The Seba library treats Ethos in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Hillman, James, Arthur W.H. Adkins, Auerbach, Erich).
Analysis can learn from this that its work is less to change character than to release soul from the tyranny of character, to distinguish between ethos and daimon, and so to serve daimon, a therapeia of daimon.
Hillman posits that the psychotherapeutic aim is the liberation of daimon from the fixed habitual structure of ethos, repositioning therapy as service to the soul’s calling rather than reform of character.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
‘the man who has an ethos dikaion, a just character’; for this, it soon appears, is not a misleading way of saying ‘provided he had no criminal intent, which can best be inferred from his general way of life’.
Adkins demonstrates that Plato’s use of ethos dikaion grounds ethical judgment in the dispositional character of the agent rather than in isolated acts, making character the primary ethical criterion.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
The daimon then becomes the source of human ethics, and the happy life—what the Greeks called eudaimonia—is the life that is good for the daimon.
Hillman relocates the source of ethics from collective ethos or moral code to the daimon itself, identifying eudaimonia with alignment to one’s singular calling rather than conformity to habitual character.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Such are the political and historical purposes served by the feudal ethos, the warriors’ ethos which the knights profess. Calogrenant, on the other hand, has no political or historical task… Here the feudal ethos serves no political function; it serves no practical reality at all; it has become absolute.
Auerbach traces the transformation of feudal ethos from an operative social code embedded in political reality into a purely self-referential ideal of personal self-realization, marking a decisive shift in the cultural meaning of character.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Christians rely on the doctrine of the privatio boni and always think they know what is good and what is evil, thus substituting the moral code for the truly ethical decision, which is a free one. Morality consequently degenerates into legalistic behaviour.
Jung distinguishes genuine ethical decision-making from the collective moral code — the inherited ethos — arguing that the latter, when substituted for authentic choice, reduces morality to legalism and suppresses individual ethical consciousness.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting
Ethical values are created as a result of a revelation by the ‘Voice’ to the Founder Individual… At a later date, they are collected and codified and endowed with an abstract and universal validity—and in the process, they become divorced from the concrete situation in which they were orig.
Neumann identifies the historical genesis of collective ethos in revelatory individual acts that are subsequently codified and abstracted, arguing that this process estranges the ethical code from its living situational origins.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting
That’s why translators of daimon sometimes say ‘fate’ and sometimes ‘genius.’ But never… these beings accompany, guide, protect, warn. They may even attach to a person, but they do not merge with your personal self.
Hillman’s account of the daimon as distinct from the personal self establishes the conceptual ground for the ethos/daimon distinction: ethos belongs to the habitual ego while daimon remains irreducibly other.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
ethos, ethos, i. 20
The index entry in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum records the term’s explicit citation in that text, attesting its presence in the Roman philosophical tradition that feeds into subsequent ethical discourse.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45aside