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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Our Progress Towards Virtue

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This chapter is about how we can improve our rational abilities, i.e. make progress towards virtue. I first show that, according to Chrysippus, the natural properties of children are usually corrupted in three ways when they grow up and that adults therefore can make progress only by solving their inner conflicts, becoming more steadfast in their practical reasoning, and improving their self-understanding. So I argue that the main remedy against corruption is to study philosophy. I detail how we can acquire a better self-understanding by studying physics and how we can cure the mind of its inconsistencies by studying logic. I also argue that ethics prepares the mind for an active life in which we can set a goal that is not in conflict with virtue and take the right sort of steps to realize it. I then show that, if we manage to improve our rational abilities, we come to master a degree of the art of living. A wise person masters the art of living to a perfect degree, and she is much like a child, I argue, in that she is so well-adjusted to the world around her that she is always representing things as they are and never frustrated in her impulses.