Ethics and education as practices of freedom

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Ethics and education as practices of freedom

Pedro Tabensky

To cite this article: Pedro Tabensky (2021) Ethics and education as practices of freedom, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53:6, 568-577, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1791822 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1791822

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Ethics and education as practices of freedom

Pedro Tabensky

Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

ABSTRACT

On the one hand, according to Richard Rorty, Paulo Freire and others, education is the practice of freedom. On the other hand, according to Michael Foucault, Mary Midgley and others,ethicsis the practice of freedom. How, then, are education and ethics related to one another and what do these authors mean by‘the practice of freedom’? In this piece, I argue that education and ethics are two mutually constitutive aspects of the practice of freedom. Individuals who are able to engage in this practice can most properly be said to be the authors of their lives, that is, individuals who, to borrow from Neil MacGregor, are able to find their‘place in things’. To find our‘place in things’is to do the necessary educative work required for becoming the authors of our lives, that is, for self-actualization (as Rorty and John Dewey have argued). To take on the authorial role is, moreover, to be able effectively to take control of our lives, to organize them into unities for which we are individually responsible. This, according to Midgley, is precisely what it is to be ethical. This work, moreover, requires ongoing development, that is, education, in Dewey’s sense. I further argue that professional education and skills training cannot be understood properly in isolation from these broader educational aims and I criticize mainstream educational practices for not paying sufficient attention to the intimate relationship between the vocational and non-vocational aspects of education.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 10 April 2020 Accepted 24 June 2020 KEYWORDS Ethics; education; the practice of freedom

Introduction

Without education we could not navigate the world as conscious rational beings who are at once autonomous and social. Children are voracious learners, driven by the dual thirst to belong and to make sense of things. The force of our need to belong is relatively constant throughout our lives, although its precise character tends to change over time, but the burning need to make sense that we find in children is somewhat lost as we become socialized into a world that tends to valorize learning primarily for instrumental reasons and once we are at the stage of having to question our beliefs, indeed, to take responsibility for them rather than merely absorbing them from our surroundings.

Indeed, without education we could not, to borrow the words of art historian Neil MacGregor, find our ‘place in things’ (Collini, 2012, p. 11). And, I should add, finding our ‘place in things’is not an optional extra for us. One finds one’s‘place in things’by fitting in and making sense of our situation, largely through the process of socialization. This characterization is slightly mislead- ing as it suggests that one exists as a rational being prior to becoming socialized. Rather, the

CONTACT Pedro Tabensky [email protected] Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

ß2020 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 2021, VOL. 53, NO. 6, 568–577

https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1791822

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process of socialization required for finding our‘place in things’makes us into what we are. So, education, in this basic sense, is amongst other things the process of becoming.

Fitting in and making sense are two distinct yet overlapping processes. I can fit in and not properly make sense of my situation, but I could not make sense if I did not belong, if I was not thrown into the world to start with, in Heidegger’s (1996) sense. To be thrown into the world in this sense is our becoming through the process of socialization. And indeed, making sense can put us at loggerheads with our community. Making sense, as mentioned already, may involve, indeed always involves, critically distancing myself to some extent—never completely—from the common set of practices, dispositions and beliefs that constitute the lifeworld of the social group to which I belong.

To be sure, people are often socialized harmfully, either because of misguided pedagogies or adverse social or personal conditions. Such modes of socialization are corrupting to a greater or lesser extent. So, the relevant conception of socialization at issue is normative through and through. Hence, so should our understandings of education. So, it is too with critique of what is handed down to us via socialization, for critique always finds its provenance in commitment, an understanding that this must change in relation to these standards.

I assume here, for the purpose of argument, that Dewey (2012) is broadly correct to think that intelligent life is an educative process, a process of continual growth and learning, such that, if someone becomes permanently stuck and unable or unwilling to continue learning— indeed to continually respond to changing circumstances intelligently—we would judge that person’s condition to be lamentable. And it should also be noted that at this schematic level there is broad consensus amongst some of the most prominent philosophers of education, lend- ing support to the idea that I am standing on firm ground. Aside from Dewey, I am thinking in the first instance of Plato (1992), Tagore (1917), Freire (2005), Rorty (1999) and Nussbaum (2016).

And I should not fail to mention that Rousseau (1918) would agree with the claim that one of the key functions of education is socialization and that life is an educative process, but he was, as are all those listed above, deeply sceptical about the educative processes current in his day.

All of the above were advocates of educational reform in the direction of enhancing human experience, although they would disagree significantly regarding the nature of the requisite reforms. To be sure, some, such as Rousseau, believed that socialization should happen at a later stage than, say, Dewey or Rorty, but they all agree on the basic features I am here keen to highlight regarding the importance of socialization. And the same is true with regards to critique.

I should also take this opportunity to stress that my agreement with Dewey concerns some, not all, of his views. His arguments are often unwieldly and unclear, and there is plenty of room for supplementation and refinement. I should also mention by way of example that I largely agree with Callan’s (1982) critique of Dewey’s conception of education as growth on the grounds that it is both too permissive and too restrictive in certain respects. But Callan’s concerns need not worry us here. His argument does not challenge the views expressed above.

A view that contrasts with those of the authors listed above is that education is knowledge transfer. Whilst I do not unqualifiedly disagree with this view, I do think it is a mistake to think of education primarily or exclusively in these terms. One reason is that knowledge and understanding cannot be equated. One can know lots of things and understand relatively little. So, those who endorse the idea that education is knowledge transfer would perhaps be better served by claiming that education is the transfer of our understandings of reality. I generally agree that this is one very important dimension of education and, furthermore, I think I am on safe ground in claiming that nobody could reasonably dispute the idea that understanding is a central aim of the educative process. However, and as will become evident in the pages that follow, education cannot be reduced to this sort of transfer for, amongst other things, we cannot fail to consider the attitudes required for that‘transfer’to occur. But, also,‘transfer’is too crude an idea to capture what occurs in a properly conducted educative process, for learning cannot

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be reduced to mere absorption of facts or skills. Amongst other things, proper learning involves learning to learn autonomously, and this cannot be separated from the ability to critique.

To find our ‘place in things’, then, is to a large extent to establish an indefinitely revisable rank ordering of values, in short, an ethic, both in line with and against the commonplace. This is who I am, these are my people and this is what I stand for. And, crucially, this is why I stand for this, where the seriousness and richness with which one addresses thewhy is a mark of the educated in the broad sense of‘educated’that cannot be equated with obtaining a formal education. Indeed, the broad and basic educational process I am describing here coincides with the ongoing enhancement of the process of coming to consciousness.

Integration, diremption and the practice of freedom

Educational institutions seem overly concerned with preparing students for the world of work.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this aim. But I worry when far-too-many of my students tell me that money is the aim of education or when they tell me, as they far-too-often do, that they have come to university because that is the next automatic step rather than a genuine choice that they have explicitly embraced and understood. When students come to university they far-too-often come with the idea that university is the bridge between school and remunerated employment. And the generalized lack of interest in learning (included the high incidence of plagiarism) reported by my academic peers and witnessed first-hand is consistent with the above observations. Far-too-often our students come to university to acquire skills that will allow them to access remunerated employment. And I do not think educational institutions are by and large doing nearly enough to challenge student prejudices (understood as pre-judgments), for doing this would involve curricular revision and, more generally, a shift in the way academics approach teaching. We are for the most part not offering opportunities for our students to bring themselves wholeheartedly into their studies as opposed to approaching their studies as a necessary evil, primarily a stepping stone to economic security or affluence.

It is safe to assume that most academics are relatively passionate about their work, but that is because they already find their work interesting and fulfilling, that is, their egos are already deeply invested in their work. But merely expressing our interest, our love for our disciplines, is not typically sufficient to cultivate the love of learning amongst our students. A bridge needs to be drawn between field of study and person, and it is at this point in the educative process that reform is required. Of course, all academics regularly come across exceptionally self-motivated students driven primarily by the love of learning, but these students are exceptions rather than the rule. Students driven by the love of learning, of course, are also typically fearful of their economic prospects as they probably should be in uncertain times. The point here is not to dichot- omize the economic motive and the love of learning motive. The point is rather to point out that only one of the two motives is far-too-often driving the educative process, helping to explain basic unconducive attitudes to learning widely represented in the student body. This, I should mention, does not so much come about as a matter of explicit policy on the part of academics (the story of the rising tide of managerialism is altogether different, one that cannot be explored presently). Rather, the issue is that universities are not sufficiently challenging students’prejudices.

There is nothing in a given subject matter, Dewey (2012, pp. 278–310) plausibly argues, that makes it inherently interesting in the sense that its interestingness stands out independently of the state of mind of the student. Instead, for a given subject matter to be of interest to the student, the student’s agency must be engaged in the right sort of way. And making it interesting to the student is indeed a central component of creating the conditions for future professionals to find themselves in their work. Things are interesting (or not) to us, given who we are, given our experiences and idiosyncrasies, rather than being interesting in and of themselves. This fact

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helps explain the diversity of interests found amongst academics, and it helps explain how personal experiences need to come into the classroom. Generally speaking, and following Dewey, a central task of a successful educative process involves helping students to integrate what is learned into the narrative of their lives. It is in this process of integration that this subject matter or that becomes interesting to the student.

Rather than promoting the proper formation of human beings, contemporary educational institutions tend not to challenge widespread student prejudices. They do not sufficiently invite students to refine their ability to self-critique, to understand the world and the ways of seeing the world that they have inherited. The efforts of the academic community are less on properly integrating the vocational dimension of student lives into the patterns of their lives, understood as relatively cohesive wholes. Contemporary educational institutions have taken it upon themselves to focus disproportionately on one dimension of life—the professional dimension—largely dirempted from life understood as a dynamic unity. Consequently, there is, generally speaking, a divorce between knowledge and knower amongst our students, making it so that the relationship between student and object of study is fundamentally instrumental, helping to explain widespread student apathy. Indeed, a central theme in Dewey’s philosophy of education is that people must find themselves in their work (Dewey,2012). His insights are supported by findings in the psychology of motivation (Deci et al.,1991).

When I ask undergraduate students why they come to university, students most often reply

‘Money!’. And when I ask students why they hold this belief, the standard reply is that they are not its authors, that they are the passive repositories of the commonplace. I take it as given here that one of the most important markers of having a genuine education is the ability to identify the provenance of many of our understandings. One of the fundamental distinctions that is at issue is that between passive absorption and genuine endorsement, between mere prejudice and understanding. My students’replies are not merely confined to working-class students living with significant uncertainty about the future, anxious to achieve economic stability for them and those they are closest to, but it cuts across social strata. Students have absorbed a way of being- in-the-world and their prejudices are not being sufficiently challenged by mainstream pedagogic practices. The socialization dimension of their educative experience is not challenged by another key dimension not sufficiently present in their lives, the ability to critique. A successful contemporary high school is typically measured in relation to how many students get into university and, more specifically, how many students are set on the path of becoming salaried professionals. Students by and large come to university passively believing that university is there to transmogrify them into salaried professionals and that’s pretty much the only reason for studying at university. This is to a significant extent born out of fear of an uncertain and potentially pre- carious economic future, but it is also born of the fact that students typically do not see how getting an education will improve their lives from their own points of view, beyond the economic dimension. I take the above reply to my question to be a tragic sign of the times, a clear indication of the deleterious work of misguided pedagogical practices, within educational institutions and in private and public spaces in general. It is a tragic sign in part because, as much research in the psychology of motivation shows, one’s professional ambitions will tend to be better met if we are motivated by higher ideals, such as those informing the need for meaning or wholeness.¹It is also—and more fundamentally—a tragic sign for it points to fragmentation and a consequent loss of freedom, something I shall have more to say about below, but a few words are warranted at present. Our educational institutions—both schools and universities—are contri- buting to forming fragmented subjects, living compartmentalized lives, helping partly to explain classroom apathy, and arguably what seems to be the disturbing rise in the incidence of mental illness amongst students (a topic for another occasion). Although perhaps a few words are warranted at present, for I am not surprised that students looking forward to a life of professional drudgery—rather than pursuing personally rewarding professional aims—are disturbed. It is arguable that the anxieties of labour uncertainty are somewhat diminished when one is pursuing

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something that one considers to be of great value to oneself and to others. But what I am getting from my students is the clear message that they are not studying in order to take up fulfilling jobs once they graduate. What my students typically tell me is that they are scared of the future, generally have little interest in the content of their studies, and have little choice but to join the world of work in order to increase their chances of perpetuating, enhancing or achieving economic wellbeing.

Students by and large seem uninterested in learning as they do not see how to relate what they learn in class with who they are and what they value, and since they do not grasp the value of education, they are vulnerable to forces that flow through them rather than actually taking responsibility for who they are. The typical contemporary student tends not to grasp the relationship between professional existence and self-realization or, more generally, between the life of the mind and day-to-day existence. And part of the reason for this is that educational institutions tend to ignore the crucial relationship that exists between education and self-realization.

Indeed, the very idea of self-realization is largely absent from the classroom. There is of course nothing inherently wrong with the aim of becoming a professional. Societies need a competent and knowledgeable workforce and sophisticated work can be, but far-too-often is not, deeply personally rewarding. The problem, however, is that focusing purely, or almost so, on professional competence militates against the limited contemporary aims of education in addition to failing to play a part in fostering personal growth. I come to a long-term project, such as a pro- fession, invested in what I am doing only insofar as I understand it as something that will in some way complete me. This is true of both highly abstract and the more hands-on disciplines.

Fragmentation, unity and the practice of freedom

Fragmentation is antithetical to agency, making it more difficult for students genuinely to take responsibility for the formation of their lives, for their own education. The goal of education is external to them, a stage of their lives that they must typically endure. The concern here should not be understood as purely self-directed. Part of the story of self-realization speaks to our ability to expand outwards, to stretch out to others meaningfully and to act as social beings able to embrace the lives of others in rich ways.

To live an integrated life is to adopt an authorial perspective on our lives understood as wholes. The schism I have been highlighting in these pages is that between self and student.

But I have said enough to suggest that the problem runs deeper than this, for a refined critical capacity is one of the key forces of personal unification.

As Midgley (1994) plausibly and richly argues, the labour of integration is what we might call the practice of freedom. Ethics and education are, as we shall further explore in the pages that follow, practices of freedom, practices of integration, of working towards wholeness and perfecting our agential capacities, our capacities to act as responsible agents who are not the slaves of undomesticated forces. This is not to say that education and ethics are one and the same thing. Instead, they are two intimately related and overlapping aspects of the phenomenon of self-realization.

In addition to Midgley, Michael Foucault (Foucault,1997) also argues thatethicsis the practice of freedom. Others—Rorty (1999), following on from Dewey (2012), and the Critical Pedagogy tradition of Freire (2005)—have argued that non-vocationaleducation, or education in general, is the practice of freedom. Those who argue that non-vocational education is the practice of freedom describe it as an ethical ideal (critical pedagogy advocates describe it as an emancipatory ideal, which is an ethical ideal). But what, more precisely, is the relationship between ethics and education and how do these relate to freedom understood as a practice?

Foucault (1997, p. 284) claims that, ‘Yes, for what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious … practice of freedom?’. To properly make sense of this claim, we need to get a better

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grip on what Foucault means by ethics and ‘the conscious … practice of freedom’. Foucault (1997, p. 286) endorses Plutarch’s conception of ethics as self-mastery to explain his idea:

It is here that one encounters a metaphor that comes … from Plutarch:‘You must learn the principles in such a constant way that whenever your desires, appetites, and fears awake like barking dogs, the logos will speak like the voice of the master who silences his dogs with a single cry’.

Thelogos must ‘speak like the voice of the master’. It must learn to tame (more specifically, to

‘silence’) the‘barking dogs’, that is,‘desires, appetites and fears’. To be ethical, according to Plutarch and Foucault, is to attain self-mastery and this is what it means to engage in the practice of freedom, the ongoing task of keeping the ‘barking dogs’in check. I am not sure I entirely agree with Plutarch’s characterization here, for I do not think the ‘barking dogs’must be silenced, at least not always and arguably not for the most part. His view, and Foucault’s, seem to echo the old philosoph- ical precept that the passions must be silenced so that the pure voice of reason—thelogos—is not interrupted by their rude presence. This precept is in turn informed by the dualism of intellect and body, a dualism which is as old as philosophy itself and, if Dewey (2012, pp. 555–579) is right, it stems from the separation of leisure and working classes in Ancient Greece, where the labour of the body and its distracting emotional quiverings are constructed as animal-like and where the labour of the mind is constructed as divine and hence superior. Self-mastery is not so much about silencing as it is about welcoming the‘barking dogs’into an organized pack so that they coordinate their distinct contributions for the sake of the totality to which they belong, a totality which is largely constituted as such because the different aspects are permanently scrutinized by the conscious self in relation to the totality which is their home, the person. The welcoming process involves what could be characterized as emotional literacy, where‘desires, appetites and fears’are made to play the positive roles they should play in our quest for wholeness, in the permanent Neurath-style tinkering of the boat of life. Indeed, it is because this tinkering is unavoidable that ethics, like breathing, is unrenounceable.

It is what guides the tinkering, as we shall see below, following Midgley’s richly Darwinian conception of the homeostatic role that ethics plays in human life and its intimate relationship to the idea of freedom understood as a practice. We should not necessarily see the‘barking dogs’as negative forces, as Plutarch and, following him, Foucault, seem to have understood them. Rather, ‘barking dogs’ need taming such that the barking happens when it ought to happen and in the style it ought to happen. And the norms that guide the barking, the extent, quality and so on, of the barking is determined in relation to the roles they play in life understood as a whole.

We witness here the convergence of ethics and non-vocational education towards the ideal of freedom. To be ethical and to be educated is to attain self-mastery and to self-actualize, that is, to be in the driver’s seat of one’s life, knowing—never perfectly, to be sure—who one is and what one stands for; adopting, in short, an authorial perspective on one’s life.

By‘non-vocational education’I have Richard Rorty’s conception in mind. In his words (Rorty,1999, p. 39):

The point of non-vocational higher education is … to help students realize that they can reshape themselves—that they can rework the self-image foisted on them by their past … into a new self-image, one that they themselves have helped to create. It is … a matter of inciting doubt and stimulating imagination, thereby challenging the prevailing consensus.

Cultivating self-creation and self-mastery, I take it, are central aims of higher education (arguably central aspects of all educational institutions), and they are fundamentally ethical ideals—if, that is, we think of ethics as the art of flourishing. Higher education (and arguably the educational sector as a whole) should aim to foster propitious conditions for the formation of what David Foster Wallace describes as ‘well-adjusted’ individuals in his well-known 2005 commence- ment speech at Kenyon College entitled ‘This is Water’. To achieve self-mastery is to become

‘well-adjusted’, to develop the capacity to organize our lives—in relation to commitments (values) endorsed by a reflective mind—so as to be able to act effectively as responsible agents.

These are individuals who can engage their critical faculties in the process of self-creation and self-

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mastery in ways that involve consciously readjusting what Wallace describes as our ‘default-settings’, those aspects of ourselves that allow us to operate on autopilot thus avoiding the taxing labour of reflective awareness. The advantages of running on autopilot in our daily lives are clear and they should not be ignored, as shown by Kahneman (2012) and others. But running on autopilot without the oversight function of the reflective self—the explicit valuing self—will inevitably undermine our agential autonomy and often lead us to act in ways that we would not endorse upon considered non-evasive scrutiny. Automaticity often militates against autonomy, despite the fact that it is a constitutive aspect of agential existence. To ignore our critical capacities—or to fail to take them seriously enough—is to succumb to a slavish way of being, leading us to blindly accept what we have been socialized to hold and, relatedly, to become the servants of our

‘default-settings’, following whatever commands our greatest attention without the surveillance of a refined critical faculty. Ideally, non-vocational education is aimed fundamentally at refining students’critical capacities and making them aware of the extent to which their freedom, their ability to play a role in shaping their own lives in accordance with explicitly endorsed values, depends on their capacity genuinely to take responsibility for who they are and what they stand for.

Given the contemporary commodification of just about everything, it seems that non-vocational education is slowly exiting the classroom, or at least it is not being allowed properly to enter. And this is unfortunate not merely because it is required for becoming‘well-adjusted’, but also because it impoverishes the vocational dimension of education by helping to establish a dis- tance between students’ lives and study, arguably partly explaining the generalized apathy far- too-often found in the contemporary classroom. Students are by and large and in differing degrees alienated from their studies and this is to no small degree because they find themselves adrift in a sea of forces pushing them hither and thither, prisoners of their ‘default-settings’ (or, to make an overlapping point, of the‘barking dogs’) and lacking the critical capacities properly to notice these and to engage in the project of self-creation. They have not been shown how hard it is to take responsibility for their lives, to engage in the art of self-mastery, the practice of freedom. Non-vocational education plays a central role in the formation of critical consciousness.

It provides us with the framework through which what is learned is rendered intelligible as something that matters, something worth investing our attention and energies on. Non-vocational education helps draw a bridge between self and understanding, between the task of self- creation and vocational learning. And since non-vocational education is ethics education, ethics understood as the practice of freedom—indeed the practice aimed at furthering our practical understandings of how to live—draws the bridge between self and the educational process as a whole. It fosters greater commitment to learning than would otherwise exist, a greater sense of how learning and self-creation are two interrelated aspects of a properly conceived education.

The practice of freedom and responsibility

When claiming that ethics is the practice of freedom, in addition to Foucault and Wallace, I have in mind Mary Midgley’s Darwinian conception of freedom and I have in mind Hannah Arendt’s views on banality and how it relates to the issue of freedom and education. In Midgley’s words (Midgley,1994, p. 183):

… I have tried to sketch out a notion of our freedom which will do some kind of justice to the two opposing aspects of it. One aspect is the deep complexity and dividedness of our nature. The other is the equally deep need which each of us feels to act somehow as a unity. When we try, however faintly, to act rather than merely letting forces flow through us, we are not just trying to throw off some outside tyranny.

Let me now merge Midgley’s thought with Arendt’s in order to highlight key features of both of their mutually reinforcing conceptions of freedom. A central idea in Arendt’s work (Arendt, 2006), most influentially explored in her report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, is that of thoughtlessness. She coined the term ‘the banality of evil’ when examining Adolf Eichmann’s

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character, particularly his apparent inability genuinely to think. One gets the impression that he trained himself not to think, which implies that in some sense he chose to limit one of our most fundamental defining characteristics, and in so doing avoided putting himself in the difficult situation of having to reflect on the extent to which he was responsible for his deeds. He was, it seems, entirely at the mercy of his default-settings,‘letting the forces flow through’him. He con- strued himself as a cog in a machine rather than as a genuinely responsible agent. By‘thinking’ here Arendt has something specific in mind. Inner dialogue, the ability to compare and contrast views, indeed to challenge some of our views in light of others, is central to agentic existence.

And this ability, which overlaps with the ability to deal with conflicting forces in the mind, is something that Eichmann seems to have habituated himself against. Another way of describing this peculiar feature of Eichmann’s mind is that it was devoid of conflict. But it was not devoid of conflict because he had succeeded in the task of integration. Integration presupposes bringing different aspects of mind to bear upon each other, and this is something that Eichmann seemed unable to do. In short, he seemed quite incapable of thinking. His mind was a series of isolated and relatively static segments rather than a cooperative and conflictual whole.

Eichmann was a deeply flawed human being from an ethical point of view, not so much because he was evil in the sense of having sadistic motives, although evil is a good descriptor of his deeds, but because his mind seemed quite incapable of genuinely understanding the nature of his crime. He just let‘forces flow through’him. He seemed incapable of taking responsibility for his life. Beyond the excusing cliches that he deployed there was nothing. Silence within. No inner interlocutor was present to sow the seeds of doubt, and hence he was quite incapable of genuine understanding and hence of fully grasping the ghastly reality that he helped bring about. He became the slave of the corrupting forces that established the character of his time and place. Eichmann, although apparently an officious and efficient bureaucrat, was a fool precisely because rather than managing dissonance he eliminated it altogether from his conscious life. And it is precisely this process of elimination that allowed him to act as he did. Cliches helped him do this, particularly his cliche—helped along by Hitler’s vision—that an ideal German subject is a cog in the Nazi machine, that the Fuhrer is the thinking organ of the German state.

Midgley, we already know, argues that freedom is the function of at least two basic forces in us: the brute existence of conflict and the need to remain whole. To take responsibility is, amongst other things, to manage the field of conflicting drives and motives that we inherited from our long evolutionary history. In Midgley’s words (Midgley,1994, p. 178):

… morality necessarily works to harmonize the motives that we have actually got, rather than to impose a quite new pattern. For Darwin, this obscure and alarming workplace, this muddle of conflict-ridden motivation emerging from evolution, is still our home. It is the only mind that we have. It is where we must make our choices and exert our freedom. Though cultures have done their utmost to reorganize it, they have never been able to root out its deep anomalies. Our conflicts are real, not illusory. Our freedom must lie in becoming aware of them and in learning to arbitrate them better.

In order to be free in the proper sense we must exercise our freedom. Freedom is here being characterized as an active process, a deliberate process, rather than something that we simply have by virtue of our humanity. The potential for freedom must be actualized. This active exer- tion is what it is to be responsible, according to Midgley. And, it is because we must take responsibility in order to remain whole that we are moral animals. We must engage in the com- plex task of regulating our lives when, for instance, we have to regulate our sex drive in order to function in society, as Freud (2002) has argued; when we have to manage the conflict between our need to belong and our need to be self-reliant, or our need to spend time with family and our professional responsibilities; when we have to manage the conflict between comfort and personal safety and the command of duty; when we are pressed to resolve intersubjective conflicts or, as discussed by Rorty (1999), when critically engaging with the given in the process of self-creation. In situations such as those just mentioned, pressure is put on us to manage this complexity, to be, that is, responsible for our lives and, more specifically, for who we want to be.

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For Midgley freedom is a feature of non-paradisal beings trying to remain whole in the face of conflicting instincts, motives and in light of conflicts that are part and parcel of living social lives.

Freedom emerges as a consequence of having to manage the muddle, to organize our lives by taking responsibility for who we are and who we would like to be. For Midgley, as for Foucault and Plutarch before her, freedom is the art of taming the ‘barking dogs’, although Midgley would disagree with their characterization of taming as silencing. However, Midgley’s conception of freedom is more inclusive. She is not only interested in taming the passions. She is also interested in managing internal conflict more generally. Taming, in the sense that Midgley has in mind, a sense I endorse, aims not to silence but to integrate. And the integration in question can never be taken for granted and is always contested and at risk. This is precisely why, Midgley argues, taking responsibility for our lives is not an optional extra. It is a condition for living humanly and at the same time it is something that requires ongoing refinement. And it is this need to remain whole by the ongoing process of taming that ethics is for us not an optional extra, but a condition for living humanly.

What Arendt and Midgley have in common is the view that human freedom, that the practice of freedom, is only possible in the face of inner conflict and that ethics is the practice of freedom.

Exercising our freedom is hard work and requires considerable refinement, which is to say that it requires an education. And what Eichmann’s failed life expresses is that the vocational and non-vocational dimensions of education operate together. Forces went through him, pushing him hither and thither like a marionette. And he lost or never developed the critical capacity to resist these forces in accordance with genuinely chosen guiding principles. He was unable to work towards unity, for he was stuck and unable to engage in the ongoing task of integration, of dealing with conflict and bringing the new into a relatively domesticated totality. Whatever unity he may have had was so by external imposition, and hence was rigid and unmoving, or at the very least whatever changes in circumstances may have brought about were effected without the committed work of an authorial self. In short, he was incapable of learning in a way that challenged his prejudices. In this regard his case is not unusual, except, importantly, for the effects of his poorly educated mind, a mind that could be said to be his but which was not authored by him. He walked through the world with his eyes closed, a slave of his time and place, effective in the manner of a well-constructed cog in an infernal machine that he seemed barely to have understood.

Eichmann is a stark example of a bad education—an education that ignores the fact that education and ethics are practices of freedom—but one should not be tempted to think that the failings that I have highlighted here are particular to an exceptionally rare type. Rather, I have chosen Eichmann as an example in order to highlight, as Arendt did, the commonplace, including some of its dangers.

Unless we take responsibility for our lives—unless we are properly educated to do this—we will become the slaves of our circumstances rather than genuine agents: responsible, free and ethical.

Learning, genuine learning, cannot happen without an agentic, indeed ethical, orientation towards learning. Cultivating this orientation is part and parcel of the educative process.

Note

1. See, for instance, (Pink,2010).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Pedro Tabensky is the founding director of the Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics (AGLE), Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University (South Africa). He is the author ofHappiness: Personhood, Community, Purposeand of 576 P. TABENSKY

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several articles and book chapters. Tabensky is also the editor of and contributor toJudging and Understanding:

Essays on Free Will, Narrative, Meaning and the Ethical Limits of Condemnation; The Positive Function of Evil;and, coedited with Sally Matthews (his wife), Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. Until 2016 Tabensky ran a Ford Foundation sponsored yearly roundtable series on critical issues in higher education—CHERTL Roundtable Series on Critical Issues in Higher Education.

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