Potential as the key to ethical understanding

Potential as the Key to Ethical Understanding

While each of us is a work-in-progress, we are not blank slates. Some empiricist philosophers described the mind as tabula rasa, or blank slate. This makes a poor metaphor because reality does not write ideas on passive minds. Rather, we actively develop ideas as we interact with our environment. For example, the fifteen-month-old toddler approaching a step down may create the idea that she is less likely to fall if she turns backward and crawls down. The complex idea of turning around and crawling was not written on her mind by experience; she had to conceive the idea to prevent the unpleasant experience from ever happening. The same dynamic takes place in the most sophisticated adult thinking in science, business, health-care, education, or anything else. The potentiality of our mind does not imply blankness and passivity but rather a specific power. "Potential" stems from the Latin word for power, potentia. The Greek word used by Aristotle, dynamis, provides such English words as dynamo and dynamite. We can learn to make better decisions on what we make of our lives, by looking at our capabilities, our potential.

What can we know about the potential of each human person and specifically the person that we call our “self?” The answer to this question requires that we find out what we can know about human beings in general, and the more difficult question of what we can each know about our particular selves.  Each of us is unique, but the following beliefs about the human nature have developed over time and express general truths.  

            Human nature includes those characteristics that we share with all animals. Ancient and medieval philosophers defined us as rational animals. While the notion of what this means has changed over time, the reality of our animal nature has certain constancies, especially our mortality. Because we are going to die, our life is precarious and limited. Awareness of vulnerability can awaken us to the obligation to treat ourselves and all others with the utmost respect. Our time and our life are precious. We can learn to see that time quickly slips away and that missed opportunities constitute moral problems. In dealing with other people, we would treat them with greater care if we thought they were going to die.  In fact, they are going to die. This awareness increases our moral burden but also releases our moral energy.

            Awareness of personal mortality underlies the human need for loyalty. Those who live for their own individual pleasure or power inevitably meet defeat as death takes away their perceived goods. In contrast to the individualists whose insatiable desire for pleasure or power meets frustration, Royce depicts the meaning of mortality for the loyal:

They, too, are indeed subject to fortune; their loyalty, also, is an insatiable passion to serve their cause; they also know what it is to meet with tasks that are too vast for mortals to accomplish. Only their very loyalty, since it is a willing surrender of the self to the cause, is no hopeless warfare with this fate but is a joyous acceptance in advance of the inevitable destiny of every individual human being.

The person who lives loyally for a cause can live and die in the hope that the cause endures.

            In addition to mortality, our animal nature requires that we obtain food and other necessities, that we watch out for our health and safety and that of our neighbor, and that we reproduce sexually and take care of our young. In later posts I will look at each of these human needs with suggestion how they may be met in a way that nourishing the good.

            While we humans have much in common with other animals, reason is our defining characteristic. The classical definition of humans as rational animals does not depict us as mere animals but rather emphasizes the qualification of rational animal. Writers and teachers often make reference to reason without stopping to say what it is. Reason may be something so familiar to us that it needs no introduction. But since the term is so often used and misused, readers have the right to know what each writer means by reason. Reason consists of the ability to form concepts so that we can be aware of things that are not present to our senses. It goes beyond memory and imagination in that we are not limited to pictures of things, but may also form logical and mathematical connections by which we unite things into greater and greater generalizations. Our rationality provides us with a desire to learn and to find or create meaning in our world. We need to find a way to connect the rich variety of experiences into a whole, or at least into a manageable number of parts. Without such connections or meanings, experience would overwhelm us. In the words of William James it would be a “big, buzzing, blooming, confusion.”

            Royce defines reason as “...the power to see widely, and steadily, and connectedly.” He illustrates the meaning of reason by showing the distinction between a reasonable and an unreasonable person. In ordinary language, when we consider a person to be unreasonable we usually mean that the person sees only one side of an issue or one aspect of a problem. Or if the unreasonable person sees several things, he does not see the connections between them or does not think consistently. Such a person might have one set of standards for him or herself and another set for everyone else. The reasonable man or woman sees as many sides of an issue as possible and sees them as a whole and how they develop over time. By rationally connecting our experiences, we can form ideas about how to live our lives personally and in cooperation with other people. Reason gives us the desire and the ability to deliberately seek goals and to find ways to live with others justly and beneficially.

            Our nature as rational animals connotes mortality and rationality. But other qualities that spring from our nature endow us with a sense of community, freedom, creativity, and the potential to be something more. First, we can depict ourselves and our neighbors as social animals. Like many animals we like to live together. But our rationality expands our sociality beyond our immediate tribe. We belong to many interlocking communities ultimately including the human race and, in fact, the whole biosphere. We depend on these communities and they depend on us. This awareness provides us with moral guidance on how we play our many roles to the benefit of ourselves and our community.

            The next post will explore the human potential to be free and creative, and the ethical implication of these potentials.