Episode 122 - Gabriel Richardson Lear: "What kind of person do I want to be?"

Professor Gabriel Richardson Lear of the Department of Philosophy and the Chair of UChicago's Committee on Social Thought joins us on The Course in this episode to talk about how her parents' early observation encouraged her to dip her toe into the philosophy world. From arranging state dinners to studying the works of Plato and Aristotle, Professor Lear finds the most satisfaction in mentoring and teaching students. Tune in to hear more about her career journey and also what the Committee on Social Thought studies.

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Gabriel Richardson Lear of the Department of Philosophy. Professor Lear is the author of the book Happy Lives and the Highest God, an Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and she's also the Chair of UChicago's Committee on Social Thought.

She joins us today to talk about how her interests have evolved from arranging state dinners to the works of Plato and Aristotle, the enjoyable and less enjoyable aspects of academic bureaucracy, and how she became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Lear, welcome to The Course. It's lovely to have you. How are you?

Gabriel Richardson Lear 00:37
 Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. 

Stephen 00:39
Well, let's just get started with the very basics. Can you tell us what your role is at UChicago and just like a little bit about what that entails?

Gabriel Richardson Lear 00:49
 I'm professor in the philosophy department and also in the Committee on Social Thought and I right now am the chair of the Committee on Social Thought.

Stephen00:58
Yeah, I look forward to learning about that. But for now, would like to go pretty much all the way back, when you were a kid, what did you imagine doing with your career? And were there any signs that it was going to lead to you being a philosophy professor or no?

Gabriel Richardson Lear 01:13
 Well, there weren't signs to me, but my parents thought there were. They told me pretty early on that they thought I should be a philosopher. And that just seemed like a crazy idea, and I, you know, resisted that strenuously. You know, first my thought was that I would be a ballerina, and that was indulged for a while, but didn't work out.

And then I thought, you know, when I tried to be more serious about what I might do, I was pretty argumentative, so I thought I could be a lawyer. I also was very interested in sort of the meaningfulness of physical arrangements. And so I thought, well, maybe I should go work for the State Department and be a protocol officer.

I didn't know if there was such a thing, but I just loved the idea of thinking about how to plan state dinners in ways that might actually have an effect on world affairs, depending on who you sat next to who. So those were my ideas when I headed off to college. 

I got a job during college, a summer job doing event planning at our local college, and I just really liked, I really liked that, and actually that turns out to be something that I do a fair amount of now as chair of the Committee on Social Thought,

Stephen 02:28
I was going to say, okay, so you do get some opportunity to…

Gabriel Richardson Lear 02:30
 Yeah, some continuity.

Stephen02:32
Could you fill us in a little bit on, uh, the journey, between then and now. where you went to college, uh, what you studied, and, and sort of how your academic career progressed. 

Gabriel Richardson Lear 02:48
 Sure. So I grew up in Tennessee, it was a small college town at Sewanee: The University of The South. So I went to a private high school that was affiliated with the college. But everyone I knew intended to go to college in the South. And so did I, that was my plan. But I had a teacher who encouraged me to apply to Princeton, which allegedly was the most Southern Ivy League. And so I did apply. And when I got in, I thought, oh, well, I guess I should go. And so I went to Princeton. And that was a very big that was a big fork in the road for me, as it turned out. 

I started off, I thought I would major in English. I loved English literature, but in my sophomore year, I was, I both got turned off of one of the required English classes. And at the same time decided as an acquiesce to my parents telling me that really you should try philosophy and took a course in Introduction to Moral Philosophy. And I just loved it. I could not get over the project of trying to use reason alone to substantiate and justify the idea that we should act morally. So it was particularly, Kant's groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. I just like could feel the wheels of logic turning and I just thought this is the most fun thing and such an exciting intellectual project. 

I also had a wonderful teacher in that class, a young woman. I now realize she had only recently gotten her PhD. She seemed very mature to me, named Sarah Buss. So she was inspiring. So in the second semester of my sophomore year, I took only philosophy classes, and I still just, I just loved them. So I decided to become a philosophy major. And, in my, the second semester of my senior year, I mean, it came to the end of college. I didn't really know what I was going to do. I couldn't quite see going on to graduate school. So, I applied for a job doing public relations in publishing, and I thought that might be something that I could do to work in the publishing industry. It's still intellectual. 

But at the same time, in my second semester of my last year, I was allowed to enroll in a graduate seminar on Aristotle's ethics. And again, I was just blown away. I thought, wait, this is the way ethics should be done. And I had not taken Aristotle before, but at this point it was the end of my college career. And luckily, I already had a job lined up. So, you know, I took this course, had a wonderful time and then set off to live in New York.

And that was a great year making almost no money, but it really, you know, clarified my sense that this was not what I wanted to do. I mean, one thing that happened is, you know, public relations, you write press releases. And so I would spend time writing press releases and then come in on a Monday morning and there would be a stack of clippings from newspapers and magazines with my words attributed to somebody else.

I just, What? You know, that was so antithetical to the whole academic idea that your words are an expression of you. And I never, I had never realized that these people, these journalists were not writing their own copy. So that was a bit of a disillusionment then. 

I was interested in Aristotle still, so I started taking, ancient Greek courses in night school at The New School. And I have such a huge appreciation now for people who go to college at the same time as they're working. I'm glad I had that experience because I really respect that more than I think I would have otherwise. It was hard. 

So, the professor who had taught me the Aristotle class was actually normally, a professor in Cambridge, and he encouraged me to come to Cambridge and do an MPhil in Classics. So, luckily, I was able to do that, and I quit my job. I took a crash course in Ancient Greek and then set off to Cambridge, to Clare College, and did an MPhil in Classics, for a year. And that was a fantastic experience. And my thought had been just that I would, that I would learn a little bit of ancient philosophy and then apply for PhD programs in contemporary ethics.

But while I was in Cambridge, I just became enamored of this whole milieu of the serious study of ancient Greek philosophy. And so, I applied to PhD programs in that, and I went back to Princeton for my PhD and wrote a dissertation on Aristotle and the relationship between moral virtue and contemplation.

And then it was time to, you know, apply for jobs. And, I was really thrilled because a job, there was a job opening just that looked perfect for me at Chapel Hill, and I thought that's great. I can go back to the south and I will be able to live near my parents. But you know, life does not always work out the way you plan things and often for the better. And I went to a conference at Columbia and ran into somebody who then turned out to be my husband, but I met him. We just, I fell madly in love. And I thought, I don't want to go to a place that's going to be so far from him. 

And so fortunately there was also a job opening at Yale, where even though he was teaching at the University of Chicago, but he commuted regularly to New Haven, because his daughter was growing up there. And, so I fortunately got the job at Yale, and so I was an assistant professor there, and then, again, very fortunately was able, at the right time, to move to the University of Chicago.

Stephen 08:56
Wow.

Gabriel Richardson Lear 08:56
 So here I am.

Stephen 08:57
So, okay. Are your parents philosophers? Why were they so insistent that that was the right…

Gabriel Richardson Lear 09:04
 No, well, I mean, actually, I think my father really is, but I mean, officially, he taught English literature, his dissertation was on 18th century English literature. My mother was the in Italian department of this college. No, I mean, why did they think that I would like philosophy? I mean, my father is a very religious person, and we spent a lot of time discussing theology.

And so, I think that probably, and I was argumentative, but I think he saw that I was really interested in trying to understand, not just sort of what the doctrine was, but why, what the rationale was.

Stephen09:45
Yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. That's interesting. Could you talk a little bit more, I guess, about the switch towards the ancients, I guess, and then classics. I've done a little bit of ancient Greek. I can't imagine learning it in night school or taking a crash course and feeling in any way competent in it. But it sounds like you were, you were really drawn to investigate these much older works and writers.

Gabriel Richardson Lear 10:10
 Yeah, well, I mean, let me just hasten to say that learning Greek took much longer than that. But it was a good start. So, let's, so I was interested in moral philosophy, but I had a feeling as an undergraduate that somehow, contemporary ethics, at least at that time, wasn't addressing the full human being.

So the emphasis was very much on what makes an action right. What must an action be like in order to be right? So focused on the moment of action and really focused on both what you do and what your reasons are for what you do. But there was not very much attention to your emotional life, for instance.

And the thought was, your emotions are not immediately under your control. And so since those aren't voluntary, they aren't the subject of moral praise and blame. But that didn't resonate to my own sense of life, which is that, of course, we do praise and blame people for the emotions that they have.

And from the point of view, not of judging others, but of thinking about what kind of person I myself want to be. I, that's the way I put it to myself. What kind of person do I want to be? And not always necessarily what specific action do I think I can best justify to others as one that's permissible to do.

That was another thing is that the focus is very much on what's permissible instead of what's the very best way you could act. That's not, I mean, I have to say that's a little bit of a, that's a little inaccurate when you think about utilitarianism is, looking for which is the best action to do.

But in any case, that was the focus. And I felt like there was something missing in our, about emotional life. And I couldn't quite think about how to, I couldn't figure out how to think about this. Now, it should be said that this kind of question was already coming up in the literature. So, you know, Kantian philosophers were becoming interested in what they might say about virtue, and they were turning back to other parts of Kant's corpus that dealt with virtue.

I didn't know so much about that. I did, however, had a professor who was not one of my teachers give me a paper called the Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions that was written by Martha Nussbaum. And that, I thought, yeah, that's what I'm interested in. The idea that the Stoics thought that our emotions are expressive of judgments and they can, those judgments can be true or false. They're expressive of judgments of value and they can be true or false. And so now suddenly your emotions become part of the field of morality. And so I thought, Oh, that's interesting. And so then when I got to Aristotle's ethics, I saw, Oh, wait, the question he's asking about is eudaimonia. Yeah, which is usually translated as happiness, and that's fine, but eudaimonia is really, it's that condition of life that we want for our children.

It's flourishing, it's success, and the question is, what is that? That's, and then the attempt to argue that you, that what that is moral, morally virtuous living itself. I thought that's the kind of answer, that's what I would like to be true. And so I would like to study some philosophers who attempted to show that it is true.

And what are the various you know, ways in which they did that. So that's what got me into ancient Greek philosophy.

Stephen 14:02
Cool. I'm skipping ahead a bit here, but, what are you interested in and excited about at the moment? Like what, what are you working on currently?

Gabriel Richardson Lear 14:10
 A couple of things. I have for a while been thinking about the idea of moral beauty, which is very central concept in all of the ancient philosophers, except maybe the Epicureans, but certainly Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. And so I, it's, the Greek word is kalon, and I'm interested in thinking about, well, what does it mean?

Should that really be translated as beauty? Why would that be important? Is it, we often look at virtuous people and say, you know, how beautiful, but does it matter from the standpoint of the agent herself that her actions be in life, be beautiful? So that’s something I've been thinking about.

And, I'm also have become more interested in the conception of wise reasoning that Plato and Aristotle assume. They, as everybody knows, they model wise reasoning on craft or, you know, or art. And like, you know, carpentry or, you know, shipbuilding or medicine. And I've started to think that the model of rationality that they assume there is in important ways quite different from the conception of rationality that's assumed in both modern consequentialism, but also really sort of across the board in modern life.

And so I'm trying to figure out whether that's true, and then if so, figure out what to say about it.

Stephen 15:51
Gotcha. Thank you. Could you, to the best of your ability, because I know that it probably changes, but yeah, just describe a little bit about your daily life and how the different aspects of your job at UChicago, you know, interact.

Gabriel Richardson Lear 16:04
 I feel like I have the most wonderfully varied daily life. It is so great. It's sometimes a bit overwhelming, but it's very varied and fun. So, just thinking about as I look ahead to my week right now. I'm going to be meeting with graduate students on drafts of papers. That's something that I really love to do.

That's probably one of my favorite parts of teaching is getting to help sort of students who are really serious and improve their work. So I have a couple of meetings about that. 

I will also be meeting with the Dean to discuss our budget, for the Committee on Social Thought. I will be attending a workshop presentation. I will be running a department meeting. I will be, I hope, writing. That's, that's something that I do need to do actually, but I always try to get some writing done and reading. 

So, it's a mix of teaching and administration. I'm also actually, another thing will be taking part in a panel to discuss free expression. I'm a member of the faculty advisory board of the new Chicago Center for Inquiry and Free Expression. So, I'm often called on to discuss issues about that in some way or other. So, I get to talk about the values of the university, I get to talk about ancient Greek philosophy, and I get to talk about the nuts and bolts of how we are going to just keep this place running.

Stephen 17:44
Well, yeah. Okay. It's, that's quite a spectrum, when you play it out like that. We  have been asking people what some of their least favorite aspects of the job are?

Gabriel Richardson Lear 17:55
 Yeah, I mean, can there be any doubt it's grading who nobody likes to grade? Yeah, that's my least favorite part, what's the my other least favorite part? The, I think I hope the university is trying to change in this respect, but there is a lot of bureaucratic, just finagling that has to happen, writing memos, requests. I get very tired of that. 

Stephen 18:26
Yeah, we, the answers are usually something along those lines. I think grading or email…

Gabriel Richardson Lear 18:32
 Yes, that's right. No email, email is, yeah, there's sometimes just too many of them. I'd rather talk face to face. It's so much more efficient.

Stephen 18:43
And yeah, can you tell me a little bit more about what, what your Committee does and like what your, role on it is? Because, you know, I think people are, it's pretty straightforward what teaching is and, you know, research I think is something that a lot of people can understand.

But, you know, there's also these kinds of other bodies that are an important part of academic life that I'm not sure people who aren't, currently on one. Really, really understand.

Gabriel Richardson Lear 19:09
 Well, the Committee on Social Thought is sui generis. That, there really isn't anything else like that. And that, you know, could be fine. The name is almost meaningless. Not entirely, but it is. What we are is a, we're an interdisciplinary group of faculty and we are not united by a common area of study.

That makes us different from almost all other committees. It's not that we address the same problem from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Instead, we are united by a sort of methodological commitment to the idea that good questions in the humanities and humanistic social sciences matters often precede disciplines and they transcend disciplines. So, in our jargon, we call these fundamental questions, but that really good scholarship arises from just actually being human beings wondering something, and that people have, in various ways, tried to address these questions across time, across cultures, and in different genres.

So, we're committed to reading texts, across a variety of disciplinary domains. And to not worry so much whether that fits into my disciplinary expertise or not. I'm going to draw inspiration and illumination from that wherever I can. 

So we admit graduate students. And if this program is really not for everybody, you have to be self directed, but the students are required only to put together a list of texts that are fundamental for them, and they have to be in three areas, imaginative literature, philosophy and religion, and history and social theory, and half have to be ancient, and half have to be modern.

And of course, where you draw the boundary depends on what culture you're talking about, since ancient and modern differs, and that’s it. And they think of what is their own, what are their own interests, and they try to put together text that they think would be interesting for them to read and think about together.

And then they, we set an exam for them and they write it and then once they've passed that exam, then they sort of now focus into a particular discipline through which they're going to pursue their more scholarly research. So that's what we do in the Committee on Social Thought. It was the home of many well-known Chicago academics - Hannah Arendt was in the Committee on Social Thought. Alan Bloom was in the Committee on Social Thought. You know, who else more recently, John Coetzee, the Nobel Prize winning novelist, was in the Committee on Social Thought. 

Stephen 22:06
Wow. Well, and, and yeah, I mean is that advice that you would give to people interested in philosophy more generally, just sort of reading outside of your specific field?

Gabriel Richardson Lear 22:20
 Absolutely, absolutely. It's changed my life. I think it's very easy when you're in graduate school, your job is to become disciplined. Your job is to really learn the field and learn the techniques of argumentation, but you can lose sight of the larger field that these, these questions are ultimately supposed to speak, and the answers you find, are supposed to speak to people as human beings.

And I think the disciplines end up speaking to a very narrow field. And sometimes that's necessary because the argumentation is difficult. But you should be aiming to speak to a larger, at least academic audience. And a good way of doing that is just keeping in touch with people. You know, the great sources of culture.

Stephen 23:10
Yeah, that's a very cool approach. We have a couple of minutes left, and I did just want to kind of quickly look towards the future. Is there anything in particular ,or just sort of any subject areas that you are really hoping to explore or like, you know, starting to think about?

Gabriel Richardson Lear 23:30
 One thing that I think, I mean, I'm certainly not the only person to have had this idea, but the ancient Greek philosophers were very interested in the idea of political friendship, and that is sorely lacking, in our current moment. And so I would like to do more work trying to understand what, in particular, Aristotle's idea of political friendship is very interesting.

You know, there's a lot about his political theory that is, we're going to find absolutely abhorrent and should, but it's good to think about it to understand why he felt that, you know, for instance, the disenfranchisement of women, and also his theory of natural slavery, why he felt pushed to those positions.

So those are things that we would think undermine the possibility of political friendship. But there’s interesting thinking there. We don't always have to agree with these people in order to respect them.

Stephen 24:34
Yeah, very important point. Finally, and I know this is a big question, but what would you say you find the most fulfilling about what you do at UChicago?

Gabriel Richardson Lear 24:42
 That is a big question. I, let me just say some things I haven't yet mentioned. I love teaching in the humanities first year core course. That is so much fun to have the chance to teach small groups of students. Reading this collection of wonderful texts. I'm not an expert in a lot of them, but I have read them many times before and to think with these students about what they might mean for us is just a thrill every single time. I love that.

 I like being part of a community. That's I think part of the reason I like being a chair. I've also been the Chair of the philosophy department and I've served in faculty governance and, you know, certainly faculty governance can be improved in my opinion. But the opportunity to contribute to a community that you think is actually doing something good in the world is one of the most fulfilling things I think anybody could do.

Stephen 25:41
Thank you, Professor Lear, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu, or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.