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TAFT BROOME: So comments, questions,
anything about Thursday?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: On the narrative ethics?
Yeah.
Yeah, you all didn't get a chance to do your--
AUDIENCE: When I was [INAUDIBLE] the way I [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] was pointing out
that both of these [INAUDIBLE] structures that are common
[INAUDIBLE] so when you were [INAUDIBLE] pointed out
[INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Right.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] are talking about [INAUDIBLE]
And that was that there is always
someone that lives in a culture that is [INAUDIBLE]
a rational [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] but it is another structure that
[INAUDIBLE] And I thought that was [? cool. ?]
TAFT BROOME: What he said was something that I did not know,
but if I was taking a test, would probably
guess it, that you do have a cultural building
and monitoring mechanism in all cultures.
People just don't go around doing what they're going to do.
I mean, somebody is sitting down watching and talking about it,
and then passing it down.
But I did not know that that was a universal phenomenon.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Yeah, I was [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Yeah, that was a sweeping statement.
See, I had this picture that at least, wherever you go,
there's a tradition, and the tradition
is known and is handed down.
I didn't know that it was discussed
and that people always have it as subject matter.
I don't if they're changing it, but it's more than just
handing it down.
It's more than just having one person who knows it
and everybody hands it down, and you just go from day to day.
It's more than that.
What they actually do have is an academic community, a community
that not only transmits culture, but advances and preserves it.
Now they probably don't do research on it,
but they're talking about it in terms of current problems.
AUDIENCE: Right.
Well, and he suggested that sort of the way in all cultures
that those critics evaluate the norms
is whether or not it promotes human flourishing.
TAFT BROOME: Yes.
AUDIENCE: And that's where he quoted
Thomas Pope, that philosopher that I was talking about.
TAFT BROOME: Well, flourishing comes out of Plato.
And it's still very popular, but in different terms.
I'll tell you I tell you what I think
is the best way to describe human flourishing,
and that is the advertisement of the United States Marine Corps,
be all that you can be.
It's not exactly destiny that I talk about.
But destiny is being all that you can
be too, so human flourishing.
You've got to have a community where each individual can
be all that they can be without breaking the community up
into pieces.
AUDIENCE: So the balance of the individual and the community
flourishing.
TAFT BROOME: Yes.
So there's an individual definition,
there's a collective definition, and there's
some kind of presumption that harmony can exist
between individual and society.
But I think you ought to get your own perspective
on human flourishing, and I think a good place to start
is with Plato.
OK.
Any other observations, comments, criticisms,
critiques?
AUDIENCE: I think that was the biggest point [INAUDIBLE] I
mean, that was what impressed me most was [INAUDIBLE] tough
issue, how do you deal with all these different cultures
and all these established [INAUDIBLE] judgement
[INAUDIBLE] what does flourishing mean?
[? And that's kind of ?] [INAUDIBLE]..
And I'm sure that's culturally independent also [INAUDIBLE]
flourishing probably [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: Which is maybe the one possibility for a weakness
in [INAUDIBLE] argument.
He says the critique of a culture,
in so far as how it allows for human flourishing,
is common across all cultures.
But what if human flourishing is different across all cultures?
TAFT BROOME: Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, go ahead.
[INAUDIBLE] Well, I had some question about that.
Well, no, I did not have questions about it.
I wanted to think more about that one.
Because that's just one view on a goal for moral conduct.
It's just one view and there's other views.
And I'll tell you what really gave me some pause about that.
See, I have these three ways of life
that I learned from Joseph Campbell.
And I added a little something to it
that seemed to make a lot of sense to me.
And one of them is this way of the primary mask, where
you give up your personality.
Better stated, you give up your individuality
in order to assume a particular kind of role.
Now I don't think that the Greeks had a whole lot
of respect for that.
And so when you start talking about the Greeks talking
about human flourishing, I don't think
they're talking about wear a primary mask.
And I think that the wear a primary mask
is very popular east of Greece in those days, Persians,
going out to the Chinese, and others.
And when we start talking about Greek philosophy--
you may disagree with this-- but I
think that we have to remember when
we talk about Greek philosophy, we're
talking about the people who invented democracy.
So we're talking about the primacy of the individual.
And when you go outside of that kind of a culture
and the primacy is not the individual,
the primacy is a role in society,
then I think you've got a conflict.
And I think that the conflict is not bad.
I think that people just have different ways of thinking, OK?
And there are probably ways for them
to be worked out when people have to live together.
But I don't think that people should be forced
to think one way or another.
It's good to know what other people think.
And if their thoughts are defensible,
then they should be valued.
And you should look for ways to get along.
But I don't think that people should walk around
the world without debate.
And so when he mentioned the flourishing part,
he went from something universal to something
that was not universal.
AUDIENCE: Right.
TAFT BROOME: So the observations--
the scientific, more or less, observations.
The descriptive ethics, he found universal themes.
But then when he started talking about normative ethics, what
should be the goal, what constitutes a goal,
then I am not so sure.
I need to think about it more.
But I'm not so sure that that has
the power that the other part had in terms of universality.
AUDIENCE: That's interesting that you
say that's what gave you pause.
Because what I was going to say was the most surprising to
me was his willingness, in fact, his insistence
on not being morally relative.
One of the first things he told me when I was talking to him
was I don't think we have to be morally relative.
I think there are universal [INAUDIBLE] to evaluate.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: Oh, on Thursday, we had a lecture.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I'm talking about the [INAUDIBLE]..
AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.
AUDIENCE: Sorry.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] So I was just surprised
to hear a scholar come from a starting point of really
wanting to have a hierarchy of culture.
AUDIENCE: Actually, that's [INAUDIBLE] I don't know,
that's the thing that left the biggest
impression on me, that he wasn't afraid to do that.
TAFT BROOME: (LAUGHING) Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I'll have to think about it more.
[INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: One thing that I've heard him speak about before--
and we're not just talking about him.
You can criticize me and you can criticize
what I said about [? Winston. ?] But one thing he didn't
have time to talk about--
and if he had more time, I'm sure he
would have talked about-- but he's
an activist with Nigerian issues.
So the things he talks about are not purely theoretical.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it seemed to come
from a place of experience.
TAFT BROOME: Yeah, he applies what he does.
He's quite serious.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: If we have time [INAUDIBLE]
if you have time [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Well, it's a good review.
It won't take but a minute.
Mythology talks about three different ways a person
can conduct one's life.
One is called the individual way.
And that's where a person has to grow up
by separating oneself out from the group,
finding one's own destiny by going out into the world
and fighting dragons, winning the Holy Grail, so to speak,
and bringing it back and sharing it with everybody.
And one of the lessons of all of that, it seems to me,
from mythology is that if you have a leader that
has power, like a king, then you want a person who
has gone the individual way.
Because that's a person who not only knows how to use power--
has fought dragons--
but will do it in your interest, not for his own.
So that's called the individual way.
There's one called the way of the primary mask, where
a person comes to a point in one's life
where they give up their individuality
and become mother or father or king or whomever.
And they define their lives first
in terms of their role responsibilities.
AUDIENCE: [? That's only ?] [? one mask. ?]
TAFT BROOME: That's called the way of the primary mask.
It's just a name.
And then there is another way that I give a name to.
People talk about it, I didn't invent it,
but I just didn't see where anybody gave it a name.
And I call it the popular way.
And that's the way a person does not go out,
does not assume a role, but just demonstrates
how to be a good citizen.
And I've used some examples, and one example of that
is Socrates.
Socrates was not a leader.
Socrates was one of the populists.
But he was a model at being a good citizen,
a good ordinary person.
Now you can go different places in the academy
and find the same lesson.
Now one place that I've mentioned in this class, which
is what religion does.
Religion tries to give an example
in the spiritual world of how to conduct our lives
in the material world.
And one of those examples they try to give us
is an example of the family.
In Christian religion, that example
is called the Trinity, God the Son, God the Father, God
the Holy Spirit.
So the son is supposed to demonstrate
how to be a good child in the family, [INAUDIBLE]..
The father is supposed to show what the father's role is.
And the Holy Spirit is supposed to show
what the mother's role is.
And if you understand that and use it
as authority for the same structure
in other divisions of society--
the family, community, work, and different places--
then that's supposed to make harmony for the whole society.
So there's a good engineering word for all of it
this called fractal.
You have the whole.
And then when you look at the parts,
you see the whole repeated.
Then when you look at a smaller part,
you see the whole repeated again.
And that concept goes across different religions.
You might want to talk about that.
But it seems to be very effective
that if you learn how to be a good citizen of the family,
then it doesn't take a whole lot more
to be a good citizen of the community
and of these other social institutions.
So that's what I was talking about, in that in a democracy,
the individual way is respected a lot.
The way of the primary mask is not.
You're supposed to hold onto your individuality
in a democracy.
In communism, the individual way is not respected.
The way of the primary mask is respected.
You're supposed to come to the realization
somewhere early in your life where the state is more
important than the individual.
And so as the world becomes more a global society,
then the stresses of trying to make all three
of these ways work become stronger.
And we just have to find ways to deal with it.
AUDIENCE: Do you see a conflict between these three [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: I see a conflict between human flourishing
and the way of the primary mask.
That's what I see.
It's worthy of debate.
But I've given that some thought over the last couple of years.
But I think the concept of human flourishing
as a goal is as justifiable as any other
what I would call great concept.
I'm not talking about something that somebody
thought of yesterday.
It's something that's been tested.
So any other view that I come up with
will exhibit some of the same weaknesses.
It's just that I don't see that one fitting in as
a global concept like the other concepts that [INAUDIBLE]
was talking about that I thought were global.
I would see them as global.
So in ways that I didn't describe earlier,
Joseph Campbell does the same thing.
Joseph Campbell, depending on which
lecture you're listening to, can drift off
into cultural anthropology and stay there.
He can get very much involved in it.
And then he'll start talking about how
you'll find the same rituals in all societies.
For example, there's one ritual where it's in where?
I can see the island in my head, it's in Southeast Asia.
Can't think of the country.
But when two people get married, then there's
this big celebration where they build this tunnel out
of grasses and weeds and things.
And then there's this bulge at the end.
And the two people come into the tunnel from different sides
and they crawl through it.
And when they come out at the other end,
everybody goes berserk.
Oh, it's a great thing.
Well, what it is that it's really born again.
That's the Fallopian tube.
Now the two parts of the egg have come together,
and they've come out as one.
And whoever the person was--
if you call him Jim in our society
and Lorraine-- they come out, they're different names,
and they've come out as one.
And the whole village goes berserk.
Well, I mean, doesn't that sound familiar?
So you can find different expressions of the same thing
in a lot of different places.
So I think that is one of the lessons we learned [INAUDIBLE]..
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: That was just brought up here
just before you came in, and I assigned it as homework.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Well, no, I assigned it as homework today,
because I wasn't prepared to give a lecture on it,
frankly, all right?
So start with Plato, and go through some of the things
people have said about human flourishing.
And see if you can't pick out one idea that appeals to you.
And you might find ways to live with that.
That's a good tool, I mean, [INAUDIBLE]..
I said a few things that I hadn't
said before in this class, and got a few noses turned up.
Any comments on any of that?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Pardon?
AUDIENCE: [? What were ?] the things that you said that--
TAFT BROOME: Well, let's give--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Let's give them a chance to say what they think.
Because this is a university, isn't it?
AUDIENCE: There's no presentation today, right?
TAFT BROOME: No presentation today.
Presentation on Thursday.
AUDIENCE: I mean, you talked some about [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I guess you talked about it a little [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Want to talk about it more?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I mean, I guess what
I recall is the new things had to do with defining learning
disciplines as specialty knowledge
and a special claim some cognitive process.
TAFT BROOME: Mental process underlying the specialty
that empowers the specialty.
AUDIENCE: So yeah, I don't know.
AUDIENCE: You made a distinction between someone's specialty
and someone--
I don't know what the other word-- forte?
TAFT BROOME: Forte.
AUDIENCE: Forte.
TAFT BROOME: Let's go through that.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
TAFT BROOME: OK.
Yes, let's go through that.
We've got time.
OK.
What I'm going to talk about now comes from my own researches,
but 99% of it is not new.
I'll let you know what new spin I put on it.
I shouldn't say 99%.
10% of it is new.
But I'll let you know where my spin comes in.
There is discussion about what is called learning
in educational psychology.
And there are discussions about four categories of learning.
One, two, three, four.
One category of learning is knowledge.
Another category is values.
And let's stop for a second here.
Because what I'm going to put up over here is--
I'm going to use words to describe something
that a lot of people talk about, but they have not
used these same words.
And that is on this side what I have called already
praxis and practice.
And I've talked about what a knowledge statement looks like.
I've talked about two kinds of knowledge statements,
rational and empirical.
We've talked about value judgments.
And one kind of value judgment is a moral or ethical value
judgment.
You're talking about now good and bad, right and wrong.
Another kind of value judgment is an aesthetic value judgment.
Then we talked a little bit about action and theory.
Praxis being not a theory of what action is,
but a theory of how to perform a certain kind of an action.
It's the kind of theoretical thought
you do just before you act.
And to understand this part here, what I do
is add this little piece here.
And it's called the commitment pathway from wishes
to wants to intentions to action.
This is called the commitment pathway.
And praxis is a theory for getting through this thing,
and practice is actually what you do to get through it.
How do you go from a wish to a want to an intention to action
that you think will bring about the wish,
or will fulfill the wish?
Now what's the difference between a wish
and a want, a want and intention,
and intention and action?
All right?
I've got another row to talk about that.
The psychological capacity to is called the cognition.
And there is in psychology and in brain science,
a considerable proportion of the research and discussion
is on the cognition.
Now I will not hazard a percentage.
I will say offhand, maybe 80% of all the research that's
done on brain and cognitive sciences in the learning areas
is on the cognition.
Now I've heard brain and cognitive scientists say that.
But the point is that, at least in the United States,
almost all of it's on the cognition.
And this goes into the significance of knowledge.
Because, as we'll see in a minute,
the sciences have specialties in knowledge.
So if you really want to advance science in the brain
and in the mind using great scholarship,
you're going to have to talk about knowledge
and the cognition.
Now following this same row, you get
something called the affect, which
has feelings of good and bad.
But it also has some other feelings in it.
I've read where psychologists will
say this is more difficult to study than this.
But underlying this is called the conation.
And underlying this is called psychomotor skill.
And so what you are talking about in terms
of the learned disciplines--
and I'll define that in a minute,
but it's good to just talk about this chart first--
what you're talking about when it
comes to the learned disciplines are two words that I use.
One word I did not invent.
The other one I didn't invent, but I
don't know how many people talk about the subject,
so I needed a word.
And the first word is specialty, and the other word is forte.
So you'll find the word specialty
being used when people say that a learned discipline has
a specialty.
That is deep penetration of learning
into one of these categories.
So a specialty of science is deep penetration
into the category of knowledge, particularly knowledge
about the material world.
And you can break the material world up
into two kinds, the physical and the social,
from which you get the physical sciences
and the social sciences.
A specialty in values can be ethics or aesthetics.
And if you want to put ethics and aesthetics together,
I've got another word for you called axiology.
And aesthetics is usually best understood
at the fundamental level in terms of the senses.
So [? did ?] I say [? aesthetics? ?]
So if you're talking about the good as applied
to the visual senses, then art is
one of the learned disciplines that has a specialty
and values the way I put it.
If you're talking about the auditory senses,
then music is a learned discipline.
If you're talking about the gustatory, taste,
then you're talking about food.
You're talking about food preparation.
You're talking about something being
prepared better than another.
And let me see, did I miss any?
Yeah, olfactory.
That can be food too for us.
And tactile, that's the physical feeling of things.
So on this side over here, I claim
that you'll find the practical learned
disciplines, engineering, medicine, law,
and the rest of them.
All right?
So engineering is going to have a specialty in both of these.
And when you start talking about what we call engineering
theories, that's mostly praxis.
And when you talk about how you actually
put the theories into action, you're talking about practice.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] ask about [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Right.
Now in all learned disciplines, you'll find all four
of these areas.
But the specialty is the question.
So in other words, most engineering professors
are specialties in engineering praxis.
And when you go out and somebody's actually
building the building up and is chief of the project,
that's a specialty in practice.
You can go to some universities, and the students
will have a very solid education in engineering.
But when they come out that first day,
they're ready to work.
Now mostly, what I know about MIT comes, believe it or not,
from my undergraduate education at Howard.
Because Howard's educational program
was built up as an imitation of MIT's program.
Because the first dean of engineering and dean for 30
years was an MIT graduate.
So our graduates [INAUDIBLE] have never
come right out of school the first day
and went right on a construction job and knew what to do.
You have to sit there and learn it for a while.
But we knew what to do the first day
when we got to graduate school.
So in other words, you can stress praxis as opposed
to practice in some educational systems.
And you can stress practice in terms of praxis
in some educational systems.
So a friend of mine who graduated from Texas A&M
said, when we walk out of the ivory tower,
we can go on a construction project,
and we know what to do first day.
Stanford, you come out, you got a good education.
You have to stand around for a little while.
All right?
So that's basically these differences.
Now here's now here's what inevitably
comes into a discussion about all of this
that I think describes more about the culture of higher
education than any of this.
And that is, on what basis, if you're a scientist,
do you say you have the ability to know
all of these scientific things, or that you have an inclination
to be a scientist?
Well, what people will say is that they have a very
well-developed cognition.
They make a special claim on their innate ability to know.
Or they will make a special claim
on how that innate ability has been cultivated to know.
And that's what I call the forte.
So the specialty and the forte go together.
But specialty is understood in this row
and forte is understood in this row.
And that is important, because as I discussed
at the end of the seminar, when people started
asking me some questions about, what
does it mean when you engage two learned disciplines,
and does that mean that you engage
the practitioners or the scholars of the two
learned disciplines?
And the answer is, no, not necessarily.
And so the question is why.
And one of the reasons is not just
that you're talking about tradition as being a conflict.
You're talking about an arrogance
that's built up in scholars because of this forte.
And the arrogance is not unjustified.
I mean, maybe the word arrogance means unjustified.
That's not the way I'm using it.
I'm using it as a particularly acute self-esteem.
Once you have gained a lot of scientific knowledge,
you believe that you have abilities to gain knowledge
in certain ways that other people don't
have those abilities.
Innately?
No.
In cultivation?
Probably, yes.
You've been cultivated to use your knowledge
in a certain systematic way.
That's what we've been doing with ethics in here.
Your effective abilities are the same.
But all of this talking about, well, let's
talk about the principle as opposed to the consequent, now
that's cultivating the affect.
So now you look back and say, well, I
know how to do these things.
So people are willing to make compromises when
it comes to their specialties.
But they are not willing to make compromises
when it comes to their forte.
And they will tell you, you have to do things my way.
And when you get somebody in one field,
like an ethicist, and somebody in another field,
like an engineer, and they're going to work together,
you're going to have to make compromises,
both in the specialty and in the forte.
You're going to have to say, well,
let's let the affect drive the discussion.
So that's the argument that I was making about all that.
AUDIENCE: Do you [INAUDIBLE] some professionals
[INAUDIBLE] that lean more towards one
of the other fortes?
So like an engineer who actually bases
a lot of decisions or actions on affect, or a scientist who's
really good at science because of his or her psychomotor
skills in lab?
TAFT BROOME: Yes.
AUDIENCE: How do you deal with that?
TAFT BROOME: I don't deal with that.
I say that all of this is a structure that gets us started,
and it applies in the general case.
Applying it to individuals is hard.
So it's like ethics.
I mean, we can get the general principle,
but applying it to a specific case
is not always a straightforward matter.
And yes, you could be a mathematician
that they call an intuitive mathematician.
You haven't figured anything out.
You just seem to see the pattern with these numbers.
You ever heard of Ramanujan?
Yeah, so Ramanujan was an intuitive mathematician.
I might have talked about him in here.
Talked about how he came up with this method of determining
whether a number was a prime number
or not using hand calculations, long 30-digit numbers.
And he couldn't prove to you that his method was right.
Somebody else 20 years later proved it.
But yeah, the human capacity to manipulate this chart
is extraordinary.
We want to talk a lot about psychomotor skills
when it comes to ballet.
So yeah, so all of this is in all of the disciplines,
but we want to talk about the disciplines being distinct
in terms of specialties and forte.
And that's the usual way we do it.
And if we apply this on an individual basis,
it's very hazardous.
Another thing is to separate out what's going on in the brain
and in the mind from what is actually written down
in a manuscript.
Because what will happen with your rigorous mathematicians
is that many of them will get a formula or something
through intuition first, and then spend the next two
years trying to prove it.
But they've got it already.
And so what you and I get in the end
is the manuscript, where it's nice and rigorous and laid out
systematically.
But what went on in the person's brain
is something different, a lot more complicated.
And people are beginning to understand that a lot now.
But it's very important to us as teachers
to give the manuscript to the students,
and do the guessing about what's actually
going on in the mind over here as a separate kind
of discussion.
Because otherwise, the student is not what we call liberated.
You really don't know where to go on your own.
So if I give you this, you learn that, and take the author
at his or her word, then we can start talking about, well, I
can tell you what Einstein told my grandfather.
He didn't figure this stuff out.
It came to him in the night.
That's a separate discussion.
Now you're liberated, you can do what you want.
But I am not going to teach, let's say, relativity
from the standpoint of what went on in Einstein's mind.
I'm going to look at the manuscript
and try to induct back what systematically went on
in his mind, and then make the other argument separate.
Because it will not be systematic.
But it will be what you do when you try to do something great.
So I guess the last thing I want to say
is that these two are what most people refer
to when they use the word intellect
and call you an intellectual.
It means that your cognition and/or
your affect has been cultivated by great study, great study
meaning a specialty.
What I argue-- and I've already gotten
unhappiness expressed from engineers--
is that that's the intellect.
We've got to give another name to this.
This is not intellectual.
And the reason is that it just goes
to show just the power of science and ethics
in our educational system over what engineers do when
we're really doing engineering.
And I think that's unfortunate.
I don't think we get enough press,
or because we don't get the press right.
So I've given this a name.
I'll put it in quotes to remind you that that was my word.
I call it the practition.
And so I find no problems in letting the intellectuals have
their intellect.
And what I want to say is that the practition
is a higher order function of the mind
just like the intellect is.
And what I also want to say is that when
you get out of the United States and go
to some other philosophies, as a matter of fact,
existentialism is one of them.
What they really say is that this is the highest order
function of the mind.
Because you don't need a whole lot of knowledge to do what
you got to do.
Or better stated, what they're really saying
is we can transcend the intellect.
The intellect confines you.
The practition liberates you.
So that's the way a lot of that argument goes.
But engineers, partly for this reason,
partly for other reasons, do not--
and engineering just does not have
the learned status as the sciences
and the humanities in the United States.
And I think that the intellect and the practition
are equally what they call higher order
functions of the mind.
We've got 20 minutes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
TAFT BROOME: OK, self-esteem.
Now that's a psychological term, but I'm not
going to use it as a psychological term.
There is a scholar of jurisprudence
by the name of John Rawls, who wrote this book called
A Theory of Justice.
And to understand Rawls, one of the things you
have to understand is what he was trying
to do with A Theory of Justice.
He's a social contractarian.
He was trying to do the same thing
that other social contractarians--
I'm going to name big names in Western philosophical
and learned thought--
Hobbes with Leviathan, Rousseau with the Second Treatise
on Government, Machiavelli, The Prince.
All of these people were working at a time
when there was a revolution of some sort,
and they wanted to replace it with a whole new idea
of government.
So you're talking about Rousseau with the French Revolution.
And all of these people were trying
to figure out, how do you just start out
a whole new kind of government?
And what they did was they came up
with what was called social contract theory.
Actually, it was a social contractarian approach.
You'd be surprised.
It was a narrative approach.
And what they did was they said, all right,
how are we going to-- just think about it.
Suppose there's some big revolution in the United
States.
I remember this, they called it the 1960s.
People running up and down the streets, all sorts
of things falling apart.
And you sit down and you say, now this whole thing
is going to fall apart.
How are we going to build a whole new government?
How are we going to do that?
So what the social contractarians did was
they came up with a fictional situation
where people are going to build a whole new government.
And how would they do it?
And how would you populate this group?
You're only going to have a small number of people, 20, 40,
50.
And what do they know?
Are they experts, are they ordinary people?
And how do they work their way through this thing?
And that's called social contract theory.
And even the man who gave the lecture on the internet
a couple of weeks ago referred to Hobbes
when he talked about life can be nasty, brutish, and short.
That's one of Hobbes's statements in Leviathan,
it's called.
And Rawls sat down, and he was concerned
about all that was happening in the 1960s
here in the United States.
And he said, how can we build a whole new society where we
can solve all these problems?
One of the things he started with was what he called the--
well, I forget what he called it, but the things that people
need to live.
What are the basic things?
Primary needs, that's what he called them.
For him, that's a term of art.
What are the primary needs?
Food, shelter, all that.
He named about half a dozen of them.
And he justified them.
He justified his list.
And self esteem was one of them.
And he said self esteem was the most important one.
Because if you don't have high self-esteem,
you will never see the point in putting your time and energy
in the rest of them.
So he talked about self-esteem.
And when I was studying him in a course that I was taking for--
this book was the textbook for the course
and I had to get a grade--
this chart worked out for me.
And that was I put internal here.
I put external here.
And what that meant was that one kind of self-esteem
is a value judgment that you make about yourself.
So that's the internal.
The external is one that you make,
but it's what you think everybody else thinks
about you.
That's the external.
So it is possible to have a very high internal self-esteem
and a very low external self-esteem.
You can think very highly of yourself,
but you think that nobody else thinks highly of you.
And that's important, because if your external self
esteem is low, then you're going to find
it difficult to get people to join you in the things
that you want to do, to help you out getting the things that you
want to do.
The other side was called self-confidence and self-worth.
AUDIENCE: Self-worth is not the same as self-esteem?
[INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: In other words, you're
saying that it's the same thing as this?
AUDIENCE: Self-worth is the same as self-esteem.
TAFT BROOME: Oh, all of these are
the dimensions of self-esteem.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: All of them.
All of them are different kinds or facets of self-esteem, yeah.
So this internal judgment--
not only of yourself, but whether or not
you put something like a number on it--
that if you think yourself as not being worthy,
then you probably will not succeed in the things
you set out to do, because your unconscious will just not
come up with a picture of you being the king.
How can you be the king?
So when Rawls begins to talk about all of these things,
I could put them in one of these boxes
and find out and follow what he's saying.
So that's what this chart was about.
And self-esteem is what is needed to go from
wants to intentions.
Low self-esteem, you'll sit around wanting things and being
in pain all day, but you will never get to the point
where you intend to do something about them.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] self-confidence [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Self-worth, I guess, is clear.
Self-confidence, [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: What about--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: OK.
What about if you think that--
let's say there are five of us here in the room.
Let's say that we want to build a car
and put it in competition as the best gas-saving car.
Now suppose you look around, and everybody has a different job
to do.
Suppose you know that you can do your job,
but the rest of us think you cannot do your job.
That means that your external judgment
of your self-confidence is low.
Because you think that the rest of us
don't have any confidence in you.
And that's not--
AUDIENCE: What I think about how you think about me.
TAFT BROOME: Right, that's complicated,
but that's the way it goes.
It's what you think about what we think about you.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: I don't know of any better way.
That's what it is.
So how many times have you ever been in a group,
and somebody says, well y'all don't have any confidence
in me?
That's what it is.
So that has to do with the prosecution of this commitment
pathway from wants to intentions.
So what you've got to do is to be
able to convince your customers that you can do it.
You got to convince yourself you can do those things.
That's where that came up.
So I really think that the basic idea of engineering and all
the practical disciplines has to do with this commitment
pathway and this innate ability that we all have.
And I make the a priori assumption
that we all have it at the same degree.
What I will say is that it's possible to study and debate
and to read and develop this, so that you can do more
in the area of this.
And your development of it is what I call the forte.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: You want to write it down?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Go ahead, just write it out.
Because I mean, this isn't--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Right.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Oh, you're going to make a matrix out
of that, the cognition?
AUDIENCE: Cognition.
TAFT BROOME: Oh.
AUDIENCE: It doesn't work that way?
TAFT BROOME: I don't know.
Look, there's a way to think about all of this.
It depends on how you want to use it and make your arguments.
This is good for me.
AUDIENCE: But what's he's doing kind of suggests
that there's different permutations of the specialty
and the forte, sort of take new lens to describe things
we haven't talked about yet.
TAFT BROOME: Yes.
AUDIENCE: So like knowledge plus psychomotor
skills is a different [? lens ?] than [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] talked about [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Sure.
So this matrix would be best for that kind of thinking.
And this would be best for the established learned
disciplines, I guess, perhaps.
But this is the way I think about it.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: No, that's right.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: Right.
There's a word that I did use over here.
Now first of all, I'm applying the whole chart
to every learned discipline.
What I do not apply to everyday any
the discipline is the same specialty and the same forte.
In other words, what do you spend your time
learning the most on?
We already said that there's a difference between the way
you think about this matter and what you write down and pass on
to others, and how you argue the matter.
And these are what you have called,
when we talked about learned disciplines,
and what I call the body of knowledge.
That's what that is.
The real value of the body of knowledge
is really not that it's set down here
and that you can argue from it.
The real body is that when we're dead,
we can give it to somebody else who's living.
That's the real value of it.
It can go from generation to generation.
You can preserve it.
A lot of these thoughts about what's
coming to me in the night are gone when I'm gone.
So when we talk about the body of learned knowledge,
we're talking about something that's
transmittable through the generations, which
makes ballet hard.
So you have to transmit through--
what's the word?
I'm looking for the word.
AUDIENCE: Apprenticeship?
TAFT BROOME: Apprenticeship, yeah.
So you get it clear and then you pass it to somebody,
and hopefully, the line is not broken.
In philosophy, they have such a thing as--
since we got five more minutes--
that I think is remarkable.
Believe it or not, they have it in philosophy.
When you think about it, they have it in theology too.
In philosophy, there's such a thing as a Kantian scholar.
Now a Kantian scholar is not merely a person
who did his or her dissertation on Immanuel Kant.
A Kantian scholar is a person who
has been cultivated by somebody who was cultivated by somebody
who was cultivated by Immanuel
Kant.
There's an intellectual lineage--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: --that comes straight
from the person straight down.
And that person's duty in life is
to be Immanuel Kant in our generation.
And there was a philosopher, an African-American
who was chair of the philosophy department at Howard
named Alain Locke for 40 years, 35 years.
They're still making Lockean scholars.
They got that lineage coming straight down.
AUDIENCE: Do you know who the Kantian scholars are now?
TAFT BROOME: I don't know any of them.
But I'll tell you this, it would be a nightmare for me
to learn that the line was broken.
Yeah.
It would be nice.
I even know how much this stuff is cherished today.
But as a matter of fact, can you think of where this idea--
we got three more minutes--
is kept alive or has been kept alive for a long time?
I understand that the Pope had to be cultivated by somebody
who was cultivated by somebody who was cultivated all
the way back to the Apostles.
They tried to keep it going.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: They tried to keep it going.
I think they broke it, though.
Well, I don't want to get into all that.
But philosophers did try.
They still do it with some scholars.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: It's be nice if engineers did it, wouldn't it?
The question is, who would we start with?
But yeah, the idea is to have that person with us
in this generation.
What would that person say, and would we
be better off if we had that point of view straight out of--
as close as we can get it-- that person's mind?
AUDIENCE: It's like the game of Telephone,
where every time [INAUDIBLE] kids get in a line, and--
TAFT BROOME: I know that game.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] this lineage of scholarship changes
[INAUDIBLE]
TAFT BROOME: You [? realize ?] you
can't take it too seriously, but there's something in it.
Because the person is not supposed
to just learn the method.
Supposed to learn the person's habits, and his personal views
on this, that, and the other.
It's supposed to be a biographer.
And you're supposed to be that person, Immanuel Kant,
in this life today.