Excellence Comes by Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue

All too often we are inclined to think of excellence as the product of good genes and good fortune rather than our personal habits. The fates bestow their blessings indiscriminately and haphazardly, and the talented and successful are the lucky recipients of excellence, while the rest of us are mired in mediocrity. Those who rise to the top, the outliers, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them, were born that way, or else became that way because of a combination of heredity, privileged upbringing and opportune circumstances.

As we’ve mentioned before (Aristotle and the Growth Mindset), while the great philosopher Aristotle doesn’t discount any of these factors in attaining excellence, he is more inclined to emphasize the importance of education and our personal habits.

Of course, as Christians, we attribute all of these factors to the providence of God and can relativize the importance of them by appealing to a heavenly hope. People may not have an equal shot at excellence in this life, whether in academics, sports, business or the arts, but it doesn’t ultimately matter in comparison with spiritual and eternal realities.

Intellectual and Moral Excellence: Where do they come from?

The situation gets trickier for us Christians when we think of moral virtue. Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition had one and the same word for these two ideas: excellence was virtue, and virtue was excellence. According to Aristotle there were two types of excellence:

Excellence [or virtue], then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence in the main owes its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral excellence comes about as a result of habit….

Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25 (trans. W. D. Ross)

Interestingly, Aristotle attributes the origin and development of intellectual excellence to teaching or instruction. While he doesn’t discount the role of heredity in academic attainment, he emphasizes the primary role of the long process of education. Intellectual virtue requires the accumulation of experience and knowledge over time through qualified teachers.

(Incidentally, I wonder what would happen in our schools if we actually took on board the liberal arts tradition’s insistence on the intellectual virtues as a chief goal of education…. We might have an educational renaissance on our hands.)

Moral excellence, on the other hand, Aristotle attributes to our habits or customs, those repeated practices that form in us character qualities or propensities to act in a certain way in a given situation. This idea is revolutionary for putting ball in the human court, as it were, and calling on individuals to reform themselves through building better habits, and parents to set their children up well through moral habituation. As he concludes the section cited above,

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.

Plato had emphasized, as we might be inclined to, that moral virtue was a result of divine gift:

To illustrate, he tells Protagoras the charming account of a conversation between Hermes and Zeus. While Zeus is putting the finishing touches on his human creation, Hermes asks him if virtue is to be distributed among men like the gifts of the arts, unequally, with only a favored few receiving skills in medicine and in music. But Zeus resists this proposal and commands Hermes to distribute the gift of virtue to all men equally, ‘for cities cannot exist if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts’ (Jowett 1969).

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility (24)

In a way this makes sense, since basic moral virtues (like fair dealings in business, general truthfulness, courageous action in warfare, hard work and perseverance) are the glue that holds society together. Without a general distribution of these qualities, no city-state could survive for very long. Civilization can only operate in a world where most of the time a good number of people have been divinely blessed with basic moral virtues.

Or course, it’s possible that divine gift and human responsibility are ultimately compatible, rather than opposites. Aristotle might have agreed with Plato and simply contended that divine gift manifested itself in the habit training of the citizenry to form basic levels of moral virtue in most people.

Moral Virtue a Result of Common Grace

When Christian students and teachers interact with Plato or Aristotle on the topic of moral virtue, in my experience, they tend to think primarily in terms of higher order spiritual virtues, like faith, hope and love, or else the absolute versions of these virtues, where all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But Aristotle and Plato had in mind the work-a-day world of the polis or city-state, and while they were certainly not hesitant to criticize the rampant human corruption they saw, they also noticed how often things tended to go right.

In this way, their discussions of moral virtue cohere with the Christian doctrine of common grace. Despite the reality and pervasiveness of human depravity and sin, the doctrine goes, human society would completely fly off the rails if God did not also grant the grace of moral virtue, distributed generally (i.e. in common) to people, regardless of their spiritual condition. This explains why unredeemed human beings, while still corrupt, are not nearly so bad and destructive as they could be.

For this reason, it’s probably helpful for us to differentiate between moral excellence and spiritual excellence, just as the medieval tradition did. In borrowing from the classical tradition of philosophy, medievals distinguished between the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which could only be imparted by the Holy Spirit as a result of true repentance, and the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance (or self control) and courage.

Not only is the doctrine of common grace helpful for answering questions about virtuous non-believers, it can help us in raising and educating the children of believers. In the classical Christian school movement there can tend to be some uneasiness about our ability to train our students in moral virtue as the classical tradition proposed and some modern educators still discuss today. We have a strong sense as Christians that only the Holy Spirit can change hearts and we tremble to tread too presumptuously on his domain.

With the doctrine of common grace in our minds, we can proceed forward boldly with the project of cultivating moral virtues in our children through the power of habit. (By the way I borrow the phrase “the power of habit” from Charles Duhigg’s incredible book, which I can’t recommend highly enough.)

The Power of Habit in Forming Moral Excellence

For Aristotle, habits are the primary determiner of character. I don’t have to quote his famous, “We are what we repeatedly do…. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” (By the way, does anyone ever give a citation for that? Where is it from? What translator?) Everyone already knows it, and hopefully we all have a sense of its power. The power of habit comes in its susceptibility to practice and development, like all other sports, arts or skills. This means that we can grow in moral excellence, and therefore have every reason to foster an Aristotelian growth mindset.

Moral virtues become the qualities of a person through active exercise of them. As Aristotle explains,

Excellences 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, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25 (trans. W. D. Ross)

It’s hard to overstate how important the implications of this insight are for education. A few immediate applications come to mind. Procedures that allow or encourage cheating for the sake of grades are abhorrent because they form the habit of deceptive practices to get ahead in children. Motivators that operate primarily on students’ desire to be better than others or receive awards for achievement may be forming the vices of avarice and pride.

The customs and culture of a school or home are not a neutral factor in a child’s education, if moral excellence is our goal.

Another implication, unpacked by the English philosopher John Locke, is that children should not be taught by memorizing rules for conduct but by habit:

But pray remember, children are not to be taught by rules, which will always be slipping out of their memories. What you think necessary for them to do, settle in them by an indispensable practice as often as the occasion returns; and if it be possible, make occasions. This will beget habits in them, which, being once established, operate of themselves easily and naturally without the assistance of the memory.

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (40)

If you’ve ever experienced the failure of your precepts, whether as parent or teacher, to stick in the minds of children, then you know what Locke is talking about. “I forgot,” is about the most common excuse for misconduct of all. Locke invites us to view moral formation in a different light, by relying on the peaceable coaxing of habits. While difficult, because it requires a proactive presence and gentle encouragement beforehand, rather than the harsher but less labor-intensive scolding afterward, Locke’s path of habit training holds incredible promise.

Perhaps this sort of habit training, then, is part of what Paul was talking about when he commanded parents to “train their children in the discipline and nurture of the Lord.” Then Paul’s encouragement to fathers not to “provoke them to anger” or “exasperate them” could have had in mind the same sort of phenomenon that Locke mentioned just before the passage quoted above: parents heaping up rules and expectations for their children without giving them the practice and training they need, and then harshly punishing them for forgetting to perform them later on (39-40). All too often our attempts at discipline are merely an exercise in unrealistic expectations.

Of course, this isn’t a rejection of discipline and rules for children; the place of legitimate authority and obedience is a primary given of life. But the function of habit in the development of character and moral virtue provides the key backdrop that will prevent us from numerous abuses.

For more on Aristotle’s educational paradigm for today, check out my series on Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues replacing Bloom’s Taxonomy.