Abstract

As virtue is experienced and understood in Confucian ethics as power to act and perform a moral action, we must inquire into the source and foundation of such a power and see how the Daoist-Confucian understanding of virtue as de is significant and illuminating. The crux of the matter is that virtue has to be onto-cosmologically explicated, not just teleo-logically explained, for its creative ability to achieve an end. Thus we see how virtue is a power derived from self-reflection and self-restraining and how it also functions as a motivated action for attaining its practical end in a com-munity. But in order to attain such a practical end, one needs to practice and make one’s practice effective and sustainable. It has to achieve a self-integrat-ed moral consciousness so that one’s experiences, action and ideal end remain in creative coherence. This leads then to the Aristotelian notion of virtue as excellence. In light of this understanding we see how virtue as arête could be introduced as a second feature of virtue as de, namely as the power for effective action in the whole system of virtues, apart from the first feature of de as self-restraining power.