Is Being Good Like Playing the Piano? #036

Your Daily Happiness Gym -- Today: Virtue as a skill

Welcome again to Every Dawn, where we have our happiness gym—one happiness exercise for every day—following classic philosophy and trying to apply the theories of philosophy to our everyday life in order to live happier and more satisfying lives.

We have been talking about Aristotle. If you missed the previous few videos, perhaps you want to go back and watch them. Aristotle is a very hands-on philosopher, very practical, and he has this concept of virtues—how we need to act in morally good ways in order to become happy.

One important part of his philosophy is to say that whether we are virtuous or not is not something that is part of our genes, that we are born with, but it is something that we can practice. Virtues are something that we practice, and as we practice piano playing or we practice handwriting, we become better and better at it over time.

Aristotle thinks that when we are born, we are born into a stage in which we do have the ability to be virtuous, but as children, for example, we don't know how much is the right amount of virtue. Sometimes we look at our own advantage more than we look at our virtues because we don't yet understand how these things work.

Children are essentially egoists; they take what they want. When there is a plate with cakes, they will grab for the one that is more attractive to them without thinking of the other children. This is Aristotle's idea of how this works.

Then we develop into this intermediate stage in which we are tempted to do something egoistic, to do something that benefits only us, but slowly we develop the ability to resist the temptation and to do the right thing instead. So I will have this plate of cakes, and I want this one cake that looks very attractive, but I realize there are other people around who perhaps also want this, and so I hold myself back and give the others an opportunity to get this piece of cake.

This intermediate stage is not yet the best stage — because, what is the best stage? What is the truly wise person doing? According to Aristotle, he's the one who has practiced his virtue so much that at this point in time, it comes to him totally automatically. He does not need to think at all. So this plate comes to me with cakes, and immediately I ask my neighbor if he wants a piece of cake, and when everybody else has taken a piece of cake, then I take mine, and this happens automatically; I'm not even thinking about it.

For Aristotle, this is a skill, just like let's say piano playing. Many people know how to play the piano, even if you don't. I also don't know really how to play the piano, but we know, you know, there are some keys there which I press with my fingers and make notes and a musical notation, right, with these five lines and you have this little dot signifying where the notes go.

There's a skill involved when I play the piano. As a beginner, I have to look at the notes and then I have to understand where these dots are located on these lines and I have to translate this into a position of my fingers on the keyboard so that I can press the right buttons, the right keys on the piano to produce the right notes.

In the beginning, I don't have the skill at all, right? And then I learn the piano. So now, I learn how these dots on the paper correspond to the keys, and now I can see the dots and I can translate it in my brain into a movement of the fingers. This is better. Now I am a novice piano player. I know how to do that, but I'm not doing it very well. I can still sometimes press the wrong key, or I can be confused. I can have maybe to stop in order to find the right key to press, and I have to think about it for a moment.

And if the musical notation becomes very complicated, let's say I have right hand and left hand, and each one has multiple notes to press at a high speed, then it can become very difficult to me, and I can only play it very slowly, or I play it wrongly many times until I finally manage to play it correctly.

So this is how it works with ethics for Aristotle—it's the same thing. We know what is the right thing to do, but it's only theoretical, and in reality, we struggle to do it. This is the stage of the novice, and now this improves with time, with exercise, by keeping on, by doing it, by playing the piano again and again.

Slowly this piano player learns to be better at it. She learns to play faster, to make fewer mistakes, to find the correspondence between the score and the actual finger on the piano faster and more reliably, and in the end, you know when he's a really good piano player, this has become automatic.

So now he does not need to think, and perhaps you have the same experience with a computer keyboard, or a typewriter if you're older, is a good example of this, because I can type with ten fingers pretty well. All my life I've been typing. I've written books. I'm typing all day, emails, so I'm very good at typing with my ten fingers, very fast, as fast as I can think, almost.

But if you ask me right now where is a particular key, or how are the keys arranged on a computer keyboard, and you ask me to tell you row by row how they are arranged, I could not do it right. You cannot do it because I have not learned it in this way. It's not that I have learned this correspondence, and now I'm translating into my brain and pressing the keys when I want to write something. Something else happens; my body has taken over. My body knows, but I don't know consciously. My brain does not know, so this is important, right, for Aristotle because this is also how our morality works.

If I am an experienced moral agent, then I'm acting right not as the result of a process of thought but as a spontaneous action because I'm just unable to act wrongly. I am, you know, when I want to type something, I'm unable to type it wrongly. Of course, I type it right because my fingers know where the right keys are. An expert piano player in a concert will not play wrongly. I mean, perhaps at some point his finger can slip, but in principle, he knows where things are, and he is going to play this thing correctly. He's not going to make mistakes because of the long practice.

And the same is true of morality. The long practice makes it possible for you to act right every time without having to think about it. It becomes automatic. It becomes part of your character, and then you are a good person, right? You're not somebody who once does something good; you are a good person.

And this now is important, and then we end because this distinguishes the person who is one time good from the person who is good as a habit. If you have a young guy who wants to impress his girlfriend, and they're walking on the street, and the young guy sees a beggar and he gives him, you know, $10 to be generous to impress the girlfriend, but he wouldn't have done it otherwise, Aristotle wouldn't say that this is a good person. This is a mediocre person, perhaps a bad person, we don't know, you know, some kind of medium person, and he just does this one time. This is not part of his character.

While if somebody goes down the street and no matter who is with him, no matter what happens, he sees a person who needs help and he helps automatically, out of habit, this is a good person because this person has internalized these good properties. They have become a habit. It has become a part of this person's personality, and this is for Aristotle the important thing.

So when we apply this to our own life, you know, when I think about myself, I always ask myself which properties of my character, of the good properties that I want to have, are actually so internalized that they're automatic, that I don't have to think about them, because if I catch myself thinking about what is the morally right action, then according to Aristotle, I know already that I'm not yet a perfectly good person. I still have to think. I am like a piano player who still has to think where the fingers go.

If I was a morally good agent, a perfect agent, I wouldn't have to think. It would come to me automatically, and so when you look at yourself again, write me in the comments if you like. If you have this experience, you don't need to say anything negative about yourself, just tell me about your success, perhaps in applying this.

When you look at yourself, you can see that sometimes you have to force yourself to think how to act in a particular situation, and perhaps you want to shout at someone who annoys you, but then you think about it, and you instead react in a kind way, but you have had to first fight for this outcome. Then you know that this is not yet the optimal stage. It is good. It is better than being rude to them, and it's better to be kind to them, of course, but it's not yet fully integrated into your personality.

So only when this happens, then you are a fully developed moral agent, then you are a fully good person, and then according to Aristotle, you are on the way to happiness.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.