Finding Traction
Faith makes blessed—
Virtue
bestows happiness and a kind of bliss
only on those
who have not lost
their faith in their virtue—
not on those subtler souls
whose virtue consists
in a profound mistrust of themselves
and of all virtue.
Ultimately, then, “faith makes blessed” here, too,
and not–mark it well–
virtue.
–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 214 by Friedrich Nietzsche
The virtuous person is the happiest of all.
In the philosophical world much has been made of virtue. The Greeks were captivated by the ideal of moderation, the golden mean. Aristotle writing his Nicomachean Ethics takes great pains to describe the parameters of virtue, an extended meditation upon the nature of virtue, and its cultivation.
Nietzsche characteristically takes a critical view, suggesting that it is the belief-in-virtue which matters most. Belief is an unquestioned framework, that assumption which qualifies, holds-in-place, arranges the object(s) of our attention. We become satisfied, discover blessedness, when we find what we were looking for…
Nietzsche’s assertion is hard to deny. Inevitably we bring our expectation(s) to the table do we not? How does one initiate a course of inquiry without a hypothesis, that hunch which guides our adventure of discovery? A belief/faith, which is strong enough to bear the weight of inquiry…
After all, one has to find traction in order to move forward…
