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Excerpt from “Ethical Criticism and Liberal Education: The Pedagogical Connection,” ADE Bulletin No. 90 (Fall, 1988):  34-45.

Appetite, pride, and emotion have a thousand ways of corrupting, diluting, or otherwise weakening our determination to make our actions conform to what we know, not merely to what we want. (I know that we often lack conclusive knowledge about actions that must be made, but that is another issue.) What I am focusing on here is how appetites and passions frequently conquer or contradict sufficient knowledge. We have all heard of cancer patients whose knowledge of symptoms, even before their own diagnosis, was sufficient to let them know that they should have gone in for tests but whose desire to avoid facing something terrible was stronger than their knowledge. This is an impulse that lives in all of us. A trivial case is my own knowledge that all I have to do to lose my extra ten pounds is stop eating sweets and having second helpings. But my desires overrule my knowledge, and I am master of a thousand rationalizations. “I deserve a treat,” I say, or “This dinner is a special celebration,” or “You only live once,” and so on. Plato describes this kind of rationalizing with his usual terse insight: "in the soul of . . . man himself there is a better and a worse part. . . . When . . . the smaller and better part . . . is overpowered by the larger and worse, this is made a reproach and called being defeated by oneself, and a man in this situation is called uncontrolled" (431a). All of us are sometimes self-defeaters; some of us are chronics. Not all desires and appetites are illegitimate, of course, but when they conflict with knowledge and even when knowledge or reason tells us that they are illegitimate, we still tend to pursue desires rather than stand firm on knowledge.

Thus those of us in liberal education cannot rely on the teaching of knowledge or how-to skills alone to produce citizens who will even reach for, much less achieve, Sidney's “ending end” of virtuous action. Moral reasoning and analysis are not irrelevant or worthless, but in themselves they are insufficient and incomplete. If we want to help our students become fully formed citizens who will exercise self-control; who will value honesty, kindness, justice, and generosity; who will reject cheap fads and commercial fakery; and who will have the social conscience to take responsibility for the world as their shared home, we will have to do more than preach platitudes at them or scorn them for being Philistines. We must, among other things, help shape their desires and appetites.

The problem is not that students lack desires and appetites or any vision of the kind of world they want to live in. The problem is more serious than that. It is that most students’ vision ofthe world they want to live in is deeply, profoundly impoverished. Heirs of an atomistic social theory that posits no intrinsic obligations among classes, and heirs of a tradition of individualism that places its highest value on self-fulfillment and success, many students uncritically accept a view of the world that is frequently solipsistic, instrumentalist, and devoid of either historical or future perspectives. In the absence of any powerful social conscience or vivid moral imagination and in the vacuum created by the disappearance of the tradition of moral discussion that used to help train both conscience and imagination, students are mainly left, through no fault of their own, with what they call  “personal objectives” or “self-realization.” They talk about realizing the self, discovering the self, helping the self, liking the self, styling the self, fulfilling the self. The terrible and sad irony of this frantic self-emphasis is poignantly described by Robert Penn Warren:

“The prime example of individualism, the man of will who says, ‘I please myself,’ is the victim of the last illusion: he can have no self. Why? Because the true self, among the many varieties of fictive selves, can develop only in a vital relation between the unitary person and the group. That is, the self is possible only in a community.”

But without this knowledge, and under the illusion that serving the self is the best way to discover the self, most students today can follow the implications of this position only far enough to see that what the self needs is a large area of unrestricted “space.” Their inference is a logical one, given what their culture has told them about the inviolability of self-fulfillment as a guiding principle of life, but it leads to some frightening consequences.

© 2005 Copyright Marshall Gregory