The Golden Mean

​This concept is something we have inherited from the ancient Romans who themselves got it from the still more ancient Greeks. The Greek philosopher most closely associated with The Golden Mean is the 4th Century BCE philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE). In his Ethics he describes the ideal human virtue as the mean between the excess of a particular quality and its lack. A common example, one that Aristotle himself used, was courage. If you have too much of it, that’s foolhardiness. An example would be riding your horse out into a clear view of a line of enemy soldiers who are pointing their loaded rifles at you. You are basically committing suicide. But the lack of courage is called cowardice. In this case you don’t have enough of the basic quality to take a stand or face an adversary or an unhappy boss one on one.

Courage is therefore the Golden Mean between too much of the quality in question and too little. It’s that just-right amount. Or think of food consumption. Eating too much, the excess is overindulgence. Eating too little, by contrast, is undernourishment. While there is no single word for eating just the right amount of food, it can be referred to as maintaining a healthy diet. Of course, here it is not only a question of quantity but also of quality and diversity. So we’d be better off speaking of maintaining a healthy balanced diet.

I remember reading a history of Greece during my college junior year abroad in Germany, 1958-59. The author, possibly someone named Robinson, offered that the ancient Greeks came up with the concept of the Golden Mean precisely because they were an emotional people who tended to go to extremes. The Golden Mean was thus meant as a corrective or balancer to keep them from the potential negative effects of their emotional extremism, an analog to the dykes in Holland used to hold back the occasional high tides that could easily overrun their low-lying country. Indeed, that is the meaning of its alternate name, The Netherlands (Nederlande, or “the Low Lands” in Dutch).
Interestingly, the renowned Chinese philosopher known in the West as Confucius (ca. 551-479 BCE), who lived nearly two centuries before Aristotle, also came up with a Doctrine of the Mean. Wikipedia says some of the following things about this concept:

The Doctrine of the Mean or Zhongyong is one of the four books of classical Chinese philosophy and a central doctrine of Confucianism. The text is attributed to Zisi (Kong Ji), the only grandson of Confucius…. The goal of the mean is to maintain balance and harmony from directing the mind to a state of constant equilibrium…. The Doctrine of the Mean represents moderation, rectitude, objectivity, sincerity, honesty and propriety. The guiding principle is that one should never act in excess. (Wikipedia, article on the “Doctrine of the Mean”)
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The Greek version, to be sure, is more complete by avoiding the deficiency as well as the excess. Whatever the case, practicing the Golden Mean sounds like a good idea for us in today’s world too.

Aristotle

Confucius