There are two distinctive features of Aristotle’s ethics that are useful for us, and it so happens they are also key to understanding Aristotle’s “science of happiness.” First, Aristotle focuses not on character as some fixed and immutable quality, like temperament. Rather, his emphasis is on the development of character through the deliberate cultivation of […]
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Moderation’s other half
According to Plato, moderation is about self-rule regarding our desires. Aristotle might take that in the direction of finding balance in and among our desires. But what are desires? Essentially, desires are impulses to act seeking a state of satisfaction. An individual desire needs moderation in the sense that we find the right balance — […]
Continue ReadingTraditional Virtues
I’ve been catching up after the winter storm in Texas, and I didn’t quite catch up enough to post last Sunday. So, today, I’m going to take a short detour and talk about excellences of mind and the traditional virtues. Some people have asked me why I don’t use the more common language of “intellectual […]
Continue ReadingPractically speaking
The gospel reading for the First Sunday in Lent, from Mark 1, recounts the familiar scene of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River. We tend to focus on the dramatic parts of that story: The cleaving of the heavens, the booming voice announcing the Beloved, the Spirit descending like a dove. But right […]
Continue ReadingBalancing Act
Taking a cue from Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean, I talked about humility as a balance between too much confidence, which produces deliberative arrogance, and too little confidence, which produces timidity. We can generally recognize the extremes when we see them (and especially when we encounter them in dialogue), but it’s a lot harder to […]
Continue ReadingFruits, Vegetables, and Relationships
Next time you visit your grocery store, take note of your relationship to produce. What do you look for? What are your expectations? Consider this: We’re doing to fruits and vegetables what we do to relationships. We’ve gradually come to expect produce to look like the glossy, air-brushed pics in magazines, and we think we […]
Continue ReadingTimidity
Deliberative humility can be conceived as a “mean between extremes,” which implies a continuum. At one end, we’ve seen what we might call deliberative arrogance, but what’s at the other end of the continuum? We don’t really have an adequate word for it, so I’m co-opting the word timidity — though diffidence usefully captures another […]
Continue ReadingHumility
As we saw in the introduction to the Everyday Excellence challenge, deliberative humility is one of the basic excellences of mind. Superficially, this is the excellence of being open to the possibility that we don’t have all the answers. But if we don’t have all the answers, then what should we do?On this first day […]
Continue ReadingEveryday Excellence
Are you up for a philosophical challenge? Great — let’s go! Excellencifying isn’t about superhuman feats of excellence; it’s about cultivating daily habits of acting and thinking that lead to excellence. I’m introducing a monthly challenge to cultivate everyday excellence. Our first series of challenges are about excellences of mind. Let’s start by defining excellences […]
Continue ReadingI know how you feel
Knowledge, narrative, and insight Have you ever shared one of your experiences and got a hearty “I know just how you feel!” in reply? Were you skeptical that your conversation partner actually did know how you feel? Because of what we share, we are tempted into believing that we know more about each other’s experience […]
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