Nicomachean Ethics II.1

We will continue to take it slowly for now. This is one of the most important books in human history, and there's groundwork to do to understand almost every chapter. This one not least!

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit).

It is enlightening to learn that "ethics" and "ethos" come from a word that originally meant "habit." It almost means "habitat," as it can be used for a dwelling place. It is the moral place where you live, and where therefore you are most comfortable. Home is where the habit is, the place where everything is done just the way you think is best.

From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Natural place is one of Aristotle's core ideas from the Physics and Metaphysics. It makes a lot of sense, can be directly verified by your own personal experiment, and by the way explains the idea that the earth is at the center of the universe -- it wasn't, as you have probably heard, arrogance on the part of mankind; it was rather an empirical observation about how things made of earth moved in the world. This idea suffused educated Europe: here's an example from 12th century 'science fiction.' 

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

The senses come to be as potential in gestation, in other words, and are actual by childhood. The virtues exist in us naturally, Aristotle thinks, but only as potentials (and not, we shall see, in everyone equally). Practice is necessary to bring them out. 

Note the interesting analogy between art and these moral virtues. Art/artistry/technology (techne) is actually one of the intellectual virtues, which comes to us (we have just read) by teaching more than by practice. You won't become a very good lyre-player by picking one up and, having never heard a good lyre-player nor met one, just fooling around with it. You learn building by studying with those who understand architecture, not just by going out and getting some rock and piling them up.

This returns us again to the idea that a good upbringing is needed for the development of moral virtue. You do have to do the work of practicing, but you also do have some initial learning to do. It's not that there is no learning involved in moral virtue, only practice: it is that you must first know what you are aspiring to do, but then you must also do the hard work of practicing the difficult thing until it becomes -- well, "second nature" as we will discover.

This is confirmed by what happens in states; for legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

As mentioned before, this is a disconnect between Aristotle's idea of politics and our own.  

Again, it is from the same causes and by the same means that every virtue is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced.

Indeed if you never play a lyre, you'll never be bad at it.  

And the corresponding statement is true of builders and of all the rest; men will be good or bad builders as a result of building well or badly. For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but all men would have been born good or bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the virtues also; by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appetites and feelings of anger; some men become temperate and good-tempered, others self-indulgent and irascible, by behaving in one way or the other in the appropriate circumstances.

The above further clarifies the analogy between art and moral virtue, and also the similarity between intellectual and moral virtue more broadly. Upbringing gets another mention at the end: 

Thus, in one word, states of character arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states of character correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.