Imagine you want to improve your character. You are a bit irresolute and would like to be able to persevere on tasks. Maybe you are a bore and desire to be humorous, or are impatient and need to learn to wait well. Perhaps you are stingy, aspiring to be generous, or cowardly and desire courage. How do you make these changes? How do you improve your character?
I have some advice you may expect: find someone you admire and emulate them. Read good books that clarify the human condition. Locate friends with similar character goals and hold each other accountable. Select your situations so you are not tempted by bad choices. Reflect. Say you are sorry and try again. Do good deeds until you are reliably disposed to perform them without thinking, and they define you in a stable way.
But I also have advice that may surprise you: sometimes the road to virtue comes by way of vice.
Several philosophers employ an image of warped wood to describe our moral character. Immanuel Kant wrote that ‘from such crooked timber as humankind is made nothing entirely straight can be made’. When Xunzi made his notorious declaration that human nature is evil, he said that we must be denatured, straightened like warped wood to correct our naturally twisted moral condition.
In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, this image appears in a discussion about whether virtue can be taught. Protagoras offers a pedagogical sequence that is built around punishment and constraint, which are seemingly required because the student never comes to love what is choice-worthy. A student is given directives to ‘do this, and not do that. If he readily obeys, – so; but if not, they treat him as a bent and twisted piece of wood and straighten him with threats and blows.’
Aristotle also used the image of warped wood. He viewed moral virtue as a mean positioned between two vices – a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. For example, courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness. Wittiness is the mean between buffoonery and boorishness. In the context of a virtue mean, the image of warped wood has interesting implications for character development.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers advice for how to achieve the mean and attain virtue. First, we must notice the errors to which we are prone, since ‘different men are inclined by nature to different faults’. Then we should ‘drag ourselves away in the opposite direction, for by steering wide of our besetting error we shall make a middle course. This is the method adopted by carpenters to straighten warped timber.’
On the one hand, this is odd advice. People are like warped wood, which must be corrected not by inching closer to the mean but overshooting it entirely.
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