When Aristotle wrote about virtue, he was writing specifically about the desire for people to find moderation in a life that often encourages them to seek out one pole or another. Life has a tendency to drift toward two extremes. People can find themselves caught in excess. When they are doing well, excess can mean a wide range of things, including spending too much money, eating too much food, or engaging in one of a number of vices. Having one Coke is fine, but drinking thirty Cokes may send one to the hospital. In addition, Aristotle saw nothing good about deficiency, either. Not having enough, and not being invested enough in a given venture, is a sure way to be average at it and have no impact. What Aristotle understood is that the path to the good life requires one to navigate these two different poles. The goal for a person has to be finding the middle path, allowing one’s self to miss out on the excess and to rise about the deficiency in order to have just enough but not oo much. This is a general rule in life that the philosopher believed could be applied to almost anything, and for that reason it has become something of a motto to those who recognize the value and virtue of Aristotle’s work.
Aristotle’s thoughts were a function of expediency and survival. He believed strongly that virtue was based in an appropriate disposition that was, itself, based in rational thought. Given that Greek society was the way it was, there was a strong desire among the people to demonstrate that they had engaged in some way in straight thinking. So it was with Aristotle, who saw virtue in life as being able to navigate through life’s most difficult decisions with the proper manner. In looking at his beliefs on virtue, one can clearly see that Aristotle saw value in appropriately assessing situations. In a scenario where there is some danger, the virtuous man is the man who takes a middle line. A man with no fear of that situation is dangerous and may walk himself into trouble. A man with too much fear in a situation will never leave his home, always fearing what might happen to him if he happens to take a step out. The virtuous man, then, is the one who can show balance. This is not an arbitrary belief on the part of Aristotle. He recognized that being able to maintain a balanced manner in all things is an absolutely necessary component to success over the long run because it involves seeing the many angles and still responding appropriately.
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The Greeks, and in particular, the great Greek thinkers, saw virtue in being able to live a life in reality. To them, there was nothing to be gained from stepping back from reality and not taking on important issues with one’s eyes wide open. This is why finding the mean between two extreme emotions is so critical. Going back to the previous example of a man entering a dangerous situation, a person who does not see the danger in the situation is likely going through with his eyes closed. He is wishing that danger does not exist. Like a person who refuses to open his bills in hoping that they will go away, he prefers to live his life unaware of the danger even though the danger is real. This is a sign of moral and intellectual weakness in the view of Aristotle, and for that reason, it cannot be the basis for virtue or happiness. On the other end of the pole is the person who is unable to open his eyes and see the reality of fear. Fear, it seems, is an instinct that debilitates people because human beings tend to have a very poor sense of the danger all around them. Human beings underestimate and overestimate the risk in situations all the time, and they act according to that ignorance of their own world. This was what Aristotle was trying to push back against. He did not want people to be debilitated by their own unwillingness to process their world, and they also did not want people to go blindly forward without dealing with the reality of a given situation. Virtue is in that middle line—being able to see the situation for what it is but also being able to process all the ways and reasons that the situation is not as scary as it might have otherwise been. This is virtue.
Virtue in this way is tied up in living and flourishing as a part of a bigger human community. To Aristotle, as with others, the ability to be free in thought is the height of human behavior. People who are free in their thought, not controlled by fear and not living in a separate state of reality, are the ones who are better able to process their own lives and also communicate well with others. Perhaps most importantly, the thinker believed and knew that life would offer plenty of opportunity for so-called “wins” and so-called “losses.” Having the ability to navigate poles and remain in good spirits is a life management skill that a person must have if he or she wants to be able to deal with the inevitable things that lif is necessarily going to throw at a person as a function of just being alive.
