Writing the self through service, a Dietetic Ethics.

Abstract

In this paper, the writer offers an approach to writing ethical arguments that depends on service-learning. Ethical thinking and writing are often associated with pure theory, dogmatism, and the enforcement of normative morality; however, in the view presented here, ethics is only possible through constantly situational and dialectical engagement between the practical and theoretical, the philosophical and the material, the subject and the object. Thus, writers in a medically focused service-learning composition course are in a rewarding but challenging educational position. In order to adequately learn in such an environment and to succeed as an ethical writer, the writing student puts into practice certain habits or techniques: she or he engages in a dietetics, a mode of self-production in the midst of frequently contradictory cultural materials and practices. This approach aligns experientially based composition with the ancient medicinal ethics of Hippocrates and a more recent ethical theory, technologies of the self, as described by Michel Foucault.

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A Dietetic Ethics

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm. [1]

Thus reads what is effectively the third tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, in its classical incarnation. To twenty-first-century eyes and ears, the passage quoted above probably seems a little estranged, out of place, anachronistic. Some perhaps come across the word "dietetic" and then repeat it to themselves to make sure that they have heard or read correctly. At least this is the case when many freshman composition students study the Oath in an argumentative composition classroom. Certainly, nurses, general practitioners, and family doctors are concerned about what a patient eats, but we arguably sense, when hearing the third tenet, that Hippocrates had something even more substantial in mind. Such is the case with most of the Oath, even the modern version, and with most of Hippocrates' writings: one feels temporarily displaced or encounters a conceptual gap and then recalibrates one's thinking. Take for instance the deep ambiguity in the following phrase from Hippocrates' Epidemics: "Do no harm." [2] It is a dialectic of the affirmative and negative. It tells us to progress through reflection. It calls for intervention and restraint, as does the Hippocratic Oath. The Oath's profundity indeed lies in the energy created by its contradictory nature and its impracticality--as is the case with most moral philosophy, [3] and as is the case, most pertinent here, with ethical argumentative writing.

It is because of the medicinal arts' problematic aura, as indicated in the Oath and elsewhere in Hippocrates' work, that one might use medicine as a window through which to have students enter into ethical writing. Composition students in a service-learning course at Louisiana State University encounter and research topical medical issues and take part in experiential learning--or service-learning--in order to write ethical arguments. Many of the students who enroll in this course intend to pursue medically related professions; they are typically wary of the English curriculum. Consequently, the course is geared toward students not necessarily interested in the humanities, while at the same time covertly introducing them to the humanities--i.e., rhetoric and ethics. Instead of learning ethics through extensive lecture, students delve into the fray of societal and cultural problems by volunteering in a local hospital, by making a number of journal entries, and by writing in multiple phases and in multiple genres on a medically related topic they have chosen.