Back to DIALOGUES ON VIRTUE

When choosing our virtues, I immediately jumped on "honesty". I figured that I had dealt with dishonesty often, so I would have a lot to say about honesty. What I found was that it was much harder to define honesty than I thought, let alone discuss it.

Brian:

I had been mentioning the discussion to him weeks before we actually conducted it, and I thought that we would both be prepared to have a fruitful dialogue. In a lot of ways, we did. We came up with a definition that focused on personal insight and discussed that honesty may depend first on how honest a person is with themselves. The content of our talk was more than sufficient, but there was something in the quality of the atmosphere that just did not seem right for a philosophical dialogue. Perhaps it was the fact that we had to plan it, as opposed to it springing up naturally in a more general discussion about life or current events. The lack of ambiance could have also been attributed to that fact that it was recorded, a factor that definately created an extra level of stress. Instead of letting my mind drift off into the outer reaches of the philosophical world, I found myself constantly checking to see if we were close enough to the recorder, looking at articles, and checking the time to make sure we did not end the conversation too soon. Despite all of the faults, there was one shockingly inspriational aspect of the conversation: I felt significantly closer to Brian afterwards. I considered how and why this would happen, and what I realized is that there is something extremely intimate about the Socratic dialogues. They might not be particularly sexy, but this form of thinking and articulating provides a valuable insight into the character of the person with whom you are talking, an insight that one does not find in many other places.

Mom: Transcript

Right before my mom and I had our discussion, we had been fighting. That doesn't seem like a very good way to go into a conversation about virtues, but we had the conversation nonetheless and it went better than I would have expected. Right away when we started talking my mom said, "Let's define our terms." That being the objective of the discussion, I went with it. As a whole, the conversation was a bit confusing. Where I can remember specific details from my conversation with Brian, I only have a rough idea of what the conversation with my mom consisted of. I tried to think about why this might be and could think of only one possibility... Brian had spoken quietly and cautiously in our conversation. Because of this, I listened very carefully to what he was saying and paid close attention. My mom, on the other had, spoke loudly and fluidly, so I didn't feel the need to lean in and listen carefully to what she was saying. Our conversation was more back and forth, throwing ideas out here and there. Some might say that is the sign of a more productive conversation, but as it turned out, it is the conversation that remember less. Apart from that, I remember the conversation being a bit odd because we kept having to start and stop due to interruptions. But as a whole, the discussion was interesting and engaging. Again, I felt the sense of being closer to my mom because although we have had these kinds of discussion before, we don't often get the chance to sit down, one on one, in an organized fashion to talk about something that we both are interested in.