After I finished writing A Foundation for Living Ethically, I started to think about what I hadn’t said in that book. It was, after all, a book on ethics, not the whole of life. I had been trying to articulate what was important to an ethical point of view. But the question remained: what are the things that are important if we were looking at all of life? I was thinking about the assertion of the poet John Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
I can see that there is truth in beauty, and there is beauty in truth, but it doesn’t quite answer my concerns. If you wanted to name some fundamental categories of life, that were wide enough to embrace all that you thought was important, what would they be? Of course, morality would be one of them, but morality does not stretch to cover all that we think is important in life. I was thinking very broadly, although I was not interested in summoning up a multitude of things. I felt there had to be a short list that was broad enough.
Part of my interest in this question was because of family history. When you are exploring an ancestor, you have certain things in mind: what were the things in life that were important to them? So, that became my context. These categories, could I see them in relation to my ancestors’ lives? That would be a good test.
So, after a while, I came up with four categories – what is important in life? I called them “the four pillars”. They are: Competence + Morality + Beauty + Love.
The thinking was this: when we start out in life, we are on a progression towards competence. We learn how to look after ourselves, feed ourselves, dress ourselves and so on. We learn to read and write, and many other tasks, even sporting activities are part of our competence. Competence is basic to our self-esteem. When we grow up, we generally learn an occupation, a craft or profession, and that becomes a big part of our self-esteem as an adult. Many of my ancestors were artisans – carpenters, miners, stonemasons, painters, plasterers, dressmakers.
Morality is a fundamental part of life. There is no human community without it. Care for one’s family and neighbours, honesty, responsibility, fairness, are all aspects of morality. Among my ancestors I see many signs of their commitment to morality. Their lives seem to have been imbued with it.
Beauty is the third pillar. This is to say, it is not enough to be competent. There is also an urge to make things that are beautiful. Keats would approve. I see this also in the work that my ancestors did, that there seemed to be a quest for aesthetics in their work. And in our lives, we may see that it permeates everything, from the littlest things, like tidying objects on a table and putting them in order, to the biggest things.
And the fourth pillar is love. It is not necessarily romantic love, but it includes that. It is a broad appreciation of everything in life. Without love, there is no joy.
There are other aspects that I would call “outputs”, such as happiness and joy. My four pillars I would describe as “inputs”, the things you should focus on. Happiness may come, but so too will sorrow. Focusing on happiness does not guarantee happiness, and will likely interfere with it. Focusing on Competence, Morality, Beauty and Love will give you a full heart. Striving to be “happy” will then not matter so much.
[This post comes from my book, Long Time Approaching: An Incomplete Memoir. (to be released February 2023). It is from Chapter 87..]