Virtue Ethics Aristotle Quotes

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.

Virtue lies in our power, and similarly so does vice; because where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power not to act...

He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life.

But happiness is a difficult thing-it is, as Aristotle posited in The Nicomachean Ethics, an activity, is is about good social behavior, about being a solid citizen. Happiness is about community, intimacy, relationships, rootedness, closeness, family, stability, a sense of place, a feeling of love. And in this country, where people move from state to state and city to city so much, where rootlessness is almost a virtue ("anywhere I hang my hat...is someone else's home"), where family units regularly implode and leave behind fragments of divorce, where the long loneliness of life finds its antidote not in a hardy, ancient culture (as it would in Europe), not in some blood-deep tribal rites (as it would in the few still-hale Third World nations), but in our vast repository of pop culture, of consumer goods, of cotton candy for all-in this America, happiness is hard.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life--knowing that under certain conditions it is not worth while to live. He is of a disposition to do men service, though he is ashamed to have a service done to him. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination... He does not take part in public displays... He is open in his dislikes and preferences; he talks and acts frankly, because of his contempt for men and things... He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave... He never feels malice, and always forgets and passes over injuries... He is not fond of talking... It is no concern of his that he should be praised, or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even of his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured; he is not given to hurry, for he is concerned about only a few things; he is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come to a man through care... He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skillful general who marshals his limited forces with the strategy of war... He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.

A man without regrets cannot be cured.

Virtue is a greater good than honour; and one might perhaps accordingly suppose that virtue rather than honour is the end of the political life.

Wisdom or intelligence and prudence are intellectual, liberality and temperance are moral virtues.

Any one can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy.

Actions which produce [virtue] are those which increase it, and also, if differently performed, destroy it.

Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.

Man's work as Man is accomplished by virtue of Practical Wisdom and Moral Virtue, the latter giving the right aim and direction, the former the right means to its attainment;

For 'activity in conformity with virtue' involves virtue.

[I]n speaking about someone's character, we do not say that he is wise or comprehending, but that he is gentle or moderate.

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

The actions from which [virtue] was produced are also those in which it is exercised.

The life of active virtue is essentially pleasant.

Neither by nature, therefore, nor contrary to nature are the virtues present; they are instead present in us who are of such a nature as to receive them, and who are completed1 through habit.

Hence while in respect of its substance and the definition that states what it really is in essence virtue is the observance of the mean, in point of excellence and rightness it is an extreme.

Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

None of the moral virtues is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit.

One can with but moderate possessions do what one ought.

To feel these feelings at the right time, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right purpose and in the right manner, is to feel the best amount of them, which is the mean amount - and the best amount is of course the mark of virtue.

The virtues therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature; nature gives us the capacity to receive the,. and this capacity is brought to maturity by habit.

Again, Practical Wisdom and Excellence of the Moral character are very closely united; since the Principles of Practical Wisdom are in accordance with the Moral Virtues and these are right when they accord with Practical Wisdom.

The best kind of friendship, he maintains, is friendship with those to whom we wish well and with whom we can spend time in shared valuable activities, all because of their virtue.

Aristotle insists that habituation, not teaching, is the route to moral virtue (II. 1). We must practise doing good actions, not just read about virtue.

(By the way, a question is sometimes raised, whether the moral choice or the actions have most to do with Virtue, since it consists in both: it is plain that the perfection of virtuous action requires both: but for the actions many things are required, and the greater and more numerous they are the more.)

Happiness, then, extends as far as contemplation, and the more contemplation there is in one's life, the happier one is, not incidentally, but in virtue of the contemplation, since this is honourable in itself. Happiness, therefore, will be some form of contemplation.

Pride, then, seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them. Therefore it is hard to be truly proud; for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character.

Virtue, then, is twofold, intellectual and moral. Both the coming-into-[1103a] being and increase of intellectual virtue result mostly from teaching—hence it requires experience and time—whereas moral virtue is the result of habit, and so it is that moral virtue got its name [ēthikē] by a slight alteration of the term habit [ethos].

For to nothing does a stability of human results attach so much as it does to the workings in the way of virtue, since these are held to be more abiding even than the sciences: and of these last again the most precious are the most abiding, because the blessed live in them most and most continuously, which seems to be the reason why they are not forgotten.

Ultimately there are but three systems of ethics, three conceptions of the ideal character and the moral life. One is that of Buddha and Jesus, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil only by returning good, identifies virtue with love, and inclines in politics to unlimited democracy. Another is the ethic of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy. A third, the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government.

Happiness above all seems to be of this character, for we always choose it on account of itself and never on account of something else. Yet honor, pleasure, intellect, and every virtue we choose on their own account—for even if nothing resulted from them, we would choose each of them—but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, because we suppose that, through them, we will be happy.

Without virtue, it is hard to bear the results of good fortune suitably. Those who lack virtue become arrogant and wantonly aggressive when they have these other goods. They think less of everyone else, and do whatever they please. They do this because they are imitating the magnanimous person though they are not really like him.

…existence is to all men a thing to be chosen and loved, and that we exist by virtue of activity (i.e. by living and acting), and that the handiwork is in a sense, the producer in activity; he loves his handiwork, therefore, because he loves existence.

But what matters for questions of virtue and vice is whether your acts are not merely voluntary but also chosen.

In other words, we can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s utilitarianism, or Rawls’s fairness ethics, but in science as well.

What then is a "moral virtue," the result of such a process duly directed? It is no mere mood of feeling, no mere liability to emotion, no mere natural aptitude or endowment, it is a permanent state of the agent's self, or, as we might in modern phrase put it, of his will, it consists in a steady self-imposed obedience to a rule of action in certain situations which frequently recur in human life.

Our virtues are more durable even than bits of knowledge

With those who identify happiness with virtue or some one virtue our account is in harmony; for to virtue belongs virtuous activity.

For moral excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of pain that we abstain from noble ones. Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right education.

We have then, in the first part of The Faerie Queene, four of the seven deadly sins depicted in the more important passages of the four several books; those sins being much more elaborately and powerfully represented than the virtues, which are opposed to them, and which are personified in the titular heroes of the respective books. The alteration which made these personified virtues the centre each of a book was probably part of the reconstruction on the basis of Aristotle Ethics. The nature of the debt to Aristotle suggests that Spenser did not borrow directly from the Greek, but by way of modern translations.

Now the many are plainly quite slavish, choosing a life like that of brute animals: yet they obtain some consideration, because many of the great share the tastes of Sardanapalus. The refined and active again conceive it to be honour: for this may be said to be the end of the life in society: yet it is plainly too superficial for the object of our search, because it is thought to rest with those who pay rather than with him who receives it, whereas the Chief Good we feel instinctively must be something which is our own, and not easily to be taken from us. And besides, men seem to pursue honour, that they may *[Sidenote: 1096a] believe themselves to be good: for instance, they seek to be honoured by the wise, and by those among whom they are known, and for virtue: clearly then, in the opinion at least of these men, virtue is higher than honour. In truth, one would be much more inclined to think this to be the end of the life in society; yet this itself is plainly not sufficiently final: for it is conceived possible, that a man possessed of virtue might sleep or be inactive all through his life, or, as a third case, suffer the greatest evils and misfortunes: and the man who should live thus no one would call happy, except for mere disputation's sake. And for these let thus much suffice, for they have been treated of at sufficient length in my Encyclia.

For some identify happiness with virtue, some with practical wisdom, others with a kind of philosophic wisdom, others with these, or one of these, accompanied by pleasure or not without pleasure; while others include also external prosperity.

Now the man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them… The proud man, then, is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a mean in respect of the rightness of them; for he claims what is accordance with his merits, while the others go to excess or fall short… Therefore the truly proud man must be good. And greatness in every virtue would seem to be characteristic of a proud man… If we consider him point by point we shall see the utter absurdity of a proud man who is not good.

Further, men seem to pursue honour in order that they may be assured of their goodness; at least it is by men of practical wisdom that they seek to be honoured, and among those who know them, and on the ground of their virtue; clearly, then, according to them, at any rate, virtue is better.

Now to be sure, if anything else is a gift of the Gods to men, it is probable that Happiness is a gift of theirs too, and specially because of all human goods it is the highest. But this, it may be, is a question belonging more properly to an investigation different from ours: and it is quite clear, that on the supposition of its not being sent from the Gods direct, but coming to us by reason of virtue and learning of a certain kind, or discipline, it is yet one of the most Godlike things; because the prize and End of virtue is manifestly somewhat most excellent, nay divine and blessed.

For pleasure is a state of soul, and to each man that which he is said to be a lover of is pleasant; e.g. not only is a horse pleasant to the lover of horses, and a spectacle to the lover of sights, but also in the same way just acts are pleasant to the lover of justice and in general virtuous acts to the lover of virtue.

The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good and evil). Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was defined as the ways of behaving least conducive to happiness. He observed that the virtues always aim for balance and avoid the extremes of the vices. Aristotle studied the virtues and the vices in his Nicomachean Ethics. It was a book based on experience and observation, not conjecture, about the kind of happiness that was possible for human beings. Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.

philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise. Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds,

The main factor which determines success or failure in human life is the acquisition of certain powers, for Happiness is just the exercise or putting forth of these in actual living, everything else is secondary and subordinate. These powers arise from the due development of certain natural aptitudes which belong (in various degrees) to human nature as such and therefore to all normal human beings. In their developed form they are known as virtues (the Greek means simply "goodnesses," "perfections," "excellences," or "fitnesses"), some of them are physical, but others are psychical, and among the latter some, and these distinctively or peculiarly human, are "rational," i e, presuppose the possession and exercise of mind or intelligence. These last fall into two groups, which Aristotle distinguishes as Goodnesses of Intellect and Goodnesses of Character. They have in common that they all excite in us admiration and praise of their possessors, and that they are not natural endowments, but acquired characteristics But they differ in important ways. (1) the former are excellences or developed powers of the reason as such—of that in us which sees and formulates laws, rules, regularities systems, and is content in the vision of them, while the latter involve a submission or obedience to such rules of something in us which is in itself capricious and irregular, but capable of regulation, viz our instincts and feelings, (2) the former are acquired by study and instruction, the latter by discipline. The latter constitute "character," each of them as a "moral virtue" (literally "a goodness of character"), and upon them primarily depends the realisation of happiness.

Happiness, therefore, does not lie in amusement; it would, indeed, be strange if the end were amusement, and one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself. For, in a word, everything that we choose we choose for the sake of something else, except happiness, which is an end. Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.

The question is also debated, whether a man should love himself most, or some one else. People criticize those who love themselves most, and call them self-lovers, using this as an epithet of disgrace, and a bad man seems to do everything for his own sake, and the more so the more wicked he is — and so men reproach him, for instance, with doing nothing of his own accord — while the good man acts for honour's sake, and the more so the better he is, and acts for his friend's sake, and sacrifices his own interest. Perhaps we ought to mark off such arguments from each other and determine how far and in what respects each view is right. Now if we grasp the sense in which each school uses the phrase 'lover of self', the truth may become evident. Those who use the term as one of reproach ascribe self-love to people who assign to themselves the greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures; for these are what most people desire, and busy themselves about as though they were the best of all things, which is the reason, too, why they become objects of competition. So those who are grasping with regard to these things gratify their appetites and in general their feelings and the irrational element of the soul; and most men are of this nature (which is the reason why the epithet has come to be used as it is — it takes its meaning from the prevailing type of self-love, which is a bad one); it is just, therefore, that men who are lovers of self in this way are reproached for being so. That it is those who give themselves the preference in regard to objects of this sort that most people usually call lovers of self is plain; for if a man were always anxious that he himself, above all things, should act justly, temperately, or in accordance with any other of the virtues, and in general were always to try to secure for himself the honourable course, no one will call such a man a lover of self or blame him. Therefore the good man should be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows), but the wicked man should not; for he will hurt both himself and his neighbours, following as he does evil passions. For the wicked man, what he does clashes with what he ought to do, but what the good man ought to do he does; for reason in each of its possessors chooses what is best for itself, and the good man obeys his reason. It is true of the good man too that he does many acts for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary dies for them; for he will throw away both wealth and honours and in general the goods that are objects of competition, gaining for himself nobility; since he would prefer a short period of intense pleasure to a long one of mild enjoyment, a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of humdrum existence, and one great and noble action to many trivial ones. Now those who die for others doubtless attain this result; it is therefore a great prize that they choose for themselves. They will throw away wealth too on condition that their friends will gain more; for while a man's friend gains wealth he himself achieves nobility; he is therefore assigning the greater good to himself. The same too is true of honour and office; all these things he will sacrifice to his friend; for this is noble and laudable for himself. Rightly then is he thought to be good, since he chooses nobility before all else. But he may even give up actions to his friend; it may be nobler to become the cause of his friend's acting than to act himself. In all the actions, therefore, that men are praised for, the good man is seen to assign to himself the greater share in what is noble. In this sense, then, as has been said, a man should be a lover of self; but in the sense in which most men are so, he ought not.

Ultimately there are but three systems of ethics, three conceptions of the ideal character and the moral life. One is that of Buddha and Jesus, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil only by returning good, identifies virtue with love, and inclines in politics to unlimited democracy. Another is the ethic of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy. A third, the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government.

A philosophy called "moral philosophy," and "what are we to do?" And "what is a good life?" Is a representative topic of ethics. It is also considered as a sub-division of axiology because it is one of the people who deal with "value" among the various sections of philosophy. The term "Ethics" derives from the term "ἠθικά", which is derived from the Greek term "ἦθος", which means manners, [1] which refers to "the habits of the community" It reveals the connection point with political philosophy. 펜토바르비탈 청산가리 판매하고있습니다 단지 이런제품은 동물 안락사로만 판매하고있습니다 카톡【AKR331】텔레【RDH705】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】 Ethics has been one of the central themes of philosophy since ancient Greece, and paradoxically, this debate has begun in earnest since sophisticated sociologists who are suspicious of the morality of the time have been prominent. Although the attitude of each individual is different, the sophisticated sophists who have so far remained largely "relative to morality", "morality is something that social underprivals have made for their own benefit," "rather than moral virtue, "It is said that it poses a challenge to the normal moral authority as follows. Socrates was the representative person who wanted to defend the objectivity of morality against this trend in Athens, and his disciple Plato recorded various aspects of his ethics and political philosophy while recording the teacher in his writings . Aristotle presented the ethical theory with a teleological framework of "the purpose of ethics is to obtain happiness" through writings such as "Nikomarcos ethics", which had a great influence on later generations. Roughly speaking, it is the ethical life that Aristotle says to live happily intellectually contemplated, even if it is judged appropriately by good habits and follows the rules of society.

Good master, while we do admire This virtue and this moral discipline, Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray, Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured. 5 Balk logic with acquaintance that you have, And practice rhetoric in your common talk. Music and poesy use to quicken you; The mathematics and the metaphysics, Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. 10 No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en. In brief, sir, study what you most affect. —TRANIO, The Taming of the Shrew, 1.1.29–40 In other words: Listen, boss. We all think highly of ethics and morality. But—please—let’s not eliminate fun altogether, or turn ourselves into stuffed shirts. Let’s not dedicate ourselves to a life of restraint and throw away pleasure altogether. (Let’s not get all hung up with that stickler Aristotle about stuff like right and wrong, and throw Ovid’s stories about people who get naked right out the window.) Work on your analytical skills by figuring out how to split the check. Use linguistic theory in your everyday chitchat. By all means listen to music and read poetry, but purely for your enjoyment. As for math and philosophy, get involved in that stuff only when you’re really in the mood. You can’t learn anything if you’re miserable. Here’s my point: as far as study goes, stick to the subjects you like.

We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

We are increasingly abandoning Aristotle’s view of paideia—learning and habituating virtues for personal flourishing and the common good—in favor of technical-instrumental education leading to private wealth for some, argues philosopher Richard Eldridge: “to abandon the cultivation of virtues and instead to teach only in order to produce measurable outcomes is to capitulate to an individualist culture of instrumental control and private satisfactions.”44

In the final analysis, the relation of the individual to society must not be conceived after the atomistic and mechanistic pattern of bourgeois individualism which destroys the organic social totality, or after the biological and animal pattern of the statist or racist totalitarian conception which swallows up the person, here reduced to a mere histological element of Behemoth or Leviathan, in the body of the state, or after the biological and industrial pattern of the Communistic conception which ordains the entire person, like a worker in the great human hive, to the proper work of the social whole. The relation of the individual to society must be conceived after an irreducibly human and specifically ethicosocial pattern, that is, personalist and communalist at the same time; the organization to be accomplished is one of liberties. But an organization of liberty is is unthinkable apart from the amoral realities of justice and civil amity, which, on the natural and temporal plane, correspond to what the Gospel calls brotherly love on the spiritual and supernatural plane. This brings us back to our considerations of the manner in which the paradox of social life is resolved in a progressive movement that will never be terminated here-below. There is a common work to be accomplished by the social whole as such. This whole, of which human person are the parts, is not ‘neutral’ but is itself committed and bound by a temporal vocation. Thus the persons are subordinated to this common work. Nevertheless, not only in the political order, is it essential to the common good to flow back upon the persons, but also in another order where that which is most profound in the person, its supra-temporal vocation and the goods connected with it, is a transcendent end, it is essential that society itself and its common work are indirectly subordinated. This follows from the fact that the principal value of the common work of society is the freedom of expansion of the person together with all the guarantees which this freedom implies and the diffusion of good that flows from it. In short, the political common good is a common good of human persons. And thus it turns out that, in subordinating oneself to this common work, by the grace of justice and amity, each one of us is trill subordinated to the good of persons, to the accomplishment of the personal life of others an, at the same time, to the interior dignity of ones own person. But for this solution to be practical, there must be full recognition in the city of the true nature of the common work and, at the same time, recognition also of the importance and political worth--so nicely perceived by Aristotle--of the virtue of amity.

The job of ethics, Aristotle asserts, “is not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become virtuous,” especially in our daily dealings with others.

It all went back to Aristotle’s Ethics where he proposes that all moral action is about making the right choices, and choice is about intention: “Intention is the decisive factor in virtue and character”—a point Thomas Aquinas made a cornerstone of Catholic moral teaching. On the other side, Aristotle’s teacher Plato argued that doing good versus evil was a matter of knowledge versus ignorance: in other words, the man who is ignorant of the good can no more choose good than one who is ignorant of algebra can solve a quadratic equation. Saint Augustine extended that definition of ignorance to include ignorance of God. Truly knowing God, Augustine asserted, having that blind faith in Him that suffuses our lives and gains us salvation, is impossible for our corrupt human nature unless God acts to put it there. He, not us, determines our capacity for virtue, just as He determines our fate.

He connects it to Aristotle’s virtue ethics, which stresses the importance of positive habituation and the development of certain critical virtues, such as courage, justice, benevolence, and honor, over the rote memorization of specific rules of conduct. Simply staying within the bounds of a rulebook, as Osiel observes, can often be less demanding than consistently upholding high standards of character and nobility:

There is no practical rationality then without the virtues of character. The vicious argue unsoundly from false premises about the good, while the akratic ignores the sound arguments available to him. Only the virtuous are able to argue soundly to those conclusions which are their actions […]

In The Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s philosophical enquiry into virtue, character, and the good life, his challenge is to manage our emotional life with intelligence. Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival. But they can easily go awry, and do so all too often. As Aristotle saw, the problem is not with emotionality, but with the appropriateness of emotion and its expression.

I believe that young minds need to be instructed chiefly with Aristotelian doctrine...Why? Because Aristotle's Ethics should be loved, berceuse he alone saw and understood that the virtues are middle states.

I believe that young minds need to be instructed chiefly with Aristotelian doctrine...Why? Because Aristotle's Ethics should also be loved, because he alone saw and understood that the virtues are middle states.

As Aristotle said, long before Christ, a people who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It is obvious that we are repeating it today. Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The Roman empire was declining in the days of Saul of Tarshish as the American Republic is declining today—and for the very same reasons: Permissiveness in society, immorality, the Welfare State, endless wars, confiscatory taxation, the brutal destruction of the middleclass, cynical disregard of the established human virtues and principles and ethics, the pursuit of materialistic wealth, the abandonment of religion, venal politicians who cater to the masses for votes, inflation, deterioration of the monetary system, bribes, criminality, riots, incendiarisms, street demonstrations, the release of criminals on the public in order to create chaos and terror, leading to a dictatorship “in the name of emergency,” the loss of masculine sturdiness and the feminization of the people, scandals in public office, plundering of the treasury, debt, the attitude that “anything goes,” the toleration of injustice and exploitation, bureaucracies and bureaucrats issuing evil “regulations” almost every week, the centralization of government, the public contempt for good and honorable men, and, above all, the philosophy that “God is dead,” and that man is supreme.

Plato’s fascination with number as the architecture of reality seemed to explain what had, like the Forms, been puzzles before. In the Philebus, for example, Plato applies his mathematical theories to ethics. He shows, or tries to show, that virtue itself is a matter of harmonious proportion, not unlike the intervals of the musical scale: that all human activities involve finding the right measure between the Unlimited and Indeterminate and the stabilizing Limit, and that the good life depends on the permanent establishment of right and definite measure or proportion.29 In effect, the Forms, even the Good in Itself, turn out to be nothing more than mathematical formulae for virtuous living—even if the actual calculations remain vague and elusive.

The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.” —Aristotle, from The Nicomachean Ethics

[...] Aristotle introduces a distinction between the «continent» or «self-controlled» type of human being, (who has enkrateia) and the one who has full virtue (arete). Simply, the continent character ist the one who, typically, knowing what he should do, does it, contrary to her desires, and the fully virtuous character is the one who, typically, knowing what she should do, doest it, desiring to do so. Her desires are in complete harmony with reason. [...] the fully virtuous agent is morally superior to the merely self-controlled one.