ERGON · FUNCTION
Twelve essays on the Nicomachean Ethics, beginning with its worst argument and the reason it is still worth having.
Ask most people what they are working toward and you get a target. A number, a title, a date, a thing that will have happened. Ask what the work is for and there is usually a pause.
That pause is the subject of this collection. Aristotle opens by observing that every skill and every deliberate act aims at something, that some of those things are wanted for the sake of others, and that if the chain never terminates the whole structure is empty.
A note on the text before anything else. The Nicomachean Ethics is very probably lecture material, compiled and edited rather than written for readers, which explains its abruptness and its repetitions. And Aristotle wrote for free adult male citizens of a Greek city. He defended natural slavery and held women incapable of full deliberative authority. This collection does not quietly update him; it says where he cannot be followed.
One failure answers the question with a number. The other answers it with something no week can contain.
A time, a title, a figure. These are measures, not ends, and the giveaway is that achieving one produces a brief flatness followed by a new number. A purpose you can complete was a target.
“To help people.” Unfalsifiable, unusable, and it makes no claim on Tuesday. A purpose that cannot be wrong about anything cannot guide anything either.
Three claims are packed in there and each one does work later in this collection. The good is an activity rather than a state, which is essay nine. It involves excellence, which is essays two and three. And it is assessed over a complete life, which is essay twelve.
None of that depends on the argument he uses to get there, which is fortunate.
Aristotle’s own example is a flute player, and he picks it because nobody disputes what a flautist is for. A good one is a flautist doing well the thing that only flute-playing is.
He then asks whether a human being has a function in the same sense — something a person does that nothing else does — and answers that it is rational activity.
The move is elegant and it is the point at which most readers either accept the whole book or stop.
The nearest modern construct is purpose, defined in William Damon’s research as a stable intention to accomplish something that is both meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self.4 That second half is what distinguishes purpose from a goal, and it is close to what Aristotle was reaching for.
Purpose in this sense is associated with better outcomes across a range of measures, including in longitudinal work on health and longevity.5 The usual cautions apply: much of it is self-report, the effect sizes are moderate, and people who are doing well have more room to form purposes, so the causal arrow is not settled.
The one finding worth relying on is narrower and better supported: a purpose supplied from outside does not function like one arrived at. The self-determination literature is consistent on this, which is why the practice below is a writing exercise rather than a recommendation.
The function argument is the most criticized passage Aristotle wrote, and the criticism is good.
The case against
Artefacts and roles have functions because somebody made them for something. Human beings are not artefacts, and the inference from one to the other is exactly the step the argument needs and does not earn.
The second problem is the content. “Rational activity” as the distinctively human function is doing a great deal of quiet work, and it conveniently identifies the good life with the activity Aristotle happened to be engaged in.
What survives is the method rather than the conclusion. Subtracting what is instrumental until something remains that is wanted for itself is a real exercise, and it does not require anybody to have a function. Run it on your own week and see what is left.
Write what the work is for in one sentence containing no time, no figure, no title and no selection. Most people find this hard, which is the finding.
Then test it for scale. If it is so large that nothing you do this week bears on it, it is a slogan. If achieving it is imaginable by Friday, it was a target.
Then run the subtraction. Take a goal you hold and ask what it is for. Take that answer and ask the same thing. Three or four iterations usually exhausts the chain, and where it stops is informative whether or not anything metaphysical is going on.
And do not accept an answer you were handed. A purpose supplied by somebody else behaves like an obligation, which is a different thing with different effects.
Almost all of this is writing, which is unusual for this collection and appropriate here.
Aristotle asked what a person is for and gave an answer that does not hold, using a method that does.
Subtract what is only instrumental and see what is left standing. That exercise costs an afternoon and most people have never run it, because the targets are loud and the question is quiet.
And the sentence he arrives at still sets the shape of everything after it: an activity rather than a state, done well, assessed over a whole life. The rest of this collection is those three claims taken one at a time.
Every deliberate act aims at something, some things are wanted for the sake of others, and if the chain never terminates the structure is empty. Run the subtraction on your own week.
The function argument itself does not hold — people are not artefacts, and “rational activity” conveniently names what Aristotle was doing. What survives is the method, which needs no metaphysics.
Quotations are from the Nicomachean Ethics unless noted, cited by book, chapter and Bekker number; renderings follow W. D. Ross (rev. Urmson), Terence Irwin or Roger Crisp, and a condensed line is marked “after Aristotle”. Modern research is cited by author and publication.