Book II, Chapter I, is where Aristotle and this newbie thinker part company. Who are we as humans? What is significant or unique about you and me, as humans? Aristotle is virtue signaling but some of us blew that out of the water a lifetime ago.
“The Virtues
then come to be in us neither by nature, nor in spite of nature, but we are
furnished by nature with a capacity for receiving them and are perfected in
them through custom.”
Virtues for the few is secondary but Aristotle puts them up on the front pew. No wonder the purveyors of Christian
Church tradition and its easy doctrinal believism made the thinking of Aristotle
their bread and butter. Spirituality and the pursuit of virtue is about being good
little boys and girls, so they say. Aristotle called it “custom”.
O. K., if
virtue is secondary, what is primary? Are you not asking that question? Instead
of Virtue, what other desire could we plug into the above quote? What other
desire is primary and universal among we humans? Maybe, the personal, one by
one, search for God reality is primary. Some have called the search, the
problem of God. A problem it is because the search desire “is in us neither by
nature, nor in spite of nature, but we are furnished by nature with the
capacity for receiving” messages from the spirit world.
The best and
possibly only way of thinking about this is the natural reality of imprinting. Why
does the salmon return to their natural spawning pools? Does the Salmon have a “homing organ”? What
about the homing pigeon? Can anyone, including the A.I. gurus, explain how the
homing pigeon navigates? The homing capacity just is. We humans have a home in
God land, who knows, wherever that may be.
G. Goslaw
Landers, ca.
