CONCEPT
Aretê
The ancient Greek concept of excellence, virtue, the quality of being fully what a thing is meant to be — the pre-Socratic foundation
Pirsig recovered as the original meaning of Quality before Plato buried it.
Aretê is the Greek word conventionally translated as 'virtue' or 'excellence,' but Pirsig argued the conventional
translation misses the concept's original force. For the pre-Socratic Greeks,
aretê was the quality that made a thing fully itself: the sharpness of a knife, the swiftness of a horse, the courage of a warrior, the wisdom of a leader, the beauty of a work of art. It was not a moral category in the narrow sense. It was a recognition of Quality in every domain — functional, aesthetic, moral, intellectual. The thing with
aretê is the thing that performs its function excellently, that achieves what it is meant to achieve, that has the indefinable but immediately recognizable Quality that separates the excellent from the merely adequate.
The sophists taught
aretê — they claimed they could teach people to recognize it and pursue it — but they could not define it philosophically, which Plato used as a reason to dismiss them. Pirsig's recovery of
aretê as the