What is virtue?

I first read the below quote about 15 years ago, it’s by John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a leading intellectual and spiritual influence on the Founding generation (in A Government of Laws, Ellis Sandoz, p. 181), and it struck me as one of the greatest compressions of truth I had ever seen:

Virtue consists in the love of being as such.

Now we know why the Randian atheist D. Sanchez hates me. When I said that the transcendent exists and that everything comes out of it, he interpreted that to mean that I am denying the actual, immanent existence of everything that is, in favor of some non-existence, and thus am canceling out all being, all value, all virtue, and thus am the epitome of evil.

But leaving aside the hideously distorted understanding of the Randians, let us consider this: if virtue consists in the love of being as such, what does the left consist of?

- end of initial entry -

William W. writes:

Excellent question. This very difficult issue of ultimate meaning, ultimate purpose, is very difficult for those on the atheistic left. I recently asked a good friend of mine, an atheist, why he thought we should bother ourselves about having a progressive society. He said, “Only a progressive society can really take care of and meet the needs of all people.”

I asked, “So are you saying that each person has some objective, absolute value, some inherent worth?”

He responded, “No, I’m not saying that at all. That would imply that God, or something like him, exists. But we DO have to pretend as though that were the case, because people are necessary to keep society progressing.”

[LA replies: That’s great. That’s exactly like my theme of how Darwinians constantly talk as if Darwinian evolution were teleological, in order to make sense of it and make it plausible, when in fact it is radically non-teleological. Maybe someone should write a book, Liberal Darwinism.]

When I pointed out the circularity of that logic, he responded, “It’s not actually circular logic, but that there is a cyclical nature to life, and that revolution of being thrills me.”

Consider the massive confusion and backtracking of such a position, compared to the perspective of Thomas Aquinas, as related by Chesterton:

Now there is something that lies all over the work of St. Thomas Aquinas like a great light: which is something quite primary and perhaps unconscious with him, which he would perhaps have passed over as an irrelevant personal quality; and which can now only be expressed by a rather cheap journalistic term, which he would probably have thought quite senseless.

Nevertheless, the only working word for that atmosphereis Optimism. I know that the word is now even more degraded in the twentieth century than it was in the nineteenth century. Men talked lately of being Optimists about the issue of War; they talk now of being Optimists about the revival of Trade; they may talk tomorrow of being Optimists about the International Ping-pong Tournament. But men in the Victorian time did mean a little more than that, when they used the word Optimist of Browning or Stevenson or Walt Whitman. And in a rather larger and more luminous sense than in the case of these men, the term was basically true of Thomas Aquinas. He did, with a most solid and colossal conviction, believe in Life: and in something like what Stevenson called the great theorem of the livableness of life. It breathes somehow in his very first phrases about the reality of Being. If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, “To be or not to be—that is the question,” then the massive medieval doctor does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, “To be—that is the answer.” The point is important; many not unnaturally talk of the Renaissance as the time when certain men began to believe in Life. The truth is that it was the time when a few men, for the first time, began to disbelieve in Life.”

Kevin V. writes:

“But leaving aside the hideously distorted understanding of the Randians, let us consider this: if virtue consists in the love of being as such, what does the left consist of? “

The left consists of love of the ideal. They are incapable of distinguishing what is from what should be. That’s the essence of the left, idealism over reality and the destruction of what is in favor of what might be.

Pax Domine sit Semper Vobiscum,

LA replies:

That’s interesting, because that’s the way D. Sanchez sees me, as someone who is canceling out what is, in favor of my fantasy of God.

Chris B. writes:

“It’s not actually circular logic, but that there is a cyclical nature to life, and that revolution of being thrills me.”

In this reveals that Progressivism is not actually a political policy at all: it is a psychological attitude. One needs plenty of hope to deal with this Change that has no ultimate goal, for hope is what you do when you have no control.

In this light we can also truly understand demagogic leftist slogans such as “change.” Accept change, any change, for change contains within its ontology an aspect of reality and being that to oppose change is to oppose reality. This is intended as political opponents can be presented as mad, to which the many “Phobias” in the leftist lexicon attest (for oppositions to ‘diversity’—which is a form cosmicism which signifies itself with a rainbow flag)

The actual psychological effect of this liberalism is meditative and dissociative. The mentally crippling effects of PC are implicit in this regard. It resembles Hinduism as described in the Bhagavad Gita.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 07, 2008 12:25 PM | Send