Aristotle’s ergon as Normative Basis for a Non-parochial Politics of Place

Can the Aristotelian ergon better justify rights claims not based on nation-state sovereignty than the norms generally appealed to within the liberal order? An affirmative answer entails that Aristotle’s concep-tion of the human work offers a persuasive justificaconcep-tion for a certain kind of republican citizenship independent of nation-state conventions.

Before we can judge the human ergon in this respect, though, we need first to understand what precisely it is.

we would do well to remember that Aristotle does not share our dis-tinction between ethics and politics. Right from the beginning, it is clear that what we call ethics is, for Aristotle, political thinking.⁴ Remember-ing, in this light, that the Aristotelian notion of “work” developed in the Nicomachean Ethics, 1.7, is already expressly a political norm, let us investigate how it can be deployed to articulate a radically different understanding of the normative framework for human possibilities – one not embedded in the liberal notion of “rights.”⁵ what emerges from

Living well and the Promise of Cosmopolitan Identity 61 this is the intimate intertwinement of the work (ergon) of the human being and the being-at-work (energeia) of the human being. As frank⁶ has argued, this link is vital to understanding why the ergon really is about flourishing, and not just “functioning.” that is to say, notwith-standing the justified influence of Martha Nussbaum’s “capability approach” to normative evaluation,⁷ Aristotle’s understanding of the human work is predicated not so much on “capacities” (or “capabili-ties”) and the extent to which it is or is not possible for a particular human being in a particular political community to actuate such capac-ities, but rather on the fullness of the life led by such a human being, as part of such a living polis. After establishing this link in Aristotle’s text, we will turn to investigate how his vision of the human work might ground something like a “non-parochial politics of place.”

Aristotle’s ergon argument begins with the reminder that we are searching for the “highest of the goods of action,” the teleion telos, the most complete completion that alone can be the good at which all things aim. the sign of such a good is that it is always chosen only for itself and never the sake of something else – that is, this “highest good”

must be both for its own sake and “that for the sake of which” all else is done. this, of course, brings us back to happiness; after all, happiness

“seems to be of this sort most of all,” insofar as “we choose this always in virtue of itself, and never in virtue of something else” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b1–2). there are a great many things (like virtue, honour, pleasure, and intelligence) we choose for themselves and because we believe they bring happiness, and others we choose only for the sake of something else (like money), yet only happiness exists for us as some-thing we chose only for itself.⁸

But having said this much we feel very much brought back around to the same troublesome impasse that always arises when discussing an articulation of human flourishing: sure, we are talking about happi-ness when we speak of the “highest of all goods of action,” but which happiness, whose happiness? Aristotle (NE, 1097b22–3) acknowledges this problem. How can we hope to succeed in thus defining happiness, this “unique way of being-at-work in the world,” here? the answer is the well-worn terrain of the ergon argument itself: that short bit of text where Aristotle defines the peculiar work of the human being.

this is the life of action, which Aristotle defines as the mobilization of

“the aspect of us holding rational speech, of which one aspect is able to be persuaded by reason, while the other holds reason and thinks things through” (NE, 1098a3–5). It is no accident that when Aristotle

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asks just what is this “life of action,” which has everything to do with living according to reason, he turns to the life processes of a human being.⁹ Here he says, speaking roughly, as befits the presentation of these matters proper to a political inquiry,¹⁰ that the first life process of the human being is nutrition and growth, the mere self-sustenance as a living thing, which human beings have in common with plants and other animals. the second life process is perception, which human beings share with other animals. Since these two life processes are shared by other forms of life, they cannot be paradigmatically human;

they cannot be our peculiar work. No more than what a carpenter shares with other humans – say, being a member of a family, or digest-ing cooked food – could define the work of a carpenter.

with what, then, are we left as the work of the human being? It can only be the aforementioned life of action. what belongs most properly to us is not reason as a possession or property, but action which necessi-tates holding logos, both as being able to be persuaded and as being able to think things through. Still more precisely, it is not this twofold ability which constitutes our work; it is rather the setting-to-work of this abil-ity, the energeia of this life of action: “One must set it [the work] down as that life at-work, for this seems to be the more governing sense” (NE, 1098a7).

Aristotle, then, does not describe the “function” (ergon) of the human being as “the active exercise of the rational faculty,” but, rather, claims that “the work of a human being is a being-at-work of the soul in accordance with reason, or not without reason” (NE, 1098a8).¹¹ when the whole human soul is completely set-at-work in all its various pro-cesses, all with reason, or in any case, not against it, then we can say that we see the peculiar and defining work of a human being.

this much I can say here for the first of the two Aristotelian claims at work in this piece. My account of the second will be more schematic still. I here only gesture towards Aristotle’s view that whatever the life of virtue is (and this is to be learned from the Nicomachean Ethics), it is in a certain sort of political constellation – and only in such – that such a life is possible, and the relevance of this commitment for con-temporary debates about community membership and human rights.¹² this gesture will consist of a brief discussion of three principles of the Politics: (1) the polis is the most complete form of human community;

(2)(a) the politeia is the life of the polis and, thus, some politeia is “best,”

by which is meant: most entirely a singular political community;

(2)(b) this “being best” is bound up with education and the cultivation

Living well and the Promise of Cosmopolitan Identity 63 of character in all the citizens. taken together, these principles constitute the second of the two major Aristotelian claims relevant here.

(1) the claim that the Politics, in its opening moments (1252a1–30),¹³ argues that the polis is the most complete¹⁴ form of human community is not a controversial one. But it is worth remembering a few facts regarding the presentation of what is the fundamental truth of politi-cal inquiry for Aristotle. first, that the Politics begins with the polis and its nature because this is how we will learn what the Nicomachean Ethics did not teach us: how the young might become good. Next, that what argues for the polis being the proper level of analysis is that it aims at the most “authoritative” of goods, and, for this reason, is the most “all-encompassing” of communities. third, that the “political community” that “is called ‘polis’” is not only greater than other com-munities (like a household, or a business enterprise), but different in kind because only the polis (among human communities) is a natural whole. finally, and for this reason, we will carry out the investigation of the Politics in “the way it is usually carried out,” that is, by dividing the whole into parts, and then reassembling the parts thus divided into a whole.

the Politics, we can thus see, begins with arguments about how best to cultivate characters of a certain kind. It is crucial, then, that Aristo-tle begins with education. No less remarkable is the all-encompassing purview of the polis as the subject of our inquiry: none of the other communities we form is in order, if this most authoritative one is not.

this all-encompassing character of the polis, on closer inspection, is not to do with its conventional character (its being the biggest of the com-munities of which we are part), but with its natural wholeness, which will become apparent if we examine the city in the way we have exam-ined other matters – specifically, nature. what I wish to draw on here is this natural character of both the matter and the manner of investiga-tion in the Politics. It is precisely this character of Aristotle’s thinking about the political, indeed the human as such, that Roochnik in this volume finds lacking in Sandel’s unsuccessful (to his mind and mine) attempt to appropriate the “topological” element of Aristotle’s think-ing about the polis.¹⁵ Roochnik¹⁶ pursues this cosmological character of political discourse through a reading of passages from the Physics (especially book 4) – and, to a lesser extent, the Metaphysics – that need to be understood in order to understand Aristotle’s argument regarding the proper size of the best city. I wish to show here that this character comes to light precisely in the two further claims at work here: the

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being-whole of that polis organized through the politeia that is best; and the being-whole of the soul that is educated properly within such a polis.

(2) the reading of the Politics here holds that the text is, on the whole, coherent and consistent, and that the chief interpretative issue that hangs on this consistency and coherence is that Aristotle has one view of the relation of citizen, city, and regime (politēs, polis, politeia), in which the nature of citizenship displays the nature of a city, and that of a city reveals that of a regime. On this understanding of the Politics, we may, having followed the analysis to the conclusion, look backward from the best regime to the true city and the true citizen.

this account is presented as part of the discussion of the proper size and scope of the best polis, which is to say – as Roochnik develops at length in chapter 2¹⁷ – the need for it to remain small enough to be a genuine locale, a topos in which all the individuals share an understand-ing of themselves as inhabitunderstand-ing the same place. Here I can present only a schematic presentation of the highlights of this section of the Politics, which is as follows.

(2)(a) Beginning from the preliminary definition of citizen, gleaned from the experience of “true” democracy,¹⁸ as “those who share in office” to “members of juries and assemblies,” we arrive at the diffi-culty that, the cities differing as their regimes do, the citizens of many existing cities are not citizens by this definition. we can thus say that the citizens are those among whom “it is given to some or all to delib-erate and to judge” (1275a31; 1275b1–10, b13). Next, the polis is defined as “the sufficiently-great-multitude of such persons for self-sufficient life” (1275b21). we must bear in mind that human being is not for life, but the good life, and only a good man¹⁹ – one who lives the life of virtue – can attain to the good life. thus, only under the best regime would the city be directed to the best ends, and would the good citizen be the good man as such (1277b–8a). thus, in all the “right regimes,”

rule will be by the best. the best, those who must rule in that city which would be best – whether one, a few, or many – will be those who are virtuous. And a man always becomes serious in the same way; so

“it will be more or less the same to educate a man to be political or a king” (1288a32–b1).

(2)(b) with this in mind we turn to what we know (from Nicomachean Ethics): the best life is the life of virtue. But “it is clear” that whatever is best for one human being is best for a city (1324a7). thus, the life of virtue is the best life for the city. this raises two questions: (a) which

Living well and the Promise of Cosmopolitan Identity 65 is better: the life of “active involvement in the political,” or a life “of a foreigner,” that is, “released from the political community”? (b) what is the best regime: that aiming at political or philosophic virtue? Only (b) will be addressed here, as it alone of the two is part of “the work (ergon)” of this study (1324a13–23). we need not directly answer this question, since both arguments have suasion. what we must insist on is that the best city is contingent on the virtue of its citizens; this is most complete when all the citizens are virtuous (1325a16–b30). thus, the seri-ous city – described just above – requires the right form of education.

the rightness of education is determined by answering: what virtue will the regime inculcate in its citizens? we need an education that will result in all the citizens being “serious,” that is, capable of choosing (1332a28–b10). finally, we conclude that this education must follow the division of the soul: it must cultivate in both the reasoning and desiring the best possible ends (1333a16–4a10).

One cannot avoid noticing that the question raised about the nature of the life of virtue, and the relative value of the life of theoria and politi-cal life, remains unanswered²⁰ – on the grounds that such a question is not to be addressed in a political work (and remember that that desig-nation applies to what we call ethics, too) – identifies the non-political life of contemplation with the life of the foreigner. this makes perfectly clear why Aristotle would never endorse the sort of cosmopolitanism made famous by diogenes and those who champion his “from what city am I? None; for I am a citizen of the world” style of rejecting “the politics of place.” the choice to be this sort of cosmopolitan (a politēs of the kosmos), on Aristotelian grounds, is not to be a citizen at all. It might be a better life, but it is an expressly non-political life.

But it is also a choice. I believe that the peculiar form of dialectic argumentation at work in these sections – in addition to showing the seriousness of the subject matter, and the difficulty in adjudicating between the contentious views under examination – is meant to model exactly the kind of education to be found in the best regime. the argu-ment began by placing the discussion of the best regime in the con-text of that political arrangement under which the greatest number share the burden and privilege of choice, in order to determine that it is precisely choice (in the context of voting and judging) that con-stitutes citizenship. this definition of citizenship then developed into an account of what it is to be a city, to be a regime, and thus to be a good city and a good regime, resulting in an early indication of the crucial role of education. this hint at education’s importance is then

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used to underscore the intertwinement of the best life for both city and citizen (and human as such) as the life of virtue. this is achieved, importantly, through an analysis of the question of which life is the most choice- worthy that issues in aporia, in an impasse or puzzle that Aristotle leaves unresolved. that he chooses both to bring us into this impasse and also not to solve it is crucial, I believe, because it is meant to point the way towards his view of a solution: the need for us to work it out in concert and in public. Aristotle is suggesting that the question of whether it is best to pursue the life of the non-citizen who thinks about timeless matters or the citizen who must address the con-cerns of one’s own particular place is a puzzle that must be resolved politically. It is to this model of “public deliberation,” grounded in his vision of the human work that inspires my appeal to Aristotle’s thinking. this is not to say that some kernel of Aristotle’s political thinking – whether this kernel is thought to come from his “realist”

account of existing regimes, or rather his “idealist”²¹ account of the best regime [aristē politeia], which he also calls the regime in the “city of prayer” [kat’ eukhēn]²² – should serve as a rule to be unambiguously endorsed for civic republicanism today. this is surely not the case, not only because Aristotle’s understanding of the fundamental unit of col-lective human experience – the polis – does not, and (as far as human probability allows one to say) will likely never again, exist, but also because what Aristotle expressly has to say about the matters at hand is incorrect.²³ But it does not follow from this concession that we do not still have something to learn from Aristotle in attempting to come to terms with global citizenship in today’s democracies.

It is this that chiefly arises from tracing this line of argumentation:

the best regime – notably not designated as one of the three correct regimes, but rather according to how its citizens are at-work – is the one which all those who share in the being-a-city of the city live just for the sake of doing things like going through the argument itself. this is possible only when one has been educated sufficiently to achieve the level of precision in the argument, but also when one cares enough to be interested in an inquiry about how to arrange the political com-munity in the first place. And this, as Roochnik notes in chapter 2,²⁴ is itself only possible if political life is the self-conscious expression of one’s place in an intrinsically value-laden cosmos. Put another way, the argument can only succeed when those to whom it has been presented have themselves been educated to value the life of virtue with their whole soul.²⁵

Living well and the Promise of Cosmopolitan Identity 67 2. Deploying the Aristotelian ergon to Renovate

Contemporary Cosmopolitanism

I claim that we have learned from Aristotle (1) that our life’s work is to live the life of virtue, which is not the use of reason for reason’s sake, but to set the whole human soul to work in self-preservation, sense perception, desire, and thinking, all according to logos, and (2) that this

I claim that we have learned from Aristotle (1) that our life’s work is to live the life of virtue, which is not the use of reason for reason’s sake, but to set the whole human soul to work in self-preservation, sense perception, desire, and thinking, all according to logos, and (2) that this