3 - A brief history of virtue from the Stoics to Levinas

Summary

Introduction

The history of moral thought in the West since Aristotle has been marked by a gradual reduction of the importance of the notion of virtue in favour of the notion of duty. Instead of seeing virtue as valuable in itself, people began to think of virtue merely as an aid to doing one's duty. This occurred under the influence of two leading ideas put forward by Plato: that we should live our lives under the guidance of transcendent realities; and that the faculty by which we could become aware of these realities was reason. Plato suggested that Goodness and Justice, for example, were not just concepts but actual realities, knowledge of which would lead us to act well, and that we would gain this knowledge by controlling our desires and emotions. Our knowledge connects us to these higher realities even as our bodies live in a cave of darkness and obfuscation. Human beings have their feet in the mud of this earth and their intellects in a higher reality. Even though we are imprisoned in this worldly, fallible, finite and vulnerable existence, our thinking can take us into a realm of perfection and godly ideals. The most noble and virtuous way to live, therefore, is to reject the things of this world and let our spirits soar towards the pure realm of ideas and perfections of which this world is merely a pale copy.