My Response (finally! Sorry it's so late! Google hates me.): Virtue and the Desire for Greatness

Virtue and the Desire for Greatness

Of all of the readings for this week’s seminar, Alistar MacIntyre inspired me the most. On one level, this reading allowed me to explore some pressing questions I have been struggling with (especially in the wake of SSHRC and General Awards applications) such as: does the desire for external rewards corrupt virtue? MacIntyre seems to suggest that there is a tension, but not a contradiction, between external rewards and virtuous living. And although I think I understand what he’s getting at, I am not fully convinced. My personal reflection on MacIntyre’s “The Nature of the Virtues” lead me back to a novel that I return to every now and again: Carol Shields’s Unless. In this novel, Shields seems to suggest that there is a radical (and perhaps irreconcilable?) tension between GOODNESS and GREATNESS. Here, Shields sets up and examines two models of ‘the good life,’ where on the one hand greatness is the goal for the good life in a Homeric, heroic, and extrinsically rewarded tradition (which includes rewards such as fame, money, power, and respect), and on the other hand, through Norah (whose name perhaps recalls the protagonist of A Dolls House[?]), Shields gestures towards an alternative understanding of ‘the good life’ where goodness (and not greatness) is the goal. Goodness, according to the narrator, “is respect that has been rarified and taken to a higher level. It has emptied itself of vengeance, which has no voice at all. I’m afraid I don’t put that very clearly. I’m still sorting out the details” (310). And that is also where I seem to stand. I’m still sorting out the details. This novel always moves me to tears, but I am unable to go beyond this catharsis, or translate these feelings into a way of being in the world. Perhaps this is because if we take goodness, if we take virtues seriously, we will be unable to function within the confines of an institution such as a university. Perhaps Norah’s virtues make the world uncanny, and if we, like Norah, “had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

************************************************************************

I enjoyed re-reading Eliot’s essay, especially after studying poetry with Derek Walcott, since Walcott so clearly admires and confirms many of Eliot’s ideas. One question that occurred to me in response to Eliot’s essay is: where does form fit into a discussion of tradition and the individual talent? Eliot makes much of the influence of dead poets, and emphasizes the duty of a poet to know his or her history, but I wonder if an examination of a particular form’s tradition might help us “divert interest from the poet(s) to the poetry” while also taking into account the rigor and the intensity of the artistic process. Walcott continually reminded our class that the interest is on the discipline of poetry, and he made the radical assertion that “there is no such thing as a free poem.” He claims (along with many critics and poets before him) that art is not equal; it’s hierarchical. All of these comments at first struck me as dreadfully old-fashioned. But over the course of the class I began to wonder if in fact the 20^th century lost something quite valuable when it gave up on form, and became less interested in discerning excellence. Which brings me back to MacIntyre and his discussion of practice and excellence…