Human Excellence

As a term indicating well-developed skills pertaining to performing various tasks for personal gain and group benefit, human excellence may be found in all cultures. As a perfected ability in carrying out assigned work for survival, whether in hunting, war, or other activities, such as ritual dancing, excellence has been valued and recognized as well as rewarded, especially when exhibited in defending a group, tribal property, or, as often is the case, expanding territorial limits to obtain better living conditions. In general, the concept of excellence sets the boundaries for all efforts of continuous improvement.

The term has also been used to refer to bodily skills in competitive situations, such as games and exhibitions, taking on the meaning of “best” as in the case of individuals who have earned the reputation of being “the best” by having supremely trained skills worthy of imitation by and transmission to other members of the tribal group. Excellence thus takes its place among desirable social traits, urging the continuation of an established value. In Homer's Iliad, a father advises his son who is leaving for battle, “Always excel and remain better than others.”

The list of bodily skills eventually was expanded in certain cultures to include personality traits covering activities related to powers of the “soul.” In the history of the development of the concept of excellence, the Ancient Greeks made the first successful attempt to define the meaning of excellence within an enlarged scope of human activities to refer to all pursuits, beyond the needed training steps for the acquisition of military skills. They introduced theoretical considerations that facilitated the understanding of the conditions indispensable for securing the educational process, which leads from having an initial ability to perfecting it. Criteria for evaluating such attainable perfection became an object of inquiry, debate, and critical discussion.

Recommending and praising excellence was central to the life of Greece as well as a dominant feature in the arts, from poetry to architecture. As a concept, it permeated all walks of life and was adopted for all models of performance. To put it somewhat differently, excellence applied to both artist and artistic work. The Greek word arete-, usually translated as “virtue,” and the related cognates of aristeia and agathon, including their derivatives, were used in a great variety of contexts referring to private and public activities, from shipmaking and legislating to public speaking and athletics. Eventually, with the maturing of philosophy, excellence became an indispensable trait of all ways of rational thought. Thus, a person was expected to exhibit his or her best in action as well as in thought, expecting in turn to be evaluated on the basis of explicit criteria known in advance and established as tradition. Such, then, was the rise and consolidation of a practical and reflective framework that led to the formulation of a philosophical treatment of excellence. It came to refer to a highly valued type of conduct that is usually translated in contemporary parlance as “moral virtue.”

It should be noted that the concept itself, at least as it occurs in Greek culture, had a considerably wider meaning, exceeding that of commendable “moral” properties. In classical philosophy, excellence was treated in depth and used to cover ethical and political skills (i.e., “practical”) as well as skills appropriate to acquiring knowledge (i.e., “theoretical”). The Greeks also spoke of ethical persons possessing excellence of character in the same way they referred to “right” or well-governed poleis, what we now call “city-states.” In this refined sense of excellence, whereby “good” is taken to mean perfected and working traits, it came to apply to anything that possessed the characteristic features of a well-finished product or work as the outcome of techne- (poetics). In this [Page 1222]widened context, a city having the right laws constituted the proper environment to breed excellent citizens. Inquiry, on the other hand, into the conditions and the criteria of excellence as arete- and their justification became a fundamental concern not only of poets but more so of philosophers, as we witness when reading the works of Plato and Aristotle. What had started earlier, as found in the surviving fragments of the pre-Socratics, became the subject of extensive treatment of excellence, thus contributing largely to the understanding as well as the promotion of this comprehensive use of arete- as a political, ethical, artistic, scientific, or religious value expected to accompany all institutionalized forms of conducts. It was recognized as an ideal that defined the meaning of praiseworthy “cultural conduct.”

Martial artists focus their mental and physical energies.

Source: © Jenn Reese.

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