Appearances of Ethos in Political Thought

The Dimension of Practical Reason

Sophia Hatzisavvidou

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783483143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What sort of ethos does democratic politics demand? While many political thinkers argue that democratic ethics should shape political judgments, the concept of ethos remains underdeveloped. Appearances of Ethos responds to this gap in three ways. It begins by identifying the contours of the concept as it has appeared in political thought. Then drawing on ancient philosophers such as Heraclitus and Protagoras, and contemporary thinkers such as Heidegger, it makes the case for a world-affirming ethos that can animate individual and collective political action. The book then develops an original interpretation of the ancient concept of metis – the skill and craft of practical political reasoning – showing how this is a vital part of contemporary democratic political action. Such resourcefulness, the book argues, is essential for anyone who – faced by contemporary political, social, and environmental challenges – seeks to create possibilities for action in the name of a more just and equitable life.

Chapter 1

Mapping Ēthos

Ēthos is a versatile term. It is employed, frequently unproblematically and without further elaboration, to refer both to an individual’s character and to a community’s, organisation’s, or even era’s ‘spirit’, encompassing various elements such as behaviour patterns, values, and mental or intellectual traits. Although the term has been in use for over 2,500 years, we still lack a comprehensive overview of its contours, which would bring together the different meanings and understandings attached to it. In this chapter I attend to the conceptual fluctuations of the term from its early appearances to its authoritative usages in social sciences and humanities. Although I do not claim to offer an exhaustive history of the term, my assumption is that if we follow the trajectory of the concept of ēthos since antiquity we can grasp its multifaceted and dynamic character. Ēthos, as I affirm it, is a highly complex and pliant notion, which has been assigned a variety of meanings that shift and change throughout the times and settings amidst which it has been employed. By attending to the ways that diverse thinkers—poets, rhetoricians, philosophers, and social scientists of the ancient and modern world—have aspired to ēthos in different contexts and in order to denote different things, we can map some of the content attributed to the term. More specifically, I contend that this trajectory reveals that, its indeterminacy notwithstanding, ēthos is not merely a pliable supplement to ‘ordinary’ politics. It is, and always has been, ubiquitous to social and political life, that is to life in common; ēthos is an aspect of human experience. As the discussion in this chapter demonstrates, then, some sort of ēthos infuses the ways we place ourselves towards the challenges we encounter in our engagement with this world, both human and nonhuman.

I open my discussion by clearing the landscape around ēthos, a task that will help me to demonstrate both its variability and its irreducible significance for being a member of a given or emerging community, and therefore for being politically. To achieve this aim, I offer a critical discussion of the most influential appearances of the term from the archaic era to the anthropological thought of the 20th century. As this route demonstrates, since antiquity the meaning of ēthos oscillates between two poles: the inner and the outer, the private and the public, the individual and the collective. This very idea of indeterminacy that accompanies the term is prevalent until today, rendering ēthos irreducible to either a personal ethic or a collective virtue. Foucault, I propose, not only brought the concept to the attention of contemporary political thinkers, but he also excavated its indeterminacy and actualised ēthos in its tactical dimension, one that is often obscured or neglected. By fashioning an ēthos of philosophical life as a political ēthos, Foucault set the problematic of the tension between ēthos and democracy, a tension which, as I will discuss in the next chapter, is of vital concern to political thinkers who aspire to grasp democracy not merely as a regime but also as a very way of negotiating public issues and pursuing democratic responses to them.

EXCAVATING ĒTHOS

Deleuze and Guattari open their seminal work on philosophy with the observation that every concept is already a multiplicity. As they explain, no concept is simple, in the sense that ‘every concept has components and is defined by them’.1 It is these components and their linkages that I wish to start exploring in this section in order to scrutinise how a concept as old as ēthos (ἦθος in ancient Greek) resonates in the different eras and contexts in which it has been employed while shifting and changing meaning. This plasticity of the term enhances its complexity; ēthos is much more ambiguous than we think today, denoting and connoting, as I will demonstrate, two different things: the place of life—where one dwells—and the way of life—how one dwells. Furthermore, the agent of this dwelling may be either an individual or a community, while none of them presents a fixed and predetermined category of agency; rather, they are open and indeed susceptible to transformations, some of which occur as a result of this very process of dwelling. Finally, the quality of this dwelling is associated, on the one hand, with a set of tacit traits, such as intuitions or dispositions, which frequently are the result of internalisation and adoption of the laws and principles that prevail in a given community, but also with demonstrable patterns of behaviour and action, on the other. It is around these three axes that my argument on the meaning and essence of ēthos will be established in the first instance.

In its very early appearances, the term is used primarily in its plural form. When Homer, for example, writes about ethea (ἤθεα) he refers to appropriate and customary places of animals, such as stables and pastures (nomes).2 The Homeric ethea are familiar topoi of return for animals, their habitual abode where they are safe, but also places where they are indeed expected to be encountered. Around the same era, Hesiod offers a use that is also proper to humans. In his “Works and Days” the term ‘ethea’ refers to human abodes, places of association and co-existence such as haunts, towns, territories, and homelands.3 There is an element of habituation, safety, and accustomed behaviour connected with ēthos in these early uses of the term. This connotation of the accustomed, the familiar, is, as we will see, passed on to the classical period, but also to much of the contemporary understanding of the term.

In the archaic era ēthos does not only refer to human dwellings; it is also used as a synonym for human behaviour, a use that is a first marker of the ambivalence of the term. When Hesiod, for example, refers to ethea he denotes one’s character and manners, one’s ‘ways’, as it is conveyed in the advice he gives to prospective husbands: ‘marry a maiden so that you can teach her careful ways’.4 Implicit in this use is the idea that the ethea are not inborn traits but something that can—and indeed must—be taught. The term appears with the same ambiguous meaning in the texts of the historian Herodotus, who uses it to refer not only to the haunt or abode of the (Persian) army, but also to collective common manners of life, such as customs or social practices that are common to Hellenes (ἦθεα τά ομότροπα).5 Ēthos, in its very early manifestations, assumes two different interpretations: dwellings and patterns of behaviour.

The singular form of the term rarely appears in these early narratives, and when it does, it is mainly in the context of poetry. Hesiod narrates how Hermes gives to Pandora—the woman whom gods created to punish the human race for receiving the stolen gift of fire from Prometheus—‘a shameless mind and a deceitful nature’ (ἐπίκλοπον ἦθος).6 Theognis also employs the singular form to refer to the hidden thievish disposition that many people bear and which they may demonstrate: time reveals each one’s ēthos.7 This is probably the reason why elsewhere he advises that one should return a variegated ēthos to others; ēthos is multifaceted (poikilon), it is characterised by fluidity, and it is subject to alterations and modifications according to the circumstances.8 These poetic references allude to character, but more specifically to the intellectual component of ēthos—to a particular form of mental quality, as it were. This aspect of ēthos was later suppressed, silenced, or explicitly condemned by those who intended to provide more rigorous accounts of the human selfhood and its mental abilities. A multidimensional and shifting ēthos can prove a source of instability which, beginning with Plato, systematic philosophy seeks to avoid by grounding agency on virtues or abilities that provide absolute certainty. The argument that I develop about ēthos seeks to address this point and recapture the fluidity and dimension of poikilon implicit in the idea of ēthos. Agents of ēthos, I will argue, are not bearers of fixed traits, but rather bearers of shifting modes of dwelling.

In the tradition, then, ēthos has two components: the individual and the collective. Whereas the latter refers to the customs and manners of a community, the individual aspect of ēthos appears to be synonymous with one’s most inner characteristic, to what is identified with one’s way of thinking and behaving. In this light, ēthos may reveal itself on the proper occasion or be observed by the attentive spectator. In its individual manifestation, ēthos is a ‘versatile device’, ‘something visible but ephemeral, a quality of mind that can be discerned and is subject to change’.9 Ēthos is both observable and fugitive. Its pliability, then, does not lie merely in that it is a concept that bears different meanings, but also in that it denotes a set of traits mutable and dependent on the occasion.

The flexibility of ēthos resists contemporary attempts to understand the concept and narrow it to definitive uses. For example, Charles Scott argues that by treating ētho...