Stories and analogy help us learn the complexities required to develop excellence and virtue. From the ancient tales recorded by Homer to the Bhagavad Gita to contemporary biographies of outstanding individuals, we vicariously experience how others have managed adversity and learned to flourish. These teaching tales often speak to us at the deepest level and profoundly shape how we see ourselves and the world.
Exemplars reveal to us how others throughout the ages have dealt with the challenges of living life with excellence. Through an appreciation of the challenges others have overcome, we can contextualize our struggles within the broader existential human condition. By sharing their life stories and wisdom, exemplars demonstrate the full potential of self-actualization. Exemplars are inspirational, calling us to aspire to our highest values and to attain our greatest goals. They teach us how to live our life in a way that expands our moral and emotional limits, in order to flourish.
The choices we make in life ought to reflect our deepest values and our better-self. Our better-self embodies our ideal character and virtue. However, aspiring to be our better-self is not fueled by an external moral focus of guilt and shame; but, comes from a connection to our inner sense of striving to Areté, excellence. Striving to manifest our deepest values will result in satisfaction of our profoundest longings and needs. Our character and values help us act in the world with purpose.
Sustained purposeful action in the world based on values and principles requires that those values and principles be integrated with our nature and character. This character-based virtue evokes in us moral action because we feel personally compelled rather than from feelings of guilt, duty, or moral obligation. From a perspective of virtue, moral action does not arise from rational moral judgment in and of itself; rather, morality is the result of desires and motivations intrinsic to the individual. The way we express these desires is an expression of our character, or our virtue.
Character traits generally considered virtues include: generosity, sympathy, patience, fortitude, kindness, compassion, gentleness, tact, discretion, candor, responsiveness, reverence, as well as benevolence and dutifulness. However, identifying virtuous character traits does not provide specific guidance as to what those traits look like in our personal daily life. We can acquire the needed personal guidance analogically through vicarious observation of paradigmatically virtuous characters. For example, we could get guidance on how to act by looking at the lives of Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. However, the development of virtue is challenging even with the aid of such paradigmatic, morally-virtuous exemplars. Acting like Jesus or Gandhi in pursuit of developing virtue may not be of much practical assistance.
The difficulty in using character-based virtue as moral guidance stems in great measure from the lack of specific guidance for both acquiring virtue as well as helping us understand what constitutes virtuous action. Without characters to emulate, we would be prone to acting with a subjective sense of virtue that might nonetheless be injurious to the self or others. For example, one might act in grossly inappropriate ways, all the while feeling benevolent.
Culture is one method for helping us appreciate how to act in certain situations. Throughout the ages, societies have used storytelling to inculcate virtuous character into its members. Stories based on the life of individuals in our society who have found ways to live virtuously, model for us specific guidance without the force of a rigid rule-based moral system. Each of us would be able to evaluate our own situational choices against those of such role models. These real life individuals provide virtuous examples that provide enough guidance to help us recognize and act from our personal virtues. Through the inspiration and subsequent emulation of these individuals, we can build-up a pattern of action that reflects our better-self, our deeper nature, and flourish.
The task is not to copy others, rather we must acknowledge that some of the wisdom we need in order to flourish can neither be actually lived nor directly learned. Some wisdom must be inculcated through our relationships with others, and particularly exemplars that speak to our better-self.
Below are some exemplars that demonstrate aspiring ways for each of us to live life.
These role models come to us in different shapes and sizes, suited to what we need to learn at different times in our life. The popularity of biographies and the value of mentors in our life are common, culturally ubiquitous ways that we can vicariously learn from others the ineffable skills needed to live life fully.
Profiles in Courage by J. F. Kennedy, is a great little book that shows us accessible role models being courageous in real life. The book looks at eight individuals living ordinary lives, who at certain points made extraordinary choices, choices based on the highest personal values. Each individual profiled manifested Areté, excellence, in following their values in the face of personal cost. The book also shines a light on decorum, leaving us with a sense that we can comport ourselves in the world in a manner manifesting self-respect. From this empowerment, courage is no longer a choice, but a natural result.
Vaclav Havel would fit the parameters for inclusion in Profiles in Courage. He was more than just the president of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic. His humanism and value-based leadership calls others to emulate his sense of duty and responsibility. Havel was a leader who led with values, Humanistic values of justice, equality, and accountability. Value-Leadership manifested by Vaclav Havel is an inspiration to us today where leadership is increasingly devolving into compromise, negotiation, and management.
Nelson Mandela, in his autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, shows us that one can live a modern life based on the highest ideals of humankind. His value to us is not to inspire us to survive prison and lead a nation, his value is to show our highest, potential Humanism manifested in the world. He is an inspiration, not just a role model.
Thomas Merton was a powerful cultural voice as a bridge between Eastern Religions and Western Christianity during the cultural transformation of the 1960s. However, his enduring legacy will undoubtedly be his autobiography, Seven Story Mountain, where he shares the tension between a life interior and a world exterior in his process from secular young journalist to Cistercian cloister. He can help us understand our daily tensions between reflective quietude and internal doubt.
Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, unequivocally reveals that humankind lives for meaning, and that meaning can sustain us during incomparable hardship. As a Jewish medical doctor in Nazi Germany, he was forced into slave labor in Nazi concentration camps. Frankl shares some of the horrors he witnessed and endured in the context of his deep belief that having a meaning and purpose can maintain our sanity and our humanity, even when both are under assault by evil. His writings are particularly forceful in negating the Nazi goals of dehumanization, a dehumanization that was inscribed in the transom to entering the concentration camp, Here there is no why.
The biographies of Thomas More, the sixteenth-century adviser to Henry VIII of England, show us how legendary lives can ultimately become nearly irreconcilable, yet always providing wisdom. More is sometimes viewed as a pillar of religious courage, standing up for his ideal in the face of the blind and brutal desire for power of Henry VIII. At other times, More is seen as a pragmatist who over estimated his own power and influence, to his downfall. Exemplars and role models as historical figures need not be reconciled; each perspective will have truth and relevance as well as obfuscation. When we read and explore these historical figures, they become emblematic and need not be heroic or resolved.
Just like historical figures, giants of our own time may not be reconciled or resolved, but may still guide our self-understanding. For example, Steven Jobs can be a role model to enterprising individuals even when not embodying some of the interpersonal virtues most people idealize.
Sometimes by seeing others struggle with the circumstances of life, we can enter into a timelessness of the human condition. Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French nobleman, speaks to our deepest concerns through his self-revelations. In his Essays, Montaigne describes how to live life authentically. By knowing all about himself, Montaigne also reveals each of us.