Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 72

Poem 72

When they lose their sense of awe,

people turn to religion.

When they no longer trust themselves,

they begin to depend upon authority.

Therefore the Master steps back

so that people won't be confused.

He teaches without a teaching,

so that people will have nothing to learn.

Commentary

Aristotle, following his teacher Plato's insight, believed that philosophy begins in wonder. The American philosopher Garreth Matthews (1929 - 2011) describes what Aristotle and Plato before him believed wonder to be: The wonder Aristotle has in mind is, he argues, "astonishment over basic puzzles or perplexities (aporia)." The actual word in Greek is "thaumazein" (wonder).  Aristotle talks about a man who is constantly wondering, namely constantly puzzled about the nature of people and things in this world.  So, it is so much more than simply having a question.  For Aristotle wonder is about the puzzlement we experience when contemplating the beauty of numbers - say the irrationality of root 2, the motion/path of the planets and so on and so forth. Basically, then, it's a "ah" moment rather than a "ha" or "aha" moment.

It is more than interesting, and not a little surprising that our Taoist poet sees religions as lacking in the sense of awe and wonder.  In other words, then, for our Taoist writer, religions attempt to domesticate wonder, capture it in neat phrases, doctrines, dogmas and formularies.  In so doing, our poet is arguing that they kill mystery and awe.

When people, he further argues, stop trusting their own native instincts and intuitions they begin to become dependent on the advice and on the recommendations of those in authority.  They become, consequently, overly dependent on external approval and begin to lack inner responsibility for themselves, their thoughts and their decisions.

In the final stanza, once again, our Taoist author takes refuge in paradox for the sake of making us flounder in a sea of confusion, that is, lest we become too complacent with our newly found insights into the awe and mystery of the Tao.  What he or she is saying is that we will, of necessity, be awe-struck and wonder-enraptured when we come to pondering the depths or heights of the mystery of life.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 71

Poem 71

Not-knowing is true knowledge.

Presuming to know is a disease.

First realize that you are sick;

then you can move toward health.

The Master is her own physician.

She has healed herself of all knowing.

Thus she is truly whole.

Commentary

Humility is a virtue much to be prized according to many religious and spiritual traditions, though the great Greek philosopher Aristotle denied that it could ever be one because it actually sets itself against some of our most fundamental impulses like ambition and pride for example.  Instead Aristotle exalted "greatness of soul," what he termed wonderfully in Greek as "megalopsychia," which was for him where all moral values converged - a mean, as all virtues were essentially - between the extremes of vanity on the one hand and pusillanimity or extreme timidity on the other hand.

Again, a great soul, or as we say, a humble person, would acknowledge that not-knowing is true knowledge.  It is a Socratic epistemology insofar as one's starting point is always the acknowledgement of one's ignorance and then the gradual digging down or climbing up step by step in the pursuit of that knowledge. In keeping with our Taoist poet's analogy, there are far too many sick people in the world, that is, those who presume to know; those who think they have all the answers.  That is all ego stuff, that, in actuality.

When we realise we are sick, in sustaining our Taoist metaphor, we are on the way to healing.  How true it is that when we get a diagnosis for any illness we may have, that we are on the way to a certain type of healing - please note, I do not say cure here, as curing of illnesses is an entirely different matter.  Most counsellors, tharapists and even a growing number of medical doctors acknowledge that healing is more important than cure.  

I like the call of the Master or Mistress - the Teacher is both Masculine and Feminine in Taoism, maybe even beyond all sex, but that is a matter for another place and time.  In keeping with the sentiments of this wonderful Taoist poem, let us agree to heal ourselves of all improper and inappropriate knowing.

NAMASTE.

Journal of a Soul 49

The Validity of Experience 4

Introduction:

Our winning Debating Science Issues team: The Desire to Know More!!

There is much in our experience that cannot simply be reduced to information garnered from our senses.  The preceding posts have all attempted to come at what human experience is from as many directions as possible.  Reducing our experiences to merely those perceptions that are registered on our human brains by empirical data accessed through the senses is very delimiting of what human experience is or may be in its totality. (And it is  the "totality" of experience at which I am aiming to describe in these posts).

In mystical theology there was a way of approaching the divine through what was termed "the via negativa" ("the negative way") which contended that the divine was so far beyond our human knowing that the only way of approach for us human beings to make any sense of that great mystery was to advance towards it by saying what it was not - hence its appellation as being a "negative way."  Another term for this type of mystical theology was Apophatic theology. *  The WIKI sums up this approach thus:

In negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result, all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by definition. (see HERE)

I shall discuss mystical theology later in these posts, but the point I want to emphasize here is that even on a human level we can learn from this humble approach.  Indeed, even if we are somewhat agnostic, or even atheistic, we can still learn something from the "via negativa" or "via negationis."  In other words, I am arguing here that if we are to proceed in the task of finding out what we humans really are in and through our experiences, it is surely better for us to proceed by being open-minded.  That is, it is better for us to allow  human experience to be all that it can be by keeping as many doors open to the mystery of truth, rather than by shutting certain doors of our perception because they cannot be contained within a narrow understanding of epistemology that reduces knowledge to those facts seen only through the doors of the five senses. 

And so, at this stage in this Journal of a Soul, I want to attempt a sort of summary position, or a sort of personal statement of what I believe, or what the great Victorian theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) called an "Apologia Pro Vita Sua."

(1) I am a creature of Desire

Autumn Scene, Fairview Park, 2013

As what I am attempting to do here is very personal, I must use the first personal pronoun a lot, though in academic writing one tries to avoid such a use in order to be as objective as possible.  However, it is also acceptable, especially in the social sciences to use qualitative as well as quantitative research.  These types of research methods involve describing in detail specific situations using research tools like interviews, surveys, and observations.  Self-research would fall under this heading, and it is a legitimate form of research if done methodically and with as much objectivity one can marshal. 

And so my experience of "myself" or of my "self" is that I am a sentient creature with desires and as I experience them these desires are (a) my animal desires, (b) my desire to know and (c) my desire to love and (d) my desire to be loved.  Let me briefly look at each of these subheadings: 

(a) My Animal Desires

This undoubtedly is, perhaps, the easiest to describe.  One needs to be no biologist to list our animal desires.  The obvious one is the desire for food and drink that is obvious from our very first moments of existence.  As a little child we have all cried to be fed and to have our thirst slaked.  After that the sexual nature of our bodies eventually kicks in, especially at adolescence where basically we experience our desire to mate with another of our species and so procreate or reproduce our species.

(b) My Desire to Know

Frank with the Debating Team before their victory!

This is, perhaps, the one desire, that distinguishes us most from our fellow sentient creatures.  I find as I age that this is the one of the  greatest desires that inspires me from day to day.  I am constantly desiring to know more and more. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle states: “All men by nature desire understanding.” ** This statement has also been translated as "All men by nature desire to know." Now, that statement appeals to me, but one could obviously argue that all men do not so desire and point to this or that person whose life showed that they did not desire to know because their actions showed otherwise or that they were cognitively deficient in some way.  However, Aristotle's phrase "by nature" is a qualification that retrieves his generalization somewhat as it refers to the potentiality of each individual person, irrespective of whether they achieve knowledge or not. 

Therefore, even if Aristotle's formulation is a broad generalization, we have here an insightful statement about the nature of human beings. Everyone of us desires to know or to understand something on a daily basis, no matter how small or insignificant.  "Where is room 202A?" for instance or "Could you tell me where the Post Office is, please?" and so on and so forth would be good examples of our daily desire to know small things.  We might also wonder what it would be like to travel to Athens or Corfu or Cagliari or New York and decide to go there to find out.  At a deeper level we might wonder what a "Black Hole" or "Dark Matter" is or whether the universe is really expanding. In other words we can surely say that in all the senses listed above and in many more instances, all humankind is involved in the world of ideas and reflection: Everyone is searching for some rational explanation of something, no matter how trivial on the one hand, or how important on the other. Everyone, then, contemplates the issues that are foremost in their minds.  In a deeper existential sense, each person, in his/her own right, asks the ultimate questions concerning his/her own existence. As I sit here, I experience the desire to know who I am?  Who is this creature that types these words, forms these sentences upon this virtual page out there in cyberspace. You may be wondering what it means to be you in your particular circumstances, what it means when you have to suffer X or Y or Z, or perhaps you are asking a question like, "Why did God allow my wife/husband/partner to die so painfully?" And so on.  These questions are truly unlimited, perhaps even infinite.

As I walked from the Dart Station at Sydney Parade with a group of some twenty sixteen and seventeen year old pupils over to UCD some days ago we talked about, among other trivia, different theories of the formation of the universe.  At some stage I asked a group around me how many times bigger would they think the universe was in size proportionally to the size of one little thinking human being like ourselves.  The answer of one very intelligent boy took me by surprise and got me thinking.  He replied that it would be a figure something like the reciprocal of Planck's constant that might fit the bill.  In other words, the number one over what is perhaps the smallest number known in atomic physics.  Lovely answer.  Wish I could have come up with it.  My question was not looking for a mathematical answer at all, though I appreciated the wonderful response.  It was merely asked to provoke wonderment at mystery, quite like the Biblical question of God asking Abraham how many grains of sand were on the seashore.  In other words, even as we walk here or there many questions cross our little minds by way of desiring to know.  Then, there is that wonderful philosophical question that hits me almost existentially as well as cognitively from time to time, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" ***

(c) My Desire to Love

This is also a complex desire.  There is much written on the topic of love from poems to songs to novels to learned prose essays, not to mention all the philosophical and psychological works this subject has inspired.  Our desire to procreate or our animal desires can to a little extent participate in what love is.  A materialist would perhaps have to say that his desire to love is just that, his desire to physically copulate with another.  Yet, we humans are more than a little outraged by such a reduction in what we consider ourselves to be.  Culturally, we have conceived ourselves to be so much more than our animalness or animality.  We are outraged, and rightly so, when the actions of some humans against others of our species reduce us to the actions of unthinking animals, e.g., rape, incest and legions of other horrific actions.  Indeed, oftentimes the crimes committed by humans are worse even than animalistic as even animals never drop so low.  The nature of such evil is beyond our purposes here, but it can be horrifying and troubling to a great and deep extent.

I desire to love my mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins etc.  Indeed, we culturally desire to love even our enemies.  Those of us who might be sincere and peaceful Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and indeed atheists and so on desire to love even our enemies as we sincerely believe in loving all of humankind.  On a human level, I desire to love my friends and even my work colleagues insofar as is humanly possible. However, we certainly cannot like everyone we meet, but we can certainly desire to love them in the sense of treating them justly.  Further, on a daily level I try to show my love for my pupils by the way I teach, how I treat them as individuals deserving of respect as other unique human beings and especially by  how I teach them to love and care for themselves as show real compassion for themselves as well as for others. In this context I should like to refer to an entry in my other blog on Book Reviews.  See Passion for Justice. 

(d) My desire To Be loved

With some friends, enjoying myself:  Quest for identity there, too!

I suppose, to use a fitting metaphor, to love and be loved are two sides of the one coin.  I remember my English lecturer at college, the great late John Devitt of Mater Dei Institute arguing that as a senior examiner in Leaving Certificate English he had insisted on one of his subordinate examiners increasing the essay marks of one candidate who had written with great insight on the dual nature of loving, i.e., to love and be loved.  Without a doubt, I am nothing if I am not loved.  My personhood and selfhood is reduced to a mere suffering entity which feels lost, rejected and scorned.  If Lady Macbeth could speak of being "unsexed" by her crimes, we could surely speak of being "unselfed" by not being loved.  To be loved is to be invited in from the cold, to be accepted as part of the group.  In short, to be loved means to belong somewhere.  When we don't belong, we are in fact outsiders, out in the cold, left one side, marginalized, forgotten, overlooked, discriminated against and so on.  You, dear reader, can add your own description of being unloved to my attempts here.

My desires, in my opinion, which I have outlined and explicated to the best of my ability above, push me to an identity which is, as it were, a being or a self who is so much more.  I have attempted to come to grips with what this more may be.  I see myself or my "self" as being a project, which while firmly rooted in the now, is like some strange plant that has been mysteriously sown in this body but which is striving daily to grow more and more.  Our personhood or our selfhood is a project that is always on-going.  We are reaching out to embrace that more all the time both individually and culturally.  Perhaps it is somehow in this quest for selfhood that the Divine enters in.  While I experience myself as very much finite in this all-too-human and animal body, I also simultaneously experience my desires to be of an infinite quality, that is desire belongs to the infinite, to the divine spark in me. Perhaps, I would not be so desiring, unless there is a more... unless there is a more somewhere ever ahead of me.  Or am I merely delusional?  I think not, I know not. I desire not.  All, I can proclaim, like Socrates is my ignorance seeking knowledge.  But why such seeking?  I'll leave the answer, or perhaps more accurately, the quest to you, dear read. Buon viaggio!

*Apophatic Theology: In the apophatic strand of Christian mysticism God is understood as “the One” who is way beyond words and images, the one who transcends every category in a radical simplicity beyond all human thought and idea.  God’s uniqueness and grandeur so ovewhelm our senses and minds that God is described as solitary, radically simple; even as hidden, invisible, or “dark”.  Thus, Henry Vaughan’s famous poem The Night: There is in God (some say)//A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here//Say it is late and dusky, because they//See not all clear//O for that night! where I in him//Might live invisible and dim.//

Hence, all apophatic theology can do, in one sense, is declare what God is not in terms of human words.  However, it can declare God's utter transcendence in terms that are actually ironically quite clear like that of dark mystery, of hiddenness and otherness, uniqueness and grandeur.  One might wonder here at the marvelling of our astrophysicists at the Black Holes and the Dark Matter of the Universe.  Maybe, just maybe, there could be some parallels here with The Dark Night of the Soul of St John of the Cross.  After all, there are some great parallels between mysticism and astrophysics, not to mention quantum physics. See the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

** Aristotle's most famous book is perhaps his Metaphysics.  The parts of it still in existence span fourteen books. The early books give background information and survey the field before Aristotle's time. Therein, he describes the nature of wisdom as well as criticizing the theories of Plato which he deemed as too ideal and far too poetic: it begins with sense perceptions, which must be translated into scientific expertise. Such knowledge requires the understanding of both facts and causes, and wisdom comes only with an understanding of the universal principles and primary causes built on this science. Aristotle's work in metaphysics is therefore motivated by this desire for wisdom, which requires the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What is known to us as metaphysics is what Aristotle called "first philosophy." Metaphysics involves a study of the universal principles of being, the abstract qualities of existence itself. The starting point of Aristotle's metaphysics is his rejection of Plato's Theory of Forms. In Plato's theory, material objects are changeable and not real in themselves; rather, they correspond to an ideal, eternal, and immutable Form by a common name, and this Form can be perceived only by the intellect. Thus a thing perceived to be beautiful in this world is in fact an imperfect manifestation of the Form of Beauty. Aristotle's arguments against this theory were numerous. Ultimately he rejected Plato's ideas as poetic but empty language; as a scientist and empiricist he preferred to focus on the reality of the material world.

***This question appears in Martin Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, New Haven and London (1959), pp. 7-8  See here for the philosopher Arthur Witherall's short essay on this topic. 

Journal of a Soul 42

Reaching Out

Third Year photograph from School which I took for the Year Book.  Some will be friends for life!

I remember years ago one of our philosophy lecturers, Fr. Brendan Purcell, talking about the drive to connect in the human person, that desire to establish human relationships as a “we-wards” drive.  That odd neologism, so much Purcellian, that transforms the pronoun into a directional adverb, encapsulates a lot about human relationships. Reaching out is something we humans are wont to do. And the directional adverb sums up its two-way direction. Let me illustrate.  Recently, Friday afternoon, 3^rd January to be precise, as my brother Pat and I visited the ancient town of Santa Caterina Superiore, a small medieval town atop the mountainside in Eastern Calabria a perfect stranger came over to welcome us to his town.  In broken English he proceeded to introduce himself as Luca and told us he was a stone-mason, sculptor and artist. Our conversation was in his broken English and our rudimentary Italian.  However, we had enough words to communicate at a relatively deep and meaningful level.

He brought us to his little studio where he had many carved heads, which you will see in the photos that accompany these lines that to my mind were of ancient Celtic design as they were carved out of granite rock, at least so it appeared to me, a total neophyte in sculpture.  He also had some of his paintings on the walls.  On a small desk to the front of his studio he displayed a Visitor’s Book that was signed by many.  This man was reaching out to us to talk about his art, albeit in broken English and our rudimentary Italian.

What is that Desire or Drive to Reach Out and in turn to Receive?

Students Council presenting cheque to Arthritis Society

Let’s explore this phenomenon on several levels.  Firstly, let me deal with the biological level of reaching out.  Reductionists like Richard Dawkins would argue that such a drive or desire is merely instinctual and essentially part of that “river of genes” that flows from one generation to another.  It is simply that Darwinian survival of the fittest organism. In a sense, then, this is what I call the lowest common denominator approach.  In other words, we are no more than highly sophisticated animals. In philosophical terms, I have always been taught, and am firmly convinced indeed, that this is a reductionist or scientistic approach (Scientism is defined as an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation, not simply those of the natural sciences.) 

Secondly, let me refer to the theory of social Darwinism which was extremely popular in the late nineteenth century (1870s in USA and the UK). Social Darwinists generally argued that the strong should see their wealth and power increase while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease. Different social Darwinists have different views about which groups of people are the strong and the weak, and they also hold different opinions about the precise mechanism that should be used to promote strength and punish weakness. This type of thinking can obviously lead to fascism and racism at its extreme interpretation as we have seen so vividly in Nazism and Stalinism and so forth.

Thirdly, let me mention the role of friendship in life.  Essentially friendship is an important factor in what I have termed above as the desire or drive to reach out and its opposite to receive.  Many years ago I remember learning about the ancient Greek understanding of this phenomenon.  Aristotle gives great praise his concept of friendship or philia, which includes not only voluntary relationships but also those relationships that hold between the members of a family. Friendship, says Aristotle, is a virtue which is ‘most necessary with a view to living … for without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods’.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

If friendship is so important to the good life, then it is important to ask the question, what is friendship? According to Aristotle, for a person to be friends with another ‘it is necessary that [they] bear good will to each other and wish good things for each other, without this escaping their notice’. Friendships that are based partly or wholly on virtue are desirable not only because they are associated with a high degree of mutual benefit, but also because they are associated with companionship, dependability, and trust. More important still, to be in such a friendship and to seek out the good of one’s friend is to exercise reason and virtue, which is the distinctive function of human beings, and which amounts to happiness or what Aristotle terms “eudaimonia.”

And yet, there is still a deeper sense to the drive or desire to reach out that is purely altruistic, that has absolutely no self-interest in it for the giver, as in those who work for causes greater than themselves: people who join such organizations like Vincent de Paul, The Red Cross, Goal, Trócaire, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and so forth for purely altruistic reasons.  I will readily admit that there is a return factor for the giver, namely that of satisfaction, and a positive feel-good factor.  However, my point here is that there is something more than the mere biological, more the mere egotistical or self-interest at work in my above named desire or drive to reach out and to receive in return. 

If the Greeks spoke about “philia” which we have defined above, the early Christians spoke about “agape.”  Agape is selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love, the highest of the four types of love in the Bible. [Eros, Storge and Philia are the other three terms used].  There are indeed many incidents of people laying down their lives not alone for their friends, but for others whom they don’t even know at all, like a teacher or doctor or care worker or child-minder protecting those whom they care for from a lunatic gunman, or simply a fireman or Garda or any member of the public putting his or her life at risk to save another.  Now that drive or desire to reach out to another in such a purely selfless and dramatic or dynamic way cannot be explained by any of the theories I have outlined above.  Or simply how does one explain random acts of kindness? Surely they are more than just the opposite of random acts of violence? Now, therefore, I wish to call this phenomenon I’m discussing here the Greatest Highest Factor to which we can aspire as human beings?

Are we Less or More?

Perhaps one of the less desirable characteristics of the human race is its hubris or pride that would over-estimate its own abilities and indeed even its own virtues.  This, of course has led to all types of oppression and exploitation of other human beings (deemed to be less than human as in slavery), of animals (destruction of species, endangering other species to feed the greed for ivory or whatever) and indeed of the earth through destruction of nature and the pollution of the environment. 

However, we are more than those reductionists that Dawkins et al would have us be.  We are more in our desires to reach out, our drive to do good, in our moral awareness, in so far as, in the words of the great contemporary Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, we act within moral frameworks and horizons of value that are greater than us.  Such moral frameworks and horizons of value are very clearly felt at our heart’s core in times of moral judgments in the wake of horrific crimes like those tried at Nuremberg in the wake of atrocities committed during the Second World War.  That sense of moral wrongness, of gross deviation from what we instinctively or intuitively believe is right is surely a pointer to what is more in the human person than a mere collocation of atoms, molecules or organs; to what is more in the human person than a mere correct choice of acting; to what is more in human society than the mere wellbeing of the greatest number of its citizens.

What is the more?

Many years ago (1994) I was asked by a learned theologian who was the second reader of my S.T.L. thesis what was the more in the human person at my defense of my piece of academic work before a panel of three Doctors of theology. From this distance in time I cannot recall what precisely I said then.  I most probably said something about the grace of God which lives in every human soul.  Back then in the 1990s we spoke of grace as being “the theology of Christian relationships.”  Today, I would not put the answer in such theological terms as a non-practicing Catholic who likes to describe himself as a Christian-Buddhist, whose two great heroes are the founders of both these religions.  What I’d say now is that the human being is more insofar as he is not just an animal with a high IQ.  He is an animal also with an EQ (Emotional Intelligence) and an SQ (Spiritual Intelligence).  There are times when I am meditating that some power other than me moves through me, a power that I firmly believe to be greater than me.  This is the SQ dimension I believe, to which we humans can allow ourselves to be open.  I believe that SQ shows itself in all religions in their purest forms (not in their impure forms as in Jihad or Crusades, Inquisitions or Conquistadores).  However, I also believe that SQ shows itself in many other manifestations outside of religion: in arts and crafts, in sports and in music – in all creative pursuits.  This for me is humankind in its Highest Common Factor.  Too many of us subscribe to the Lowest Common Denominator of what we humans are and can be.

Journal of a Soul 36

As if People Mattered

People who matter: Two of our Spanish students at School

If the reader has been following these musings in this blog, s/he will know that the above title is in fact the subtitle of a book alluded to in my last post, viz., Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973). In Ireland, at present, we are facing into yet another austerity Budget on Tuesday next: our Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has said €2.5bn is to be taken out of the economy in the Budget and not the projected €3.1bn. This is, of course, no reason to celebrate because, after five years of austere budgets and growing hardships, the Irish Exchequer is still spending a billion euro more every month than it is collecting in taxes.  Whatever way one looks at it, these figures simply don't add up. It is, indeed, hard to square this huge economic circle.  And yet, it is important to state loudly in answer to the contention of the late great Brian Lenihan, Jnr., our erstwhile Minister for Finance,, that many of us simply did not party while The Celtic Tiger was roaring.  However, it is also unquestionable, indeed, that many others did party.  Some "Paddy Irishmen" took to their new-found wealth through unlimited credit and unsecured loans like a an addict to alcohol or drugs.

Can Economics be Ethical?

People who matter: Myself and two senior students at school

Human beings are more than economic units, much more.  There is more to happiness and success than the amount of one's earnings or the size of one's bank account.  That money does indeed buy privilege of all sorts goes without questioning.  Middle class parents can buy their children grinds for State Examinations and they do so readily.  One young boy I know had five separate teachers coming to his house to get him through his exams.  Now he did, indeed, get the results.  The point I'm making here is that the children I teach who attend a disadvantaged inner city school can often not afford the price of their school books, never mind pay for grinds. The Vincent de Paul often advance some of our pupils the money to go on school trips or tours, and the ones we go on are not terribly exclusive.  However, the real fundamental question behind all these anecdotes I am recounting here is the question in the above sub-heading: Can Economics be ethical.  Our Uachtarán, Micheál D Ó hUiginn believes it can.  Speaking at a public lecture (Wednesday September 11, 2013) in Dublin City University on the topic of "Toward an ethical economy," he stated:

(M)y Presidency.... seeks to develop an ethical discourse that places human flourishing at the heart of public action.... I would like – tonight – to focus in particular on the relations between ethical reasoning and economic thought...

This speech proceeds like a third level lecture, replete with learned quotations and references to contemporary academic sources.  That it was delivered before a university audience is possibly the reason.  Our President, or Uachtarán is a scholar and academic as well as a former (Labour Party) Minister. He has always been renowned for his commitment to social equality issues and for his defense both of civil and human rights.  He is also a very passionate individual who speaks with compassion and conviction as well as with erudition and reason.  He continues in this lecture to adumbrate his concern for the well-being of citizens.  To this end he praises Martha Nussbaum's exposition of the teachings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially his ethical teachings as they appear in his Nichomachean Ethics. I have mentioned before in this blog Aristotle's defining "happiness" as "eudaimonia" as the "flourishing" of the human person.  Such flourishing is above and beyond mere economic concerns, while firmly based on such concerns.  Let me add to our President's reflections by suggesting a Maslowian hierarchy here.  Once a human being's economic needs have been met, and this is the firm foundation, other more human concerns are further solidly built upon it.  However, what happened to us Irish during the Celtic Tiger era was to continue greedily to remain at that foundational level only, forgetting all the other human values which both sustain and enhance the human enterprise of "flourishing."  It is, then, that I was somewhat overwhelmed by the President's call for Philosophy to be a subject on our curricula at school.  Perhaps.  However, I'm more convinced that adding a philosophical dimension to each subject might be more beneficial, given the overstretching of today's curricula.  Anyway, let me quote him more fully here:

Our schools’ curricula and pedagogical methods reflect the kind of humanity our society seeks and nurtures. The society we so dearly wish for will not take shape unless we acknowledge the need for an education of character and desires, the need to encourage and support critical reflection and a more holistic approach to knowledge. Specifically, there would surely be considerable merit in introducing the teaching of philosophy in our schools, which could facilitate the fostering of an ethical consciousness in our fellow citizens. (See President )

He then proceeds to quote professor Kathleen Lynch and her colleagues from the School of Social Justice in U.C.D.  These latter put great emphasis on the provision of care for the person in any human community.  That cold Economics allows for this depth of care is a question for disputation.  In any civilized society it certainly should.  Let me quote from the President's speech once more:

As Lynch puts it, “bonds of friendship or kinship are frequently what bring meaning, warmth and joy to life… They are both a vital component of what enables people to lead a successful life and an expression of our fundamental interdependence”...To reflect on the demands of care, love and friendship is to replace the categories of utility, efficiency and self-love with the values of mutuality, long-term commitment, trust and responsibility. It is to conceive of the Other as an end in himself, as a source of non-reciprocal responsibility, in the sense of Emmanuel Lévinas. (See link above)

The President's lecture continues on with multiple references to other learned scholars, but his contention that all human beings have a right not alone to endure on this wonderful blue planet, but also to flourish in the broadest meaning of that concept.  The reification of human concerns by a focus on an Economics, which is heartless and soulless, must be surmounted if we as a community of caring individuals are to do more than merely surviving, if we as a community and as individuals are really to flourish. 

Finding Meaning:

I have stated here many times that we humans are meaning-making creatures and our goal is our self-shaping which we can really only do within the mutuality of a community.  Such meaning can only be found if we work for our mutual flourishing.  This essentially entails that we have a vision for our future; a real hope in the possibilities of tomorrow; a true concern for the well-being of all sentient creatures as well as that of our beautiful Blue Planet, Mother Gaia; a passion for our work to bring this vision about; a conviction and a belief in the worthwhile-ness of the human project, which is always more than mere survival, more than a mere river of genes that flows ever onwards into an unknown future.  No it is more.  It is a mystical, mythic and visionary dream of what we can be, and no less real for all of that: the flourishing of a human community, replete with all those human values that cold economics can not envision, though enhanced with values, can certainly support.