EVIL EYE/GOOD EYE, VICE/VIRTUE

EVIL EYE/GOOD EYE, VICE/VIRTUE The evil eye has an ancient cultural resonance, evoking evil or calamity, caused by a glance askance by one of distracted appearance or visage. There is also a good eye, less often mentioned, feared or foresworn as the superstitious evil eye, by which ghosts, ghouls, "haints" are culled. These eyes, good and bad, come to mind in my reading of Aristotle. In NICOMACHAEN ETHICS, the great Greek philosopher he writes: "Now some one may say that all men desire the apparent good, but have no control over the appearance, but the end appears to each man in a form answering to his character . We reply that if each man is somehow responsible for his state of mind, he will also be himself somehow responsible for the appearance; but if not, no one is responsible for his own evildoing, but everyone does evil acts through ignorance of the end, thinking that by these he will get what is best, and the aiming at the end is not self-chosen but one must be born with an eye, as it were, by which to judge rightly and choose what is truly good, and he is well endowed by nature who is well endowed with this. For it is what is greatest and most noble, and what we cannot get or learn from another, but must have just such as it was when given us at birth, and to be well and nobly endowed with this will be perfect and true excellence of natural endowment. If this is true, then, how will virtue be more voluntary than vice? To both men alike, the good and the bad, the end appears and is fixed by nature or however it may be , and it is by referring everything else to this that men do whatever they do." P.973-974, (1941, 2001) edited by Richard McKeon.