“Counting Stars” with Aristotle: Why Do I Really feel So Proper Doing the Incorrect Factor? 

I’ll always remember the primary time I heard OneRepublic’s hit tune “Counting Stars.” I used to be 15 years outdated. My style in music was restricted, to say the least. I not often listened to something “mainstream,” and I used to be greater than just a little inclined to guage my friends who crammed their ears with godless pop music.

When “Counting Stars” got here on at a birthday celebration, I couldn’t assist liking the catchy tune. It was tune, and everybody appeared to get pleasure from it. Folks had been singing alongside, and I used to be listening in hopes of becoming a member of in.

Then we bought to the pre-chorus.

I really feel so proper doing the improper factor
I really feel so improper doing the best factor
The whole lot that kills me makes me really feel alive.

I used to be shocked. What an terrible message! To my thoughts, this appeared like a first-rate instance of the type of unrighteous folly that stored me distant from pop music. Appalled that my associates would sing alongside to such a tune, I wrote off OneRepublic as simply one other peddler of anti-Christian nonsense to brainwash the lots.

A few years later, it was Aristotle who modified my thoughts. The famed Greek thinker helped me notice that OneRepublic was riffing on a remarkably Christian thought—and because it seems, the author of the tune is a Christian himself. Immediately, I take advantage of “Counting Stars” to show college students about Aristotelian ethics and concerning the Christian doctrine of sanctification. What modified my thoughts, and the way does a pop tune from 2013 echo and illustrate historical knowledge and biblical theology? 

Aristotle and the Calibration of the Conscience

All of it begins with Aristotle’s understanding of advantage. In his Nicomachean Ethics, the Greek thinker argues that we’re not born with a pure inclination to do good or evil. As a substitute, we domesticate “ethical advantage” in the identical means that we develop arts like portray, poetry, or pottery. No one is born a musician or a mechanic—we develop these abilities by coaching and follow. Aristotle believed that advantage functioned in the identical means. “Not one of the ethical virtues arises in us by nature… somewhat we’re tailored by nature to obtain them, and are made excellent by behavior.” In different phrases, we’re naturally able to studying to be virtuous, and we develop in advantage by behavior—persistent repetition of virtuous motion. 

This virtue-practice is what Aristotle calls “habituation,” which is the method by which virtuous actions flip into virtuous character. “We turn out to be simply by doing simply acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, courageous by doing courageous acts.”

If people are actually “clean slates” by way of character and capability for advantage, then the habits we type from an early age are deeply essential. As we turn out to be habituated to advantage or to vice, we develop a way of what’s pure, which consequently shapes our senses of enjoyment and ache. Once more, Aristotle makes this express: “We should take as an indication of states of character the pleasure or ache that ensues on acts… For ethical excellence is worried with pleasures and pains; it’s on account of the pleasure that we do unhealthy issues, and on account of the ache that we abstain from noble ones.”

In different phrases, we are likely to do unhealthy issues as a result of they make us really feel good, and we battle to do good issues once they make us really feel unhealthy. Sound acquainted? Right here within the midst of Aristotle’s Ethics, we discover the lyrics of “Counting Stars” nearly verbatim. Many individuals actually do discover that “all the things that kills [them] makes [them] really feel alive.” Aristotle would say that that is the results of dangerous habituation. As a way to keep away from this, Aristotle insists that we should educate younger folks in advantage from the very begin. “Therefore we must have been introduced up in a selected means from our very youth… in order each to please in and to be pained by the issues that we ought.”

I prefer to name this course of “the calibration of the conscience.” As we’re taught the distinction between proper and improper and given alternatives to train advantage or vice, we calibrate our consciences. If this course of goes awry, we could uncover that we “really feel so proper doing the improper factor” and “really feel so improper doing the best factor,” as OneRepublic astutely noticed. In line with Aristotle, this sense is proof of poor ethical schooling. As soon as the conscience is calibrated, it’s tough—however not not possible—to change the notion of what conduct feels good and pure.

Whereas studying Aristotle for the primary time, I acknowledged that “Counting Stars” was truly describing a miscalibrated conscience. But there’s much more to the story, because the Aristotelian method fails to account for the fullness of the biblical image of sin.

Authentic Sin and the Intuition-Very best Hole

For all he bought proper concerning the calibration of the conscience, Aristotle’s blank-slate anthropology conflicts with the biblical doctrine of unique sin and the fallenness of humanity. In line with Scripture, we’re not born in a state of ethical neutrality, awaiting habituation into advantage or vice. As a substitute, our nature is tarnished by sin from the very starting. As David laments in Psalm 51, “Behold, I used to be introduced forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mom conceive me.” We’re certainly misled by our wishes and our sense of enjoyment and ache, however this can be a function of our nature from the day we’re born. Jeremiah notes that “the center is deceitful above all issues, and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9). It doesn’t take time and poor schooling to deprave the human conscience. Quite the opposite, a lifetime of hard-fought advantage can not overcome our eager for “all the things that kills,” irrespective of how a lot we work to habituate ourselves.

But regardless of the crookedness of the human conscience, we additionally can not persuade ourselves that this wickedness is “pure.” We can not escape from the sense that there actually is such a factor as “proper” and “improper,” and we can not outrun the sense of guilt that haunts our steps. Even probably the most vicious folks should discover methods to justify themselves as a way to dwell with themselves. We’re trapped: we appear to be vicious by nature, but we can not stop believing in advantage. Our instincts are base, however our beliefs are lofty. That is what I name the “Intuition-Very best Hole”—that haunting function of human nature which leaves us incapable of saving ourselves however deeply and desperately conscious that we have to be saved.

The famed French absurdist Camus, although removed from a Christian himself, made exactly this statement in his novel The Fall. By means of the mouth of his protagonist—a person who spends his total life doing good deeds solely to appreciate someday simply how corrupt his personal motives may very well be—Camus bemoans this inescapable entice. “Not sufficient cynicism and never sufficient advantage. We lack the vitality of evil in addition to the vitality of fine.” This place between two poles appears to Camus like a type of jail, akin to the Limbo of Dante’s impartial angels and virtuous pagans.

This can be a more true image of the human situation, and as soon as once more, “Counting Stars” echoes the sentiment. I do “really feel so proper doing the improper factor,” however I can even inform that I shouldn’t. I lengthy for a recalibrated conscience, however opposite to Aristotle’s recommendation, I can not appear to make it occur. No one can. All of the virtuous schooling on the earth can not produce a person or girl with perfectly-aligned instincts and beliefs. No quantity of virtuous motion can produce a completely virtuous character.

Romans and the “Wretched Man”

The Apostle Paul shares the lament of the prophets and the pop stars. In his letter to the Romans, Paul additionally speaks of the position of conscience, noting the way it leaves us feeling trapped between a data of the nice and a need for evil. We’ve “the work of the legislation written on [our] hearts” and but our “conflicting ideas accuse and even excuse” us (Rom. 2:15). Habituation, it appears, is not any resolution—we’re trapped. In Romans 7, Paul points a stirring lament over this imprisonment: “I do what I hate and I hate what I do… I discover it to be a legislation that once I need to do proper, evil lies shut at hand… Wretched man that I’m! Who will ship me from this physique of demise?” (Rom. 7:15-25)

Paul’s voice joins that of Aristotle, Camus, and OneRepublic: we’re trapped between advantage and vice, and we can not resolve this pressure ourselves. “The whole lot that kills me makes me really feel alive.” In gentle of all these different voices, it appears clear that “Counting Stars” is a lament somewhat than a celebration of human depravity.

Fortuitously, the Bible does extra than simply diagnose our depravity—it affords an answer. The entire of Romans is devoted to the excellent news of a “righteousness of God that’s by religion.” Paul’s plea above—“Who will save me?”—is answered definitively within the very subsequent verse: “Thanks be to God by Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:25)

That is the very coronary heart of the gospel. Although “all have sinned and fall in need of the glory of God,” we will rejoice as a result of we could also be “justified by His grace as a present, by the redemption that’s in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:23-24). Discovering ourselves totally incapable of creating our personal righteousness, we will as an alternative be clothed within the righteousness of Christ. Instantly after his lament in Romans 7, Paul joyously declares that “There may be subsequently now no condemnation for many who are in Christ Jesus. For the legislation of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the legislation of sin and demise.” (Rom. 8:1-2)

Sanctification and the Hope of Renewal 

The Bible teaches that justification—by which God declares us harmless in his sight—is adopted by lifelong sanctification. That is the street that leads us out of the Intuition-Very best Hole and into wholeness and righteousness. Sanctification, which is powered by the Holy Spirit, transforms the corrupt and divided coronary heart and recalibrates the conscience. 

Paul speaks to exactly this hope when he urges Christians to “be remodeled by the renewal of your thoughts” (Rom. 12:2). By the facility of the Holy Spirit, the perverse polarity of our crooked consciences could be reversed, and as we endure sanctification, the pleasures and pains of our hearts could be recalibrated. Solely on this means can we actually expertise what Aristotle described: a life wherein advantage feels actually pure and vice feels actually improper. That’s what sanctification looks like. Day-to-day, second by second, the Spirit “habituates” us to the best way of the dominion of God. We should spend just a little time on this fallen body, however we’re wanting ahead to the recreation of all issues, and we have now the privilege of bringing a glimpse of that superb day to life in our personal communities.

All this brings us again to “Counting Stars.” Understood rightly, this tune joins the refrain of voices all through historical past which have mourned the perplexing human situation. If I know that it kills me, then why does it make me “really feel alive”? Why does the improper factor really feel proper? That is life within the Intuition-Very best Hole, and it feels unfair. Aristotle described the issue nicely, however he couldn’t clear up it. Camus groaned within the entice, however he couldn’t escape from it. There is just one means out: “He saved us, not due to works executed by us in righteousness, however based on his personal mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

Now I salute you, OneRepublic. Thanks for drawing our eyes to this painful and perplexing downside. You might be proper to level out simply how backwards it feels. Thank God that He doesn’t go away us on this pit we have now dug for ourselves.

That’s the hopeful message of sanctification—that not by willful re-habituation however by the facility of God, our hearts could be recalibrated till we enjoyment of what is really good—and study to “really feel so proper… doing the best factor.”