[Magnanimity] seems even from its name to be concerned with great things; what sort of great things, is the first question we must try to answer. It makes no difference whether we consider the state of character or the man characterized by it. Now the man is thought to be [magnanimous] who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them; for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly. The [magnanimous] man, then, is the man we have described. For he who is worthy of little and thinks himself worthy of little is temperate, but not proud; for pride implies greatness, as beauty implies a good-sized body, and little people may be neat and well-proportioned but cannot be beautiful.
That last is not very nice by contemporary standards. It is probably true; one of the most desired qualities in a man is height, when women are asked what they find beautiful in men. It's one of the least controllable qualities, which makes it especially unfair that it is so valued; a man can make himself stronger or more educated or more successful, but he can't grow taller by any practice or exercise. That unfairness isn't exactly an injustice, since the same standard is applied to everyone; and women, too, are judged for some facts about their physical appearance that they can't change. The fact that such things are outside of anyone's power is probably exactly what makes them seem valuable, since such things can't be had by effort but only by good fortune.
Magnanimity is, perhaps, a quality like that. It isn't for everyone, just as magnificence was not. It is for the ones who have great souls, meaning souls that are capable of great things. The virtue for those of lesser capacities is humility, but not undue humility: moderate and correct estimation of themselves.
On the other hand, he who thinks himself worthy of great things, being unworthy of them, is vain; though not every one who thinks himself worthy of more than he really is worthy of in vain. The man who thinks himself worthy of worthy of less than he is really worthy of is unduly humble, whether his deserts be great or moderate, or his deserts be small but his claims yet smaller. And the man whose deserts are great would seem most unduly humble; for what would he have done if they had been less? The magnanimous man, then, is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a mean in respect of the rightness of them; for he claims what is accordance with his merits, while the others go to excess or fall short.
Again, we all benefit when the magnanimous strives to do the great things they are capable of doing. Those great things otherwise wouldn't happen. Think of Bach, for example: it would be madness for most people to imagine they could write so much music, or that they should. Yet our world was permanently improved because he thought he could and was right to think so.
If, then, he deserves and claims great things, and above all the great things, he will be concerned with one thing in particular. [That thing is honor. -Grim] Desert is relative to external goods; and the greatest of these, we should say, is that which we render to the gods, and which people of position most aim at, and which is the prize appointed for the noblest deeds; and this is honour; that is surely the greatest of external goods. Honours and dishonours, therefore, are the objects with respect to which the magnanimous man is as he should be. And even apart from argument it is with honour that magnanimous men appear to be concerned; for it is honour that they chiefly claim, but in accordance with their deserts. The unduly humble man falls short both in comparison with his own merits and in comparison with the magnanimous man's claims. The vain man goes to excess in comparison with his own merits, but does not exceed the magnanimous man's claims.
What Aristotle has just told us is that the magnanimous is chiefly concerned with what is worthy of honor. A consequence of that is that honor is a reliable guide: not whether you get honors, but whether you deserve honor for an action.
Now the magnanimous man, since he deserves most, must be good in the highest degree; for the better man always deserves more, and the best man most. Therefore the truly magnanimous man must be good. And greatness in every virtue would seem to be characteristic of a proud man. And it would be most unbecoming for a proud man to fly from danger, swinging his arms by his sides, or to wrong another; for to what end should he do disgraceful acts, he to whom nothing is great? If we consider him point by point we shall see the utter absurdity of a magnanimous man who is not good.
When we get to justice, which has been of much greater interest to philosophers (especially including John Rawls in the last generation) you will see that justice is compulsory: the idea is that it is kind of like complete virtue because it has legal mandates that require you to do the virtuous thing. Magnanimity is actually complete virtue, because it's internal. You do what is most worthy of honor, not just what is basic to justice; and you do it because you want to. Your sense of honor makes you aspire to be that kind of person.
As we have learned such acts are even pleasing for the magnanimous because it is now their habit and keeping to our habits is pleasant. Their characters are shaped to do what is best.
Nor, again, would he be worthy of honour if he were bad; for honour is the prize of virtue, and it is to the good that it is rendered.
In Latin that aphorism is Virtutis Gloria Merces, which is the motto of the Clan Donnachaidh, important to me because my mother was a Duncan.
Magnanimity, then, seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes [those virtues] greater, and it is not found without them. Therefore it is hard to be truly magnanimous; for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character.
This is a key point. As I mentioned above, justice is also treated as a sort-of complete virtue; if you obey just laws you will behave in a manner that is in accord with all the ways a virtuous person would treat another. The magnanimous goes beyond the base requirement, and strives to do what is most worthy of honor. In this way, they carry out the virtues in higher and better ways. It is this, and not justice, that we should be striving to embody.
It is chiefly with honours and dishonours, then, that the proud man is concerned; and at honours that are great and conferred by good men he will be moderately pleased, thinking that he is coming by his own or even less than his own; for there can be no honour that is worthy of perfect virtue, yet he will at any rate accept it since they have nothing greater to bestow on him; but honour from casual people and on trifling grounds he will utterly despise, since it is not this that he deserves, and dishonour too, since in his case it cannot be just.
The last part of that clause is the most important. It won't matter to him if he is shown dishonor, because he knows that he doesn't deserve it. Again, it isn't about whether he receives honors from people, it is about doing what is most worthy of honor.
This satisfies the concerns about honor as an end of ethics that Aristotle raised and accepted in I.5. Honor cannot be the end of ethics because it isn't internal to us, but depends on what others do. A sense of honor absolutely can be. It is coherent with eudaimonia, rather than a competitor to it, because it is going to bring you the highest levels of happiness. This is human flourishing at its most complete.
In the first place, then, as has been said, the magnanimous man is concerned with honours; yet he will also bear himself with moderation towards wealth and power and all good or evil fortune, whatever may befall him, and will be neither over-joyed by good fortune nor over-pained by evil. For not even towards honour does he bear himself as if it were a very great thing.
I'm going to leave 'pride/proud' in the next bit because it is where I think Aristotle is trying to talk about some things that can go wrong with being a great person; for one thing, most people are only a little bit good, so you might look down upon them. This seems closer to the sinful aspects of pride that Christianity has been much concerned about over the centuries. He is thinking here of well-born men, for example, like his student Alexander (the Great!).
Power and wealth are desirable for the sake of honour (at least those who have them wish to get honour by means of them); and for him to whom even honour is a little thing the others must be so too. Hence proud men are thought to be disdainful.The goods of fortune also are thought to contribute towards pride. For men who are well-born are thought worthy of honour, and so are those who enjoy power or wealth; for they are in a superior position, and everything that has a superiority in something good is held in greater honour. Hence even such things make men prouder; for they are honoured by some for having them; but in truth the good man alone is to be honoured; he, however, who has both advantages is thought the more worthy of honour. But those who without virtue have such goods are neither justified in making great claims nor entitled to the name of 'magnanimity'; for these things imply perfect virtue. Disdainful and insolent, however, even those who have such goods become.
We can see that Aristotle doesn't mean to praise the well-born for that reason, nor for their wealth; there may be reasons why some families produce men and women who are both greater and also richer and more likely to be included in positions of power. However, it is clear from this section that Aristotle knows they don't do so perfectly reliably; Plato was so concerned with the problem of transmission of virtue across generations that he talked about it very regularly, as for example in the Protagoras; and Plato imagined the political structure of the Republic precisely to address that problem.
For without virtue it is not easy to bear gracefully the goods of fortune; and, being unable to bear them, and thinking themselves superior to others, [the vicious wealthy and powerful] despise others and themselves do what they please. They imitate the magnanimous man without being like him, and this they do where they can; so they do not act virtuously, but they do despise others.
This is obviously not an egalitarian view; what we're looking at is not that it is wrong to despise others, but that it is wrong to despise them unless they deserve it. (Shades of Casablanca.)
For the magnanimous man despises justly (since he thinks truly), but the many do so at random.
He does not run into trifling dangers, nor is he fond of danger, because he honours few things; but he will face great dangers, and when he is in danger he is unsparing of his life, knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth having.
Death before dishonor, again.
And he is the sort of man to confer benefits, but he is ashamed of receiving them; for the one is the mark of a superior, the other of an inferior. And he is apt to confer greater benefits in return; for thus the original benefactor besides being paid will incur a debt to him, and will be the gainer by the transaction. [The original benefactors] seem also to remember any service they have done, but not those they have received (for he who receives a service is inferior to him who has done it, but the proud man wishes to be superior), and to hear of the former with pleasure, of the latter with displeasure; this, it seems, is why Thetis did not mention to Zeus the services she had done him, and why the Spartans did not recount their services to the Athenians, but those they had received.
Thetis was the mother of Achilles, herself a goddess or a nymph (there seems to be significant overlap in these categories). Her service to Zeus was to accept being married off to a mortal, because of a prophecy that her son would be greater than his father. Zeus and Poseidon had both courted her, but given the prophecy neither thought they could afford to win her and instead forced her to accept a husband whose son could not threaten their positions.
The service of the Spartans is known to everyone even two thousand years later.
It is a mark of the magnanimous man also to ask for nothing or scarcely anything, but to give help readily, and to be dignified towards people who enjoy high position and good fortune, but unassuming towards those of the middle class; for it is a difficult and lofty thing to be superior to the former, but easy to be so to the latter, and a lofty bearing over the former is no mark of ill-breeding, but among humble people it is as vulgar as a display of strength against the weak.
Emphasis added, as throughout; this is a distinction from the sin of pride. This is the kind of humility we are meant to practice: not undue humility, but the basic respect that all are due.
Again, it is characteristic of the proud man not to aim at the things commonly held in honour, or the things in which others excel; to be sluggish and to hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones. He must also be open in his hate and in his love (for to conceal one's feelings, i.e. to care less for truth than for what people will think, is a coward's part), and must speak and act openly; for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar.
It is remarkable that Aristotle thinks that such men will not be active except when great things are at stake; that part may simply be descriptive of examples he knew personally (for there were indeed great men in his day).
That you should be open in hate as in love is, however, quite right. I am reminded of Herodotus' claim that the Persians of his era taught their sons only three things: "To ride, to shoot straight, and speak the truth."
He must be unable to make his life revolve round another, unless it be a friend; for this is slavish, and for this reason all flatterers are servile and people lacking in self-respect are flatterers. Nor is he given to admiration; for nothing to him is great. Nor is he mindful of wrongs; for it is not the part of a magnanimous man to have a long memory, especially for wrongs, but rather to overlook them. Nor is he a gossip; for he will speak neither about himself nor about another, since he cares not to be praised nor for others to be blamed; nor again is he given to praise; and for the same reason he is not an evil-speaker, even about his enemies, except from haughtiness. With regard to necessary or small matters he is least of all men given to lamentation or the asking of favours; for it is the part of one who takes such matters seriously to behave so with respect to them. He is one who will possess beautiful and profitless things rather than profitable and useful ones; for this is more proper to a character that suffices to itself.
There is actually an important philosophical point buried there. Aristotle holds that useless things are actually the most important: for to be useful is to be useful for something else, something you want to pursue by pursuing the first thing as a means to that end. The highest things are useless. You pursue them even though they aren't useful for anything else. They are ends in themselves: philosophy, knowledge, wisdom, love, friendship, beauty.
Further, a slow step is thought proper to the magnanimous man, a deep voice, and a level utterance; for the man who takes few things seriously is not likely to be hurried, nor the man who thinks nothing great to be excited, while a shrill voice and a rapid gait are the results of hurry and excitement.Such, then, is the magnanimous man; the man who falls short of him is unduly humble, and the man who goes beyond him is vain.
So the virtue has to have opposing vices; but if you're in such a complete state of virtue, even the opposition won't be all that bad. It is like the advice to 'aim small' in handgunnery: if you aim small, as at a button on a shirt instead of at the whole man, you won't miss much.
Now even these are not thought to be bad (for they are not malicious), but only mistaken. For the unduly humble man, being worthy of good things, robs himself of what he deserves, and to have something bad about him from the fact that he does not think himself worthy of good things, and seems also not to know himself; else he would have desired the things he was worthy of, since these were good. Yet such people are not thought to be fools, but rather unduly retiring. Such a reputation, however, seems actually to make them worse; for each class of people aims at what corresponds to its worth, and these people stand back even from noble actions and undertakings, deeming themselves unworthy, and from external goods no less.
It is in fact a harm to us all when the virtuous do not do the things of which they are capable.
Vain people, on the other hand, are fools and ignorant of themselves, and that manifestly; for, not being worthy of them, they attempt honourable undertakings, and then are found out; and adorn themselves with clothing and outward show and such things, and wish their strokes of good fortune to be made public, and speak about them as if they would be honoured for them. But undue humility is more opposed to pride than vanity is; for it is both commoner and worse.
That's a surprising finding that I'm not sure is true.
There's one last thing to be said, which is that you don't have to be one of the greatest to have a virtue to aspire to here.
Magnanimity, then, is concerned with honour on the grand scale, as has been said.There seems to be in the sphere of honour also, as was said in our first remarks on the subject, a virtue which would appear to be related to pride as liberality is to magnificence. For neither of these has anything to do with the grand scale, but both dispose us as is right with regard to middling and unimportant objects; as in getting and giving of wealth there is a mean and an excess and defect, so too honour may be desired more than is right, or less, or from the right sources and in the right way. We blame both the ambitious man as am at honour more than is right and from wrong sources, and the unambitious man as not willing to be honoured even for noble reasons. But sometimes we praise the ambitious man as being manly and a lover of what is noble, and the unambitious man as being moderate and self-controlled, as we said in our first treatment of the subject. Evidently, since 'fond of such and such an object' has more than one meaning, we do not assign the term 'ambition' or 'love of honour' always to the same thing, but when we praise the quality we think of the man who loves honour more than most people, and when we blame it we think of him who loves it more than is right. The mean being without a name, the extremes seem to dispute for its place as though that were vacant by default. But where there is excess and defect, there is also an intermediate; now men desire honour both more than they should and less; therefore it is possible also to do so as one should; at all events this is the state of character that is praised, being an unnamed mean in respect of honour. Relatively to ambition it seems to be unambitiousness, and relatively to unambitiousness it seems to be ambition, while relatively to both severally it seems in a sense to be both together. This appears to be true of the other virtues also. But in this case the extremes seem to be contradictories because the mean has not received a name.
Even the humblest and least among us has a right scale of honor to aspire to and hopefully attain. It is not only the Great of the world for whom honor is a reliable guide to virtue; but we have to be honest with ourselves about where we fall on the scale. That, then, makes this 'pride' a sort of humility after all: even the 'proudest' must be guided by this honesty as to what their character deserves, and what their strength of character can achieve.
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