Meliorating Virtues
Openness
Make room for an unfamiliar person or possibility.
In this imagined scene, at a neighborhood recipe exchange, a visitor brings a leaf-wrapped snack. The host asks what is inside and accepts an offered look, keeping an unfamiliar food from becoming an entrance exam.
Understanding Openness
Openness is a receptive orientation toward unfamiliar people, experiences and ways of doing ordinary things. It makes an encounter possible before deciding what to adopt. The host at the recipe exchange asks and looks rather than requiring the visitor’s snack to pass a familiar test. Receptivity gives curiosity a hospitable setting.
Read this collection’s historical contextOpenness: finding the balance
A visitor brings a leaf-wrapped snack to a recipe exchange.
Too little of the fitting response
Familiarity required
The host dismisses it before asking what it is.
A fitting response
Receptive encounter
They welcome an explanation and an offered look.
A distortion of the purpose
Experience imposed
They require everyone to taste it as proof of being open.
An encounter expands possibility when people retain the choice of how far to enter it.
Openness gives…
New participants have room to contribute something of their own. Familiar groups can discover useful or enjoyable possibilities without first asking everyone to become alike. The encounter can remain worthwhile even when no new taste or practice is adopted.
What Openness makes possible
An unfamiliar contribution can enlarge a shared occasion. Someone explains a wrapper, a custom or an unusual tool; another person asks a sincere question; both gain a conversation they could not have rehearsed. Openness allows first impressions to become beginnings rather than completed judgments.
Openness in ordinary life
- Invite a new participant to explain a preferred way of doing a shared task.
- Ask about an unfamiliar ordinary custom without making its holder defend a whole culture.
- Try a harmless new format when the people involved freely agree.
Nearby virtues, different work
Tolerance permits difference to remain; Openness makes a receptive approach toward it. Open-mindedness concerns fair consideration of reasons and beliefs. Curiosity seeks understanding. This reading emphasizes making a person or possibility welcome enough to be encountered.
Openness and its counterfeits
Boundaryless acceptance is a counterfeit of Openness: a host insists that everyone taste an unfamiliar food despite their refusal. Genuine openness offers an encounter with choice. Treating a visitor as an exotic exhibit is another counterfeit; curiosity must still meet a person.
How to cultivate Openness
Notice the point where unfamiliarity becomes an automatic refusal. Replace one assumption with a respectful question. Let the person choose what to explain. Explore at a scale that allows an easy decline, and evaluate the actual experience rather than its novelty alone.
Try it today
In a comfortable ordinary setting, ask a willing person about one unfamiliar preference or practice. Listen to their account without requiring them to persuade you.
Keep the practice proportionate
You may decline food, activities, disclosure or contact. Openness does not require experiments involving health, essential resources or personal safety.
A question worth returning to
Have I left the person room to explain only what they choose?
Quotations and further reading
These historical passages offer different philosophical and literary perspectives. Each note identifies its setting, point of comparison and relevant limits; none supplies an official definition of this virtue.
Such being the partial character of prevailing opinions, even when resting on a true foundation; every opinion which embodies somewhat of the portion of truth which the common opinion omits, ought to be considered precious, with whatever amount of error and confusion that truth may be blended.
CHAPTER II. OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION. · Walter Scott Publishing edition with W. L. Courtney introduction dated 1901; selected passages from Mill’s main text, first published 1859.
Mill values a view that contains truth omitted by the prevailing account. An unfamiliar contribution can matter without being wholly correct or immediately adopted.
The traditions and customs of other people are, to a certain extent, evidence of what their experience has taught them; presumptive evidence, and as such, have a claim to his deference: but, in the first place, their experience may be too narrow; or they may not have interpreted it rightly.
CHAPTER III. OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING. · Walter Scott Publishing edition with W. L. Courtney introduction dated 1901; selected passages from Mill’s main text, first published 1859.
Mill gives custom a provisional claim as evidence of others’ experience. Openness can hear that experience while keeping judgment about its reach and interpretation.
I shall love any one that can unplume me, that is, by clearness of understanding and judgment, and by the sole distinction of the force and beauty of the discourse.
CHAPTER X——OF BOOKS · Charles Cotton translation, William Carew Hazlitt edition, 1877
Montaigne welcomes someone who can challenge him through clear judgment. The comic image of being unplumed makes revision an encounter rather than an attack on rank.
Indeed, it is a consciousness of the illuminating and dynamic value of this wider and more thorough human experience which explains in no small degree that new curiosity regarding human life which has more of a moral basis than an intellectual one.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics
INTRODUCTION · , exact-print and territory review held.
Addams describes curiosity about human life with a moral basis. Receptivity concerns meeting people’s experience, rather than collecting them as entertaining specimens.
Different things delight different people; but it is my delight to keep the ruling faculty sound without turning away either from any man or from any of the things which happen to men, but looking at and receiving all with welcome eyes and using everything according to its value.
Marcus Aurelius · The Thoughts (Meditations)
BOOK VIII. · George Long; linked edition
Marcus describes receiving people and events with welcome attention while judging their value. The welcome is an orientation toward encounter, not uncritical approval.
He was of an active nature and yet fond of learning, and he was not ashamed to ask and learn of his inferiors!
Confucius (Analects, transmitted sayings) · The Analects
BOOK V. KUNG-YE CH'ANG. · James Legge; transmitted dialogues, attributed speakers identified
Speaker: Confucius, transmitted saying in the Analects
The Analects praises willingness to learn from people described as socially inferior. The hierarchy is historical language, not this edition’s classification; the insight challenges rank as a barrier to learning.
To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own, and it is the discovery of ourselves outside us which makes us glad.
Rabindranath Tagore · Sadhana: The Realisation of Life
SOUL CONSCIOUSNESS · Linked 1916 Macmillan text; first publication 1913. Chapter VI translated by Surendra Nath Tagore; other English translation contributions acknowledged in the preface.
Tagore links understanding with discovering a connection beyond oneself. The comparison gives an unfamiliar encounter room to become meaningful without making sameness a prerequisite.
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