Virtue as Vital Power: Rethinking Ἀρετή Through Value and Original Life

Virtue as Vital Power: Rethinking Ἀρετή Through Value and Original Life

In this lecture from an ongoing reading course on Neoplatonic philosophy, I develop a reinterpretation of arete (virtue) drawing on two translation theses: to agathon as Value rather than “the Good,” and psyche as Original Life rather than “soul.” The result is a reading of the Neoplatonic ladder of virtues as a ladder of vital powers — organic, filial, political, ascetic, contemplative, and paradigmatic — each corresponding to a progressively wider political community and a corresponding form of divine madness.
Topics covered:

Why agathon should be translated as Value, not “the Good” — and what this means for Proclus’s account of evil, the plurality of gods, and the relativity of values
Why psyche should be translated as Original Life — the argument from the Phaedo, Damascius’s distinction between conferring and conferred life, and the goal of Platonic self-identification
How these two translations transform arete into vital power: a measure of how fully immortal life embodies value
The six levels of vital power and their bearers: body, child/student, citizen, immortal life, immediate subject of providence, agent of providence
The correspondence between the four higher levels and the four divine madnesses of the Phaedrus: poetic, theurgic, mantic, and erotic
The political correlates: family, city, nation, empire, world
Discussion with Yitzchok Lowy on translation strategy, the word “greatness” as an alternative for arete, Maimonides on translating without a single word, and Proclus as a metalanguage for plural societies

This session is part of a course that has previously covered Damascius’s Commentary on the Phaedo (the General Survey on the Virtues, paragraphs 138–150) and is continuing with Proclus On Providence.

Transcript