The Work of Being Human

More thoughts on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book I

We’ve been reading Aristotle’s Nicomacehan Ethics together lately. This isn’t an official read-along post, but rather some thoughts occasioned from revisiting this text. This post is partly paywalled, but the weekly read-along posts are free and open to anyone.

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Aristotle’s universe is one of teleology and intention — it is a world where it makes sense to speak of a thing having a function based on the kind of being that it is. Aristotle’s world is a world in which the existentialist inversion has not yet been made: essence still precedes existence.

We don’t seem to live in a universe like Aristotle’s, really. The nineteenth century especially saw a collapse of many of our most cherished models of the universe and the human being. Darwinism displaced human beings from our place at the height of creation, making us animals among many others. Freud radically shifted the way we think of the mind, and thus of how we come to make sense of the world. Nietzsche is perhaps the prophet, in the traditional sense of one revealing the truth (rather than foretelling), for this way of looking at the world.

Even if we want to preserve some of these classical ideas, we have to admit that things changed, and our conception of the universe was one of them. This impacts just about everything, if one is drawn to a particularly systematic way of thinking of the world.

So when we read Aristotle, we’re inclined to dismiss him — he’s working from antiquated assumptions about reality, and so his ethics will be equally antiquated, we reckon.

Let’s think about how that applies to the idea of ergon, or work. Aristotle speaks of work widely, talking about the work of various professions while also talking about the work of human beings. It is this idea of the work of a human being that I want to see vindicated in the long run, even if we abandon much of the physical and metaphysical trappings found in Aristotle. I still want to be able to say that human beings are for some things.