1.3. The correspondence is all the more significant since we know that in Aris-
totle’s thought there is a strict and complex relation between the two terms energeia
and chresis. In an important study, Strycker (pp. 159–160) has shown that the classical Aristotelian opposition of potential ( dynamis) and act ( energeia, literally “being-at-work”) originally had the form of an opposition between dynamis and chresis (being in potential and being in use). The paradigm of the opposition is found
in Plato’s Euthydemus (280d), which distinguishes between possession ( ktesis) of a technique and the appropriate instruments without making use of them and their
active employment ( chresis). According to Strycker, Aristotle had begun, based
on his master’s example, by distinguishing (for example, in Topics, 130a 19–24)
between possessing a science ( epistemen echein) and using it ( epistemei chresthai) and had later technicalized the opposition by substituting for the common chresis
a word of his own invention, unknown to Plato: energeia, being-at-work.
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In effect, in his early works, Aristotle made use of chresis and chresthai in a sense similar to that of the later energeia. Thus, in the Protrepticus, where philosophy is defined as ktesis kai chresis sophias, “possession and use of wisdom”
(Düring, fragment B8), Aristotle carefully distinguishes between those who pos-
sess vision while keeping their eyes closed and those who effectively use it and,
in the same way, between those who make use of science and whose who simply
possess it (ibid., fragment B79). That use here has an ethical connotation and
not only an ontological one in a technical sense is obvious in the passage in
which the philosopher seeks to specify the meaning of the verb chresthai:
To use [ chresthai] anything, then, is this: if the capacity [ dynamis] is for a single thing, then it is doing just that thing; if it is for several things, then it is doing
whichever is best of these, as happens in the use of flutes, when someone uses
the flute in the only and best way. . . . One must say, therefore, that the one who
uses uses correctly, since for the one who uses correctly uses for the natural end
and in the natural way. (fragment B84)
In the later works, Aristotle continues to make use of the term chresis in a sense similar to that of energeia, and yet the two terms are not simply synonymous but
are often placed side by side as if to include and complete one another. Thus, in
the Magna Moralia, after having affirmed that “use is more desirable than habit”
( hexis, which indicates the possession of a dynamis or of a techne) and that “no one would care to have sight, if he were destined never to see but always to have
his eyes shut,” Aristotle writes that “happiness consists in a certain use and in
energeia” ( en chresei tini kai energeiai; 1184b 13–32). The formula, which is also found in the Politics ( estin eudaimonia aretes energeia kai chresis tis teleios, “happiness is a being-at-work and a certain perfect use of virtue”; 1328a 38), shows that
for Aristotle, the two terms are at once similar and distinct. In the definition of
happiness, being-at-work and being-in-use, an ontological perspective and an
ethical perspective, include and condition one another.
Since Aristotle does not define the term energeia except in a negative way
with respect to potential ( esti d’ he energeia to hyparchein to pragma me outos
hosper legomen dynamei, “energeia is the existing of a thing, but not in the sense in which we say that it is in potential”; Metaphysics, 1048a 31), it is all the more urgent to try to understand the meaning of the term chresis (and of the corresponding verb chresthai) in this context. It is certain, in any case, that Aristotle’s abandonment of the term chresis in favor of energeia as key term of ontology has determined to some extent the way in which Western philosophy has thought
being as actuality.
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א Like keeping one’s eyes closed, so also is sleep the paradigm par excellence of po-
tential and hexis for Aristotle, and in this sense, it is counterposed and subordinated to use, which by contrast is assimilated to wakefulness: “for both sleeping and waking presuppose the existence of the soul, but waking corresponds to knowing in act, sleeping to
a having without exercising” ( echein kai me energein; On the Soul, 412a 25). The inferiority of sleep, as figure of potential, with respect to energeia is affirmed even more decisively in the ethical works: “That happiness is an energeia can be seen also from the following consideration. For supposing someone to be asleep all his life, we should hardly consent
to call such a person happy. Life indeed he has, but life according to virtue he has not”
( Magna Moralia, 1185a 9–14).
1.4. In modern studies of slavery in the ancient world, the problem—with
a striking anachronism, seeing that the ancients lacked even the corresponding
term—is considered solely from the point of view of “labor” and production.
That the Greeks and Romans saw in it a phenomenon of another order, which
called for a conceptualization completely different from ours, seems irrelevant.
It thus appears all the more scandalous to moderns that ancient philosophers
not only did not problematize slavery but seemed to accept it as obvious and
natural. Hence it is unsurprising to read, in the preamble of a recent exposition
of Aristotle’s theory of slavery, that this presents frankly “despicable” aspects,
while the most elementary methodological caution would have suggested, in
place of outrage, a preliminary analysis of the problematic context in which the
philosopher inscribes the question and the conceptuality through which he seeks
to define its nature.
There fortunately exists an exemplary reading of Aristotle’s theory of slav-
ery, which focuses on the entirely special character of the treatment that the
philosopher makes of the problem. In a 1973 study, Victor Goldschmidt shows
that Aristotle here reverses his habitual methodology, according to which, when
confronted with a phenomenon, it is first necessary to ask oneself if it exists and
only subsequently to attempt to define its essence. With respect to slavery, he
does exactly the opposite: first he defines—in truth, much too hastily—its es-
sence (the slave is a human being who is not of himself but of another) in order
to then pass over into interrogating its existence, but also does this latter in a
completely peculiar way. The question does not in fact concern the existence
and legitimacy of slavery as such but the “physical problem” of slavery (Gold-
schmidt, p. 75): that is to say, it is a matter of establishing whether there exists in nature a body corresponding to the definition of the slave. Thus, the inquiry is not dialectical but physical, in the sense in which Aristotle distinguishes in On the
Soul (403a 29) the method of the dialectic, which defines, for example, anger as
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a desire for vengeance, from that of physics, which will see in it only a boiling
of blood in the heart.
Taking up and developing Goldschmidt’s suggestion, we can thus affirm
that the novelty and specificity of Aristotle’s thesis is that the foundation of
slavery is of a strictly “physical” and non-dialectical order, that is to say, that
it can consist only in a bodily difference with respect to the body of the free
person. The q
uestion becomes at this point: “does there exist something like
a body (of the) slave?” The response is affirmative, but with such restriction
that it has legitimately been asked whether the doctrine of Aristotle, which the
moderns have always understood as a justification of slavery, would not have
had to appear to his contemporaries as an attack (Barker, p. 369). “Nature,”
writes Aristotle,
would like [ bouletai] to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves,
making the one strong for the necessary use [ pros ten anankaian chresin], the other upright, and though useless for such services, useful for political life. . . . But
the opposite often happens—that some have the souls and others the bodies of
freemen. And doubtless if human beings differed from one another in the mere
forms of their bodies as much as the statues of the gods do from human beings,
all would acknowledge that the inferior class should be slaves of the superior.
And if this is true of the body, how much more just that a similar distinction
should exist in the soul? But the beauty of the soul is not as easy to see as that of
the body. ( Politics, 1254b 28ff.)
The conclusion that Aristotle immediately draws from it is therefore uncertain
and partial: “It is clear, then [ phaneron, which here in no way indicates a logical conclusion, but means rather: ‘it is a fact’], that there are some [ tines] who are free by nature and others who are slaves, and for these latter to serve is both
expedient and just [ sympherei to douleuein kai dikaion estin]” (1255a 1–2). As he
repeats a few lines later: “nature wants [ bouletai] to do this [ scil. that from a noble and good father comes a son similar to him], but it often cannot [ dynatai]” (1255b 4).
Far from securing a certain foundation for it, the “physical” treatment of
slavery leaves unanswered the only question that could have founded it: “does a
bodily difference between the slave and the master exist or not?” This question
implies at least in principle the idea that another body is possible for the human
being, that the human body is constitutively divided. Seeking to understand
what “use of the body” means will also mean thinking this other possible body
of the human being.
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א The idea of a “physical” foundation of slavery is taken up unreservedly many cen-
turies later by Sade, who puts in the mouth of the libertine Saint-Fond this peremptory
argumentation:
Glance at the works of nature and judge for yourself whether she has not, in
forming the two classes of men [masters and slaves], made them vastly unalike;
I ask you to put aside partiality, and to decide: have they the same voice, the
same skin, the same limbs, the same gait, the same tastes, have they—I venture
to inquire—the same needs? It will be to no purpose if someone attempts to
persuade me that circumstances or education have made for these differences and
that the slave and the master, in a state of nature, as infants, will be indistinguish-
able. I deny the fact; and it is after having pondered the matter and sifted much
personal observation, after having examined the findings of clever anatomists,
that I affirm there is no similarity between the conformations of these several
infants. . . . Therefore, Juliette, cease to doubt these inequalities; and admitting
their existence, let’s not hesitate to take full advantage of them, and to persuade
ourselves that if it so suited nature to have us born into the upper of these two
classes, we have but to extract profit and pleasure from our situation by worsening
that or our inferiors, and despotically to press them into the service of all our
passions and our every need. (Sade, pp. 322–323)
Aristotle’s reserve has disappeared here, and nature unfailingly accomplishes what it
wants: the bodily difference between masters and slaves.
1.5. It is thus all the more surprising that Goldschmidt, after having noted
with such precision the “physical” character of Aristotle’s argumentation, does
not in any way put it in relation with the definition of the slave in terms of the
“use of the body” that immediately precedes it, nor does he draw from this latter
any consequence as to the very conception of slavery. It is possible, rather, that
comprehension of the strategy that drives Aristotle to conceive the slave in a
purely “physical” way will be revealed only if one seeks in a preliminary way to
understand the meaning of the formula “the human being whose work is the
use of the body.” If Aristotle reduces the problem of the existence of the slave to
that of the existence of his body, this is perhaps because slavery defines a quite
singular dimension of the human being (that the slave is a human being is, for
him, beyond any doubt), which the syntagma “use of the body” seeks to name.
To understand what Aristotle means by this expression, it will be necessary
to read the passage, a little earlier, in which the definition of slavery intersects
with the question of its being just or violent, according to nature ( physei) or
convention ( nomoi) and with the problem of the administration of the house-
hold (1253b 20–1254a 1). After having recalled that according to some, the power
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of the head of the family over slaves ( to despozein) is contrary to nature and thus unjust and violent ( biaion), Aristotle introduces a comparison between the slave
and ktemata, household equipment (tools, in the broad sense that this term
originally had) and the instruments ( organa) that are parts of the administration
of a household:
Household equipment [ ktesis] is part of the household, and the art of using
household equipment [ ktetikè] is part of the economy (for no one can live well, or indeed live at all, without necessary things). And as in the arts that have a definite
sphere the workers must have their own proper instruments [ oikeiai organa], so
it is for those who manage the household [ oikonomikoi]. Now instruments are
of various sorts; some are living, others lifeless (for the one who commands a
ship, the rudder is inanimate, the lookout person, a living instrument; for in
the arts the servant [ hyperetes] exists in the form of an instrument). Thus, too,
equipment [ ktema] is an instrument for life [ pros zoen], and the ensemble of household equipment [ ktesis] is a multitude of instruments, and the slave is in a
certain sense animate equipment [ ktema ti empsychon]; and the servant is like an
instrument for instruments [ organon pro organon, or an instrument that comes
before the other instruments]. For if every instrument could accomplish its
own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daeda-
lus or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, “of their own accord
[ automatous] entered the assembly of the gods,” if, in like manner, the shuttle
would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre, then architects would not want
servants, nor masters slaves.
The slave is here compared to equipment or to an animate instrument, which,
like the legendary automatons constructed by Daedalus and Hephaestus, can
move itself on command. We will be returning to this definition of the slave as
“automaton” or animate instrument; for now, let us note that for a Greek, the
slave plays, in modern terms, more the part of the machinery or fixed capital
than of the worker. But as we will see, it is a matter of a special machine, which
is not directed to production but only to use.
א The term ktema, which we have rendered as “equipment,” is often translated as
“object of property.” This translation is misleading, because it suggests a characterization in juridical terms that is lacking in the Greek term. Perhaps the most exact definition of the term is that of Xenophon, who explains ktema as “what is advantageous for the life of all,” specifying that what is advantageous is “everything of which one can make use”
( Oeconomicus, 6.4). The word, as is in any case obvious in the subsequent passages of Aristotle’s text, refers to the sphere of use and not to that of ownership. In his treatment of the problem of slavery, that is to say, Aristotle seems to intentionally avoid the definition of slavery in the juridical terms that we would expect as the most obvious in order
THE USE OF BODIES
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to displace his argumentation onto the level of the “use of the body.” The fact that even
in the definition of the slave as “the human being who is not of himself but of another,”
the opposition autou/allou is not necessarily understood in terms of ownership is also proven—beyond the fact that “being owner of oneself” would be meaningless—by the
analogous formula that Aristotle uses in the Metaphysics, where it refers to the sphere of autonomy and not to that of ownership: “Just as we call free the person who exists for
himself and not another [ ho autou heneka kai me allou on], in the same way we say that wisdom is the only free science” (982b 25).
1.6. Immediately after, Aristotle, in a decisive development, links the theme
of the instrument to that of use:
The instruments just mentioned [shuttles and plectra] are productive organs
[ poietika organa], while equipment is by contrast a practical [ praktikon] instrument. From a shuttle, we get something else besides the use of it [ heteron ti
genetai para ten chresin autes], whereas of a garment or of a bed there is only
the use [ he chresis monon]. Further, as production [ poiesis] and praxis [ praxis]
are different in kind, and both require instruments, the instruments that they
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