Pride

I had been planning to read and write about MacIntyre's "After Virtue" but have instead ended up reading another Taylor book which I have found to be very worthwhile. The book is "Restoring Pride" and is concerned primarily with discussing the concept of pride.

According to Taylor, pride is the justified love of one's self (as opposed to conceit or vanity which are both instances of unjustified self-love). However, though all people love themselves, not all are able to be proud because not all are justified in doing so. From this point most of the discussion focuses on answering the question of what serves to justify self-love. The answer, for Taylor, is not what a person has or does but what a person is. What matters is that a person is a good person and that it is only by being a good person that one can be proud.

By good person, however, Taylor does not mean 'good' as it is typically used today but rather he is employing the ancient conception of goodness where its meaning can be understood as superiority or excellence (this greatly opposed to the modern conception of a good person which more or less means a benevolent person). For Taylor, a person is good who has cultivated his talents to the point where, with respect to these talents (or virtues, or skills, or gifts, etc.), this person is literally superior to other people. What is important here is that the things that are essential to one's goodness, so construed, are all things internal to one's self. It is not riches, positions of power or immense fame that make a person good and thus have nothing to do with a person's goodness. Because goodness consists in superiority (or excellence) it means that its possessor is able to do certain things better than others and thereby create this better method of doing things or this better final product. A superior artist creates paintings that in ways and of a quality that lesser artists could not. Similarly, a superior athlete creates his own way of playing that can not be matched by the average player. Thus, for Taylor, superiority, and thus goodness, consist in a person's creative power; their ability to add something to the world that, but for them, would have never existed. It is one who has this sort of creative power and who cultivates and uses it can be proud.

What I would like to emphasize, and what I found to be the most important part of this book, is that what matters on this conception is what you are. The things you may have such as power, wealth and fame can be had by anyone and are thus no reflection of your goodness or superiority. On the other hand, your creative powers, the cultivation of which having been your life's toil, are no doubt uniquely yours and are expressed in ways that are yours alone. It is clearly here where your superiority or goodness can be found. Taylor discusses this concept in greater detail as well as how it can affect your relations with other people, but what I think is very important is the distinction between the significance of what you are and what you have. I think that this is important because I think that these ideas can be used to formulate an answer to the Gyges ring problem. This is something that I would like to discuss in the meeting, but the essence of it is this: what Gyges is focusing on the wrong thing. If he truly understood what mattered in life he would not act as he does. His actions show that he values externals over that which he truly is and is thus sacrificing the greater good for the lesser one.