# Cultivating Virtue in Educational Practice with Ethan Hsieh Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ci4CC8SaE8 Recap page: https://rapidrecap.app/video/8Ci4CC8SaE8 Generated: 2025-12-17T19:33:53.897+00:00 --- ## 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. ## Detailed Analysis The core theme is recovering the virtue of being in the world by shifting focus from defining the sacred (what/why) to relating to it (how/when), suggesting the sacred is always present but requires a shift in orientation. Ethan relates his Tiiamat tiers to the Neoplatonic virtues: Tier 1 (awakening to structures) grounds knowing like civic virtue; Tier 2 (being there/dynamic understanding) relates to purification virtues concerning selfhood; and Tier 3 (alchemy of states/altered consciousness) aligns with illumination virtues. The process involves entering epistemic vulnerability through controlled dissociation (performance), which allows for rapid complexification where intelligibility's standard is complexification, not generalizability. This complexification naturally calls forth the non-propositional, often experienced as profound, transformative insight (metanoia) where the world appears different, exemplified by the poetic exploration of a 'magical squelch.' Furthermore, the discussion heavily critiques frameworks that demonize or deify specific cognitive faculties, emphasizing that true insight occurs between hemispheres and that being in the world is the interwoven relationship (religio) between primordiality (the Dao, the uncarved block) and ultimacy (the One), manifesting as the Good, which is the holding together of things' 'for itselfness' and their accessibility 'for us' (ontoormativity), counteracting the high degree of depersonalization in contemporary culture. ### Virtue and Practice Tiers - The running theme concerns turning practice into an ecology that brings about scaffolding transformation and an orientation to virtue and the sacred - Ethan maps his Tiiamat tiers to Neoplatonic virtues: civic (agency), purification (selfhood), and illumination (personhood). ### The Nature of Knowing in Practice - Practices transfer by understanding them as ritual, accessing ways of knowing only accessible within the practice, often involving altered states of consciousness that are quotidian, not just substance-induced. ### Shifting Orientation to the Sacred - The crucial shift is moving from asking 'What is the sacred?' to asking 'How is the sacred showing up now?', establishing agency through recognizing the sacred as the always-present ground of relation. ### Complexification and Non-Propositional Insight - Deep learning requires epistemic vulnerability, leading to confusion and surprise as reality complexifies; intelligibility's standard is this complexification, which summons the non-propositional, akin to the Cloud of Unknowing. ### Critique of Faculty Demonization - The speakers reject any framework that demonizes or deifies a single faculty (e.g., intellect, emotion, right/left hemisphere), asserting insight is metaxy—between faculties—and that logic must be integrated with pre-logical/supra-logical experience. ### Identifying Healthy Traditions - Healthy practices emphasize a living tradition over leader veneration, demonstrate openness to self-correction, and foster an absence of dependency, allowing practitioners to transfer learning into their daily lives. ### Being in the World and the Good - Being in the world is the interwoven, non-dichotomous reality of primordiality and ultimacy, where the Good is the intelligible interweaving of relevance and reality realization, balancing the surprise of 'for itselfness' with the confirmation of 'for us'.