In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes the ‘great-souled man,’ someone of the highest virtue who takes pride in his own worth.
We don’t know if he had Socrates in mind as an example of such a person, but he might have, because not only did Aristotle greatly admire Socrates, but Socrates’s two principal biographers, Plato and Xenophon, describe him in just this way.
For example, in his version of the Apology, Xenophon has Socrates say of himself: ‘my whole life has been spent in righteousness toward God and man, a fact that affords the greatest satisfaction; and so I have felt a deep self-respect.’ In other words, by always striving to understand what was right and living up to that understanding—having integrity, we might say—Socrates achieved a profound self-regard and a matchless contentment along with it.
Perhaps we don’t typically think of ‘making our own souls’ in this way, of achieving pride in our characters by consistently judging what is best and acting on those judgments. Yet that is what Socrates suggests we do: live with integrity and produce for ourselves a genuine self-esteem—the ultimate source of pleasure and happiness.
Be First to Comment