Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Welcome back to the On Duties podcast where we are reading through all of On Duties by Cicero with the scholars of the Ciceronian Society. We are using this version in the Cambridge texts in the History of Political Thought, but you're welcome to use any edition including the free translation that's linked in the in the description to this episode. I'm Chris Anadale. Joining me today are Catherine Bradshaw, Ethan Alexander, Davey, and Coy o'.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Neill.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Last episode we just finished with a discussion of houses and a kind of wrap up discussion of the nature of seemliness and rules for conduct. Now we're going to turn to the topics of orderliness and opportuneness, acting at the right time.
So we'll begin with chapters 142 and 143. Ethan, I ask you to read the those and Coyle to lead off comment.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Now I must say something about the orderliness of things and the opportuneness of occasions. These are included under the knowledge that the Greeks called eutaxia and not under that that we translate as moderateness. The latter word contains the element moderate, while eutaxia is that in which we understand the maintenance of orderliness.
Therefore, if we may call this too moderateness, it is defined by the Stoics as moderateness is the knowledge of putting in their proper place things that one says or does. Thus the significance of orderliness and that of proper placing seem to be the same, for they also define orderliness, thus the arrangement of things in appropriate and suitable places.
And they say that the place of an action is the opportuneness of the occasion. The opportune time for acting is called in Greek eucaria and in Latin ocasio.
Consequently, this type of moderateness, which we interpret, as I have explained, is the knowledge of opportuneness, that is of the fitting occasions for doing something.
But the same definition could be given for good sense, which we discussed at the beginning.
Here, however, we are inquiring about moderation, restraint and such virtues. We talked in their proper place of the things appropriate to good sense. Now we must discuss the things appropriate to the virtues of which we have for some time now been speaking. Things that concern a sense of shame and the approval of those with whom we live.
[00:02:48] Speaker C: Yeah, I wasn't involved in the earlier conversations when you guys talked about good sense, but I love that Cicero connects that to moderation.
He basically says they are the same thing. And I don't know if you got into whether good sense is the same thing as common sense, but to echo some of what we said in the last pod. Yes, that is a virtue that applies to everyone. That is not a virtue that is restricted to the upper classes.
Everyone can be. Be orderly, everyone can be moderate, everyone can exercise good sense. Whether we do or not is a very different question, but it is a virtue that is universally available.
And I think by tying them all together, he kind of highlights how, how, how universal it is. Right. If someone has common sense, they're probably also orderly. Someone is orderly, they're probably also moderate. And so, so, yeah, that's, that's what I would say.
[00:03:45] Speaker D: And there is a way in which this virtue of good sense, which is a great translation, the Latin is prudentia, where we have prudence.
So this is the virtue that Aristotle says is essential for all the other virtues to be used properly, because good sense will tell us how much of something to do, when and how often and to what degree. And this is what Cicero's tackling now is how do we figure out how to be orderly and in what sense to be orderly and also just the opportuneness piece.
What is the right time? What is the right occasion, Ocasio for doing these particular things? The science of doing the right thing at the right time.
And he gets into all of this Greek, and it's basically one of those times when Cicero elsewhere laments that Greek has all of these nice precise terms for things and it's a very nice language to use for philosophy. And then he says, but Latin, we don't have all these words. And so he's trying to translate the Greek into the Latin. And in other places he almost makes up words sometimes just to make it fit.
Here he's working with the Latin, but including the Greek, so that his son, who knows Greek, will be able to figure out what's going on and exactly what he's referring to.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Thank you. My observation about prudentia and about good sense is the.
I come back to this. In trying to teach ethics to college students, there seems to me there's a certain kind of modern struggle, maybe sort of 20th century struggle, with the very concept of this type of orderliness, because it can't be quantified and it can't be subjected to an algorithm. There is no rule, it's simply a matter of good judgment. But when we think about judgment, if there's no clear rule that can be articulated for when it's right and when it's wrong, people begin to suspect that it's merely a matter of taste, of which their is no accounting as the proverb. Goes. So I'd be curious to know what we can get out of this in the coming chapters of Cicero. In answer to that type of modern challenge.
If there is a question of putting everything in its proper place, in all that one says and does, of taking the action that's just right for the occasion, how do we take that out of the aesthetic realm, where it might be regarded as being sort of remote from reason and the rational conduct of life, and pull it to the place where we can say, actually that kind of good judgment, cultivating it, developing it and practicing it, ought to be central to one's moral life and one's daily activities. One should aspire to do only what is fitting upon every occasion.
So ways of trying to relate this to people who perhaps don't see it because of it's at odds with or sort of cuts across the grain of modern ways of thinking.
That's my interest in this particular set of chapters. Ethan.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: I like the way you put that, Chris. And I suppose I would add is that, as we've discussed in earlier chapters, so much of this learning that Cicero is discussing is the kind of learning by example. So in reference to one learns from one's father how to put things in their proper place, and the father learn from his father. So this is all these kinds of rules maybe are not so easily taught in a lesson, but are learned by example, are learned by the maintenance of a tradition, which is, if you're living in the same household over generations, it's easier for that tradition to be maintained. And so that's maybe one of the challenges that we face today in trying to understand and even resurrect something like this, is that our conditions are very different.
Very good.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Very good observation. Thank you. The next chapter is 144. Coyle, may I ask you to read that one and Catherine, to comment.
[00:08:19] Speaker C: Orderliness, then, must be imposed upon our actions in such a way that all the parts of our life, as of a speech that has constancy, are fitted to one another and in agreement.
Riffet is dishonorable and a great failing to introduce into a serious matter something worthy of a dinner party or some frivolous conversation. Pericles and the poet Sophocles were great colleagues as praetor and admit about some shared duty. By chance, a beautiful boy went past and Sophocles said, pericles, what a lovely boy. His answer was a good one. It is seemly for a praetor Sophocles to abstain not only from touching, but even from looking. What if Sophocles had said the same thing at an athlete's trial, it would not have been just to criticize him. So great is the significance of place and time.
Similarly, if someone who is about to conduct a lawsuit were to practice to himself on a journey or walk, or were to reflect deeply on some other matter, he could not be criticized.
If, however, he were to do the same at a dinner party, his lack of awareness of the occasion would make him appear uncivilized.
[00:09:18] Speaker D: Oh, this is such an interesting chapter.
The.
The comment about the things that if we introduce things that are inappropriate to the time and place, it doesn't work. So this is a continuation of the seemliness question, but in a different sense, because the example of saying one's lines, because we have to remember that when someone is preparing for a lawsuit, the Romans tend to do this from memory. So they're basically writing a script, rehearsing their script, and then delivering said script with no notes.
So it's perfectly fine to say things to yourself if you're by yourself walking along the road, or if you're in your own home.
But if you're in a sociable setting where you're supposed to be talking to everyone else around you and you're muttering to yourself, that is out of place to the point of being unsociable and rude and unseemly.
And I think this is something that I've noticed over. Over the last 10 years. I think that there's an uptick in the amount of muttering under one's breath or humming under one's breath. And it's just an interesting thing that that has become a lot more accepted in our modern in various situations that would not have been acceptable 20 years ago, 30 years ago.
And let's not even get started about like when our grandmothers were children.
There is a sense in which there's a public nature again, that everyone can be orderly, everyone can be sociable, instead of just, well, this is my who cares if I'm muttering to myself as long as I'm happy? There's a concern for place and time, but also for the other person around the other people around you. That is in orderliness. So it's not just an internal virtue, but it's also a virtue that cares about others.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Well, at the risk of being an old man who complains, I'll add that the case that comes to my mind right away is people speaking on cell phones, loudly in shared public spaces, people listening on the subway or on the bus or in some other public space.
To music without headphones, which seems to me quite rude. But thinking of it in a more general sense, some of this has to do, I think, with what's happening in our own place and time, which is not maybe the direct subject of this podcast, but it seems to me it could at least be described as a kind of thinning out of the concept of a public space. The public space is a space where you actually take account of yourself as occupying a public space. Right. I'm in a library. In a library. One acts respectfully to other people in the library who, like oneself, are in the library. So there's a sort of implicit code of conduct in it. And it seems to me there's a way in which I can port myself and even think of myself as a subway rider, as a person who is in a store where other people are around.
So there's a certain amount of respect that I show. There's a certain kind of social grace and virtue that I exercise. And when people begin breaking those rules, either deliberately or through thoughtlessness, it does come off badly. But it also pollutes the commons. It deteriorates this sort of common space so that we no longer have parks where we can go, because people are using them for things that parks are not used for.
And similarly, so Cicero here, I think, is talking about the way in which maybe in some fashion, the locus of our behavior is to some degree beyond ourselves. Like, I have to respect that this is a funeral. And so one must do funeral behavior at a funeral, no matter how one feels, no matter what one's other circumstances before and after the funeral are like one has to perform, so to speak.
That brings in all sorts of questions of identity and behavior and then social decline in our own place and time, to which I think maybe the concepts he's describing here might be helpful in both to diagnose and to try to reverse.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Ethan, I approve of all of these examples of speaking out of place. I'll add one more. There was a period in my life when I spend a fair amount of time in Washington, D.C. and what you encounter there is lots of young and very ambitious people who are at social gatherings, can't talk about anything but their jobs, and they obsessed about the social climbing that they're engaged in and all the various details of the jobs that they're working at and don't seem to be able to speak about anything else. And so I think also it may indicate that there's nothing else in their lives than that. But it's also an unseemly way to carry on at a social gathering to speak of nothing but your work.
[00:14:54] Speaker D: Well,
[00:14:56] Speaker C: yeah, I think I again agree with everything you guys have said, although I will throw out there that maybe social media is part of the culprit here. And I think it's really interesting to try to think about this passage in the context of social media, which has just obliterated the. The seemliness of discourse. Whatever was left at the end of the 20th century is largely out the window now. And it's, it's in part because it is this pseudo public space.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: Right?
[00:15:25] Speaker C: Theoretically, anyone can be on social media. Most people are on social media where you have the combination of no consequences and anonymity that together, I mean, you can say whatever you want and there isn't that cost, right? You can, you can scream into your cell phone on Twitter and Dr. Annandale is not going to be there frowning at you because that's just not how it works. Right? So I don't know what that means in practice. I don't know how to fix that. But it is interesting to sort of raise this question of how do you be seemly when there are seemingly no consequences, when no one is going to do anything to you for it. And you might even be celebrated for being unseemly.
You might be elected to high office for being unseemly. How do we wrangle that?
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Well, a lot of great stuff coming out here towards the end of book one. This is becoming feels like it's becoming increasingly relevant to the kind of lives we live today rather than less so.
The next sections I'd like to tackle chapters 145 and 146. Catherine, may I ask you to read those together? And I'll lead off comment?
[00:16:36] Speaker D: Certainly.
Actions that are strongly discordant with civilized behavior, such as singing in the forum or any other instance of extreme waywardness, are readily apparent and do not call for very much admonition or advice.
However, greater care is required to avoid failings that seem to be minor and cannot be recognized by many people. If a lyre or a flute is only slightly out of tune, a knowledgeable person will still usually notice it.
We ought to see that nothing in our lives happens to be discordant in just the same way, or rather as much more so. As the harmony of actions is greater than that of sounds, the ears of musicians can perceive that liars are even the smallest bit out of tune. Similarly, if we ourselves are willing to notice faults keenly and carefully, we shall often grasp important things from small Indications we shall readily be able to judge what is done fittingly. And what discords with duty and nature. Or from a glance of the eyes, from the relaxation or contraction of an eyebrow, from sadness, cheerfulness, or laughter, from speech, or from silence, from a raising or lowering of the voice, and so on. Here it can be advantageous to judge by looking at others the nature of each of these things. So that we ourselves may avoid anything that is unseemly about them. For somehow it is the case that we can detect failings better in others than in ourselves.
Consequently, a very easy way for pupils to be corrected. Is if their teachers imitate their faults in order to remove them.
[00:18:10] Speaker C: All right, thank you.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: What a suggestion for people who are teachers. Instead of pointing out the fault and naming it, merely mirror it back at the student.
Perhaps parents have had experience trying this with children as well.
I don't know if it is an easy way to correct a pupil any longer, but I note it with some amusement.
I love the image here of the lyre, which is slightly out of tune versus greatly out of tune. I think of two things here. One, think of the advice that a spiritual director might give to someone who's sort of working on his moral character, his spiritual life.
The large faults are easy to notice. The small faults will go unnoticed. And if they go unnoticed for too long, they can undermine the integrity of the whole. And the second, from the chapter 146.
Mentioning the raising of an eyebrow and the tone of voice. And we should be very sensitive to notice these things. I think of the difference between a really excellent actor turning in just a bravira performance.
And an actor of sort of middling ability who can get the job done, can communicate the emotion, but not with that kind of exquisite touch, that sort of one sharp intake of breath that makes the scene by communicating emotion all in one moment. If you look at it sort of objectively or you try to quantify it, you say, well, how different is one performance from the other? But if you look at it with this kind of connoisseur of human behavior eye, you can say, well, that one raised eyebrow at exactly the right moment. Made all the difference in the world for the performance. I think our experience of seeing actors perform.
And knowing the difference between really good ones and only passable ones. Might be helpful in this regard, too.
Ethan, onto you.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Yes. I also, of course, like the metaphor of the lyre. We should take care that not only that the lyre not be out of tune, but not even slightly out of tune. We should make sure that it is fully in tune. And when I think about that as a metaphor for behavior, the first thing that comes to mind about the current era is the rock musician who screams into the microphone and then lights his guitar on fire for effect. And that's sort of the spirit of the second half of the 20th century, that one should be authentic and let it all out and not worry about whether you're in tune at all. Not even think about tuning as a question. But here, Cicero is being very demanding here.
Don't even be slightly out of tune.
Try to make everything in your life in tune. And that's going to require a good deal of effort and time of perfecting your manners and the way you approach every aspect of your life.
[00:21:22] Speaker C: Yeah, I guess I've got to be the discordant note on the lyre here, since you guys have both said it's a great example. And I was a percussionist, so I count to four really well. But if something's out of tune, and I'm not the person to go to on that, but I do appreciate the example from teaching, being a teacher. I'm a college teacher, so I don't know that I get into the weeds of every look and intonation of how my students are doing. And are they smiling or grumpy? They're adults. It's whatever. Whatever they're doing is fine.
But I think there is definitely something, when we're dealing with our subject matters, what is going on in the reading? What is going on? I'm a political scientist, so what's going on in government, that's where you do get into the weeds. And we do have to successfully convey that to others. So not only do we have to recognize it ourselves, we have to be able to explain to people who don't know much about this what's going on. So the details there, I think Cicero is exactly right about, even if I can't experientially appreciate the example he uses, maybe the same way others do.
Catherine.
[00:22:29] Speaker D: And there's just to continue with the example on the lyre, what's interesting is how much effort. Ethan, you talked about the amount of effort that this requires to be in tune, metaphorically speaking, particularly with a lyre, because, I don't know, some of our listeners may have had experience with the Irish harp, the small handheld harps, and how they go out of tune so quickly, as opposed to the big harps, which stay in tune longer. And so an Irish harp, you have to have a little key that you're always tuning.
Lyres were similar in that they can get out of tune very quickly and very easily. And they're made. These are not plastic strings that are standardized. These are made from animal products and are natural. And therefore they stretch and do funny things.
And so the ear has to be. If you're going to get all the details right, you have to be constantly monitoring the sound.
And not to be. Not in a hyper vigilant way, but just in a way of you are attentive, you are attending to the thing.
And so I think that this attention that Cicero is advocating for, for the small bits of the person's face or something like that, it can sound excessive to a modern ear. But it's not a hyper vigilance. It's just being present. If we want to use a very popular phrase now, it's giving one's attention to the task at hand, giving one's attention to one's own behavior, to the behavior of others.
And I apprec.
His. His observation about human nature that we see other people's faults much more quickly than our own. And so, if not just as teachers mirroring to students, or parents mirroring to children, but even to ourselves, to say, oh, that person's action is discordant.
Let me look at myself. Do I have that same discordance in me? And so he's again arguing for this self awareness that allows us to improve in a way that we cannot if we are just going along without attending to those matters.
Right.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: I think in scripture maybe the paradigmatic passage for that is the you are that man.
Right.
It's very easy to see that the one has committed a fault and that well, actually now look in the mirror. So that's great. Thank you all very much. We have one more chapter, I think for this episode. It's 147. I'll read it. And Ethan, start comment with you.
It is not an inappropriate thing when making choices that cause you to hesitate to summon men who are learned or experienced also, and to discover what they would approve in the case of each sort of duty for the majority tend to be carried along to where they are led by nature herself. In such matters, we must see not only what each person says, but also what he thinks and indeed why he thinks it.
Painters and makers of statues and even poets, indeed each want the public to inspect their own work so that they may correct anything that most people criticize. They ask not only themselves, but others too, what is wrong with it.
In the same way, there are very many occasions when we ought to rely on the judgment of others in choosing or rejecting or altering and correcting our actions.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Well, this is some of the oldest advice, the most common advice you could hear.
Consult about any important matter. Consult people who know something. Consult people who have. Who have shown that they have good judgment about the thing in question. And I mean, this is something to bring it back to academics, which we all are. Before you give a paper, you might send it to some of your colleagues and ask them what they think about it, and if there are things that could be improved, if there are things that you have, if there's something discordant in your discourse. And so it's always best in any matter to consult with people who have shown they know something about the matter in question before you act and can anticipate the sorts of criticisms that you may face when you present yourself to the world.
[00:27:21] Speaker C: Well, yeah, I fully agree with Cicero on this, both professionally. As Ethan pointed out, this is a great thing to do. It is what peer review is supposed to be, whether it actually is or not. That's what it's supposed to be.
There's a personal element where this is wise. So my. My wife gets a universal veto over anything I put on social media, and it's to the point where I don't even question it. Just if she says no, it doesn't go up. And so far, I have not been canceled. So I think there's some wisdom behind this that may change someday, but so far that's been the case.
And then in public. Right. I was talking with some friends about this the other day. What is the.
What is the function of experienced wisdom in our public life?
And the answer is not much. Outside of the Supreme Court, we don't have much deference to that. And it's interesting to think that there are four living former presidents right now.
They have no function in our society.
We listen when they say things, it makes the news, they write a book, it automatically hits the bestseller list. But they have no formal function of any kind whatsoever.
And it is always interesting to think about whether there maybe should be something, Right. Whatever it is, some kind of council of former presidents or former speakers of the House or something, we have chosen not to make that a part of our public life. And I suspect Cicero would disapprove what
[00:28:50] Speaker A: the Romans would have called the Senate, if I may add.
[00:28:53] Speaker C: Right, right. Yeah.
[00:28:59] Speaker D: There's a sense also in which there's the public life in the sense that you've talked about, coil with the political sphere, and there's also the public life in the sense of the non private life.
So you mentioned social media. I think there's also a sense in which in an era where we have several generations who have been sort of taught, don't trust anyone over 30.
There is a dearth of the kind of thing that Cicero's advocating for, that scripture talks about in Titus, where the older men and the older women are teaching the younger men and the younger women respectively.
And the fact that that's in Cicero and in Scripture indicates that even in these cultures it is a thing that we must be reminded to do in an era when it's much more common than it is now.
So here I think Cicero is also advocating for not just political or public discourse, we might say, but also just, I mean, for the older woman kind of taking aside the younger woman and saying, have you, you know, have you thought about this?
Or the older man telling the younger man, perhaps you should not do that, perhaps you should do this other thing instead. Just in social interactions like, hey, I have been observing your behavior and you seem open enough to this that I can talk to you about it. Maybe you should think about doing something differently.
This is something that is part of the passing on of wisdom, not just on the here are the proverbial things that one should know, but just kind of the street wise or street smarts sense of just this is how you have social graces. This is how you interact with people. And this other way is not a good idea.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: I wonder if just a few concluding thoughts.
It may be we're all teachers and academics of a sort. I wonder if perhaps the tenured faculty of a university was maybe one of the last remaining places where you might hope to find something like this initiation. Look, here's how this is done. Here's the standard here for how things happen. I think of many years ago, how I had a faculty mentor when I first came to where I'm at now.
But then reflect on this, the modern attitude, the 21st century attitude, where what might be characterized from one perspective as a reservoir of talent and experience, wisdom waiting to be drawn upon, might be described from a different angle as sort of a hotbed of corruption and self interest.
And this is also battling the cult of the new.
The attraction of fashion, which is also sweeping through, has swept through academia in several waves. So the idea that new programs, new faculty, new people, new ways of doing things which the old have necessarily no experience and authority to speak about.
So the last thing I'll mention here and something I'll sort of pick up on a theme that's come up several times from Ethan Cicero uses the example of artisans here, right? Painters, people who have, won't say, a contemptible but a lesser sort of station, people who are not doing perhaps glorious work well, makers of statues and poets. Artists, I guess I should say, maybe artists, not artisans.
They certainly will seek out input because they know that they are not capable, from their own sort of inner authentic selves alone of creating a great work of art. They need the feedback, they need the input. They need to be told where the flaws are that they cannot themselves see. This is a general rule that should apply to all of us in terms of our moral behavior, in terms of our public presentation and choosing, rejecting, altering and correcting our actions.
[00:33:27] Speaker C: Right?
[00:33:27] Speaker B: I'm doing this. Am I doing the right thing? But I need to find people who are learned and or experienced in this area. So I trust the people. Back to the whole virtue ethics idea of the moral exemplars of the authorities with the experience and good judgment to assist me in improving my judgment. So that's my comment.
Any final thoughts about this set of chapters about orderliness and the like?
Okay, well, if there's nothing, we're at time, so we'll wrap up this episode. I want to thank each of you guys, Catherine, Ethan Coyle, for being with me today. You've been listening to the Cicero On Duties podcast, a production of the Ciceronian Society. Please join us next week as we come closer and closer to the conclusion of book one of On Duties. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.
