Navigating Interstitial Spaces

Navigating Interstitial Spaces

“[T]he law permits the Americans to do what they please.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The protection of virtue, I submit, requires an understanding of interstitial spaces—spaces where formalist adherence to rules and laws does not suffice to adequately promote virtue. Recognition of these spaces spawned agent morality and Aristotle’s practical wisdom. Fascination with these spaces fueled Alexis de Tocqueville’s inquiry into American religious, familial and political mores in Democracy in America. Though America’s formal, codified laws of the 1830s granted “dangerous freedom” to the individual, Americans managed to navigate interstitial spaces with assiduous virtue. This discussion will briefly connect threads from Aristotle’s Ethics, Plato’s Republic, and Pericles’ funeral oration to preface a more extensive examination of Tocqueville’s careful study of the institutions which reinforced virtue within America’s interstitial spaces. The conclusion will examine and evaluate the doctrine of “self-interest rightly understood” as the sole guarantor of virtue in the United States.

Aristotle, one of the forefathers of agent morality, understood that universal and formalist rules alone could not sustain virtue. Practical wisdom, “a truth-attaining intellectual quality concerned with doing and with the things that are good for human beings” allows the moral agent to operate virtuously in a context-specific way. “[I]t is not possible,” Aristotle writes, “without practical wisdom to be really good morally.” Obedience to fixed rules cannot govern action “to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way.” In order to cultiv...

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...ticipation correlate directly with the correct practice of “self-interest rightly understood” and we accept both Michael Sandel’s thesis about the rise of the “voluntarist self” and Robert Putnam’s thesis describing the decline of American social and political capital—then a gloomy picture emerges about the sustainability of virtue in the hands of enlightened self-interest alone. Without guidance in a wide expanse of interstitial space, it is easy to slip through the cracks.

Words Cited

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics.

Mitchell, Joshua. The Fragility of Freedom.

Plato. The Republic.

Putnam. Bowling Alone.

Sandel, Michael. Democracy’s Discontents.

Thucydides. The History of thte Peloponnesian War. “Pericles’ Funeral Oration.”

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America.