by Plutarch (AD 46 ~ AD 119)
Translated by Robin Waterfield. Introduction and annotations by Ian Kidd. Penguin Classics 1992.
On Listening
37E:
It is only those who follow reason who deserve to be regarded as free. For they alone live as they want, since they have learned to want only what is necessary; but undisciplined and irrational whims and actions signify an inferior caste, and there is little freedom of will in often changing one’s mind.
38D: ✨
It goes without saying that a young man who is denied all instruction and never tastes any rational discourse not only remains barren and unproductive of virtue, but also might become marred and perverted towards vice, producing plentiful mental weeds from his unturned and unworked soil, as it were. The reason for this lies in the tendency towards pleasure and the tendency to have reservations about hard work, which are not external tendencies implanted by words, but are (so to speak) native sources of countless pathological conditions: if these tendencies are allowed to roam free along the paths they naturally take, if their nature is not disciplined by using good arguments to eradicate or divert them, then there is no wild beast which would not appear tame compared to a human being.
38E: ✨
Therefore, since both the benefits and the dangers inherent in listening are equally great for young people, I am of the opinion that listening ought to be a constant topic of discussion in one’s own mind and with other people. This is especially so because it is noticeable that most people go about the matter in the wrong way: they practise speaking before they have got used to listening, and they think that speaking takes study and care, but benefit will accrue from even a careless approach to listening. It may be the case that in ball games learning to throw and learning to catch the ball are simultaneous, but in dealing with speech proper receptivity is prior to delivery, just as conception and pregnancy precede the birth of viable offspring.
40C-D: ✨
Sloppy thinking, hollow phrases, cheap figures of speech, excited and tasteless delight in seeking applause, and so on, are more obvious in others when we are listening than in ourselves when we are speaking, so we ought to transfer our scrutiny from the speaker to ourselves, and ask ourselves whether we make the same mis takes without noticing them. There is nothing easier than criticiz ing one’s neighbour, but we might share the same faults, and such criticism is useless and vain if it fails to lead to any improve ment or vigilance in these respects. When faced with people making mistakes, one should not balk at constantly repeating to oneself Plato’s saying: ‘Am I really sure that I’m not like that too?” For just as we see our own eyes reflected in the eyes of our neighbours, so where speaking is concerned it is inevitable that our own mannerisms are mirrored by those of others, and this should stop us rushing headlong into contempt of others, and make us pay closer attention to ourselves when we speak.
41B:
Openness is essential when extending praise to speakers, but caution is essential when extending trust to what they say. It is crucial to be a kind and artless observer of the debaters’ languagel and diction, but a precise and harsh analyst of the value and truth of what is being said: in this way, the speakers will not take against us, and at the same time their words will not harm us – amiable trust in speakers often causes us to take in false and pernicious opinions without noticing it.
41E: ✨
Consequently, Dionysius’ quip applies to them. Apparently, he went to a performance by an eminent singer and player of the kithara and promised to reward the man handsomely, but later gave him nothing, on the grounds that he had already paid his debt: ‘For,’ he said, ‘all the time your songs were giving me pleasure, your hopes were giving you pleasure.’ This is the fare with which such lectures satiate the speakers: they are admired as long as they are giving pleasure and then as soon as the pleasure of listening has evaporated, their reputation forsakes them; one party has wasted their time, the other their life.
41F-42A:
The dedicated and genuine listener should consider both flowery, showy language and melodramatic, ostentatious topics to be ‘the fodder of the drones’, the would-be professional speakers, and should ignore such things; instead, he should concentrate on settling his attention on the meaning of the speech and on the speaker’s attitude and should extract from the attitude what is useful and beneficial and bear in mind that he has not come to a theatre or a concert hall, but to a school or classroom, with a view to correcting his life under the guidance of reason.
42B:
“Neither a bath, nor a discussion are any good unless they are cleansing” – Ariston
44B: ✨
A person who greets everything that is said with obdurate impassivity is a contemptible nuisance in the audience: he oozes hollow conceit and the deep-rooted self-aggrandizement of assuming he could improve upon what is being said, and he neither alters his appearance nor lets slip a sound which might indicate that he is listening with enjoyment and appreciation. Instead, he uses silence, feigned seriousness and posturing to pursue a reputation as a man of calmness and depth, and - as if compliments were cash he thinks that any compliment he pays someone else is one less for himself.
45D:
Whatever the product, there is no exception to the rule that beauty is the result of a plurality (to use a mathematical image) forming a single proportion under the influence of a certain commensurability and harmony, while ugliness is generated at the precise moment that one of the elements is removed or any extra and inappropriate element is added.
45E:
Instead, just as in a ball game the catcher must move and change position in a rhythm which responds to that of the thrower, so in the case of speeches there is a certain harmonious rhythm on both the speaker’s and the listener’s part, if each of them makes sure that his own conduct is appropriate.
46A:
Another exceedingly offensive group are those who accompany their favourable verdict on the speakers with an oath, as if they were in a lawcourt. And no less offensive are those with incorrect estimates of speakers’ qualities, when they call out ‘Smart!’ to a philosopher, and ‘Neat!’ or ‘Brilliant!’ to an aged speaker: they transfer to philosophers expressions suitable for those who trivialize and flaunt intellectual pursuits, and they praise restrained speeches as they would a prostitute, which is like crowning an athlete with lilies or roses rather than laurel or olive.
46C-D: ✨
The next point is that one should not turn a deaf ear to criticism and disapproval, or run away from it. People who treat a rebuke by a philosopher with nonchalance or indifference, and laugh at reproof and praise their reprovers (which is how parasites react to their benefactors’ insults), are behaving in a thoroughly forward and reckless fashion, and no one mistakes their effrontery for proper, genuine courage. It is true that it is not a sign of bad breeding and lack of education, but of an autonomous and disci plined character, not to get upset and to remain genial when faced with non-malicious banter which is delivered lightly and humorously; but to hear castigation and criticism whose goal is improvement of character and whose damning logic stings like medicine, and not to cower, body sweating and head spinning and mind burning with embarrassment, but instead to remain untrembling and to grin and brush it aside with a laugh, is the mark of a young man whom habitual and continuous deviance has made terrifyingly crass and deaf to conscience, and whose mind is as unreceptive of the lash as hard and callused flesh.
48C-D: ✨
We must encourage those lazy ones, however once they have grasped the basic points – to interconnect everything else on their own, to use memory to guide original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting-point, a seed to be nourished and grown. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting – no more – and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbours for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his innate flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.
48D: ✨
If any further advice about listening is needed, it is for us to remember what has just been said and to combine learning with working towards originality, which will enable us to acquire an attitude which is not merely sophistic and curious, but profound and philosophical – and the basis of this is the view that proper listening is the foundation of proper living.
How to Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend
“The friend aims at our good, the flatterer only at our pleasure.” - Aristotle 53B: ✨
I have no need of a friend who changes place when I do and nods in agreement when I do; my shadow is better at that. I need a friend who helps me by telling the truth and having discrimination.
56C:
In times of civil and external wars, as Thucydides remarks, “They changed the way words had usually applied to behavior and justified the change: irrational foolhardiness was considered to be courage born of love for one’s comrades; circumspection was regarded as specious cowardice; self-restraint as a mask for gutlessness; the desire to understand everything as the desire to do nothing.’ And in cases of flattery we must watch and be wary of wastefulness being described as ‘generosity’, cowardice as ‘cation’, capriciousness as ‘quickness’, small-mindedness as ‘a sene of proportion’, a lustful person as ‘sociable and affectionate’, a short-tempered bully as ‘courageous’, a good-for-nothing lackey as ‘altruistic’.
On Being Aware of Moral Progress
Plutarchs signs of moral progress:
- Whether or not we give up in the face of challenges and setbacks.
- Whether we welcome or feel pain at our separation from training (i.e. reading philosophy and practicising it).
- How do the initial setbacks feel? Are they easier to traverse than before?
- Do we resist external criticism? How do we receive a friend’s advice or an enemies’ critic?
- Do we envy the public success of others?
- Whether we value arguments for the sake of our own self-improvement or for public reputation.
- Are we valuing the actual subject matter in a lecture, book, poetry more than the style and eloquence?
- How do we react to an audience when we ourselves are giving a lecture or presentation? Do we depend on the size, response, noise of the audience to give ourselves a sense of glory?
- Do we act the way we do for the truth of the actions itself or for showmanship, self-advertisement or for our own pleasure?
- Do we accept and welcome criticism, acknowledging our ignorance and faults, and use it to our improve our defects? The mentally ill often think they have no need of an doctor.
- What do we dream about in our sleep? Dreams often reveal the subconcious hopes and desires.
- Whether or not we are free from excessive emotions (apatheia)
- Present emotion is less intense than a former occurence.
- We are becoming subject to more appropriate and respectable emotions rather than disgraceful or objectionable ones.
- How good we are at translating words and arguments into action.
- How excited we are at emulating good men. On whether or not we admire them and are genuinely motivated by them. Not being deflected by minor blemishes or major mishaps to them.
- On whether or not we wish to show our whole life and actions to those whom we most revere and admire.
Whether Military or Intellectual Exploits Have Brought Athens More Fame
On the Avoidance of Anger
On Contentment
On God’s Slowness to Punish
On Socrates’ Personal Deity
In Consolation to his Wife
611A:
And that is a condition we should avoid – the syndrome of whinging if the book of our life has a single smudge while every other page is perfectly clean.