Playful Seriousness: The Virtue of Eutrapelia in Dialogue

ABSTRACT

In Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle identified three moral spheres associated with human communication: speaking with decorum, conversation, and social conduct. Each sphere has a corresponding virtue. The virtue in speaking with decorum is truthfulness, the virtue in conversation is eutrapelia (refined, playful wit), and the virtue in social conduct is friendliness. Eutrapelia is gained in part by education and in part by personal experience. One learns to habituate oneself in conversation to avoid the excessive vice of bomolochos and the deficient vice of agroikos. A communicator enacts phronesis to deliberate good communicative choices, relying on one’s awareness of ethics, tact, and ingeniousness. Eutrapelia functions in dialogue to reveal unexpected connections in language, to open new interpretations in linguistic speculation, to negotiate meaning in the play of language, and to potentially shift one’s horizon of understanding about the content under consideration. Enacting eutrapelos as both refined humor and keen insight offers a place of respite that allows one to engage in the playful seriousness that is the hermeneutic work of dialogue.

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the fine research assistance of Justin Bonanno in preparing this manuscript. I thank the scholars who offered anonymous reviews of this article. Their comments and suggestions are much appreciated.

Notes

¹ Masculine pronouns will be used in the discussion of eutrapelia in education. In antiquity, educational opportunities were primarily but not exclusively available to men.

² In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses friendliness in Book 4, Chapter 6; truthfulness in Book 4, Chapter 7; and playful wittiness in Book 4, Chapter 8.