Aristotle says in part 2: "In this way, then, every knowledgeable person avoids excess and deficiency"
Now, this made me really curious. My first reaction was to believe he meant wise men avoid excess of any kind. Which sounds alot like the idea of christian virtue to me, and made me wonder if such christian values were based on this same idea of avoiding extremes.
However, then the thought occured about excessive goodness. Isn't alot of good a good thing? For example, chariity. Helping the more people, 'the merrier' as they say. But then I considered a negative to this. What if you give so much that you are in neeed of your own charity? Then an excessive good has become an evil. This thought caused great surprise, and made me consider if perhaps an excessive evil could become a good, if an excessive good can become an evil. Thus far, I have found that good leads to evil, and evil leads to more evil.
This realization was not the most uplifting of discoveries, and made me really reconsider optimism and cynicism.
I am fairly certain my conclusion that evil is the end result of all actions is accurate. With notable exceptions I suppose, but even then, those probably lead to pride which then leads to worse things, and thus also evil.
Thus, evil is the end of all things. Even good things in excess lead to evil.
Sexuality would be another great and obvious example of this fact. Sex si a beautiful thing when respected, when not: leads to pediphilia and all sorts of other perversions.
I don't know if there is anything we can do to avoid the evil. Perhaps, as aristotle suggests, habit of virtue would help, but judging by looking at society, I wouldn't get my hopes up.
The Thinking Skull
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3 comments:
Is excessive kindness inherently evil if there isn't another evil individual there to take advantage of it?
I understand you point when you state that too much charity will lead to you being unable to support yourself but I do not believe that good necessarily leads to evil. Good needs to be balanced with other good such as temperance, self-respect, responsibility, and reason. If you combine all of thease I believe there is no quantity of good that will produce evil.
See the Ethics, second book, sixth chapter, line 17. Certain things are always wrong; conversely, certain things are always righteous.
The goodness of an action can be identified in multiple ways. In one, the physical situation is evaluated, as in almsgiving the amount of money determines the goodness of an action. A more proper method of evaluating actions is using the criteria of the soul. Thus it is that Christ teaches that the donation of the last two pennies of the old woman is more charitable than a rich man's large donation.
Using this distinction, we can see that the amount of money, or the specific physical situation, can be in excess, but the actual charity can never be in excess. When one is giving so much so as to neglect their own well-being, one is not being charitable.
Goodness begets more goodness. Granted, good deeds may be accompanied by good feelings about oneself; however, this is rarely pride. Consider the greatest saints who took the greatest joy and pride in their good works and yet were the consummate exemplars of humility.
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