Identity and Magnanimity

Here is a quotation by Josef Pieper from a book I've been reading called Living the Truth. Who are we and why are we here? Pieper weighs in:

"An attitude of willing readiness for an unlimited variety of challenges and tasks seems to correspond best to man’s intrinsic orientation toward the universe of all that is. This ethical attitude of openness, which readily acknowledges what is required in a given situation, was seen by Thomas Aquinas as one of the foundations for a truly human life, especially in his teachings on the virtue of prudence. For him prudence ranks as the first, the ‘mother,’ of the other cardinal virtues of justice, fortitude and temperance. This concept of prudence, of course, does not make it ideal behavior to remain uncommitted, ever neutral and ready to do anything, as it were. The realm of prudence is the realm of all that lies at man’s disposal, and indeed it does not include the ultimate ends of man’s life. ‘Not the final goals are we to determine, but only the ways leading there.’[1] Thus it is not the task of prudence to decide on life’s final goals and determine the basic aspirations of human nature. Rather, the virtue of prudence consists in finding, here and now, the right approach to attain those goals and aspirations. Prudence does not answer the question whether I ought to be just or not; instead it answers the question of how I can pursue justice here and now. Accepting the goal, having the right objective, acting with ‘good intention’—these are the preconditions, the preceding attitudes, of any prudent decision. Without that lasting determination to pursue what is right, going beyond the immediate situation, all efforts to find out what would be prudent and good here and now amount to nothing more than self-deception and empty busywork. Important here is that all inner determination, transcending specific circumstances, be indeed aimed at the true and highest goals of man’s life. These goals themselves should not require, again and again, our personal decision. It could happen, however, that someone ‘exempts’ from conscientious consideration even those points of prudence; that is, the domain of all those contingent things to be pondered and decided in each case and in view of each specific situation. This is a quite common accommodation on a factual and practical level, to fashion for oneself some sort of moral enclave to escape some of life’s particular demands. Not only that, but such an approach is found even on a theoretical level, justified and legitimated in certain systems and theories of ethics and education, say, through authoritarian prescription of ‘ideals,’ and ‘models’ or else through casuistical directives. But in no other manner are the noble purposes of life achieved and man’s ethical call fulfilled than by struggling, in each specific case, for the appropriate answer to a reality whose ultimate extent we cannot measure once and for all and whose inner nature is marked by unlimited, changing diversity. Plato, in his ninth letter, says, ‘One part of out life belongs to our country, another to our parents, another to others we love. The largest portion, however, is dedicated to all those moments, coming to us quite accidentally, when we are challenged to accomplish something good.’

The spirit-based self, ordered as it is toward the whole of reality, is in its very essence called to face with an attitude of receptive, unbiased openness this universality of its world, revealed in countless concrete experiences. Only in this way, indeed, can man realize his own destiny, a destiny, not of his own invention, a destiny, moreover, whose final features he may not even behold beforehand. Nobody is able to anticipate his personal destiny and set it up as his ‘ideal’: man is positioned too much in the midst of a world that constantly deals out surprises beyond all presumed knowledge; man is living too much face to face with the absolute of it all, so that his own inner boundlessness constitutes but the counterpart to an unfathomable world.

Yet this world itself, according to its inner nature, is beholden to the creative word spoken in God’s knowing mind, and there, by God’s ‘artistry’, its primordial ideas have and are life. For the world of all existing things ‘is placed between two knowing minds,’ the mind of God and the mind of man. And precisely from there, as classical Western metaphysics have always known, springs the truth of all things.”
--Josef Pieper, Living the Truth, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 96-98.
[1] ST, II.1.14.2