Aristotle now proceeds to develop the distinction he has already mentioned briefly in I viii, between natural and unnatural methods of acquiring goods, chrēmatistikē. In these two chapters he distinguishes:
(1) The acquisition of goods (food, etc.) directly from the environment, by hunting, etc. Mutatis mutandis, this method is common to animals and men, and is ‘natural’ chrēmatistikē.
(2) Exchange, of goods for goods or for money. This too is natural: it adjusts inequalities due to nature in the distribution of goods, and is not pursued beyond the satisfaction of needs.
(3) Trade, strongly characterized by the use of money and a desire to pursue monetary gain beyond the satisfaction of needs. This is unnatural.
Of these, (2) and (3) are both chrēmatistikē, ‘the acquisition of goods’, in a general sense; but the word is also in this chapter used several times of (3) in a stronger and unfavourable sense: ‘money-making’. Only (2), exchange (metablētikē or allagē), is naturally part of household-management, for (3), trade (kapēlikē), goes beyond what is necessary for the maintenance and self-sufficiency of a community, and is thus not natural.
Aristotle’s imaginative and plausible historical explanations of barter and of the invention of money, and his psychological speculations about the desire for unlimited acquisition, have impressive range and subtlety. Perhaps the sharpest reasoning of this chapter occurs in his comparison between money-making and other skills. A doctor recognizes no limit to the ‘end’ (health) of his craft: he would hardly wish to restrict the ‘amount’ of health he produces by his ‘tools’ (drugs, instruments, etc.). But ‘money-making’ too is a skill, with an unlimited end, money, and money is also its ‘tool’ or means. Ends and means are therefore formally identical, and (unlike in other skills) the ends do not tend to limit the means; so means too, as a result of the skill of ‘money-making’, chrēmatistikē, become unlimited. The unfortunate result is that household-managers, who have the same means, goods and money, as traders (‘money-makers’), with which to achieve their ends, i.e. of the household, suppose that their means too, i.e. as well as those of traders, ought to be unlimited. This, Aristotle claims, is a mistake, for the manager’s ‘means’ are for ‘living’, for which limited and modest means (in the other sense of this word) suffice. All this is nicely observed and cleverly argued in the terminology of Aristotle’s teleology, and his exposition is an intricate combination of logic, imagination, psychology and common sense.
1256b40 But there is another kind of property-getting to which the term ‘acquisition of goods’1 is generally and justly applied; and it is due to this that there is thought to be no limit to wealth or property. Because it closely resembles that form of acquisition of goods which we have just been discussing,2 many suppose that the two are one and the same. But they are not the same, though admittedly they are not very different; one is natural, the other is not. This second kind develops from the exercise of a certain kind of skill won by some experience. 1257a5 Let us begin our discussion thus: Every piece of property has a double use; both uses are uses of the thing itself, but they are not similar uses; for one is the proper use of the article in question, the other is not. For example a shoe may be used either to put on your foot or to offer in exchange. Both are uses of the shoe; for even he that gives a shoe to someone who requires a shoe, and receives in exchange coins or food, is making use of the shoe as a shoe, but not the use proper to it, for a shoe is not expressly made for purposes of exchange. The same is the case with other pieces of property: the technique of exchange can be applied to all of them, and has its origin in a state of affairs often to be found in nature, namely, men having too much of this and not enough of that. (It was essential that the exchange should be carried on far enough to satisfy the needs of the parties. So clearly trade is not a natural way of getting goods.)3 The technique of exchange was obviously not a practice of the earliest form of association, the household; it only came in with the large forms. Members of a single household shared all the belongings of that house, but members of different households shared many of the belongings of other houses also. Mutual need of the different goods made it essential to contribute one’s share, and it is on this basis that many of the non-Greek peoples still proceed, i.e. by exchange: they exchange one class of useful goods for another – for example they take and give wine for corn and so on. But they do not carry the process any farther than this.
1257a28 Such a technique of exchange is not contrary to nature and is not a form of money-making;1 for it keeps to its original purpose: to re-establish nature’s own equilibrium of self-sufficiency. All the same it was out of it that money-making1 arose, predictably enough – for as soon as the import of necessities and the export of surplus goods began to facilitate the satisfaction of needs beyond national frontiers, men inevitably resorted to the used of coined money. Not all the things that we naturally need are easily carried; and so for purposes of exchange men entered into an agreement to give to each other and accept from each other some commodity, itself useful for the business of living and also easily handled, such as iron, silver, and the like. The amounts were at first determined by size and weight, but eventually the pieces of metal were stamped. This did away with the necessity of measuring, since the stamp was put on as an indication of the amount.
1257a41 Once a currency was provided, development was rapid and what started as a necessary exchange became trade, the other mode of acquiring goods. At first it was probably quite a simple affair, but then it became more systematic4 as men become more experienced at discovering where and how the greatest profits might be made out of the exchanges. That is why the technique of acquiring goods is held to be concerned primarily with coin, and to have the function of enabling one to see where a great deal of money may be procured (the technique does after all produce wealth in the form of money); and wealth is often regarded as being a large quantity of coin because coin is what the techniques of acquiring goods and of trading are concerned with.5
1257b10 Sometimes on the other hand coinage is regarded as so much convention6 and artificial trumpery having no root in nature, since, if those who employ a currency system choose to alter it, the coins cease to have their value and can no longer be used to procure the necessities of life. And it will often happen that a man with wealth in the form of coined money will not have enough to eat; and what a ridiculous kind of wealth is that which even in abundance will not save you from dying with hunger! It is like the story told of Midas:7 because of the inordinate greed of his praver everything that was set before him was turned to gold. Hence men seek to define a different sense of wealth and of the acquisition of goods, and are right to do so, for there is a difference: on the one hand wealth and the acquisition o goods in accordance with nature, and belonging to household-management; on the other hand the kind that is associated with trade, which is not productive of goods in the full sense but only through their exchange. And it is thought to be concerned with coinage, because coinage both limits the exchange and is the unit of measurement by which it is performed; and there is indeed8 no limit to the amount of riches to be got from this mode of acquiring goods.1
1257b25 The art of healing aims at producing unlimited health, and every other skill aims at its own end without limit, wishing to secure that to the highest possible degree; on the other hand the means towards the end are not unlimited, the end itself setting the limit in each case. Similarly, there is no limit to the end which this kind1 of acquisition has in view, because the end is wealth in that form, i.e. the possession of goods. The kind which is household-management, on the other hand, does have a limit, since it is not the function of household-management to acquire goods.9 So, while it seems that there must be a limit to every form of wealth, in practice we find that the opposite occurs: all those engaged in acquiring goods go on increasing their coin without limit, because the two modes of acquisition o goods are so similar. For they overlap in that both are concerned with the same thing, property; but in their use of it they are dissimilar: in one case the end is sheer increase, in the other something different. Some people therefore imagine that increase is the function of household-management, and never cease to believe that their store of coined money ought to be either hoarded, or increased without limit.
1257b40 The reason why some people get this notion into their heads may be that they are eager for life but not for the good life; so, desire for life being unlimited, they desire also an unlimited amount of what enables it to go on. Others again, while aiming at the good life, seek what is conducive to the pleasure of the body. So, as this too appears to depend on the possession of property, their whole activity centres on business, and the second mode of acquiring goods1 owes its existence to this. For where enjoyment consists in excess, men look for that skill which produces the excess that is enjoyed. And if they cannot procure it through money-making,1 they try to get it by some other means, using all their faculties for this purpose, which is contrary to nature: courage, for example, is to produce confidence, not goods; nor yet is it the job of military leadership and medicine to produce goods, but victory and health. But these people turn all skills into skills of acquiring goods, as though that were the end and everything had to serve that end. 1258a14 We have now discussed the acquisition of goods, both the unnecessary kind of acquisition,1 what it is and why we do in fact make use of it, and the necessary, which differs from the other in being concerned with household-management and food in a way that accords with nature, and also in being limited as opposed to unlimited.