I. What it means to me to be a good person:
a) To be a good person is to act in accordance with what you most value within yourself.
b) What I most value within myself is that capacity that allows me to do what cannot literally be done: to put myself in the place of another person and to create something out of nothing. That capacity is my imagination. It is through the imagination that there is something it is like to be another person, and it is through the imagination that there is something beautiful when there need not be anything at all. If I come to end of my life and know that I have lived my life in as full a consciousness of the lives of others as possible and that I have created something of beauty, it will have been a good life.
c) What you most value within yourself may be very different. It may also be that what you most value is something outside of yourself, e.g. God, Truth, etc. I would argue that you love God or Truth because of the image of God or Truth that exists within you. In any case, whatever it is that you do most value will determine what it means to you to be a good person. What the value is or whether the value comes from within or without is not critical to my argument.
2. What it means to Aristotle to be a good person:
a) For Aristotle, to be a good person means to act in accordance with man’s defining virtue, his rational capacity. The rational capacity, however, has two actions, practical reasoning and contemplation, and so there are two ways in which a man can be said to be good: one by the action of his practical reason to make the right choice among alternatives, to achieve what Aristotle calls the mean, and the other by the activity of the mind itself to achieve philosophical understanding. The happiest life would be that of a man like Socrates, who exhibits throughout his life the highest excellence of both activities of our rational capacity.
b) For Aristotle, what you should value most within yourself is your rational capacity.
III. How Aristotle was helpful in thinking out what it means to be a good person:
a) Aristotle was helpful in thinking out my own idea of what it is to be a good person. I essentially substituted the imagination for Aristotle’s rational capacity. As Aristotle finds two different actions of the rational capacity, one moral and one purely philosophical, I also found two different actions of the imagination, one moral, compassion, and one purely imaginative, the creation of something beautiful.
b) It may be that what we value most within ourselves will characteristically have a dual aspect: one that relates to others and one that relates only to the activity itself.
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