Ethos

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ethos as ‘the characteristic spirit of a people, community, culture, or era as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations’. The verb form is ethó, which means ‘to be accustomed’, or, to have a behaviour or disposition fixed by habit. It was a popular expression in ancient Greek philosophy and was made particularly influential through Aristotle's Rhetoric. It remained in circulation in the Renaissance humanists’ discourses surrounding education, as it marked the distinction between the holistic approach of rhetoric and the more exclusively logical approach defined by dia-lectical logos. While the term remained part of the scholarly lexicon, Pierre Hadot has argued that its usage within philosophical ethics (despite the latter term itself being derived from ethos) waned in the West following the rise of Christianity. The particular practices associated with the ethoi of the ancient philosophical schools were appropriated by the Christian monastic orders and subordinated to revealed theology. Following the rise of the modern natural sciences, the ethoi of the ancient schools were not recuperated, although they did reappear in the works of Montaigne, Spinoza, Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau and Nietzsche. Partly as a result of Hadot's work from the 1970s through the early 2000s, the notion of ethos began regaining popularity in philosophical scholarship as way of characterising the difference between ancient approaches to philosophy built on spiritual exercises that entangle theory with practice, and modern approaches that take ontology, epistemology and ethics to be fundamentally different fields that do not necessarily implicate one's very being or way of living. For Hadot, ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Epicureanism and Platonism cannot be understood without an appreciation of their aim to cultivate certain dispositions toward existence through a deepening understanding of the role of the human in the cosmos. For the ancients, one became a philosopher as a result of an existential choice (or calling), one that brought with it a commitment to live a specific style of life. This is in sharp contrast with most modern philosophies, which in developing their discourse demand only one's intellectual assent, if that. From Hadot's point of view, the modern conception of philosophy has emptied it of its real power – its ability to nourish spiritual and intellectual growth.