Areté

« Aretē A pivotal term of ancient Greek ethics, aretē is conventionally translated 'virtue', but is more properly 'goodness' - the quality of being a good human being.

Philosophy came, largely through Plato, to recognize four cardinal aretai: wisdom (phronēsis), moderation (sōphrosynē), courage (andreia) and justice (dikaiosynē).

Others, considered either coordinate with these or their sub-species, included piety, liberality and magnanimity.

The term generated many controversies.

For example, is aretē a state of intellect, character or both? Does it possess intrinsic or only instrumental value? Is it teachable, god-given or otherwise acquired? Is it one thing or many? If many, how are they differentiated, and can you have one without having all? In ordinary Greek, aretē functions as the abstract noun correlated with agathos, meaning 'good', and 'goodness' is in most contexts a correct translation. However, 'goodness', unlike aretē, lacks a plural, and so requires awkward periphrases such as 'kinds of goodness' or 'ways of being good'.

Hence 'virtue(s)' (sometimes 'excellence(s)') is usually preferred.

Similarly, 'vice(s)' is favoured for its opposite, kakia, more correctly rendered 'badness'.

In early Greek, aretē has no narrowly moral use, but is contextualized to mean prowess in any field - athletic, military, political, and so on.

Given the predominance of male values, it often approximates to 'valour'.

This is reflected in its eventual Latinization as virtus, literally 'manliness', which has made 'virtue' the almost inevitable modern rendering.

A specifically moral use of aretē emerged gradually in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The centrality of civic obligations in the Greek (especially the Athenian) value system gave cooperative virtues such as justice and courage a special standing, even before philosophers like Socrates and Plato began to scrutinize them.

Many of the Sophists professed to teach aretē to the young (see Sophists).

How if at all it could be acquired was a much-debated issue: would it be by teaching, practice, nature, divine favour or sheer luck? Whereas modern virtue ethics tends to stress the culture-specific character of virtue implicit in such a background (see Virtue ethics), Greek thought rarely acknowledged this, and sometimes explicitly denied it.

The dominant concern was to investigate goodness as a universal human property or ideal.

Aretē is above all functional goodness.

In Plato, Republic I, Socrates investigates the 'goodness' of a soul by direct analogy with that of an eye: just as the aretē of an eye is what enables it successfully to perform its function, seeing, so the aretē of a soul is what enables it successfully to perform its own function, living.

Aristotle's conception of aretē is founded on the analogous idea that there is a distinctively human function, which can be performed better or worse (see Aristotle §21).

All this points to the intimate link between aretē and 'living well', a regular equivalent of 'happiness' (see Eudaimonia).

One recurring issue is the nature of that link.

Socratic thought tended to make aretē and happiness extensionally equivalent.

Aristotle's modification was to locate happiness in the active use of virtue, not its mere possession.

A third tradition, sketched in Plato's Protagoras and later fully developed in Epicureanism, gives aretē purely instrumental value, as the prudential skill of maximizing the one intrinsic good, pleasure (see Epicureanism §10).

Socrates, on Plato's usual portrayal of him, has little sympathy with this instrumentalist account, but does favour one feature of it, the identification of aretē with some sort of knowledge or wisdom.

Nothing is valuable unless used wisely; hence wisdom is the only underivatively valuable thing.

In Plato's Protagoras, Protagoras himself considers the political aretai - justice, courage and so on - to be innate human potentialities which can be realized by training.

He sees them as separate capacities, so that someone might become, for example, brave but not wise.

This separability assumption may well have been widespread, but philosophers in the wake of Socrates formed a united front against it.

In the Protagoras, Socrates treats aretē as a single thing, never using the plural, and argues that justice, moderation and so on are not its 'parts' (perhaps meaning species?) but coreferential terms for it.

This strong thesis of the Unit of Virtue was developed in the later Socratic tradition, especially by the Stoic, Ariston of Chios (§3), who maintained that 'justice', 'courage' and so on are all names for a single state of psychic health, differentiated purely by the contexts to which its possessor responds (apportionment, danger…).

A version of the same thesis - in effect, that there is just one way of being a good person - is applied by Socrates in Plato's Meno to gender and class distinctions: the aretē of men and women, free and slaves, is one and the same; they are all good in the same way.

Others considered the several aretai to be essentially distinct states of the person, but still inseparable.

For mainstream Stoicism, this arose from the analysis of them as exact sciences, each with its own defining concerns, but made interdependent by their shared stock of theorems (see Stoicism §16).

In the case of Plato and Aristotle, it was arrived at by concluding, contra Socrates, that the soul has emotive components as well as reason, and that moral aretai consist in a properly balanced relation between emotion and reason.

Consequently the various aretai admit of complex analyses which enable them to be more clearly differentiated.

For Plato in Republic IV, there are three psychic components - one rational, one spirited or competitive, one appetitive - and each of the cardinal aretai consists in a different relation between them.

For Aristotle, each aretē is an educated disposition to make choices which strike a mean between excess and deficiency, especially in the relevant emotions; the rational component lies in the 'practical wisdom' (phronēsis) with which the choices must be informed (see Aristotle §§22-4).

The conception of aretē varied with the conception of human good.

In his more other-worldly moods, especially in the Phaedo, Plato located true aretē in the soul's purification from bodily concerns and return to its natural discarnate state of purity and wisdom.

This emphasis on intellectual (as distinct from moral) aretē, later taken up in earnest by Neoplatonism (see Neoplatonism) is also reflected in Aristotle.

To aretai of character ('ethical' aretai) Aristotle adds intellectual aretai, including not just practical wisdom but also pure wisdom (sophia).

The highest form of happiness, the life of contemplation, is achieved by concentration on the latter.. »