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Schooling of Desire

As Helen Keller eloquently stated, true happiness stems from our “fidelity,” our capacity to identify and invest ourselves in “a worthy purpose.” Our topic, virtue, has much to do with happiness because living virtuously is directly related to happiness, eudaimonia or human flourishing. Virtue, I would argue, is not a very compelling end in and of itself. While virtues such as self-mastery, courage, justice, and integrity present themselves as noble ideals, they must be understood, as Aristotle observed, within the context of a higher order desire to lead a happy life. Moreover, the most powerful education in virtue comes not from a lesson or an abstract ideal but from a life. We know from experience that conceptions of the good life vary greatly not only from one individual to another, but also from one stage of a person’s life to another. Since antiquity it has been commonplace for wise persons to observe that popular notions of the good life as devoted to the accumulation of wealth, honors and power, or as given over to the pursuit of pleasure, are misguided. Human beings are more likely to flourish if they attend to those internal characteristics that define who they are themselves, rather than focusing on life’s external trappings of success.