by Lioba » October 25th, 2007, 10:07 pm
@ Ben: When I´m finished! There is a difference between understanding a text and understanding its meaning for your live.
But I will share my thougts with you as soon as I have more time. The next two weeks are horribly stuffed.
A few thougts right now. I begin-just begin- to understand, why prudence has such a predominant position. It is a virtue in itself, but it also makes you able to live the other virtues properly.
Righteousness-before I <met> Pieper and now Aristotle , I didn´t reflect the ideas of righteousness specially.
For me the idea had so much to do with law and order, self-righteousness, non-forgiving, punishment. So I didn´t see anything that could improve my relation to others. Well, I was totally wrong!
Trying to act righteous against the other person really destroys all self-righteousness. Here a thought of Pieper becomes very important to me . He emphasises the term the other(person). It is hard to express it in english, but the other as a person, that I see as specially different from me, strange, not connected to me through anything .
I´m a person that tends to go by sympathy. Feelings have great influence of my judgimg and treating others- and that is not righteous.
I excused myself with being emotional and a woman. But as virtues are not made only for matter- of-the fact, uemotional males, my excuses are not really good.
Generally, my ideas about virtues changed through reading Aristotle and Pieper. Before I read them, Ihad the idea, that being virtuous is a kind of state-of-mind and virtuous people are a bit prim and overbearing and not from this world.
I was astonished, that the virtues have the focus so much on acting in this world, that you can not become virtuous by running away from this world but only by living in it.
Now, these are a few thoughts, still much on the surface, maybe I´ll be deeper in it in a while.
Cheers, Lioba