I can see tolerance as a virtue up to a point…until a laizzez fair attitude or lack of conscious observation and action causes death and destruction.
How is apathy a virtue? It goes against life.
Was Aristotle being literal here or facetious ~~ or did he mean something else by the quote.
Can someone explain this to me.
Spoiler alert, the quote might be misattributed to Aristotle.
Aristotle did convey the idea of virtue as a mean between two extremes; e.g. bravery falls somewhere between cowardice (a deficiency) and recklessness (an excess), and not necessarily square in the middle. To your point, though, I wouldn’t say that a virtue (e.g. bravery) could be turned into a vice. By Aristotle’s framing, bravery never becomes recklessness or cowardice, but is always some intermediary between them.
I agree the quotation casts apathy and tolerance as “virtues” in a darkly ironic way - to say that they aren’t really virtues at all; they wouldn’t be worth their weight as virtues or earn the name.
Terence was a man, fuse. Why would he say "I am [a] man if he was speaking in the universal sense?
I posed that question because of all the great inhumanity to man that has existed in this world.
Can all the chaos and tragedy and despicable acts that have been perpetrated and existed throughout history be so familiar and comfortable to us ~ that we can make that statement.
“Nothing human is foreign to me”.
Maybe the word “foreign” needs to be defined here. Maybe he was being ironic.