"Humility is a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is hard to discern. Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom it positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self. [....] The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing can see other things as they are. He sees the pointlessness of virtue and its unique value and the endless extent of its demand. Simone Weil tells us that the exposure of the soul to God condemns the selfish part of it not to suffering but to death. The humble man perceives the distance between suffering and death. And although he is not by definition the good man perhaps he is the kind of man most likely of all to become good."---Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970): 103.
"Gandhi was concerned to find a common basis for a common quest in the company of atheists and agnostics as well as theists. He said to a friendly atheist: 'Truth means existence; the existence of what we know and of that we do not know. The sum total of all existence is absolute truth or the Truth.... The concepts of truth may differ. But all admit and respect truth. That truth I call God....' This notion of truth as an objective, impersonal reality is historically prior to the atomistic, epistemological and scientific view of truth. [....] To Gandhi, as for the Stoics, who identified God with the Logos of Eternal Reason, and for mystics like St. Augustine, Plotinus and Synesius, Truth in its most transcendental sense is identical with God or the Divine Reality and is a proper object of worship and total devotion. Gandhi's ultimate justification for the preservation of this transcendental notion of ultimate Truth was not intellectual but practical, and the same is true of his deification of Truth and even of his faith in God. 'A mere mechanical adherence to truth and non-violence is likely to break down at the critical moment. Hence I have said that Truth is God.' We cannot do without absolutes, felt Gandhi, and what better absolute can we afford than that of Truth?"---Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (2nd ed., 1983): 156.
"I have proposed that 'good' is defined by direct reference. If so, it is plausible that 'good life' is defined by direct reference as well. It is a life like that, which is to say that we know it when we see it. [....] If we define the good life as a life like that, we do not do it independently of referring to persons whose lives we want to imitate. We imitate persons we regard as exemplars, and we imitate lives we regard as exemplary, and these are not independent activities. [....] So what is a flourishing life? I propose that it is determined by what the exemplars say it is. [....] The exemplars make the determination of good lives in hard cases. If 'good life' is defined by direct reference independently of 'good person,' then the life of a good person can come apart from a good life. However, if I am right, that is not the way these concepts work. The lives we want to imitate* are the live of persons we want to imitate."---Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory (2004): 115-116.
*With Iris Murdoch, we might clarify the meaning of "imitation" or this modeling of virtue which is not, strictly speaking, used in the sense of "copying" the exemplar: "Both Plato and Kant use an image of referring to an ideal or original pattern, not as imitation of either the model itself or of some chosen instantiation (example) of it, but as an inspired interpretation into the realm of practical life of a deep and certain moral insight. The notion of copying the model itself would be a 'category mistake,' since the model is not a particular thing, like a particular command or picture; imitatio Christi does not work simply by suggesting that everyone should give away his money, or wondering how Christ would vote."
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