Something I've had a lot of trouble reconciling are two ideas that, up until recent times, I thought were contradictory. These ideas are Nietzsche's 'time as a flat circle' and Aristotle's 'virtue lies between deficiency and excess.'

To understand the virtue we'll eventually bear witness to, we must understand both of these ideas.

Nietzsche presents the idea that for us to be happy and fulfilled, we must conduct ourselves in a manner that we'd be happy to live in day-to-day, even if days were to be repeated. The point from this is to abstract a constant positive behavior or action, which 'flattens' the time we experience as it is punctuated by our failures and hardships. A consistent aim towards the positive, the virtuous, the good, places a stabilizing consistency within our experience.

In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics the idea that virtue lies between the deficiency of a thing and excess of a thing is presented. Aristotle's definition of virtue includes the notion that it is reason within our judgment that discerns for us whether we should or should not do a thing. Take courage, for example. If you are constantly defending yourself, putting up a fight, and on the look out for a fight, you are being rash. However, if you are constantly hiding yourself away from controversy and letting others take advantage of you, you are being a coward. The dilemma is that rashness and cowardliness can be different decisions to the same environment.

I'll give an example. In class, my friend brought up the story of whether it was courageous or not for a former navy seal to jump into a flowing river with a waterfall at the end of it to save a girl who'd fallen in. It turns out this was a true story, and what had happened was that they both died in the end. You could either agree or disagree, this was courageous or not.

One might say it is courageous to jump in and save her, and one might say it is simply being rash. (Here we delve into Aristotle's notion that to judge correctly, we need to--from time to time--take the extremity that is farthest from a thing--as cowardice is to courage--and go in the opposite direction. From there, we get what most people would discern as the appropriate virtue.)

Jumping into whitewater to save a drowning girl heading towards a waterfall is rash. But of course, it is also courageous. It is a purely rash action that, when perceived through our human eyes and made significant by our imagination's capability to consider the elements of the girl's life, is made courageous.

Rashness is percieved courageously, in that sense.

This brings in exactly how two polar opposites are reconciled and mediated, leading to virtue found between them. Of course, there is reason to believe it is too risky to jump in and save the girl, but there is also reason to believe the payoff is worth it and one should do it. Because we have correct reasoning for both courses of action, but they both are opposite extremes, what I propose is approaching them as neither correct or incorrect but merely as a potential.

For, "cowardliness" and "rashness" have nothing merely incorrect and nothing correct in their nature, but are made good and bad by how they are seen in a specific environment. If there were no girl in the water, jumping in and risking your life for nothing would seem rash.

With the girl in the water, the danger of the situation is not lessened--if anything, it's more intensified!--but we do not solely see rashness anymore. So now rashness has been judged to be correct, not because it itself is correct, but because it was the correct response to a presented situation.

If we are then not to see virtue as lying between two extremes, but simply as the appropriate judgment of when an extreme is necessary, people's common conception of virtue is changed.

Most people take Aristotle to mean that we should attempt to mix our extremes and find a consistent platform for morality. We shouldn't agree with everyone, and we shouldn't disagree with everyone. One might say this, but to act morally, you cannot approach everyone with a neutral approach! You cannot approach Moussilini and think to not agree and not to disagree.

You, likewise, cannot approach Martin Luther King Jr. with the same mentality. You, in some sense, judge the correct times to be in deficiency and excess of agreement. Even though both are extremes, there is nothing wrong or right about extremes until they are actually manifested. The reason is because, arguably, nothing is completely real until it is manifested.

So herein lies how we reconcile Aristotle's notion of us making constant judgments with reason and Nietzsche's assertion of a kind of consistency that brings about happiness and virtue: to constantly strive to make correct judgments aimed at producing the virtue they will yield. We can do this consistently, even if the specific judgments we make will be polar opposites from time to time.