Maxim 631

"Men make virtues out of various acts thrown together by mere chance."

Let us consider some of the words La Rouchefoucauld uses here. The word "virtue" comes from the Latin for "manliness." So, to be virtuous is to be manly. And what does it mean to be "manly"? The various answers to that give us our various virtues. Next, to act means both to do something, and to pretend to do something. If one acts "in life," one is doing something, while if one acts "on the stage," one pretends that one is doing something. Further, plays are divided up into "acts," or parts that are small wholes that together make up a larger whole. The actions in the acts make up the action of the play, and the meaning of the play. But the playwright goes not throw his acts together by mere chance, but by plan. Do men live according to their plans? How many people have actually lived their lives fully according to a preformualted plan? You cannot plan for all the things that will happen to you – from your perspective, there is too much that will happen randomly, by mere chance. And how do we react to what happens to us by mere chance? It is easy to act virtuously in a world where each action is planned, where chance is removed. But the world is not one where chance is removed. And what do we do under those circumstances? Do we act virtuously, or do we look back on our actions, read them into a consistent narrative, see the acts placed together in their proper order, and read our actions as having been virtuous? When we are consistent with our interpretation of what it means to be manly, we make these out to be virtues, and ourselves to have been virtuous.

Incidentally, since virtue is manliness, is it any wonder that American feminists have associated acting like men with good action? Goethe associates virtue with manliness (consistent with the etymology), and aesthetics with womanliness, or the feminine. Thus, we can understand what Goethe means at the end of Faust when he writes "The eternal feminine draws us on high," in combination with issues of virtue in the poem. Ethics and aesthetics need to be brought together – the masculine and the feminine unified as yin and yang – bound together as they should be, in an attractive-repulsive bond.