Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values

Greek “Virtue” Was Never Moral: The Competitive Value-System as the Unconscious of Western Ethics

Arthur W.H. Adkins’s Merit and Responsibility (1960) performs an act of philosophical archaeology that remains unmatched in its specificity: it excavates the precise mechanisms by which Greek moral language resisted moralization. The central thesis is deceptively simple but devastating in its implications. In Homeric Greek, ἀγαθός (“good”) does not mean morally virtuous; it means effective, powerful, successful in the competitive arena of war, wealth, and social standing. Its antonym κακός (“bad”) does not mean wicked; it means weak, failed, defeated. This is not a curiosity of translation. It is the structural foundation upon which Greek ethical thought was built—and the flaw-line along which it perpetually cracked. Adkins demonstrates that from Homer through the tragedians, the lyric poets, and into the philosophers, the “quiet” cooperative virtues (δικαιοσύνη, σωφροσύνη—justice, temperance) never achieved linguistic or conceptual parity with the competitive excellences. You could call a man ἀγαθός for winning a battle or accumulating honor; you could not, in the operative grammar of the culture, override his competitive failure by praising his justice. The cooperative virtues were “other things being equal” additions, never trump cards. This hierarchy was embedded in the words themselves, and no amount of philosophical argument could fully dislodge it.

What makes this finding essential for depth psychology is its demonstration that a culture’s deepest values are carried not in its explicit doctrines but in the semantic architecture of its language. Adkins is not merely describing what the Greeks believed; he is showing what their language permitted them to think. This resonates directly with Peterson’s analysis of the Greek Middle Voice in The Homecoming of the Soul, where the argument is that the loss of a grammatical form—the Middle Voice—constituted the loss of an entire ontological stance. Peterson traces how Latin collapsed the Middle into the Passive, and how the Fourth Council of Constantinople in 869 AD ratified this grammatical catastrophe as theological dogma. Adkins performs an analogous operation on the ethical vocabulary: he shows that when ἀρετή meant competitive success, the entire moral field was pre-structured to privilege results over intentions, status over character. The quiet virtues could whisper, but the competitive virtues shouted—and the language itself amplified the shout.

Tragedy as the Symptom of an Irreconcilable Value-System

Adkins’s treatment of Greek tragedy is where his analysis achieves its greatest force. He argues that Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were not moral philosophers dramatizing ethical lessons but artists caught in the gravitational field of a value-system that could not reconcile its own demands. When Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia, he acts within the competitive framework: the expedition must sail, the leader must succeed, failure is the only true κακία. But the cooperative framework—the claims of family, piety, the sanctity of a daughter’s life—simultaneously condemns him. The tragedy arises not because Agamemnon makes the wrong choice but because the value-system offers no right choice. Both imperatives are structurally binding, and neither can override the other. This is what Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology, calls pathologizing: the soul’s insistence on falling apart, on refusing the ego’s demand for resolution. Hillman writes that “psychopathology is an archetypal fantasy,” that symptoms are the gods forcing their way into consciousness. Adkins, working from philological rather than psychological premises, arrives at a convergent insight: Greek tragedy is the cultural symptom produced when a society’s value-language cannot integrate its own contradictions. The pathology is not in the hero; it is in the system.

The Failure of Philosophy to Complete the Moral Revolution

Adkins is unflinching in his assessment of the philosophers. Plato and Aristotle attempted to complete what the tragedians could only stage: the subordination of competitive to cooperative values, the redefinition of ἀρετή as moral excellence rather than worldly success. But Adkins shows that even these titanic efforts were only partially successful. Aristotle’s μεγαλόψυχος—the “great-souled man”—remains a figure defined by his superiority, his claim to honor, his competitive standing. The cooperative virtues are present in Aristotle’s schema, but the gravitational pull of the old competitive hierarchy distorts the orbit. The language itself resists the revolution. This has direct bearing on Hillman’s critique in Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account of the “monotheism of ego-psychology”—the single-centered, self-identified consciousness that subsumes all diversity under one governing principle. Adkins shows that the Greeks never achieved this monotheism of value; their ethical vocabulary remained stubbornly polytheistic, hosting competing and irreducible claims. The Platonic attempt to install the Good as the single sun illuminating all value was, in Adkins’s reading, a philosophical aspiration that the inherited language could never fully support.

Why This Book Matters Now

Hillman argued that “the gods have become diseases” and that depth psychology’s task is to recognize the divine configurations operating within psychological affliction. Adkins provides the philological ground for this claim by demonstrating that the Greeks themselves never succeeded in unifying their value-world under a single moral principle. The competitive and cooperative, the heroic and the just, coexisted in unresolved tension—and this tension was the engine of their greatest cultural achievements, from epic to tragedy to philosophy. For anyone working in depth psychology today, Merit and Responsibility is indispensable not as a history of ethics but as a diagnostic manual for the pathologies that arise when a culture’s language encodes values it cannot reconcile. It reveals that the “Greek miracle” so often invoked by psychologists and philosophers was not a harmonious synthesis but a sustained, brilliant, and ultimately unresolved confrontation with the problem that still defines the soul’s life: how to hold competing claims without collapsing into the false resolution of choosing one.