Northern Arizona University/Environmental Ethics/Journals/Virtue

After reading the last portions of Thoreau's Walden I am left with a ponderation of virtue. A classic cliché that I hear is "It's not the destination, it's the journey." How true is the experience of pursuing virtue opposed to attaining it? In our experience as sentient beings we attempt to make reason of our existence and the purpose behind it all. While reason can explain a lot in our existence it cannot predict much of anything! Perhaps this is where the limitations of science begin to feel their ceiling. We, as a species, seek so tirelessly a way to justify the means of our existence. We battle for and manufacture whatever pittance we can muster up to justify our lives in a manner that science, however ideal in its nature, can suggest to us the correct course of our behavior and actions. We live in an "economically-based society" that runs its whole operation based upon equations and theories that have not be proven to work. Yet we trust that this system built of imaginary mathematics will give us the very means to our fulfilled ends. We trust without knowing what trust is. We act without knowing what action is. We base our observations on previous interpretations without pursuing our own understanding of what life entails.