Cultivating Virtue in Educational Practice with Ethan Hsieh

Quick Overview

The cultivation of virtue in educational practice centers on recovering the virtue of being in the world by shifting focus from propositional 'what' and 'why' questions about the sacred to adverbial 'how' and 'when' questions concerning orientation, which involves integrating Neoplatonic tiers of virtue (civic, purification, illumination) with embodied practices like those in the Tiiamat ecology to achieve epistemic vulnerability and non-propositional knowing.

Key Points: The ultimate orientation discussed is the cultivation of virtuosity into a responsibility to virtue and an orientation to the sacred, picking up on how an ecology of practices transfers into daily life. The Neoplatonic virtues discussed include civic virtue (agency in order), purification virtues (selfhood ordered to what is most real), and illumination virtues like theosis (personhood in right order). Practices transfer by understanding them as ritual, which facilitates ways of knowing reality that are otherwise inaccessible, linking to Tier 3 'alchemy of states' or altered states of consciousness. The proper focus regarding the sacred shifts from adjectival ('what is it?') to adverbial ('how is it showing up?'), which is consonant with shifting focus from substances to relational entities. Deep insights often occur during complexification, manifesting as a non-propositional flash of presence and connectedness, where one opens up to participate in a self-organizing process. A healthy tradition avoids deifying or demonizing any faculty (e.g., left vs. right hemisphere, logic vs. emotion) and fosters an absence of dependency, encouraging practitioners to transfer learning into the world. Recovering the virtue of being in the world involves breaking the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy and recognizing the Good as the intelligibility interweaving of relevance realization and reality realization, balancing the 'for itselfness' and 'for us' of things.

Context: This discussion is the third in a series between the host and Ethan Hsieh, focusing on Ethan's developed 'educational deductive ecology of practices' (Tiiamat), which integrates work from performance theorists and aesthetics to scaffold pedagogical transformation. The conversation specifically explores how this ecology leads to the cultivation of virtue, responsibility to virtue, and an orientation toward the sacred, building upon previous discussions about practice transfer into daily life.