Aretē

Aretē (ἀρετή) is usually translated 'virtue', but its meaning is wider and more concrete: excellence, the condition in which a thing performs its proper work supremely well. The aretē of a knife is its sharpness, of a horse its speed and spirit, of an eye its keen sight. It is often connected with aristos, 'best', and it carries no narrowly moral flavor — in Homer it names above all the prowess of the warrior and the nobility of the hero.

The question of human aretē — what the excellence proper to a human being might be — is the founding question of Greek ethics. Socrates gave it a revolutionary turn by arguing that virtue is a kind of knowledge, so that no one does wrong willingly but only through ignorance of the good, and that the true aretē of a person lies in the good condition of the soul, not in wealth, birth, or power.

Plato developed this into the doctrine of the cardinal virtues — wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice — each answering to the right ordering of a part of the soul, with justice as the harmony of the whole. Aristotle grounded ethics in the idea that human aretē is the excellent exercise of our distinctive function, the activity of the soul in accordance with reason, and made its cultivation the path to eudaimonia. To possess aretē, in every version, is to be fully and well what one is.

Can it be taught?

The Meno opens with the question whether virtue is taught, acquired by practice, or comes by nature — and turns on whether virtue is a kind of knowledge. Socrates’ recurring thesis that the virtues are one, and that no one does wrong willingly, sets the stage for Aristotle’s account of virtue as a settled disposition aiming at the mean, and for the Neoplatonic ladder of civic, purifying, and contemplative virtues.