Sunday, August 13, 2006

Virtuous as a cucumber?

My friend Cyberian Tygre posted his "rules of cool" in response to an encounter he had with a not-so-cool SEXYDIVA driving a cool car. His thoughts on coolness inspired some of my own, which I posted on his blog, but thought I'd post here as well.

Cyberian Tygre's idea that one either is or is not cool reminded me of Yoda telling Luke "Do or do not. There is no try." That made me wonder whether trying to be cool necessarily rules out actual coolness. And I think it does.

Now this is intriguing ground for someone who spends as much time as I do thinking (though not necessarily writing) about intention, action, and virtue. Aristotle and Thomas both argue that, to be fully virtuous, the virtuous action must be done for the sake of the virtue. My current thinking--and I'm open to correction here--is that coolness (though in a certain way a virtue) functions precisely opposite of virtue in terms of this relation. You can perform a cool action (or purchase a cool car), but insofar as you do so for the sake of the coolness, it is in fact no longer cool. The intention to be cool nullifies the coolness. One is not truly cool if one is trying to be cool.

Interestingly enough, I think coolness functions like goodness does for Thomas. For Thomas, for an act to be good, it must be good in every respect, but a single defect is enough to mar its goodness. In the same way, coolness is a package deal. For something to be truly cool, it has to be totally cool. A single defect ruins the whole.

SEXYDIVA stands as evidence of this.


By the way, I humbly admit and appreciate that citing Aristotle and Aquinas on the subject of coolness also, in most circles, rules it out entirely. Alas, the best I ever did really was being "pretty cool for a smart kid."

I think I've ruled out my own coolness and virtuousness in about 24 hours in this blog.

Perhaps this is why Christians have begun to aspire to that much vaguer and therefore easier virtue of "niceness." Perhaps I'll aim at that.

1 comment:

Rachel said...

Oh, dear God, no -- you're far too cool to settle for being "nice."