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The virtues are human excellences that express themselves in the capacity to act for the achievement of what the agent recognizes as the highest values possible in some situation. Such capability (Können) requires the re-integration of the person and the overcoming of conflicts between the "head" and the "heart," or the "drives" and the "spirit," and the possibility of such integration is limited. The virtues themselves are difficult to synthesize and integrate in a single person, for they each aim at values on different levels of relative worth and cannot be realized simultaneously. Even the most virtuous life, therefore, involves an inward tension in the face of irreconcilable oppositions. The capacity for the highest possible virtue is found in a rightly disposed personhood, including a tendency toward happiness. Similar observations concerning virtue are explored in von Hildebrand and Husserl. Virtue, for Husserl, must involve a struggle to achieve a lucid account of the values available in one's situation and to will the right action insightfully. Binding together disparate elements in the human being, such as the desire for moral goodness, the intention to right action, and the capacity for right reason, is a requirement of virtue. Hartmann's contribution to the foundations of virtue grows out of a phenomenology of the most general moral values, viz., goodness, nobility, richness of experience, and purity. An examination of this phenomenology prepares us for the phenomenology of the virtues themselves.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1845-6_7

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