What is arete?

Aristotle, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Aristotle answers

Aretē — excellence, virtue — is the state of character that makes a thing good and makes it perform its characteristic work well.¹ Consider the eye: its excellence makes both the eye itself good and makes us see well; the excellence of the horse makes the horse good in itself and good at running, at carrying its rider, at standing firm before the enemy.¹

The same holds for the human case: aretē is the state of character that makes a person good and makes him do his own work well.¹ To understand what sort of state it is, one must first rule out two alternatives. Virtue is not a passion — appetite, anger, fear, joy, and the rest — because we are neither praised nor blamed for simply feeling these things; we are praised or blamed for the way in which we feel them.²

Nor is virtue a faculty, a mere capacity for feeling; we have those capacities by nature, and yet nature alone makes no one good or bad.³ What remains, by elimination, is that virtue is a hexis — a state of character, a stable disposition in which we stand well or badly with respect to the passions.³ What sort of state? One that aims at the mean — not the arithmetical middle between two quantities, but the mean relative to us, relative to the agent and the circumstances.⁴

If ten pounds of food is too much and two too little, six is the arithmetical middle, but the trainer does not simply prescribe six: what is too little for Milo of Croton is too much for the man just beginning his training.⁴ So too with courage: the courageous person is neither the coward, who feels more fear and less confidence than he ought, nor the reckless person, who feels less fear and more confidence than he ought — courage is the best disposition between these two defective extremes.⁵

And the mean is not merely a matter of feeling rightly; it is bound up with decision. Virtue makes us choose for the sake of something, and that something is what is fine.⁶ We are not moved by passion without choice when we act virtuously; we are disposed in a particular way, and that disposition issues in deliberate choice directed at the noble.²

This is why, in the case of courage, facing danger from mere experience or from compulsion or from shame before one's comrades does not yet reach the thing itself: true courage is enduring what is fearful because doing so is fine — not from ignorance of the danger, not for pleasure, but because the noble end demands it.⁷ So the genus is settled — aretē is a state of character — and the differentia is the mean relative to us, chosen by the person of practical wisdom, phronesis, who perceives what each situation requires. The full definition waits on that account of practical wisdom, but the structure is already visible here.

Sources

1. every virtue or excellence both brings into good condition the thing of which it is the excellence and makes the work of that thing be done well; e.g. the excellence of the eye makes both the eye and its work good... the virtue of man also will be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.

   Nicomachean Ethics

2. we are not called good or bad on the ground of our passions, but are so called on the ground of our virtues and our vices, and because we are neither praised nor blamed for our passions... but for our virtues and our vices we are praised or blamed.

   Nicomachean Ethics

3. we have the faculties by nature, but we are not made good or bad by nature... If, then, the virtues are neither passions nor faculties, all that remains is that they should be states of character.

   Nicomachean Ethics

4. the intermediate relatively to us is not to be taken so; if ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds; for this also is perhaps too much for the person who is to take it, or too little- too little for Milo, too much for the beginner in athletic exercises.

   Nicomachean Ethics

5. Courage is the best disposition with respect to fear and confidence. One should be neither like the reckless, who display deficiency with regard to the former and excess with regard to the latter, nor like cowards... it is clear that courage is the mean disposition between recklessness and cowardice, this being the best.

   Eudemian Ethics, p. 73

6. all of virtue is connected with decision... virtue makes everyone choose for the sake of something, and this 'something for the sake of which' is what is fine.

   Eudemian Ethics, p. 78

7. it is clear that courage too, being a virtue, will make us endure what is fearful for the sake of something... not to ignorance... nor to pleasure, but because doing so is fine.

   Eudemian Ethics, p. 78