When I last blogged at the end of
last week, my session at the British Museum about Hercules and his choices was
about to take place. This has now happened. I had some unexpectedly useful
feedback, including from one of the participants who raised the potential of
considering Hercules' Choice in the
context of Computer Science and binary computation. I’ll say more about this as
soon as I’m ready to get my head around this wonderfully unpredicted possible
new path.
Tomorrow I’m off to Warsaw to
take part in a congress on something
that is more within my disciplinary comfort zone – it’s on a Roman rather than
an ancient Greek topic. But that topic is Cicero, one of the few ancient
authors who wrote about the Choice of Hercules. The key thing I will be doing
is making a presentation during a session led by Katarzyna Marciniak. This sesson will be setting out work underway by members
of The Cluster for the Past and the Present and the Our Mythical Childhood project. The presentation I shall make will
be on the Choice of Hercules. The exact content is a surprise, so I’ll keep
that a secret for now. Instead, I’ll say a few things here about Cicero’s take
on the Choice of Hercules, as I will refer to this during my presentation.
Cicero raises the Choice of Hercules in the de officiis, a treatise concerned with how best to live and behave including where a conflict emerges between different obligations. Referring to the time when a youth, i.e. a male youth…, will need to decide which calling in life to take up, Cicero says that this is is ‘the most difficult problem in the world.’ For:
Cicero’s Hercules, then, is faced
with a simple choice – between hardship that would bring great eventual
rewards, and a life of pleasure. But it is always so simple for Hercules? Or
perhaps I should put it like this: the choice might be simple. But does
Hercules ever commit himself? He does… and he does not… And it is this lack of
clarity in terms of the outcome that makes the episode so full of potential, as
a talking point and as an opportunity for reflecting on moral positions and
about dilemmas one might face in life. Making choices can be difficult for
anyone. It is possible to feel caught in indecision. Looked at one way, the
choice involves a clear decision between two things as opposed as Virtue and
Vice, where the heroic career is reduced to a choice between things as extreme
as they come, with none of the ambiguities that often accompany a choice in
life. Or there is complexity (Computer Science, I’ve learnt since Saturday, is
likewise moving beyond binary thinking – I’m itching to discuss this with the
participant I mentioned above…).
It is not clear how to read the episode and how to determine what choice the hero made. It is this simultaneous simplicity and complexity that I shall be drawing on in my resources for autistic children. The episode offers potential for getting any user to reflect on a choice in life, and to think about different possibilities and what the implications of these possibilities could be including around where they fit in the world, between themselves and others. Meanwhile, it is this simplicity of Hercules' choice – the very thing that distinguishes Hercules’s choice from that of other young people according to Cicero – that counts as one of the reasons why the story has so much potential for use with autistic children. This is because it can enable children to think about moral dilemmas and to think about contrary ways to respond to making a decision in life. By doing this, the children for whom I'll be creating the resources will have the opportunity to engage in a process that has engaged others as well, including those for whom the particular representation of the choice was likely created.
I’ll come back to this on my return from Warsaw. Plus, I’m looking forward to learning from the assembled Ciceronian expects, which include my Roehampton colleague Kathryn Tempest. What I discover might well impact on my appreciation of the use of the Hercules example in the de officiis, especially as a strong focus of the conference will be Cicero’s vision of education.
Cicero raises the Choice of Hercules in the de officiis, a treatise concerned with how best to live and behave including where a conflict emerges between different obligations. Referring to the time when a youth, i.e. a male youth…, will need to decide which calling in life to take up, Cicero says that this is is ‘the most difficult problem in the world.’ For:
it is in the years of early youth, when our judgment is most immature, that each of us decides that his calling in life shall be that to which he has taken a special liking. And thus he becomes engaged in some particular calling and career in life, before he is fit to decide intelligently what is best for him. For we cannot all have the experience of Hercules (1.117-18, W. Miller Loeb tr.).
It is not clear how to read the episode and how to determine what choice the hero made. It is this simultaneous simplicity and complexity that I shall be drawing on in my resources for autistic children. The episode offers potential for getting any user to reflect on a choice in life, and to think about different possibilities and what the implications of these possibilities could be including around where they fit in the world, between themselves and others. Meanwhile, it is this simplicity of Hercules' choice – the very thing that distinguishes Hercules’s choice from that of other young people according to Cicero – that counts as one of the reasons why the story has so much potential for use with autistic children. This is because it can enable children to think about moral dilemmas and to think about contrary ways to respond to making a decision in life. By doing this, the children for whom I'll be creating the resources will have the opportunity to engage in a process that has engaged others as well, including those for whom the particular representation of the choice was likely created.
I’ll come back to this on my return from Warsaw. Plus, I’m looking forward to learning from the assembled Ciceronian expects, which include my Roehampton colleague Kathryn Tempest. What I discover might well impact on my appreciation of the use of the Hercules example in the de officiis, especially as a strong focus of the conference will be Cicero’s vision of education.
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