Human Being, Beast and God
Deborah Achtenberg
In Sim, ed., The Crossroads of Norm and Nature. Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.

"We are different from plants and non human animals, not to mention the simple bodies, because, unlike them, we can act. Fire must go up and stones must go down; plants must move by nature to their end; the other animals must follow their passions. We human beings, to the contrary, can act: We are more flexible; we are not bound by our feelings or by our end; we move towards what we take to be good. We are different from the god because, unlike the god's actions, ours are not guaranteed success but must, if they are to succeed, be in accord with something outside ourselves. That something Aristotle calls 'telos' or 'end.' He also calls it 'nature,' 'the mean,' or 'the good.' We are in between, then, beings that have a limit (a constitutive limit or telos) without having action, and the one being that has action without limitation. The god is a telos without having one; the god's aim, like ours, is for the good, but, unlike us, the god's every aim meets its mark. These differences are important because, according to Aristotle, something's good is its completion, and completions of things different in kind are themselves different. Happiness is the human good, according to Aristotle. Therefore our happiness will be what completes beings of our kind, not what completes plants, the other animals, or the god. Human beings, he says, are distinguished by reason - or logos-based action; every action is aimed at something believed to be good, but our beliefs may be false or the relevant ones may fail to inform our passions. The good, then, is the completion of this our defining function or activity (ergon); it is the completion, or, we might say, full development, of both intellect and feeling so that intellect hits the truth and informs feeling. Such developed intellect and feeling is called virtue. The good, according to Aristotle, is a life of activities in accordance with virtue; it is, in other words, a life in which developed capacities for intellect and feeling flourish." (ACHTENBERG-1995, pp. 29-20)

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