Maatukathe II Session 2

Maatukathe II

Minutes of Meeting

Session 2

15.12.2013

What constitutes instances of knowledge? We have skills and information. But we also have something which cannot be reducible to these two. It may be indexed by terms like judgment and discretion. But they are qualifiers for individual actions and not types of knowledge in themselves. So, for instance, we say ‘he has a good judgment in these matters’, ‘he showed great discretion in handling the situation’. Wisdom is another candidate. But then again, wisdom is not taught; only learnt. Therefore, the term ethos (Gr., ethic, ethics etc.,) might be a better term to capture this form of knowledge: the ethos of a society, ethos of an individual etc.

While skill requires practice, the practice itself is not merely a form of drill. It also involves reflection on the practice. It is this reflection which provides richness and texture to experience. A further distinction can be made between socialisation and ethos. While both involve some form of acquisition of habits, socialisation mostly indicates habits which are not consciously acquired but passively acquired. An ethos involves an active acquisition of habits. An important aspect in habit is that every act either reinforces or weakens the habit. Similarly, an ethos can be strengthened by practice. Rituals are examples of such practices which have a direct bearing on the formation of an ethos. Seeing ethos as a form of knowledge is one of the tasks ahead of us in the course.

Seeking knowledge

We saw that knowledge can be present as skills, information and ethos. How are each of these acquired? Whereas skills are learnt and perfected by practice, ethos is cultivated by following exemplary actions and reflecting on them; for example, the ethos of leadership. This leads us to the question, what are the modes of learning that are useful to become the ideal person that we wish to become? Here it may be important to note a point about virtue. When we say that virtue cannot be taught, it means that it is not possible to design an instructional manual for virtue. Nevertheless, virtue is learnable. As an aside, we may note that, the genre ‘novel’, as it emerges in Europe, has one function of exhibiting different forms of virtue (or lack of it). In this way, the novels are forms of vicarious experience in cultivating virtue.

Here it may be important to distinguish between teaching a skill and creating conditions to make someone virtuous or cultivate an ethos. It is to the latter problem that this course applies itself.

Apart from the three forms of knowledge we mentioned (skills, information and ethos) we need to pay attention to another aspect of knowledge which is usually glossed over or inadequately recognised: the capacity to articulate what we already know and the capacity to construct an overview of what is already known (concerning a theme). A crucial clarification: this is different from saying that new knowledge is acquired on the basis of the old. The emphasis here is not about the continuity between old and new knowledge, but about the importance of articulating, and presenting in a cyclopaedic from, the knowledge that we already have concerning a theme.

A person with a particular ethos may not articulate it. Therefore, we cannot easily subsume this latter form of knowledge within ethos or skill. It may take a special reflective ability to articulate the ethos that forms a person.

Philosophy of Science

If science (or more broadly, Wissenschaft) is not merely a specific set of skills or information but an ethos, that is, an ethos defined by the centrality of the life of learning, then, Philosophy of Science, in this sense of the term, would mean reflecting on the conditions required for leading a life of learning as also the way of cultivating the virtues associated with it. Some distinctions along the way are useful:

-          The good life widely desired v/s the good life worthy of desire

-          The actual v/s the ideal

-          The art (as discipline) (Ex: art of healing, art of speaking)

A famous aphorism of Hippocratus, “life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience deceptive, judgment difficult” points us to the fact that no one individual can comprehensively master the art. One can, at best, insert oneself into the discipline.

Human communities attempt to

-          bequeath a notion of good life worthy of desire

-          educate and cultivate in its members a desire for that ideal of good life

Cultivation and education are prerequisites of conceiving and desiring a good life worthy of desire. If that is the case, then the question is how are the young initiated into the pursuit of good life by communities? Through conversations.

(What are the different things that can be identified as conversations – as cognitively oriented conversations towards the cultivation of such pursuits?)