Socrates,
I think that’s patly true, but isn’t there a certain amount of narcissism and vanity lurking in the desire to be more virtuous? Thomas Merton put it this way:
“The more one seeks ‘the good’ outside oneself as something to be acquired, the more one is faced with the necessity of discussing, studying, understanding, analyzing the nature of the good. The more, therefore, one becomes involved in abstractions and in the confusion of divergent opinions. The more the ‘good’ is objectively analyzed, the more it is treated as something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes. As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability. The more, therefore, one concentrates on the means to be used to attain it. And as the end becomes more and more diffcult, the means become more elaborate and complex, until finally the study of the means becomes so demanding that all one’s effort must be concentrated on this, and the end is forgotten… a devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing means which lead nowhere. This is, in fact, nothing but organized despair: ‘the good’ that is preached and exacted by the moralist thus finally becomes an evil, and all the more so since the hopeless pursuit of it distracts one from the real good which one already possesses and which one now despises or ignores.”
“The Way of Chuang Tzu” by Thomas Merton, New Directions Books 1965, Introduction p. 23.
