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Before saying goodbye to José Ortega y Gasset's book What Is Philosophy?, I'd like to offer one more quote:
[L]ife always carries with it a fatal dimension and some hint of having fallen into a trap. Except that this trap does not strangle us, but leaves to life a margin of decision and always permits us, out of the imposed situation, to achieve an elegant solution and to forge for ourselves a beautiful life. Hence, because life is part fate, and part the freedom we need to make decisions for ourselves, there is at its very root the stuff of art.... [D]o not say that fate does not allow us to improve our lives, for the beauty of life does not lie in the fact that destiny is or is not favorable to us, but in the grace with which we accept the challenge and out of its fatal material fashion a noble figure.
Each of us is dropped into the pageant of the world, and we are fated to live as human beings in a certain time and place with all of the attendant difficulties and ambiguities. Yet, despite this destiny, each of us has enough freedom to forge a beautiful life. That's all that truly matters, isn't it? If I'm not creating something beautiful, why am I here?
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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(Previous: Eudemian Ethics II.1.)
Clearly, then, excellence of character is all about pleasures and pains. Because character (as the name suggests) develops from what we characteristically do, acquiring a certain character happens not by being born into it but by being guided into it through repeated changes, and only then being activated in that way. (We don't see this in inanimate things, for you can throw a stone upwards ten thousand times but it will never do so except by being forced to.) Thus let character be a quality of the unthinking aspect of personhood that has the ability to heed thought and that is directed by the orders of reason.
Next we must articulate what it is in personhood by which character traits have the qualities they do. And these are our capacities for the feelings - for being sensitive, as it's said - as well as our traits, by which we are said to be affected or unaffected by these feelings in a certain way. After that there is the distinction, already settled, between feelings, capacities, and traits. By feelings I mean things such as anger, fear, shame, craving, and in general things which in themselves are accompanied by an awareness of pleasure or pain. With regard to these there arises no particular quality but instead they are something we undergo, whereas with regard to capacities a quality does arise. I mean those capacities by which we are said to be activated with regard to feelings, such as being belligerent, stolid, amorous, bashful, or shameless. Traits are the things responsible for these capacities, either guided by reason or the opposite, such as courage and moderation or cowardice and dissipation.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In José Ortega y Gasset's book What Is Philosophy? can be found the following quote:
Truth descends only on him who tries for it, who yearns for it, who carries within himself, pre-formed, a mental space where the truth may eventually lodge.
On reading that I immediately thought it would be interesting to substitute "love" for "truth", resulting in this:
Love descends only on him who tries for it, who yearns for it, who carries within himself, pre-formed, an emotional space where love may eventually lodge.
I was primed for this substitution because a few pages prior Ortega had made a connection between love and truth:
He who fixes his attention only on what awakes and fires love does not understand what love is. If the love of a woman is born of her beauty, it is not pleasure in that beauty which constitutes love and the process of loving. Once awakened, love consists in the constant beaming forth of a favorable atmosphere, a loyal and affectionate light in which we envelop the beloved being, so that all her other qualities and perfections can reveal themselves, make themselves manifest, and we will recognize them. Hatred, on the contrary, puts the hated being in a negative light, and we see only its defects. Love, then, prearranges and prepares the possible perfections of the beloved. Hence it enriches us by making us see what we would not see without it. Above all, the love of a man for a woman is like an attempt at transmigration, at going beyond ourselves, it inspires migratory tendencies within us.
This is a topic which I explored a few days ago in a post (also inspired by Ortega) on love and attention. In relation to both love and attention, Ortega interestingly uses the word "transmigration" and sees the possibility that one can engage in truthful perception of the other person or being. Far from holding that love is blind, he insists that the perception discovered in the "favorable atmosphere" engendered by love and attention is more truthful since it "makes us see what we would not see without it". In his book On Love, which I discussed a few months ago in a post about enchantment and surrender, Ortega locates the essence of love and friendship in uprooting your vital depths and transplanting them into the soil of another soul, which is an activation of your capacity for transmigration. It is only by migrating out of yourself to some extent that you can see and love another person for who they truly are.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In Book X, Chapter 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes the puzzling claim that "eudaimonia extends just so far as theoria does"; much of the puzzle arises from the fact that in standard translations this is usually rendered as "happiness extends just so far as contemplation does", which according to some recent scholars implies that happiness consists primarily or exclusively in acts of contemplation. By contrast, I would render it as "fulfillment extends just so far as attending does" - still somewhat puzzling, but something that I think I can unpack in a more reasonable manner.
In the Philebus, Plato has Socrates argue that no human being would ever want to experience physical pleasures without the accompanying psychological awareness of those pleasures, since that would betoken a merely animal existence. Aristotle seems to be saying much the same thing in the full passage from the Nicomachean Ethics:
[T]he other animals have no share in fulfillment, being completely deprived of such activity [i.e., theoria as attending]. For while the whole life of the gods is blessed, and that of men too in so far as some likeness of such activity belongs to them, none of the other animals experiences fulfillment, since they in no way share in attending. Fulfillment extends, then, just so far as attending does, and those to whom attending more fully belongs are more truly fulfilled, not by-the-way, but as directed by attending; for this is in itself glorious. Fulfillment, therefore, must be some form of attending. [Revised Oxford Translation modified; 1178b24-32]
One approach to elucidating this matter comes from Alexander Grant, who all the way back in 1885 wrote as follows:
[A] psychical energeia [i.e., activity - PSA] must be different from the same category exhibited in any external object. Life, the mind, the moral faculties, must have their 'existence in actuality' distinguished from their mere 'potentiality' by some special difference, not common to other existences. What is it that distinguishes vitality from the conditions of life, waking from sleeping, thought from the dormant faculties, moral action from unevoked moral capacities? In all these contrasts there is no conception that approaches nearer towards summing up the distinction than that of 'consciousness.'
Instead of the notoriously slippery word "consciousness", I prefer the verb "attending". Grant seems to be saying that the activity of attending to things distinguishes aliveness from nonexistence, waking from sleeping, and a capacity from its activation. This is true even of animals which engage in perceptual awareness, but is even more true of human beings, which engage in conceptual awareness through the activity of attending.
Another way to put it is captured in a passage from What Is Philosophy? by José Ortega y Gasset:
Life is knowing oneself, it is evidential. It is right to say that living comes first and then philosophizing - in a very strict sense this is, as you see, the principle of my entire philosophy. It is well that this should be said, but not without noting that the root and heart of living consists of knowing oneself and understanding oneself, of observing oneself and what surrounds one, of being transparent to oneself. Therefore, when we put the question, "What is our life?" we might answer, "Life is what we do, of course, because living is knowing what we do; in short, it is finding oneself in the world and being occupied with the things and beings in the world."
To my mind, "knowing what we do" is equivalent to the Socratic requirement (described in Plato's Laches) to give an account of one's life, while "being occupied with the things and beings in the world" is equivalent to attending to them through the ongoing activity and practice of theoria. Fulfillment extends just so far as attending does because living consists in knowing oneself, which is a matter of attending to one's life in the world.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Having recently rebalanced my financial portfolio, I remembered that I've been meaning to write about the ways in which I periodically rebalance my life portfolio, too. I first sketched out the idea of a life portfolio about eight years ago, asserting somewhat arbitrarily (because the areas of life can be sliced and diced in a variety of ways) that for my own purposes I think of my life pursuits as consisting of Health & Vitality, Wealth & Achievement, Love & Caring, Character & Self-Improvement, Wisdom & Sagacity, and Beauty & Creativity. As my life circumstances change, I tend to modify the weightings I assign to these different areas. Here are a few examples:
I've observed similar portfolio rebalancings among friends and loved ones, so the idea seems to be generally applicable even though the particulars may differ. As always, your mileage may vary...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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We return to José Ortega y Gasset and another quote from his book What Is Philosophy?, simultaneously making a connection to his previously-cited book of essays On Love:
[T]heorizing, philosophizing are, properly speaking, not living - precisely because they are a form of living; the theoretic life, the contemplative life ... Theory, and its extreme form, philosophy, are the attempt which life makes to transcend itself; it is to de-occupy oneself, to de-live, to cease to be interested in things. But this dis-interesting of oneself is not a passive process. On the contrary, it is a form of being interested: for instance, to be interested in something while cutting the intro-vital threads which link it to me - saving it from its immersion in my life, leaving it alone, in pure reference to its own self, seeking in it its very being. To be dis-interested is, then, to be interested in the inner self of each individual thing, to dower it with independence, with substance, one might almost say with personality - putting myself in a position to look at it from within its own point of view, not from mine. Contemplation is an attempt at transmigration. But that - to seek in a thing what it has of the absolute and to cut off all other partial interest of my own toward it, to cease to make use of it, to cease to wish that it serves me, but to serve it myself as an impartial eye so that it may see itself and find itself and be its very own self and for itself - this - this - is this not love? Then is contemplation, at root, and act of love, in that in loving as differentiated from desiring, we are trying to live from within the other and we un-live outselves for the sake of the other?
First I'd like to translate these insights into some of the alternative renderings I am using in my translations of Aristotle. To theorize or to be interested or to contemplate (to engage in θεωρία) is to give attention; to de-occupy oneself is to be at ease or at leisure (i.e., to engage in σχολή, in contrast to the pre-occupation of ἀσχολία); personality or personhood is ψυχή (traditionally translated as soul) - the aliveness which Aristotle attributes not only to humans but also to the other animals and to plants; that something exists for itself is what Aristotle calls "that for the sake of which" (τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα) in the sense of both the aim of its actions and the beneficiary of its actions; and love is φιλία in all its forms (including the love and affection of parents, children, siblings, spouses, friends, even fellow citizens).
Second, I'd like to personalize and humanize these insights even more deeply. Yes, I can gaze out my window in meditation and dower with independence the squirrels scampering up and down the ponderosa pine trees in my yard, and I can even do this with the trees themselves, which sprouted before I was born and which will be here long after I have passed from the pageant of life; these beings don't exist to serve my purposes but to live for their own sake. Yet when I cultivate the attitude of "being interested in the inner self of each individual thing", that applies most significantly not to arbitrary things out in the world but especially to my fellow human beings, and most especially to those with whom I have close personal relationships. A friend, a sibling, a lover - these wonderful people don't exist for my sake but for their own sake, aiming primarily at their own fulfillment, not mine. I can enjoy their presence in my life and gratefully receive whatever they freely wish to give, but I feel a great responsibility to do so both without taking them for granted and with the utmost respect for their independence and autonomy.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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