Gadamer I 317
Ethics/Aristotle/Gadamer: [Aristotle is concerned with] the correct measurement of the role that reason has to play in moral action. [This is the problem of the relationship between the general and the particular.]
Gadamer: (...) what interests us here [is] that it is a matter of reason and of knowledge that are not detached from an existence that has become, but are determined by it and are decisive for it.
AristotleVsSocrates/AristotleVsPlato: Through his restriction of the Socratic-Platonic
"Intellectualism" in the question of the good, Aristotle, as is well known, becomes the founder of ethics as a discipline independent of metaphysics. By criticizing the Platonic idea of the good as an empty generality, he poses the question of the human good to it, the good for human action.
In the direction of this criticism, the equation of virtue and knowledge, of "arete" and "logos" as it underlies the Socratic-Platonic doctrine of virtue proves to be an exaggeration. Aristotle brings them back to the right measure by showing the orexis as the supporting element of man's moral knowledge, the "striving" and its shaping into a fixed attitude (hexis). The concept of ethics already bears in its name the reference to this Aristotelian foundation of the "arete" in practice and "ethos". >
Humans/Aristotle.
Gadamer I 318
(...) Aristotle [confronts] "ethos" with "physis" as an area in which there is no irregularity, but which does not know the regularity of nature, but rather the changeability and limited regularity of human statutes and human behaviour. >
Knowledge/Aristotle, >
Humans/Aristotle.
Gadamer I 319
Knowledge/Aristotle: remains Socratic in so far as he records knowledge as an essential moment of moral being (...).
1. Eth. Nic. A4. (But cf. my vol. 7 of Ges. Werke proposed academic paper: „Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles“).
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Adorno XIII 226
Mesotes/Ethics/Aristotle/Adorno: the ideal of the middle is an all-Greek ideal. One finds it formulated in Aristotle's theory of virtue, for example the bravery as the middle between cowardice and foolishness. Generally formulated this is in the category of mesotes, the middle measure.
As an ethical ideal, it reappears in apathia, the state of apathy, in which one is independent of pain, and no longer knows any affects.
