Morality as Reason

10 o'clock class was tired today.

That or I'm just not connecting with their corporate personality the way I connect with 9 o'clock. However one slices it, my first discussion session went better than my second.

Teaching Republic once again has me thinking about "western culture" as an abstraction and the alienness of the texts that folks name as the classics of "western culture." For instance, just about all my students (in both sections) named something other than Reason as the source of morality. I would have too were I not teaching Plato. Folks' opinions certainly differ, but whether a student espoused a quasi-solipsism or a divine mandate, nobody seemed to want to put reason in the driver's seat of the morality bus.

I realize that such developments are modern developments, that Augustine and Aristotle would have named reason as an engine of morality where Hume and Freud would not. But that's precisely the problem with abstracting "western culture" from its tangled history--there's no there there!

Anyway, I've got to get a better set of notes going for Friday's discussion. Until I'm convinced that the disconnect is insurmountable, I'm going to have to keep plugging away at my sleepy section.