The word that I have been translating as ‘excellence’ (arete) is often, and quite properly, translated as ‘virtue’.1 This rendering can, however, give a misleading impression of the question to which Plato’s Socrates urges his interlocutors’ attention. First of all, as it is used in English today, ‘virtue’ tends to refer to a character trait – a feature of a person’s psychology. That this is so, however, is partly the intellectual legacy of Plato and Aristotle, at whose hands arete comes to be defined as just such an internal phenomenon: ‘the condition of one’s soul (Rep. 444dl3-e2; cf. Ap. 29e).2 This definition, however, is a theoretical refinement of the notion of arete understood by Socrates’ interlocutors.
Arete, as Plato’s and Socrates’ contemporaries understand it, can certainly apply to such recognizable virtues as courage, wisdom, self-restraint (sophrosune), and justice (although the last two are controversial for those attracted to the Homeric ideal). We regularly find these four virtues listed as the four ‘kinds of arete’ in Plato (e.g. Meno 74a, Pr. 329d-330a, La. 198a, Rep. 428a, Laws 963a-964b). Socrates’ interlocutors, however, are more likely to understand courage, self-restraint and justice as patterns of behaviour than they are to conceive of them as psychological conditions.3 Indeed it takes some coaching (La. 191e-192b) for Socrates to get Laches to agree that virtue is a ‘power’ (dunamis 192b6) of the soul. In any case, these interlocutors clearly understand arete to encompass many things other than the cardinal virtues. Such things as noble birth, bodily strength, good looks, social status, wealth, and success in competition are generally considered by Greeks of Plato’s day to be very important aspects of arete.4 These can in no way be understood as psychological traits. Thus Meno answers Socrates’ question, ‘What is arete?’, with the proposal that arete is ‘ruling others’ (Meno 73d) or ‘acquiring gold and silver’ (78c6-7). However unimpressive these proposals may be as ideals of human excellence, it is clear that Meno does not take arete to be a state of character. Similarly, the disappointed sons of Aristides and Thucydides who want their own sons to achieve the arete of their illustrious grandfathers have in mind not the characters of these famous statesmen, but their great accomplishments.
Those whom Plato depicts as questing for excellence are primarily interested in improving not their characters but their lives. As a result, the natural way for them to understand Socrates’ question, ‘What is excellence?’ is as a normative issue about how one should live, rather than a psychological issue about states of character. This normative question is a central motif in dialogues such as the Gorgias and the Republic, which attempt to resolve the competing claims of the life that looks good by [11] Homeric standards, and the life that meets the norms of a functioning polis. The issue is typically articulated as a choice between lives: the life of the self-aggrandizing strong man unshackled by the political norm of equality (isonomia) among citizens, as opposed to the life of the person who restrains his pursuit of worldly advantage in the light of the norms of justice.5
The dispute is explicitly articulated by Callicles in the Gorgias as a question about which sort of life is excellence (arete, 492c5), although it is more regularly presented in the dialogue as a question about what life is happy (472c-e, 493d, 507a-508b; cf. 492c). Alternatively put, the question concerns ‘how one should live’ (492d5, 500c) or the correct way to live (491e, 487a; cf. 461c, 481c), or ‘the best way to live’ (hos arista bioie, 512e5; cf. Rep. 344e). Thus Socrates’ question, ‘What is excellence?,’ inquires into the best way to live.6
Modern readers of Plato are prone to ask, best in what way? Does Plato have in mind the life of the best sort of person (a good person), or the life that is best for the person who leads it (a good life)? The answer is that he has both in mind. The two value terms associated with excellence in Plato’s discussion are the ‘kalon’ (fine, admirable) and the ‘agathon’ (good, beneficial). It is tempting for readers today to assume that kalon (the fine or admirable) applies to the life of the good person, while the notion of good (agathon) applies to the life that is good for a person.7 Polus in fact attempts to make such a distinction, in the dialogue Gorgias, in support of his claim that the life of injustice can be superior to that of the just person. While the unjust life, he admits, may be more shameful (aischron, the opposite of kalon), it is still a better life (more agathon) (Gorg. 474c-d). However, Polus makes no headway with this improvisation, which gets him involved in a muddle (474d-475c; cf. 477b-479c).8 Moreover, he receives no support for this argumentative strategy from any other character in the dialogue, including the most strident defender of the glories of ‘injustice’. Callicles, who takes up the debate with Socrates after Polus has proved inept, explicitly rejects the latter’s attempt to drive a wedge between the kalon and the agathon: ‘whatever is worse is also more shameful’ (Gorg. 483a; cf. H. Map 296e).
In this respect, it is Callicles, not Polus, who is more faithful to the original notion of excellence. While the ambitious young people (and their parents) portrayed by Plato understand excellence to be admirable and fine (kalon), something they would be ashamed to lack,9 they also consider the excellent life to be flourishing, successful, and prosperous – that is, good for the person who lives it. The Greek term for such success in life is ‘eudaimonia’ (‘happiness’ or well-being), synonymous with ‘doing well’ (eu prattein, Euthd. 280b6). This is what parents wish for their children (Lys. 207e), and it is what we all want for ourselves (Euthd. 278e, 282a; Meno 78a).10 [12] In dialogues whose central motif is the quest for excellence, this quest is not distinguished from the pursuit of happiness. Thus Callicles sums up the choice between lives in the Gorgias as a question about which life is ‘excellence and happiness’ (arete te kai eudaimonia – Gorg. 492c5-6; cf. 507c). After spending many pages in the Euthydemus determining what a person needs in order to be happy (278e-282d), Socrates refers to this as what will make a person ‘a happy man and a good one’ (282e). Indeed, the very thing that Meno identifies as excellence – the power to acquire good things such as wealth and influence (Meno 77b-78b) – appears in the Euthydemus as a popular conception of happiness (278e-279b). Socrates’ interlocutors readily agree or assume that to harm someone is to make him less excellent (Rep. 335b; Meno 91c).11 In general, any proposal in Plato’s dialogues about what excellence is must pass the test that it be good for a person, as Socrates regularly reminds his interlocutors.12 Indeed the dispute in the Republic, whether justice is a virtue (Rep. 348e, 350d, 351a), turns on whether justice is good for the just person.
This is not to say that the notion of arete at play simply collapses into the notion of self-interest, as we understand it. Granted, Plato’s intended readership and Socrates’ interlocutors are disinclined to judge a course of action admirable (kalon) unless they think it is beneficial to the person who performs it (La. 192d; cf. H. Maj. 296e). Indeed, they are likely to think it admirable precisely because it is beneficial (Rep. 364a) and shameful to the extent that it harms the agent (Ap. 28b, Gorg. 486a-b; cf. 509c). On the other hand, they are also disinclined to think something is good unless they also think it is admirable. Hence a popular song about the greatest goods does not count wealth as a good unless it is honestly acquired (Gorg 451e; cf. Solon I, 3-8). Most people, Socrates reports, even if they are inclined to think pleasure is good, do not consider shameful pleasures to be good (Pr. 351c). Callicles is a case in point (Gorg. 494e-495a, 499b).
It is important not to confuse this background assumption about the relation between excellence and happiness, which is shared by Socrates and all of his interlocutors other than Polus, with the disputed normative thesis about justice debated in the Gorgias and the Republic. In these dialogues, Socrates addresses the scepticism of those who doubt that justice (not arete in general) is good for a person – that is, whether it is a genuine excellence (Rep. 348d, 351a). This controversial thesis concerns the choice between lives: is the life of justice better than the life of successful injustice? The uncontroversial background assumption, by contrast, has no normative implications. It implies nothing about which lives are admirable and good, but functions instead as a constraint on how one is to form and integrate judgments about what is admirable and who is happy: if something is admirable, it has to be good, and if good, admirable.13 If it seems to you (as it does to Polus) that justice is admirable but that it [13] may not be good for a person, the background assumption constrains you to reject either the judgment that justice is admirable, or the standards of well-being according to which it is not beneficial. In the normative dispute that pervades the Socratic dialogues, Plato portrays Socrates’ opponents as taking the first option while Socrates takes the second.
The modern response to the impression that justice is admirable but not necessarily beneficial has been to endorse both conjuncts of the impression. But this is implicitly to reject the background constraint that operates in the Platonic dialogues. The modern ethical tradition has concluded that the goodness of persons is of a different kind than the goodness of lives. This is the route to the modern distinction between morality and self-interest, but it is not the route that Plato takes. Plato shows no interest in investigating ethical matters outside the scope of the assumption that what is admirable and what is beneficial in human life converge – hence the short shrift given to Polus’s proposal to the contrary (Gorg. 483a-b; cf. Rep. 348e-349a).
To see why this assumption about the good life and the good person seems natural and plausible to Plato’s contemporaries, consider the parallel case of health. Socrates identifies it as both the excellence (arete) of the body, and its well-being (eudaimonia) (Gorg. 479a-c, 478b-c). Even to modern philosophical sensibilities, this equivalence should seem quite straightforward. Plato and his contemporaries assume that the excellence and happiness of a human being are related in just the same way. What is admirable in a human being is expected to coincide with what is good for that person. In the dialogues of Plato, we find the inquiry into the good life conducted in the optimism (to modern views, perhaps naive optimism) that these two types of value converge. (MAYER, Susan Sauvé. ANCIENT ETHICS. Londo: Routledge, 2008, p. 10-13)
- The English term ‘virtue’ comes from the Latin ‘virtus’, which Cicero uses to translate the Greek ‘arete’, even though the Latin term in non-philosophical contexts connotes only a particular kind of excellence, namely, ‘manliness’ (from the noun ‘vir’ man).[↩]
- On the development of an internalized conception of excellence in authors before Plato, see Kahn 1998: 32-7.[↩]
- Glaucon and Adeimantus conceive of justice as a pattern of behaviour in Republic II. Most of the proffered definitions of the ‘virtues’ offered by Socrates’ interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues cite types of behaviour, although the interlocutors agree readily enough to Socrates’ usual suggestion that a virtue is a power (dunamis) of the psyche (Charm. 159b-160d, La. 191d-e). It seems that the generic notion arete is more likely to be considered an activity or life, while the particular kinds of arete (courage, temperance, etc.) are more easily used for or taken as powers of the soul (internal psychology) – although Heraclitus (sixth-fifth century bce) uses arete for temperate activity (Diels and Kranz 1952, B 112).[↩]
- On the importance of birth and social status, see Homer, Odyssey 17.322-3; Plato, Eutbd. 306d-e; Rep. 618b-619b; cf. Pr. 316c. On wealth as a criterion for a good reputation, see Meno 70a.[↩]
- The choice of lives: Gorg. 472e-473d, 483b-484c, 488b, 491e-494a; Rep. 360d-362a, 617d-620d. On equality (isonomia), see Gorg. 483c, 489a.[↩]
- In choice of lives in the Myth of Er in Republic X, Socrates characterizes a life (bios) as ‘worthy’ (chrestos) or ‘vile’ (poneros) (Rep. 618c4-5), using terms which more usually apply to persons. But the popular criteria surveyed here for making this choice (618c8-d4; cf. 618a7-bl) are the standard measures of the happy life: wealth, power, etc.[↩]
- But when Meno proposes that excellence consists in acquiring ‘fine things’ (kala, Meno 77b), the things he has in mind as ‘fine’ (kala) come from the standard popular list of goods (agatha): wealth, etc. (78c).[↩]
- At Rep. 348e-349a, Socrates indicates that it is easy to refute someone who (like Polus) claims that injustice is more advantageous, but still more shameful, than justice. In Laws, the Dorian interlocutors (Megillus and Cleinias) espouse a version of Polus’ claim (662a), which the Athenian takes to be evidence of their faulty education (paideia).[↩]
- Excellence is fine and admirable (kalon, Pr. 349e; Charm. 159c, 160e; La. 192c, 193d). Lysimachus and Melesias are ashamed to lack excellence (La. 179c6). Thus the fact that being a sophist is considered shameful (Pr. 312a) casts doubt on the sophists as suitable teachers of excellence.[↩]
- cf. Gorg. 467c-468c and Meno 77c-78a.[↩]
- Conversely, to benefit people, which is what the true ruler does to the citizens (Rep. 342e), is to make them better or more excellent (Gorg. 502e-503a; 515a-517c, 519b-520e; cf. La. 186c-d).[↩]
- Excellence must be good for its possessor: Euthd. 279a-b, Meno 87e, Charm. 160e-161a, 175d-176a; La. 192c-d; cf. Rep. 336d; Pr. 360b. On this guiding assumption, see Irwin 1977: 39, 1995: 48-9.[↩]
- We might say that the shared assumption is part of the formal conception of excellence, while the view that justice is an excellence is a substantive conception of excellence. A parallel point is often made about the two sorts of claims Aristotle makes about happiness in ΕΝ I.[↩]