Notes on the Contributors
Emily Brady is Professor of Philosophy and Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair and Director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. Previously, she was Professor of Environment and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She has published six books, including Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments (2018, as co-author); The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (2013); and Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (2003). Her current book project explores the aesthetics of nature in eighteenth-century philosophy.
Andrew J. Corsa is an Assistant Professor at Lynn University in its Dialogues of Learning programme. His essays on magnanimity, focusing on Hobbes, Hume, Smith, and Thoreau, have been published in the journals Hobbes Studies, Ergo, and Environmental Philosophy He is currently working on a book reflecting on the role that the virtue of magnanimity should play in the contemporary world.
Christopher Gill is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter. He works on Greek and Roman philosophy, especially ethics and psychology, with a special focus on ideas of character, personality, and self. His books include Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (1996); The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (2006); Naturalistic Psychology in Galen and Stoicism (2010); and Marcus Aurelius Meditations Books 1–6, translated with introduction and commentary (2013), all published by Oxford University Press. He is currently writing a book on Stoic ethics and its potential contribution to modern thought.
Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. A specialist in the history of moral and political philosophy in the Enlightenment period, he is the author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton University Press, 2019); and, most recently, The Political Philosophy of Fénelon (Oxford University Press, 2020), with its companion volume of translations, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Jennifer A. Herdt is Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Yale University Divinity School. She is the author of Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (2008), and Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (1997), and has served as guest editor for special issues of the Journal of Religious Ethics and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. In 2013 she delivered the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary on Christian eudaimonism and divine command morality. An ongoing project on ethical formation, Bildung,
and the Bildungsroman, is supported by a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Andrew Huddleston is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Prior to moving to Birkbeck, he was Michael Cohen Career Development Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford. His work focuses on nineteenth-century European philosophy (especially Nietzsche), aesthetics, ethics, and social philosophy. His book Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (2019) explores issues of ethics and social philosophy in Nietzsche’s thought. Huddleston’s work has also appeared in a number of journals and edited volumes.
Terence Irwin read Literae Humaniores at Magdalen College, Oxford, and received a PhD from Princeton. From 1975 to 2006 he taught at Cornell University. He is now Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College. His main research interests are in ancient philosophy, moral philosophy and its history, and the philosophy of Kant. He is the author of: Plato’s Gorgias (translation and notes, 1979); Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (translation and notes, 2nd edn 1999); Aristotle’s First Principles (1988); Classical Thought (1989); Plato’s Ethics (1995); and The Development of Ethics, 3 vols (2007–9). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Kristján Kristjánsson received his doctorate in moral philosophy from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and his research focuses on issues at the intersection between moral philosophy, moral psychology, and moral education. He is currently Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics, and Deputy Director of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, at the University of Birmingham, UK. Kristjánsson has published extensively in international journals on his research topics, and his latest books are The Self and Its Emotions (Cambridge, 2010); Virtues and Vices in Positive Psychology (Cambridge, 2013); Aristotelian Character Education (Routledge, 2015); and Virtuous Emotions (Oxford, 2018).
John Marenbon is a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he has been a Fellow since 1978. He is now also Honorary Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and was Guest Professor at Peking University in 2015–16. His recent books include The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy (as editor, 2012); Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (Princeton, 2015); and Medieval Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2016).
Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He was previously Centenary Professor of French Literature and Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1988); Roland Barthes (Cambridge, 1991); Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford, 2003); Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford, 2006); and Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford, 2011). He has translated Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy and The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings for the Oxford World’s Classics series. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Robert C. Roberts is Distinguished Professor of Ethics, Emeritus at Baylor University, and was formerly Chair of Ethics and Emotion Theory at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham. He works on the philosophical moral psychology of emotions and character traits and its intersection with empirical psychology. He is the author of Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (2003); Spiritual Emotions (2007); Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (2007, with W. Jay Wood); and Emotions in the Moral Life (2013), as well as numerous papers in journals and collections. Most recently, Roberts is the editor (with Daniel Telech) of The Moral Psychology of Gratitude (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), and he is currently working on Kierkegaard’s Psychology of Character (Eerdmans).
Eric Schliesser is Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Scholar at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. He has published widely on early modern philosophy and science as well as contemporary philosophy of economics, including a monograph on Adam Smith (Oxford University Press, 2017). He has authored an essay on magnanimity in David Hume and Adam Smith for Hume Studies.
Sophia Vasalou received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge, and is currently a Senior Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow in Philosophical Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Her work focuses on Islamic ethics, virtue ethics, and a number of other philosophical subjects. Her books include Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Muʿtazilite Ethics (Princeton, 2008); Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge, 2013); Wonder: A Grammar (SUNY, 2015); and Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics (Oxford, 2016).
Introduction
Sophia Vasalou
‘We all love great men . . . nay can we honestly bow down to anything else?’ So wrote Thomas Carlyle in a well-known set of lectures running under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.1 It is as good a place as any to open a conversation about that singular virtue—a virtue of greatness and great men—to which this volume is dedicated. Carlyle himself may not have had the virtue of greatness of soul or magnanimity specifically in mind when he launched his investigation of the hero. But it is a virtue that has often been understood to bear an especially close relation to the heroic, a relation to which it owes some of its strongest tensions but also the deepest roots of its power to fascinate.
For philosophers, the history of this virtue begins with Aristotle, who provided the first extensive philosophical account of it in his Nicomachean Ethics. The great-souled or magnanimous person (megalopsychos), as he pithily put it there, is the one who ‘thinks himself, and is, worthy of great things’ (1123b1–2); or in another translation, ‘who claims much and deserves much’.2 The basis of this person’s sense of worth is his excellence of character. And insofar as the greatest external good is honour, the great-souled person is one who is knowingly worthy of the highest honours. Greatness of soul is thus primarily a virtue that regulates one’s relationship to great honours.
Aristotle’s account, articulated in the distinctive moral and civic environment of the Athenian democracy, has often been seen under its aspect as an heir to a different kind of moral world to which fourth-century Athens maintained a strong but uneasy relationship—the world represented in the Homeric epics. Aristotle’s specific virtue term, as Terence Irwin points out in this volume, has scarcely a discernible footprint in fifth-century Greek, making its earliest literary appearances in the work of the Attic Orators. Yet not-too-distant cognate words— such as megalētor, often translated as ‘great-hearted’—are rife in Homer as designations of his heroes. And when Aristotle’s specific term comes into common use,
1 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 31.
2 The first quote is from the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Christopher Rowe with commentary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), which I draw on throughout the text with occasional modification. The second translation is by F. H. Peters.
Sophia Vasalou, Introduction In: The Measure of Greatness: Philosophers on Magnanimity. Edited by: Sophia Vasalou, Oxford University Press (2019). © the several contributors. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840688.003.0013
its association with the raw splendour of the Homeric world and its gallery of larger-than-life heroes is unmistakably clear. Great-souled or great-hearted men (and it is unmistakably a male virtue) are men like Achilles, whose love of honour, famously the source of the destructive wrath of which the Iliad sings, also leads him to disdain death in the ardour to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus, or men like Ajax, who prefers suicide to dishonour.
What do such men have in common? A love of honour, it is clear, even to the death. Aristotle himself is certainly thinking of such men when, in a well-thumbed passage of the Posterior Analytics (II.13.97b15–25), he brings up the term megalopsychia and names ‘intolerance of insults’ as a key component of its meaning. Yet that passage also attests that the transition from the Homeric battlefield to the Athenian polis has not left the moral universe, and the meaning of words, untouched. Since Achilles’ death-defying heroism—a heroism whose tendency to benefit the community mingled uneasily with its destructiveness—there had been other precedents, setting different examples of what a well-lived and indeed heroic life might look like. There had been Socrates, whose pregnant words in the Apology would resonate subtly with Aristotle’s chosen vocabulary in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he would ask his judges what ‘such a man’ as he deserves, and volunteer the answer: ‘Some good thing, men of Athens, if I must propose something truly in accordance with my deserts’ (36d).3 For far from hurting the community, he had been its ‘benefactor’. In Socrates, the death-defying pursuit of the noble had taken a giant step farther, leaving even the love of honour behind to become an allencompassing indifference to external goods. ‘Indifference to fortune’, in fact, was a second semantic strand of the virtue term that Aristotle would go on to identify in the Posterior Analytics.
Language had caught up with the changing views of heroism. Yet this seemed to leave moral language in a curious state of tension. When one described the warrior as magnanimous and the philosopher as magnanimous, how much was there in common between the two uses? Was one talking about one and the same characteristic? Aristotle’s considered exposition of the virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics has often been read as an attempt to provide a response to this question, and thus to work through the stress fractures between the moral world of the Homeric epics and the democratic polis. On one reading, Aristotle’s compromise was to maintain the connection with honour but to moderate Achilles’ attachment, and to maintain the link with a reserved attitude to externals, but to moderate Socrates’ detachment.4
It would be hard to understate how deeply this account has divided modern readers. This profound division was captured starkly by the French scholar René
3 Translation by Harold N. Fowler in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914).
4 See the discussion in Neil Cooper, ‘Aristotle’s Crowning Virtue’, Apeiron 22 (1989), 191–205.
Antoine Gauthier in a panoramic work published in 1951, Magnanimité: l’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie païenne et dans la théologie chrétienne, which remains a landmark in the limited scholarship on the topic. It is astonishing today to read some of the strongly worded expressions of admiration that Gauthier documented among some of Aristotle’s readers in the nineteenth and early parts of the twentieth century. One writer speaks of the portrait of magnanimity as a ‘true gem’ in the Aristotelian corpus. Another breathlessly describes the magnanimous man as ‘sparkling with spiritual beauty, he consumes my entire ability to admire’. Aesthetic terms abound: a noble ‘painting’, a work of art.5
Modern readers may find it difficult to relate to these gushing reactions. This reflects the degree to which the more recent reception of this virtue has been dominated by the very opposite response, what Gauthier himself referred to as a sense of ‘scandal’. There has been no end to the forms this sense of scandal has taken. Several of these are hard to adumbrate without dwelling on the particulars of Aristotle’s account. The easiest to pick out is the deep moral discomfort provoked by the sense of entitlement—an entitlement to ‘great things’—exhibited by the great-souled person and by the self-satisfaction that marks his appraisal of his own moral credentials. Smug, priggish, disdainful of others; to these faults have been added myriad others which find their purchase in different elements entering Aristotle’s picture. The great-souled person likes to ‘bestow benefits, but is ashamed at receiving them’ (1124b9–10) and dislikes hearing about his debts; he tends ‘not to ask anyone for anything’ while being eager to give; he is ‘slow to act, holding back except where there is great honour to be had or a great deed to be done’ (1124b24–6); he is not given to wonder, thinking that ‘nothing is great’ (1125a3). Mining such and other passages, different kinds of readers have excoriated the ideal of magnanimity for failing to make room for gratitude, for codifying a near-delusive desire for god-like self-sufficiency, and for legitimating an unjustifiable self-exemption from the smaller yet nonetheless significant acts that make the warp and woof of the moral life. The great-souled man’s imperviousness to wonder in turn betrays a suffocating self-absorption and the constriction to an all-too-human sphere of virtue lacking transcendent object.6
This last point represents a criticism which Gauthier puts to the mouth of one of Aristotle’s Christian readers in the first half of the twentieth century, the Jesuit writer André Bremond. This is the thin edge of a wedge into the larger observation that many of the moral values antagonized by the ideal of magnanimity—notably
5 See René Antoine Gauthier, Magnanimité: l’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie païenne et dans la théologie chrétienne (Paris: J. Vrin, 1951), 5–7.
6 The last point reprises the discussion in Gauthier, Magnanimité, 9. The other points draw on remarks voiced by a number of different commentators. Some of the recurring criticisms of Aristotle’s account can be found clustered in Howard J. Curzer, ‘Aristotle’s Much-Maligned Megalopsychos’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (1991), 131–51, and Roger Crisp, ‘Greatness of Soul’, in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Richard Kraut (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 158–78.
humility and gratitude, taken as a virtue of acknowledged dependence—in fact occupy a special place within Christian morality more narrowly. It may thus appear unsurprising that magnanimity has often been viewed as epitomizing the clash between pagan and Christian ethics. Yet to the extent that these kinds of values remain deeply embedded in modern moral culture, the clash inescapably has wider reach, and magnanimity seems calculated to find itself in tension with this broader culture.
This tension, it has been suggested, partly reflects Aristotle’s failure to shake off the heroic origins of the virtue he was commending and leave the Homeric world fully behind. Taken as a virtue of deserving great honours through great acts that require similarly great means and opportunities, this virtue remains the province of the privileged few, and as such, one of the ‘holdovers from an age of Homeric heroism that lay too much emphasis on the lottery of natural and social endowments’. Insofar as this emphasis was encrusted within the structures of Aristotle’s own society no less than his moral philosophy, magnanimity represents a remainder of cultural contingency that Aristotle failed to think away.7 We often view Aristotle as the great universalist voice in ethics; yet here, his mask slips. If we see it slip, this reveals the extent to which our own culture is informed not only by Christian values but also by liberal political values in which egalitarianism occupies pride of place. In this regard, taken as a virtue that enshrines the ‘selfishness of honour-loving gentlemen and glory-seeking warriors’, magnanimity would seem to be the ‘vestige of a bygone aristocratic and militaristic age’ and by the same token to have no conceivable place in the modern world.8
This fusillade of hostile readings has not gone unchallenged. Over the last few decades, the number of Aristotle’s detractors has been almost evenly matched by that of his defenders, who have met such criticisms point-by-point with increasingly nuanced responses. Central to the debate about how we should evaluate Aristotle’s account of this virtue, inescapably, have been heated debates about how we should interpret it—how we should understand the nature of this virtue and its place in Aristotle’s ethics. Is the great-souled man’s fundamental commitment, for example, to honour, or rather, as many of its defenders have argued, to virtue?
How does Aristotle’s claim that honour is the greatest good square with his identification of that good with friendship elsewhere? Did Aristotle really intend to present greatness of soul as the peak of excellence, or was it rather as a limited peak, one towering over the sphere of the moral but not the intellectual virtues? His wonderlessness, it has been argued, marks him out as the ‘political man par excellence’ as against the philosopher capable of self-transcending contemplation
7 The quoted remark is from Nancy Sherman, ‘Common Sense and Uncommon Virtue’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988), 103. Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre’s remarks in After Virtue, 3rd ed. (London: Duckworth, 2007), 182, and A Short History of Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 75–7.
8 The quote is from Ryan P. Hanley, ‘Aristotle on the Greatness of Greatness of Soul’, History of Political Thought 23 (2002), 1, though it is Hanley’s aim to question that assessment.
whose way of living Aristotle commends in the last book of the Ethics.9 In this regard, Aristotle’s great-souled man is closer to Achilles than to Socrates, or indeed to the conception of greatness of soul marked out (if not fully expounded) in the work of his teacher, Plato, who had highlighted its philosophical character in the Republic. Some have taken the deficiencies and internal incoherencies of this figure to be so blatant that the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that it was intended by Aristotle less as an admirable and emulable ideal than a report— ‘half-ironical’ or indeed ‘humorous’—of popular moral views of his time.10
Such interpretive analyses have sometimes been paired with a closer questioning of the evaluative commitments that underlie criticisms of the Aristotelian account of this virtue. If the great-souled man’s concern with honour, or selfconscious sense of worth, antagonizes us, perhaps the right response is not to reject this ideal but to interrogate our moral premises, and to consider whether there may be a degree of preoccupation with honour, and well-founded sense of self-esteem, that is not only legitimate but salutary.11 Such self-interrogation may require us to challenge deep-seated moral feelings that represent the legacy of a long religious past.
The pendulum of such debates has swung back and forth several times over the last few decades, and although the sense of ‘scandal’ has gradually given way to more balanced assessments, the ambivalence provoked by Aristotle’s presentation of this ideal still lingers. This explains why this has been one of the few elements of Aristotle’s ethics that, outside the sporadic salvos of such debates, has not benefitted from the burgeoning interest taken in his ethical legacy by contemporary moral philosophers. Distrustful of the dazzle of this grandstanding virtue, philosophers have generally consigned it to the shadows.
So why bring it out of them—dedicating an entire volume of essays to its investigation? There are different ways of answering this question. The simplest is to point out, with Carlyle, that certain types of ideals carry their own intrinsic claims. ‘We all love great men’—we all ‘reverence’ heroes. And while we might disagree whether to call Aristotle’s great-souled man a ‘hero’, or whether Aristotle’s own stance towards him was one of tacit reservation as against whole-hearted embrace,
9 Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952), 130. The ‘limited peak’ view is also argued by James T. Fetter in ‘Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man: The Limited Perfection of the Ethical Virtues’, History of Political Thought 36 (2015), 1–28. Gauthier is the most notable dissenter from this view, having identified the Aristotelian megalopsychos with the philosopher. See the discussion in Magnanimité, part 1, chapter 3.
10 The words are John Burnet’s: The Ethics of Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1900), 179. Cf. Fetter’s discussion in ‘Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man’.
11 The legitimacy of a certain kind of concern with honour is a theme, for example, in Carson Holloway’s discussion in ‘Christianity, Magnanimity, and Statesmanship’, Review of Politics 61 (1999), 581–604; the legitimation of a certain kind of pride (or pridefulness) is a central theme in Kristján Kristjánsson’s engagement with the virtue in Justifying Emotions: Pride and Jealousy (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), chapters 3 and 4.
the claim of this ideal on constituting a vision of greatness will be clear. If this larger-than-life image of virtue engages us, it is precisely in its capacity as a vision of human greatness; and it is in the same capacity that it antagonizes us and demands a critical response. We all love great men—yet is this a vision of greatness we can ‘honestly bow down to’?
This is a vision, moreover, in which stakes with crucial importance for the moral life are played out, however differently these stakes might be ordered and negotiated by different interpretations. Seen from one perspective, this is a virtue that governs the correct attitude to honour and to proper self-worth. Taken also as a virtue concerned with benefaction on a large scale, as some have emphasized, it is a virtue with crucial significance for the political sphere and the well-being of the community.12 Seen from another perspective, it is a virtue that governs the correct attitude to external goods and vicissitudes of fortune more broadly, and as such, in Gauthier’s wording, is concerned with ‘the problem which is the crucial problem of Greek ethics in its entirety: that of the relationship between human beings and the world’.13 From this perspective, it is a virtue enmeshed with farreaching questions about the role of luck in the good life, and the nature and extent of human dependency, that carved deep tracks through much of ancient ethical thought.
These were questions that attracted different kinds of responses among ancient philosophers, with significant repercussions for how the broader moral landscape was configured and how the conception of human greatness was in turn drafted within it. Already Aristotle’s account reveals a concept in transit, whose boundaries have undergone critical shifts. Yet in doing so—and this is to move towards a second answer to the above question—it invites a question about how its boundaries might shift yet again. If the meaning of this virtue, and the evaluative commitments keyed into it, underwent important changes in the transition from the heroic world to the democratic polis, what can we say about those later stages of intellectual history in which this world, as indeed the Athenian polis with its constitutive social hierarchies and divisions, was left even farther behind? What story of continuity and change might there be to tell?
This collection of essays is an attempt to answer this question by shining a more inclusive and sustained spotlight on the longer life led by this virtue—this vision of greatness—in the unfolding of philosophical history. In doing so, it seeks, on the one hand, to broaden a discussion that has often focused all too narrowly on Aristotle’s account, placing the latter in conversation with a longer sequence of philosophical and indeed theological approaches. Taking this longitudinal view is important if we wish to achieve a fuller and more nuanced
12 The political character of the virtue is accentuated by a number of writers cited above, including Holloway and Jaffa.
13 Gauthier, Magnanimité, 303.
understanding of this virtue, to the extent indeed of raising questions (and I will return to this in a moment) about how we understand this virtue’s unifying identity across these historical transitions. It is also important for confronting more judiciously evaluative questions about its significance, and for considering what place, if any, this virtue can still occupy among our ideals.
This type of question seems particularly relevant set against the record of recent contestations of its significance, framed relative to its Aristotelian expression. Yet in this regard, there could be no more illuminating theme than that of ‘conflict’ or ‘contestation’ to raise as a looking glass to this virtue’s longer history. And it is illuminating precisely because of the ways in which this history frustrates and surprises it, revealing an ideal that, if it did not meet the welcome of heroes throughout its entire passage, was warmly received precisely where it seemed most liable to be rejected, and as such challenging any preconceived notions about the conflict it must inevitably pose to key evaluative perspectives—to an ethic shaped by Christian values, by egalitarian commitments.
It is thus commonplace, as already noted, to wonder whether an ideal still so redolent of the world of honour-loving warriors and aristocrats could have a place in the modern world, with its distinctively egalitarian values. Yet this is to overlook a ferocious preoccupation with this type of ideal—an ideal of greatness and great men—that swept through European and American intellectual culture over an extended period spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This preoccupation can be seen at work among a broad array of intellectuals, and assumes a variety of different forms. In many of these forms, it emerges precisely out of a concern with the problematic consequences of the culture of modernity, with its liberal egalitarian values, democratic structures, and commercial ethos. We hear the acute observer of American political life, Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, mourning the effect of democratic society in making men small-minded, so that their thoughts become confined to the satisfaction of bodily needs and the multiplication of physical comforts and they forget about the ‘more precious goods’ of the soul which constitute ‘the glory and the greatness of the human species’. Democratic men, in this sense, think too meanly of themselves—humility, in them, is a vice. Countering this tendency means cultivating anew a ‘taste for the infinite, a sentiment of greatness, and a love of immaterial pleasures’.14 This is a pedagogical task with a crucially political dimension, requiring visionary statesmanship, one of whose cardinal virtues must be an independence of mind that enables one to resist another endemic peril of democracy, the coercive power of public opinion.
14 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 509, 519. The religious dimension of Tocqueville’s concerns distinguishes his perspective sharply from some of the other thinkers mentioned next.
We find the same lament about the erosion of greatness among many other intellectuals of de Tocqueville’s time. It is in the same vein that John Stuart Mill ruefully comments on the disappearance of individual greatness and of ‘energetic characters on any large scale’.15 Perhaps the best-known philosophical development of this concern is by Nietzsche (the subject of Chapter 9 of the present volume), whose preoccupation with the levelling effects of modern society (read against a more distinctive cultural genealogy), with the creep of mediocrity, and the imperative of clearing the space for human greatness is paired with a more explicit problematization of humility as a value.
Among a number of other philosophers, this preoccupation takes shape directly as a renewed concern with the importance of magnanimity as a virtue. The Scottish philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith (the subject of Chapter 7) form a case in point. For Smith, as Ryan Hanley has persuasively argued, magnanimity is a virtue that modern conditions not only fail to render otiose but on the contrary mandate all the more urgently—the very antidote for its unique ills. These ills include the type of small-mindedness de Tocqueville would later bemoan, but also that evil which so memorably exercised Rousseau: the tendency to live in other men’s opinions, more concerned with how we appear than how we really are. Magnanimity is the virtue that supplies the corrective to these evils, orienting us to the noble and enabling us to live in our own consciousness of our merit. Insofar as it displaces our concern from the self to the common good, magnanimity has a special role to play in the political sphere.16
We find echoes of this approach in numerous later thinkers. They are distinctly present, for example, in the ideal of self-reliance articulated by the great American intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson (the subject of Chapter 10), which embodies the stout imperative of looking inward rather than outward to convention and opinion. ‘Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist’.17 In these new revivals, significantly, magnanimity is conceived as a virtue oriented to the honourable rather than to actual honour—which it rather enables one to resist—and to a proper sense of self-worth that can remain independent of the latter.
Thus, a more nuanced consideration of some of the episodes of this concept’s history suggests that there may be a more complex story to tell about its apparent conflict with the modern world and its distinctive ethos. Modernity may have left the Homeric battlefield and the ancient polis far behind. But if we think the modern world has no room left for heroes and great men—and surely we can now add: for great women—and their virtues, we may need to think again.
15 ‘On Liberty’, in On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 77–8.
16 See the discussion in Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter 5.
17 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 134.
If this conflict invites re-reading, the other source of conflict mentioned above—tied more particularly not to modernity with its democratic egalitarian ethos, but to an ethical culture influenced by Christian values—might seem more stubborn and harder to think away. It is noteworthy that many of the intellectuals just named who preoccupied themselves with the concept of human greatness and who sought to reclaim the virtue of magnanimity as an important ideal saw their concerns as expressly pitted against this ethical culture. Nietzsche is the clearest example, with his vitriolic critique of central Christian values including humility and compassion for their debilitating effects, glorifying human weakness rather than greatness and strength. Yet so is Hume, well known for his dismissive view of the ‘monkish virtue of humility’. The virtue of greatness of mind, by contrast, was shaped by a ‘steady and well-establish’d pride and self-esteem’. In foregrounding the latter, Hume thus saw himself as advocating an ideal with a distinct anti-religious edge, which ‘many religious declaimers’ decry as ‘purely pagan and natural’.18
Hume’s point may seem intuitive in rehearsing a familiar understanding of the conflict between magnanimity and Christian values. The opposition between the Christian ideal of humility and the sense of pride embedded within Aristotelian magnanimity offers one of the most obvious ways of parsing this conflict. Yet there is an interesting question as to how comfortably this picture squares with the actual history of Christian thinkers’ interaction with this particular virtue. Even Augustine, that formidable architect of enduring features of the ethical outlook of Latin Christianity and its relationship to the pagan world, had not entirely refused his admiration to the dazzling examples of Roman heroism in the City of God, and had not singled out magnanimity for special rebuke.19 Looking to the later stages of Christian intellectual history, in fact, we see the virtue living and breathing in the works of major theologians in the Middle Ages, from Abelard, to Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and beyond (as explored in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book).
Yet here, to be sure, a closer plotting of this virtue’s historical reception— surprisingly welcomed where rejection might have been expected—locks paths with the task of a finer-grained reading of its constitution, and historical evolution, as a concept. Because even the briefest inquiry reveals that the concept that lives and breathes in Aristotle is not quite the same as the one that animates these theological articulations. Aquinas’ reworking, for example, has been characterized in a number of ways, all of which serve to highlight its distance from the Aristotelian account. If Aristotle’s virtue is concerned with the management of honour, Aquinas’ has by contrast been described as a virtue of ‘hope management’, most immediately
18 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 3.3.2, 599–600.
19 Some of his most concentrated references to the virtue appear in Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), Book I, §22, and do not betray a critical attitude to the virtue as such.
concerned with the passion of hope.20 If Aristotle’s virtue is that of consummate self-aware greatness, Aquinas’, on one reading, is a virtue in which greatness figures in the content of aspiration. One might even go so far as to call it a virtue of self-realization.21
Similar shifts or divergences can be plotted across several other stages of the virtue’s history, beginning from the ancient world itself. Some of the medieval reworkings can in fact be seen as renegotiating precisely those elements often taken to constitute the Aristotelian virtue’s troublesome ethical commitments. Yet these moves, as John Marenbon shows in his contribution to this volume, in turn partly reflect the influence of the rather different conception of magnanimity stemming from the Stoic tradition (explored in Chapter 2 of this book) and mediated to medieval thinkers notably through the works of Cicero. In this conception, Aristotle’s emphasis on the virtue’s role in managing attitudes to honour is replaced by a stronger emphasis on attitudes to external goods or circumstances more broadly, and magnanimity is configured more specifically as the ability to rise above these and treat them with indifference or disdain. The interweaving of Stoic and Aristotelian elements continues down to post-medieval times, and new emphases emerge that introduce delicate yet not insignificant shifts into the virtue’s content. Thus, Descartes’ seemingly Aristotelian construal of magnanimity or generosité as the ‘passion of legitimate self-esteem’ (as Michael Moriarty puts it in his chapter) is tied, in a not-quite-Aristotelian way, to the subject’s awareness of her freedom of will and resolution to use this freedom well, and to a capacity to regulate desires directed to what lies outside one’s control. Magnanimity, thus, is fundamentally a kind of wonder at one’s own power.
Where the concept of magnanimity opens out to the broader concept of human greatness, as with Nietzsche, or to allied states that share some of the historical content of this virtue but not its conceptualization as a virtue—such as Kant’s sublime (the subject of Chapter 8 of this volume), which is shaped by a perception of human greatness not unlike Descartes’ and his Stoic predecessors’—the divergences may loom larger still. Nietzsche’s understanding of human greatness, for example, not only stocks that concept with very different evaluative features compared with most ancient thinkers, but is also remarkable for its willingness to countenance the possibility that the concept of greatness and that of goodness may come entirely apart. Widening the conversation to include approaches taken outside the European world, such as the virtue of greatness of spirit articulated in the
20 David Horner, ‘What It Takes to Be Great: Aristotle and Aquinas on Magnanimity’, Faith and Philosophy 15 (1998), 431.
21 This suggestion can be read out of both Horner’s and Gauthier’s approach to the virtue. Gauthier characterizes it as a virtue that presides over the efflorescence of the human personality in all its aspects—moral, intellectual, physical—which as such ‘defines a personalist style of life’ (Magnanimité, 368–69). Horner similarly underlines its involvement in the recognition, and thus confident fulfilment, of one’s personal capacities and distinctive calling. See especially ‘What It Takes to Be Great’, 431–3.
Arabic tradition (the subject of Chapter 5) which was structured by an emphasis on great aspiration and aspiration to virtue, may seem to drive the wedge a notch deeper insofar as it involves severing the textual link with the ancient tradition that holds all of the other accounts together.
Looking at these and other divergences—ably plotted by Robert Roberts in his contribution—it may be tempting to conclude that the concept that forms the subject of this book possesses such internal plasticity and such permeable seams that to talk about magnanimity is to talk about everything and nothing, a perfect chameleon. In what sense, it may be asked, are we talking about the same concept? In what sense is the story of this book a story about a single subject? This, of course, is a question as old as Aristotle. Has the passage of time made it any easier to answer?
Now some of the differences can be exaggerated, and just how deep they appear will depend on important interpretive decisions. The interpretation of Aristotle’s account advanced by Terence Irwin in his contribution, for example—which draws the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics more closely together to accentuate the status of magnanimity as a virtue involving the correct appreciation and relative ordering of goods—may roll up part of the distance between Aristotle’s approach and several others, including Descartes’ and the one found in the Arabic tradition. Other differences run deeper, reflecting the fact that this virtue, like any other ethical concept, takes its meaning from the broader ethical and indeed metaphysical landscape in which it is anchored. As Roberts suggests here and elsewhere, our view both about which character traits constitute virtues, and about how particular virtues are to be understood, will inevitably be responsive to larger views about human nature and the nature of the world we live in.22
Yet even so, certain patterns can be discerned—certain clusters of physiognomic features which permit us, if not to draw hard-and-fast boundaries around this virtue, at the very least to trace out a set of family resemblances that bring the different accounts documented in this book together. One such feature is the concern with attitudes to fortune or external goods. Another feature is the concern with attitudes to honour, and the related connection to self-worth and elevated self-esteem. There is then room for competing approaches as regards the precise calibration of attitudes to honour (for example, concerning the degree of attachment, whether this should be Aristotelian moderation or Socratic/Stoic indifference) and to external goods more broadly. There is also room for competing views about the precise features of the self that form the basis of proper esteem and self-esteem, for example one’s acquired excellence of character as a particular individual (Aristotle) as against one’s moral capacities as a member of the human species (Descartes, Kant, several of the philosophers and theologians in the
22 See his discussion in ‘How Virtue Contributes to Flourishing’, in Current Controversies in Virtue Theory, ed. Mark Alfano (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 36–49.
Arabic tradition). There are also different ways of parsing the notion of worth, for example whether it is backward-looking (worthiness to receive some good, as on an obvious reading of Aristotle) or forward-looking (worthiness to perform some action or actively achieve some good, as in Aquinas or the approaches attested in the Arabic tradition). Linked to the latter parsing is another recurring feature, the constitutive concern with the pursuit of virtue and of great and virtuous actions, which can in turn figure as the object of (thus forging a further link with) elevated hope and aspiration. There is then room for different specifications of the virtuous pursuit at stake, including whether the emphasis is on moral virtue (notably virtue involving large-scale benefaction, as among numerous thinkers) or on intellectual virtue and thus on the philosophical life more broadly (as among some of the American Transcendentalists). The global connection with virtue and the pursuit of central aspects of the good life as a whole lends the concept a higher-order aspect.
This inventory of conceptual filaments, to repeat, is not so much a way of marking out the determinate boundaries of the concept as of plotting those physiognomic resemblances that make it natural to regard many of the accounts surveyed in this book as instances of a single concept or members of the same family. At the same time, even this more generous understanding of what is involved in identifying our theme concept might seem to come under strain faced with some of the approaches showcased in this volume. This holds especially true of those approaches whose distinction lies in the fact that they cannot be straightforwardly seen as developing a focal concept parsed, categorially, as a virtue. This applies, most obviously, to the exploration of Nietzsche’s approach to human greatness (Chapter 9), and of Kant’s conception of the aesthetic experience of the sublime (Chapter 8).
Here, certainly, the boundaries of the topic breathe with greater freedom. Yet to let them breathe is to give acknowledgement to the complex web of relations in which this concept is embedded, and the broader evaluative landscape into which it sends its nerves. It is to acknowledge, for example, that this is a virtue that has often represented not just one virtue among others but a more overarching and superordinate vision of what it is to be great. Nietzsche in particular, as already noted, stands at a special juncture in the revived concern with this vision and the renegotiation of key values, such as humility and pride, that make up the field of relevance of magnanimity as a virtue. To let these boundaries breathe is also to acknowledge the manifold and evolving contexts in which the concerns of this virtue can be manifested—indeed, the plural and evolving contexts in which the moral life more broadly extends its nerves. Kant’s moralized view of the sublime is the best example of that, making the aesthetic encounter with nature (and to a lesser extent art) the scene of a numinous confrontation with our own moral nature and the higher dignity with which it invests us. The terrible wonder provoked by nature can thus become a wonder at our own greatness, understood in
ways informed by a long tradition of ethical reflection in which the specific virtue of magnanimity also had a solid place.23 This, too, belongs to the history of engagement with this virtue and the moral world in which it lived and breathed.
To point to these breathing boundaries and to the larger universe in which this concept sends its pulse is also, by the same token, to call attention to the fact that this book itself is in an important sense incomplete, because inevitably selective. A showcasing of crests rather than a comprehensive topography, its task will nevertheless be complete if it succeeds in opening new windows into the history of a virtue that still both enchants and divides, and if it helps us think more constructively through our conflicted responses.
Having conjured the broad stage in which the project of this book unfolds, let me offer a brief preview of its contents. The chief aim of this book, as I have said, is to offer a more sustained insight into the historical development of the virtue of magnanimity or greatness of soul set against the larger aim of refocusing discussion about its contemporary significance. This aim is reflected in the structure of the book. Its backbone consists of ten chapters which explore the approaches taken to the virtue among a number of key thinkers, schools, and contexts. Two chapters focusing on the ancient context (Aristotle and the Stoics respectively) are followed by two chapters exploring the virtue’s articulation in the world of medieval Latin Christianity, and by another chapter that addresses the approaches taken in the Islamic world. The next chapters focus, in turn, on Descartes and his predecessors, outstanding thinkers of the Scottish enlightenment (Hume, Smith, and John Witherspoon), Kant, and Nietzsche. A final chapter addresses the American context with a focus on Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. With this historical backbone in place, the concluding two chapters take a more reflective view, with Robert Roberts critically surveying the concept against its manifold historical articulations, and Kristján Kristjánsson closing the circle by offering a broad-brush appraisal of the Aristotelian account of the virtue and what, despite everything, it may still have to teach us.
Taking each chapter in sequence, Terence Irwin (Chapter 1) offers a rereading of Aristotle’s account of magnanimity which takes its point of departure from a commonly overlooked element: the magnanimous person’s disposition to forget past evils. Far from a faithful reproduction of conventional views, this move appears surprising set against earlier conceptions of the virtue, as notably exemplified by the Homeric heroes, in whom magnanimity was tied to an intolerance of dishonour requiring a lively memory of wrongs suffered. Similarly, while the notion of ‘not recalling evils’—of taking a generous attitude towards past offences—had a
23 I have unpacked this idea a little more fully in Wonder: A Grammar (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), chapter 4, esp. 160–2, and Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 5, esp. 189–90.
