🏛 Western Thought

Aristotelianism — The Good

"Habit is character"

아리스토텔레스 (Aristotle, 기원전 384~322) · 기원전 4세기

📜 Origin

Plato's student Aristotle walked a different road. Where Plato looked up, Aristotle looked across. He personally dissected 500 species, compared 158 constitutions, analyzed the structure of poems. In Nicomachean Ethics he nailed one thing: virtue is not innate but grows from habit. "We are what we repeatedly do."

💡 Meaning

Aristotle's ethics: action makes the person. A just person doesn't do just acts; just acts make a just person. A brave person doesn't do brave acts; repeated brave acts make a brave person. Ethics, he saw, is not faith but training.

🌏 Eastern Classic Cross-link

Analects, Wei Zheng: "By nature people are alike; by habit they grow apart." Confucius said the same 2,500 years ago. Natures differ by a sheet of paper, but daily habits make different people. Aristotle and Confucius, East-West ethics deeply converging.

善

Compressed into One Hanja

"善" depicts a sacrificial sheep (羊) above a mouth (口) — meaning "fitting" or "right." 善 is not abstract goodness but action that fits the situation. Sometimes kindness is 善; sometimes firmness is 善. Aristotle's phronesis (practical wisdom) points to the same.