Arts in Medicine Advanced Professional Seminar

Week 1 Creative Practice

Reflecting on this week’s theme Ethics and Human Nature, I really enjoyed and felt inspired by the reading, Aristotelian Ethics. Here are a few excerpts from the reading that inspired my creative practice artwork this week. 

Aristotle insists that ethics is not a theoretical discipline: we are asking what the good for human beings is not simply because we want to have knowledge, but because we will be better able to achieve our good if we develop a fuller understanding of what it is to flourish. In raising this question—what is the good?—Aristotle is not looking for a list of items that are good. He assumes that such a list can be compiled rather easily; most would agree, for example, that it is good to have friends, to experience pleasure, to be healthy, to be honored, and to have such virtues as courage at least to some degree.

Aristotle thinks everyone will agree that the terms “eudaimonia” (“happiness”) and “eu zên” (“living well”) designate such an end. Aristotle's conclusion about the nature of happiness is in a sense uniquely his own. No other writer or thinker had said precisely what he says about what it is to live well. But at the same time his view is not too distant from a common idea. As he himself points out, one traditional conception of happiness identifies it with virtue (1098b30–1). Aristotle's theory should be construed as a refinement of this position. He says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition. It consists in those lifelong activities that actualize the virtues of the rational part of the soul.

He needs to discuss honor, wealth, pleasure, and friendship in order to show how these goods, properly understood, can be seen as resources that serve the higher goal of virtuous activity. He vindicates the centrality of virtue in a well-lived life by showing that in the normal course of things a virtuous person will not live a life devoid of friends, honor, wealth, pleasure, and the like. Virtuous activity makes a life happy not by guaranteeing happiness in all circumstances, but by serving as the goal for the sake of which lesser goods are to be pursued (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015).

I am in the process of creating a group ceramic tile art installation with the participants of my weekly Creative Aging Workshop at an assisted living center. Here are a couple of photos of the project still in progress.

I still had to make my tile for the project and  was inspired from the reading to create a tile that reflected a “Well-Lived Life”. I felt having the words; happiness, virtue, honor, friendship, pleasure and wealth on the tile were appropriate for the group of older adults and to hang on the wall at the center. “Life’s Hand Print”, was created for the tile wall inspired by Aristotelian Ethics.

Reference

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2015). Aristotelian Ethics. Retrieved from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/