Fall 2015

8 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 1
The good understood in this way provides the principle of the good’s unity.
However, explaining the goodness of these lower activities in light of the best
requires positing the dependence of that best activity on what is inferior to it,
thereby bringing into question the self-sufficiency of that good. Alternatively,
if thought were to provide wholly for itself, without dependence on any other
thing or action, that would leave nothing to explain why or for what reason
human beings act at all. Aristotle’s first account of the good would therefore
seem to leave us at a crossroads, unable to reconcile necessity of action with a
theoretical account of the good.
It is appropriate, then, that Aristotle proceeds in the remainder of I.7
to determine what happiness for a human being specifically entails by looking
for what work or function (ergon) is “fitting” to a human being. Just as
we identify “every expert” as good or bad in accordance with whether he
performs the function or work assigned to him well, so we might discover
the good of the human being by discovering the proper function of the
human being. In so doing, Aristotle immediately excludes having life and
perception as these belong to plants and animals as well. What belongs to
human beings, Aristotle concludes, is “some practice of one possessing reason
[logos]” (1098a4–5). Some type of rational activity is the human work,
but this definition of the human work is nevertheless complicated by what
reason (logos) is for a human being. Human reason is not a seamless whole
but rather divides into a part “having [reason] and thinking” and another
that “obeys reason” or is “persuaded” by reason. In this outline of the human
work provided here, Aristotle thus leaves unspecified whether simple life and
sensation are excluded because they are activities belonging also to beings
lower than human or whether they are not specific and peculiar to human
beings alone.
This question is suppressed at the end of Book I by Aristotle’s account
of the soul. Aristotle here divides the soul into a rational and nonrational
part, with the former dividing into a part that has reason “in itself,” and an
appetitive part that is rational inasmuch as it listens to reason, “like a son listens
to his father” (1103a4). This division of logos allows virtue to be divided
into intellectual and ethical components, which are the excellences of each
part. However, as has been noted by others, Aristotle does not articulate the
relationship between these two parts. He does not say what part of the soul
enables the rational part to give commands to the part that listens and obeys,
and so leaves the reader to wonder how the “rational part” that is not reason