eigenvirtues
17 Jul 2026 - 27 Sep 2026
- Apparently I just made this term up but I'm astonished if I'm the first. I'm not entirely happy with it but it was a big hit when I mentioned it in my Jubilee and Forgiveness talk at Protocols/Symposium 2026. I mean something like, basic virtues. Atomic virtues, but that sounds like a business self-help book. Root virtues but that sounds fake-Buddhist. Generative virtues maybe. blyg
- The reason I don't like the name is that it suggests that virtue can be decomposed into independent aspects, and that is really the opposite of the point I want to make. None of these are independent, its more like they are aspects of a single thing, and focusing on the aspects risks ignoring that single thing.
- The prototype for this abstraction was forgiveness, which is more of an act than a virtue, or maybe a stance?
- See also, inevitably, eigensin,
Prior Art
The term itself
- OK let's see if there are earlier usages of the term eigenvirtues Ask Claude
- The term "eigenvirtues" doesn't appear in any literature I'm aware of — you may indeed have coined it, or at least it's obscure enough that it hasn't entered any corpus I was trained on.
- A few things worth unpinning here:
- What decomposition are you doing?
- "Eigen" in the mathematical sense (eigenvalues, eigenvectors) implies you're decomposing something into basis components — directions that are invariant under some transformation. So eigenvirtues would be something like: the irreducible components of virtue space, where other virtues are linear combinations or projections.
- This raises the question: invariant under what transformation? Eigenvectors only make sense relative to a matrix/operator.
- The forgiveness problem
- Forgiveness is interesting as a prototype because it decomposes into distinguishable components that often come apart:
- Releasing resentment
- Behavioral reconciliation
- Moral re-crediting of the person
- Cessation of punishment
- These can vary independently. If forgiveness is a compound, what are its "eigen" components?
- Which sense of virtue?
- Are you decomposing:
- Aristotelian virtues (stable character dispositions)?
- Virtue as moral praise-worthiness?
- Something more like psychological stances or attitudes?
- The stance framing seems most tractable for decomposition. What was your actual intuition when the term arose?
Virtue Factorings
- Surely there have been attempts by various theologians from all religions to try to list the aspects of god and goodness, the most basic components. Ask Claude
- The theological tradition you're gesturing at is real and rich:
- Directly relevant attempts:
- The Divine Simplicity debates — whether God's attributes (omniscience, omnibenevolence, etc.) are genuinely distinct or aspects of one thing
- Aquinas on the unity of virtue — whether the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance) are truly separable or mutually entailing
- The Platonic question in Meno and Protagoras: is virtue one thing or many?
- Kabbalah's Sefirot — literally an attempt to decompose divine qualities into a structured basis set with relationships between them
- The Aquinas point is sharp: he argued the virtues are unified through prudence/phronesis — practical wisdom is the operator, and the other virtues are its expressions. That's almost an eigenvector claim: prudence is the transformation, virtues are invariant directions under it.
- Your list so far: patience, compassion, forgiveness, intelligence-as-pseudo-virtue
- The "pseudo-virtue" framing for intelligence is interesting — it might be more like a multiplier on other virtues rather than a basis vector. Evil intelligence is possible; evil patience is harder to construct.
- What's the operator you're implicitly using? Something like: what remains when you subtract situation-specificity?
- OK the classical concept "cardinal virtues" is basically the same idea (I think) Cardinal virtues - Wikipedia'=
- Buddhists love making lists and some seem to fit the bill.
- What are some specifically Buddhist lists of basic viertues
- Ask Claude
- Here is a survey of the major specifically Buddhist lists of basic virtues:
Buddhist Virtue Lists
- Buddhism is notable for developing multiple classifications of virtue rather than a single unified list — likely because it accepts different modalities of living well, associated with different practices and ordered hierarchically.
- Here are the main ones:
1. The Five Precepts (Pañca-Sīla) — the universal baseline
- The Five Precepts (Pañca-Sīla) is the basic Buddhist moral code: not to kill, not to steal, not to commit sexual misconduct, not to lie, and not to indulge in intoxicants. All Buddhists are called upon to observe at least these five.
2. The Ten Wholesome/Virtuous Actions (Kammapatha)
- A more granular expansion organized by body, speech, and mind:
- Among the ten, three are bodily, four are verbal, and three are mental. The ten courses of unwholesome kamma are: Body — destroying life, stealing, sexual misconduct; Speech — false speech, divisive speech, offensive speech, senseless speech; Mind — covetousness, malice, wrong view. The ten courses of wholesome kamma are the opposites of these.
- In Buddhism, virtue is anything that causes happiness, and non-virtue is anything that causes suffering.
3. The Four Brahmaviharās ("Divine Abodes" / Four Immeasurables)
- The Brahmaviharās are a series of four Buddhist virtues and the meditation practices made to cultivate them. They are also known as the four immeasurables (appamaññā) or four infinite minds. They are: loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), empathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā).
4. The Ten Perfections (Dasa Pāramiyo) — Theravāda
- The term Pāramitā/Pāramī means "perfection." In Buddhism, the Paramitas refer to the perfection or culmination of certain virtues, which purify karma and help the aspirant live an unobstructed life on the path to Enlightenment.
- The Pāli Canon's Buddhavamsa lists the ten perfections (dasa pāramiyo) as: generosity (dāna), virtue (sīla), renunciation (nekkhamma), wisdom (paññā), energy (viriya), patience (khanti), truthfulness (sacca), determination (adhiṭṭhāna), loving-kindness (mettā), and equanimity (upekkhā).
5. The Six Perfections — Mahāyāna
- Mahāyāna philosophers reduced the Theravāda list from ten qualities to six, omitting renunciation, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness, and equanimity, and adding concentration. The order is: generosity, virtue, patience, energy, concentration, and wisdom.
6. The Noble Eightfold Path
- The Noble Eightfold Path to enlightenment consists of: **(1) Right View, (2) Right Intention, (3) Right Speech, (4) Right Action, (5) Right Livelihood, (6) Right Effort, (7) Right Mindfulness, and (8) Right Concentration**. These virtues generally fall into three categories
- (wisdom, ethics, and mental cultivation).
7. The 37 Factors of Awakening (Bodhipakkhiyā Dhammā)
- The most comprehensive early Buddhist list.
- The Pali term literally means "states on the side of awakening" — they are conducive to spiritual development and help one gain awakening. It is a common term for 37 factors comprising a comprehensive list of the Buddha's teaching in terms of doctrine, found in a number of early Sūtras and Vinaya texts.
- The 37 Factors of Enlightenment are a structured collection of qualities that lead to liberation, presented in seven overlapping groups which, according to traditional Theravāda analysis, consolidate into 14 distinct mental factors.
- The seven groups are:
- Four Ways of Attending to Mindfulness, Four Right Strivings, Four Bases of Spiritual Power, Five Faculties, Five Strengths, Seven Factors of Awakening, and the Noble Eightfold Path.
Summary Table
- | List | Count | Tradition | |
|
|
| | Five Precepts | 5 | Universal | | Ten Wholesome Actions | 10 | Universal | | Four Brahmaviharās | 4 | Universal | | Ten Perfections | 10 | Theravāda | | Six Perfections | 6 | Mahāyāna | | Noble Eightfold Path | 8 | Universal | | 37 Factors of Awakening | 37 | Early/Theravāda |
- Three of these are especially significant as possible "catalogs of virtue" from a philosophical standpoint: (1) the components of ethical conduct (sīla), (2) the 37 factors that contribute to awakening (bodhipakkhiyā dhammā), and (3) the wholesome (kusala) or beautiful (sobhana) mental factors (cetasika).
Candidates
- forgiveness the prototype (actually not sure that is true. which was the first? Lost to time.)
- compassion aka love, kindness
- intelligence
- not exactly a virtue, it's more of a tool that can be employed for good or bad ends.
- aka cleverness or metis
- wisdom is the obvious alternative.
- humility which seems to overlap a bit with patience. Not the same thing but dependent upon each other so might as well be. Note that it is essential for learning or development, so tightly related to aspiration.
- gratitude hm these are basically stances, aren't they? Or families of stance, qualities of stance. Gratitude pairs well with forgiveness.
- 4A as resonant. "Agreements" are not exactly virtues but pretty close?
- humor or playfulness. Late addition, and maybe not exactly a virtue but pretty basic and essential. It enhances all the other ones, and without it they become dull, mechanical, fake.
- Huh the ones I came up with are all kind of female-coded, let us not neglect the more manly (if unfashionable) sorts of virtues
- strength
- courage
- honesty, righteousness
- nobility that is a term favored by Meaningness, not something I'd come up with myself. I tend to translate it to menschiness because I don't like the class connotations of "nobility".
- Speaking of Meaningness I feel there is some specific basic virtue underlying his work on metarationality. The willingness and ability to reflect and step outside of a system.
- Ask Claude
- This is a rich question. Let me lay out what Chapman's work actually points to, and then think with you about what virtue underlies it.
- What Chapman's metarationality actually requires:
- You have to have a thorough understanding of how to work within systems before it's feasible to step up and out of them, to manipulate them from above.
- So it's not anti-system — it presupposes mastery of systems. The move is transcendence through competence, not around it.
- Meta-rationality is not the same sort of thing as rationality; it is not an alternative method for doing the same things. It's a different way of being, for doing different sorts of things in a quite different way.
- A main mode of learning meta-rationality from experience is reflection-in-action — observing yourself doing rationality, and considering how it is working, and how well, and why. It is wondering — with open-ended curiosity, and taking into account the context and purposes — how else you might do it.
- What virtue does this name?
- The candidates I'd float, in roughly "manly" register:
- Integrity in the old sense — the wholeness to not be captured by any one framework you inhabit. The person who can fully commit to playing a game while retaining the ability to see the board from outside it.
- Intellectual courage —
- you have to have seen how many different systems work, and — more importantly — how they fail. At the undergraduate level, you are mainly shielded from the failures, and systems get presented as though they were Absolute Truth.
- Seeing through that and not flinching takes courage more than curiosity.
- Detachment (in the Stoic/martial sense, not the Buddhist one) — the capacity to wield a system without being owned by it. The swordsman who knows his style deeply but isn't superstitious about it.
- Groundedness — Chapman's own word for the disposition that doesn't need the system to be The Truth in order to use it well. You can act decisively within a frame you know is partial.
- Of these, I'd argue the most specifically male-coded and underrated one is something close to detachment-as-competence: the warrior's ability to enter a system fully, fight inside it skillfully, and exit or switch without existential crisis. It's different from flexibility (which can be spineless) — it requires prior depth in the system. It might be called non-attachment to one's own frameworks or simply equanimity under systematic failure.
- Chapman himself gestures at this:
- the floundering vertigo of rationality breaking down resembles the groundless open-ended curiosity of meta-rationality.
- The virtue is what converts that vertigo into curiosity rather than panic — which is closer to steadiness or nerve than to any typically feminine virtue.
- Does "groundedness," "nerve," or something like "systemic detachment" feel like it's hitting the target you have in mind?
- More meta
- creativity / imaginativeness
- attentiveness
- ok that sounds out of place but I think it encapulates part of Buddhist teaching, what it is, how to cultivate it
- grace or maybe courtesy
- aspiration, the desire to be better. Pretty basic but not exactly a virtue? Like intelligence, it can be employed for non-virtuous ends and often is.
- Let's say, that is the fake form of aspiration, the egoic kind whereas the real one involves a certain selflessness. Paradoxically. Or not. A self that wants to be better than it is effectively is willing to destroy itself in order for something better to emerge, something other than its current self.
- or You Must Change Your Life verticality. "Anthropotechnics" are the methods, but what is his term for the goal or motivation?
- Ask Claude
- There are several distinct terms Sloterdijk uses, and it's worth clarifying which level you're asking about — the structure of the drive vs. the telos:
- **"Vertical tension" (Vertikalspannung)** is his most pervasive term for the motivating force itself.
- Sloterdijk contends that human beings are always subject to "vertical tensions" in all periods and in all cultural areas: "Wherever one encounters human beings, they are embedded in achievement fields and status classes."
- "You must change your life!" means: you must pay attention to your inner vertical axis and judge how the pull from its upper pole affects you. It is not walking upright that makes humans human; it is rather the incipient awareness of the inner gradient.
- "Metanoia" is his term for the goal-state or turning-point that anthropotechnics aims at.
- Modernity for Sloterdijk appears torn between its attempt to expand and democratize the life of practice, and the dilution of its vertical dimension — i.e., the prospect of a radical transformation, a metanoia, a leap to the most improbable as the condition of possibility of any asceticism.
- Sloterdijk describes the imperative itself as "the absolute imperative — the quintessential metanoetic command."
- "Self-surpassing" (or self-exceeding / self-transcendence) is how commentators gloss the underlying drive.
- Sloterdijk refers in general terms to the self-surpassing tendencies of the human animal, or its perfectionist aspirations.
- The human type shaped by all this has its own name too:
- Sloterdijk gives many names to the species whose work is precisely this "self-shaping through practice," including Homo repetitivus, Homo artista, and Homo immunologicus — a human-in-training who is a student of self-disciplines and an athlete in pursuit of anthropotechnics.
- So the most precise answer to your question: if anthropotechnics names the methods, then metanoia (radical self-transformation, a "turning") is Sloterdijk's term for the goal, and vertical tension is his term for the motivating structure that makes the whole enterprise feel obligatory.
- equanimity upekkhā The most basic Buddhist virtue according to ZMBM. Not something I'd list on my own but I can see how it works as a kind of root.
- empathetic joy (muditā) also from the Buddhists, and here I don't feel I have any idea. I'm all for joy and empathy, how do they work together? Maybe it's something like the joy parents feel in the joy of their children.
- Ask Claude
- Your parental intuition is exactly right — it's actually the canonical example. Here's a full picture:
Mudita — Empathetic/Sympathetic Joy
- Mudita is a dharmic concept of joy, particularly a sympathetic or vicarious joy — the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people's well-being.
- It means taking joy in others' happiness and is the opposite of jealousy and envy. It is one of the "four immeasurables," the four highest qualities of the heart (brahmaviharas).
- The other three are loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), and equanimity (upekkha). A useful frame for how they relate:
- Metta is the ground — goodwill toward all. Karuna is metta when it meets pain; mudita is metta when it meets joy.
Your parental example is canonical
- The traditional paradigmatic example of this mind-state is the attitude of a parent observing a growing child's accomplishments and successes — but it must not be confounded with pride, since the person feeling mudita must not have any interest or direct benefit from the accomplishments of the other.
- That last clause is the key refinement: parental joy gets you most of the way there, but the Buddhist version strips out any residual possessiveness or ownership.
What makes it hard
- Mudita is traditionally regarded as the most difficult to cultivate of the four immeasurables.
- The reason is structural:
- it does seem easier to feel compassion for someone who is suffering than to experience sympathetic joy over a person's good fortune.
- Suffering pulls us toward others; others' success can push us away through comparison. The direct opponents of mudita are:
- Far enemies (obvious opposites):
- jealousy or envy (irshya) and boredom or indifference (arati), which interfere with experiencing empathetic joy in response to others' successes and well-being.
- Near enemy (a subtle counterfeit):
- exhilaration — described as a grasping at pleasant experience out of a sense of insufficiency or lack.
- This is the person who gets too swept up in others' good fortune, vicariously feeding their own excitement rather than genuinely celebrating the other person.
A deeper interpretation
- Some teachers push beyond "feeling happy for others" toward something more active.
- To have mudita one has to be able to recognize conditionality — the way certain conditions and actions give rise to suffering, while others free us from it. Mudita is therefore at least in part a wisdom practice. Just as compassion is metta meeting suffering, mudita is metta meeting skillfulness.
- In other words, you're not just glad someone got lucky; you're rejoicing in the good choices and good qualities that led to their flourishing.
Why it matters for the whole system
- Mudita is the essential balancing force. Without it, compassion can become heavy and lead to burnout. Without it, loving-kindness can feel incomplete — only wishing for happiness but not celebrating it when it arises. Mudita brings lightness, celebration, and connection to the spiritual path.
- So the concept is more precise than "joy + empathy" blended together. It's specifically the joy that arises in response to another's joy or flourishing — and the practice is about expanding that response from the easy cases (your children, your close friends) all the way to strangers and even adversaries.
- Any pantheon of gods could be mined for more. What about The Zoas