Aristotle's painful path to virtue

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 141-162

  Curzer, Howard J ^a  

^a TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 4444358745     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2002.0026     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. All quotations from Aristotle are taken from The Complete Works of Aristotle, J. Barnes, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) except that I translate arête as "virtue" rather than "excellence." Parenthetical citations are to the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) unless otherwise specified.
2. What exactly is the explanation of why certain acts are virtuous? How does teaching provide this explanation? What exactly are virtuous passions? How does music train our passions? These difficult questions are beyond the scope of this paper. See P. Crittenden, "Aristotle: Reason and the Passions," Learning To Be Moral (London: Humanities Press International, 1990), 115-6;
3. Depew, "Politics, Music, and Contemplation in Aristotle's Ideal State," in D. Keyt and F. Miller, eds., A Companion to Aristotle's Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 368-9;
4. C. Lord, Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 85ff;
5. J. McDowell, "Deliberation and Moral Development in Aristotle's Ethics," in S. Engstrom and J. Whiting, eds., Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 31;
6. C. D. C. Reeve, "Aristotelian Education," in A. O. Rorty ed., Philosophers on Education (London: Routledge, 1998), 61.
7. M. Burnyeat, "Aristotle on Learning to be Good," in A. O. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 69-92.
8. The claim that one can acquire moral truths beyond our own experience is affirmed by R. Hursthouse in "Moral Habituation," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6 (1988): 215, n. 15, and denied by Reeve (Reeve, op. cit., 53).
9. Julia Annas writes off these passages as cases where Aristotle is ignoring his own considered view and merely expressing the simpler, popular view that contrasts the lives of virtue and pleasure (J. Annas, "Aristotle on Pleasure and Goodness," in A. O. Rorty ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980], 290-2).
10. S. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 122, n. 46.
11. MacIntyre, making a similar move, cites chess (A. MacIntyre, After Virtue [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981], 188).
12. Hardie compares virtue acquisition to learning to skate (W. F. R. Hardie, Aristotle's Ethical Theory [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980], 110-4).
13. J. Coker, "On Being Nemsetikos as a Mean," Journal of Philosophical Research 17 (1992): 61-91;
14. H. Curzer, "Aristotle's Account of the Virtue of Justice," Apeiron 28 (1995): 233-6.
15. For an excellent discussion of "the many" in Aristotle, see J. Garrett, "The Moral Status of the Many," Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1993): 171-89. Garrett does not recognize the generous-minded as a separate category, and seems to think of the vicious as a subset of the many.
16. Some commentators take Aristotle's statement to mean only that virtuous people perform virtuous acts because they believe them to be virtuous. See S. Broadie, op. cit., 87; J.
17. Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 170).
18. Other commentators take Aristotle's statement to mean only that virtuous people perform the acts as ends in themselves. See R. Kraut, "Aristotle on Choosing Virtue for Itself," Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie 58 (1976): 235-8;
19. Thus, "shame" seems too broad a translation; "guilt" or "remorse" seem to be better. Unfortunately, guilt can only be appropriately felt for one's past acts, but as I shall explain below, aidōs can be appropriately felt about contemplated future acts. One can feel aidōs with respect to an act with which one is toying, a fear of becoming guilty. Lacking an English term narrow enough to focus on guilt, but broad enough to allow revulsion toward potential acts, I shall leave aidōs untranslated. (See D. Cairns, Aidōs: the Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 14-20, 415-8;
20. B. Williams, Shame and Necessity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 79-90.)
21. Eugene Garver finds it puzzling that in the Rhetoric Aristotle attributes to the youth "a concern for the noble [that] coexists with domination by emotion and excess" (E. Garver, "Growing Older and Wiser with Aristotle: Rhetoric II. 12-4
22. and Moral Development," in J. Cleary and W. Wians, eds., Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 10 [1994], 176).
23. Stephen Leighton suggests that fear does tell us that there is danger. See Leighton, "Aristotle's Courageous Passions," Phronesis 33 (1988): 90-4.
24. He could. See K. Kristjansson, "Self-respect, Megalopsychia, and Moral Education," Journal of Moral Education 27 (1998): 5-17.