By A/Prof Tim Papadopoulos, Specialist Plastic Surgeon Greek City Times is launching School of Beauty, a new weekly series by A/Prof Tim Papadopoulos examining beauty, aesthetics, identity, and self-perception through the lenses of philosophy, medicine, and culture. There is a word in ancient Greek that has no satisfying English equivalent. Aristotle introduced it in the Nicomachean Ethics as the crowning virtue of his entire moral system — the virtue that, in his view, completed and dignified all the others.
It is usually translated as greatness of soul, or sometimes magnanimity. But neither translation quite captures what Aristotle meant. What he meant was something more specific and more demanding: the disposition of a person who accurately understands their own worth, neither inflating it into arrogance nor diminishing it into false humility, and who acts in the world from that accurate self-understanding.
The megalopsychos — the great-souled person — neither overclaims nor underclaims. And they move through the world accordingly, with a kind of considered, unperformed self-respect that Aristotle considered the foundation of a genuinely good life. I want to suggest that megalopsychia is the correct philosophical framework for understanding why people legitimately seek aesthetic surgery.
Not the shallow preoccupation with surfaces that the critics of aesthetic medicine have always reached for. But the ancient, entirely serious, Aristotelian project of bringing the outer self into alignment with an accurate inner sense of one’s own worth and identity. That is what the best aesthetic surgery does.
And it has never, to my knowledge, been properly said. Aesthetic surgery has an image problem that it has largely brought upon itself. The industry’s promotional language — younger, tighter, more beautiful, turn back the clock — has consistently framed the desire for aesthetic change as a response to inadequacy.
This framing is commercially effective and philosophically catastrophic because it locates the motivation for surgery in deficit rather than in aspiration. It tells patients — implicitly, persistently — that they are seeking surgery because something is wrong with them.
Summary from source