in conformance to the other virtues, for instance, justice. Similarly, the courageous individual needs temperance so as to not overreach by being reckless. And the temperate person requires courage to resist the temptation of peer pressure. Hence the person of virtue needs to consolidate the various virtues into a unity, allowing each of the virtues to display their respective value. Prudence plays a role in each virtue and in turn depends on all of them to keep from being more than just a mean-driven excuse for risk avoidance. Armed with such a disposition, a person of prudence will reckon into a given circumstance the requirements of the various virtues in order to craft a well-arranged verdict about how to act.
Having merged the virtues of character into a concordant totality, could different virtues impose competing demands, pulling in different directions? For Aristotle, such dilemmas need not pose a threat to the excellent individual's virtue. When pressed to make a choice between distasteful alternatives, going with the least abhorrent one does not imperil your character, albeit you may experience a sense of remorsefulness for making the choice.
Raising Existential Thoughts
If you are consciously deciding that you wish to be a good person, are you thereby deciding the sorts of desires and emotions that you want to have? Based on the linkage of a good character to having the right kind of dispositions, it would seem that this would be the case. But on what basis should you decide what kinds of things you want to enjoy and desire in the first place? To be frank, if you take this route of inquiry, you are raising some deep existential questions for yourself. When I am getting to know my students at the beginning of a semester I ask them to write on a card what they want to do in their career, and what kind of lifestyle they want to have. “What are your objectives, both business and personal, and why,” I inquire. “Are you interested in just making money? Or is there something beyond that you are after? Do you want a career-driven lifestyle where work is everything, or a more balanced lifestyle where work matters but is not necessarily the end-all-and-be-all? Is there anything that might lead you to prefer the one lifestyle to the other?” Then I probe further with a string of almost mind-numbing questions: “Can you tell me what, deep down, you desire your desires to be?” “What do you actually want your inner wants to be?” “What do you prefer your preferences to be?” “What are you interested in being interested in, and why?”
These questions matter. Sometimes people reflect back on their careers with a profound sense of regret of the sort depicted in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illich. They question whether they have really lived a good life. It occurs to them that, given the chance to do it all over again, perhaps they could find a way to devote more of their time to family life, or to be less occupied with their own self and more concerned with others. A person who has attained great financial achievements yet has fallen short of living a genuinely good life may have gotten shortchanged by being devoted to the kinds of considerations parodied in Sinclair Lewis's Babbit 92—materialism, conformity, and false values—instead of being guided by reflection and contemplation.
There is something exceedingly difficult about confronting such questions. Yet when you consider that the culture of the firm where you work sometimes exerts an enormous influence on your character, the task of selecting where you are going to work includes selecting the kinds of desires that you are likely to be fostering. This kind of choice is almost like selecting your character in advance. A choice about the character of the company you want to work at, and the line of occupation you will pursue, figures into a choice about the character of the person you wish to become. It is, in the end, an existential choice of the sort we will discuss further in Chapter 2 (“Authenticity and Freedom”).
Opting to work at a particular company having a reputation for a virtuous culture might incline you to wish to become honorable and forthright as you imbibe that culture day in and day out. Making a decision in favor of some other firm, like the ruthless stock brokerage company portrayed in the movie Boiler Room, might lead you to prefer being cold-blooded and opulent. But how do you arrive at the knowledge beforehand of what sort of person you wish to become? Making a choice such as that is not what we would normally call a “rational” decision. (It is for this reason that we will look at the Sartrean account of character and the freedom of choice that lies at the heart of human existence in the next chapter.)
For Aristotle, being reared in a good community constitutes the chief means of becoming virtuous. What the community considers as important influences what is taken to be virtuous. From childhood, a person starts to understand what courage is all about by being shown that certain kinds of actions exemplify courage, while others exemplify cowardice. Then, over time, a person acquires a habit of behaving courageously.
Having a virtue requires using rationality and knowing what is important, being attuned to one's values. For instance, a person does not acquire the virtue of courage simply by going around mimicking courageous individuals. It is necessary for a courageous person to understand what she values. Only in this way can she be in a position to make a rational assessment of what degree of risk is called for to preserve what she deems important.
While ethics depends on rationality, it bears a greater resemblance to endeavors such as navigation93 and the arts,94 which are “less exactly worked out” than the sciences.95 We will see in a moment how closely ethics is affiliated with the field of music and its study.
The way that Aristotle conceives of ethics and the good life are closely related to the idea of harmony. Instead of just involving a string of unrelated occurrences, the good life carries with it an underlying unity or totality. Well-being involves having rational desires. That means your desires are in harmony with each other and also in harmony with your values. It also means that your actions are in harmony with your desires. What all of this amounts to is that you are happy when you are living in a state of psychic harmony. Basically having a good character boils down to keeping your soul in such a state, where everything in your soul is functioning the way it is meant to. Naturally we want to avoid being troubled with conflicting desires. That only leads to a state of continual dissatisfaction with life, which Aristotle associates with wicked persons. Such people “shun themselves,” because
they remember many a grievous deed, and anticipate others like them, when they are by themselves, but when they are with others they forget. And having nothing lovable in them, they have no feeling of love to themselves. Therefore also such men do not rejoice or grieve with themselves; for their soul is rent by faction, and one element in it by reason of its wickedness grieves when it abstains from certain acts, while the other part is pleased, and one draws them this way and the other that, as if they were pulling them in pieces.96
To most of us this is self-evident. According to Aristotle's perspective, declaring the lack of any right or wrong in ethics—as many who buy into today's pervasive moral relativism are inclined to do—is tantamount to claiming that happiness and unhappiness are indistinguishable, that living a satisfying existence is identical to living a wretched one. But such an assertion flies in the face of common sense.
Music, Culture, and Character
Philosophers throughout the ages have been intrigued by the question of the broader significance of music for human existence. According to Jamie James, to retrace the paths taken not only by Western music but also Western intellectual history reveals a concerted quest for the supreme orderliness of the cosmos.97 This idea of music manifesting a universal order is what Pythagoras claimed to be the music of the spheres: the apparent soundlessness across the firmament is eternally emitting a higher form of music that only the gods can hear. According to Liebniz, writing at the time of J. S. Bach, music represents a kind of unconscious calculation that produces, along with harmonic delight, an apprehension of the uppermost forms of truth. Schopenhauer believed music to herald an appearance of cosmic reality, which
