Concept
Ethos
Overview
Ethos is a Greek word meaning "character" that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology; and the balance between caution and passion. The Greeks also used this word to refer to the power of music to influence emotions, behaviors, and even morals. Early Greek stories of Orpheus exhibit this idea in a compelling way. The word's use in rhetoric is closely based on the Greek terminology used by Aristotle in his concept of the three artistic proofs or modes of persuasion alongside pathos and logos. It gives credit to the speaker, or the speaker is taking credit.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Ethos is discussed.
Accordingly moral character is well called by the Greeks [Greek: ethos], for it is, to speak generally, a quality of the unreasoning element in man, and is called [Greek: ethos] because the unreasoning element moulded by reason receives this quality and difference by habit, which is called [Greek: ethos].[226] Not that reason wishes to expel passion altogether (that is neither possible, nor advisable), but only to…
Plutarch, Plutarch's Morals
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
Its constitution in itself is the =intelligible character=, which is equally present in all the acts of the individual, and stamped on every one of them, like the impress of a signet on a thousand seals. The empirical character of the phaenomenon--the character which manifests itself in time, and in succession of acts--is thus determined by the intelligible character; and consequently, the individual, as…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality
states what it is
Now consider how many changes take place in human character and life. And this is why that in them which changes is called “tropos” (turning) and “ethos” (_ēthos_), because habit (_ĕthos_) finds its way in so often, and masters them so mightily. I think [Sidenote: F] myself that the ancients called Cecrops “double-shaped”, not, as some say, because from a good king he became a very dragon of a tyrant, but, on the…
Plutarch, Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. II.
states what it is; names the idea
_Retrospect._—We seldom become conscious of the real pathos of any period of life as such, as long as we continue in it, but always think it is the only possible and reasonable thing for us henceforth, and that it is altogether _ethos_ and not _pathos_[10]—to speak and distinguish like the Greeks. A few notes of music to-day recalled a winter and a house, and a life of utter solitude to my mind, and at the same time…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom
In respect of Character there are four things to be aimed at. First, and most important, it must be good. Now any speech or action that manifests moral purpose of any kind will be expressive of character: the character will be good if the purpose is good.
Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle
author linked in the graph
Philosophers who discussed Ethos
- Ernst Troeltsch
- Thomas Carlyle
- Heraclitus
- Julius Evola
- Aristotle
- Ernst von Glasersfeld
- William Desmond (philosopher)
Related ideas
- Belief
- Greek language
- Polis
- Informal fallacy
- Isocrates
- Rhetoric (Aristotle)
- Intellectual
- Orpheus
- Nancy Fraser
- Postmodernism
- Rhetoric
- Russian Revolution
- T. S. Eliot
- Aristotle
- Logos
- Terminology
- Morality
- Piety
- Virtue
- Mores
- Nicomachean Ethics
- Self
- Concept
- Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy)
Place in the tradition
Part of Heraclitus.