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philosophy, where it has assumed the contradictory form of an “absolute or cate-
gorical duty.” Insofar as Kantian morals are founded, in this sense, on “concealed
theological hypotheses”—it is, in truth, a “moral theology” ( Moraltheologie)—
one can say that it has made “the result that which ought to have been the prin-
ciple or presupposition (theology), and . . . as presupposition that which should
have been deduced as result (the order or command)” (ibid., 124/57).
Once its theological origin has been identified, Schopenhauer can unmask
or, at least, read in a new light the definition of “the fundamental idea of the
whole Kantian ethics, namely, duty. It is ‘the necessity of an action out of respect for the law’ [ die Nothwendigkeit einer Handlung, aus Achtung vor dem Gesetz]”
(ibid., 134/67). The syntagma “necessity of an action” is, according to Schopen-
hauer, nothing but a “cleverly concealed and very forced paraphrase of the word
‘you must’ ( soll ),” which, as such, refers to the language of the Decalogue (ibid., 135/67). Consequently, the cited definition “‘duty is the necessity of an action
out of respect for the law,’ would therefore read in natural and undisguised lan-
guage, ‘ Duty signifies an action which ought to be done out of obedience to a law.’
This is the gist of the matter” (ibid., 135/68).
The genealogy sketched by Schopenhauer, which is certainly correct, shows
how little has been done in removing the mask from something, laying bare
its hidden origin. By relating Kantian ethics to its theological presuppositions
one does not gain much, in fact, as far as what would be of interest above all,
namely, the understanding of the practical paradigm that has produced both
the structure and the specific characteristics of human action that is in question
in it. As Foucault had suggested, doing a genealogy does not mean “remov-
ing the mask in order to finally unveil a primary identity” (Foucault 2, 138). It
means, rather—by means of the fine-grained analysis of details and episodes, of
strategies and tactics, of lies and truths, of détours and main roads, of practices and knowledges—to attempt, in the case that here interests us, to replace the
question that can be taken for granted, namely, “What is the origin of the idea
of duty?” with the no less obvious questions “What are the stakes in the strategy
that leads to conceiving human action as an officium?” and “What is the nature
of a liturgical act, of an act that can be defined totally in terms of officium?”
2. It is decisive that, in the liturgical tradition, the relation between the two
elements of the action, the officium and the effectus, is conceived according to the model potential-act. Not only, as we have seen, does effectus translate the Greek
energeia in the earliest versions, but in the missals and sacramentaries the divine effectus completes and perfects ( perficiatur, impleatur, compleatur . . . ) each time
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what was in some way in potential in the priest’s action. According to the appeal
that the test of the Missale Romanum addresses to God: vere dignum . . . aeterne Deus, qui invisibili potentia tuorum sacramentorum mirabiliter operaris effectum
(you are truly worthy, O eternal God, who by the invisible potency of your sac-
raments wonderfully work your effect) (Diezinger, 78).
Here as well, however, the passage from the paradigm of energeia to that of
effectiveness implies a novelty that is not negligible. While in Aristotle dynamis
and energeia were two ontological categories, two “ways in which being is said,”
which designated as such two different modes of presence, now what is in ques-
tion is instead the constitution of praxis, the relation between a certain func-
tion—the munus or ministerium of the priest—and its being rendered effective ( effectus).
It will be helpful to reflect on the differences and, at the same time, the anal-
ogies between the Aristotelian and Christian models. If in the Aristotelian model
of the architect ( Metaphysics 1046b32ff.) dynamis and energeia are two distinct and homogeneous modes of presence of being-an-architect, in the case of the priest,
officium and effectum are two (heterogeneous) elements whose concurrence defines liturgical praxis. In both cases, however, what is decisive is the problem of
what permits the passage from potential to act and from ministerium to effectus.
In the Aristotelian tradition the element that secured this passage was hexis (in
Latin, habitus) and the locus in which the problem was dealt with was the theory of the virtues (this explains why in both Cicero and Ambrose the analysis of
officium is worked out in a treatise on the virtues). An archaeology of officium will therefore necessarily have to confront the way in which theologians, in taking up
the Aristotelian approach, articulate the doctrine of habitus and of the virtues.
3. Any understanding of the Aristotelian theory of the virtues must begin
from the passage of the Nicomachean Ethics (1105b19–20) in which they are de-
fined as “habits” ( hexeis): “Since in the soul there are produced three things: passions [ pathē], potencies [ dynameis], and habits [ hexeis], virtue [ aretē] therefore must be one of these three things.” The inscription of the virtues in the sphere
of the habits, which immediately follows, is motivated solely by exclusion: in-
sofar as they are neither passions nor potentials, “it remains that the virtues are
habits” (1106a12). For this reason a virtue will be that hexis “from which [ aph’ēs]
one becomes good [ agathos gignetai] or will do one’s function well [ eu to heautou ergon apodōsei]” (1106a24).
The correct interpretation of a concept or a theory depends on the prelimi-
nary comprehension of the problem that it is meant to confront. As often hap-
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pens, however, this problem cannot be singled out while remaining solely within
the treatise on ethics but demands a confrontation with the theory of hexis that
Aristotle unfolds in book Theta of the Metaphysics. The theme of this book is the
division between being in potential ( dynamis) and act ( energeia). Only starting from this division of ontology is it possible to comprehend why Aristotelian
ethics must take the form of a theory of the virtues, which is to say of the habits
( hexeis). If being is divided into potential and act, something will in fact be
needed to render possible, regulate, and operate the passage from the one to the
other. This element, which defines and articulates the passage of potential from
the merely generic (the potential according to which we say that the child can
learn to write or play the flute) to the effective potential of the one who already
knows how to write or play the flute and can therefore put it in action, is hexis, the habit ( hexis from echō, “to have”) of potential.
It is on this second mode of potential that Aristotle concentrates his atten-
tion. In On the Soul (417a22–30) he thus places two modes ( tropoi) of being in potential in opposition to the one who exercises in action a knowledge or a
technique:
One sense of “instructed” is that in which we might call someone instructed be-
cause he is one of a class of instructed persons who have knowledge; but there is
another sense in which we call instructed a person who
has [ echonta] knowledge,
for example, of grammar. Each of these two has potency, but in a different sense:
the former, because the class to which he belongs and his matter [ to genos kai hē
hylē] is of a certain kind, the latter, because he is capable, whenever he likes, of knowing in act [ hoti boulētheis dynatos theōrein], provided that external causes
do not prevent him. But there is a third kind of instructed person—one who,
in exercising his knowledge, is in act [ entelecheiai ōn, possesses himself in his
end]; he is in actuality instructed and in the strict sense knows, for example, this
particular A. The first two men are only potentially [ kata dynamin] instructed;
but whereas the one becomes so in actuality through a qualitative alteration by
means of learning, and after frequent changes from a contrary state [that is from
privation, sterēsis, which for Aristotle is the opposite of hexis], the other passes by a different process from having [ echein] sensation and grammar without exercising
it in act, to exercising it in act [ eis to energein].
Habit is therefore the mode in which a being (in specific, a human being) “has”
in potential a technique, a knowledge, or a faculty, “has” a potential to know
and act. It is, that is to say, the point where being crosses into having. But it is
precisely this that constitutes hexis as an aporetic concept. It is in fact essential to the Aristotelian theory of habit that this “having” maintains itself in a con-
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stitutive relation with its privation ( sterēsis). “So a thing is potential,” one reads in Metaphysics 1019b6–10, “in virtue of having a certain habit, and also in virtue of having the privation [ esterēsthai] of that habit . . . and if privation [ sterēsis]
is not in a sense habit [ hexis] . . . , then everything will be potential by having
[ echein] a certain habit or principle and through having the privation of it, if it can ‘have’ a privation.”
This relation with privation (or, as he can also say, with adynamia, impoten-
tial or potential not to) is essential for Aristotle because it is only through it that
potential can exist as such, independently of its passing into action. The strategic
meaning of the concept of habit is that, in it, potential and act are separated and
nonetheless maintained in relation. Only insofar as habit is also habit of a pri-
vation can potential endure and have mastery over itself, without always already
losing itself in action. For this reason the decisive thesis on potential-habit reads,
“Every potential is an impotential for producing the same result in respect of the
same subject [ tou autou kai kata to auto pasa dynamis adynamia]” ( Metaphysics
1046a30). Having the hexis of a potential means being able not to exercise it.
In On the Soul (412a35) habit is thus compared to sleep, in which a person has
knowledge but does not put it into action: “waking is analogous to the exercise
of a knowledge, sleep to its possession but not its exercise [ echein kai mē ener-
gein].” Something like a subject of hexis is constituted only through this possibility of not using it. As Aristotle never stops repeating against the Megarians,
someone truly has a potential who can both put it and not put it into action (cf.
Metaphysics 1046b29, 1047a25).
א In the passage cited from book Theta of the Metaphysics (1046a30), the Ross edition has pasa dynamis adynamiai, “every potential is in impotential,” which is not much different in terms of the sense, but betrays the editors’ discomfort before such a radical affirmation. The most authoritative manuscripts and, significantly, the commentary of
Alexander of Aphrodisia, have the reading adynamia, “every potential is impotential.”
א In the seminar of Le Thor of September 1966, Heidegger asked the participants
in an improvised way, “What is the fundamental concept of Aristotle?” Since no one
responded, the youngest of them suggested, not without fear: “Kinēsis, movement,” a response that proved to be exactly correct. The theory of potential and habit is in truth
a way for Aristotle to introduce movement into being, and the passage cited from the
Nicomachean Ethics (1106a22–23) is the proof of that. Aristotle does not say “is good”
but “becomes good” ( agathos gignetai): what is in question is not only the crossing from being into having, but also of being into acting and of acting into being. According to a
paradigm that has marked Western ethics with its aporias, the virtuous person becomes
what he is and is what he becomes.
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4. Only if one situates it in the context of the theory of habit does the Aris-
totelian conception of virtue acquire its proper sense. By means of the concept
of hexis, Aristotle had given reality and consistency to potential and rendered
thinkable its peculiar relation with act (a potential that always already passed
blindly into act or that, like generic potential, had no relation with action could
not have interested him). But precisely what had assured philosophical citizen-
ship to hexis, namely its relation with privation, now rendered problematic how
to think concretely its passage into action. If habit is always also privation, a
potential not to pass into action, who and what will be in a position to define
that passage for it?
While assigning to habit an essential place in the relation between potential
and act and in this way situating hexis in a certain sense beyond the opposition
potential/act, Aristotle never stops repeating, however, the supremacy of the ergon
and the act over simple habit. “And the end of each thing,” he writes in the
Eudemian Ethics (1219a9–10), “is the ergon, and from this, therefore, it is plain that the ergon is a greater good than the habit.” And in the Nicomachean Ethics (1098b30–31), the image of sleep as a cipher of the one who has a hexis but does
not use it returns, but with a completely negative meaning: “it makes a great
difference whether we put the greatest thing in possession [ en ktēsei] or in use
[ en chrēsei], in habit [ en hexei] or in act [ en energeiai]. For one may possess the habit without its producing any good result, as for instance when one is asleep or
is otherwise inoperative; but virtue in energeia cannot be inoperative—it will of
necessity act, and act well.”
The theory of the virtues is the response to the problem of the inoperativity
of habit, the attempt to render governable the essential relation that links it to
privation and potential-to-not ( adynamia). Hence the insufficiency and the apo-
rias of the aretology that Aristotle transmitted to Western ethics. Virtue ( aretē) is, in fact, “a certain habit” ( hexis tis: Metaphysics 1022b14) and at the same time something that, in habit, renders it capable of passing into action and of acting
in the best way. For this reason the above-cited Aristotelian definition of virtue
is, in a certain sense, twofold and is situated on the plane of being as much as on
that of action: “virtue is a habit from which [or thanks to which, aph’ēs] one be-
comes good [ agathos gignetai] and from which [or thanks to which] one will do
one’s work well [ eu to heautou ergon apodōsei]” ( Nicomachean Ethics 1106a22–23).
The repetition of aph’hēs underlines the twofold status of habit-virtue, at once
ontological (“it becomes good”) and practical (“it does its work well”).
>
However, the way in which this species of habit that virtue represents can
obtain this result is not defined in any way, unless it is through the frequent
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exercise that transforms it into “custom” ( ethos). In a passage from the Eudemian Ethics (1220b1–5), which was to exercise a strong influence on the scholastics,
this connection between custom and the becoming operative of virtuous habit is
forcefully expressed: “As even its name implies that it derives from habit [ ethos], by our often moving in a certain way a character [ ēthos] not innate in us is
finally trained to be operative [ energētikon] in us (which we do not observe
in inanimate objects, for not even if you throw a stone upwards ten thousand
times will it ever rise upward unless a force moves it).” And that the connection
between ethical virtue and habit serves to render habit governable in view of
action and passage to the act is stated in the definition of moral character that
immediately follows: “let moral character then be defined as a quality of the
spirit in accordance with governing reason that is capable of following reason
[ kata epiktatikon logon].”
א Precisely because Aristotle thinks action starting from potential-habit, which
maintains an originary connection with privation and the potential not to pass into
action ( echein kai mē energein, to have without exercising), his ethics must necessarily run up against an aporia (that is, an “absence of a way”). The theory of virtue, which was to render this passage possible, remains in its essence an ethology, a theory of custom-character, because all the elements that Aristotle has recourse to in order to govern action by means of virtue (like choice, proairesis, and will, boulēsis) are obviously adventitious and, in presupposing a subject external to potential, have no basis in the habit that they are supposed to guide. For this reason Aristotelian virtue is now presented as an ontological
property (a modality of habit), now as a quality of the work and of the action, and one
same work defines both hexis and the action and its subject (“the same work belongs to a thing and to its goodness (although not in the same way): for example, a shoe is the
work of the art of shoemaking and of the act of shoemaking; so if there is such a thing as shoemaking goodness and a good shoemaker, a good shoe is the work of both”; Eudemian
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