VIRTUISM: PHILOSOPHY AND THE AESTHETICS OF VIRTUE
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Virtuism: Philosophy and the Aesthetics of Virtue is a philosophy book
that draws on aesthetics and ethics. Virtuism started in the mid-1980's
as an aesthetic theory. Like other art manifesto writers, like Andre
Breton with his Surrealist manifestoes and Tristan Tzara with his Dada
Manifestoes, the author was a young art theorist who was striving to do
something new in the art world. Since everything shocking and
scandalous seemingly had been done in the arts at that time, Virtuism
became about the aesthetics of human virtue, how virtuous acts produce
in us the same experience as great works of art. The author describes
in his book how witnessing or creating a virtuous act produces the
aesthetic experience. The book argues that the giving of the good
feeling of the aesthetic or "art" experience gives evidence that life
has a higher meaning, since in fact the aesthetic experience is so
pleasant.
One area the author discusses is how modern philosophy states that the
existence of a benevolent God can not be proven, but then modern
philosophers go on anyway to write books overshadowed with the premise
that there is no benevolent purpose to life on earth. Since the
opposite view could be also taken as true, since it is supposedly
equally unprovable, the book writes from the perspective of how to
pragmatically get life to act benevolent to us. The book discusses
other philosophical implications of this relationship such as the
dubious value of religious and sectarian exclusionism, and the fact
that much social science statistics seem to prove the value of the
virtues.
The author wanted to distance himself from the appearance of creating a
simplistic philosophy because of the post-modernist critiques of
narratives. Yet, philosophy and art are by necessity
"ism-manufacturing" disciplines. For mathematics to grow, it must
create new nouns and verbs, and philosophy and art must create new
movements to grow. A person creating their own "ism" to the untrained
mind is looked at dubiously. Yet, there are, every year, hundreds of
new "isms" and new schools of thought created by academics and artists
because of the ever present necessity for change and growth.
The book is divided into thirty-nine short chapters. Some chapters
tackle arguments against the idea of good and bad existing at all, an
idea which is sometimes argued in philosophy. Other chapters help the
reader see how leading a virtuous life can be connected to ideas of
beauty. One chapter is titled "Scrupulosity as a Way of Avoiding True
Virtue." Another is called, "A Virtuist Perspective on the
Philosophical Concept of Power."
The author was born and raised in New York and resettled to Seattle in
1982. He started self-publishing "Virtue Manifestoes" in 1984, and
distributed them via creating small magazines with the themes of the
manifestoes. In 1992, he started ParaMind Brainstorming Software, which
is a software product that uses the idea of "exhausting the
interactions of words" to develop new ideas related to the user's
typed-in sentence.
"Virtuism: Philosophy and the Aesthetics of Virtue," published by
Telical Books, can be purchased online at Amazon.com or by sending
$19.95 to Telical Books, P.O. Box 27401, Seattle, WA 98165-2401.
A note from the author:
"What Virtuism is all about is the aesthetics of human virtue, how
virtuous deeds produce in us the same experience as great works of art.
Witnessing or creating a virtuous act produces the aesthetic experience
-- a discovery in aesthetics that must be understood to proceed in true
aesthetic understanding. Emotive Virtuism has other philosophical
implications and is also about trying to understand the artist's role
in society, and how artists can both positively or negatively affect
culture."
"Virtuism started out as aesthetic theory and then moved into
reflections about other areas of philosophy. I did not purposefully
intend to create an "ism" and I have a somewhat post-modernist idea
about being wary of new narratives. But since people are starting to
use the word "virtuism" (found out by my doing a search on Google) with
no connection to my writings (much like the alteration of the word
"Surrealism" having nothing to do with Breton, the founder's,
writings), I figured I had better formalize it the way I originally
intended. because I have a certain idea about the philosophy of
Virtuism. This book is a result of that work."
Virtuism is the philosophy that stands against the various philosophies
today that state there is no such thing as good or evil, or no meaning
in the world. I don't look at this from a polyanna perspective of the
religionist: every sophisticated thinker in the last hundred years held
a similar view as I do (just look at the work of Sorokin). It is only
the half-intellectuals that come up with these wrong ideas."
"Negative philosophies and aesthetic theories are ones that
intrisically disempower any idea of virtue because virtue is the force
that has caused the evolution of society and even political theory. If
society and political theory is not evolving, the result is that the
democratizing force that has been growing for the last five hundred
years will slow down."
"The Virtuism philosophy has already been added in many academic
websites on philosophy."
What is Virtuism? Virtuism first started in the mid-1980's as an
aesthetic philosophy that also reflected on ethics and metaphysics. It
states that acts of virtue produce the aesthetic experience, and this
fact was one proof of the objective value of living a virtuous life.
The pleasant and beneficial nature of the aesthetic experience is one
proof Virtuism is lucky to have. Virtuism states that philosophy,
science, technology, and art must look at what is inherently virtuous
towards society, while they are discovering their theories. It is the
idea that philosophical truth is only complete if it incorporates into
its structure not only epistemological truth (the virtue of its
arguments) but truisms about the experiential relationship of human
reasoning and the lives of human beings themselves. Thus, a philosophy
of ethics is not necessarily whole in itself as an epistemological
study only, it must eventually look at what is needed in ethics by
human experience. The virtue of this need being filled is a truth in
itself.
There is so much criminality on earth not just against people, but the
way people treat animals, that we must see that virtue is the complete
other side of the story, that to be open to it, is to be open to a
completely different universe. We all hope to witness more of the
virtuous. We usually can never do "too much virtue" because the only
perspective we have is a world that has far too little virtue. Too
often this world calls the mundane and mandatory virtuous, so we can
only do what might be considered too much virtue -- and in this we
begin to do what is really virtuous.
The idea of gratitude coming back to oneself from others who one has
helped is a type of metaphysical system that is important in Virtuism.
Does a person want to live a life in which people are grateful that
they have lived, or one in which people have anger at that person for
the life that he or she has lived? In doing things that make others
grateful towards oneself, one creates a type of energy. One might argue
that these energies somehow come back to a person at one time or
another. If one believes that they come back to one in this life, to
create these gratitude-producing acts is a type of proving the validity
of a metaphysical system. One can do these virtuous acts to animals as
they are easy targets, but also to all people that we live around.
The question arises: can you only improve your life if you improve the
life of others? That is to say, are those who believe they are
improving their own lives always wrong when they are still causing
damage and undue stress to the lives of others? What is it to improve
one's life? It seems most of all it is in emotional health -- positive
emotions -- and physical health. Improving one's life is also having
access to the past, being able to be what one was in good seasons in
one's life, because often in life people can become less than what they
were at earlier ages.
Deep help, a great relief, equals a reward in itself, a reward to the
person who receives our help because we know we will receive a deep
gratitude from some of those who we have helped. Have we given this
level of gratitude in our mind to those who have helped us? Is the
acknowledgment that we have been helped a part of the cure for much of
human incompetence or evil?
The aesthetic experience of virtue may be of higher value or signify
higher cultivation then the aesthetic experience of art because it
involves understanding the rewards of living a good life, which is
testified to in all cultures. A life that has only the appreciation of
the aesthetics of art can sometimes result in a person who becomes
depressed, bitter or drug addicted.
Aspects of seeing the aesthetic value of virtue:
1) We develop better capacity to take care of ourselves. That which is
called "vice" always tears a person apart. Historically, vice means
things like drug addiction, drinking in excess, promiscuity, laziness,
and overindulgence in cheap entertainment. One can see how avoiding
these things can lead to obvious benefits. Not just tobacco but
over-consumption of alcohol and other drugs do serious damage to a
person's body.
2) We develop a world in which people are grateful we are alive, verses
one in which people are angry with us. Treating others with kindness
and having a forgiving attitude avoids both external and internal
stresses and free oneself to do more in life.
3) The virtue of applied non-attachment to the negative in life gives
one a freedom from those mental obsessions surrounding the negative
that do so much damage in life. This is not to say one avoids the
negative or one's responsibility.
It's not the purpose of this book to speculate on the idea of energy
fields, auras, or any of the other ideas that might state that our
positive deeds have a way of coming back to us. One can see the present
result of living a loving life compared to one which is filled with
slander, cheating, lying, or breaking other laws of the land. These
types of people often become caught in their lies and destroy
relationships. People get tired of overly negative and slanderous
people. Likewise, people who don't get caught up in petty gossip, who
don't give reports to others of slandering people live easier social
lives, as people easily become duplicitous and will report a slanderer
to the slandered . So, even without positing a metaphysical doctrine on
how our good deeds come back to us, something based on faith, one can
at least see the beginning of these rewards.
This is also seen in the regenerative effect on health in witnessing
the virtuous and appreciating it like a fine work of art. A life left
without thinking of virtue as a beautiful thing, a life that cannot
feel the beauty of a human experiencing the virtuous actions of another
human, is prone to the destruction and degeneration that so often
captures human life. For we become what we witness, we cannot truly
witness something if we cannot appreciate and understanding its various
aspects. We become what we hold in the mind by the very nature of the
fact that it is what we occupy ourselves with, and our mind is the
program of our experience of life.
A person becomes committed to virtue when he or she decides that
creating virtue in the world is the highest return he or she can make
on the investment of living. A person spends life no longer concerned
with the question of whether he or she is doing too much good. One no
longer feels as if one must make accounts of how people have treated
them, of whether one is too generous. One always knows the way out of
despair, out of a mundane life. A person really proves life, not by
belittling and crass attitudes of how we demand to be treated, but
proves life by seeing what happens when we pour out a force of creating
virtue in the world around us.
This is the perfect action for those who wish to live a life on the
edge of intelligence and creativity. The world is at its most frozen in
that which is against virtuous interaction between human beings. There
are literally hundreds of thousands of improvements that can be made in
this world. All of these take intelligence, creativity, bravery,
stamina and love. To the artist, even the most modern and innovative,
this is an aesthetic doctrine that never ends.
Humility keeps beauty alive, but it also keeps our possibility and the
future alive. As we value others, the earth, the way things can be and
often are, this value is reflected in us. As we hold the thought, the
container of the thought, ourselves, takes on that form of beauty and
value.
As we limit what other people are by certain stereotypes we limit what
we too can become because we limit possibility. Like the lack of value
we give to others, we hold this lack in our cognition, it becomes the
shape of our mind, and it limits our possibility and perceptions of the
future.
The future exists in the human perception in grades, in amounts. How we
limit the concepts of possibility in others, is how we limit ourselves
in our own life. The way we perceive our future existing is created in
ratio to the amount of possibility we allow others to have. Some people
can be said to have much of the future, some people can be said to have
little.
Virtuism works in the realm of trying to achieve regenerative emotional
states by perceiving the beauty of human virtuous action. Sometimes it
is the act of doing or witnessing kindness, but it can also come upon
reflection of the virtue inherent in creation. Living with the thought
of a benevolent God in the mind also can transform the person who holds
this quality in the mind. However, if there is a lack in the ability to
perceive value in others because of religious regulation, the
regenerative effects of virtue can be impeded.
The person who practices aesthetic virtue tries to make the world
artful in a way which will seek to keep this regenerative energy
flowing. The idea of Virtuism can be applied to the ideas of art. A
Virtuist act creates benefit and beauty in the world.
What holds a person back from seeing the beauty in virtue?
One thing that can stop a person from seeing the beauty in virtue is
having values in the mind that one holds as higher than virtue. When it
can be seen that these values do not serve any purpose in fulfilling
any unmet needs, the value in virtue can be affirmed. Achieving a state
of appreciating virtue becomes seen as a way of fulfilling the need of
regenerative thought.
The act that approaches the aesthetic in virtue is the act that gets in
where no virtue was -- seeing a disabled person not as their limitation
but as a normal person, or the feeling a person has if they have not
been touched or kissed for a long time becoming embraced for the first
time in a long time.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pearson, Robert Scott.
Virtuism : philosophy and the aesthetics of virtue / Pearson, R. S.
Type of Material: Text (Book, Microform, Electronic, LC Control Number:
2005930056 etc.)
1st edition.
Seattle, WA : Telical Books, 2005.
The author founded the ParaMind Brainstorming Software company in
Seattle in 1992, and has been running it since then. His web page for
this book is at: http://www.rspearson.com/virtuism.html
Copies of the ebook are sometimes on sale on eBay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4644228762
--
Robert Pearson
ParaMind Brainstorming Software http://www.paramind.net
Creative Virtue Press/Telical Books/Regenerative Music
http://www.rspearson.com/