Greatness of Soul Across the Ages

That a virtue should be called magnanimity suggests that souls come in sizes. But what makes for this sizing? This chapter is framed between the Homeric heroic ideal embodied in the megalêtôr and the gentle but resolute American hero, the magnanimous Abraham Lincoln, interacting along the way with the other chapters in the volume. This chapter compares conceptions of greatness of soul (heart, spirit, mind), touching on Socrates, Aristotle, the New Testament, Stoicism, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī and al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, the Scottish Enlightenment, Kant, and Nietzsche. The story is one of diversity, indeed in some cases mutual exclusion, with overlap and continuities. But in the end the chapter suggests a certain evolution of our conception of human greatness in which the virtues of strength and toughness are integrated with those of generosity and compassion.

Nietzsche on Magnanimity, Greatness, and Greatness of Soul

This chapter brings Nietzsche into dialogue with the tradition of thinking about the virtue of magnanimity. In a few places in his work, Nietzsche uses the German Großmuth (magnanimity) to pick out a specific character trait. But the more important connection to this tradition of thought lies in his notion of human greatness (particularly greatness of ‘soul’, as he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil). The chapter works through, and comments on, what Nietzsche regards as some of the central marks of this greatness. It then turns to two further reflections: first, it looks at Nietzsche’s relation to Aristotle on this issue, and how similar the Aristotelian megalopsychos is to the Nietzschean great individual. Second, the chapter considers the tension that Nietzsche—unlike most figures in this tradition—apparently sees between greatness and moral goodness and how exactly this tension should be understood.

Introduction

‘We all love great men … nay can we honestly bow down to anything else?’ So wrote Thomas Carlyle in a well-known set of lectures running under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.1 It is as good a place as any to open a conversation about that singular virtue—a virtue of greatness and great men—to which this volume is dedicated. Carlyle himself may not have had the virtue of greatness of soul or magnanimity specifically in mind when he launched his investigation of the hero. But it is a virtue that has often been understood to bear an especially close relation to the heroic, a relation to which it owes some of its strongest tensions but also the deepest roots of its power to fascinate....

Greatness of Soul

Part 1 explores how thinkers in the Islamic world received the ancient virtue of greatness of soul by focusing on one particular ‘virtue of greatness’ found in works of Arabic philosophical ethics. Greatness of soul appears in the works of prominent Muslim thinkers such as al-Fārābī, Miskawayh, and al-Ghazālī under the Arabic term kibar al-nafs. In Miskawayh’s and al-Ghazālī’s classifications of the virtues and vices, it is defined in terms approximating to Aristotle’s account. The overall treatment of the virtue is cursory yet apparently approving. This will seem surprising given the oft-remarked conflict of the virtue, particularly in its Aristotelian version, with an ideal of humility. Did thinkers in the Arabic tradition take a different view of this ideal? Part 1 investigates this question by offering a substantive reading of Miskawayh’s and, more concertedly, al-Ghazālī’s account of the ethics of esteem and self-esteem. There are delicate interpretive issues to be navigated in piecing together an account of al-Ghazālī’s ethical commitments. Yet the author’s conclusion is that al-Ghazālī privileges the virtue of humility and denigrates the status of honour as a good. The virtue of magnanimity he incorporates in his tables of the virtues thus appears to be in profound conflict with his considered ethical viewpoint, and with values central to Islamic religious morality more broadly. Why then does al-Ghazālī (like Miskawayh) pass this conflict over in silence? Part 1 concludes with some suggestions about this puzzle and about what it may have to tell us about these thinkers’ engagement with ancient philosophy.

Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic Tradition

There are few ideals of character as distinctive as the ancient virtue of “greatness of soul.” A larger-than-life virtue embodying a vision of human greatness, it has often been seen as a relic of the Homeric world and its honour-loving heroes. In philosophy, it found its most celebrated expression in Aristotle’s ethics, and it has lived on in the minds of philosophers and theologians ever since. Yet among the many lives this virtue has led in intellectual history, one remains conspicuously unwritten. This is the life it led in the Arabic tradition. A virtue of Greek warriors and their democratic epigones—what happened when this splendid virtue made landfall in the Islamic world? One of the aims of this book is to answer this question. Yet in the process, it opens out to become a story about a larger family of virtues united by their preoccupation with greatness and things great. We may call them “virtues of greatness.” An important constituent of the character ideals expounded across a range of genres within the Islamic world, this type of virtue tells us as much about the content of these ideals as about their kaleidoscopic genealogies. The Islamic world, too, had its native heroes, who bequeathed their conception of extraordinary virtue to posterity. Heroic virtue is above all expressed in a boundless aspiration to what is greatest. Could we admire such virtue enough to want it as our own? What can we learn from the Arabic tradition of the virtues?

Introduction

When we survey the rich terrain of ancient ethics and the different visions of the best human character that flourished within it, there is one element—one virtue within these visions—that stands out as particularly distinctive. This is a virtue usually translated as ‘magnanimity’ or ‘greatness of soul’. For philosophical readers, its most familiar expression is the one it received at the hands of Aristotle in the ...

Greatness of Spirit

The denouement of Part 1 might seem disappointing. Greatness of soul, that larger-than-life ancient virtue, enters the Islamic world only to fade away. Yet there was another concept belonging to the same broad family that led a more flourishing life in the Islamic world. This virtue, designated as ‘greatness of spirit’ (ʿiẓam al-himma), appears in philosophical treatises but also in other genres, including mirrors for princes and works of literature (adab). Unlike the first concept, which thematized the right attitude to the self and its merits, this second concept thematizes right desire or aspiration, and some of its architects parse it as a foundational virtue of aspiration to virtue. Part 2 first documents its development in works of a philosophical character, notably Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī’s and al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī’s, before considering its presentation in mirrors for princes. There are interesting comparisons to be drawn between the way the virtue is articulated across different genres, and also suggestive comparisons with approaches familiar from broader philosophical history. These observations invite a question about the origins of the virtue. While the Greek influence cannot be excluded, a stronger argument can be made for the influence of the Persian cultural tradition and, more compellingly, pre-Islamic Arab culture. ‘Greatness of spirit’ was an epithet applied to the Arab hero of pre-Islamic times. This heroic ideal is reconfigured in the Islamic era in important ways. This genealogy allows us to place on new footing the question about the relationship of the ‘virtues of greatness’ to Islamic religious morality.