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onsdag den 3. juli 2013

IT IS NOT IN MUGABE`S NATURE TO BE DEMOCRATIC!


Seneca, the Roman Stoic, said that perfect prudence is indistinguishable from perfect virtue. Thus, in considering all consequences, a prudent person would act in the same way as a virtuous person. We can conclude that people only act for what they perceive will maximize the good and the same can be said for Mugabe. It is the lack of wisdom which results in the making of a bad choice, rather than a good one. In this way, wisdom is the central part of virtue. However, Plato realized that if virtue was synonymous with wisdom then it could be taught, but that is not the case. He then added "correct belief" as an alternative to knowledge, proposing that knowledge is merely correct belief that has been thought through and "tethered". Hence, the saying, there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom, Mutambara, understands this fact. 

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. 

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity; but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.  This said how then do we expect Mugabe to be a kind, noble, generous when we know that it is not his nature. The attitude and behavior he has shown, is his true character, yes he is a murderer, torturer and self serving quack whom history has just thrown into our paths. 

This is confirmed by what happens in true democratic states; for legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one. Again, it is from the same causes and by the same means that every virtue is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced.


A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access-Friedrich Nietzsche

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