Can Virtue Be Taught？
Episode Stats
Summary
The ancient Greeks and Romans thought a lot about what it means to live a virtuous life. They believed that good character was essential for achieving both individual excellence and a healthy, well-functioning society. For this reason, they also thought about whether virtue could be taught to citizens. And philosophers put this thinking into practice by attempting to educate the moral ideals of leaders.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:10.760
The ancient Greeks and Romans thought a lot about what it means to live a virtuous life.
00:00:14.520
They believed that good character was essential for achieving both individual excellence and a
00:00:18.840
healthy, well-functioning society. For this reason, they also thought a lot about whether
00:00:23.060
virtue could be taught to citizens, and philosophers put this thinking into practice
00:00:26.540
by attempting to educate the moral ideals of leaders. My guest, professor of philosophy Massimo
00:00:31.680
Pelucci, explores what the Greco-Romans discovered about the nature and teachability of virtue in his
00:00:36.640
new book, The Quest for Character. Today on the show, Massimo and I discuss how the ancient Greeks
00:00:41.100
and Romans defined virtue, and what it meant to them to live with erite, or excellence. We then
00:00:45.760
look at case studies of philosophers who tried to shape men into being better leaders, including
00:00:49.800
Socrates teaching Alcibiades, Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great, and Seneca mentoring Nero.
00:00:54.840
Massimo explains how these field experiments turned out, and the takeaways they offer on
00:00:59.020
the question of whether virtue can be taught. We're in a conversation with the ancient insights
00:01:02.840
that have been confirmed by modern research that can help us become better people. After
00:01:06.600
the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash teachvirtue.
00:01:24.040
So you are a professor of philosophy, and you got a new book out called The Quest for
00:01:28.200
Character, with the story of Socrates and Alcibiades, teaches us about our search for
00:01:32.880
good leaders. And this is a great, very readable introduction to moral philosophy. For those
00:01:39.500
who aren't familiar with moral philosophy, how would you describe it? And you're an academic,
00:01:44.200
how does moral philosophy differ from a lot of the philosophy you see in academia today?
00:01:48.740
Oh, it differs a lot. So first of all, moral philosophy refers to, depending on who you
00:01:56.120
ask, I guess. So in modern terms, and that means for the last, let's say, two and a half
00:02:02.680
centuries, moral philosophy deals with the question of right and wrong. So if you're asking yourself,
00:02:07.780
you know, I'm about to do a particular act to carry out a particular action, is this right or
00:02:11.900
wrong thing to do? Then you're doing moral philosophy, whether you realize it or not.
00:02:16.060
And there are a number of, you know, major theories in academic philosophy that deal with
00:02:21.600
how to settle questions of right and wrong. So for instance, you could be a utilitarian. You could
00:02:27.080
say, well, you know, whatever is right is whatever has the best consequences and increases people's
00:02:32.780
happiness. And whatever is wrong is whatever does the opposite. But in the sense in which I use it in
00:02:39.940
the book, morality and ethics, which I use interchangeably, they mean the same thing to me,
00:02:46.060
it, they're really about how to live your life. So it's a much broader question than just,
00:02:51.460
is this action right or wrong? Of course, how to live your life includes questions of right and
00:02:57.560
wrong. We all face issues of, you know, should I do this or should I not do this? But it's much
00:03:02.800
broader. For the ancient Greco-Romans, ethics or morality, which is really the Latin translation
00:03:10.080
of the Greek word for ethics, means, you know, what kind of priorities should I have in life?
00:03:16.740
What is important? What is not important? How should I behave with respect to other people? And
00:03:21.240
how should I behave with respect to myself, in a sense? What are my priorities? Why am I doing what
00:03:27.480
Why were the Greco-Romans, the Greeks and the Romans, so concerned with these questions? Particularly,
00:03:32.340
we're going to talk about this today, particularly in regards to leadership.
00:03:37.220
I think everybody's concerned with these questions, but the Greco-Romans really put a lot of
00:03:42.180
thought into it, in a sense. And that's one of the reasons why they're still so relevant to us today.
00:03:47.680
You know, often people ask me, why bother going back, you know, two millennia, two and a half millennia?
00:03:53.720
Don't we, things have changed in the meantime. Don't we do things differently?
00:03:58.180
And the answer to that is, well, yes and no. We do things differently, as in, you know, we have a lot
00:04:02.900
of science and technology that the Greco-Romans certainly did not have. Aristotle would be stunned
00:04:07.740
by the way in which you and I are communicating right now, for instance. However, in terms of human
00:04:13.720
nature, in terms of what we want and what we don't want, what we aspire to, and what we want to stay
00:04:19.780
away from, things haven't really changed that much. We're still going after the same things, and we're
00:04:25.560
still afraid of the same things. And that is why the Greco-Romans are still relevant, because they
00:04:31.080
thought a lot about this. They were not the only ones, of course. In ancient India, for instance,
00:04:36.320
Buddha and others, or in ancient China, Confucius and others, they're pretty much similar thinking
00:04:42.600
and arrived actually often at similar conclusions. But within the Western tradition, it is the Greco-Romans
00:04:49.720
So, Greco-Roman moral philosophy is all about becoming virtuous. For these Greco-Roman moral
00:04:56.640
philosophers, what did virtue mean? Because I think their idea of virtue is different from our
00:05:03.800
Yeah, that's right. I mean, today, if we think about the word virtue at all, we tend to think
00:05:09.440
about the Christian version, because, of course, we come out of 2,000 years of history of Christianity.
00:05:15.200
And so, we tend to think about things like chastity and purity and things like that. That's not what
00:05:22.400
the Greco-Romans were referring to. For the Greco-Romans, virtue is a type of excellence. In fact, the Greek
00:05:29.260
word is arete, which literally means excellence. And the idea, therefore, is to be the best human
00:05:35.500
being you can be. And that, of course, means different things. And one of the important contributions
00:05:41.160
of the Greeks and the Romans was to sort of unpack what that means. But the word excellence applies
00:05:47.460
to all sorts of things, not just to human beings, for instance. I mean, you can have an excellent
00:05:51.060
knife, which is defined as a knife that cuts very well, right? Well, that's a virtuous knife, according
00:05:56.960
to this way of thinking. So, in terms of being humans, what does it mean to be virtuous? Well, it
00:06:02.520
means that you're very good at living with other human beings, because that's your job.
00:06:05.940
That is what you do. And living well with other human beings, according to the Greco-Romans,
00:06:12.520
fundamentally meant following four virtues. Practical wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.
00:06:21.720
Practical wisdom is the knowledge of what is and is not good, in general and for you in particular.
00:06:28.720
Justice is the knowledge of how to treat other people, you know, fairly, with respect,
00:06:34.000
the way in which you were wanting to be treated. Courage is the knowledge that you should be
00:06:41.600
behaving in a certain way, regardless of the fact that it might cost you at a personal level.
00:06:47.220
And then finally, temperance is a question of acting in the right way, in the right measure,
00:06:52.480
not too much, not too little. If you follow those four, according to the Greco-Romans,
00:06:58.520
Well, as you said, virtue for these guys meant excellence, being an excellent human being.
00:07:02.780
But how they figured that out, like, what does it mean to be an excellent human being?
00:07:07.100
Everyone took different approaches. So, and just to give people an idea, like,
00:07:09.960
what was the approach that Plato took? And can we maybe contrast that to how Aristotle
00:07:13.820
tried to figure out what excellence meant or virtue meant?
00:07:17.740
Well, Plato actually did follow the four virtues that I just mentioned. Aristotle actually expanded
00:07:23.660
that number because he was really into classifying things into taxonomy. And so he actually expanded the
00:07:29.180
list to about 12 virtues. But essentially, for both of them, a good human life, what they refer to as
00:07:35.540
a eudaimonic life, eudaimonia in Greek just means a good life, a life worth living, is a life that
00:07:42.300
works well for a human being. Now, let's try to figure out what that means. Let's say that
00:07:48.340
you invite me over for dinner. And as a present, I bring you a plant, let's say a cactus, right?
00:07:56.440
And now you have to take care of the cactus, okay? Now, in order to take care of the cactus,
00:08:01.960
you have to know something about what makes cacti happy. If you just say, well, it's a plant,
00:08:08.280
wants lots of water, you're probably going to kill it because it's not a plant. It's a desert plant,
00:08:12.980
right? So it doesn't, yes, it does need water, but not too much. On the other hand, it does need a
00:08:18.240
lot of light. If you put it in the shade, it's also going to die, et cetera, et cetera. So there
00:08:22.520
are certain things that are in the nature of cacti that make a particular type of life good for them
00:08:29.720
and other kinds of lives not good. The Greco-Romans reasoned that the same goes for human beings.
00:08:36.100
Human beings are a particular kind of animal. We are social animal in doubt. We have very intelligent
00:08:41.700
social animals in doubt with the ability to reason. We tend to solve our problems by reasoning about
00:08:47.360
it. So a good human life, therefore, is a life that is social, where you interact in a positive
00:08:53.780
fashion cooperatively with other human beings. And when you get to use your brain, basically,
00:09:00.420
which is your most powerful evolutionary weapon, so to speak, in order to solve problems. So human
00:09:07.360
excellence means a high capacity to reason and a high ability to live socially.
00:09:13.880
And as you said earlier, other cultures had similar ideas. Confucianism is all about this.
00:09:19.080
That's the same conclusion. Like, we are social beings. And the way they try to express virtue was
00:09:23.660
different from how the Greco-Romans did. They had these very set rituals and social protocols you're
00:09:30.680
It is the same fundamental idea. And, you know, too many times often these people are interested
00:09:37.600
in the differences between philosophies. Oh, the Confucians think this, the Buddhists think that,
00:09:42.880
the Stoics think that. Yeah, there are obviously differences. But what I think is more interesting,
00:09:47.400
in fact, are the similarities. Because if the same idea occurred to different people across the globe
00:09:53.820
and in different centuries, you know, maybe there is something to that idea. And so this notion that
00:09:59.240
we ought to behave in a virtuous fashion, meaning cooperatively with other people, you know,
00:10:05.080
be nice to other people, be cognizant of the fact that we are a society that for where the
00:10:13.560
individuals depend on others in order to not only survive, but actually thrive. Well, that idea has
00:10:20.160
occurred to a lot of different people in different times and cultures. And so, you know, probably there is
00:10:25.240
Okay. So the Greco-Roman philosophers, they spent a lot of time thinking, debating about what is,
00:10:30.800
what is virtue? What does it mean to be an excellent human? But then after that, they started
00:10:35.060
thinking about, okay, can we teach other humans to be more virtuous? Can virtue be taught? This is an
00:10:41.420
important question. This is how civil society can exist. And there's two Socratic dialogues that
00:10:47.200
wrestle with this question. Can virtue be taught? And what's interesting is they both come to
00:10:52.480
different conclusions, which is disheartening. Can you walk us through the arguments as to whether
00:10:59.040
virtue can be taught that are found in the Mino and the Protagoras?
00:11:05.000
Yeah. So those are both, as you say, platonic dialogues. They both feature Socrates. And Socrates
00:11:11.020
comes up with two different conclusions. In fact, diametrically opposite conclusion. In the Mino,
00:11:16.400
his conclusion is that, no, you cannot teach virtue very likely. And in the Protagoras,
00:11:22.180
he arrives at the opposite conclusion. Now, what do we make of this? First of all, we need to figure
00:11:26.960
out what is it exactly that Socrates is doing there. In the Mino, Socrates is debating the question of
00:11:34.940
whether we can teach virtue. And in the end, he says, look, if teacher were the kind of thing that you
00:11:40.500
can teach, then I would expect to see teachers of it around, right? Just in the same way in which you
00:11:46.300
can teach other skills, and therefore you have teachers accordingly, you should see a lot of
00:11:53.240
teachers of wisdom. And he says, I don't see anybody. I don't see anybody that can do that sort of stuff.
00:11:58.800
So he tentatively concludes that virtue cannot be taught. However, that tentative conclusion is then
00:12:05.340
reversed in the Protagoras. Now, Protagoras is an interesting dialogue because it's named after a
00:12:11.380
sophist, and the sophists were, in a sense, the archenemies of Socrates. You know, there are several
00:12:17.100
platonic dialogues that feature the debates between Socrates and the sophists. However, in this
00:12:24.060
particular case, the sophist, Protagoras, not only argues successfully with Socrates, but Socrates, at the end of
00:12:32.340
the dialogue, actually changes his mind. And he says, yeah, you're right. I guess that's correct.
00:12:38.260
Virtue can be taught. And how does Socrates arrive to that stunning conclusion? Because he's convinced
00:12:45.780
by a number of arguments that Protagoras puts forth, one of which is that virtue is a little bit like,
00:12:52.820
let's say, learning how to play an instrument, right? It's the kind of thing that requires a little bit of
00:12:59.060
of theory. You know, you want to know a little bit about musical theory and musical notation if you
00:13:04.980
want to be successful at playing an instrument. But mostly, it requires a lot of practice.
00:13:10.740
And that practice is helped if you go and learn from somebody who is already a good practitioner of it,
00:13:17.140
right? In fact, Protagoras at some point says, look, Socrates, imagine that the survival,
00:13:23.300
the very survival of our society dependent on everybody playing music, no matter how well,
00:13:30.100
but everybody playing. What do you think would happen? We would be teaching music to everybody.
00:13:36.180
And some people would, of course, be virtuosos and would be really, really good at what they're doing.
00:13:42.180
Others would barely be able to produce a tune. But nevertheless, the skill can be taught to
00:13:48.420
everybody and everybody would improve. And the idea is the same is true for virtue. Sure,
00:13:54.740
some people are going to be naturally so much better. They're going to be much more pro-social,
00:13:59.300
much more altruistic and whatever it is than others. But we can all improve. And part of that
00:14:05.380
improvement comes through knowing what virtue is. So that's the theory, right? Knowing where you want
00:14:12.100
to go with this. But mostly it comes out of hanging around people like Socrates who are actually already
00:14:19.540
very virtuous and that you can learn from just observing them and following them and imitating
00:14:25.140
them in a sense. So the thing about Greco-Roman moral philosophers was that it wasn't just theory
00:14:30.260
for them. They didn't just talk about these things in the Agora. They actually tried to put the theory
00:14:34.340
into practice. And same thing happened with Socrates. And you use the relationship between
00:14:40.500
Socrates and an Athenian playboy slash politician named Alcibiades to explore this idea whether virtue
00:14:49.300
can be taught. So in the Protagoras, Socrates is like, yeah, virtue can be taught. We're going to see
00:14:54.180
this in action with Alcibiades. Why is Alcibiades such a great case study in whether virtue can be taught or not?
00:15:00.420
I think Alcibiades is a great case study because it is in the end a failure, a big failure. And we
00:15:08.340
learn often more from failure than from success. Socrates did succeed in teaching virtue to other
00:15:14.820
people. I mean, you can see not only in the Platonic dialogues, but also in dialogues by another friend
00:15:20.020
of Socrates, Xenophon, that he actually does succeed in a number of cases. But with Alcibiades,
00:15:26.580
he failed spectacularly, and he knows why he failed. And so there is this wonderful dialogue,
00:15:33.220
the Alcibiades major, which is attributed to Plato, although we don't really know whether Plato wrote
00:15:37.780
it or not. But nevertheless, it is one of our major sources on the relationship between these two.
00:15:44.260
And the dialogue features a young Alcibiades who was dashing and brave and full of himself,
00:15:51.660
of course, and handsome and rich, right? It was everything that you could possibly want to be
00:15:58.140
as a young man. And he goes to Socrates and says, look, I want to be a leader in Athens. I want to
00:16:05.500
really make an impact here, make a difference. But I understand that I need help. And I need help from
00:16:13.260
somebody like you, like my mentor, like Socrates. So the two start talking about it. And Socrates
00:16:19.140
tries to figure out what kind of ideas Alcibiades has in mind. And at the end of the dialogue,
00:16:27.260
the conclusion is stunning because Socrates says, I'm sorry, Alcibiades, you just don't have the stuff
00:16:33.240
that it takes. If you are going to do what you think, what you want to do, if you want to become a
00:16:38.400
leader in Athens, this is going to be a disaster. And the reason it's going to be a disaster is
00:16:43.300
because you don't care enough about virtue. You don't care enough about the common good. You
00:16:48.880
really care only about yourself. You are, you know, self-aggrandizing narcissist, essentially,
00:16:53.940
in modern terminology. And of course, it turns out that Socrates was right. Alcibiades ignores his
00:17:01.960
advice and goes on anyway to lead Athens during the Peloponnesian War. And it is, in fact,
00:17:07.980
the disaster of Alcibiades. I'm surprised that Alcibiades' life has not been the subject of a
00:17:15.860
movie so far, because it was really incredibly interesting. And, you know, he lived in one of
00:17:21.860
the most interesting times in the history of ancient Greece. But nevertheless, he did exactly
00:17:28.200
what Socrates predicted. It was a complete disaster that cost a lot of Athenian lives and eventually the
00:17:33.940
defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. What do you think the takeaway for Socrates, I mean,
00:17:39.200
maybe we don't know, but maybe from Socrates or Plato about Alcibiades? I mean, like, what was the
00:17:45.600
takeaway? Okay, if a guy just doesn't want enough, then you can't teach virtue?
00:17:51.420
Right. So the idea is not dissimilar to what any modern teacher in any subject will tell you.
00:17:57.920
If somebody doesn't want to be taught, there's nothing you can do about it. There's not much
00:18:02.380
you can do about it. If the person is open, if the person is at least interested in genuinely
00:18:09.320
learning something, then there is absolutely something you can do. Then you can definitely
00:18:13.080
teach people. But if there is a mental closure, it's just not going to happen. Look, the best time
00:18:19.980
to teach somebody, to start teaching somebody virtue and in general sort of how to live properly in a
00:18:26.500
human society is when they're very young, very, very young, right? Which is one of the unfortunate
00:18:31.320
tragedies of modern society. We don't teach moral philosophy. We don't teach how to behave to our
00:18:39.000
kids, by and large. We teach them a lot of other stuff, but not really anything about ethics in the
00:18:45.200
sense of how to live in a human society. Once you get to the age of Alcibiades, in your 20s, let's say,
00:18:52.540
or even later, there is not much there left to do unless the person wants to improve, unless the
00:19:00.360
person is in fact convinced that something needs to be done. It's a question, you know, Aristotle
00:19:05.760
famously said that virtue is by and large a question of habit. You get into it and then because you do it
00:19:14.700
over and over and over, it kind of eventually becomes second nature. But guess what? The best time
00:19:21.500
to learn a habit, either in a good sense or in a negative sense, is when you're a kid. If you get
00:19:28.980
used to things, you know, then you'll do it. Let me give you a completely different example that has
00:19:34.620
to do not with virtue, but let's say with physical activity, right? For years, I just wouldn't want to
00:19:43.360
listen to when people would tell me, you know, you need to get to the gym and start doing some
00:19:47.460
exercise. Like, no, because I wasn't exposed to that when I was a kid. I was not introduced to that
00:19:54.260
way of thinking. It took me years of, you know, experience and self-reflection and all that. And
00:19:59.200
finally, I said, you know what? I don't like this thing, but I guess I need to do it because it's good
00:20:03.480
for me. And now I've been doing it regularly for a long time. But it came out of me, not out of somebody
00:20:11.580
else telling me, you know, this is good for you. I wouldn't listen. It took me quite a bit of time
00:20:17.760
to get around to that idea. But if somebody had taught me when I was a kid, that would have been
00:20:22.920
a completely different thing. And that is why, you know, unfortunately, again, we do not spend enough
00:20:29.140
time teaching our kids about these kind of things. We're going to take a quick break for your words
00:20:33.420
from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so Socrates failed with Alcibiades. You
00:20:41.180
highlighted some other philosophers who tried to put this idea that virtue can be taught into practice
00:20:47.280
by coaching, mentoring, teaching other leaders. Another famous one was Aristotle. He famously tutored
00:20:55.000
Alexander the Great. When did that relationship start? And do you think Aristotle was successful in
00:21:01.280
teaching virtue to Alexander? Well, the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander
00:21:06.880
started fairly early, although not as early as it would have been ideal. I think Alexander was 16 or
00:21:17.060
something like that, 16 or 17, when he was being taught by Aristotle. And yes, Aristotle did have
00:21:24.280
certainly an impact on Alexander. In fact, in a sense, one could argue, and I do argue in the
00:21:31.100
book that Alexander went above and beyond what Aristotle taught him. For instance, one of the
00:21:37.320
ideas that Aristotle insisted on was the importance of Pan-Hellenism, that is, of the notion that all
00:21:44.260
agrees should be unified in order to, you know, function as a broader society and being more resistant to
00:21:55.080
invasions from the outside, like the Persians, for instance, which from time to time were
00:22:00.340
making trouble. Well, Alexander took that idea and ran with it. He actually conceived of unifying the
00:22:07.560
entire planet under his banner. And that is, in fact, a major, that was a major motivation for
00:22:14.800
building his empire. Now, of course, we today wouldn't go about unifying humanity by building an
00:22:22.320
empire, presumably. We wouldn't think that that's the right way to do it. But Alexander really was into
00:22:29.660
it, in part at least, because he thought it was a good idea to unify people of different cultures.
00:22:36.580
So, in a sense, Aristotle did have a significant impact on Alexander. Alexander kept for the rest of
00:22:44.340
his life, for instance, a copy of Homer's Iliad annotated by Aristotle. And he used it, you know,
00:22:52.500
to frequently as a guide for his own thinking and his own preparing for what he was doing. So,
00:23:02.920
yeah, that's an example of fairly positive influence by a philosopher over a, you know,
00:23:11.240
statesman. The problem there, too, however, is that I think that was a little too late again,
00:23:17.100
because by the time Aristotle got to Alexander, Alexander was already, had already been bred to
00:23:24.720
be a conqueror and had already been bred to be, you know, the heir of his father to the Macedonian
00:23:31.300
throne. And so, he already had a way of looking at things that would have been pretty difficult for
00:23:37.020
Aristotle to dramatically alter. Okay. So, on that case study, kind of successful with Alexander.
00:23:44.740
You highlight another one. It's a Roman Stoic philosopher, and this is in your wheelhouse. You
00:23:49.160
write a lot and research a lot about Stoicism. Seneca was an advisor to Nero. Tell us about that
00:23:57.420
relationship. And because you point out Seneca, he was a Stoic philosopher, but he was kind of a mixed
00:24:02.520
bag when it came to living up to his ideals in terms of his, you know, politics and even his
00:24:07.140
philosophy. Why is that? And then, you know, how did Seneca go about teaching Nero?
00:24:13.260
That's another interesting story in and of itself. I mean, Seneca, yes, as you just pointed out,
00:24:18.720
was a Stoic philosopher who certainly did not live up to the full expectations of a Stoic,
00:24:25.880
but he was also very aware of it. He was, in fact, in a sense, humble about it. He wrote to his
00:24:31.220
friend, Lucilius, at some point, look, don't come to me for advice. I'm just as wretched as
00:24:37.500
anybody else. I'm trying to do my best, but it's not like I can teach anybody. I'm just as sick as
00:24:43.940
anybody else, and I'm just trying to do my best. So, he actually was very aware of his own
00:24:49.660
limitations, in a sense, which is more than you can say for a lot of people, I would argue.
00:24:53.400
Yeah. Now, in terms of Nero, the standard story is that Seneca completely failed, you know, in fact,
00:25:01.920
that he was complicit in some of Nero's crimes during his regime, etc. But that's not quite,
00:25:07.300
that's a little simplistic. The reality is, as often is the case, it's a little bit more
00:25:13.240
complicated. It turns out that Seneca, together with a colleague who was the head of the Praetorian
00:25:21.040
Guard, which was the special guard of the emperor, they were actually able to pretty much reign in
00:25:26.960
Nero for the first five years. The first five years of Nero's reigns are referred to by historians
00:25:33.940
as the Quinquennium Neronis, which literally means five years of Nero. And they were a good time for
00:25:40.240
Rome. There was prosperity. There was, you know, the empire's borders were secure. People experienced a
00:25:49.720
good life, etc., etc. So things actually went pretty well in the beginning. But Nero was unhinged,
00:25:57.620
and it became more and more unhinged and difficult to control. And Seneca realized that. And in fact,
00:26:04.280
he tried to retire. And Nero didn't want Seneca to retire because he felt that he needed, the regime
00:26:13.480
needed basically the support or the endorsement of the famous philosopher and the esteemed statesman
00:26:19.480
that Seneca was. And this thing, this back and forth went on for a while until Seneca eventually
00:26:26.780
tried to bribe the emperor. And he says, look, I'm going to give you most of my fortune. I don't care.
00:26:32.700
I just want to, you know, get out of the way. And in the end, of course, the result, the end result
00:26:39.780
was that Nero at one point suspected that Seneca was involved in a conspiracy, in a failed conspiracy
00:26:46.380
against the emperor, which he probably wasn't. But Seneca probably didn't know about the conspiracy
00:26:52.880
and didn't tell the emperor, which for all effective purposes is being involved in the
00:26:56.900
conspiracy. And so Nero ordered Seneca to commit suicide, which he did in classic Stoic fashion.
00:27:03.780
He did it sort of imitating his role model, which was Socrates. So that's another story that has a mixed
00:27:10.940
back kind of situation, right? And in fact, in the book, there are several along those lines. And the bottom
00:27:17.640
line, the end message there is like, look, if you want to try to teach somebody else, doing it late,
00:27:25.280
rather late in his life, it's not a good idea because it's not likely to succeed. The success stories
00:27:31.260
in the book tend to come from people who themselves want to improve, want to become better persons.
00:27:39.720
They want to practice philosophy in their lives. And so one classic example there is Marcus Aurelius,
00:27:46.300
one of the famous Roman emperors, right? So the bottom line, the message there is that
00:27:52.200
if we're talking about teaching somebody else, that has to be done under one of two conditions,
00:27:57.760
either very early on in their lives so that you set them in the right habits, or if they really are
00:28:04.860
prone and ready to be taught, if they want that. Otherwise, it's much better to actually bet
00:28:13.620
on somebody who is already of his own accord going into the right direction. He's striving already
00:28:21.060
on his own accord because those are the people that really want to do the right thing.
00:28:24.460
Yeah, that second approach of pick the leaders, instead of trying to train leaders to be good
00:28:29.500
leaders, because you're probably going to be too late. The idea is you pick people to be your
00:28:34.560
leaders who are already philosophers. And this is like the idea, this is going back to Plato and the
00:28:38.400
Republic, this idea we want to pick the philosopher kings to be our leaders.
00:28:43.060
Right. Now, remember that, of course, philosopher at the time in this particular context doesn't mean
00:28:50.000
somebody like me with a PhD in philosophy who does academic scholarship. It meant somebody who lives
00:28:57.060
philosophy as a way, as a practical life, right? So philosophy is the art of living. So a philosopher,
00:29:04.140
you know, it's very easy to laugh at condescendingly at Plato and say, oh yeah, sure. The last thing we want
00:29:10.840
is to have philosophers in charge. That's because we tend to think of philosophers as these people
00:29:15.620
with the head in the cloud who think about abstruse subject matters. But what Plato meant there
00:29:21.600
was a philosopher here is somebody who lives philosophically. And therefore, anybody can be
00:29:32.800
Yeah, you gave the example, Marcus Aurelius is an example of that. This is a young man,
00:29:36.760
he was philosophizing since he was a boy, and he carried that on through his adulthood.
00:29:42.580
Right. And another example, which I also describe in the book, is Cato the Younger,
00:29:48.100
who was a Roman senator and archenemy of Julius Caesar. And Cato was not a philosopher in the academic
00:29:56.060
sense of the term. He never wrote a book about philosophy. He wasn't spending his time thinking
00:30:01.540
about abstruse matters. What he was doing is he was living the life of a Roman senator and statesman.
00:30:06.760
And he was trying to do it with integrity. And in fact, he was so famous for that, that if in Rome
00:30:14.500
somebody slipped up and was doing something not quite right, often the excuse would be, well,
00:30:22.080
not everybody can be a Cato. So Cato was such a well-known role model that people would say,
00:30:29.780
you know, it's only Cato can be that good. I'm not, I'm not Cato. So that's another good example of
00:30:35.940
somebody who tried to live by his principles and tried to live philosophical and largely succeeded.
00:30:43.060
So, but there's also cases where it didn't succeed, right? Like Socrates wasn't a politician
00:30:50.480
per se. I don't think he'd call himself that. He was a philosopher, but he did have an influence
00:30:54.360
on the state, right? And it's why he got executed because the state thought he was causing too much
00:31:00.920
trouble. And that's one of the problems when you try to live philosophically. Sometimes it doesn't end
00:31:07.080
well for you. Yes. Unless you're an Epicurean, because if you're an Epicurean, then you close
00:31:12.820
yourself into your garden with your friends and forget the rest of the world. So you're fine.
00:31:18.580
Yeah, you're right. You have, you have a good point there. But then again, we're talking about
00:31:22.460
intentions. We're not talking about outcomes. We don't control outcomes. Of course, there's no
00:31:27.020
guarantee of succeeding, right? You can have, you can be the best person in the world. You can have the
00:31:33.100
best intentions and even very good skills. And nevertheless, you're not going to
00:31:36.980
succeed because the external circumstances are such that success becomes impossible. I mean,
00:31:43.080
Socrates, we have, we have to remember in historical terms, Socrates was living most of his life during
00:31:50.020
the Peloponnesian War, which was a disaster for Athens, which went on for decades, which cost a lot
00:31:57.160
of lives and resources and so on and so forth. And he lived not only during the period of democracy,
00:32:04.020
but also during the period of the 30 tyrants, which as the name implies, was not a, was not a
00:32:10.720
particularly bright and, and, and happy period for Athens. So the external circumstances are always
00:32:17.600
going to be certainly to a large extent determining the outcomes, right? But what we can do is to try
00:32:25.280
our best. And that is why the figure of Socrates is so important still two and a half millennia after
00:32:32.180
his death. I mean, yes, he did die, but he died in a sense on purpose. He knew that, uh, he could
00:32:41.180
escape, uh, his, his friends had bribed the guards in prison and it was pretty normal for people who
00:32:48.400
were condemned to death to just disappear at the last minute and move to another city and, and be
00:32:53.060
fine. He didn't want to do that. Uh, his, he, his position was one of principle. He said, you know,
00:32:59.200
I lived well and I thrived under the, the laws of Athens for most of my life. What am I going to do
00:33:06.400
now that those laws are turned against me? I'm just going to quit because I don't, I don't want
00:33:10.460
to play by the rules anymore. So he set an example essentially. Right. Uh, and it's a, it's a difficult
00:33:16.340
example, of course, to follow. It's, this is, this is a high level example, but then again, that's why
00:33:21.100
we remember Socrates and not a lot of other people. Okay. So the lessons from the Greco-Roman
00:33:26.000
moral philosophers that, uh, virtue can be taught. Um, if you try to do too late in life,
00:33:32.200
it's going to be probably too late, but are there any insights from say modern cognitive science or
00:33:39.060
modern psychology that we can combine with the insights from Greco-Roman philosophy to figure
00:33:44.700
out, you know, how can we help people be better people? Yes, there are. Uh, interestingly,
00:33:51.540
and again, another reason why the Greco-Roman is so important is because they got a lot of stuff,
00:33:57.260
not everything, but I got a lot of stuff right, uh, that modern cognitive science, modern psychology
00:34:03.640
actually in fact confirms and of course expands on. Obviously the Greco-Roman didn't carry out
00:34:09.480
systematic experiments on, you know, uh, randomized samples of people and all that sort of stuff.
00:34:14.700
But a lot of what modern psychologists are learning about virtue and about wisdom and about,
00:34:21.260
uh, you know, character, it actually does, uh, reflect the intuitions of the Greco-Romans. For
00:34:27.340
instance, one thing that does work, uh, according to modern psychologists in order to improve your
00:34:33.920
character is to pick role models. If you, uh, imagine when you have to make a decision, if you imagine
00:34:41.220
in your mind, uh, somebody who you regard highly looking over your shoulders, you're more likely
00:34:49.760
to make the right decision. And that person that you imagine could be somebody you actually know,
00:34:55.060
you know, like your grandmother, let's say, uh, it could be a fictional even, uh, role model,
00:35:00.400
or it could be somebody you don't know, but you know of, and that you admire. The point is you do that
00:35:06.080
exercise mentally. Whenever you're making a big decision, you think you ask yourself, well, what
00:35:11.060
would Socrates do? And, uh, the, the, the empirical data show that, uh, you're more likely to do the
00:35:19.000
right thing. Well, that technique of, of picking a role model is certainly a stoic technique. It's
00:35:25.260
certainly something that Aristotle would have, uh, would have approved. Another thing that we know
00:35:31.300
that works is active, uh, self-reflection. So things like keeping a philosophical journal. Uh, we
00:35:39.540
mentioned Marcus Aurelius. He's very, he's famous because of the meditations, right? This book that he
00:35:45.280
wrote, but he did not write it as a book for publication. This was his actual, his, his personal
00:35:50.860
philosophical diary. He put down his own thoughts that were meant to help him carry out some continuous
00:35:58.620
self-analysis and self-criticism in the, in the process of improving as an individual. Turns out
00:36:05.440
modern cognitive behavioral therapy will tell you that that actually is a very effective technique
00:36:09.900
to keep that kind of, of, of journal. And in fact, even to keep it in the way in which Marcus was
00:36:16.400
keeping it, that is, for instance, uh, one of the odd things from the point of view of a modern reader
00:36:21.640
about meditations is that it is within the second person. So Marcus writes to himself, but he writes
00:36:28.240
as if he were writing to a friend, you did this, or you did not do this, right? Now, what the hell is
00:36:33.740
he doing that? Uh, a modern cognitive therapist would tell you, well, the reason for that is because
00:36:39.000
he's trying to keep some distance, some cognitive distance between his own actions and the fact that he
00:36:45.440
wants to learn from his actions. So if he were to write in the first person and using very emotional
00:36:51.660
language, he would simply get caught up into the emotional component of what he, what he was doing
00:36:58.700
and not learn much from his experiences. Instead, he's using very neutral, very analytical language and
00:37:06.480
he's using the second person. And that, those, those tricks actually work. They're, they're very good.
00:37:11.620
Uh, modern cognitive science also tells us that some of the things that this, the ancient
00:37:17.840
Greco-Romans thought did not work, do not in fact work. Uh, one of the big ones is do nothing. Now you
00:37:26.320
would say, yeah, of course doing nothing doesn't, doesn't work. But we, a lot of people today think
00:37:31.940
that, uh, or seem to think that, uh, you know, the way you get old, you get wiser is just by getting
00:37:38.140
older, uh, older people become wiser. But in fact, that's simply not the case. Becoming old is
00:37:46.180
necessary, but not sufficient condition as philosophers would, would put it for, for becoming
00:37:51.520
wise. Just, just because time passes, that doesn't mean you're learning anything from your
00:37:56.440
experiences. You have to learn actively. You have to pay attention to your experiences and then you're
00:38:02.360
learning. So it turns out that in order to be wise, you do need age because you need experience.
00:38:07.360
Uh, it's hard to imagine a, you know, 15 year old who is wise, uh, 15 year old may be in, you know,
00:38:14.420
ahead of his own age or her age or more mature, et cetera. But wise is kind of hard because they
00:38:20.240
haven't had enough life experiences to reflect on, uh, to actually be wise. But then again, you know,
00:38:27.700
I'm sure you like myself know a lot of people in their fifties, sixties, or seventies were definitely
00:38:33.340
not wise because they have experience, but they didn't pay attention to it. So not doing anything,
00:38:39.240
uh, you know, not reflecting critically on your own experiences, not learning actively from what
00:38:44.740
you're doing. Uh, it's certainly a problematic, it, it gets in the way of, of developing wisdom.
00:38:51.080
And I think something else that the Greco-Romans got right, that's being confirmed by cognitive
00:38:55.020
psychology. You, um, highlight research by a guy named Miller. Uh, we had on a podcast,
00:39:01.120
wrote the book called the character gap. And he just talked about different studies that show that
00:39:04.720
when people in positions of power, um, they tend to think that they're good because they're in
00:39:10.160
charge. Like, well, if I'm in charge, it must be good. The Greco-Romans be like, you know,
00:39:14.300
Socrates would be like, well, no, you might be in charge. It doesn't necessarily mean you're a good
00:39:18.380
person. So that's where that self-reflection comes along, having role models to kind of put you in
00:39:23.360
check. Like, I guess the, the, the Renaissance or medieval, um, philosophers would call it a mirror,
00:39:28.820
right? You want a mirror that you can look into to see what you really are.
00:39:32.420
That's right. That's right. And another kind of mirror, which again, was, uh, very much at the
00:39:37.940
forefront of, uh, the, uh, the minds of the Greco-Romans. And it is confirmed by research
00:39:43.300
like the one that Christian Miller, uh, wrote about is friendships, good friends, right? So
00:39:50.580
what helps you improve, uh, is in fact, hanging around the right people. Uh, this is probably not
00:39:57.980
very surprising, right? It's, it's what your mom probably told you when you were a kid, you know,
00:40:01.940
just be careful who you hang around with. Uh, but it does work. If you hang around people who are not
00:40:07.540
good, who are not virtuous, who are not trying to improve themselves, then you're probably going to
00:40:12.340
slide down into, you know, uh, dangerous territory. Well, on the other hand, if you surround yourself
00:40:18.120
with people who are, uh, you know, at least as good or even better than, than, than, than
00:40:22.920
yourself, and they're trying to strive to go in the right direction, then you will as well. So
00:40:29.160
who you frequent is very important. And I took this to heart. I mean, in, in, you know, at some
00:40:34.220
point a few years ago, I started looking at the kind of people I was hanging around and I saw,
00:40:38.180
okay, some people are really in that category, others, not so much. And I need to make decisions.
00:40:43.880
I need to figure out, do I really want to do certain things or hang around certain people? Because if it's
00:40:48.920
not good for either me or them, as it turns out, uh, then why are you doing it?
00:40:55.120
Well, Massimo, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:41:00.060
Well, it's easy. There is a site called massimopulucci.org and everything about my work,
00:41:06.080
my podcasting, my essays, and my books is there.
00:41:09.560
Fantastic. Well, Massimo, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:41:14.100
My guest today was Massimo Pulucci. He's the author of the book, The Quest for Character. It's
00:41:17.660
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at
00:41:21.120
his website, massimopulucci.org. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash teachvirtue,
00:41:26.420
where you can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:41:31.600
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:41:35.220
at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:41:39.020
written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free
00:41:42.580
episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,
00:41:46.600
sign up, use code, and manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you're signed up,
00:41:50.240
download the Stitcher app on Android iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the
00:41:53.560
AOM podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us
00:41:56.980
a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you've done that already, thank you.
00:42:00.780
Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something
00:42:03.560
out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay.
00:42:07.500
Remind you not to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
00:42:16.600
AOM podcast is brought to you by the AOM podcast.