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

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