Aristotle v. Nietzsche and the divergent ways of thinking about virtue

"For Aristotle, man has a Telos, a built-in goal, a type of excellence specific to man, which we’ll attain if given proper nurturing. We’re very much like a plant or animal, except given our rational nature, we need education in addition to good food and exercise. We are political animals; we need other people and even institutions to help us grow, but with some careful observation of how people in different conditions grow, we could more or less develop a science of education and apply it to produce individuals that, at least in most cases (we can’t rule out the role of fortune) will produce maximally flourishing individuals.

Nietzsche also believes in human excellence, and would agree with Aristotle that there is a biological component to it and surely (though he would deny this on grumpy days) a social component: we are profoundly self-ignorant and do need other people to help us realize our virtue. However, his view of virtue is much more complex and (he would like to think, at least) rigorously empirical: what might seem a virtue in some respects ends up leading one into a rut. New ways of excellence are discovered over time (one can be out of synch with the times in an excellent way) or lost and rediscovered. Man is conflicted and often self-sabotaging in the ways Freud would later elaborate on, so flourishing is not something that can be scientifically engineered, though surely we can discover and institute rules of thumb in our educational practices: certainly there are practices (e.g. corporal punishment) that we can discover to be simply counterproductive and damaging in a way that will not yield to further dispute."

Continue reading here at Partially Examined Life