Excellence

Hypomnemata

Do not agree with praise about your clothes, home, children, income, status or popularity. These are not up to you.

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Your moral, ethical choices are up to you. These define who you are and whether you can be called a good, or excellent human, or not.

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What Fate and Fortune send your way - your circumstances - must be embraced; and are the material for good use, to be able to demonstrate reason, virtue and excellence.

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If you are to spend time learning and gaining knowledge with regard to wisdom, do not only learn, but also apply. Recall Epictetus: embody your philosophy.

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The wise man will not only strive for moral, ethical excellence, but will also strive to do well in all his duties. For you, you must strive to be an excellent husband, father, employee, neighbor, friend, student of philosophy, citizen, chess player, basketball player and volunteer.

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Your social nature requires you to pass on what you learn. In so doing, you both learn and teach excellence.

Thoughts

In a notebook I carried with me during the years 1995-2000, I wrote about the idea of excellence. As I read what I wrote back then, I equated excellence to 'maximum effort' and 'productivity.' In my mind, I could only be excellent by outworking everyone else, or working myself to sleep every night. Excellence, to me, was heavily weighted actions and not so much in virtue or knowledge.

As I reflect on the topic of excellence today, I hear a strong theme of 'sustainability' in Aristotle's quote:

Virtue being, as we have seen, of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue is for the most part both produced and increased by instruction, and therefore requires experience and time; whereas moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit (ethos) (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2).

Excellence becomes a habit - it becomes a part of your character and soul - as you diligently learn and apply knowledge toward a wise life. It is not blind effort, but rather savvy and intelligent effort based on context (i.e. Fate or Fortune).

The excellent chess player is knowledgeable, intuitive and astute in his moves. His moves are efficient and he will checkmate his opponent in the swiftness fashion. A good chess player may brute-force a win, but the excellent one finds the beauty.

Twenty years ago, my view of excellence was also based in the context of comparing myself to others. Excellence in rational virtue cannot be compared between individuals. Each person is highly unique, coming from vastly different backgrounds and contexts. To compare people is a fool's errand. We can look at the circumstances and spectrum of choices the person had to choose from, but cannot ideally rank people's choices from best to worst. To do so would require deep knowledge of each individual's background, education, knowledge and circumstances.

For example, can we call Jean Valjean a bad man for stealing bread? Perhaps at the time of him stealing the bread, we might cast judgement on him by calling him bad. But we would also have to ask ourselves if he knows good from bad? Does he have knowledge? What about when he steals the bishop's silver? Is he still a bad man then? Does he know? By the end of the book, could we call him a bad man? Would Inspector Javert have stolen the bread were he in the same shoes as Valjean? And do we call Javert a bad man for not having compassion on Valjean? Was Javert an excellent officer of the law? Was he an excellent man?

Jesus was right in telling the Sadducees and Pharisees to cast the first stone at the adulterous woman, only if they were without sin. When they all left, and the woman alone was still there, Jesus exhorted her to sin no more - freeing her to begin her journey of knowledge and right actions.

Indeed, striving to be an excellent human being is a very tall order. Not all want to learn and practice philosophy. But, perhaps sooner or later in our individual lives, we will be faced with profound, deep truths. And we'll have to learn timeless, ancient lessons and then we'll need to choose how we will react with that knowledge.

Quotes

One who has achieved virtue and excellence, after having examined all these questions, submits his will to the one who governs the universe just as good citizens submit to the law of their city. And one who is still being educated should approach his education with this aim in view: ‘How may I follow the gods in everything, and how can I act in a way that is acceptable to the divine administration, and how may I become free?’ For someone is free if all that happens to him comes about in accordance with his choice and no one else is able to impede him (Epictetus, Discourses 1.12.7-9).

And of a human being, then? Surely it must be the presence of a human being’s excellence? So if you want to be beautiful for your own part, you should strive to achieve this, the excellence that characterizes a human being.

‘But what is it?’

Consider who it is that you praise when you praise people dispassionately: is it those who are just, or unjust?—‘Those who are just.’—The temperate or the intemperate?—‘The temperate.’—The self-controlled or the dissolute?—‘The self-controlled.’ —You should know, then, that if you make yourself a person of that kind, you’ll be making yourself beautiful; but if you neglect these virtues, you’re bound to be ugly, whatever techniques you adopt to make yourself appear beautiful (Epictetus, Discourses 3.1.6-9).

Whenever you meet someone, ask yourself first this immediate question: 'What beliefs does this person hold about the good and bad in life?' Because if he believes this or that about pleasure and pain and their constituents, about fame and obscurity, death and life, then I shall not find it surprising or strange if he acts in this or that way, and I shall remember that he has no choice but to act as he does (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.14).

To put it another way, cosmic Nature or God (the terms refer to the same thing in Stoicism) and man are related to each other at the heart of their being as rational agents. If a man fully recognizes the implications of this relationship, he will act in a manner which wholly accords with human rationality at its best, the excellence of which is guaranteed by its willing agreement with Nature. This is what it is to be wise, a step beyond mere rationality, and the goal of human existence is complete harmony between a man's own attitudes and actions and the actual course of events (Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, p. 108).

Nature is not merely a physical power causing stability and change; it is also something endowed with rationality par excellence. That which holds the world together is a supreme rational being, God, who directs all events for purposes which are necessarily good. Soul of the world, mind of the world, Nature, God-these terms all refer to one and the same thing-the 'artistic fire' going on its way to create (Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, p. 148).

Virtue is a consistent character, choiceworthy for its own sake and not from fear or hope or anything external. Happiness consists in virtue since virtue is a soul which has been fashioned to achieve consistency in the whole of life (Diogenes Laertius, LS 61A).

They [the Stoics] also say that the wise man does everything well - that is to say, everything that he does: for as we say that the flute-player or the lyre-player does everything well, with the implications 'everything to do with flute-playing, and 'everything to do with lyre-playing', so the prudent man does everything well, so far as concerns what he does, and not of course also what he does not do. In their opinion the doctrine that the wise man does everything well is a consequence of his accomplishing everything in accordance with right reason and in accordance with virtue, which is expertise concerned with the whole of life. By analogy, the inferior man does everything that he does badly and in accordance with all the vices (Stobaeus, LS 61G).

How, indeed, could a person immediately become temperate if he only knew that one must not be overcome by pleasures, but was quite unpracticed in withstanding pleasures? How could one become just when he had learned that one must love fairness but had never exercised himself in avoidance of selfishness and greed? How could we acquire courage if we had merely learned that the things which seem dreadful to the average person are not to be feared, but had no experience in showing courage in the face of such things? How could we become prudent if we had come to recognize what things are truly good and what evil, but had never had practice in despising things which only seem good? Therefore upon the learning of the lessons appropriate to each and every excellence, practical training must follow invariably, if indeed from the lessons we have learned we hope to derive any benefit. And moreover such practical exercise is the more important for the student of philosophy than for the student of medicine or any similar art, the more philosophy claims to be a greater and more difficult discipline than any other. study (Musonius Rufus, p. 53)

"But what, then," people say, "have not certain persons won their way to excellence without complicated training? Have they not made great progress by obeying bare precepts alone?" Very true; but their temperaments were propitious, and they snatched salvation as it were by the way. For just as the immortal gods did not learn virtue having been born with virtue complete, and containing in their nature the essence of goodness – even so certain men are fitted with unusual qualities and reach without a long apprenticeship that which is ordinarily a matter of teaching, welcoming honourable things as soon as they hear them. Hence come the choice minds which seize quickly upon virtue, or else produce it from within themselves. But your dull, sluggish fellow, who is hampered by his evil habits, must have this soul-rust incessantly rubbed off (Seneca, Letter 95)

Helping, however, really means prompting the soul in accordance with Nature, both by the prompter's excellence and by the excellence of him who is thus prompted. And this cannot take place without advantage to the helper also. For in training the excellence of another, a man must necessarily train his own (Seneca, Letter 109).

Citations and further reading

Aurelius, M., & Hammond, M. (2014). Meditations.

Epictetus, ., Hard, R., & Gill, C. (2014). Discourses, fragments, handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Long, A. A., & Sedley, D. N. (January 01, 1987). The Hellenistic Philosophers.

Long, A. A. (1986). Hellenistic philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Musonius, R. G., & Lutz, C. E. (1947). Musonius Rufus - "the Roman Socrates". New Haven, Conn: Yale Univ. Press.

Seneca, L. A., & Gummere, R. M. (1917). Ad Lucilium epistulae morales: London: Heinemann.