Virtue, East and West

“Of that unique man

Whose name is not to come from the lips of the wicked.

Theirs is not the right to praise him-

Him who first revealed clearly

By word and by deed

That he who is virtuous is happy.

Alas, not one of us can equal him.”  Aristotle, Fragment 623.

            Much of what is best (to my limited knowledge) of ancient Greek thought is summarized by the above.  Aristotle is specifically referring to his teacher, Plato, and credits him with an important idea, that virtue and happiness are of the same nature. 

This emphasis is also central to the yoga school, whose Yoga Sutras and Bhagavad Gita, two central texts, were written around the same time as the flowering of Greek Thought (around 200BCE).  Virtue and the development of character are central to philosophies both East and West. 

            So what then is virtue anyway?  Typically we think of it as moral excellence, and I in the past have considered it in my relativistic way as the conformity to social standards of behavior and moral values. But let’s consider the word itself.  Our word virtue comes from the Latin word virtūs, meaning manliness, excellence, or worth, as well as moral virtue in general.  Virtūs comes from Vir, the word for man, or true man, husband, or soldier.  Similarly we get words like virile (from virīlis; of a man, manly, bold or firm) and vigor (from vigor, physical or mental energy).  Another related word to consider is vīres, a plural form of the word vīs or vim, meaning strength, control, force, power, resources, value, or meaning.  On the whole, we get an idea of the original meaning of Virtue (at least as the Romans understood it) as great strength and control, as befits a “true man”, ie. a responsible citizen and exemplar of the human race. 

            Interestingly in Sanskrit, we have a similar word, वीर, vīra, which means man, but especially a brave or eminent man, in a word, a hero.  For those of you who are wondering, yes this is the origin of the sanskrit names for vīrāsana (hero’s pose), and vīrabhadrāsana (warrior pose).  From this root, numerous derivatives come, including a word given an important place in the Yoga Sutras, vīrya, meaning strength in a very similar way to the Latin vigor.  As I was writing this, I found an even more interesting connection with the Latin, वीरत्व vīratva, meaning manliness.  Keep in mind that in Latin, the letters v and w are essentially the same (and related to the letter u), and in Sanskrit the letter व can be pronounced either as v or w.  So we can prounce that last word as “veeratwa” which is not particularly far from our word virtue. 

            The Greek word for Virtue is Arete, and means more specifically excellence.  Having never studied Greek, I must rely on Wikipedia, which tells me that Arete would be attributed to excellence in everything, ie, an excellent stove, an excellent car, etc.  The Latin equivillents would only be attributed to a human being.

            It should be clear from the above that our understanding of virtue has changed over time.  Certainly the influence from Christianity cannot be ignored.  Plato’s four cardinal virtues as listed in the Republic are Wisdom, Courage or Fortitude, Temperence, and Justice.  Wisdom is sometimes translated as prudence, which is this sense means the same thing: the ability to judge good actions from bad.  Christianity, while accepting these virtues (allegorial forms of which appear in many churches, stained glass works, and other forms of Christian art), added to them, and due to the Church’s all-pervasive influence in the Middle Ages, thereby substantially changed the way we think of virtue.  

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”  Corinthians 13:12-13

            Even here, these virtues are connected to manliness, at least in its sense of adulthood.  I should also note for completeness that the Greek word used here for love, agape, is sometimes given as charity (you may be more familiar with Faith, Hope and Charity from the King James Version), as agape represents the kind of impersonal “brotherly” love existing between all men everywhere.  Charity is clearly a natural extension of this. 
            I’m not judging Christianity’s influence on virtue one way or another (at least not right now), as certainly I can’t find fault with faith, hope or love.  I am pointing out the distinction, as we moderns naturally tend to associate virtue with these ideas, and that is not necessarily the way the word was understood by the Stoics and their contemporaries.  That said, what did the Stoics think about Virtue?
            To Epictetus, a Greek Stoic teaching in the 2^nd Century C.E., like many of the other Greek and Roman Philosophers, the question of Virtue rests primarily with the first of Plato’s four cardinal virtues – wisdom.  Wisdom is the ability to make accurate judgments concerning right and wrong, and it naturally follows that this must be present for the other virtues to exist.  What is the faculty which makes these distinctions?  Stoicism agrees with the Socratics in this absolutely: wisdom is a product of a well-developed reason. 
From this an old debate emerges:  Is it possibly to teach virtue?  The Stoics, like the Socratics, would argue that as virtue (read: wisdom) is a product of reason, it can be taught by means of reason.  By education and cultivation of the intellect, wisdom arises, and as Aristotle pointed out to us at the outset of this post, thereby arises true happiness.  (This interesting op-ed piece by Stanley Fish is an interesting read in this connection.) 
            In the Stoicism of Epictetus, this virtue (wisdom) takes the form of distinguishing between Externals and Internals, or those things we can control, and those we cannot.  As I cannot explain it better than Epictetus, I’ll let him speak for himself:

“We are responsible for some things, while there are others for which we cannot be held responsible.  The former include our judgment, our impulse, our desire, aversion, and our mental faculties in general; the latter include the body, material possessions, our reputation, status – in a word, anything not in our power to control.  The former are naturally free, unconstrained and unimpeded, while the latter are frail, inferior, subject to restraint – and none of our affair.” – Enchiridion (The Manual), 1-2.  (Italics added)

           The development of virtue then, according to Epictetus, is really about the development of those things we can control, in other words, our judgment (wisdom), the mind, and our values. This virtue of wisdom has an important equivalent in yoga, which is called in Sanskrit विवेक viveka, discrimination.  What exactly is discriminated is very different; it is the Self, or immortal, changeless soul (or in a Vedantic gloss, Consciousness itself), discriminated from the world of manifest existance, which includes not only Epictetus’ list of externals, but also the entirety of the list of externals, with a possible, but extremely debatable exception of Judgement (without veering TOO far off course, judgement is associated with the idea of the Buddhi, or highest part of the mind, which is said to be material, but exceedingly subtle.  The problem is whether or not the Self, being changeless and complete in its own nature, has agency.  Hence the debate.) Like Stoicism, the yoga philosophy encourages a renunciation of those things which we cannot control, although in yoga this is because these things (the world) distract us from the realization of the Self, while in Stoicism it is due to the inevitability of dissappointment, trouble and unhappiness which comes from giving valuing externals.

           In Stoicism, virtue is close to its Latin meaning of manliness, strength and control. These faculties are normally directed outward (used for the control of nature, of other people through government, commerce, and physical coersion, of material goods and pleasures, etc) become inwardly directed, and concern themselves primarily with Self-Control.  From this sense of self control come the other virtues; Temperence (a man in control of his desire does not go to excess), Justice (a man uninterested in externals is not personally concerned, ie selfishly concerned about another man’s business, and therefore is able to be just in all his dealings – he has no hidden agenda), and Fortitude.  For this last, I turn to Epictetus once again:

“It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them.  Death, for example, is nothing frightening, otherwise it would have frightened Socrates.  But the judgement that death is frightening – now, that is something to be afraid of.  So when we are frustrated, angry or unhappy, never hold anyone except ourselves – that is, our judgements – accountable.  An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his misfortune.  To blame oneself is proof of progress.  But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.” - Enchiridion (The Manual), 5.

          This matches our modern idea of what it means to be stoic – one who is apparently indifferent to pleasure or pain, which is really the outward impression of someone who is self-controlled and who has renounced the externals.  This may be even taken negatively, as in a person who appears to be unfeeling or unemotional to the extreme, but this is all still on the surface.  If a person gets into a car accident, totaling their vehicle, because another driver wasn’t looking where they were going, the expected reaction is anger towards the other driver.  In fact, if I were the other driver, I’d expect to see anger expressed by the driver of the car I hit.  Now, if I hit a Stoic, someone who viewed their car as an external, and was not particularly concerned about having it totaled, or even the brief inconvenience of a jolt to the body (or injury for that matter, as the body is external), then clearly there would be no anger.  I as the other driver would probably be a little confused by the other guy lack of passion. 

           It’s a sad fact that we come to expect that everyone around us will immediately react to and express emotional impulses full-throatedly, with a big dramatic display.  When someone reacts dispassionately, due to either the yogic pratice of vairagya, non-attachment (to externals), or the Stoic equivalent, everyone around them is often a little thrown off.  I’ve found that sometimes just reacting dispassionately is enough to actually nip a big dramatic display in the bud, and may even stop a fight.  That, of course, is assuming that there isn’t someone present who considers manliness in its lowest form, macho posturing, to be virtue.  In this case, a person who is used to defining all impressions as either “safe” or “threatening” will interpret their confusion and my own lack of a response as a threat, and get angry themselves.  Similarly, others might feel anger for you, rather than at you, almost as if they were trying to teach you how to play their social game.

            Plato defined man as the “reasonable animal” and reason is essentially the capacity for mental reflection.  Turning our strength and power to control from its natural outward focus inwards by reflection seems to me to be the difference between the virtue of an animal and that of a “real man.”  Machismo, and any other expression ruled by pure emotion, is therefore the reaction of not a man, but of an animal in the body of a man.  The philosophers of Greece and Rome, along with those of India hold that the happiness possible for this animal man is inherently unstable, as it is bound to externals, while only in reasonable man is a higher, more firmly grounded happiness (or absolute happiness, ie, Liberation), possible.  You take their stuff, they suffer.  You make them late, they suffer.  You say you don’t like them, they suffer.  All because they’ve chosen to base their happiness on things outside themselves.  We might call this person dependent, much as we would call a child (“put away childish things…”).  You might not be wrong to call that person a slave.  A person who is a slave to passion or objects lacks the power of discrimination between what is good for us, and what is bad for us, or at least the strength or inclination to change one’s habitual responses.  As the Bhagavad Gita says: “Men of demonic nature do not have the discriminative understanding of what should be done and what should be avoided.” (BG 16.7)   Here demonic is used much as I mean animal above.  We must remember that most depictions of demons, East or West, are really nothing more than a hybrid human with various animal traits: horns, tails, large jaws, hooves, etc.

            Stoicism teaches that once we differentiate between those things which we can control, and those we cannot, we must purify our natural tendency for desire (attachment) and aversion, so that we only desire those things which are good and are only averse to those things that are bad for us.  This duality of attachment and aversion plays a prominent place in both Stoicism and Yoga, and that’ll be the next topic I chew on.

            It might be a good idea to mention here that I recognize how hard it is to live up to such ideas of virtue and self-control.  I struggle with it every day, and I feel that I’m far from successful.  After all, I’m not only up against my own animal instincts, but the habits of years.  Even the desire to cultivate virtue comes rather late to me, and those who’ve known me for years may be surprised that I’ve started now.  Still, it seems to me a worthy endeavor, and what success I have had in the practice of non-attachment has shown me a peace and happiness that was not possible only a few years ago.  As they say, the proof is in the pudding.  You’ve got to taste it to know for sure.