Arete and Maslow
Two strikingly similar concepts for fulfilling human potential from different eras
There are two concepts from different cultures and eras of history–Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from the modern world, and an ancient Greek term, arete–that accept remarkably similar conclusions for how one comes to live a good life.
Arete
Arete, roughly translates as “excellence”, but it’s broader than how we think of excellence and includes the notion of "full realization of potential or inherent function". A person with arete is someone who is all they can be and utilizes all their powers, intelligence, bravery, strength, discipline, and will to achieve the full potential a human being can achieve in themselves.
Another way of considering arete is to think of how it was used more broadly than just with humans and virtue. A hammer could be considered to have arete if it fulfills its function of a hammer to the full potential a hammer should. A human has arete if they fulfill the full potential a human should.
Arete is a complicated term that never had a nice set of unchanging qualities that defined a person with arete. It could mean different things to different people, different contexts, and different eras. A person with arete in the Homeric era is similar, but not identical to a person with arete in the era of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. What qualities we consider make an excellent human being are defined culturally and individually. The excellent human being to you might not be exactly the same as the excellent human being to me.
However, I’d go out on a limb and say that if we both really thought about it, the differences between our conception of an excellent human being would be minor. Deciding what metric to measure a human against is obviously perilous. It’s a big objective vs subjective debate, but I think there are virtues so universal that it’s hard to argue an excellent human being would not have them. I think the the Greek cardinal virtues cover this well:
Andreia: A term that means “courage”, “honor”, and something like “manliness”
Phronesis: Intelligence or wisdom in terms of practical action
Dikaiosyne: “Justice” in English, although In the Greek sense it also had a meaning like “fairness”
Sophrosyne: “Self control”
Maslow’s Hierarchy
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a model for human flourishing. The concept was that as your needs are met in each level of the hierarchy you get closer to achieving your highest need to become all you possibly can be. You’ve likely seen the pyramid structure of the hierarchy, although a better structure, as Scott Barry Kaufman put it in Transcend, is to represent it as a sail boat with the hull of the boat representing the needs of safety, health, and relationships, and the sail representing the higher needs of exploration, love, and purpose.
In this model the hull of the boat, your safety, connection, and self esteem needs must be met first and always. As soon as the boat is leaking you won’t go anywhere and all the higher needs of the sail become useless. But whatever the model used, the goal of Maslow’s hierarchy was achieving self actualization. Self actualization is the realization of one’s full potential. “What a man can be, he must be” as Maslow once put it.
If you deliberately plan on being lass than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.
Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
Connecting the Two
As far as I can tell Maslow never mentioned Arete in his writings–but you can see how the Greek arete and Maslow’s hierarchy are about the same thing. You could almost simply say that Maslow’s hierarchy was about achieving arete. Although that might be simplistic. Arete had an objective quality to it–that there is a form of excellence beyond any individual’s subjective existence (certainly the Greeks believed only the elite could achieve arete), while Maslow’s hierarchy feels more subjective–that there is a particular arete for you and only you.
But besides that, the two concepts have the same goal for the individual: fulfilling full potential. However, beyond the individual there are other differences. Maslow doesn’t talk much about a person’s physicality besides feelings of safety and satisfying hunger, but physical health and ability is important for a person to feel like they have agency and power in the world. Without feelings of agency and being in control it becomes difficult to achieve arete. I imagine this is why Plato believed training someone in athletics was necessary for achieving arete.
On this view, the virtue and value of the physical trainer and appropriate physical training would seem to be twofold. On the one hand, the physical trainer (like the physician, but unlike the cook or beautician) is the possessor of genuine expertise (or techne) concerning how to bring the physical aspects of human being into an order that is (sensibly) analogous to (intelligible) moral order. On the other hand, such order reflects intelligible moral order in so far as it (for Plato) serves to inhibit contrary-to-virtue inclinations. Physical training and discipline, under the guidance of morally informed spirit, may discourage those tendencies to softness and dissipation that serve to weaken virtue. So, for example, those hardened to danger and fatigue through adventure sports will be less prone to the coward’s excessive concern for personal safety and those devoted to maintaining a healthy level of physical fitness and efficiency should be less intemperately drawn to over-indulgence in drink or the wrong kind of diet.
David Carr, On the Moral Value of Physical Activity: Body and Soul in Plato's Account of Virtue
Another difference is beyond the individual. Maslow did discuss how a culture (particularly a workplace) could promote self-actualization, but the focus was more on the individual and what would be good for the most individuals.
While not widely read by the general public, the book was read among many in the management field. The journal is a trove of new ideas, ranging from the need for enlightened management policies and the psychology of enlightened salespeople to employee motivation and healthy self-esteem in the workplace, from creativity to customer loyalty and enlightened leadership to methods of social improvement.
One major thread was the idea of “synergy,” which fascinated Maslow. It was a term he first learned from his friend and mentor, anthropologist Ruth Benedict, one of the main inspirations for his work on self-actualization (because he viewed her as so self-actualizing). Only a handful of people who had known Benedict personally (such as Margaret Mead) were aware of her idea of synergy, but it clearly left an imprint on Maslow, and he saw the relevance to enlightened management and self-actualization in the workplace. Benedict referred to synergistic cultures as those that are holistically structured and function for mutual benefit of the individual and the larger society.Placing this notion within an organizational context, Maslow argued that in an enlightened or “eupsychian” workplace—meaning an environment conducive to self-actualization—that which is good for personal development is also good for the company.
Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend
Can a community or nation rise through Maslow’s hierarchy and achieve self-actualization? It might seem like an odd way to think of it when the focus is on each individual person and their route to self-actualization. However, there is no issue with arete. The Greeks would have had no issue asking if a city-state had arete.
In the Greco/Roman model shame and a desire to compete acted as a powerful social mechanism to encourage Arete when luxury and entertainment were readily available. Remember that the social classes that would have the greatest chance of achieving arete in those cultures were the elite–the very people who, by having their security needs most easily met, were most at risk of wasting their lives on entertainment and luxury. Shame and a desire to compete and outdo each other in honor served as powerful social mechanisms to keep the elite focused on achieving excellence in life.
The greatest source of power for the ancient Romans had been their willingness, singly and as a group, to compete strenuously, but not in order to win, not to survive. The most powerful social bonds in ancient Rome were a precipitate of the blood the Romans were willing to expend so prodigally for one another generation after generation; no law, no god, no victory, no pride in family or race or status could ever so clarify or crystallize the spirit. The will, the willingness, on behalf of the collectivity to lose everything, to become nothing, had kept selfconsciousness and shame from being too excruciating, too alienating.
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The religious and legal systems of ancient Rome, as well as the stories and exempla of the Republic, reveal a contest culture with all its attendant emotional and social frictions.
Carlin Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones
There is something to keep in mind with both these concepts: although both arete and Maslow’s hierarchy are about living up to your full potential you can never truly know what that is. You’ll never know if you had reached it, or if you could have gone further.
That is a blank spot on the map of life that never goes away, and it requires a willingness to explore your own capabilities. Sometimes what you need to tell yourself isn’t “I can do this.” Instead you should ask, “I wonder what I am truly capable of?” Goals are good, but they imply you already know what’s possible and there isn’t anything left to explore that will surprise you.