According to Aristotle How Are Virtues Like the Arts
All besides ofttimes we are inclined to call back of excellence every bit the production of good genes and skilful fortune rather than our personal habits. The fates bequeath their blessings indiscriminately and haphazardly, and the talented and successful are the lucky recipients of excellence, while the rest of united states are mired in mediocrity. Those who ascent to the peak, the outliers, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them, were built-in that way, or else became that way considering of a combination of heredity, privileged upbringing and opportune circumstances.
As nosotros've mentioned before (Aristotle and the Growth Mindset), while the great philosopher Aristotle doesn't discount whatever of these factors in attaining excellence, he is more inclined to emphasize the importance of teaching and our personal habits.
Of course, as Christians, we attribute all of these factors to the providence of God and tin can relativize the importance of them past appealing to a heavenly hope. People may not have an equal shot at excellence in this life, whether in academics, sports, business organisation or the arts, just it doesn't ultimately affair in comparison with spiritual and eternal realities.
Intellectual and Moral Excellence: Where do they come from?
The situation gets trickier for us Christians when nosotros recall of moral virtue. Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition had one and the same word for these two ideas: excellence was virtue, and virtue was excellence. According to Aristotle in that location were two types of excellence:
Excellence [or virtue], then, being of ii kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence in the main owes its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and fourth dimension), while moral excellence comes about as a issue of habit….
Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25 (trans. Westward. D. Ross)
Interestingly, Aristotle attributes the origin and development of intellectual excellence to education or instruction. While he doesn't discount the role of heredity in academic attainment, he emphasizes the primary office of the long process of educational activity. Intellectual virtue requires the accumulation of feel and knowledge over time through qualified teachers.
(Incidentally, I wonder what would happen in our schools if nosotros really took on lath the liberal arts tradition'southward insistence on the intellectual virtues every bit a primary goal of education…. Nosotros might have an educational renaissance on our hands.)
Moral excellence, on the other manus, Aristotle attributes to our habits or customs, those repeated practices that form in u.s. character qualities or propensities to human activity in a certain fashion in a given situation. This thought is revolutionary for putting ball in the human court, as it were, and calling on individuals to reform themselves through building amend habits, and parents to set up their children up well through moral habituation. As he concludes the section cited higher up,
It makes no small deviation, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very swell divergence, or rather all the difference.
Plato had emphasized, as we might exist inclined to, that moral virtue was a upshot of divine souvenir:
To illustrate, he tells Protagoras the charming account of a conversation between Hermes and Zeus. While Zeus is putting the finishing touches on his human creation, Hermes asks him if virtue is to be distributed among men like the gifts of the arts, unequally, with only a favored few receiving skills in medicine and in music. But Zeus resists this proposal and commands Hermes to distribute the souvenir of virtue to all men equally, 'for cities cannot exist if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts' (Jowett 1969).
David Hicks, Norms and Nobility (24)
In a way this makes sense, since basic moral virtues (like fair dealings in business, general truthfulness, courageous action in warfare, difficult work and perseverance) are the gum that holds society together. Without a general distribution of these qualities, no city-state could survive for very long. Civilisation can only operate in a earth where most of the time a good number of people have been divinely blessed with basic moral virtues.
Or course, it's possible that divine gift and human responsibility are ultimately compatible, rather than opposites. Aristotle might have agreed with Plato and simply contended that divine gift manifested itself in the addiction grooming of the citizenry to course basic levels of moral virtue in nigh people.
Moral Virtue a Result of Mutual Grace
When Christian students and teachers interact with Plato or Aristotle on the topic of moral virtue, in my experience, they tend to recollect primarily in terms of higher lodge spiritual virtues, like faith, hope and dearest, or else the absolute versions of these virtues, where all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But Aristotle and Plato had in mind the work-a-day world of the polis or city-country, and while they were certainly not hesitant to criticize the rampant human abuse they saw, they besides noticed how often things tended to go right.
In this way, their discussions of moral virtue cohere with the Christian doctrine of mutual grace. Despite the reality and pervasiveness of homo depravity and sin, the doctrine goes, human society would completely fly off the rails if God did not also grant the grace of moral virtue, distributed generally (i.e. in mutual) to people, regardless of their spiritual condition. This explains why unredeemed human beings, while still corrupt, are not nearly so bad and subversive as they could be.
For this reason, it'southward probably helpful for us to differentiate between moral excellence and spiritual excellence, only as the medieval tradition did. In borrowing from the classical tradition of philosophy, medievals distinguished between the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which could only exist imparted by the Holy Spirit as a upshot of true repentance, and the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance (or self control) and backbone.
Not only is the doctrine of common grace helpful for answering questions about virtuous not-believers, information technology can help us in raising and educating the children of believers. In the classical Christian schoolhouse movement at that place can tend to be some uneasiness about our ability to railroad train our students in moral virtue as the classical tradition proposed and some modernistic educators still hash out today. We have a strong sense every bit Christians that only the Holy Spirit can change hearts and nosotros tremble to tread likewise presumptuously on his domain.
With the doctrine of mutual grace in our minds, we tin proceed forward boldly with the project of cultivating moral virtues in our children through the power of addiction. (Past the manner I borrow the phrase "the power of habit" from Charles Duhigg'southward incredible volume, which I can't recommend highly enough.)
The Ability of Habit in Forming Moral Excellence
For Aristotle, habits are the master determiner of character. I don't accept to quote his famous, "We are what nosotros repeatedly practice…. Excellence, then, is not an act only a habit." (By the way, does anyone ever give a citation for that? Where is it from? What translator?) Everyone already knows it, and hopefully we all take a sense of its ability. The power of habit comes in its susceptibility to practice and development, like all other sports, arts or skills. This means that we can grow in moral excellence, and therefore have every reason to foster an Aristotelian growth mindset.
Moral virtues go the qualities of a person through active exercise of them. Every bit Aristotle explains,
Excellences we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts every bit well. For the things nosotros accept to acquire before we can exercise, we learn past doing, due east.1000. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so also we go just by doing only acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave past doing brave acts.
Nichomachean Ethics 2:ane or 1103a15-b25 (trans. Westward. D. Ross)
It'due south hard to overstate how important the implications of this insight are for teaching. A few immediate applications come to mind. Procedures that allow or encourage cheating for the sake of grades are abhorrent because they form the addiction of deceptive practices to go ahead in children. Motivators that operate primarily on students' desire to be meliorate than others or receive awards for achievement may be forming the vices of avarice and pride.
The community and civilization of a school or home are non a neutral factor in a kid's education, if moral excellence is our goal.
Another implication, unpacked by the English philosopher John Locke, is that children should non be taught by memorizing rules for conduct merely by habit:
But pray call up, children are not to be taught by rules, which will e'er be slipping out of their memories. What you think necessary for them to practise, settle in them by an indispensable practice as often as the occasion returns; and if it be possible, make occasions. This will afford habits in them, which, beingness in one case established, operate of themselves easily and naturally without the assistance of the memory.
Some Thoughts Concerning Pedagogy (40)
If you lot've ever experienced the failure of your precepts, whether as parent or instructor, to stick in the minds of children, and so you lot know what Locke is talking about. "I forgot," is most the near common excuse for misconduct of all. Locke invites u.s. to view moral formation in a different lite, by relying on the peaceable coaxing of habits. While difficult, considering it requires a proactive presence and gentle encouragement beforehand, rather than the harsher but less labor-intensive scolding afterward, Locke'due south path of habit training holds incredible promise.
Perhaps this sort of habit grooming, then, is function of what Paul was talking near when he allowable parents to "railroad train their children in the discipline and nurture of the Lord." Then Paul's encouragement to fathers not to "provoke them to anger" or "exasperate them" could have had in listen the aforementioned sort of phenomenon that Locke mentioned only earlier the passage quoted to a higher place: parents heaping upward rules and expectations for their children without giving them the practice and training they demand, and so harshly punishing them for forgetting to perform them later on (39-xl). All besides often our attempts at discipline are merely an do in unrealistic expectations.
Of course, this isn't a rejection of discipline and rules for children; the place of legitimate authority and obedience is a primary given of life. Simply the function of habit in the development of graphic symbol and moral virtue provides the fundamental backdrop that will foreclose the states from numerous abuses.
For more on Aristotle'south educational prototype for today, cheque out my series on Aristotle's Intellectual Virtues replacing Flower'south Taxonomy.
mccormickliblaingledy.blogspot.com
Source: https://educationalrenaissance.com/2019/03/25/excellence-comes-by-habit-aristotle-on-moral-virtue/
0 Response to "According to Aristotle How Are Virtues Like the Arts"
Post a Comment