The aim of this paper is to assess whether and how the crossing of the “threshold of biological modernity” has changed the highest end of politics as defined by Aristotle.
In Aristotle the possibility of accomplishing the highest end of politics rests on the knowledge about what the human being is for. In the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, he states that the highest end of politics is to reaching the highest good of human beings, namely happiness (εὐδαιμουίαν). In order to define happiness, Aristotle asks what the function, or the work, of human beings is, and argues that it consists in the activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue.
When Foucault introduces, for the first time in his work, the notion of biopolitics, he maintains that the entrance into biological modernity has deeply transformed the Aristotelian notion of political animal. Two key and intertwined elements characterize the emergence of a new figure of the human. First, the opposition to transcendent metaphysics and the claim that the explanation of the human being is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”. Second, the rejection of final causes by modern scientific worldview and the consequent introduction of a mechanistic conception of the human being. At the core of the new definition of human being there is Charles Darwin who wrote that “there seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows”.
If biological parts and processes simply operate, no intrinsic finality should be embedded in them. However, it will be argued that the notion of natural selection risks to introduce a finality in life itself and, therefore, a new intrinsic function of the human being. Contemporary biopolitical vitalist theories are the direct result of this new blind teleology hidden in the theory of evolution by natural selection. The critique to a biological function of human being will be aimed at demonstrating that only if human beings find themselves brought into politics without the vehicle of a supernatural or natural purpose can space for a secular political realm be opened fully.
