Intellectual Virtue

You want the inside of your head
to be an interesting place
to spend the rest of your life.
—Judith Shapiro

Recently, while making some claims about the role of character development in education, I was also reading a book by philosopher, Jason Baehr, who makes a claim of his own about the nature of individual character that I had not previously considered.  He suggests that character is multidimensional in its qualities—with “intellectual character as a separate dimension of character, alongside its interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions” (p. 20)—and he argues that one of our chief goals as educators should be the maturation of this intellectual character in our students.  As he presents it:

What will stay with our students isn’t the laundry list of names, dates, computations, and procedures we have covered.  What endures are the dispositions and habits of character we have been able to nurture.  What stays with us, what sticks from our education, are the patterns of behavior and thinking that have been engrained and enculturated over time.  These are the residuals of education.  These are the foundations of intellectual character (p. 19).

Baehr then goes on suggest that just as we use the language of “virtues” and “vices” when discussing the other components or properties of a given person’s character, we can employ these concepts as well when examining intellectual character, writing that:

Intellectual virtues are strengths, or excellences, of intellectual character [that] dispose people to act, think, and feel well or excellently in the context of inquiring, learning, and reasoning; [while] intellectual vices, by contrast, are defects or weaknesses of intellectual character, such as intellectual apathy, laziness, arrogance, dogmatism, and cowardice.  They dispose people to act, think, and feel poorly or defectively in a learning context (p. 31; original emphasis).

Now traditionaly, I suspect most of us have tended to associate the notions of virtue and vice almost exclusively with what Baehr identifies as the interpersonal dimension of character (see my essays, Our Moral Nature and The Good Teacher).  But after encountering Baehr’s basic thesis, I realized that the kind of intrapersonal character which Adam Grant studies could have potential virtues associated with it, too (e.g. self-discipline and determination), and that, therefore, Baehr’s talk of intellectual virtues might have value for those of us in education.  So allow me to elaborate on what he thinks the nine of them are.

The first Baehr identifies is curiosity.  But he is quick to point out that he is not speaking of the hard-wired kind built into our hippocampus to pay attention to and identify interesting stimuli.  Instead, “we can think of [this] natural curiosity as the psychological soil out of which virtuous curiosity grows.  The emergence of the latter is not guaranteed.  For natural curiosity to blossom into the virtue of curiosity, it must be nurtured, shaped, and cultivated [by our learning]” (p. 36).  In other words, rich, complex, deep questions don’t just happen; we have to develop the capacity to generate them.

Next on the list is autonomy, and what Baehr means by this is the capacity to think for oneself.  He argues that intellectually autonomous individuals “form their own judgments and draw their own conclusions.  They aren’t overly reliant on the assistance of others.  Nor are they overly influenced by what other people think or say” (p. 36).  And Baehr contrasts this with intellectually heteronomous thinkers “whose judgments and ways of seeing the world are dictated by other people and sources” and whose conclusions “tend to vary from situation to situation” (p. 37) depending on whoever is doing the preaching at the time—which is why heteronomists tend to be conformist; autonomists, not so much.

However, the danger of thinking for oneself is that all of us make cognitive mistakes and errors, and sometimes, we are just flat out wrong! Thus, autonomy’s partner in the intellectual virtues is humility, and those who possess it “are appropriately aware of and attentive to their intellectual limitations.  They don’t try to conceal these limitations; nor do they respond defensively when their limitations are brought to light.  Rather, they are accepting of their limitations and take appropriate responsibility for them” (p. 38).  In other words, humble thinkers own their warts and scars.

Together, though, curiosity, autonomy, and humility, Baehr argues, only “[get] the learning process started and headed in the right direction,” which is why we need the next three virtues—attentiveness, carefulness, and thoroughness—”to keep the learning process on the right track” (p. 39).  The first of these, being attentive, may seem self-explanatory, but what Baehr means by this virtue is something closer to what Buddhists call “mindfulness” in which the thinker has achieved sensory clarity and a concentrated focus on the matter at hand.  Hence, we are not talking what a student’s body language or eye contact might suggest about how engrossed they are; we are talking about how carefully they are actually attending to the learning process in which they are engaged.

Likewise, the virtues of intellectual carefulness and thoroughness might seem self-evident or even duplicative.  However, what Baehr means by the former is “an awareness of, and a disposition to adhere to, the rules of accuracy specific to a given domain” (p. 41; original emphasis); while what he means by the latter is the depth of understanding being sought.  Thus, for example, a careful learner might know every word of the Gettysburg address but have no ability to explain its significance within the context of the American Civil War which a thorough learner of the speech could do. Which is why “thoroughness complements carefulness by resisting a kind of superficiality or conservatism to which careful thinkers can be drawn” (p. 44), and it is why Baehr distinguishes these two concepts as separate virtues.

Thus far, then, we have covered the three virtues which Baehr thinks get us started learning and the three that keep the process going in the right direction.  His finally three are “for overcoming familiar obstacles that arise during the learning process” (p. 45), and they are open-mindedness, courage, and tenacity.  Open-mindedness, of course, is the compliment of the intellectual virtue of humility and is about what The Mill Institute calls being “less certain, more curious.”  It is the classic “look at a situation from all sides.”  Meanwhile, courage compliments both curiosity and autonomy, with tenacity having a similar relationship to carefulness and thoroughness, and indeed, of the nine virtues, these three are the ones Baehr presents as more self-evident, spending less time defining what they are and more time defining what they aren’t. For example, about courage, he writes: 

An absence of intellectually virtuous activity does not entail the existence of an intellectual vice.  Many students who struggle with anxiety, for instance, are paralyzed by fear in a classroom setting.  Although this fear may impede their intellectual growth, these students are not intellectual cowards (p. 47).

And about tenacity, he writes:

Intellectual tenacity is not mindless.  When tenacious learners fail, they don’t simply try again, using the same strategy as before.  Students who repeatedly retake an exam or rewrite a paper but do little to adjust their approach from one attempt to another aren’t manifesting the virtue of tenacity.  The persistence of tenacious learners is intelligent (p. 49).

In fact, part of the power of Baehr’s exposition is that he clearly recognizes that “intellectual virtues and vices are possessed in degrees.  People are more or less—not categorically—open-minded, closed-minded, intellectually careful, careless, and so forth” and that “relatedly, the intellectual character of most people is a mixed bag, a combination of virtues and vices, each quality possessed to a greater or lesser degree” (p. 31).  In addition, he is clear that the absence of something does not imply its opposite, using the example of ADHD and attentiveness, arguing that “we need to distinguish an absence of attentiveness from the vice of inattentiveness, that is, a willful or voluntary tendency to check out or be mentally absent from the learning process” (p. 41; original emphasis). 

Hence, in short, he openly acknowledges and treats us as the imperfect works-in-progress that we are, and that is precisely why he believes:

We can treat the intellectual character growth of our students as a worthwhile educational goal and allow this goal to inform and guide what we do in our classroom even if we know that the vast majority of our students won’t leave our classes having been transformed into paragons of intellectual virtue (p. 21).

I will save how he thinks we can teach in support of this goal for next time.

References

Baehr, J. (2021) Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.