David Ebrey (Northwestern University): `The Difference between Teaching and Habituation in Plato and Aristotle`

ABSTRACT

One of Plato and Aristotle’s insights is that moral education should develop both reason and the emotions. But how should it do this? Should there be a single type of education that simultaneously develops both reason and the emotions or should these be developed by separate processes? If separate, how should they relate to each other? Our answers to these questions will be tightly connected to our understanding of moral psychology: what is the relation between reason, desires, and emotions, and what role do they play in a good life? I argue that Plato and Aristotle have interesting, compelling, and yet importantly different answers to these questions. It is frequently thought that their views on moral education are very similar, perhaps with different emphases. I argue that they differ on some key issues. We can put the basic issue this way: are there fundamentally different methods for acquiring different virtues, or is the acquisition of virtue a more holistic process, in which the same sort of training is involved in the acquisition of the virtues? Aristotle thinks that there are two fundamentally different processes for different types of virtues. Habituation is the process for developing the non-rational part of our soul and, in doing so, one develops the character virtues. Teaching, by contrast, properly develops the rational part of the soul, leading to the intellectual virtues. Plato, by contrast, doesn’t think that there are fundamentally distinct processes for developing the different parts of the soul. Instead, in Plato’s Republic moral education sometimes involves the same activity developing different parts of the soul and sometimes involves very different activities developing the very same part of the soul. Typically the goal of this web of activities is to bring the different parts of the soul into harmony, not to separately develop the different parts. And Plato doesn’t contrast teaching with habituation at all. He gives habituation a different role from Aristotle, an interesting development found in his Phaedo, Republic, and Laws.