ENERGEIA · ACTIVITY
On potential as an identity — and on the sentence this argument is one step away from, which should be written out rather than left implied.
Somebody has been described as promising for long enough that the description has become the thing. It was accurate once. It has now been load-bearing for years, and what it is bearing is the absence of any instance.
The comfortable part is that a capacity cannot fail. An instance can. So living on the capacity is safer than converting it, and the safety is why people stay.
Aristotle’s distinction is between dunamis, a capacity, and energeia, the activity of exercising it. He insists that the good is the second, and the image he uses for the alternative is a man asleep his entire life, whom nobody would call happy.
One failure never converts. The other cannot stop.
The potential becomes the identity, and the identity is safer than the instance. It is protective in the short run and it has an expiry date, after which the description becomes something people avoid saying.
The reverse error: only what was demonstrated this week counts, so a person is only worth what they most recently produced. That is not what the argument says and the next section is about why it matters.
The reason it makes no small difference is that a state can be had while asleep. If the good is a state, then the sleeping man has it, which Aristotle takes to be an obvious absurdity.
If the good is an activity, it has to be done, and it has to keep being done, which is a considerably less comfortable conclusion.
Aristotle’s example is the Olympic games, and it is unusually direct.
The crown, he says, does not go to the finest or the strongest, but to those who compete — because it is from among the competitors that the winners come.
He is not being harsh. He is describing how the category works: the strongest man in Greece who did not enter has no claim on the crown, and this is a fact about crowns rather than a judgment about him.
The relevant modern literature is on the difference between what somebody can do and what they do do, and the clearest finding is that the gap is large and not well predicted by capability alone.
Work on early promise is consistent on one point: identification is a poor predictor of later achievement, because the correlates of early standing are substantially about maturation, access and opportunity rather than about eventual ceiling.4 Most of the identified do not convert, and a substantial proportion of those who eventually do were not identified.
The practical reading is not that capacity is unreal. It is that capacity is a much weaker signal than it feels like from inside, and that instances are the only evidence the world actually collects.
This argument is one step from something harmful, so the step should be made explicit rather than left implied.
The case against
Illness, disability, caring responsibilities, poverty and circumstance all constrain what a person can convert. An ethics that measures a life by exercised activity will rank those people lower, and Aristotle — who thought the contemplative life the highest and who had firm views about who was capable of it — does not supply a defence.
The repair is to keep the claim descriptive rather than evaluative. “A capacity you never use is not producing anything” is true and useful. “A person who does not produce is worth less” does not follow and should be refused explicitly.
The other repair is scale. Activity here means exercising the capacity, not achieving with it. A person who does the thing badly, once, in circumstances that made it hard, is doing exactly what this essay is about.
Pick something you can do and have never done in a real setting. Do it once, badly.
The standard is that it happened. Not that it went well — essay three is the reason. A first instance measured against the settled version does not get attempted.
Then notice what changes. Usually two things: the capacity stops being an abstraction, and something specific becomes available to work on, which was not available while it was potential.
And watch the language. “I could” is a comfortable tense to live in. Replacing it with “I have, once” is a small thing that moves a surprising amount.
One capacity, one instance. The list is the first half of the work.
The strongest man in Greece who did not enter has no claim on the crown. Aristotle is describing how the category works rather than passing judgment on him.
The useful part is that a capacity is safe and an instance is informative, and people generally prefer the safety for longer than is good for them.
And the limit needs stating rather than implying: this is a claim about what capacities produce, not a ranking of people by output. Circumstance constrains conversion, and an ethics that forgets that is measuring luck.
A capacity cannot fail and an instance can, which is why living on the potential is comfortable and why it has an expiry date. Convert one, badly, and the abstraction dissolves.
But “the good is activity” is one sentence from “people who cannot act have no good”, and illness, disability, care and circumstance all constrain conversion. Keep the claim descriptive, not evaluative.
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.