A Proto-Phenomenology of Life in Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics-libre
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A Proto-Phenomenology of Life in Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics
Alexandru Cosmescu
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explores a concept of life which touches
certain themes which are important for contemporary phenomenology and
offers some interesting parallels with the work of the French phenomenologist
Michel Henry. Given Aristotles influence on phenomenology and the tendency
to interpret him as a proto-phenomenologist1, this is not unexpected.
At 1170a-b, Aristotle writes (I will cite in extenso the passage I will refer to in
the present text):
People define animal life by the capacity for perception, and human life by the capacity for
perception or thought. But the capacity is relative to its activity, and what really matters lies
in the activity; so living in the real sense seems to be perceiving or thinking. And living is
one of the things that are good and pleasant in themselves, since it is determinate, and the
determinate is characteristic of the nature of the good. What is good by nature is also good
for the good person, which is why life seems to be pleasant for everyone. But we must not
consider here the case of a wicked and corrupt life, or of a life of pain; a life like this is
indeterminate, as are its qualities. (In what follows, the issue of pain will be clarified.) But if
life itself is good and pleasant (and it seems to be so from the fact that everyone desires it,
especially those who are good and blessed, because their life is the most worthy of choice,
and their being the most blessed); and if someone who sees perceives that he sees, and one
who hears that he hears, and one who walks that he walks, and in the case of other activities
there is similarly something that perceives that one is engaged in them, so that, if we
perceive, we perceive that we perceive, and if we think, we perceive that we think; and if to
perceive that we perceive or think is to perceive that we exist (since we saw that to exist is
to perceive or think); and if perceiving that we are alive is pleasant in itself (since life is by
nature a good, and perceiving some good thing as present in us is pleasant); and if life is
worthy of rational choice, and especially so for good people, because to them being is good
and pleasant (since they are pleased when they perceive in themselves what is in itself
good); and if the good person is related to his friend as he is related to himself (because his
friend is another self ); then, as his own being is worthy of choice for each person, so that of
his friend is worth choosing in the same way, or almost the same way.
Someone's being we saw to be worth choosing because he perceives that he is good, and
perception like this is pleasant in itself. He ought therefore at the same time to perceive the
1Cf. for example David Roochnik, Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis (New York: SUNY Press, 2013) or
Barbara Cassin, Aristote et le Logos. Contes de la Phnomnologie Ordinaire (Paris: PUF, 1997).
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being of his friend, and this will come about in their living together and exchanging words
and thoughts; this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of people, and not,
as in the case of cattle, grazing in the same place.2
First of all, what attracts attention in this passage is the definition of animal life
as the capacity for perception and of human living as actual perception or
thinking. It is a phenomenologically sound characterization: in our common
experience, we call alive a being which perceives and, as a consequence, acts in
its environment. Later, Aristotle argues that the one who perceives, thinks, or
acts perceives, at the same time, that he/she perceives, thinks or acts. As
perceiving and thinking constitute our living / existence, Aristotle interprets this
perception of perception as perception of existence.
Michel Henry also offers, in his texts, a non-scientific3concept of life.
According to him, life is co-extensive with subjectivity and auto-affectivity, and
living consists in feeling oneself, experiencing oneself. This capacity for
experiencing oneself is what gives the human being the capacity to experience
something else; when one experiences, e.g., the keys of the keypad while
writing, the basis for this experience is the feeling of oneself typing, touching
the keys. Thus, any experience has at least these two dimensions: experience of
an object and the transparency of this experience to us, the feeling of ourselves
experiencing the object.
At the same time, for Henry, this feeling of oneself is not a perceiving, which,
for him, would be similar to the perceiving of objects. When we perceive an
2Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.
178-1793Henry argues that science cannot capture this sense of living, because it deals only with what presents itself
ojetively, ut it starts fro the sae groud of sujetivity/ life. The scientist is a living being who
experiences the world, but, when he/she is doing science, she/he abstracts from his/her subjective / affective
experience and describes not the world as it is experienced, but the world as it is regarded by the scientific
communityas formed from atoms or cells which interact, etc. In a way, on the basis of the world as it is
experienced, the scientist constructs another world, in which life as subjectivity / experiencing oneself has no
place.
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object, we perceive it as something different from ourselves, something
removed, at a distance, in the horizon of the world; but when we experience
ourselves, we experience precisely ourselves, immediately and immanently. As
Michel Henry puts it, experiencing oneself constitutes the distinctive feature of
life. Living is in fact nothing else: suffering what one is and rejoicing in it,
rejoicing in oneself.4
Henry insists in many of his texts on this dialectics of suffering and rejoicing as
forming the dynamics of life. At the same time, in Aristotles text, we find the
characterization of life as intrinsically pleasurable. He writes something to the
same effect in Metaphysics 1072b, when he discusses the pleasures of God:
And it is a life such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time (for it is ever
in this state, which we cannot be), since its actuality is also pleasure. (And for this reason are
waking, perception, and thinking most pleasant, and hopes and memories are so on account
of these.)5
Here, waking, perception, and thinking, along with hopes and memories, areregarded as most pleasant in the case of our everyday life. Waking per se,
perception per se, thinking per se are considered pleasurable because they are
actualizations of potentialities; at the same time, in the case of God, thinking
thinks itself, with no difference between the thought and its object, being the
best life not only because it is an actualization, but also because its object is the
most exalted and perfect.
Henry, on the other hand, in his discussion of affects, tries to persuade us that
the movements of life are known not as objects, separate from the
experiencer, but in themselves and through themselves; we dont think our
suffering or our joy, we dont receive the affective content in the neutral khora
of our noesis, but suffer or rejoice:
4Michel Henry. Words of Christ (Kindle Location 454). Kindle Edition.5Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. by W.D. Ross, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.12.xii.html
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Suffering proves itself. That is the reason why, so we say, only suffering permits us to know
suffering. It is only in this way that suffering speaks to us; it speaks to as in its suffering.
And what it says to us, by speaking to as in this way, is that it suffers, that it is suffering.6
Thus, when we feel an affect, we dont feel it as something different from
ourselves and we dont know it by something else. Suffering communicates
itself immanently, and we know it by suffering, in suffering. This feeling of our
affects is regarded as certain and indubitable, being Henrys variation on the
Cartesian cogito. In Henrys interpretation, there is no difference betweenthe
feeling of suffering and what is felt in sufferingwhat is felt reveals itself in
the feeling, with no distance between the two. Arguably, this is similar to the
thinking of thinking mentioned in Aristotles Metaphysics but, for Henry, it
forms the ground of the human being and it isnt reserved only for God.
In this sense, suffering is, first of all, suffering of oneself what Henry terms
radical passivity towards oneself, the impossibility of being other than
oneself, of escaping oneself. What is felt has to be felt, it couldnt be otherwise;
immanence is recoiled over itself, experiencing itself, as Henry says, at every
point of itself. Passivity, impossibility of escaping oneself, condemnation to
experiencing oneself are conceived as suffering. At the same time, the self
which experiences itself is close to itself, fulfils itself, excludes everything
which is other than itselfand this can also be construed as joy. For Henry, this
offers the possibility of joy following suffering, suffering transforming itself in
joy. The main factor here isnt the object that generates painful or pleasurable
sensation, but the structure of our affectivity, which, recoiled over itself, can
experience itself as suffering or joy. Suffering and joy have the same structure
and can transform in their opposite7.
6Michel Henry. Words of Christ (Kindle Locations 1294-1296). Kindle Edition.7Cf. Michel Henry. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 73-74
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For Aristotle, on the other hand, the affective tonality of our experience depends
on our character: the virtuous person experiences herself in a positive affective
tonality of pleasure or joy (when she is alone, she is ok with herself, remembers
with pleasure her past virtuous actions and enjoys thinking over her projects),
but the viciousin a negative one, of despair, sadness, self-hate (this is, for
Aristotle, the reason for which he avoids remaining with himself and looks for
company: his own presence is unbearable8). This is the reason why he specifies,
in the passage from which we started, that life is a pleasure especially for the
good and the blessed. Their content, if one can put it this way, reveals itself
as pleasure / enjoyment of oneself.
The question we may ask here is whether life is good / desirable in itself, or it is
so only when its content is of such a type that it can offer us pleasure, i.e.
whether the feeling of existence itself is pleasurable or not. For both Aristotle
and Henry, the feeling of existence / the feeling of oneself can be separated
from simple perceiving or thinking about something. That is, the experiencing
of pleasant sensations while perceiving an object is not enough for us to feel
pleasure regarding it; we may feel, for example, regret for having lost
something similar, irritation at ourselves for losing time looking at it or
whatever other emotion, coloured negatively. So, the main factor here is the
experience of ourselves in relation to the object, not solely the experience of the
object. But there also is the possibility of taking oneself as an object this
seems to be the case Aristotle speaks about when he describes the way virtuous
/ vicious persons regard themselves in solitude. The problem here is that the
same thing applies: when one takes oneself as an object, the feeling one has
regarding oneself are not necessarily dictated by the object. For example, a drug
user may remind herself, in solitude, with joy, of particularly good trips, a
convictof the crime he committed and so on. That is, we have to differentiate
8cf. Nicomachean Ethics, IX 4.
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the pleasure / pain one experiences in regarding oneself from the joy / suffering
one experiences in feeling oneself as existing. And concerning this last aspect
Aristotle and Henry are in accord, regarding life as intrinsically desirable and
pleasurable:
Life, when all is said and done, desires itselfand that is why it passionately refuses death
a refusal that is at the root of every moral rule and probably all religions. It wants,
according to the desire for growth within it, to live longer, feel, understand and love more.
In all that it does, in each of its abilities, it aspires to experience itself more intensely, it
seeks an ever greater happiness. This happiness of living constitutes the unique finality of
life, as well as of all that it undertakes9
The difference here is one of wording: Aristotle says that one perceives ones
life as good and finds it desirable, but Henry prefers the more impersonal
formulation that life. . . . desires itself, aspiring to a more complete and
continuing experience of itself. Lifes tendency to continue, its desire of itself
may be construed as an instinctive tendency, outside any rational choice. In
more Aristotelian terms, it would be a case of perceiving our own potentiality
and rejoicing in it, feeling it will become actual and desiring it to be so.
But the most surprising thing regarding this passage from Aristotle is the
context in which it appears: not during an extended meditation on subjectivity,
as it does in Michel Henry, but as part of a discussion of friendship. The point
of this Aristotelic proto-phenomenology of life is to persuade its reader that,
since the friend is another self (heteros autos), we will rejoice at her existenceand desire her to live well the same way one desires that for oneself. The mutual
rejoicing of friends at their existence functions thus as a basis for their their
living together and exchanging words and thoughts.
9Mihel Hery, What iee Doest Know, p. 6,
https://www.academia.edu/5595142/What_Science_Doesnt_Know_by_Michel_Henry