a very brief and quick meditation on Aristotle concerning character

Aristotle was particularly concerned about the virtues of ethical character. It was obvious to him that habituation based on repeated exposure to particular kinds of experiences influenced an ethical agent along two entangled matrices: (a) what one professes to believe about particular ethical propositions such as “Courage is a virtue” and (b) how one actually conducts oneself ethically in the messy details of everyday life. Aristotle lays some groundwork early in his ethical treatise:

Hence it is also clear that none of the virtues of character arise in us naturally. For if something is by nature in one condition, habituation cannot bring it into another condition. A stone, for instance, by nature moves downwards, and habituation could not make it move upwards, not even if you threw it up ten thousand times to habituate it; nor could habituation make fire move downwards, or bring anything that is by nature in one condition into another condition. And so the virtues arise in us neither by nature nor against nature. Rather, we are by nature able to acquire them, and we are completed through habit. (Nicomachean Ethics Book II, chapter 1, §2)

To sum up in a single account: a state [of character] results from [the repetition of] similar activities. That is why we must perform the right activities, since differences in these imply corresponding differences in the states. (Book II, chapter 1, §7-§8)

First, then, we should observe that these sorts of states naturally tend to be ruined by excess and deficiency. We see this happen with strength and health — for we must use evident cases [such as these] as witnesses to things that are not evident. For both excessive and deficient exercise ruin bodily strength, and, similarly, too much or too little eating or dinking ruins health, whereas the proportionate amount produces, increases, and preserves it. (Book II, chapter 2, §6)

The same is true, then, of temperance, bravery, and the other virtues. For if, for instance, someone avoids and is afraid of everything, standing firm against nothing, he becomes cowardly; if he is afraid of nothing at all and goes to face everything, he becomes rash. (Book II, chapter 2, §7)

For example, one may claim to believe that courage is a virtue, but the only way in which both to profess this authentically and to have this belief function as part of one’s character is to experience scenarios in which one is challenged to behave courageously. Furthermore, one must successfully practice courageous actions in the face of those challenges. Once such successes become more the rule than not, one may say that one has acquired the virtue of courage that is expressed in an integrated manner by both verbal profession and habitual action. For Aristotle, there is no other way to acquire both the belief and the character trait.

Moral agents, including readers of this blog, possess a range of possible moral and immoral actions that they could right now, in the moment, perform and fail to perform. Even stronger, moral agents have a range of moral and immoral actions springing from habit that they could not fail to perform or could not help but performing. This is why, for example, the phenomenon of addiction is so powerful and frustrating. Addiction circumvents one’s best intentions and the most noble of one’s tragically powerless volitions to the contrary. These actions that moral agents may hate nevertheless spring forth largely as a result of a complex structure of dispositions, habits, and automatic responses that are embedded within their moral characters. These moral characters represent the social and moral identities of these agents and the complex substance of their life histories.

Aristotle was well aware of this moral psychology, and he deployed his insights to great effect in his Nicomachean Ethics, his masterpiece of ethical meditation on how one becomes virtuous. If one lacks the virtue of courage, then one must undergo a formation regimen, not unlike the athlete who trains her body and mind through specific and regular exercise programs in order to stress them into the sort of athletic compliance that one might call one’s “second nature.” The well trained athlete in the heat of the moment simply performs, as if by instinctual second nature. What is invisible to the casual observer is the lengthy, disciplined training regimen that makes possible the effortless-seeming athletic virtuosity. Sports commentators even have a phrase for this majestic phenomenon: being “in the zone.” In a similar vein, the one who has invested spiritual energy to become courageous has done so through a largely invisible life history in which the agent has been courted towards either courage or cowardice. To the degree that such pressure scenarios have resulted in volitions towards courage, the habit of courage is founded, nurtured, and solidified. Other candidate virtues can be similarly analyzed, such as generosity and patience. An exactly similar analysis can be given to the acquisition of vices, such as gluttony and miserliness. The key idea for Aristotle in all such analyses is habit. The cliché that “practice makes perfect,” though indeed a cliché, expresses a powerful truth about the human condition, whether the practice is towards virtue or vice. Consistent, intentional practice yields a habit, and moral character is largely a collection of one’s habits. It is not an accident that the notion of virtue is connected with the notion of a habitual disposition or power, and these notions are a powerful tool for understanding how it is that persons become just or wicked.

Consider what one is actually saying when one says of another, “He has become powerless to do otherwise.” One is inchoately implicating a life history of experiences and choices that have engraved determinative gutters within the agent in question, where his actions have become the runoff of his character.

Spinoza the mystic

Recently in class (and hopefully again this week), we talked about whether Spinoza should be considered a strange theist (e.g., a pantheist or panenthiest) or an atheist. Either is consistent with his monistic metaphysics.

Hard to say...

He’s got this great way of referring to his view of reality: “God, or in other words, Nature.”

Recall that Descartes was a substance-type dualist and a substance-token pluralist. Spinoza is a substance-type monist and a substance-token monist! There is only one kind of thing, and there is, in fact, only one thing.

This one thing is “God, or in other words, Nature.”

So... what is this God like? The Appendix to Ethics part I is a wonderful tirade against traditional notions of a personal God.

He gives an argument against taking God to be a personal agent. If God is perfect, then it follows that he lacks nothing. If something intervenes owing to intentional purposes, the reason that such intervention occurs is due to a lack in the something that intervenes. The idea is that one could only hold a view of an interventionist God if one gives up the view that such a God is perfect. So, Spinoza preserves perfection at the price of God having one of the marks of personhood — viz., intentional, purposive action. The real target obviously is any traditional notion of God that is drawn from religions.

What doesn’t appear very defined at the end of this argument is the notion of perfection that he attributes to God. And here is where it begins to become clearer why he says of reality that it is “God, or in other words, Nature.”

If God were to exist as religions proclaim, it would make impossible any type of explanatory rationalism, whereby all events that occur in the spacetime world could be explained by reference to a (hopefully) small class of deterministic laws. I think that the real awe-inspiring prospect of a completed explanatory rationalism is what Spinoza has in mind when he attributes perfection to God (or Nature). For us today, I imagine it’s the same sensation of awe and hints of viewing perfection when we think about the prospects of a completed physics.

It’s not really a coherent merging of the concepts of God and Nature, since the conceptual hangover of traditional religious notions of God (e.g., the inspiration of awe) begin to obscure the impersonal but also awe-inspiring, even terrifying, aspects of the Natural world. Something that seems correct gets transposed, but can you really transpose the thing you want without also dragging along some residue of the other thing you don’t want?

Still, there’s a tense resonance that Spinoza was onto, and I probably would be where Spinoza is if I did not hold onto some of my more traditional religiously-inspired beliefs about God being personal.

I asked the students why Spinoza’s treatise is called Ethics. Here again is another tense and incoherent resonance between two views that seem right in their own ways. If something happens according to the will of (a traditional religious) God, then it follows that, in some respect, the thing that happens is “good” (though maybe not “good” for the collection of things implicated in that one event). In the same way, if something occurs by the will of Nature (that is, according to laws of determinism... Spinoza would go further and argue fatalism), and if one conjoins this alleged fact with the view of Nature as being perfect, then it follows, in some sense, that this occurrence is “good” or “fitting” or “perfect.”

The lesson drawn for agents is the same in both cases: contentment is the correct response.

In the first case, it’s pious contentment as a way of surrendering to the will of God. In the second case, it’s rational contentment as a way of surrendering to the perfect, law-like, and inevitable workings of Nature. Thus it makes sense why Spinoza’s musings, though totally saturated with metaphysics, are actually for him an investigation into ethics. It amounts to Stoicism for the seventeenth-century.

In the end, his use of “God” and “nature” may be an incoherent juxtaposition of vocabularies that are too different in their semantic histories. It is nevertheless a gem of linguistic play that makes progress in the way a pinball makes progress through a series of bumpers. It’s almost never a straight line and it’s not clear that the ball is going anywhere but you’ll play every time.