Category: Virtues and Vices

Courage

Mut verloren — alles verloren!
Da wär es besser, nicht geboren!
To lose courage is to lose everything, in which case it would have been better never to have been born.
 
A few stabs at rhyme-preserving translation:
Of courage shorn, of everything shorn!
In that case better, never to have been born!
Courage lost — everything lost!
Then having been born's too high a cost!
Loss of courage, something fatal!
Better then, never natal!
Loss of heart — loss of all!
'Twould then have been better, not to be at all!

Virtue, Vice, and Mastery

I lately quoted St. Augustine  to the effect that a bad man has as many masters as he has vices. But to be mastered by one's virtues, though better than to be mastered by one's vices, is arguably shy of the ne plus ultra of mastery.

The ultimate in mastery is mastery of both one's vices and one's virtues.

My pithy formulation wants explanation. It may have been from Donald Davidson that I picked up the notion of akrasia in reverse. Akrasia is weakness of the will.  Imagine a runner who runs every day without exception. He is proud of himself, his 'streak' going on two years now, and his self-mastery. And then a day comes when conditions are bad; there are patches of ice on the roads and a freezing rain is falling. Our man is tired from a hard day at work, and a cold is taking hold. He suits up anyway. The upshot? He slips on the ice, smashes a knee and is out of the running for a good long spell.   Our runner has demonstrated akrasia  in reverse. 

In this instance he has failed to master his virtue: it has mastered him to his own detriment.

The virtues exists for us and our flourishing; we do not exist for them.

The ultimate in mastery is mastery of both one's vices and one's virtues. 

Another Advantage of Old Age

The abandoning of your vices becomes easier as they abandon you.

The mechanism of flight of the vices of the flesh is powered by the mortal coil's decline, which is why the old man out for spiritual gain should rejoice, not rue, his libido on the wane. 

The old man, unlike the young, has a good shot at freedom from lust's subornation even in the decadent West if freedom he wants, the wanting standing in inverse relation to the subornation.

Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.  (St. Augustine, City of God)

The Near Occasion of Doubt

Acutely aware of our moral weakness, the wise among us do not continually test our virtue: we  avoid the near occasion of vice. Tests will come without our seeking them. But the wise among us  are also keenly aware of our intellectual weakness.  Reason in us we know to be infirm, prone to error, and easily swayed by our passions and especially the suggestions of others. It does not follow what we should refrain from testing our beliefs or entertaining doubts about them.   Doubt is the engine of inquiry. What follows is only that the testing and the entertainment should be kept within limits.

So while we ought to avoid the near occasion of vice, we ought merely to beware of the near occasion of doubt.

Courage

Courage is the hardest and hence the rarest of the four cardinal virtues. A Substack 'sermon.' Leftists hate sermons, which is good reason to give them.

The best sermon, however, is one's own existence. (Kierkegaard)

Attributed to Robert Frost

Here:

"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel” is usually credited to American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Frost used the quote in January 1961 (discussing John F. Kennedy, who Frost thought was not this type of liberal) and Frost used it again in January 1962. A popular form of the quotation is: “A liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in a fight.”

William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) wrote this in his book What Man Can Make of Man (1942): “He lends himself to the gibe that he is ‘so very liberal, that he cannot bring himself to take his own side in a quarrel.’” It is not known where Hocking got the phrase, or if Frost (who was an avid reader) was borrowing from another source.

One can be hobbled by one's virtues. There is something noble about being fair-minded, objective, and considerative of all points of view. It is the way of the philosopher, the lover of objective truth, "the spectator of all time and existence" in a stirring line from Plato's Republic. But before a man is a philosopher, he is a man of flesh and blood, brutally embedded in a brutal world in which he must stand his ground and battle his enemies. He must not allow his noble viewership of life's parade to make impossible  his marching in it.  

The End of Moderation

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 29:

Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end, he has radically violated the virtue.

Haecker TheodorA penetrating observation.  What is the end or goal of moderation? Haecker is rejecting the notion that the purpose of moderation, conceived as a virtue, is to maximize the intensity and duration of pleasure. Of course, moderation can be used for that end — but then it ceases to be a virtue. For example, if I am immoderate in my use of alcohol and drugs, I will destroy my body, and with it my capacity for pleasure. So I must limit my pleasure to my capacity for pleasure. And the same holds for immoderation in eating and sexual indulgence. The sex monkey can kill you if you let him run loose. And even if one's immoderation does not lead to an early death, it can eventuate in a jadedness at odds with enjoyment. So moderation can be recommended merely on hedonistic grounds. The true hedonist must of necessity be a man of moderation. If so, then the ill-starred John Belushi, who took the 'speedball' (heroin + cocaine) express to Kingdom Come, did not even succeed at being a very good hedonist.

But if enjoyment is the end of moderation, then moderation as a virtue is at an end. Haecker, however, does not tell us what the end of moderation as a virtue is. He would presumably not disagree with the claim that the goal of moderation as a virtue is a freedom from pleasure and pain that allows one to pursue higher goods. He who is enslaved to his lusts is simply not free to pursue a truer and higher life.

The Intellectual Chutzpah of David Bentley Hart

Here (HT: Karl White):

Let me, however, add one more observa­tion that will seem insufferably pompous or a little insane: to wit, that the argument I make in my book—that Chris­tianity can be a coherent system of belief if and only if it is understood as involving universal salvation—is irrefutable. Any Christian whom it fails to persuade is one who has failed to understand its argument fully. In order to reject it, one must also reject one or another crucial tenet of the faith. The exits have all been sealed. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I do not believe it likely.

Hart seems not to have noticed that he embraces a logical contradiction when he says that the argument he has given is irrefutable AND that he could be wrong about that.  For if an argument is irrefutable, then it cannot be refuted; if, on the other hand, the producer of an argument can be wrong about whether it is irrefutable, then the argument can be refuted. Hence the contradiction: the argument cannot be refuted AND the argument can be refuted.

But a man can be a pompous ass and a blowhard and still have interesting things to say. If you are interested in the question of universal salvation, see Douglas Farrow, Harrowing Hart on Hell in First Things. (HT: Dave Lull)