Excellence occupies a richly contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, engaging registers that span ancient Greek ethics, emotion science, Stoic and Christian ascetic traditions, and hermeneutical philosophy. In the Greek materials — Homer, Aristotle, and their interpreters — excellence is rendered through the concept of aretē: a compound of skill, virtue, and surpassing merit that is simultaneously personal achievement and communal measure. Nussbaum and Sullivan trace how aretē is inseparable from political life, habituation, and the fragility of human circumstance, while Ricoeur, following MacIntyre, relocates excellence within practice-communities whose socially established standards precede and constrain the solitary practitioner. A competing inflection appears in the emotion-science literature: Lench’s functional account treats excellence as the prototypical eliciting context for pride, admiration, and moral elevation, positioning it as a catalyst for the twin social imperatives of ‘getting along’ and ‘getting ahead.’ The ascetic and contemplative traditions — Cassian, the Philokalia, John Climacus — remain largely indifferent to excellence as competitive achievement; they redirect the term toward interior purification, where any claim to personal excellence is suspect and divine grace displaces individual merit. The I Ching materials add a further dimension: excellence as a quality to be efface rather than displayed. These divergent orientations — competitive achievement, communal standard, emotional catalyst, and spiritual snare — make excellence a genuinely productive concordance node.
Excellence of the self is the prototypical eliciting context of pride. Excellence of others can give rise to admiration (in cases of skill-based excellence) and moral elevation (in cases of morality-based excellence).
This passage establishes excellence as the master category organizing three distinct positive emotions — pride, admiration, and moral elevation — and differentiates its self-directed from other-directed forms.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018thesis
These standards of excellence are rules of comparison applied to different accomplishments, in relation to ideals of perfection shared by a given community of practitioners and internalized by the masters and virtuosi of the practice considered.
Ricoeur, via MacIntyre, argues that standards of excellence are irreducibly social and historical rather than solipsistic, anchoring self-esteem in cooperative and traditional practice-communities.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Excellence clearly is a potent elicitor of emotional experience. When it is oneself that achieves excellence, pride can arise. When another person achieves excellence, moral elevation can arise when that excellence is virtuous in nature, and admiration can arise when that excellence is skill-based.
This coda passage synthesizes the chapter’s argument, confirming excellence as a tripartite emotional trigger while acknowledging that relational context can attenuate or reverse pride.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018thesis
Achieving a promotion can elicit pride (Tzafrir & Hareli, 2009), whereas the success of a colleague can elicit admiration (Ford, Agosta, Huang, & Shannon, 2018).
The workplace is presented as a naturally occurring laboratory in which excellence reliably generates pride, admiration, and group-level moral elevation across individual and organizational levels.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
When excellence is achieved, it is not only a noble occasion but also an occasion that gives rise to potent emotional experiences. Among these are pride, moral elevation, and admiration.
The concluding passage frames the search for excellence as both morally noble and functionally adaptive, affirming its dual role in navigating the tension between communal and agentic social imperatives.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
One broad function of admiration is emulation: admiration prompts actions aimed at emulating the admired other. Given that admiration arises in contexts of skill-based excellence, emulation takes the form of wanting to improve one’s own skills.
Admiration in the context of others’ excellence functions primarily as an agentic driver toward self-improvement, though this effect is complicated when direct upward social comparison is operative.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
Morally elevated individuals not only seek moral excellence but are also less tolerant of others who fail to act with moral excellence.
Moral elevation induced by witnessing another’s virtuous excellence creates a secondary social function — heightened intolerance for moral violation — that strengthens prosocial norm enforcement.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
arete, or pride in excellence, which has been called the very soul of the Homeric hero — as it is the soul, also, of the Celtic and Germanic; or, indeed, everywhere, of the unbroken male.
Campbell identifies aretē — pride in excellence — as the animating ethos of the heroic masculine ideal across multiple mythological traditions, while noting its paradoxical extension to the female figures of the Judgment of Paris.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
if excellence is perfection then anything less than excellence is clearly a defect. A more serious case for the existence of intermediates between excellence and defect, however, can be made with reference to the qualities of enkrateia (continence, self-control) and akrasia (incontinence, weakness of will).
Cairns traces the Aristotelian taxonomic problem of whether states like enkrateia and akrasia constitute genuine intermediates between excellence and defect, illuminating the logical structure of aretē as a binary perfection-concept under pressure.
, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting
pride stemming from prior moral excellence prompts outcomes associated with communal warmth.
The passage introduces a crucial qualification: pride’s communal or antisocial character may depend on whether its source is moral excellence specifically, distinguishing this from achievement pride more broadly.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
He claims ‘to excel all others in making people fine and good’ — never (as was common at the time) to excel in helping people to realize ends that are separable from those of the community. He characterizes ‘the excellence of a man’ (andros areten) as
Nussbaum’s reading of the Protagoras establishes that Socratic excellence is intrinsically civic rather than separable from communal good, directly contesting any purely individualist conception of human virtue.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
In the Iliad Homer’s picture of arete is thus many-faceted
Sullivan demonstrates that Homeric aretē encompasses not merely martial prowess but compassion and moral depth, resisting any reductive interpretation of early Greek excellence as pure competitive achievement.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
He does not involve himself in initiating anything but must respond to the lead of another and must wait for orders before he starts to act: this is someone who effaces his own excellence and in so doing keeps himself correct.
The I Ching commentary presents a counter-intuitive valorization of excellence through self-effacement, where concealing one’s superior qualities and deferring initiative constitutes genuine virtue.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting
CEIUAY delicious, glorious; happy, pleased; rejoice in, Excellence, superior quality; fine, praise. The ideogram: increasing goodness, pleasure and happiness.
The I Ching lexicon links the ideogram for excellence semantically to increasing goodness, pleasure, and happiness, grounding the concept in an affective and relational register rather than a competitive one.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994aside
These early Greeks believe that no human being could ever be capable of splendid behaviour on the basis of birth alone. Training, education, and guidance over a period of time was always necessary.
Sullivan’s survey of early Greek thought affirms that excellence is an acquired rather than innate condition, requiring habituation and education — a premise foundational to both Platonic and Aristotelian ethics.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995aside