Happiness and virtue in Socrates' moral theory

Abstract

I Άρετή, εὐδαιμονία: their translationThe key terms in my title pose problems of translation with which I can only deal in the most cursory manner. On ‘virtue’ for ἀρετἡ I need not linger at all, for whatever may be the general usage of ἀρετἡ, Socrates' use of it is fixed beyond doubt by the fact that whenever he brings the general concept under scrutiny – as when he debates its teachability in the Protagoras and the Meno – he assumes without argument that its sole constituents or ‘parts’ (μόρια μέρη) are five qualities which are, incontestably, the Greek terms of moral commendation par excellence: ἀνδρεία, σωφρούνη, δικαιοσύνη, ὁσιότης, σοφία. ‘Happiness’ for εὐδαιμονία is a more contentious matter. Leading Aristotelians, Ross and Ackrill, have claimed that ‘well-being’ would be a better translation. But in their own translations of the E. N. both stick to ‘happiness’ all the same. It is not hard to see why they would and should. ‘Well-being’ has no adjectival or adverbial forms. This may seem a small matter to armchair translators – philosophers dogmatizing on how others should do the job. Not so if one is struggling with its nitty gritty, trying for clause-by-clause English counterparts that might be faithful to the sentence-structure, no less than the sense, of the Greek original. And ‘well-being’ suffers from a further liability: it is a stiff, bookish phrase, bereft of the ease and grace with which the living words of a natural language perform in a wide diversity of contexts. Εὐδαιμονία perfectly fits street-Greek and Aristophanic slapstick, yet also, no less perfectly, the most exalted passages of tragedy.