Athletic virtue and aesthetic values in Aristotle’s ethics

ABSTRACT

When Aristotle praises pentathletes’ beauty at Rhetoric 1361b, it is not the idle observation of a sports fan. In fact, the balanced and harmonious beauty of athletes’ bodies reflects Aristotle’s ideal of a virtuous soul in the Nicomachean Ethics: one which discerns noble ends and means, then acts accordingly. At Eudemian Ethics 1248b, he takes it a step further, characterizing kalokagathia as ‘the virtue (aretē) that arises from a combination’ of virtues (aretai). These passages raise important questions about the relationship between ethics, athletics, and aesthetics. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle’s ideal of kalokagathia is compatible not just with athletic training, but also with an ideal of citizenship that rejects traditional ideas about inborn virtue and superficial beauty.

KEYWORDS:

• Kalokagathia
• Aristotle
• ancient Greek athletics
• virtue ethics
• Eudemian ethics

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Academy in Rome, Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies, the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, Morningside College, and Exedra Mediterranean Center for supporting my scholarship during the research and writing of this paper. No endorsement or approval of its contents are implied

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The beauty of the Discus Thrower and other athletic statues is discussed at some length in Reid (2012a).

2. This and all English translations used in the text are from Aristotle (1995), unless otherwise specified.

3. This and all Greek quotations from the Politics come from (Aristotle 1957).

4. For a critical analysis of Burriot’s study, see Fisher (1999).

5. English translations of NE are from Aristotle (1999).

6. NE1103a15-20: Virtue being, as we have seen, of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue is for the most part both produced and increased by instruction, and therefore requires experience and time; whereas moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit (ethos), and has indeed derived its name, with a slight variation of form, from that word.1 1. 2 And therefore it is clear that none of the moral virtues formed is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit.

7. Aristotle’s discussion of habituation (ethos) appears in Nicomachean Ethics 2.1: ‘Hence, it is also clear that none of the virtues of character arises in us naturally … Rather, we are by nature able to acquire them, and we are completed through habit … we acquire [virtues] just as we acquire crafts, by having first activated them. For we learn a craft by producing the same product that we must produce when we have learned it; we become builders, for instance, by building and we become harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just be doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.

8. Says Hawhee (2004, 17), ‘My use of the term “virtuosity,” … signals the concept’s status as a condition the ancients repeatedly tried to achieve, a condition not unrelated to art and skill. Virtuosity, then, is meant to stand apart from contemporary notions of “virtue” that teeter on the edge of moralizing. Aretē, that is, was an ethical concept, and as such was associated with bodily appearance, action, and performance as much as it was conceived as an abstracted “guide” for such actions.’

9. The classic source in the philosophy of sport for the autotelicity of play is Huizinga (1955).

10. Autotelicity is taken as a crucial aspect of play, instrumentalism is its opposite – namely using sport as a means to some external end, especially money. For discussions, see Weiss (1969, 139), Suits (1988, 9), and Morgan (2006, 26). An overview of the connection between ethics and aesthetics in sport can be found in Reid (2012b), chapter 11.

11. See Bradley (1998) for a detailed description of those values.

12. On partisanship ruining sport, see Singer (2010). Mumford 2011, ch. 2) sings the praises of purists.

13. This part of Aristotle’s argument resembles Plato’s distinction between technē (skill) and aretē (virtue), for example in Hippias Minor where the benefit of lying derives not from a person’s skill but rather from the virtuous disposition to use that skill for the good. Lying to protect runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad may demand the same skill as lying to conceal a crime, but the former action is praiseworthy, while the latter is blameworthy.

14. In Plato’s Hippias Major it is suggested indirectly that beauty is the child of good by refuting the idea that beauty (to kalon) might be the father of the good. 297a-c.

15. D.Chr. 71.2: ‘A handsome (kalos) man is not only getting to be a rare sight nowadays; but when there is one, the majority fail to notice his beauty, much more than muleteers fail to observe beautiful horses. And if people do by any chance take an interest in handsome men, it is in a wanton way and for no good purpose … .For it is not only virtue that is increased by commendation, but so beauty is likewise by those who honor and revere it. But when it is disregarded and esteemed by no one, or when wicked men esteem it, it fades away like reflections in a mirror.’