Arete, Purpose, and Virtue

I find myself compelled to write about arete.

In college, I played Sir Thomas More in a production of Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. I can't put my hands on it now, but I recall at the time reading something (possibly by Bolt himself) about what the title could really mean. How could someone truly be "a man for all seasons?" What is a man for? And if he has a purpose, how would we know what it was?

(In a moment of sychronicity, Gwen just walked in wearing a shirt from that production of A Man For All Seasons.)

The ancient Greeks had a concept called arete. In a nutshell, arete is the idea of "excellence" or "virtue" but applied to fulfillment of a particular purpose. So a sharp knife has arete, because it is well-suited to cutting, and that's what knives do. The problem is that I keep applying the lens of arete to how I see myself.

It's not really a problem so much as an ideosyncrocy, I suppose, but it's intellectually challenging. I see myself as acting not out of some cosmic sense of Purpose, but out of a sense of being in the moment. Over the last few years I've turned away from long-term plans and large-scale ideas in favor of constant re-evaluation and re-prioritization. How does arete work in that context?

One way out to see myself as acting purposefully, that my individual actions have purpose even if there is no grand, overarching Purpose to my life. When I act, I want to achieve something. Acting in an effective way towards whatever that specific goal is, then, can be said to have arete. But I'm not sure that really resolves my conundrum.

Virtue and arete are slippery things for me. On a poetic level, I'm attracted to them, but on a rational level, I have a hard time pinning them down. Expect to hear more about them as time goes on.