IV. Practicing
Throughout his account of moral virtues, Aristotle (2002) often falls back on analogies with more immediately familiar kinds of human endeavor. On the way to his first definition of the highest good, for example, he considers what might be the work – the fundamental, species-defining task or function – of being human by analogy with the work of being a harpist: “the work of a harpist is to play the harp and the work of a serious harpist is to play the harp well” (1098a10f). So it is with his account of acquiring the virtues appropriate to a given work. “We do take on the virtues by first being at work on them, just also as in other things, namely the arts;” for example, “people become, say, housebuilders by building houses or harpists by playing the harp. So, too, we become just by doing things that are just, temperate by doing things that are temperate, and courageous by doing things that are courageous” (1103a31f).
This last point, that one becomes virtuous by acting virtuously, leaves open the question of how one determines what actions would be just or temperate. Aristotle (2002) takes up the question later, in his account of practical wisdom. Here he simply notes that, at the very least, “no one is going to become good by not performing those actions” (1105b10-13) The aim is to cultivate a stable active condition[1] of responding appropriately to situations as they unfold, which is in effect to say that practicing is necessary as means to the end of establishing good practices.
Aristotle’s appeal to musical analogies should be familiar to anyone who has learned to play an instrument or to refine control of the human voice. A student learning the violin must discover the possibilities inherent in fingers, strings, and bow. By practicing scales and arpeggios, and by working through a series of graduated fingering and bowing exercises, the student develops dispositions of perception and movement that reliably produce good tone, intonation and rhythm.[2]
Or consider a musician working to learn an unfamiliar tune by ear, like Schutz’ pianist working to master an especially demanding passage in a piano sonata, or a jazz musician learning to improvise on a chord progression. The process is the same: try and try again, making slight adjustments with each iteration; maybe start at a slow tempo and then speed up by increments; fall back on more basic technical exercises in a bid to overcome remaining obstacles to mastery of the instrument.
To underscore his point that the path of virtue often runs between two extremes – as courage, for example, lies somewhere between cowardice and rashness – Aristotle (2002) also draws imagery from the practice of archery. In striving to act virtuously, “it is possible to go wrong in many ways,” he writes, “but there is only one way to get something right (which is why the one is easy and the other difficult, it being easy to miss the target and difficult to hit it)” (1106b30f).
As it happens, the analogy with archery aligns nicely with an example from Donald (1999): other species of primates throw projectiles but “they do not practice throwing projectiles” whereas, among humans, “even young children routinely practice and refine skills for endless hours, for example experimenting with different styles of throwing.” This process of practicing and refining a skill Donald calls a “rehearsal loop”, and he emphasizes that it involves a complex sequence of cognitive operations: “rehearse the action, observe its consequences, remember these, and then alter the form of the original act, varying one or more of the parameters dictated by the memory for the consequences of the previous action, or by an idealized image of the outcome.”
Evidence for the rehearsal loop may be found in the Acheulian industry, the stone tool-making cultures associated especially with H. erectus. Archaeologists trying to reconstruct the cognitive capacities of early hominins often themselves learn to make the tools those earlier hominin species used (see Coolidge & Wynn, 2018). When they set out to do so, Donald (1991) reports, they “require months of training and practice” to become proficient: “They have to learn, and remember, exactly how to strike a sharp edge and not break off the finished part with the next blow.”
For modern practitioners of throwing, or music, or ethics, the cognitive possibilities opened up by narrative and by theory may well be involved in setting the aims of the rehearsal loop – “the idealized image of the outcome” – and in judging and then altering the remembered performance. Consider jazz improvisation, which is informed by music theory – often at a highly sophisticated level – but which, in the moment, is caught up in the ebb and flow of mimesis: a musician needs “just enough theory” to see and respond to the harmonic and rhythmic prompts and possibilities in the moment.[3] Perhaps the possibility for adept and responsible social practice in the modern world depends on having “just enough theory” to perceive the possibilities for responding to that ebb and flow of social interaction, without stopping to formulate hypotheses, for example, in a fully theoretical mode.
The same might apply to someone seeking to cultivate the virtue of temperance – a well-calibrated response to desire – who might adopt a training regimen informed by modern theoretical explanations of the dopamine reward loop, a neurochemical account of the experience of satisfaction. The practice of temperance, however, will still involve concrete acts of avoidance and approach, attention and distraction, all aimed at the development and refinement of strategies for regulating desire and avoiding temptation.
Whatever narrative and theoretical refinements modern humans may have added, the rehearsal loop as such remains rooted in mimetic representation and culture: pursuing the “idealized image of the outcome” still involves movement and gesture, responsiveness to the perceived intentions of others who are moving and gesturing. The mimetic rehearsal-loop, Donald (1999) insists, is a precondition for the emergence of the first human protolanguages, and hence for the emergence of the mythic and theoretic cultures that followed. His argument, in brief, is that primates are locked into a range of behavior fixed by their genes and the ecological niches they happen to occupy; to get from there to the cognitive flexibility of language-users there are some more basic requirements to be met, especially “a generalized capacity for deliberately refining action.”
Regarding human moral development, one aspect of the rehearsal loop stands out: in the process of consciously reviewing actions, “humans redirect their attention away from the world, and toward their own actions. The focus of attention becomes, not the reward or punishment that follows an act, or its social consequences, but the form of the act itself” (Donald, 1999). From this it would follow that mimetic culture already contains the possibility of at least one aspect of mature moral practice: moving from external to internal motivation or, at least, something other than mere punishment-avoidance as the motivation to cultivate a given practice.
At this point, Donald’s account intersects with schema theory, the model of human moral cognition developed by Rest, et al., as a refinement to and extension of Kohlberg’s (1984) stage-and-sequence theory of moral development. Briefly, ‘schemas’ are “general cognitive structures in that they provide a skeletal conception that is exemplified (or instantiated) by particular cases or experiences. That is, a schema has ‘slots’ that can be filled in by particular instances” (Rest et al., 1999). One significant point of departure from Kohlberg’s model is that schemas do not succeed one another in a fixed sequence: in responding to a given problem, an individual may appeal to more than one schema at once, though it seems clear enough that mature moral practice will lean more into the “postconventional” schema than into the “conventional” or “maintaining norms” schema, and certainly more than what Kohlberg had characterized as the “premoral” stages of punishment-avoidance and personal interest, which together might constitute a “preconventional” schema.
In very general terms, in the “premoral” or “preconventional” condition, coordination of the individual’s actions with the needs and expectations of the community would motivated primarily by external factors: one gets along only in order to avoid social sanctions imposed from without, or to secure some advantage for oneself (Kohlberg, 1984). With the “conventional” or maintaining norms schema, however, coordination may come to be motivated internally, through a reciprocal recognition of shared responsibility and “respect for the social system” (Rest et al., 1999).
Rest, et al., (1999) associate the historical emergence of the maintaining norms schema with the advent of written laws in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, going so far as to claim that “law established social order.” However, as Donald’s model suggests, social order is a precondition for developing a technology as cognitively sophisticated as writing, and likely even a precondition for developing a strategy as socially oriented as spoken language. So, it must be that order came first, and law came later as a reflection and refinement of a pre-existing order. If Donald’s account has merit, then, something very like the maintaining norms schema would have arisen within mimetic culture, including some manner of reciprocity among members of a community and a motivation to act in the interests of others and the community.
What is not so clear from Donald’s account is whether anything like a postconventional schema would have been possible within the limits of mimetic memory and culture. Among other features, a postconventional schema includes the possibility of critiquing and reforming existing norms on the basis of moral criteria and a presupposition of a kind of moral equality or “full reciprocity” among members of a community (Rest et al., 1999).
There are two points that favor the possibility of some manner of postconventional moral cognition within mimetic culture. First, it is at least suggestive that, in the mimetic rehearsal-loop, the practitioner’s attention may shift from social consequences to “the form of the act itself” – though a form that would necessarily not be expressed in words. This is plainly the case with music, as the “form” of a tune may be grasped as a coherent whole even though its meaning cannot be spoken.
Second, Narvaez and Rest (1995) have further enriched schema theory with a four-component model of moral action, only one component of which would require the context of theoretical cognition and culture: moral judgment on the basis of principles. The first component, moral sensitivity, “involves the receptivity of the sensory perceptual system to social situations and the interpretation of the situation in terms of what is possible.” The question is whether sensitivity, along with motivation and implementation, are responsive and flexible enough to allow for moral self-correction and learning in the absence of judgment based on concepts.
Taken together, these few hints suggest that at least the precursors of postconventional moral thinking may already have been part of the cognitive repertoire of pre-linguistic hominins. Perhaps it could be conceived as a variety of communal rehearsal-loop, with repetition, evaluation, judgment, and adjustment shared reciprocally among members of the community. For now, this can be only an intriguing suggestion, the full exploration of which is perhaps best left for another context.
References
Aristotle. (2002). Nicomachean Ethics (J. Sachs, Trans.). Focus.
Coolidge, F. L., & Wynn, T. (2018). The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking. Oxford University Press.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.
Donald, M. (1999). Preconditions for the Evolution of Protolanguages. In M. C. Corballis & S. E. G. Lea (Eds.), The Descent of Mind: Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution (pp. 138–154). Oxford University Press.
Kohlberg, L. (1984). The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (1st ed.). Harper & Row.
Narvaez, D., & Rest, J. (1995). The Four Components of Acting Morally. In W. Kurtinesk & J. Gewirtz (Eds.), Moral Behavior and Moral Development: An Introduction. McGraw-Hill.
Rest, J., Narvaes, D., Bebeau, M. J., & Thoma, S. J. (1999). Postconventional Moral Thinking: A Neo-Kohlbergian Approach. L. Erlbaum Associates.
[1] In his translation of Aristotle’s works on ethics, Sachs opts to translate hexis as ‘active condition’ rather than as ‘disposition’ or ‘habit’, as the latter two terms suggest a passive or fixed trait and so lose the sense of active responsiveness to dynamic situations (see Sachs’ “Glossary” in Aristotle, 2002)
[2] As suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) account of an experienced organist “settling into” an unfamiliar organ.
[3] The idea of “just enough theory” is inspired by a comment from Laura Light, a fiddler who in her final years was based in Asheville, North Carolina.
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