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Virtue and Modernity
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12086 |
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EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
1,684 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
THE WORLD & I is running a number of articles this month on the subject of virtue, a topic we are trying to retrieve from Greek philosophy. I have great respect for the concept, but it is necessary to understand why the concept cannot be used in its Greek form.
The concept of virtue is found in Greek literature as early as Homer. His Odysseus, unlike his crew, survives because he is unwilling to break the law even when harsh circumstances seem to require it. This Greek world is a world governed by divine law that must not be broken.
Nearly five hundred years later, in the classical Greece of Plato and Aristotle, the divine law becomes natural law. There is a universal order into which man fits. This is made manifest not merely by inquiries into the nature of ethics, but by epistemological and ontological accounts that require inquiries into logic and physics as well. Although Plato and Aristotle used it differently, the concept of essence is required for the Greek concept of natural law.
For the Greeks, natural law entailed an external constraint on humanity. Even the advice of Socrates, to know oneself, quoted from the temple at Delphi, had more to do with the relationship of the self to others and to the world than with an examination of one's own psyche. The concept of individuality that is so dominant today - and that has produced an obsessive concern with our internal life and the importance of the self - was foreign to the classical Greek world.
There was not an unbroken tradition from Homer to the classical philosophers. In the sixth century, when tribal law was being replaced by territorial law, terrible dilemmas arose, which are expressed, for example, in Sophocles' Antigone. Thus in the Greece of Socrates a new natural - and not simply divine - order was asserted that governed both the heavens and men.
It was possible to believe in this kind of order at least into the nineteenth and possibly into the twentieth century. But the only reason why some philosophers are able to argue for this order today is because they do not integrate their ethical theories into a coherent worldview. If one wants to resurrect a philosophical conception of virtue, it must be done from a new base, one that takes into account the revolutions that physics and psychology have introduced into our understanding of the nature of the world. It is possible for an ethics that is related to a coherent contemporary worldview to be
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