I have the same reaction as Ben Pace’s shorter comment. Especially given the section entitled “Wholesome vs virtuous vs right”. These three words could be permuted throughout without changing any of the meaning, including in that section. For example:
That stopping-giving-it-attention is a looking-away-from-the-whole-of-things. It cuts one off from the ability to recognise what is virtuous. Perhaps a bullet was worth biting in one case, but if it’s learned just as “that was the wholesome thing to do”, we may come to forget that there was a bullet to be bitten there at all, and start biting it at times when it’s decidedly wrong to do so.
I think if we keep on asking ourselves “what is virtuous?” rather than “what is wholesome?”, we are less likely to fall into this trap of not looking at big swathes of issues. Another question that might work is “what is good and wholesome and comfortable?”. We may feel that something unvirtuous is right, but it’s hard to feel entirely comfortable about that. When we truly feel ourselves to be acting virtuously, we are aligned — both internally, and with the whole we are a part of.
Or:
That stopping-giving-it-attention is a looking-away-from-the-whole-of-things. It cuts one off from the ability to recognise what is right. Perhaps a bullet was worth biting in one case, but if it’s learned just as “that was the virtuous thing to do”, we may come to forget that there was a bullet to be bitten there at all, and start biting it at times when it’s decidedly wrong to do so.
I think if we keep on asking ourselves “what is right?” rather than “what is virtuous?”, we are less likely to fall into this trap of not looking at big swathes of issues. Another question that might work is “what is good and virtuous and comfortable?”. We may feel that something wrong is wholesome, but it’s hard to feel entirely comfortable about that. When we truly feel ourselves to be acting rightly, we are aligned — both internally, and with the whole we are a part of.
I think that there’s something fair about your complaint in that I don’t think I’ve fully specified the concept, and am gesturing rather than defining.
At the same time I feel like your rewrites with substituted words are less coherent than the original. I think this is true both with respect to the everyday English senses of the words (they’re not completely incoherent, and of course we could imagine a world where the words were used in ways which made them comparably coherent—I just think on actual usage they make a bit less sense), and also with respect to what I have outlined about my sense of “wholesome” in the essay prior to that, where it’s important that “wholesome” is about paying attention to the whole of things.
Favourable to morals, religion or prosperity; sensible; conducive to good; salutary; promoting virtue or being virtuous.
Marked by wholeness; sound and healthy.
Decent; innocuous; sweet.
I quote this not as an authority on what the word “really means”, but as a record of how the word is generally used. Notice the words “morals”, “good”, and “virtuous” in the third.
All of these words name things, but none of them anything precise. Each is likely to appear in a definition of any other. They point to clouds that overlap more than they differ. To a large extent they are interchangeable. No precise distinction can be communicated by the words alone, only by talking in concrete terms of what sorts of things exemplify the intended concepts.
But I will be interested to see the subsequent essays.
I read the rewrites before I read the corresponding section of the post and, without knowing the context, I find Richard’s first rewrite to be the most intuitive permutation of the three.
I fully expect that this will stop once I read the post, but I thought that my particular perspective of having read the rewrites first might be relevant.
I have the same reaction as Ben Pace’s shorter comment. Especially given the section entitled “Wholesome vs virtuous vs right”. These three words could be permuted throughout without changing any of the meaning, including in that section. For example:
Or:
I think that there’s something fair about your complaint in that I don’t think I’ve fully specified the concept, and am gesturing rather than defining.
At the same time I feel like your rewrites with substituted words are less coherent than the original. I think this is true both with respect to the everyday English senses of the words (they’re not completely incoherent, and of course we could imagine a world where the words were used in ways which made them comparably coherent—I just think on actual usage they make a bit less sense), and also with respect to what I have outlined about my sense of “wholesome” in the essay prior to that, where it’s important that “wholesome” is about paying attention to the whole of things.
Here is Wiktionary on “wholesome”
I quote this not as an authority on what the word “really means”, but as a record of how the word is generally used. Notice the words “morals”, “good”, and “virtuous” in the third.
All of these words name things, but none of them anything precise. Each is likely to appear in a definition of any other. They point to clouds that overlap more than they differ. To a large extent they are interchangeable. No precise distinction can be communicated by the words alone, only by talking in concrete terms of what sorts of things exemplify the intended concepts.
But I will be interested to see the subsequent essays.
I read the rewrites before I read the corresponding section of the post and, without knowing the context, I find Richard’s first rewrite to be the most intuitive permutation of the three. I fully expect that this will stop once I read the post, but I thought that my particular perspective of having read the rewrites first might be relevant.