The highest virtue, according to Aristotle was intellectual contemplation. In addition, there are an additional 12 virtues that can also be attributed to Aristotle and they are as follows:.
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Wittiness: At the midpoint between buffoonery and boorishness, this is the virtue of a good sense of humor. Friendliness: While being friendly might not seem like a moral virtue, Aristotle claims friendship is a vital part of a life well lived.
This virtue lies between not being friendly at all and being too friendly towards too many people. Shame: The midpoint between being too shy and being shameless. Justice: The virtue of dealing fairly with others. It lies between selfishness and selflessness. This virtue can also be applied in different situations and has a whole chapter dedicated to the various forms it can take. Each virtue is the midpoint between a vice of deficiency red and excess blue.
The virtuous person will tend to the center. Aristotle sees ethics as more of an art than a science, and his explanations purposely lack specifics. We have to learn what the right approach to a situation is as part of our moral development. This makes virtue ethics more flexible than deontological systems of ethics but also harder to use since we have to determine when we can lie, get angry, or be prideful on our own.
Keep in mind that this list was designed for upper class, Greek men who had a decent education and a fair amount of luck. The virtue of magnificence, for example, would be impossible for a person of limited means to practice. Virtue, therefore, manifests itself in action. More explicitly, an action counts as virtuous, according to Aristotle, when one holds oneself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own sake.
This stable equilibrium of the soul is what constitutes character. In the Nichomachean Ethics , Aristotle repeatedly states that virtue is a mean. The mean is a state of clarification and apprehension in the midst of pleasures and pains that allows one to judge what seems most truly pleasant or painful. This active state of the soul is the condition in which all the powers of the soul are at work in concert.
Achieving good character is a process of clearing away the obstacles that stand in the way of the full efficacy of the soul. For Aristotle, moral virtue is the only practical road to effective action. What the person of good character loves with right desire and thinks of as an end with right reason must first be perceived as beautiful.
Hence, the virtuous person sees truly and judges rightly, since beautiful things appear as they truly are only to a person of good character. It is only in the middle ground between habits of acting and principles of action that the soul can allow right desire and right reason to make their appearance, as the direct and natural response of a free human being to the sight of the beautiful. Mind-body problem. A faculty seminar I attended a few years ago was mired in the opinion that Aristotle thinks the good life is one of mindless routine.
Can it really be that Aristotle thought life is lived best when thinking and choosing are eliminated? On its face this belief makes no sense. It is partly a confusion between an effect and one of its causes. If this is what sticks in your memory, and leads you to that conclusion, then the cure is easy, since habits are not the only effects of habituation, and a thing that makes all the difference is indispensable but not necessarily the only cause of what it produces.
We will work through this thought in a moment, but first we need to notice that another kind of influence may be at work when you recall what Aristotle says about habit, and another kind of medicine may be needed against it.
Are you thinking that no matter how we analyze the effects of habituation, we will never get around the fact that Aristotle plainly says that virtues are habits? He says that moral virtue is a hexis. Hippocrates Apostle, and others, translate hexis as habit, but that is not at all what it means. The trouble, as so often in these matters, is the intrusion of Latin.
The Latin habitus is a perfectly good translation of the Greek hexis , but if that detour gets us to habit in English we have lost our way. In fact, a hexis is pretty much the opposite of a habit. Socrates makes the point that knowledge can never be a mere passive possession, stored in the memory the way birds can be put in cages.
Socrates thus suggests that, whatever knowledge is, it must have the character of a hexis in requiring the effort of concentrating or paying attention. A hexis is an active condition, a state in which something must actively hold itself, and that is what Aristotle says a moral virtue is.
Some translators make Aristotle say that virtue is a disposition, or a settled disposition. In De Anima , when Aristotle speaks of the effect produced in us by an object of sense perception, he says this is not a disposition diathesis but a hexis. In Book VII of the Physics, Aristotle says much the same thing about the way children start to learn: they are not changed, he says, nor are they trained or even acted upon in any way, but they themselves get straight into an active state when time or adults help them settle down out of their native condition of disorder and distraction.
We somehow set them free to speak, and give them a particular language to do it in, but they—Mr. Everyone at St. In neither account is it possible for anyone to train us, as Gorgias has habituated Meno into the mannerisms of a knower. Habits can be strong but they never go deep. Authentic knowledge does engage the soul in its depths, and with this sort of knowing Aristotle links virtue.
In the passage cited from Book VII of the Physics , he says that, like knowledge, virtues are not imposed on us as alterations of what we are; that would be, he says, like saying we alter a house when we put a roof on it.
In the Categories , knowledge and virtue are the two examples he gives of what hexis means 8b, 29 ; there he says that these active states belong in the general class of dispositions, but are distinguished by being lasting and durable. He confirms this identity by reviewing the kinds of things that are in the soul, and eliminating the feelings and impulses to which we are passive and the capacities we have by nature, but he first discovers what sort of thing a virtue is by observing that the goodness is never in the action but only in the doer.
This is an enormous claim that pervades the whole of the Ethics , and one that we need to stay attentive to. No action is good or just or courageous because of any quality in itself. Virtue manifests itself in action, Aristotle says, only when one acts while holding oneself in a certain way.
The indefinite adverb is immediately explained: an action counts as virtuous when and only when one holds oneself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own sake.
This stable equilibrium of the soul is what we mean by having character. Skinner, the psychologist most associated with the idea of behavior modification, that a class of his once trained him to lecture always from one corner of the room, by smiling and nodding whenever he approached it, but frowning and faintly shaking their heads when he moved away from it. That is the way we acquire habits. We slip into them unawares, or let them be imposed on us, or even impose them on ourselves.
A person with ever so many habits may still have no character. Habits make for repetitive and predictable behavior, but character gives moral equilibrium to a life. The difference is between a foolish consistency wholly confined to the level of acting, and a reliability in that part of us from which actions have their source.
It should now be clear though, that the habit cannot be any part of that character, and that we must try to understand how an active condition can arise as a consequence of a passive one, and why that active condition can only be attained if the passive one has come first. What we need to notice now is that there is yet another rung of the ladder below the habits.
We all start out life governed by desires and impulses. Unlike the habits, which are passive but lasting conditions, desires and impulses are passive and momentary, but they are very strong.
How can such powerful influences be overcome? But Aristotle gives pride of place to the appetite for pleasure as the passion that undermines reason. We thus have these four forms of akrasia : A impetuosity caused by pleasure, B impetuosity caused by anger, C weakness caused by pleasure D weakness caused by anger. It should be noticed that Aristotle's treatment of akrasia is heavily influenced by Plato's tripartite division of the soul in the Republic.
Plato holds that either the spirited part which houses anger, as well as other emotions or the appetitive part which houses the desire for physical pleasures can disrupt the dictates of reason and result in action contrary to reason.
The same threefold division of the soul can be seen in Aristotle's approach to this topic. Although Aristotle characterizes akrasia and enkrateia in terms of a conflict between reason and feeling, his detailed analysis of these states of mind shows that what takes place is best described in a more complicated way.
For the feeling that undermines reason contains some thought, which may be implicitly general. Perhaps what he has in mind is that pleasure can operate in either way: it can prompt action unmediated by a general premise, or it can prompt us to act on such a syllogism. By contrast, anger always moves us by presenting itself as a bit of general, although hasty, reasoning. But of course Aristotle does not mean that a conflicted person has more than one faculty of reason.
Rather his idea seems to be that in addition to our full-fledged reasoning capacity, we also have psychological mechanisms that are capable of a limited range of reasoning. When feeling conflicts with reason, what occurs is better described as a fight between feeling-allied-with-limited-reasoning and full-fledged reason. Part of us—reason—can remove itself from the distorting influence of feeling and consider all relevant factors, positive and negative.
But another part of us—feeling or emotion—has a more limited field of reasoning—and sometimes it does not even make use of it. Anger is a pathos whether it is weak or strong; so too is the appetite for bodily pleasures.
And he clearly indicates that it is possible for an akratic person to be defeated by a weak pathos —the kind that most people would easily be able to control a9—b So the general explanation for the occurrence of akrasia cannot be that the strength of a passion overwhelms reason. Aristotle should therefore be acquitted of an accusation made against him by J. Plato and Aristotle, he says, collapsed all succumbing to temptation into losing control of ourselves—a mistake illustrated by this example:.
I am very partial to ice cream, and a bombe is served divided into segments corresponding one to one with the persons at High Table: I am tempted to help myself to two segments and do so, thus succumbing to temptation and even conceivably but why necessarily? But do I lose control of myself? Do I raven, do I snatch the morsels from the dish and wolf them down, impervious to the consternation of my colleagues? Not a bit of it. We often succumb to temptation with calm and even with finesse. With this, Aristotle can agree: the pathos for the bombe can be a weak one, and in some people that will be enough to get them to act in a way that is disapproved by their reason at the very time of action.
What is most remarkable about Aristotle's discussion of akrasia is that he defends a position close to that of Socrates. When he first introduces the topic of akrasia , and surveys some of the problems involved in understanding this phenomenon, he says b25—8 that Socrates held that there is no akrasia , and he describes this as a thesis that clearly conflicts with the appearances phainomena.
Since he says that his goal is to preserve as many of the appearances as possible b2—7 , it may come as a surprise that when he analyzes the conflict between reason and feeling, he arrives at the conclusion that in a way Socrates was right after all b13— For, he says, the person who acts against reason does not have what is thought to be unqualified knowledge; in a way he has knowledge, but in a way does not.
Aristotle explains what he has in mind by comparing akrasia to the condition of other people who might be described as knowing in a way, but not in an unqualified way. His examples are people who are asleep, mad, or drunk; he also compares the akratic to a student who has just begun to learn a subject, or an actor on the stage a10— All of these people, he says, can utter the very words used by those who have knowledge; but their talk does not prove that they really have knowledge, strictly speaking.
These analogies can be taken to mean that the form of akrasia that Aristotle calls weakness rather than impetuosity always results from some diminution of cognitive or intellectual acuity at the moment of action. The akratic says, at the time of action, that he ought not to indulge in this particular pleasure at this time. But does he know or even believe that he should refrain? Aristotle might be taken to reply: yes and no. He has some degree of recognition that he must not do this now, but not full recognition.
His feeling, even if it is weak, has to some degree prevented him from completely grasping or affirming the point that he should not do this. And so in a way Socrates was right. When reason remains unimpaired and unclouded, its dictates will carry us all the way to action, so long as we are able to act.
But Aristotle's agreement with Socrates is only partial, because he insists on the power of the emotions to rival, weaken or bypass reason. Emotion challenges reason in all three of these ways. In both the akratic and the enkratic, it competes with reason for control over action; even when reason wins, it faces the difficult task of having to struggle with an internal rival.
Second, in the akratic, it temporarily robs reason of its full acuity, thus handicapping it as a competitor. It is not merely a rival force, in these cases; it is a force that keeps reason from fully exercising its power.
And third, passion can make someone impetuous; here its victory over reason is so powerful that the latter does not even enter into the arena of conscious reflection until it is too late to influence action. Aristotle frequently emphasizes the importance of pleasure to human life and therefore to his study of how we should live see for example a7—20 and b3—a16 , but his full-scale examination of the nature and value of pleasure is found in two places: VII.
It is odd that pleasure receives two lengthy treatments; no other topic in the Ethics is revisited in this way. Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics is identical to Book VI of the Eudemian Ethics ; for unknown reasons, the editor of the former decided to include within it both the treatment of pleasure that is unique to that work X. The two accounts are broadly similar. They agree about the value of pleasure, defend a theory about its nature, and oppose competing theories.
Aristotle holds that a happy life must include pleasure, and he therefore opposes those who argue that pleasure is by its nature bad. He insists that there are other pleasures besides those of the senses, and that the best pleasures are the ones experienced by virtuous people who have sufficient resources for excellent activity. Book VII offers a brief account of what pleasure is and is not.
It is not a process but an unimpeded activity of a natural state a7— Aristotle does not elaborate on what a natural state is, but he obviously has in mind the healthy condition of the body, especially its sense faculties, and the virtuous condition of the soul. Little is said about what it is for an activity to be unimpeded, but Aristotle does remind us that virtuous activity is impeded by the absence of a sufficient supply of external goods b17— One might object that people who are sick or who have moral deficiencies can experience pleasure, even though Aristotle does not take them to be in a natural state.
He has two strategies for responding. First, when a sick person experiences some degree of pleasure as he is being restored to health, the pleasure he is feeling is caused by the fact that he is no longer completely ill.
Some small part of him is in a natural state and is acting without impediment b35—6. Second, Aristotle is willing to say that what seems pleasant to some people may in fact not be pleasant b31—2 , just as what tastes bitter to an unhealthy palate may not be bitter. To call something a pleasure is not only to report a state of mind but also to endorse it to others. Aristotle's analysis of the nature of pleasure is not meant to apply to every case in which something seems pleasant to someone, but only to activities that really are pleasures.
All of these are unimpeded activities of a natural state. It follows from this conception of pleasure that every instance of pleasure must be good to some extent. For how could an unimpeded activity of a natural state be bad or a matter of indifference? On the other hand, Aristotle does not mean to imply that every pleasure should be chosen.
He briefly mentions the point that pleasures compete with each other, so that the enjoyment of one kind of activity impedes other activities that cannot be carried out at the same time a20— His point is simply that although some pleasures may be good, they are not worth choosing when they interfere with other activities that are far better.
This point is developed more fully in Ethics X. The pleasure of recovering from an illness, for example, is bad without qualification—meaning that it is not one of the pleasures one would ideally choose, if one could completely control one's circumstances.
Although it really is a pleasure and so something can be said in its favor, it is so inferior to other goods that ideally one ought to forego it.
Nonetheless, it is a pleasure worth having—if one adds the qualification that it is only worth having in undesirable circumstances. The pleasure of recovering from an illness is good, because some small part of oneself is in a natural state and is acting without impediment; but it can also be called bad, if what one means by this is that one should avoid getting into a situation in which one experiences that pleasure.
Aristotle indicates several times in VII. Here he is influenced by an idea expressed in the opening line of the Ethics : the good is that at which all things aim. Plants and non-human animals seek to reproduce themselves because that is their way of participating in an unending series, and this is the closest they can come to the ceaseless thinking of the unmoved mover. Aristotle makes this point in several of his works see for example De Anima a23—b7 , and in Ethics X.
He will elaborate on these points in X. Human happiness does not consist in every kind of pleasure, but it does consist in one kind of pleasure—the pleasure felt by a human being who engages in theoretical activity and thereby imitates the pleasurable thinking of god. Book X offers a much more elaborate account of what pleasure is and what it is not. It is not a process, because processes go through developmental stages: building a temple is a process because the temple is not present all at once, but only comes into being through stages that unfold over time.
By contrast, pleasure, like seeing and many other activities, is not something that comes into existence through a developmental process. If I am enjoying a conversation, for example, I do not need to wait until it is finished in order to feel pleased; I take pleasure in the activity all along the way. The defining nature of pleasure is that it is an activity that accompanies other activities, and in some sense brings them to completion. Pleasure occurs when something within us, having been brought into good condition, is activated in relation to an external object that is also in good condition.
The pleasure of drawing, for example, requires both the development of drawing ability and an object of attention that is worth drawing. But the theory proposed in the later Book brings out a point that had received too little attention earlier: pleasure is by its nature something that accompanies something else.
It is not enough to say that it is what happens when we are in good condition and are active in unimpeded circumstances; one must add to that point the further idea that pleasure plays a certain role in complementing something other than itself. Drawing well and the pleasure of drawing well always occur together, and so they are easy to confuse, but Aristotle's analysis in Book X emphasizes the importance of making this distinction.
He says that pleasure completes the activity that it accompanies, but then adds, mysteriously, that it completes the activity in the manner of an end that is added on. In the translation of W. It is unclear what thought is being expressed here, but perhaps Aristotle is merely trying to avoid a possible misunderstanding: when he says that pleasure completes an activity, he does not mean that the activity it accompanies is in some way defective, and that the pleasure improves the activity by removing this defect.
The latter might be taken to mean that the activity accompanied by pleasure has not yet reached a sufficiently high level of excellence, and that the role of pleasure is to bring it to the point of perfection. Aristotle does not deny that when we take pleasure in an activity we get better at it, but when he says that pleasure completes an activity by supervening on it, like the bloom that accompanies those who have achieved the highest point of physical beauty, his point is that the activity complemented by pleasure is already perfect, and the pleasure that accompanies it is a bonus that serves no further purpose.
Taking pleasure in an activity does help us improve at it, but enjoyment does not cease when perfection is achieved—on the contrary, that is when pleasure is at its peak. That is when it reveals most fully what it is: an added bonus that crowns our achievement. We should take note of a further difference between these two discussions: In Book X, he makes the point that pleasure is a good but not the good. He cites and endorses an argument given by Plato in the Philebus : If we imagine a life filled with pleasure and then mentally add wisdom to it, the result is made more desirable.
But the good is something that cannot be improved upon in this way. Therefore pleasure is not the good b23— By contrast, in Book VII Aristotle strongly implies that the pleasure of contemplation is the good, because in one way or another all living beings aim at this sort of pleasure. Aristotle observes in Book X that what all things aim at is good b35—a1 ; significantly, he falls short of endorsing the argument that since all aim at pleasure, it must be the good. Book VII makes the point that pleasures interfere with each other, and so even if all kinds of pleasures are good, it does not follow that all of them are worth choosing.
One must make a selection among pleasures by determining which are better. But how is one to make this choice? Book VII does not say, but in Book X, Aristotle holds that the selection of pleasures is not to be made with reference to pleasure itself, but with reference to the activities they accompany. Since activities differ with respect to goodness and badness, some being worth choosing, others worth avoiding, and others neither, the same is true of pleasures as well.
Aristotle's statement implies that in order to determine whether for example the pleasure of virtuous activity is more desirable than that of eating, we are not to attend to the pleasures themselves but to the activities with which we are pleased. A pleasure's goodness derives from the goodness of its associated activity. And surely the reason why pleasure is not the criterion to which we should look in making these decisions is that it is not the good.
The standard we should use in making comparisons between rival options is virtuous activity, because that has been shown to be identical to happiness. That is why Aristotle says that what is judged pleasant by a good man really is pleasant, because the good man is the measure of things a15— He does not mean that the way to lead our lives is to search for a good man and continually rely on him to tell us what is pleasurable. Rather, his point is that there is no way of telling what is genuinely pleasurable and therefore what is most pleasurable unless we already have some other standard of value.
Aristotle's discussion of pleasure thus helps confirm his initial hypothesis that to live our lives well we must focus on one sort of good above all others: virtuous activity. It is the good in terms of which all other goods must be understood. Aristotle's analysis of friendship supports the same conclusion. Although Aristotle is interested in classifying the different forms that friendship takes, his main theme in Books VIII and IX is to show the close relationship between virtuous activity and friendship.
He is vindicating his conception of happiness as virtuous activity by showing how satisfying are the relationships that a virtuous person can normally expect to have. His taxonomy begins with the premise that there are three main reasons why one person might like someone else. One might like someone because he is good, or because he is useful, or because he is pleasant.
And so there are three bases for friendships, depending on which of these qualities binds friends together. When two individuals recognize that the other person is someone of good character, and they spend time with each other, engaged in activities that exercise their virtues, then they form one kind of friendship. If they are equally virtuous, their friendship is perfect.
If, however, there is a large gap in their moral development as between a parent and a small child, or between a husband and a wife , then although their relationship may be based on the other person's good character, it will be imperfect precisely because of their inequality.
The imperfect friendships that Aristotle focuses on, however, are not unequal relationships based on good character. Rather, they are relationships held together because each individual regards the other as the source of some advantage to himself or some pleasure he receives.
Aristotle does not mean to suggest that unequal relations based on the mutual recognition of good character are defective in these same ways. Rather, when he says that unequal relationships based on character are imperfect, his point is that people are friends in the fullest sense when they gladly spend their days together in shared activities, and this close and constant interaction is less available to those who are not equal in their moral development.
When Aristotle begins his discussion of friendship, he introduces a notion that is central to his understanding of this phenomenon: a genuine friend is someone who loves or likes another person for the sake of that other person. Does such good will exist in all three kinds of friendship, or is it confined to relationships based on virtue?
At first, Aristotle leaves open the first of these two possibilities. He says:. The reasons mentioned are goodness, pleasure, and advantage; and so it seems that Aristotle is leaving room for the idea that in all three kinds of friendships, even those based on advantage and pleasure alone, the individuals wish each other well for the sake of the other. But in fact, as Aristotle continues to develop his taxonomy, he does not choose to exploit this possibility.
He speaks as though it is only in friendships based on character that one finds a desire to benefit the other person for the sake of the other person. Those who wish good things to their friends for the sake of the latter are friends most of all, because they do so because of their friends themselves, and not coincidentally.
When one benefits someone not because of the kind of person he is, but only because of the advantages to oneself, then, Aristotle says, one is not a friend towards the other person, but only towards the profit that comes one's way a15— In such statements as these, Aristotle comes rather close to saying that relationships based on profit or pleasure should not be called friendships at all. Friendships based on character are the ones in which each person benefits the other for the sake of other; and these are friendships most of all.
Because each party benefits the other, it is advantageous to form such friendships. And since each enjoys the trust and companionship of the other, there is considerable pleasure in these relationships as well. Because these perfect friendships produce advantages and pleasures for each of the parties, there is some basis for going along with common usage and calling any relationship entered into for the sake of just one of these goods a friendship.
Friendships based on advantage alone or pleasure alone deserve to be called friendships because in full-fledged friendships these two properties, advantage and pleasure, are present. It is striking that in the Ethics Aristotle never thinks of saying that the uniting factor in all friendships is the desire each friend has for the good of the other.
Aristotle does not raise questions about what it is to desire good for the sake of another person. He treats this as an easily understood phenomenon, and has no doubts about its existence. But it is also clear that he takes this motive to be compatible with a love of one's own good and a desire for one's own happiness.
Someone who has practical wisdom will recognize that he needs friends and other resources in order to exercise his virtues over a long period of time. When he makes friends, and benefits friends he has made, he will be aware of the fact that such a relationship is good for him.
And yet to have a friend is to want to benefit someone for that other person's sake; it is not a merely self-interested strategy. Aristotle sees no difficulty here, and rightly so. For there is no reason why acts of friendship should not be undertaken partly for the good of one's friend and partly for one's own good. Acting for the sake of another does not in itself demand self-sacrifice.
It requires caring about someone other than oneself, but does not demand some loss of care for oneself. For when we know how to benefit a friend for his sake, we exercise the ethical virtues, and this is precisely what our happiness consists in.
Aristotle makes it clear that the number of people with whom one can sustain the kind of relationship he calls a perfect friendship is quite small IX. Even if one lived in a city populated entirely by perfectly virtuous citizens, the number with whom one could carry on a friendship of the perfect type would be at most a handful.
For he thinks that this kind of friendship can exist only when one spends a great deal of time with the other person, participating in joint activities and engaging in mutually beneficial behavior; and one cannot cooperate on these close terms with every member of the political community.
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