A Brief Meditation on Disputation

This is certainly not brief and it meanders, but I'm simply trying to get some scattered thoughts down, so bear with me:

I read and I think and I recognize a pattern in the ethics materials that I've been mulling over lately. In brief, I've been considering the Mahabharata (ever since the first reading, the text that I will always return to), the Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), Martha Nussbaum's strategies for reading literature as ethically relevant, and those few notes from Wislawa Szymborska that I've linked elsewhere about writing poetry.

Szymborska, in his notes to aspiring poets, wrote about the difference between prose and poetry; in prose, something happens, something takes place. Poetry, on the other hand, is about observing and discovering and making something happen from the words, not from action. This is the appreciation of things in themselves, and it's one of the reasons poetry can (and should) be discussed and even argued about, in order to find out how it can compel a response from us without forcing action. I'll argue with anyone, endlessly and passionately, that the line "the woods are lovely, dark and deep" in Frost's "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening" is best taken as an adjective and two modifying adverbs rather than three consecutive adjectives because I think that's how the poem best acquits itself to us. That's how the description becomes something more than flat description - it's how something happens.

Aristotle posed the essential ethical question, how should one live a good life? And as I've been reading and ruminating on and arguing about some of these texts, I keep coming back to that framing question as a way of reading and, more importantly, as a way of cultivation. In literature, something happens as well, and great literature can be read as a narrative or simply for the flavor of the language, the descriptions that evoke and are powerful as poetry. This is why we have to re-read, so that we can walk familiar paths again and savor all of the details that may have missed us when we rushed through the first (or second, or third, etc) time. We can also embody the story, internalize the narrative and let it work on us as thinking, feeling individuals. No matter how craven the individual, anyone can remember some kind of story with a moral from their childhood or some piece of literature or other art that made them aware of something beyond themselves. That's what great art does - it removes us from our own experience and gives us an experience we did not (or could not) otherwise have. And that's why it's so vital to be exposed to many types of art, to be granted the full range of human experience that can only be captured by artists in various forms, prismatic experiences of aesthetic beauty.

But even as we wax rhapsodic about aesthetics, the ethical is alongside. There's been a lot of discussion in current events about empathy, especially with regards to the current Supreme Court vacancy, but what does empathy mean and how can we cultivate it? I would always make the argument that we can develop empathy not only through our own direct experience but also through aesthetic experience. When we read literature and travel alongside a character, we can gain insight into the way other people think and how they make decisions, and see how those decisions have consequences for them and for people around them. When we read, say, Dumas' "Count of Monte Cristo", and experience the pain of his loss and his steely resolve, we have access to a situation that most of us will (hopefully) never have to face. And when, after traveling with him and his pain and resolve for a time, we experience his vindication, that vindication can be ours as well. And when he shows mercy and compassion, we can experience that too and reflect on why it is the right (or wrong) choice.

This is what leads back to Aristotle's question, because the question of how to live a good life makes us reflect on how we can make good decisions. Aristotle's question often leads us to virtue ethics, the cultivation of personal virtues which guide us in life rather than dealing with situational ethics, asking about the right decision in relation to problems as they come up. I'm a virtue ethicist myself, so I'm very sympathetic to the way Nussbaum brings Aristotle's question into a relationship with Victorian and modern literature. Yet I think there's something missing as well, because there's always been something that bothered me about virtue ethics. It's all well and good to cultivate the virtues, but what is the ultimate goal? Can we become perfected? What does perfection look like? Or are we just struggling in a world that's hostile and does not permit perfection?

Now here's where I take a few conceptual leaps to get to what I really think is at stake here: I think that at least one model of perfection offered by virtue ethics most closely corresponds to a type of art-less sagely character that is most commonly found in Taoist, Zen, and Hindu sources. It's not a type of mysticism (although it is often tied to that), but instead represents a perfection of human ways of acting in the world such that actions happen spontaneously, not willed, but in perfect proportion to the surrounding world. These actions (reactions might be a better word) reflect the situation at hand rather than trying to impose a type of interpretation that complicates circumstances. The problem is that these sagely characters go against everything we try to do in the world, which is interpret and judge and be proactive in our actions.

So what, then, are we to do about this whole situation? The Zhuangzi gives us one approach: deny distinctions, and cultivate a mirror-like response to the world. We become sage-like when we deny everything that encourages us to make judgements. Zhuangzi gets his point across by constantly undercutting our attempts to pin him down to a philosophy in his eponymous text, and instead flits across character identities, strange parables and iconoclastic behaviors. Each episode is beautiful and self-contained in itself, but simultaneously interlocks with and dissolves the meaning of other episodes in the text. I'm not really sure how we can take the text in the end, or even if a kind of discursive understanding is possible. I think a type of aesthetic understanding is possible, and that people can share in that kind of understanding, but I'm not sure whether that can be transmitted verbally.

I think the Mahabharata offers another way of getting to this sage-like position, and this is the one that I find more interesting on a personal level. I think that the Mahabharata uses some similar tactics to the Zhuangzi in terms of constantly undercutting attempts to settle on one teleology for the text, but on a much larger scale. It's fascinating because anyone who I talk to about the text has a different idea of what constitutes "the good life" in the Mahabharata, and each of them can be persuasively argued. Yet in the very process of arguing about these different notions, new vantage points open up, and I come away with a deeper understanding of how episodes in the text can be interlinked, how different proclamations can be considered authoritative, etc. And so the text invites me back into it, to discover things that I may have overlooked before, and to walk its paths again.

Yet isn't this a type of ethical practice that follows from what I described above? In this case, with a mammoth text which invites interpretations and then objects to them with such seeming glee, can there be anything but disputation? I'm not sure if there can be, but I do think that the disputation is enough for ethical work. This applies to other texts as well, because as I've said above, we can argue about poetry and its affect as easily as about narrative and its discursive value. But disputation requires a re-engagement with arguments and understandings, and in the process, it makes us question our distinctions and judgments. It forces us to embrace other points of view and figure out how to agree or disagree with them. Strangely enough, this process doesn't lead to a sort of facile relativism, since we can know what a good or a bad interpretation is, but instead aids us in understanding what it means to make judgments and interpretations. Whether that process leads us to Zhuangzi's end, that we reject all such judgments, or whether it leads us to a strong, legalistic type of virtue ethic, I'm not sure. And that leads to an interesting question, which is whether we have to choose virtues or whether we can follow an amalgam of them and trust that they lead us towards some sort of human perfection.