Bene Vivere Politice: Aristotelian Metabiopolitics of 'Happiness'

In On the Greek Origins of Biopolitics (2016), Mika Ojakangas shows beyond dispute that the political art of governance as understood by Plato and Aristotle offered a wide array of techniques for governing human beings through the exercise of what can be characterized as “biopower” in the Foucauldian sense. In this sense, Platonic and Aristotelian political though was indeed “biopolitical.” However, with the help of Hannah Arendt, I will propose a slightly different understanding of biopolitics based not on techniques of governance but on the way in which the final aim of the political community is conceptualized. The Western tradition of political thought since Plato has generally identified this aim as “happiness” (eudaimonia, beatitudo, felicitas), taken to consist in the attainment of the supreme good (summum bonum) accessible in the human life; Ojakangas cites this as one of the “biopolitical” features of ancient political thought. I argue—with Arendt—that Aristotelian eudaimonia was not a “biopolitical” ideal in the sense that the supreme good, for the human being, consists neither in the fact of being alive (zēn) nor in any way of life (bios) typical for the human species, but rather, as Aristotle puts it in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, in a bios according to something “divine” in the human being, namely, in a contemplative beholding (theōrein) of reality in the light of an intuitive insight (noein) into its most fundamental principles. This “metabiopolitical” understanding of the “good life” (eu zēn), for the sake of which the political community ultimately exists (even though, according to Aristotle, it initially comes into being for the sake of survival), was then transposed by Thomas Aquinas into a Christian context, in which the ultimate aim of political governance becomes the salvation of souls for an eternal life of the contemplation of God (contemplatio Dei), which alone constitutes the perfect human beatitudo. As Roberto Esposito notes, it is only in the early modern model introduced by Thomas Hobbes that civic happiness (felicitas civilis) becomes identified with the simple avoidance of violent death as the human summum malum. For modernity, Arendt maintains in The Human Condition, being alive as such becomes the greatest human good, and the task of the contractual state is the coordination of individuals’ private pursuits of subjective happiness—or “quality of life” or “welfare”—in order to avoid the deadly conflicts characteristic of the prepolitical “state of nature.” In this sense, “biopolitics” is a decidedly modern paradigm. Interestingly, Arendt traces the roots of this biopolitical valuation of life for its own sake to the Christian notion of the sanctity of life, which Ojakangas, in turn, credits for the decline of ancient biopolitical practices under the influence of Christianity.