ARISTOTLE
A virtue is not a feeling.
It is a hexis.
Not innate. Not learned from a single lecture. ἕξις is the word: a settled disposition, formed by what you do over and over. As builders become builders by building, just people become just by doing just acts.
So Aristotle: virtue is acquired the way crafts are acquired. By practice. Not by knowing the rule. Not even by wanting to. By doing it, again, and then again.
We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him. ... We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.
The thirtieth time you keep your temper, you have changed. Not because the situation changed — because you did.
a note The often-quoted line — "we are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit" — is not Aristotle's. It is Will Durant's paraphrase in The Story of Philosophy (1926). Aristotle's nearest formulation is the passage above.
What is the work of a human being?
Every craft has its ἔργον. A flautist's is to play well, a carpenter's to build well. The good of the thing is doing its work — well.
The human ergon is activity of soul in accordance with virtue. Eleven virtues, each a mean — hover a case to see what it stands between.
- Courage ἀνδρεία
- Temperance σωφροσύνη
- Liberality ἐλευθεριότης
- Magnificence μεγαλοπρέπεια
- Magnanimity μεγαλοψυχία
- Ambition φιλοτιμία
- Patience πραότης
- Truthfulness ἀλήθεια
- Wittiness εὐτραπελία
- Friendliness φιλία
- Modesty αἰδώς
So the human good is ἐνέργεια ψυχῆς κατ’ ἀρετήν — activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Not a state we possess, but a thing we do.
The mean is not arithmetic.
For one person, two loaves are too few and ten are too many: trainers do not, on that account, hand out six. Six is the mean only for the dish, not for the eater.
What the right amount is depends on who you are, what the situation is, what is at stake. This is why ethics cannot be the science Plato wanted it to be — a deduction from definitions. It is a craft of particulars, and the craftsman's name is φρόνησις.
Practical wisdom. The perception that finds the mean in the case in front of you. Not a rule. A perception of cases.
"The decision rests with perception."
— 1109b 23
Chapter VII — Akrasia
VII · Akrasia
Socrates thought it impossible — to see the good clearly is to do it.
Aristotle knew better. You see the good whole, and still — ἀκρασία — you do the other thing.
Ἀριστοτέλης