Why do you think you have potential? On living in the shadow of Aristotle, crises, and the events that define you
Here’s a telling difference between history and anthropology that reveals something odd about your understanding of your own life and its possibilities, and in the process, also exposes some of the Classical ideas to which that understanding is indebted.
History’s grand project starts with what has already happened and asks the question how did what has come to pass – or indeed, the present – come to be? And looking back, it constructs a narrative of units it calls ‘events’ (from the Latin ‘eventus’, a ‘fate’, ‘result’ or ‘consequence’), each one linked by causes and effects in linear sequence, which together tell the story of what led up to (a) now. It works with known outcomes – each event a ‘complete end’, what the Greeks called a ‘telos’– and theorizes preceding causes. (It is teleological).
Compare now the event as explored by anthropologists and social philosophers. For Anthropology approaches events not as linked units of the past, each the inexorable outcome of those that came before, and each pointing forward only to the next in line, but as sites of generative process. Instead of looking back at them as part of a determined causal sequence, it sees them from the inside, looking forward to futures yet unknown. And now no longer completed ends, they emerge as pregnant with agency and creation: moments in which the tensions, dynamics, resolutions and transformations implicit in everyday social life can be glimpsed in action.
The father of this view, Max Gluckman, who pioneered a kind of multi-vocal situational analysis of the event in Manchester in the 1950s and 1960s, argued that crisis events analysed over time in particular reveal those dynamics in an especially vivid way. So, as developed by those inspired by his School, the project of this conception of the event was to drop the anthropologist into the moment and watch. And from this vantage – looking alongside those with whom you stand – what you see is not movement toward a fixed outcome, but open-endedness, precarity, uncertainty, and the event itself as a dynamic process by which society makes itself under those conditions.
The innovation of Gluckman's student, and my teacher, Bruce Kapferer, was to see the person as in effect an event, and the person in crisis (as when, for instance, reconstituted by Buddhist anti-sorcery rites in the context of Sinhalese sorcery attacks) as a site of self-formation, and so, in that heightened ritual moment, as a window onto the social processes by which people are made.
But the heirs of Aristotle's world, we in the West tend to think about people as historians tend to think about events. You see, Aristotle was not only a philosopher but also a natural scientist, and when he came to the problem of how things come to be the way they are he, too, thought in terms of known outcomes and causes: but most crucially, in terms of what he called actuality (enargeia) and potentiality (dunamis, in one of two Aristotelian senses, later translated into the Latin potentia, from which our ‘potential’). Here is the oak tree, he observed, and it grows only from this acorn, so there must be something in the acorn that uniquely promises in potential what is actualized, under the right conditions and causes, only in the great oak, which, in turn, is the acorn fully realized (its telos).
And move up the scale from mindless plant to person, we as human beings are no different. For the fullest realization of the human - and human ‘flourishing’ (eudaimomia) itself (our telos) – was for Aristotle to be found in our soul’s distinctive exercise of reason in accordance with its capacity of excellence (or ‘virtue’), which marked the actualization in practice of our innate potentiality as Aristotle’s uniquely rational being, through education, experience, and habituation. And herein lies the origin of our modern idea of life ‘fulfilment’ (entelecheia) and a strand of thought that has fundamentally shaped our understanding of ourselves. (Have you ever wondered why you aspire to be ‘fulfilled’? And why that ‘fulfilment’ involves action? Well, it is here, with Aristotle, that a pervasive story begins).
Because how many of us, listening to our parents and teachers and friends, have come to think that we are each beings of unique potential, and that the trick to a happy life is working out what that potential is, what we’re really good at (make good choices for College!), and then fulfilling it, finding our ‘niche’ — becoming who we and only we can be.
And how many of us, if we push further, understanding ourselves from our first moments of self-awareness in this way, as young people with potential, head out into the world to find our spot in the grand scheme? And so off we go, as Tim Ingold has argued, sparing little thought that our futures so conceived are not futures of expanding horizons, but ones of ever narrowing scope – that they involve a closing of us down to that rare and precious space in which we can fully realize the talents unique to us.
In this life quest, some of us never find that special space – the space of their unique realization – although they search for it, and we call those people ‘drifters’ and tend to look at them with condescending sympathy (or worse). But some of us do (or at least some of us understand ourselves to have done so) and we flourish in our one comfortable spot: we grow to (ful)fill our little space, like great oaks, (perhaps we become experts in a ‘field’) and our lives narrow to our plot since our long search is over and we have found where we ‘fit’.
And rarely do we give a thought as to what will become of us if our circumstances change. Until they do – and of course they always do – and we no longer fit. And then what happens to us?
We are thrown into crisis! We lose who we thought we were (we lose the ‘plot’): cut adrift from the comforts of the home where we have grown large and tethered ourselves, we, too, become ‘drifters’ just like those poor souls we pitied earlier.
But isn't that crisis revealing? Because it is the consequence, the telos, of thinking about ourselves teleologically, as did Aristotle, and as our historians are prone to do, with the ‘wisdom’ of what is already known, and from the vantage of hindsight.
But now let us return instead to the person as anthropologists like Kapferer understood them, which is how at base Gluckman, his followers of the Manchester School, and later Marshall Sahlins after them, approached events – that is, seen from alongside those who face into them, and each merely one iteration of many possible iterations of what or whom each one of us might become. For in Gluckman’s hands, the change that just now threatened to set us adrift was not a cause for crisis (although crisis, he famously argued, can reveal its dynamics most vividly); it was characteristic of the unfolding moment, because anthropology's events – not those events written about in history books, but those in the world constructed by their participants – are not known outcomes, pre-constituted and tacitly connected, to be ordered and explained away in retrospect; they are unfolding processes, open-ended and pointing outward to new horizons of immanence. They are moments in and of formation, emergent in their encounter, rendered and known only as they are met, ‘happenings recognized’, as Sahlins would say.
And so it follows, now the person so conceived is no longer the prisoner of some innate ‘potential’ on a path to narrowing horizons, both realized and delimited by their unique promise, but something more: now they become an agent of precarious, emergent possibility (even if our concepts constrain our possibilities). And, perhaps more profoundly, – another insight of anthropology against the Classical philosophers – it now also follows that there is no one kind of life that such persons should each aspire to live, no one kind of fulfilment of the sort that Aristotle, modelling (with supreme arrogance) the life of the ideal human on himself, said held the key to our ultimate human flourishing (eudaimonia). ‘We’ instead become beings –better, to quote Kapferer on events, ‘becomings’ – always in the making (‘becomings’, he wrote, that are ‘always not yet’) and, looking forward to the undetermined futures of the immanent possibilities ahead, always the authors of our own self-realizations.
Who would you rather be?
Ashley Clements
is Associate Professor in Greek literature and Philosophy & Head of Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin. His most recent book is Humans, among Other Classical Animals (Postclassical Interventions). Oxford University Press (2021)