The term kalon — the noble, the fine, the beautiful-and-good — occupies a contested and structurally pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus’s engagement with Greek ethics and value theory. Adkins traces its evolution from a Homeric marker of competitive, success-oriented excellence, where ou kalon lacks the emotive force to restrain the claims of the agathos, through its gradual infiltration of ‘quiet’ cooperative values in the fifth and fourth centuries. By Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, kalon functions alongside dei as the operative evaluative standard through which the aretai are described and commended — distinct from, yet ultimately reconciled with, eudaimonia. Hobbs examines the Platonic struggle to unify kalon with the agathon, showing how Socrates in the Hippias Major and the Gorgias resists definitions of kalon as mere beneficial pleasure or conventional eudaimonia, pressing instead toward a deeper identity between the fine and the genuinely good. The critical tension running through the corpus is whether kalon names an independent value — particularly the heroic nobility of self-sacrifice — or whether it is finally subsumed under the criterion of the beneficial. This tension reverberates into the psychology of courage, shame (aischron), and the competing claims of individual glory versus civic virtue, making kalon indispensable to any account of Greek moral psychology.
from the second to the ninth book the aretai are described and evaluated not in terms of eudaimonia, but in terms of dei, it is necessary, and of ‘the kalon’.
Adkins identifies kalon, alongside dei, as Aristotle’s operative evaluative standard in the Ethics, distinct from yet ultimately connected to eudaimonia.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
Socrates is well aware that it is the alleged tension between the kalon and, specifically, the good-qua-beneficial that he needs to deny.
Hobbs argues that Socrates’ central project is to dissolve the apparent conflict between the kalon and the beneficial, so that no tragic choice between noble and advantageous action remains possible.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
it is hinted that it is kalon for the powerful man to be just to his inferiors — particularly when he is in a position to dispense that justice — not that justice is kalon per se.
Adkins demonstrates that in Pindar, kalon begins to associate with dikaiosune only contextually and conditionally, foreshadowing later moral development but not yet asserting justice as intrinsically noble.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
he and Hippias are again debating whether the kalon is something beneficial, in this case beneficial pleasure. But such a definition once more invites the criticism that, if it were true, then ‘neither could the good be kalon nor the kalon good, but each of them is different from the other’.
Hobbs traces Socrates’ systematic rejection of reductive definitions of kalon — whether as eudaimonia or as beneficial pleasure — in the Hippias Major, exposing the philosophical stakes of their potential identity.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
Ou kalon, then, in Homer, since it is not used to decry failure, is not an equivalent of aischron either in usage or in emotive power.
Adkins establishes that in Homer, ou kalon lacks the coercive force of aischron and cannot override the competitive demands of the agathos, marking the term’s limited moral reach in the earliest stratum.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
it is evidently this use of arete and kalon on whose attraction Aristotle is relying in writing the Ethics and Politics.
Adkins argues that fourth-century writers’ expanded use of kalon to include cooperative excellences provides the rhetorical and ethical capital upon which Aristotle’s entire moral project depends.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Before discussing aischron and kalon, we must draw attention to an aspect of Greek moral thought and practice which is, from this point onwards, of great importance.
Adkins frames the aischron/kalon dyad as structurally central to the evolution of Greek moral psychology from competitive to cooperative value systems.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
by saying ‘if something kalon is achieved with much labour’ he implies that the true kalon is that which results from toil and effort in war or in the games.
Adkins shows that for Pindar, kalon retains its competitive, agonistic character, anchored to physical prowess and military achievement rather than moral virtue.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Thrasymachus, too, unifies the fine and the beneficial; the problem for Socrates is that he achieves this by equating arete with an ideal of flourishing viewed solely in terms of worldly success and material gain.
Hobbs reveals that the unification of kalon and the beneficial is contested terrain: Thrasymachus collapses the distinction in an immoralist direction, while Socrates seeks a psychic-harmonic grounding.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
HERMOGENES: But what is the meaning of kakon
The Cratylus passage situates kalon’s semantic field through its opposition to kakon, within Plato’s etymological investigation of value terms and the nature of virtue.
, Cratylus, -388supporting
the agathos or kalos kagathos, the ‘gentleman’, promises no better: one ‘ought’ in one’s own interest to pursue a course of action which is likely to lead to one’s success
Adkins notes that the compound ideal of kalos kagathos, while gesturing toward moral integration, remains anchored to self-interested success rather than categorical ethical obligation.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960aside