A Sense of Ethics
During college, while visiting a second-hand bookshop on the north side of Chicago, my future-wife picked up a tattered red cloth-covered book that had caught her eye — the Journal Intime of little-known nineteenth-century Swiss writer Henri-Frédéric Amiel. In it we would later find much wisdom, but above all, the following:
“We receive everything, both life and happiness; but the manner in which we receive, this is what is still ours.”
We have since treated this as a cherished piece of intimate advice, and it has become somewhat of a family motto.
In ancient Greece, the word ethos referred to one’s gait and manner of dress, indicating the manner in which we approach the world and present ourselves to it. Accordingly, this original sense of ethics does not bear the sense of what we mean today by “morality” but rather the sense of transforming our very manner of relating to the world — including, and perhaps especially, the manner in which we engage the political sphere, or with regard to collective institutions. Even as we cannot choose our circumstances, this — this possibility of transformation — is what is inextricably ours.
Under such a framing, the stakes living lie in learning to receive our collective circumstances in a manner befitting them, or, as one might say, to intervene justly — patiently, earnestly, discerningly, without compromise, and with the audacity to risk everything for what needs to be done — and thus to find new meaning in Amiel’s words.
