Abstract

The literature on human ethos evinces terminological arbitrariness, which can in my opinion be overcome in only one way: through historical reflection of the meaning which the moral-philosophical concepts have expressed at the very beginning of European philosophy. The first part of the paper is therefore dedicated to the reflection on Greek notions and then its Latin translations. In this respect there appears a fundamentally historical and substantial difference between classical Greek “ethos” and modern “morality”. The second part begins with the nowadays prevailing impression that “ethos” is foredoomed to disappearance for the sake of “morality”. Attempts at rehabilitating the ethos of virtues in contrast to modern morality, undertaken by communitarily inclined philosophers after the publication of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, have for the most part been justly criticized. By means of the phenomenological method of stepping back to originary experience, I would like to approach this matter from a different and new angle. My thesis is that “ethos” represents the normality of the world of experience. “Morality” of the modern world is based upon the borderline case of such “normality”, which is elevated to the level of a normal case. In conclusion, I will try to provide a phenomenological explanation of this historical development by interpreting it as the process of “idealization”