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In philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, especially that of Aristotle
Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
, the golden mean is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency.

To the Greek mentality, it was an attribute of beauty. Both ancients and moderns realized that "there is a close association in mathematics between beauty
Beauty

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, Location , Object , or idea that provides a perception experience of pleasure, Value , or satisfaction....
 and truth
Truth

semantic fields for the word truth extend from honesty, good faith, and sincerity in general, to agreement with fact or reality in particular....
". The poet John Keats
John Keats

John Keats was an England poetry who became one of the principal poets of the English Romanticism movement during the early nineteenth century....
, in his Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on a Grecian Urn

Ode on a Grecian Urn is a poem by John Keats written in 1819 and first published in January 1820. It was one of Keats's "Five Great Odes of 1819" which also included Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and To Autumn....
, put it this way:

Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.


The Greeks believed there to be three 'ingredients' to beauty: symmetry, proportion, and harmony.






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In philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, especially that of Aristotle
Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
, the golden mean is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency.

To the Greek mentality, it was an attribute of beauty. Both ancients and moderns realized that "there is a close association in mathematics between beauty
Beauty

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, Location , Object , or idea that provides a perception experience of pleasure, Value , or satisfaction....
 and truth
Truth

semantic fields for the word truth extend from honesty, good faith, and sincerity in general, to agreement with fact or reality in particular....
". The poet John Keats
John Keats

John Keats was an England poetry who became one of the principal poets of the English Romanticism movement during the early nineteenth century....
, in his Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on a Grecian Urn

Ode on a Grecian Urn is a poem by John Keats written in 1819 and first published in January 1820. It was one of Keats's "Five Great Odes of 1819" which also included Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and To Autumn....
, put it this way:

Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.


The Greeks believed there to be three 'ingredients' to beauty: symmetry, proportion, and harmony. This triad of principles infused their life. They were very much attuned to beauty as an object of love and something that was to be imitated and reproduced in their lives, architecture, Paideia
Paideia

In ancient Greek, the word paideia means "education" or "instruction." Paideia was the process of educating humans into their true form, the real and genuine human nature....
 and politics. They judged life by this mentality.

In Chinese philosophy, a similar concept, Doctrine of the Mean
Doctrine of the Mean

The Doctrine of the Mean , is both a concept and one of the books of Neo-Confucian teachings . The composition of the text is attributed to Zisi the only grandson of Confucius....
, was propounded by Confucius
Confucius

This articles talks about a Chinese thinker and social philosopher. For a food company in China with its brand name "Master Kong", please refer to Tingyi Holding Corporation....
.

History of the golden mean in philosophy


Crete

The earliest representation of this idea in culture is probably in the mythological Cretan
Crete

Crete is the largest of the Greek islands and the List of islands in the Mediterranean largest island in the Mediterranean Sea at 8,336 km? ....
 tale of Daedalus
Daedalus

In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a most skillful artificer, or craftsman, so skillful that he was said to have invented images that seemed to move about....
 and Icarus
Icarus (mythology)

Icarus is a character in Greek mythology. He is the son of Daedalus and is commonly known for his attempt to escape Crete by flight, which ended in a fall to his death....
. Daedalus, a famous artist of his time, built feathered wings for himself and his son so that they might escape the clutches of King Minos
Minos

In Greek mythology, Minos was a mythical king of Crete, son of Zeus and Europa . After his death, Minos became a judge of the dead in Greek Underworld....
. Daedalus warns his son to "fly the middle course", between the sea spray and the sun's heat. Icarus did not heed his father; he flew up and up until the sun melted the wax off his wings.

Delphi

Another early elaboration is the Doric
Doric Greek

Doric or Dorian was a ancient Greek dialects of ancient Greek Greek language. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon....
 saying carved on the front of the temple at Delphi
Delphi

Delphi is an archaeology site and a modern town in Greece on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus in the valley of Phocis. Delphi was the site of the Pythia, the most important oracle in the classical Greek world, when it was a major site for the worship of the god Apollo after he slew the Python , a deity who lived there and protecte...
: "Nothing in Excess".

Pythagoreans


The first work on the golden mean is often attributed to Theano
Theano (mathematician)

Theano was a Greeks mathematician. She is also thought to have been a physician.The best known interpretation of her life is that her father Pythonax of Crete was a great supporter of Pythagoras....
, a student of Pythagorus.

Socrates

Socrates
Socrates

Socrates was a Classical Greece Philosophy. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students....
 teaches that a man "must know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible".

In education, Socrates asks us to consider the effect of either an exclusive devotion to gymnastics or an exclusive devotion to music. It either "produced a temper of hardness and ferocity, (or) the other of softness and effeminacy
Classical definition of effeminacy

In Ancient Greece society, effeminacy was a term applied to men who were perceived as having the quality of unmanliness, softness or delicacy, shown by moral weakness, cowardice or a lack of perseverance....
". Having both qualities, he believed, produces harmony; i.e., beauty and goodness. He additionally stresses the importance of mathematics in education for the understanding of beauty and truth.

Plato

Something disproportionate was evil and therefore to be despised. Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
 says, "If we disregard due proportion by giving anything what is too much for it; too much canvas to a boat, too much nutriment to a body, too much authority to a soul, the consequence is always shipwreck."

In the Laws
Laws (dialogue)

The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue. The question asked at the beginning is not "What is law?" as one would expect. That is the question of the Minos ....
, Plato applies this principle to electing a government in the ideal state: "Conducted in this way, the election will strike a mean between monarchy and democracy …"

Aristotle

In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle
Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
 writes on the virtues. His constant phrase is, "… is the Middle state between …". His psychology of the soul and its virtues is based on the golden mean between the extremes. In the Politics, Aristotle criticizes the Spartan Polity by critiquing the disproportionate elements of the constitution; e.g., they trained the men and not the women, and they trained for war but not peace. This disharmony produced difficulties which he elaborates on in his work. See also the discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics
Nicomachean Ethics

Nicomachean Ethics, or Ta Ethika, is a work by Aristotle on virtue and moral character which plays a prominent role in defining Aristotelian ethics....
 of the golden mean, and Aristotelian ethics
Aristotelian ethics

Aristotle believed that ethical knowledge is not certain knowledge but is general knowledge. Because it is not a theory discipline, he thought a person must have "experience of the actions in life" and have been "brought up in fine habits" in order to become good ....
 in general.

Quotations

  • "In many things the middle have the best / Be mine a middle station."
    — Phocylides
    Phocylides

    Phocylides, Greek gnomic poetry poet of Miletus, contemporary of Theognis of Megara, was born about 560 BC.A few fragments of his "Maxim " have survived , in which he expresses his contempt for the pomps and vanities of rank and wealth, and sets forth in simple language his ideas of honour, justice and wisdom....


  • "When Coleridge
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an England poet, critic and Philosophy who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romanticism in England and one of the Lake Poets....
     tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety."
    — J. Bronowski


  • "…but for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following."
    — Henri Poincaré
    Henri Poincaré

    Jules Henri Poincar? was a French mathematician and theoretical physicist, and a philosophy of science. Poincar? is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime....
    .


  • "If a man finds that his nature tends or is disposed to one of these extremes..., he should turn back and improve, so as to walk in the way of good people, which is the right way. The right way is the mean in each group of dispositions common to humanity; namely, that disposition which is equally distant from the two extremes in its class, not being nearer to the one than to the other."
    — Maimonides
    Maimonides

    Moses Maimonides, also known as Rabbi Moses ben Maimon , the Rambam, and Musa ibn Maymun , was born in C?rdoba, Spain, Spain on March 30, 1135, and died in Egypt on December 13, 1204.....


Miscellanea

  • Jacques Maritain
    Jacques Maritain

    Jacques Maritain was a France Catholic philosopher. Raised as a protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he is responsible for reviving St....
    , throughout his Introduction to Philosophy, uses the idea of the golden mean to place Aristotelian
    Aristotelianism

    Aristotelianism is a Tradition#Philosophical tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. Sometimes contrasted by critics with the rationalism and Platonic idealism of Plato, Aristotelianism is understood by its proponents as critically developing Plato?s theories....
    -Thomist
    Thomism

    Thomism is the philosophical school that arose as a legacy of the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas. The word comes from the name of its originator, whose Summa Theologica is arguably second only to the Bible in importance to the Roman Catholic Church....
     philosophy between the deficiencies and extremes of other philosophers and systems.
  • Confucius
    Confucius

    This articles talks about a Chinese thinker and social philosopher. For a food company in China with its brand name "Master Kong", please refer to Tingyi Holding Corporation....
     in the Analects taught excess is similar to deficiency(????). A way of living in the mean is the way of Zhongyong(????).
  • Gautama Buddha
    Gautama Buddha

    Siddhartha Gautama was a Spirituality teacher in the northern region of the Indian subcontinent who founded Buddhism. He is generally seen by Buddhists as the Supreme Buddhahood of our age....
     taught middle Way
    Middle way

    In general, the Middle Way or Middle Path is the Buddhist practice of non-extremism.More specifically, in Theravada Buddhism's Pali Canon, the Middle Way crystallizes the Gautama Buddha's Nirvana-bound path of moderation away from the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification and toward the practice of wisdom, morality an...
    .
  • Zhuangzi
    Zhuangzi

    Zhuangzi was an influential Chinese philosophy who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States Period, corresponding to the Hundred Schools of Thought philosophical summit of Culture of China thought....
     had a similar idea.
  • Hu Shi wrote an article 'the tales of Mr. Chabuduo'(??????) on people who did not mind accuracy on matters.


See also

  • Argument to moderation (fallacy)


Bibliography

  • The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton, W. W. Norton & Co., NY, 1993.
  • Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Why the Greeks Matter, Thomas Cahill, Nan A. Talese an imprint of Doubleday, NY, 2003.