Citizens

To ask who is a citizen, as Aristotle does at the start of Politics III, is to ask about the identity or nature of a citizen.⁹

In Aristotle's hands, this is to ask who deserves to be a citizen or who merits the political good of citizenship. Aristotle answers by saying what will not qualify someone for citizenship: not place, or location, or the capacity to sue and be sued (Pol. 1275a7–11); not birth, ancestry, or blood (Pol. 1275b32–34). Rather, a citizen is one who participates in ruling and judging (Pol. 1275a22–23), one who rules and is ruled in turn (Pol. 1277b13–16), one who shares in the judicial and deliberative offices of a polity (Pol. 1275b18–20). Place, legal capacity, birth, and parentage—as static qualities and/or markers of status—do not demonstrate merit in Aristotle's view. Although there may be subtle differences among the formulations Aristotle approves, they share an emphasis on activity: “Sharing in a constitution,” in Malcolm Schofield's (1999, 144–49) phrase, qualifies one for citizenship.¹⁰

Aristotle's emphasis on activity has a curiously tautological or self-contained quality. Practicing citizenship, Aristotle seems to be saying, makes someone a citizen: A “citizen is a citizen in being a citizen”(Winthrop 1975, 407). This circularity is a feature not only of Aristotle's understanding of citizenship but of all human activity. In doing, he says, “the end cannot be other than the act itself” (NE 1140b6). Activity, energeia or entelecheia, is that which has, echein, what is aimed at—an end or telos—in, en, itself (Meta. 1050a23–24). Although self-contained, human activity is not invulnerable to external influences. There is no carrying out one's citizenship in a vacuum. Indeed, Aristotle insists that there can be no citizen qua citizen prior to the regime of which that citizen is a part (Pol. 1275a3–4). For this reason, he pursues his investigation of citizenship by asking who is a citizen of a democracy or of an oligarchy. Being a citizen is regime-dependent not least because what it means to share in a constitution largely depends on the laws, education, and other social and political institutions of that particular constitution.¹¹

These institutions all contribute to the making of citizens (Pol. 1275b4). Being a citizen, this suggests, is a complex combination of doing on the part of citizen practitioners and making on the part of social and political institutions.

At the start of his inquiry into citizenship, however, Aristotle says that it is important to leave to one side “those who have been made citizens, or who have obtained the name of citizen in any other accidental manner” (Pol. 1275a5–7). This sentence is key. It carves out what, for philosophical reasons, Aristotle thinks ought not to be included in an inquiry into the identity or nature of a citizen. To be excluded, as already noted, are those who are “made” citizens by the accidents of birth, ancestry, parentage, or location. That is clear enough. But, against the backdrop of Aristotle's ready acknowledgment of the role of social and political institutions in the making of citizens, how are we to understand Aristotle's apparently sweeping exclusion of all “made citizens”? He offers the following examples. To be excluded from consideration of the nature of a citizen, Aristotle says, are those who have been made citizens “by the magistrates,” a kind of making he analogizes to the production of artifacts, specifically, kettles (Pol. 1275b29–30);¹²

and those who have been made citizens “after a revolution” (Pol. 1275b35–36).¹³ As with the granting of legal rights under a treaty (which, as “the capacity to sue and be sued,” Aristotle rejects as a qualification for citizenship), these are examples of citizens having been made citizens, one might say, ex nihilo: by being so named by a magistrate, or by fiat after a revolution, or by the force of legal treaty alone. Aristotle does not identity those who are made citizens in any of these ways as citizens for the same reason he excludes those who are made citizens by accident: Their citizenship does not come about in virtue of their own activity. It is rather granted to them.

Aristotle includes in the proper making of citizens, laws, education, and other social and political institutions because, unlike treaty, revolution, or magisterial edict, which like accident or force, make irrelevant the activity of a citizen, a polity's institutions do not make that activity irrelevant but rather supervene upon or guide it (Pol. 1258a22–23). Indeed, it is impossible to understand a citizen's identity without taking into account the ways in which it has been shaped by these institutions (Salkever 1990b, 176; Smith 2001, 23–26). Citizen identity is, then, a product of making and doing, where doing is a kind of self-making (by sharing in the constitution, I make myself a citizen) and making, as the guided shaping by laws, education, and other institutions, entails citizenly doing. Accident and force must be pushed to one side when investigating the nature of the citizen because they make irrelevant what is at the heart of both formations of citizen identity: the dynamic and reciprocal relation between identity and action, between doers and their deeds.

Citizens are made citizens not only by their particular or individual activities but by sharing in a constitution, in other words, by their collective activity (Pol. 1275b4–6). At the same time, collective activity produces the social and political institutions that contribute to the making of citizens in the first place. If, to be citizens, citizens must act as citizens, they do so not only individually but also in their collective action, by which they make for themselves the social and political institutions that also help make them. Taking democracy, with Josiah Ober (1996), to be constituted neither by institutions alone nor by popular action alone but rather by “dynamic tensions” between institutionalization and participation (31), there is something nicely democratic about Aristotle's understanding of citizen identity, read in this way.¹⁴

Citizenship is a matter of individual self-determining activity and it is participatory. By acting in concert, sharing in their constitution, citizens make the institutions that, in turn, as institutions, guide, but do not fully determine, their individual activity.

Reading Aristotle on citizenship and political participation calls for attending not only to those he includes but also to those he excludes, specifically to those he excludes not because of what they do (shopkeepers, craftsmen) but, ostensibly, because of who they are: women, foreigners, and slaves. For most readers, it is because Aristotle takes the nature of these individuals to be essentially and necessarily different from the nature of citizens that they must be excluded from political participation.¹⁵

I disagree. To explain why, I turn next to an extended treatment of Aristotle's account of slavery in Politics I, the hard case for the claim I am making about nature.¹⁶

Slaves

Aristotle opens his discussion of slavery with the question: Who is a slave? As he does in the case of citizenship, he analyzes this as a question of justice, that is, in terms of desert or qualification. Rejecting parentage or ancestry (Pol. 1255b1–3) and convention (which he calls nomos and equates with violence or force, bia) (Pol. 1255b15) as inadequate justifications of slavery, Aristotle pushes to one side, as he does when he discusses citizen identity, those who have been made slaves by accident or by force. The significance of these moves on Aristotle's part should not be underestimated. That Aristotle parses slavery as a question of justice, which he treats as the key question for politics (Pol. 1255a7–17) and “a question for political philosophy” (Pol. 1282b23), signals that he intends to give it careful political and philosophical consideration. That he rejects as unjust all forms of enslavement by force shows that he is prepared to challenge the predominant form of slavery in ancient Greece, which was the enslavement of foreigners captured by war or kidnaped by pirates and their descendants (Kraut 2002, 280; MacDowell 1978, 79). For these reasons, those who read Aristotle as simply a product of his times (Annas 1993, 153, 155; 1996; Saunders 1995, 79–83) or as merely an apologist for the institutions of his regime (Waldron 1992; Williams 1993, 103–29) are mistaken.¹⁷

In the light of the structural similarities between his accounts of slave and citizen identity, one might expect Aristotle to draw the same conclusion in the case of slavery that he draws in the case of citizenship. If being a citizen is to be understood in terms of citizen activity, then being a slave is to be understood in terms of slave activity. If citizen activity (including how this activity is guided by a polity's social and political institutions but nothing accidental, forced, or necessary) defines the nature of a citizen, then slave activity (similarly understood) should define the natural slave.

These are exactly Aristotle's conclusions. He says, “The good man and the statesman and the good citizen ought not to learn the crafts of inferiors except for their own occasional use; if they habitually practice them, there will cease to be a distinction between master and slave” (Pol. 1277b5–7). He warns against including in the art of household management knowledge on the part of the master of how to do the tasks of slaves (Pol. 1255b23–38), and he warns his audience of free citizens in the Nicomachean Ethics against engaging in slavish kinds of activities (NE 1118a23–b4, 1118b21, 1128a22).¹⁸

Aristotle demands this sort of vigilance on the part of masters, citizens, and rulers because, as these examples suggest, performing the activities of a slave can make one a slave. The reverse seems to be true as well: Presuming the capacity to cease being a slave, Aristotle maintains that it is appropriate to hold out to slaves the promise of their freedom (Pol. 1330a33–34). Insisting that friendship is not possible with a slave as a slave but that it is with the slave as a person (NE 1161b5–6), Aristotle holds out the possibility that a slave can become a person worthy of friendship, Aristotle's model for free politics.

Aristotle may take slavery to be necessary to politics, but all this suggests that there is nothing immutable that singles out any particular person as a slave. Instead, slave identity, like citizen identity, is determined by activity. If this is right, then there is no “permanent and complete” difference between slave and citizen (contra Nichols 1992, 6).¹⁹

Aristotle's account of slavery in Politics I, accordingly, serves not to describe and set apart a domain that is pre- or nonpolitical, but to warn his audience of free citizens of their vulnerability, not only to accident and force but, more importantly, to the power of acting in shaping their political destinies (Davis 1996, 22; Mara 1995, 286, 296). It follows that when I make myself a citizen or a slave in virtue of my own activity, it is just to so treat me.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between citizens and slaves in this regard: The social and political institutions that supervene upon self-determining activity to produce citizens as citizens and slaves as slaves are the products of citizen activity alone. Insofar as I am produced as a slave by social and political institutions in whose making I have not myself participated, I am made a slave independently of my own activity. I am, therefore, by the terms of Aristotle's own account, made a slave by accident or, more likely, by force. As we have seen, Aristotle insists that the effects of accident and force are to be left out of a consideration of the nature of identity. A study of slaves produced as slaves by coercive social and political institutions, then, reveals little about the nature of slaves. It does, however, reveal something about those who create such institutions, namely, that they confuse political rule with mastery, a science Aristotle refers to as servile (Pol. 1255b30–35).²⁰

Citizens or rulers who act as masters show that they are prepared to rule despotically, which, for Aristotle, is the unmaking of their polity (Pol. 1292a14–38, 1295b20–24). The practice of slavery and its institution, though necessary to free citizens individually and collectively, are also, and at the same time, dangerous to the very freedom they secure.

Against the backdrop of this reading of Politics I, how might we understand Aristotle's defense of natural slavery? Appearing to carve out a category of nature defined independently of activity, it seems to display a lack of parallelism with his treatment of citizenship. This appearance is deceptive. Aristotle's discussion of who is by nature a slave imports into the Politics language he has introduced in the Physics. Parsing this question along two axes, he asks whether nature as matter, meaning physical bodies, will distinguish slaves from nonslaves; and he asks whether nature as form, meaning soul, will do the trick. In Politics I Aristotle has insisted that nature makes nothing in vain (1253a9). On the contrary, nature makes things to particular uses and so should mark a slave in a way that shows him to be fit for use as an object of property by giving him a body suited to menial chores. Aristotle notes, however, that although “nature would like to distinguish” slaves from nonslaves on the basis of physical appearance, nature can fail to do so, giving slaves, instead, the bodies of freemen (Pol. 1254b26–32). Under its material aspect, as body, nature cannot tell us who deserves to be a slave.

Most scholars agree that under its formal aspect, as the soul, nature does a better job of distinguishing slaves from nonslaves. They claim that, to Aristotle, it is the absence of the faculty of deliberation, a deficiency of the soul or, in the terminology of De Anima, a first-level incapacity, that makes natural slavery natural. Aristotle's examination of the soul of the slave is not so clear, however. He says that slaves lack the deliberative element (Pol. 1254b22–23, 1260a12–13) but also that if they could not deliberate at all they would not be able to execute their masters' orders (Pol. 1260a1); he says that slaves are not capable of self-rule (Pol. 1254b16–21) but also that they have the excellence necessary to prevent them from failing in their function through lack of self-control (Pol. 1259b22–28, 1260a1–3); he distinguishes slaves from children on the ground that, unlike slaves, children possess the deliberative element (albeit in an immature form) (Pol. 1260a13), but he also insists that the proper response to slaves, even more so than to children, is admonition rather than command alone (Pol. 1260b5–7); he says that slaves are essentially not-form and instead simply matter or bodies waiting for minds as form to impose order upon them (Pol. 1252a31–34, 1254b15–20) but also that, as human beings, they are constituted by matter and form (Pol. 1254a32–34) and share in the capacity to reason (Pol. 1259b29). On the basis of these inconsistencies, some scholars dismiss Aristotle's account of natural slavery as incoherent (Garnsey 1996, 107, 125; Smith 1991). Aristotle is not, however, unaware that his examination of the soul of the slave pulls in different directions. He maintains, by way of response, that “beauty of soul is not seen” (Pol. 1255a1). Because the soul is not visible to the eye, Aristotle's answer to the question of who is a slave by nature in terms of soul can be no more conclusive than was his answer to who is a slave by nature in terms of body.

Aristotle, nonetheless, concludes that “it is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and for these latter slavery is both expedient and just” (Pol. 1255a1–2). If natural slavery is not determined by an immutable physical deficiency and the soul's invisibility makes it impossible to know whether natural slaves suffer from an immutable psychological deficiency, what, then, makes slavery natural? Aristotle's answer is that the master–slave relation is natural when it benefits both individuals involved, when the interests of the slave and of the master are the same (Pol. 1255b13–14, 1252a35–b1). The circumstances in which slavery might benefit a master are clear enough. In what sorts of circumstances might someone benefit from being a slave?²¹

Aristotle says that a person whose soul is so disordered that it fails to guide his body might well be better off guided by someone else's soul than left wholly unguided (Pol. 1254b16–20). Because it is difficult to see and therefore to know whether a soul is well ordered, evidence of a disordered soul is provided by the activities in which the person engages. The inference that a person's soul is disordered is justified not when he acts, every now and then, “as most slaves act,” as this would give the status of slavery too much weight. Nor is there a biological standard for determining when a soul is disordered: none, at least, in the sense of a necessary one. Rather, what might be called characteristically human activity itself provides a kind of internal standard sufficient to allow judgment about which activities and ways of living are more slavish than others.

What is characteristically human activity? At the start of the Politics, Aristotle distinguishes human beings from all other natural beings on the ground that human beings alone possess logos, the capacity for articulate speech or reason (Pol. 1253a10). All human beings, by virtue of being human, possess this first-level capacity, including slaves (Pol. 1259b29). It is in virtue of logos that human beings make choices about the useful and harmful, the just and unjust, the good and the bad (Pol. 1253a14–18), and it is characteristic of human beings that, with regard to these ethical and political matters, we act “according to thoughtful or deliberate choice” (Salkever 1990b, 195; 1991, 182; Saxonhouse 1985, 66), kata prohairesin (Pol. 1280a31–34). Choice, prohairesis, charts the course of a human life. It is the act of choosing one action instead of (or before, pro) another, namely, making a judgment about what to choose. It is, Aristotle says, the starting point or rule, arche, of action (NE 1113a4–9). As signaled by the prefix “pro,” prohairesis, in the Greek understanding, has an embedded character: The choices that initiate the actions people undertake are determined by their habits, which reflect who they have been and therefore who they are.²²

Prohairetic activity, combining desire and intelligence (NE 1139b5–7), is characteristically human activity insofar as it discloses the character, the soul, and, thereby, the nature of the one who acts, specifically by revealing the degree to which, in the actions he undertakes, the actor is using the capacity for logos he possesses.

The one who possesses the capacity for logos but consistently does not use it, engaging, instead, in activity that falls short of prohairetic activity, is a natural slave. Such a person can have no share in “a life based on choice” (Pol. 1280a34–35) but rather must have his choices made for him by someone who, in contrast, uses foresight to choose thoughtfully (Pol. 1252a32). Slavery thus benefits the person who consistently fails to engage in prohairetic activity by bringing that person into a relation that allows him to mirror or approximate it.²³

The deficiency of a natural slave is, then, his failure to actualize the first-level capacity for logos he possesses.²⁴ A natural slave thus lacks what Aristotle calls a second-level capability. To say this is not, however, to ascribe to natural slaves an immutable nature in the sense that I have been challenging. A second-level capability is an actualization of a first-level capacity that comes about by virtue of the activity of its use (De Anima II.4–5): I actualize my first-level capacity for logos through prohairetic activity. Similarly, a second-level incapacity results from a failure to actualize the first-level capacity: My consistent failure to exercise my capacity for logos produces my deliberative deficiency.

Those who are deliberatively deficient owing to their consistent failure to use their logos are, for that reason, worthy of slavery and are, therefore, in Aristotle's terms, natural slaves. In contrast, those who are prevented from using their logos owing to conquest or coercive institutions, or those whose capacity for logos is damaged from birth or incapacitated later in their lives (through no willing nonuse of their own), are made slaves by force or accident and are, therefore, to Aristotle, not natural slaves at all. Understood by way of prohairetic activity, nature thus distinguishes slaves from nonslaves but secures no absolute boundaries and offers no permanent foundations. Guided and determined by activity, nature is changeable. It is for this reason that, when he discusses the capacity of nature, under its formal aspect—the soul—to distinguish slaves from nonslaves, Aristotle's statements are imprecise. It is so as to preserve the prohairetic activity he takes to be characteristic and also constitutive of a distinctively human way of living that Aristotle is especially keen, in his more explicitly philosophical treatments of nature, to safeguard nature's changeability. As I show next, this he does by guarding against the assimilation of nature to necessity and also to chance.

Between Necessity and Chance

Aristotle understands the natural as what happens usually and for the most part, epi to polu. What happens usually and for the most part is a “modal” middle between what is always and what is rare (Frede 1992). What is always corresponds to what is by necessity, and what is rare to what happens by accident. There is much to learn about Aristotle's understanding of nature from this tripartite division. In an Aristotelian fashion, I begin my investigation of what is distinctive about the natural by looking first at what he counterposes to nature: the necessary and the accidental.

The primary signification of the necessary, anagkaion, or the sense from which “all others are somehow derived,” is “that which cannot be otherwise” (Meta. 1015a34–b1). The necessary also includes the compulsory or forced, that which is opposed to impulse or purpose (Meta. 1015a27–28); and what is true by demonstration, the first principles of knowledge (Meta. 1015b7). The category of the necessary includes a range of significations across different fields of inquiry—ontology, epistemology, ethics—held together by a kind of family resemblance.²⁵

What these significations share may be explored by looking at Aristotle's epistemological and ethical treatments of the necessary in NE VI.3 and NE III.1, respectively. Discussing the intellectual virtue of scientific knowledge, episteme, Aristotle says it studies what is eternal, ungenerated, and imperishable (NE 1139b24–25), numbers or figures, for example. Always and invariable, they are necessary in that they are out-of-time and, hence, without motion. As form without matter, numbers and figures may be precisely and scientifically studied by the intellectual virtues of science, episteme, and philosophic wisdom, theoria. Although they may be studied by human beings, what is necessary or always is independent of human being. This feature is present as well in Aristotle's understanding of necessity as compulsion or force: “Actions are forced when the cause is in the external circumstances and the agent contributes nothing” (NE 1110b1ff).

The necessary, understood as that which cannot be otherwise in its ontological, epistemological, and ethical senses, shares a kinship with the past. What is past, Aristotle says, is not capable of not having taken place (NE 1139b7–9). Once past, what has happened cannot be otherwise. People may study the past, but owing to its invariability, no one deliberates about the past (NE 1139b7–9). Likewise, no one deliberates about eternal things, for these cannot be brought about by our own efforts (NE 1112a20ff.). The past, like the first principles of knowledge, and like force or compulsion, is independent of human being; human agency cannot change it (NE 1140a32–34).

Counterpoised to the necessary and flanking the natural on the other side is the accidental or the rare. “Accident” is what applies to something “but neither necessarily or usually” (Meta. 1025a15). It is what can always be otherwise and so is never, at least not in the way the invariable is. The accidental is contingent. It is what Aristotle associates with chance, tuche, which he calls the indefinite, aorista, and cites as the cause of accidents (Meta. 1025a25). If what is necessary can be studied precisely and scientifically, what happens accidentally or by chance cannot be studied at all. Inexplicable, indeterminate, and random, chance or accidental events have no account of their own (Physics 197a18–19). If there is a kinship between the necessary and the past, there is one as well between the accidental and the future: The accidental is the always possible, what lies uncertainly ahead. Although in most ways unlike the necessary, the accidental and the necessary have one thing in common: What happens by accident, like what happens necessarily, is independent of human agency.

Between “necessity and contingency,” between what is always and what is never, “between past and future,”²⁶

lies what is by nature: What happens usually and for the most part. Unlike that which can never be otherwise and unlike that which can always be otherwise, that which is by nature is both variable and stable: What is by nature, Aristotle says in the Physics, has within itself a principle of change and resistence to change (192b13–14). Neither motionless nor perpetually in motion, natural beings are. They can also be otherwise. Owing to their relative stability, what is by nature, unlike what is by accident, can be studied. Owing to their relative variability, studies of what is by nature, unlike studies of the necessary, will be imprecise. It is because their possibilities may be actualized in any number of unpredictable ways that only by looking at what natural beings do can anything be known about what they are (Salkever 1990a, chap. 3). Claims about the identity of natural beings will, therefore, be claims about their activities. This is why, in his inquiries into the natures of citizens and slaves, as we have seen, Aristotle rejects status claims and focuses instead on what they do. It is also why, in his accounts of the natures of citizens and slaves, Aristotle, as we saw, is often imprecise. The imprecision arises because the nature of a natural being will change should its characteristic activities change. There is thus an iterative quality to Aristotle's studies of natural beings that accommodates the revision of his own conclusions in cases of change (Lear 1988, 43–54; Salkever 1990, chap. 1).²⁷

Even if the identity of a natural being is given by its characteristic activities, and is therefore variable, most commentators claim that Aristotle is, nonetheless, committed to there being something necessary about nature, something that somehow lurks behind or beyond a natural being's characteristic activities to disclose its true identity (Kraut 2002; Swanson 1999). As we have seen, this is not true of those whom Aristotle calls natural slaves. It is, indeed, not true of any natural beings, for to claim a necessity to nature, especially in the case of human nature, is to undermine precisely what Aristotle aims to preserve, namely, the characteristically human activities of prohairesis, and, relatedly, of accountability and responsibility. To demonstrate this, I turn next to an exploration of the boundaries of Aristotle's category of the natural.

Aristotle often includes in the category of the natural features that seem to belong more properly to the categories of the necessary and the accidental. Aristotle sometimes uses the phrase “what is always or for the most part” instead of “what is usually or for the most part” to refer to what is by nature (replacing “usually” with “always,” the term he associates with the necessary) (Physics 199b15–18). Other times he seems to hold up as natural examples that are more rare than usual.²⁸

Some commentators take these to be signs that Aristotle's account of the natural is equivocal or that he is adjusting it to fit circumstances that do not readily mold to his principles (Annas 1993, 146; 1996; Irwin 1985, 416–17). I disagree. Starting first with the apparent elision of the distinction between nature and necessity, and looking next and more briefly at the relation between the natural and the accidental (because the tendency is to read nature as necessity not as chance), I argue that although Aristotle takes necessity or force and chance or accident to affect natural beings—indeed, he sees natural beings as singularly vulnerable to both—neither has a part, and they must have no part, in the definition of what is by nature. We have seen this already in Aristotle's exclusion from consideration of force and accident/chance in his investigations of the nature of citizens and slaves. We must now look more carefully at what underlies Aristotle's exclusion of force and chance and his inclusion of what I call the “as if” necessary and accidental.

The nature of natural beings is discerned, we have seen, by looking at their activities. Although this is not to say that nature is determined by activity alone, these activities do form the patterns of our lives. Because natural beings usually act thus and so, it is not hard to imagine patterns of activity becoming so ingrained as to be justifiably treated as predictable and precise, that is, as characteristic: A human being who has acted courageously when confronted with danger will always do so, we might say, for she is that sort of person. We often speak in this way, and it might be said that the stability and security of our daily lives depend on the trust in the world presupposed by this way of speaking. We think, speak, and act, in other words, as if usual patterns of activity were compelled, as if they were necessary. Aristotle's definition of “the usual” in the Physics makes this plain: What is by nature “always [tends] toward the same end, unless something intervenes” (199b18). Although we think, speak, and act as if the usual were necessary, we do so knowing that it is always possible that things will turn out otherwise. The courageous person may meet a danger she cannot face down. We speak of “the always” in the case of human beings and all natural beings only as if it were necessary. This is as it should be. Human beings are stable insofar as we have within ourselves a principle of staying the same or rest. Insofar as we have within ourselves a principle of change, we are also changeable and in constant interaction with our circumstances. In different circumstances, human beings act differently. When nature is understood not in terms of stability but in terms of necessity, invariability controls beings who, for Aristotle at least, are defined as well by movement and possibility (Arnhart 1998, chap. 9).

Aristotle's vigilance against any more than an “as if” assimilation of nature to necessity is on display in his discussion of responsibility in Nicomachean Ethics, III.1, where nature and necessity are brought into a confrontation. As noted earlier, Aristotle takes actions to be compelled when a person contributes nothing to the action; the cause of action is rather in external circumstances. Only two kinds of situations meet Aristotle's definition of force or compulsion, so understood: when an agent acts without knowledge of the circumstances of action (and his ignorance is honest or innocent); or when a third party physically effects the action in the agent's place by, to use an anachronistic example, putting his hand over the agent's when she is holding a gun and using his finger over hers to pull the trigger despite her efforts to resist. For all other actions, the agent, in Aristotle's view, is responsible, for, as he puts it, the origin of action is in the agent (NE 1111a23). In comparison to modern legal definitions, Aristotle's account of force is exceedingly limited: It does not include actions taken under conditions of duress, debilitating drunkenness, pent-up rage, and the like, when these conditions are brought about by the agent himself. For Aristotle, an agent's actions are forced only when he is effectively prevented from acting voluntarily.

If Aristotle's understanding of force is narrow, his account of responsibility is remarkably expansive.²⁹

As the following passage from the Nicomachean Ethics indicates, people are responsible for all of their voluntary actions, virtuous as well as vicious: Prohairetic activity is at stake in Aristotle's vigilance against assimilating responsibility to force. Prohairetic activity is also at stake in his vigilance against assimilating nature to necessity. In the Nicomachean Ethics, necessity or compulsion—as that to which the agent contributes nothing, because the cause of action lies altogether outside the agent—stands opposed to prohairetic agency as that which has within itself its own principle, arche, of action. Absence of force or necessity is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition of choice, prohairesis. In the Metaphysics, the Physics, and elsewhere, force or necessity stands opposed to what is by nature as that which has within itself its own principle of motion and rest. Eliding the distinction between nature and necessity makes virtue no more voluntary than vice, a position Aristotle rejects (NE 1113b14). When nature and necessity are paired, prohairetic activity, responsibility, and self-determination disappear. What is by nature, then, may reach toward necessity but it must remain distinct from the necessary so as to preserve the activity characteristic of human beings.

What is by nature also reaches toward but remains distinct from the accidental. Aristotle may recognize the role of chance or luck in the lives of natural beings and the ameliorative effects of contingent external goods throughout the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics (Nussbaum 1986, chap. 11). As with necessity, however, Aristotle refuses to understand the identity of natural beings in terms of chance, luck, or accident. The stakes in keeping nature and chance distinct are no different from what they were in keeping distinct nature and necessity. Understanding the nature of natural beings in terms of chance, like understanding it in terms of necessity, makes prohairetic activity and responsibility irrelevant.

If, on the side of the necessary, Aristotle enfolds into the category of the natural what I called the “as if” necessary, on the side of the accidental, he enfolds into the category of the natural, the “as if” accidental, what, in the Nicomachean Ethics, he calls art, techne. Art is concerned neither with things that are or come into being by necessity nor with things that do so in accordance with nature. Art is rather “concerned with the same objects” as chance (NE 1140a14–20). Both are concerned with possibility, with how something may come into being which is capable of being or not being (NE 1140a13). Moreover, in art, as in chance, the finished work is not completely governed by the activity of producing (NE 1140a18).

“Art loves chance and chance loves art” says Aristotle, quoting Agathon approvingly (NE 1140a20). But art is only “as if” accidental. Unlike chance, where the cause is altogether indeterminate, in art, it is the blueprint in the soul of the maker, eidos, that is the cause of action (Meta. 1032b22ff.). There is, in other words, prohairetic agency in art but not in chance. This is not to deny the key difference Aristotle is at pains to underscore between the making of art and the doing that belongs to activity proper: In art, he says, the end is outside the activity of making; whereas doing is activity that has within itself its own end (NE 1140b4–6). Even if the end product in art is outside the agent's control, nonetheless, making, like doing, but unlike chance or necessity, crucially involves activity and responsibility.

In keeping distinct what is by nature from necessity or force and also from chance or accident, as Aristotle does in his discussions of the nature of citizens and slaves and in his account of the nature of nature itself, Aristotle preserves the prohairetic activity that characterizes and distinguishes human nature. In including the “as if” necessary and the “as if” accidental in his account of the natural, Aristotle reveals the expansiveness of his conception of prohairetic activity. It is politics, itself an art and so a product of human activity, that produces the institutions that help make citizens and slaves. Politics is the art that Aristotle takes to be integral to any understanding of the practices of human beings and their natures (NE 1094a27–1094b11). It is because what is by nature is, in Aristotle's view, defined by the practice and effects of activity under all three aspects, self-determining activity, guided making of citizens by institutions, and making by citizens of institutions, that he can, without inconsistency, treat human beings and, indeed, the polity itself as both natural and made (Pol. 1253a19–31, 1252b30ff.).

The Power of Activity

Is human nature all and only activity? Aristotle's answer seems to be “yes”: yes, in that, as we have seen, there is nothing necessary lurking behind activity; yes, in that natural beings are distinguished by their activities; yes, in that even the stability characteristic of human nature is based on activity. Aristotle insists, however, that activity alone cannot produce the movement and change or stability that characterize human nature. Activity alone does not account for the nature of natural beings because the nature of a natural being is not simply a description of what it tends to do. Activity, we have noted, also sets a standard, an internal and demanding one. To see how requires attending not simply to activity but also to what gives rise to activity in the first place, the conditions of its possibility.

Aristotle calls that which makes activity possible dunamis, which is translated variously as capacity, power, capability, potentiality. Dunamis is, Aristotle explains, the capacity or power activity has to regulate itself. He analyzes this relation between capability, dunamis, and activity, energeia, in his discussion of the Megarians in Metaphysics, IX.3.³⁰

The Megarians, Aristotle recounts, say “that a man who is not building cannot build, but only the man who is building, and at the moment when he is building” (Meta. 1046b30ff). This means that it is only when a dunamis (or capability) is actually at work that the ability to do something is present. When it is not at work, the dunamis, as a capacity, is only potential and, therefore, absent. For the Megarians, as for some contemporary post-Nietzscheans, this means, that activities emerge ex nihilo.

Aristotle thinks that this account of activity is absurd. When dunamis is treated as only present when it is in action, he argues, there can be no change or movement at all (Meta. 1047a15). Change or movement must happen from one thing to another. It may be true that to be capable means to have a dunamis, and that not having the dunamis means not being capable, but, Aristotle insists, dunamis has its own energeia or activity. The activity or actuality of dunamis (the activity or actuality of capacity) lies in its being possessed even when it is not at work. The builder can have the capability to build, this means, even when he is not actually building. Not building, then, does not necessarily signal the absence of dunamis, though it can, as when, for example, the builder loses the capacity to build through bad luck (he loses his hands, say) or he forgets how to build owing to the passage of time. Under these conditions of accident or nonuse, there can be no building activity at all. Where there is activity or energeia, it emerges not from something only potential, i.e., absent, but from dunamis understood, in Heidegger's (1995) words, as “the withdrawal into itself of the capability such that it is primed for release, i.e., primed for activity” (158). Dunamis, as “the source, arche, of change in some other thing, or in the same thing qua other” (Meta. 1046a11, 1019a19–21), is the “power” of activity: It is what makes activity possible. As we saw earlier, without the capacity for logos, there could be no activity of its use.

If dunamis powers activity, this does not make activity itself any less important. Dunamis may be that from out of which change occurs, but it is not something inert, waiting to move to action. Rather, it effects change by way of its actualization, by doing its work, through practice. It is by performing the activities for which it is holding itself in readiness that a dunamis becomes capable in the first place. It is, in other words, by building that a builder becomes capable of building (Meta. 1046b34–36). The activity of building actualizes the builder's capability to build. One is a builder in the way one is a courageous person or a deliberative person, for example, that is, only as long as the disposition to build or to act courageously or prohairetically shows itself from time to time in the relevant activity. Along similar lines, Aristotle remarks that “distance does not break off friendship absolutely, only the activity of it. But if the absence is lasting, it seems actually to make men forget their friendship” (NE 1157b6–13).

Human nature is, then, not determined all and only by activity on Aristotle's understanding, for activities come out of capabilities. There are, so to say, doers behind deeds. Who the doer is, the nature of the doer, is stable. This is not to say, however, that nature is once and for all determined. Rather, who the doer is, his nature, is continually informed by the activities he has performed and continues to perform. This means that if a deed or action is the product of activity, it is not activity's sole product. For even as activities emerge out of a stable character, activities themselves are formative of character. The more courageously I act, for example, the more courageous I become. There can be no activity without capability, but there can also be no capability without activity. Each depends on the other. It is this interdependence between energeia and dunamis that makes possible the changes over time and movement that define the nature of human beings and also their stability. This interdependence also defines soul, the part of natural beings that contains their principle and source of motion. If the ordering or constitution of soul and of human nature itself is given by the interdependence between energeia and dunamis, and is changeable, it is nonetheless possible, at any given moment, to distinguish among those who are and those who are not actualizing their potential. This distinction, as we have seen, rests on the practice of prohairetic activity.

Some commentators have taken Aristotle's definition of nature in Metaphysics V.4 to be equivocal. They say that he defines nature in two senses and they criticize him for sometimes favoring one and sometimes the other (Annas 1993, 146; Irwin 1985, 416–17).³¹

As “the source of motion in natural beings, which is somehow inherent in them, either potentially, dunamei, or actually, entelecheia” (Meta. 1015a18–19), Aristotle's definition of nature in the Metaphysics involves duality, to be sure. In one sense, he says, nature is the primary stuff—matter—and, in another sense, it is form. In one sense, it is the immanent thing from which a growing thing first begins to grow, dunamis; in another sense, it is the genesis of growing things, their activity, energeia. He takes form, or energeia, to be primary and guiding (Physics 193b17) (Lear 1988, chap. 2; Nussbaum and Putnam 1992), and he also understands form to take its guiding orientation from matter, much in the way the shape of a statue may appear to its sculptor from out of the clay. But this is not to equivocate. For in the Metaphysics, as in the Physics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and also the Politics, where Aristotle both establishes the necessity of hierarchy or teleology (among species and human beings in Politics I and among regimes in the rest of the Politics) and also alerts us to its dangers, the sense of nature that Aristotle takes to be primary and guiding is nature neither as an origin nor as an end separable from growth.³² It is both, and it is captured in the process of growth itself. A natural being becomes and reveals its nature as it grows, changes, and moves through time. Nature, understood as an end and a beginning all at once, is an ongoing process.³³ As the domain of activity, it is also, and crucially for Aristotle, the domain of ethics and politics (NE 1103b26–30).