5 - Boredom and acedia
Summary
The life full of commitments is associated with enthusiasm, activity and single-mindedness. Committed people get things done. In work, their focus is on achievement, whether to satisfy personal ambition or because they are enthusiastic about the aims of the endeavour (or both). In love, they are not always looking for new thrills. In their philosophical stances, they are likely to have stable dispositions and not be easily led by new fads or instantly persuaded by apparently plausible arguments, unless they are ultra-rational, which is unlikely. Their commitments are underscored by a certain stability of character, in which their values and dispositions are fairly well rooted, yet allow enough flexibility to assess and perhaps reassess whether their present commitments continue to reflect their values. After all, when you have made a mistake, the rational thing is to stop making it, not to continue making it in order to honour a past commitment. At the same time, the capacity for commitment requires certain stable character traits such as courage, temperance and sometimes reflectivity, to ensure that you don't simply give up on encountering drawbacks.
If the capacity for commitment requires certain character traits, virtues in fact, what obstacles do these need to overcome? It is not difficult to think of vices such as intemperance, which entails a disposition to instant gratification, or cowardice, which deflects us from risky commitments. But there are other characteristics we may be more reluctant to regard as vices, or at least as not obviously so.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Commitment , pp. 111 - 130Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2011