The Pursuit of Excellence and the Role of Philosophy
| Autor | Ramin Jahanbegloo |
| Páginas | 179-186 |
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David Robertson, the American conductor, addressing his audience while conducting the 2009 Last Night of the Proms, relected on the makeup of his orchestra: “When looking at strife in the world, and for examples of overcoming it, just think of the orchestra. All the instruments you see originated in different parts of the world. They have different histories and modiications. They look different and produce different sounds. But here they are playing together in harmony.”
When we look into the history of human civilizations, we will discover one fundamental fact: those which laid the stress on power and violence have passed away. Those which laid their stress on the development of excellence have survived. If history has any lesson to teach us, it is the following: excellence is the end that we have to set before ourselves. It is only through a life in excellence that we can bring together the nations into a fellowship. My argument in this lecture would be to show that a life in excellence is an agency and a transformative force, a lived experience underpinning the dialogue and cross-fertilization of cultures. Hence, to make the world a better place to live in, we must do a better job of ourselves. That is what a life in excellence stands for, and it is
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that which constitutes the inal goal of humanity, when we rise from our present existence to a better life.
The term “excellence” certainly denotes a harmonious vision of the world that sees all cultures and traditions acknowledging as a common horizon of global responsibility. Therefore, the idea of the excellence is one shared by all civilizations; but the notions of what is the best, vary over a wide range of cultures.
Excellence is certainly an attractive moral and political idea, though it remains hard to deine. Excellence has been deined in so many different ways that no consensus has emerged. Ancient Greeks were familiar with the word arete which was applied to the gods as well as to men. It would be wrong to translate arete as vir-tue, because virtue refers to a feature of a person’s psychology. But the word arete can be described as excellence, or as Plato deines it in the Republic as “the condition of one’s soul” (444d13). To the modern ear this may perhaps sound very strange, but central to the general outlook of the Greeks was a concern for excellence. For the Greeks, human excellence in general characterized the kalos kagathos, the noble and good man. But this nobility of spirit was considered possible only in the context of the polis, the city-state, because it is an ethos that excels toward public virtue. That is why paideia was the education through which excellence was fostered. To the Greeks the supreme task of man therefore was to discover what human “excellence” is and to achieve it; and paideia traced the steps of the discovery and the growing process and enrichment of the human ideal. The Greeks believed that excellence breeds excellence. So striving for excellence for its own sake, for truth, beauty and goodness in the whole educational process, was considered as the only way to produce it. For example, in Homer “being best” (aristos) meant a striving for excellence, a supra-personal ideal pursued without compromise, even at the cost of life itself. In the Ajax of Sophocles we can see the same Homeric note: “Live best or die best, for the best man/it must be one or the other” (479-80). The stress is on the manner, not merely the matter, of living and dying. Therefore to be aristos (the “best”) one needs to have "excellence." One can say that excellence for the Greeks is more than merely an ethical term. It was above all a quality of character, to be realized in action. This is what Aristotle says in Book II, chapter 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics when he summarizes his account of excellence as “a
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determining choice, involving the observance of the mean relative to us…” (1106b36-1107a2). According to Aristotle...
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