the subject-matter; matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health. The general account being of this nature, the account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any art or set of precepts, but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the art of medicine or of navigation. (Book II, ch. 2, pp. 1743-4)
Here Aristotle claims that morality is more like practicing in the dark, since “matters of conduct must be given in outline and not precisely”. This is because the man who is too rash should aim back toward cowardice if he would hit the mark of courage, yet the cowardly should turn toward being a little bit rash. Aiming at the golden mean of virtue or excellence is relative to the individual person and the situation at hand, even if it is a real and true quality.
In the same way the arts of navigation and medicine, two important professions in Aristotle’s day, depend very much on the case at hand and all the particulars. There may be sub-skills that their practitioners can master, but the complex problems that will be faced—how to respond to an oncoming storm or what treatment to try first for a patient with a tricky set of symptoms—resist any attempt to be boiled down to a clear and simple set of practice exercises. But this does not mean people cannot become excellent navigators or physicians, simply that the way is less clear.
So then, we have seen that some arts have well-defined and clear steps to mastery through deliberate practice, but others do not. Moral actions, for Aristotle, may be trained by cultivated habit and practice, but the way is not always clear and well-defined enough to be subject to a deliberate practice regimen. Christians might initially object to this claim, citing the ten commandments and the way of discipleship as a straight and narrow path. But on reflection we must admit that temperance is not attained simply by a regimen of fasting—that was one of the Pharisees’ mistakes—nor is love of God attained by the rich young ruler obeying all the outward commandments from his youth. Jesus must prescribe a specific cure for his love of security. And so, while we cannot do away with habit training and the mentoring process, we know that diagnosing moral ailments and prescribing moral remedies is more fraught than we might sometimes imagine. If the recitation of Bible verses and specific acts of contrition and restitution were necessarily effective cures, Christendom would have advanced into the modern age and the virtues would adorn all of its members.
Distinguishing Marks of Moral Virtue
Part of the wrinkle with practicing moral virtues is that they require certain characteristics beyond that of many arts. Aristotle introduces these extra requirements in his ethics by first explaining the apprenticeship process in the liberal arts of grammar and music:
The question might be asked, what we mean by saying that we must become just by doing just acts, and temperate by doing temperate acts; for if men do just and temperate acts, they are already just and temperate, exactly as, if they do what is grammatical or musical they are proficient in grammar and music.
Or is this not true even of the arts? It is possible to do something grammatical either by chance or under the guidance of another. A man will be proficient in grammar, then, only when he has both done something grammatical and done it grammatically; and this means doing it in accordance with the grammatical knowledge in himself. (II.4)
In both morality and the arts, it is always possible to stumble upon the right way by chance. A person can act justly and temperately on an occasion simply because the circumstances favor it. This is part of why a single just act does not make a man just. In a similar way, even a toddler can say a perfectly grammatical sentence, but this does not mean the child has mastered the art of grammar. Likewise, a child can act justly under the guidance of his parent or teacher; while this might be a necessary step in his training in moral habits, it does not mean the child is just. If a teacher holds a Kindergartener’s hand as she writes a word with her pencil, that doesn’t mean the Kindergartener has mastered penmanship. The apprenticeship process begins with guidance, but ends with self-directed mastery.
So far so good, but in the case of moral virtues, there is a further set of requirements, making their attainment different from the arts:
Again the cases of the arts and that of the excellences are not similar; for the products of the arts have their goodness in themselves, so that it is enough that they should have a certain character, but if the acts that are in accordance with the excellences have themselves a certain character it does not follow that they are done justly or temperately. The agent also must be in a certain condition when he does them; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character. These are not reckoned in as conditions from the possession of the arts, except the bare knowledge; but as a condition of the possession of the excellences, knowledge has little or no weight, while the other conditions count not for a little but for everything, i.e. the very conditions which result from often doing just and temperate acts. (II.4)
The three requirements for moral virtue are 1) knowledge, i.e. the prudence or practical wisdom to know that they are acting in a way that corresponds with their ultimate good, 2) deliberate choice of the actions for their own sake, and 3) a “firm and unchangeable character”. The first requirement is necessary because if a person eats temperately without knowledge he has simply stumbled upon the right path by chance, and there is no expectation that he will persist in it, since being blind he cannot see the path he chanced upon.
The second requirement that a person choose the act for its own sake would seem to contradict both Aristotle’s commendation of habit and his earlier discussion of happiness or eudaimonia as the only true end toward which all other choices tend. We can probably resolve these dilemmas by recalling our earlier discussion of habit as not being thoughtless. In the contemporary world the concept of ‘habit’ often has behaviorist undertones, due to the influence of modern psychology and naturalistic materialism. But it seems as if for Aristotle, a moral custom or habit should still be a result of conscious choice, even if those choices came earlier to solidify stock responses by a regimen of training. Likewise, the comment about choosing the course of action for its own sake, should not be seen as indicating a final end, but merely qualifying the act as chosen because of its goodness, rather than for an ulterior motive. For example, a person might choose to eat temperately one evening because he knows that he plans to rob a bank and wants to ensure that his body and wits are not sluggish while committing the dastardly deed.
The third and final requirement needs little comment, since we all know that human nature is changeable and fickle; a character quality only recently adopted will not necessarily characterize the whole of a person’s life. The strength of this statement is an important correction to modern nonsense about it taking only 21 days (or 30 or 66) to build a new habit. At the very least, this is not true of the more complex moral virtues that represent a firm and unchangeable character, even if it can secure a propensity to take a multivitamin after your morning coffee. One reason for this is the fact that it is purposeful practice which we must engage in to discern between good and evil; therefore, the practice must be “constant” and have time to grow to ripeness or maturity (see Heb 5:14). If practicing morality is like bushwalking, then it takes longer to learn the route and how never to stray, than it does to drive to work on paved roads.
Practicing virtue is not the work of a summer, a season, a semester or even all of grammar school, but of a lifetime. As Aristotle says,
Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.
But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy. (Book II, ch. 4; pp. 1755-6)
Aristotle’s rebuke to the mass of self-proclaimed “philosophers” strikes a note that will be taken up again and again by the Stoics: the centrality of action for the cultivation of moral virtue. In this he is arguably correcting a crucial misunderstanding of Plato’s emphasis upon knowledge. Many of Plato’s dialogues go about the work of promoting moral virtue by first revealing the ignorance of Socrates’ conversation partners about the nature of true virtue, whether piety, justice, temperance or courage. This seems to imply a doctrine of salvation by knowledge, a concept that Plato certainly affirms in a number of ways throughout his works. Unfortunately, human nature makes it all to easy for us to mistake our own theoretical insight for this saving, sanctifying knowledge; on the Christian side of things, the gnostics are the prime example of this error, as they considered their special gnosis, or knowledge, as exempting them from the hard work of moral practice.
Crucial Distinctions between the Intellectual Virtues
For this reason, Aristotle is careful to distinguish episteme or scientific knowledge, the ability to demonstrate the truth of something, and moral virtue. The first concerns man as knower, to borrow the terminology from Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody, and the second concerns man as doer. But in fact, this division goes deeper for Aristotle, since even the term ‘wisdom’ itself has a line running through it. Phronesis, prudence or practical wisdom, characterizes the wise in action, while sophia, philosophic wisdom, or the possession of both knowledge (episteme) and intuition (nous) about the highest things, concerns the wise in thought, man as knower.
This important set of distinctions cuts the line straight through the arts as well, where two equally damaging errors pervade the educational world of Bloom’s taxonomy. First, modernism’s emphasis upon scientific knowledge (episteme) to the neglect of all other educational objectives has run ramshod over the proper training of the arts. A “bare knowledge” is necessary for developing mastery in the arts, but far more important is the apprenticeship model that embraces a regimen of deliberate or at least purposeful practice. This is because the arts primarily concern man as maker, rather than knower. The knowledge necessary is little more than a precept here or there to guide practice: always point your toes, lift your knees higher as you’re running, open your throat more and relax your tongue, hold your paintbrush this way. But in the case of the liberal arts especially, this scientific knowledge mindset has short circuited the apprenticeship process in the arts of language and number by overemphasizing knowledge to the neglect of sufficient practice and feedback. Elaborate textbooks convey a host of instructions, but teachers without the proper skill in these crafts fail to coach their students to mastery.
At the same time, a mistaken focus upon abstract cognitive or intellectual skills, also born of Bloom’s, has replaced the traditional liberal arts themselves with half-baked acts of the mind outside of their holistic and natural process in the search for truth. Comprehension and analytical exercises isolate useless “academic skills” from the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge regarding ultimate questions. The distaste of many students for academics grows from this arid soil of academic training without any phronesis or sophia.
The way out of this mess is to restore each of these intellectual virtues as proper goals for education throughout the school’s curriculum and pedagogy. While some ‘subjects’ may be more suited to developing a particular intellectual virtue, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues cut across traditional lines. To bring our conversation full circle, moral discussions should occur in the gymnasium. Bodily habits should be reinforced in philosophy class. Liberal arts training should follow the apprenticeship model and not simply impart knowledge. At the same time, ultimate questions and practical considerations of human action should point the student upward toward practical and philosophic wisdom. Practice in the classroom, the studio and on the field should be purposeful, if not deliberate, and we should not “take refuge in theory”. In the next article we’ll zero in on the apprenticeship model of training in the arts and what implications this has for pedagogy and structuring a school’s curriculum and classes.
Earlier Articles in this series:
2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s
3. Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science
4. When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education
5. What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues
6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education
7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship