Beauty and Motivation in Aristotle

Abstract

The concept of kalon appears at important places in Aristotle’s Ethics.1 For instance, Aristotle claims that the virtuous agent acts for the sake of what is kalon; in his account of individual virtues of character, he describes many of them explicitly as dispositions oriented toward what is kalon; he also describes many of the virtues themselves as kalon, and suggests that this has something to do with the value and importance of the virtues. The Greek word kalon has been rendered variously in English as ent translations have arisen not only among translators and commentators, but also within single translations of the Ethics. This fact draws our attention to two problems facing an investigation of the concept of kalon in Aristotle’s ethics. First, it suggests that we have no English word that corresponds isomorphically with the term kalon. As English-readers of Aristotle, we need, instead, an arsenal of terms to capture the nuanced features of its evidently complex Greek connotation. Of course, this is a common problem facing translators; isomorphic translations are perhaps more the exception than the norm. However, a peculiar problem arises in this case because the concept it is supposed to express is patently central to Aristotle’s Ethics, and yet we lack not only a single word in English that corresponds to the Greek term, but it might also very well be a native concept of the attribute kalon itself. From a cursory survey of the above list of candidate translations, it isn’t at all clear why the meanings associated with this list of English words should hang together as expressing a single attribute familiar to English language users. The second problem facing translators is the diversity of contexts in which Aristotle employs the term kalon. As it turns out, one reason for