This paper is about the nature of the pre-classical European virtue of critical self-restraint and necessity for the new Europe’s renewed confrontation with the still open possibilities of future nuclear warfare.

As recent history demonstrates, many intelligent international political leaders would seem repeatedly to manifest in their most important deliberations and decisions an insufficiently self-critical understanding in such centrally significant matters as institutionalizing further nuclear disarmament. Details of recent international negotiations suggest that some leaders and some of their most prominent advisors would seem to suffer, as many of their ancient European forbearers from - in an old Greek word - hubris. That is, some of the most influential persons in Europe today sometimes not just an unbridled self-interest and pervasive self-deception but especially an unmitigated intellectual pride. But a renewed European ethos today needs to comprise more than an unremitting but overly general Sophoclean awareness of fundamental human limitations. Such an ethos also needs to articulate freshly the nature of a reasoned and meditative self-restraint.

After situating the newly problematic nature of a European ethos within the most recent very difficult circumstances that have muted European voices in recent international discussions of not just the environment and the protection of species but especially the reduction of nuclear arsenals, my paper examines the historical and philosophical moment of the emergence of the archaic Greek virtue of sophrosune. I take this moment as the moment of transition from the artistic representation of the human being in Late Archaic Greek statuary to the presentation of the individual in Early Classical Greek sculpture.

From that moment of reflective plenitude, at the moment of the first (and perhaps not the last) war between an ancient Iran and European civilization and already well-before the more narrow classical ethical inquiries of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the paper then disengages three cardinal questions for further critical discussion. These particular questions come to focus on the idea of a renewed ethos for Europe today in terms of several initial elements only for an ethics of mutual understanding constructed not just on individual self-control but on both individual and social critical self-restraint.

The new virtue that emerged in early Greece was an ethical articulation of the disastrous lessons of devastating wars with ancient Iran - with Persia. These wars left Athens and the Athenian Acropolis a blackened wasteland; its surviving population no more than collections of displaced persons. That historical scene itself may be taken as a prefiguration of some future nuclear cataclysm. From then on, deliberating and acting differently, thinking within a sufficiently reflective and properly articulated sense of ineluctable limits, became an ethical necessity.

Today we know that people everywhere cannot avoid confronting many world-wide crises including global financial and economic collapses; climate change; agricultural short-falls; population growth; increasing human migrations; the annihilating poverty of the hundreds of millions of completely destitute persons - and, perhaps all too unexpectedly, the recently renewed risks of nuclear war. But carrying through these confrontations successfully requires, among other things, that persons and communities renew and sustain their critical reflections of the elusive idea of a renewed European ethos today, an ethos awarding a central place to critical individual, social, and political self-restraint.