Honor

The heroes of the Iliad are men of overweening pride, relentlessly jealous of their honor. The entire action of the poem turns on a question of honor: Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, violating the warrior's claim to the due meed of recognition, and Achilles withdraws from battle. The plot is driven not by territory or tactics but by the public fact of honor, conferred by peers and formalized through gifts, prizes, and acknowledgment of worth. Nothing grieves these heroes so much as to have their deeds go unrequited by abundant praise.

Achilles faces the choice between a short life bringing undying fame and a long life without glory. He initially chooses the latter out of rage, then reverses course when Patroclus dies, accepting death to avenge his companion and restore his standing. The choice reveals what the honor culture values: to live nobly and be remembered. Like the other heroes of the Iliad and the Aeneid, Achilles wears an aspect of divinity, but he also has a weakness in his armor. The heroes of Homer are "better than the ordinary man," as Aristotle observes, yet they possess the common frailty of man, and their faults are consequences of strength misused, not marks of individual weakness. The question of heroism and its relation to courage is treated more fully under the idea of Courage.

Homer presents the warrior ethic with the full weight of tragic poetry. Achilles' rage destroys allies as well as enemies. The honor code produces heroes who are at once magnificent and destructive, whose greatness cannot be contained within the requirements of ordinary social life. The costs of the code are registered even while its power is acknowledged.

Honor, fame, and glory combine in various proportions to constitute the heroic figures of classical antiquity. Thucydides will translate the Homeric concern with honor into the language of political analysis, treating honor alongside fear and interest as one of the three causes of war. Aristotle will subject the concept to philosophical scrutiny, distinguishing between the honor that is due to genuine virtue and the fame that attaches to the merely outstanding or exceptional.

Thucydides identifies honor, together with fear and interest, as one of the three motives that drive states to war. In the Funeral Oration of Pericles, he offers what may be the most celebrated statement of civic honor in the tradition. The Athenians do not seek posthumous glory through individual heroism in the manner of Homer's warriors; they seek it through collective civic achievement, and the city itself becomes the monument to their virtue. Honor is distributed among citizens who sacrifice for the community, rather than reserved for aristocratic warriors competing for prizes.

Yet the same city that buries its war dead with noble rhetoric also turns on Melos with the logic of pure power. The Melian Dialogue reduces all appeals to honor and justice to mere rhetoric, the Athenians insisting that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. The gap between the language of honor and the conduct of power is one of Thucydides' central subjects, and it bears on the question of whether honor divorced from virtue is genuine or counterfeit, a question that Plato and Montesquieu address in different ways.

Thucydides thus shows how civic pride can become imperial hubris and how the same community that celebrates its openness and virtue may act with ruthless disregard for justice when its power is sufficient. The reaction of the community to its great men, and the conditions under which honor is conferred or withheld, are concerns that recur throughout the tradition.

Aristotle will ask whether honor is the highest good or merely the proper reward of virtue, subordinating the political recognition that Homer and Thucydides describe to an internal standard of excellence. Hobbes, who translated Thucydides, will draw from his work the conclusion that honor-language frequently conceals a more fundamental concern with power.

Aristotle gives honor its first systematic philosophical treatment in the Nicomachean Ethics. Honor, which he calls "the greatest of external goods," is the proper reward of virtue, and "it is to the good that it is rendered." Yet it is not the highest good, for it depends too much on those who confer it. Those who make honor the chief aim of life are at the mercy of popular opinion, and Aristotle observes that men of practical wisdom seek something more self-sufficient than this.

The key concepts in Aristotle's analysis are the two virtues concerned with honor: ambition and magnanimity (or pride). The proud man is one "who, being truly worthy of great things, also thinks himself worthy of them; for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly." He will be pleased "only by honors that are great and that are conferred by good men," while honors from casual people and on trifling grounds he will utterly despise. Humility and vanity are, on Aristotle's account, the vices of defect and excess: the unduly humble man underestimates his worth and does not seek the honor he deserves, while the vain man overestimates himself and wants honor out of proportion to his qualities.

This analysis marks a considerable departure from the Homeric conception. Honor for Aristotle is not the goal of life but its indicator. It points toward genuine virtue, and the distinction between honor rightly desired and honor desired to excess is understood in terms of the virtues and their corresponding vices. The question of honor as due self-esteem, and of the relation between pride and humility, is treated also under the ideas of Virtue and Vice and Happiness.

Aristotle preserves the connection between honor and excellence while distinguishing both from fame, which attaches to the great without regard to virtue or vice. Augustine will argue that even virtuous pride, when it seeks the glory of men rather than the glory of God, remains a subtle form of sin. Aquinas will attempt to integrate these two positions within the framework of Christian theology.

Plutarch the moralist certainly does not regard the men whose lives he writes as paragons of virtue. On the contrary, he plainly indicates that many of them are examples of extraordinary depravity. But Plutarch the biographer treats them all as famous, and he takes that as a matter of historic fact, not of moral judgment. Good or bad, they were acknowledged to be great men, leaders, figures of eminent proportions, engaged in momentous exploits. Each ventured beyond the pale of ordinary men, and each succeeded at least in becoming a symbol of great deeds, a monument in human memory.

The central question running through the Lives is whether honor and virtue reliably correspond. By pairing a Greek with a Roman, Plutarch examines the relationship between character and reputation across different civilizations, and his method of comparison separates the admirable from the merely outstanding. It is not always the most successful who merit the highest praise; the question, as Aristotle had formulated it, is whether the honor a man receives is proportionate to his genuine excellence. The distribution of honors raises questions of justice, and these are among the chief problems that Plutarch's biographies illustrate.

Plutarch declares that "it is not histories I am writing, but lives," and his attention to character, motive, and the small incidents that reveal a man's nature makes the Lives a form of moral instruction. The reader encounters not only the achievements of Themistocles and the ambition of Alcibiades but also the self-discipline of Cato and the excess of Coriolanus, and from these encounters may draw lessons for the guidance of conduct, a purpose that is discussed more broadly under the idea of Education.

Plutarch treats honor and fame as inseparable from the study of great lives, and his biographies served for centuries as the principal means by which the reading public encountered the problem of honor in concrete form. Augustine will acknowledge the reality of Roman virtue while insisting that its love of glory was itself a form of pride. Montaigne will read the Lives with sustained attention, drawing from them a conception of self-knowledge that shifts the ground of honor from public reputation to private conscience.

Augustine, in the City of God, grants that the Roman love of glory was real and that it produced genuine, if limited, virtue. In order that the Roman empire "might overcome the grievous evils which existed among other nations," he writes, God "purposely granted it to such men as, for the sake of honor, and praise, and glory, consulted well for their country, in whose glory they sought their own, and whose safety they did not hesitate to prefer to their own, suppressing the desire of wealth and many other vices for this one vice, namely, the love of praise." The love of glory thus suppressed baser vices, but it remained, for Augustine, a vice.

The distinction between honor and glory, which is central to Augustine's analysis, turns on the question of the proper object of praise. The glory found in human praise is far removed, he argues, from the true glory that belongs to God. "So hostile is this vice to pious faith," he writes, "if the love of glory be greater in the heart than the fear or love of God." The Christian hero, consequently, seeks not his own glory but the glory of God, and in contrast to the pagan hero, he is great not in pride but in humility. The question of the relation between pride and humility is treated more fully under the ideas of Virtue and Vice and Sin.

Augustine's critique does not dismiss pagan honor as mere fraud. The Apostles themselves, he notes, received great glory in the church of Christ, but "they did not rest in that as in the end of their virtue, but referred that glory itself to the glory of God." True honor, properly ordered, is oriented toward God; honor detached from its divine source inflates the self, and when it becomes the end of action rather than its consequence, it ceases to be genuine virtue.

Augustine accepts that honor motivates real virtue while insisting that the motive of human glory is itself corrupted by pride. Aquinas will attempt to integrate this theological critique with Aristotle's philosophical account of magnanimity, preserving the rational analysis of honor while locating its supreme object in God. Montaigne will shift the question from divine judgment to the internal conscience of the individual.

Aquinas follows Aristotle in treating honor as the proper reward of virtue, and he preserves the Aristotelian analysis of magnanimity while integrating it within the framework of Christian theology. Honor, as Aquinas points out, "is given to a man on account of some excellence in him, and is a sign and testimony of the excellence that is in the person honored." Yet the virtuous should be prepared for the fact that honor is not always rightly distributed, since honor from men is received "by way of reward, as from those who have nothing greater to offer." Happiness, he goes on to say, is the "true reward for which the virtuous work; for if they worked for honor, it would no longer be virtue, but ambition."

Aquinas also develops the distinction between honor and fame. Fame, he observes, "has no stability; it is easily ruined by false report. And if it sometimes endures, this is by accident." The question of whether honor and fame are the same or distinct is central to the moral analysis, for it determines whether the desire for recognition is to be judged by the standard of virtue or merely by the magnitude of the reputation. Vainglory, the inordinate desire for one's own excellence as recognized by others, is a capital sin because it directs toward the creature a recognition that properly belongs to God. The theological distinction between the glory of God and the fame of men is treated more fully under the idea of God.

Aquinas also addresses the social and political dimension of honor. Communities that fail to honor genuine excellence disorder themselves; the just distribution of honors is one of the chief problems of distributive justice. Honor paid to parents and rulers is not idolatry but right order, though honor sought for its own sake rather than for the governance it enables may corrupt the office it accompanies. The question of honor as a principle in the organization of the state is considered under the idea of Government.

Aquinas integrates the classical framework of honor within a theological order while preserving its rational core. Montaigne will shift the ground from the objective hierarchy of excellence to the subjective authority of conscience, insisting that the honor worth having is a matter of internal integrity rather than public or divine recognition.

Montaigne insists that honor is primarily a matter of internal conscience rather than external reputation. "It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part," he writes, "but for ourselves within, where no eyes can pierce but our own; there she defends us from the fear of death, of pain, of shame itself." A sense of honor, on this view, functions through an inner determination of the will, and its standard is not the opinion of the community but the individual's own conception of what is good or right.

The essay "On Glory" makes the argument against public honor directly. Fame depends on the judgment of others, which is ignorant, inconsistent, and mortal. The person who performs virtue for an audience is not genuinely virtuous but is exhibiting himself for applause. Montaigne prizes moderation too much to praise heroism more than a little. Comparing Socrates and Alexander, he places all of the latter's actions under the maxim "Subdue the world," whereas Socrates, he says, acts on the principle that it is wise "to carry on human life conformably with its natural condition." The virtue of the soul, Montaigne maintains, "does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity."

This inward turn is enabled by Montaigne's skepticism about the standards that generate public honor. Different societies honor different things; what one culture admires, another scorns. If honor is genuinely relative to social convention, then the only stable reference point is the individual conscience. The question of whether honor can be separated from the opinion of others, or whether it must always depend on recognition, is one that Montaigne addresses by preferring integrity to reputation, a preference that bears on the broader question of happiness treated under that idea.

Montaigne's emphasis on the internal conscience as the ground of honor represents a considerable departure from both the classical and the theological traditions. Hobbes will agree that public honor is about social valuation and power, but he will draw very different conclusions about its function. Tolstoy will carry Montaigne's skepticism further, attacking the honor codes of his own society as screens that conceal self-deception.

The older treatments of honor, from Homer through Aristotle and Plutarch, had generally assumed that honor is conferred upon the agent by a community that acknowledges his merit, and that the pursuit of honor is a pursuit of recognition from those whose recognition is worth having. Cervantes, writing at the end of the age in which the chivalric ideal still commanded public reverence, presents the case of a man who undertakes the pursuit of honor in the old form when the age no longer knows how to supply the acknowledgment which was its condition. Alonso Quixano arms himself with rusty armor, renames his horse Rocinante, gives himself the title of Don Quixote de la Mancha, chooses a lady whose existence is mostly his own conception of her, and sets out to do deeds of valor in a country where there are no giants, no enchanters, and no distressed princesses to be saved. His honor is to be the knight errant.

The peculiar interest of the case lies in the fact that the knight does not regard the public mockery he encounters as evidence against his honor. He regards it rather as the malice of enchanters, or as the ignorance of peasants, or as part of the trial to which every knight errant must submit. The external marks of honor, which in Homer's Achilles or Plutarch's lives are bound up with the praise of men, are here supplied by the knight himself, out of the resources of his own conviction. He is his own herald, his own judge of his deeds, his own witness to the greatness of his lady. The question this raises for the tradition is whether honor which is thus internal and self-administered deserves the name, and whether the public recognition which the older accounts required was essential to honor or merely a customary accompaniment of it.

The questions raised here are taken up under other ideas as well. The tension between the chivalric code and the ordinary morality of village life belongs to the chapter on Custom and Convention; the gap between what the knight sees and what his squire sees belongs to the chapter on Opinion; the larger question of how a man should judge himself when the judgment of his community is withheld belongs to the chapter on Virtue and Vice. What is peculiar to the idea of Honor is the display of a figure whose honor has no external support at all, and yet whose honor, on the evidence of the novel, is not contemptible. Don Quixote is ridiculous and noble at the same time, and the novel refuses to let the reader keep these two judgments separate.

Hobbes will later say that "the value or worth of a man is, as of all other things, his price," which is to say, what would be given for the use of his power, as determined by others. On Hobbes's account Don Quixote should have no honor at all, since no one around him is willing to give anything for the use of his power. Yet the novel's readers have been unable to accept that verdict, and the figure of the knight has entered the tradition as the case which complicates every strictly external account of what honor is. Whether it is sustainable, whether it is a virtue or a form of self-deception, whether it belongs to the agent or to the community, remain the questions which the old knight of the rueful countenance has left for the tradition to consider.

The Shakespearean treatment of honor is given chiefly in two plays, Othello and Julius Caesar, which between them present the two principal forms the idea had taken in the tradition. In Othello, honor is the reputation which a man has acquired by his achievements in the world and which he treats as the measure of his standing; in Julius Caesar, honor is the integrity of the soul that will not be false to what it has taken as its good, and that sets the good of the state above the good of any particular man. The tradition from Homer through Aristotle and Plutarch had discussed both senses, the external and the internal, and had not always sharply distinguished them. The Shakespearean plays set them before the reader in their full dramatic development and allow the differences between them to become visible.

Othello's case is the case of a man whose whole standing in the Venetian world rests on his reputation as a soldier and as a husband, and whose loss of confidence in his wife is felt by him as a loss in the first place of honor. "Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content," he says, "farewell the plumed troops and the big wars that make ambition virtue." The speech is a lament not for Desdemona but for a self he cannot any longer occupy, since the honor that had given it its form has been put in doubt. Brutus in Julius Caesar is the opposite case: the man whose honor is not a matter of reputation but of what he will and will not permit himself to do, and who is willing to kill Caesar, whom he loves, for the sake of a Rome he believes is threatened. Antony, in his funeral oration, will call him "the noblest Roman of them all," and the play is careful not to deny the judgment even as it shows what Brutus's honor has cost him and what it has failed to secure.

The philosophical questions raised belong also to the treatments of Virtue and Vice, of Courage, and of Justice. What the Shakespearean plays add to the idea of Honor is the showing of the two senses in their tragic interaction. Othello shows what the external sense of honor amounts to when its conditions are withdrawn: the man who has been honored cannot bear the thought of not being honored, and he destroys what he has loved rather than live as the man he has become. Brutus shows what the internal sense amounts to when the state it was meant to serve has passed beyond the point at which honorable action can save it: the integrity of the soul is preserved at the cost of its political effectiveness, and what the world will remember is the integrity, not the policy.

Hobbes, who takes up honor in the Leviathan, will define it as the acknowledgment of power and will place the desire for honor among the passions from which civil conflict arises. His account is recognizably addressed to cases of the Shakespearean kind, and it is offered in part as a diagnosis of what the older conception of honor has come to be in an age which no longer takes the soldierly virtues as its model. Tolstoy, writing of war from within a very different tradition, will treat the notions of military honor and of glory with a scepticism that has some of its force from the Shakespearean showings. Each later treatment takes up one or the other of the two senses the plays had made dramatically available.

Hobbes reconstructs honor on entirely secular and naturalistic grounds. In the Leviathan, "the value of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power; and therefore is not absolute, but a thing dependent on the need and judgment of another." To value a man at a high rate is to honor him; at a low rate, to dishonor him. Honor, on this account, is not about merit or virtue in the classical sense but about the perceived capacity to act effectively in the world.

This represents a departure from the entire tradition that runs from Aristotle through Aquinas. Aristotle's magnanimous person deserved honor because of genuine virtue; Hobbes's honorable person is powerful and recognized as such. Courtly behavior, including bowing, titles, and precedence, is honor because it signals the deference that one person pays to the power of another. William James, writing much later, describes fame and honor in a similar vein as "a man's image in the eyes of his own 'set,' which exalts or condemns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not be made of one in another walk of life."

Hobbes's analysis also explains why honor-cultures tend to be unstable. If honor is a social valuation of power, then every slight signals that one's power is diminished, and the obligation to respond to insults follows coherently from the premise. The duel and the vendetta are not irrational but are logical consequences of the framework. Only the sovereign, by monopolizing the use of force, can break the cycle. The question of honor in the political community, and its relation to the organization of the state, is treated also under the ideas of Government and State.

Hobbes's account of honor as a function of power leaves no room for the internal integrity that Montaigne valued or the magnanimity that Aristotle praised. Tolstoy will approach the critique of honor from a different direction, examining how the honor codes of aristocratic society conceal self-deception in those who most insistently profess them.

Tolstoy deplores the injustice of the honor given Napoleon and the dishonor in which Kutuzov was held. "Napoleon, that most insignificant tool of history who never anywhere, even in exile, showed human dignity, Napoleon is the object of adulation and enthusiasm; he is grand. But Kutuzov, the man who from the beginning to the end of his activity in 1812, never once swerving by word or deed, presented an example exceptional in history of self-sacrifice and a present consciousness of the future importance of what was happening, Kutuzov seems to them something indefinite and pitiful." The misplacing of honor, and the gap between reputation and genuine worth, is one of Tolstoy's central concerns.

In War and Peace, the aristocratic world of salons, military commissions, and social reputation is set against the moral lives of characters who find meaning not through recognition but through love, suffering, and the encounter with ordinary reality. Prince Andrei begins the novel craving Napoleonic glory and ends it discovering how little such glory signifies. Napoleon himself appears as the culmination of the honor-culture: the man for whom history exists as the stage for his greatness. The modern period, as Tolstoy presents it, tends to substitute fame for honor and genius for virtue, and the great modern novels, counterparts of the epic poems of antiquity, portray exceptional men and women without idealizing them to heroic stature.

Tolstoy's later religious development provides a verdict on honor that bears comparison with Augustine's. Honor, in the tradition from Homer through Hobbes, is a form of pride, and Tolstoy, like Augustine, regards pride as the root of moral disorder. But where Augustine locates the problem in the theological substitution of human glory for divine glory, Tolstoy locates it in the existential illusion that any individual can be the center of his own story. Only simplicity, goodness, and truth, Tolstoy maintains, constitute genuine greatness.

Tolstoy's critique of honor completes a movement that begins with Montaigne's turn inward and continues through Hobbes's reduction of honor to power. Where Montaigne preserved the authority of conscience and Hobbes analyzed honor as social valuation, Tolstoy questions whether the entire framework of honor, fame, and glory has any bearing on what matters most in human life.