Virtue: Mind and Body

I’ve been listening to Aristotle’s Nichemachean Ethics lately. Though I read the book years ago, I keep picking up bits and pieces that didn’t seem that important at the time, but which now stand out to me. For instance, Aristotle makes a quite convoluted argument about  virtue, this it is not a condition but an action, or more accurately, that it’s impossible to distinguish between virtue of character and virtue of action. One does not exist without the other. Then, in a single sentence he clarifies his point, saying “one might possess virtue, but be asleep or inactive throughout his life.” In such a case, how could one call oneself virtuous? One has to do something. A life without ethical action cannot be a virtuous life.

I’m not sure whether I have to parse out the similarity between virtue as ethics, or virtue of the mind, and virtue as running, or virtue of the body. In both cases, it is not what we think or wish, it is what we do that makes us a runner or an ethical being. James (not William, the other one, one in the Bible) said it another way: “someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”

Martin Luther hated the Book of James, I think because he made the same inaccurate assumption, that we could separate any supposed internal attribute—virtue, faith—from its external evidence.

Yet, the intimate connection between internal and external holds true in many areas. For instance, we know the Westboro Baptist Church has no idea what holiness means because their actions are full of hate. What we can learn from the Westboro Baptist Church is how true Burke’s idea that words are “symbolic action" is. The old distinction between words and deeds is yet another misleading dichotomy. In fact, it may rise from our recognition that when a politician talks about integrity, then takes bribe money, the incongruity between his words and deeds reveals a reality he cannot hide. It is precisely because they do go hand in hand that we recognize this new reality.

A Good in Itself

Listened to the first book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics while running down the frontage road of one of the many canals that run through the Valley. In the first book, Aristotle distinguishes between those things that are "good in themselves" and those things that lead to another good, and in turn another good, until you reach end good, the good in itself because it doesn't lead on to another. (Example: cooking is good because it makes food palatable; food is good because it makes us healthy; health is good because it gives us long life; long life is good because wisdom takes years to acquire; and so on.) All these are good. But the chief end of all of them is wisdom. Though, admittedly, Aristotle was less interested in wisdom as an end in itself than Plato/Socrates. For Aristotle, wisdom was worth little if it didn't lead to action. "To virtue," he writes, "belong virtuous activity."  

Most of us who start running, particularly those of us who start late life as I have, start running as a good that leads to other goods--we are interested in improving our health, loosing weight, living a longer life.

When I started running I was looking for an alternative to yoga--which I practiced for all the reasons above. I had been doing yoga for years. Then, I hurt my back; not while doing yoga, not while straining my muscles in any way. One day I simply got up from a chair and felt a twinge just to the left of my backbone. That twinge quickly turned into intense pain. I stopped doing yoga until the pain disappeared. But every time I started back up, particularly when doing any of the poses that required me to twist at the waist. So, I started running, even though several friends told me with confidence that my back would hurt from this as well. 

After a while, I found that I no longer ran for health or weight loss or longer life. I ran to run. It had become an end in itself. I'm still grateful I receive those external benefits from running. But that's not why I run anymore.

Oh, I know that some might claim that running is not the good in itself I claim it is. They might tell me with the same confidence that my friends insisted that I'd still have back pain, that I run for the endorphins. Those are the end, those feel good natural drugs, not the running.

Aristotle seems to have been similarly scoffed at when he claimed that the chief end was happiness. He clearly realized that a simple definition of good as happiness itself created problems, admitting that "To say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude." He added that "a clearer account of what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man." He then attempts to identify the function of man. I admit to being insufficient to that task.

Do this, however: Drive down any neighborhood in middle class America on the day the Good Will is collecting and count the number of exercise bikes and treadmills are on the curb. Not a scientific sampling. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that those who start running, or any other sport, or get a gym membership, soon give it up unless it becomes an end in itself.