[Vision2020] This I Believe: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

[Nicholas Gier]

Dear Visionaries:


Some years ago I published this in two other newspapers, but this is the
first time for the Daily News, so here it is for those who do not subscribe.

I thought I would take a break from the election, and take Michelle Obama's
advice: "We go high when they go low."

A reader sent me a kind response and offered this wonderful quotation from
Mary Baker Eddy:

" We are all sculptors, working at various forms, molding and chiseling
thought….We must form perfect models in thought and look at them
continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble
lives" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 248).


May you all be good, beauty, and truthful,


nfg

*This I Believe:*

*Truth, Beauty, and Goodness*

By Nick Gier, the Palouse Pundit

            Author’s note: This essay was submitted, along with tens of
thousands of others, to NPR’s series “This I Believe.”

            I believe in truth, goodness, and beauty. I believe that ethics
is not a mechanical following of moral rules or simply doing one’s duty.
Rather, it means that truly good person is one who is wise, courageous,
compassionate, loyal, just, tolerant, and patient. Above all, I believe
that good people are those who are always true to themselves.

I believe that Aristotle was correct in making pride a virtue second only
to wisdom.  For him pride is knowing what we have accomplished and freely
acknowledging that we have done it.  Aristotle did not respect people who
hid their lights under a bushel.

Aristotle believed that humility is a vice, and people who do not own their
accomplishments (and all of us have achieved something) are not being true
to themselves.  On the other side, people who are vain glorious, claiming
more they have done, suffer from false consciousness and false pride.

Translating the beautiful Greek word *megalopsychia* as pride does not do
this concept justice.  It literally means “having a great soul.” I
therefore believe that ethics is the art of making the soul great and
noble.  Yes, I believe that ethics is an art, the art of crafting a person
of good character and of moral beauty.

The ancient Chinese believed that moral development is like the cutting and
polishing of a precious stone, and even today we say that the people we
admire are real “gems.”  Children should choose such people as models for
their lives, as they craft their growing moral selves from the raw
materials of their being.

            The Chinese philosopher Mencius switched from stones to plants
when he suggested that we all have virtue sprouts that must be carefully
nourished and tended.  If they are not, then the virtues shrivel up and
die, as many of them have done in our contemporary culture.

            Gandhi observed that although Socrates was not considered a
handsome man, “to my mind he was beautiful because all his life was
striving after truth.” Some have said that Gandhi was just as ugly as
Socrates, yet I believe that one friend was correct when he said that
“there was a rare spiritual beauty that shone in Gandhi’s face.”

Gandhi’s moral beauty came from the courage of being true to himself and
being true to others.  Moral beauty appears in lives that unites goodness
and truth. As Alexis Carrell once said: “Moral beauty is an exceptional and
very striking phenomenon. Much more than science, art and religion, moral
beauty is the basis of civilization.”

I believe that the external beauty of many celebrities may blind us to the
fact that they may be too vain glorious and self-conscious about the
attractive facades they have created.  True moral beauty is never showy and
ostentatious; if it is, it is false and only a semblance of virtue.

One can imagine even the most crippled and deformed presenting themselves
with elegance and dignity.  The literary examples of *Beauty and the Beast*
and *The Elephant Man* make this point dramatically.  The final line of the
former is “to judge by appearance is to miss the beauty of our inner
souls.”  In the ballet version the Beast’s movements become increasingly
elegant as he is accepted by Beauty.

Virtue ethics is emulative—using the sage or saint as a model for
virtue—whereas rule ethics is based on simple conformity and obedience.  I
believe that the emulative approach engages the imagination, personalizes,
and thoroughly grounds individual moral action and responsibility.

I believe that such an ethics naturally lends itself to an aesthetics of
virtue: the crafting of a good, true, and beautiful person, a unique
individual gem among other gems.

Nick Gier taught philosophy and religion at the University of Idaho for 31
years.


A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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