Wisdom For Life Show - Episode 8 - Balancing Autonomy and Connection

My co-host, Dan Hayes, and I have now produced eight episodes of our philosophy-focused radio show, Wisdom for Life.  The latest episode focuses on a common struggle in relationships: how to balance one's own need for autonomy, and that of one's partner, with the need for connection. 

If you'd like to listen to that episode, here it is!


You can also check out all of the previous episodes as well. Each is about an hour of dialogue and discussion focused on making useful concepts drawn from philosophy accessible for a general audience, and applicable to the challenges and issues we face in daily life.

Episode 1 - Philosophy as a Way of Life
Episode 2 - Dealing With Fear in a Crisis
Episode 3 - Defining What's Good and What's Bad
Episode 4 - Setting and Maintaining Boundaries
Episode 5 - What Makes Relationships Good?
Episode 6- What Is Resiliency?
Episode 7 -The Stockdale Paradox

Riverwest Radio is a community radio station. If you'd like to support the work that Riverwest Radio does, offering a wide range of quality programming you won't hear anywhere else, consider making a donation to the station!

Is Guilt Really Good?

Harvard Business Review ran a blog piece today, Defend Your Research: Guilt-Ridden People Make Great Leaders, an interview in the course of which Francis Flynn summarizes the conclusions of experiments involving the feeling of guilt. It turns out, not surprisingly, that guilt has many implications, and one might even say, functions in the workplace.  I say not surprisingly, because the research, its findings, and the media buzz about them fall into an often-recurring pattern:  (Social) scientist designs an experiment (or two, or three) which seems to bear on some interesting and long-discussed moral issue, distinction, or maxim, and arrives at startling, now "scientifically demonstrated" conclusions.  Several further features mark this whole process.

First, the reporters -- and quite often the researcher him or herself -- will extend the mantle of scientifically demonstrated or proven much further than good reflective scientific method would warrant, claiming much wider-ranging, universal claims can be inferred as conclusions from the study.  Now, they could be inferred.  Could -- yes, it might be as they interpret the experiments and the results -- but then again, one has to make all sorts of simplifying assumptions in order to bring that off.  The only problem with that is that reality -- and particularly when we are considering human beings -- is very complex, and simplifications tend towards oversimplification, and thus distortion of reality.  One can administer and compile data from all the Test of Self-Conscious Affect assessments one likes, given to carefully selected groups, and one will certainly learn some interesting things -- not directly about emotional life, and generalizable to people other than those belonging to those groups only with many caveats.

[As an aside, I must credit Flynn for resisting the interviewer's invitation to introduce untested assumptions about "Catholic guilt" as premises for speculation.

You and I both were raised Catholic. How are we not running major corporations with large philanthropic foundations by now?

We purposely stayed away from religion in this research. We don’t have any empirical evidence of a link between guilt and certain religious denominations.]

Ethics of Anger

About a week ago, one the local Cumberland County Library branches emailed me to ask whether I might be willing to give some sort of talk an evening in January, something dealing with Philosophy, perhaps, the librarian suggested, a talk about Ethics.  Always ready to squeeze another gig between already plotted engagements, even more to scribe in fresh ink on a virgin calendar (at least virtually), I immediately agreed.  Engaging a group of non-academics, people unaffiliated with the university, but intellectually active, curious, questioning, is both challenging and rewarding.  I have come to take a double view of philosophical topics.

On the one hand, there are matters of the mind which possess their own intrinsic worth and beauty, and this often renders them complex and not immediately accessible (often inexplicable, even unintelligible to my philosophical colleagues).  There is no popularizing these, no "bringing philosophy down from the heavens to earth" for such matters.  The mind and the heart must make the step by step difficult climb to reach them, must puzzle the concepts open, unfold the ideas portion by portion, before uncovering the prize.

On the other hand, there are many other matters philosophy and philosophers grapple with that ordinary plain people who have something on the ball ought to be able not only to understand without any disciplinary preparation or training, but also to enjoy, to delight in thinking about and understanding.  Aristotle begins one of his most difficult works, the Metaphysics, observing that "all human beings by nature desire knowing" (or "to know" or "knowledge", depending on how you want to translate it).  If to us academics, this seems a starting point rendered patently untrue by our experience, how much of that is due to that natural inborn human desire being stymied instead of encouraged in its development by those who are to introduce learners to a subject, to lead them deeper and deeper within, to bring them to vistas from which they can look out, their perspectives ever after altered?

I wrote back that I would mull over possible topics.  I always have four or five different irons in the fire at any given time.  Which of those would admit adaptation for a more popular lecture and discussion?  I started on the list.  Then my partner phoned and grabbing the opportunity to sound her about my proposed subjects, I started reading down the list. She stopped me after the second one.  The first one was all that was needed, it would easily draw and keep interest.  And I had not only been experiencing it, studying it, dialoguing with the great philosophers, theologians, saints and psychologists about it, I'd already written a few pieces and started on a book about it.  Just pitch the first one, she said.  It's all you need.  But it needs a sexier title.  I've got it: